Mindconnection eNL, 2009-12-06

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As long as your mind is juggling all this, your brainpower is greatly reduced. It's divided up among those various issues plus being siphoned off to carry the excess administrative overhead, of constantly changing focus.

Meditation can help with this. I don't mean sitting around cross-legged and chanting the same vowel repeatedly (that's a mistaken idea of what meditation is). Meditation is a purposeful clearing of the mind and a calming of your thought processes.

When you feel like you are trying to handle many things at once, stop. Pick one, and refuse to think about the rest. This way, you can properly address one of the thing well rather than many things poorly. You can focus either until this task is done (or issue solved) or until a set time has gone by.

One suggestion is to work in 15 minute increments, occasionally using several contiguous 15 minute blocks for a single task. During that time, don't answer the phone and don't answer e-mail. Just work on what needs doing.

Not only is this approach more effective and productive than the "all at once and interruptions take priority" approach, it's far less stressful.

People who make a habit of thinking on one thing at a time is great in itself report that they are often "in the zone" and working at a pace is incredibly fast but nearly effortless. They don't feel effort, they feel euphoria. Things just flow.

The single best investment — in terms of greatest return on invested dollars — has been the lobbying efforts of the major banks and finance firms

They spent $114.2 million dollars in contributions toward the 2008 "election," according to the the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. The companies that have been awarded taxpayers’ money from Congress’s bailout bill spent $77 million on lobbying and $37 million on federal campaign contributions, the Center finds.

These firms political activities have yielded them $295.2 billion from Recapitalization, TARP and other assorted bailouts.

The return on investment: 258,449 percent. That's astounding. And it's criminal.
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We have the best government that criminals can buy.  I keep saying that members of CONgress are mere paid employees of the corporate lobbyists. The money trail shows this is exactly the case. Follow the money, and what you see is a galling degree of wealth transfer from your pocket to those of banksters and other criminals.

As long as The Party is in power, this thievery will remain a sad fact of life. The Party will remain in power as long as people keep throwing their votes away on its candidates. If you care about crime, don't vote Demopublican.

I personally don't care for that "roid look" and sheer size isn't my goal. But people tend to overestimate my weight considerably because I look bigger than I am. When you stand up straight, you put everything into its best mechanical position for strength and also in its best position for appearance.

An erect posture gives you "presence" when you walk into a room. If you are at some kind of gathering and see a person whom others are gravitating toward, it's very likely that person is consciously using his/her best posture.

Strength and appearance are nice benefits. The vain among us may consider those sufficient. However, those benefits are minor compared to what good posture really does for you. Experts from martial arts masters to health-oriented physicians (notice the qualifier, there) make a big deal out of proper posture. And so should you.

As regular readers know, I was 48 years old in the picture (above, right), taken in December 02 2008. I don't diet down for summer. I don't have good genes for maintaining a lean body, either. I really have to be conscientious and disciplined about it. That doesn't mean I suffer, eat bland foods, or starve myself.

At www.supplecity.com, you'll find plenty of informative, authoritative articles on maintaining a lean, strong physique. It has nothing to do with long workouts or impossible to maintain diets. In fact:

• The best workouts are short and intense.
• A good diet contains far more flavors and satisfaction than the typical American diet.

Nor does it mean being hungry all the time (you are less hungry on six small meals a day than three large ones), being weak from hunger (on a proper dietary regimen, you will have much more energy than otherwise), or "giving up pleasures" (I have no idea where this concept comes from, unless a person considers being sick a "pleasure.")

Holiday tip: Check out the recipe section on www.supplecity.com. That Fit Pumpkin Pie is great...