Mindconnection eNL, 2008-01-06

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In this issue:

1. Product highlight
2. Brainpower tip
3. Time tip
4. Finance tip

5. Security tip
6. Health tip/Fitness tip
7. Miscellany
8. Thought for the day

Even in the bright sun of the Swiss Alps, the polarized lenses of the Ectaco iTRAVL Sunglasses allow you to take pictures of anything using a wireless remote, store it in the sunglasses, and transfer via USB to your PC after the trip.

Even in the bright sun of the Swiss Alps, the polarized lenses of the Ectaco iTRAVL Sunglasses allow you to take pictures of anything using a wireless remote, store it in the sunglasses, and transfer via USB to your PC after the trip. The hidden hardwired color camera built into these protective glasses allows for a 90 degree field-of-view so that everything you see will be in your pictures. Everything.

They have polarized lenses and pack 1GB of built-in memory. This means you can store up to 32 hours of music playback in WMA format and 16 hours in MP3. Or, if you're out there catching bad guys you can store 10,000 pictures of Arvin Sloan or Dr. No.

Not a bad idea for the beach, either!

You can download pictures from your sunglasses to your PC, via the USB connection. You can also upload pictures and songs to your sunglasses. Simple and easy to use, these loaded sunglasses are a "must have" for your Radical Gadget collection.

I have known the author since the late 1990s, and am always interested in what he has to say. His wit and insight have provided me with a great deal of amusement and education over the years. So when he mentioned Mindless Slogans was out, I knew it would be a worthwhile use of my time to read it.

Anyone who has known Paul for any length of time knows he is a voracious reader of history, economics, and politics. He's also a prolific writer. Paul is well-known as an author, educator, and speaker in the electrical industry. In electrical work, logic matters and facts are real. Try to play mind games with electricity, and you get burned. Literally.

Paul relies on logic and an appreciation for reality, when he presents his well-informed analyses of topics that bear on today's social and political trends. One of those trends is the language abuse that people use in place of thinking. People utter slogans, most of which are false and some of which are absurd, to justify views they have accepted and internalized.

When you trace those views back to their source, you find, almost invariably, the person acquired them as a consequence of the relentless brainwashing conducted by predators and parasites. The typical modern-day politician is an example of a brainwashing slogan-spewer.

What's the harm in not thinking? After all, thinking is work. In this book, Paul provides some reasons for you to ask that question and find answers that are relevant to your personal situation. The most important point to remember is that people who don't want you to think can (and do) cause you great harm. It is in your own best interests to make your own decisions, and to throw off the chains of mind-neutralizing slogans.

Paul portrays this book as a series of bar-stool rants. He's not one to hang out at bars, so why does he say that? He immediately wants to tell the reader that this isn't a stuffy research piece loaded with references and written with big words where simple ones will do. Yes, there are some references. But generally, he tries to communicate the idea rather than misuse statistics or someone else's flawed research. His approach is to look at each slogan and explain what's wrong with it. And he does that in plain English.

This book is full of personal opinions, and you as the reader might not agree with every opinion. I certainly don't. Nor would I expect anyone to agree with all of my opinions. Agreement on every point is never a good metric for deciding whether an author can stimulate you to thinking independently. Rejecting the lunacy that is so adroitly disguised as "common wisdom" is an essential part of being a free and responsible person.

You may be surprised at the self-revelation this book causes, but you will be better off for it.

https://www.mindconnection.com/main/timemanager/files/timetips/manageothers_003.htm

This is an exercise in majoring in minors. It leaves an awful lot of tax money on the table--well, off your table anyhow.

And this is by design. The purpose of a complicated income tax system is to create distracting games that people will play in lieu of looking at their real tax issues. It causes them to focus 90% of their efforts on 10% of their problem.

Have you ever wondered why your misrepresentatives in CONgress don't do anything about an agency in which:

• 94% of the notices they send out are erroneous.
• The employees steal thousands of computers from their own offices each year (source, GAO).
• The employees spend 50% of their time at the office surfing p*rn and gambling sites (source, GAO).
• A band of these hoodlums kidnapped toddlers at a Michigan daycare center, at gunpoint, but were released at arraignment with charges dismissed.
• A band of these hoodlums managed to make $103 million disappear, then created their own tax law out of thin air to assess a "theft on what was stolen from you" on the victims then methodically went about eliminating those victims financially and otherwise.
• The collections division of this agency contains a level of tax cheating that a formal report from government investigative office characterized as "astounding" (source, Office of the Treasury Department Inspector General).

It's very simple. With this complicated taxation system and an agency loaded with unaccountable, law-scoffing, aggressive psychopaths to administer it, the typical citizen is too distracted to look at the real problems.

Magicians call this classic tool of deception "misdirection."

Yes, it's got to be tough for that mere handful of employees of this agency who actually do care and actually aren't law-scoffing, aggressive psychopaths. They have the choice of finding a different job with mostly decent people as coworkers--so don't feel sorry for them. You have a choice, too. It's called real tax planning.

Real tax planning includes these aspects:

• File your income taxes timely and honestly. Use tax filing software for the games that CONgress wants you to play, and don't go beyond the rules.
   
• Read sources of information to discover what wasteful insanity CONgress is burning your money on now. Then, take the time to write a thoughtful, clear, business-like letter saying why that spending is wrong. An excellent source for reliable and accurate information is the National Taxpayer's Union, www.ntu.org.
   
• Control your spending. The National Sales Tax is far, far larger than the national income tax. Spend on things that you need or that make your life better. Don't spend to fill your closets with even more stuff you never use.
   
• Seek a reduction in the national sales tax., part 1. What? You haven't heard of this tax? When CONgress borrows money, it borrows massively. The federal debt is over $9 trillion and is growing by half a billion dollars a day. That money is borrowed. Think about the law of supply and demand, here. The cost of capital for businesses is much higher than it should be, due to the demand created by gov't borrowing. You pay for this additional cost in every product and service you buy. You are paying the interest on your share of $9 trillion every time you buy a roll of toilet paper ("kiss it goodbye" should not apply literally in this case, despite how CONgress treats you).
   
• Seek a reduction in the national sales tax, part 2. Regulations in the USA are mind-boggling in their depth, size, complexity, and negative consequences. Some experts say we could wipe out 90% of the existing regulations with no ill effect whatsoever. For example, there's a huge body of evidence that eliminating the EPA would result in a much cleaner environment. Be that as it may, the USA carries huge regulatory compliance costs that you pay for every time you buy any product or service. These regulations exist because bloated agencies need something to do and they justify their existence by creating senseless regulations and mountains of paperwork.

Now, that's just at the federal level. Don't forget your state, county, and city governments. Actually, you should focus on those. The "closer to home," the more influence you are likely to have. Tell your city council "NO" and "Absolutely, positively not" to any and all new spending measures. Don't give in to the "it's for the children" trick, either. That's a dirty trick, so call them on it.

Go after existing pork one item at a time to kill it off. Just pick a pet pork project, and keep after it until it dies. Pretend you are a pit bull. Each one will be easier to kill than the last one, because with practice you will get better at it. Start with something that's a fairly easy target, not something that is the most costly target.

Get other people behind you. It takes only a small group to get a city council to behave. You'll need a larger group when the government body is larger.

When these bodies are spending less, they borrow less. And they can subsequently also justify reducing various taxes such as property taxes and sales taxes.

If nobody aggressively pursues spending reduction in your local government, then it won't be pursued. And that's a bad thing. The entropy of spending isn't toward less, it's towards more.

The increased spending axiomatically must be followed by followed by increased borrowing and increased discrete taxes.

• Discrete taxes are those that exist as named taxes, such as property taxes. These are the ones politicians claim to reduce when giving you an alleged tax break. But any such tax reductions are mere shell games without the spending reductions to go along with them. That's because of stealth taxes.
• Stealth taxes are the other kind of taxes, such as the national sales tax, that don't officially exist on the books but cost you the most. These are the ones that politicians raise without batting an eye.

With a bit of concerted effort, you can reduce both taxes. If enough citizens do this in enough jurisdictions, we will see taxes fall across the board.

Finally, do not vote demopublican. That merely rubber stamps the same immoral behavior you have been seeing your entire life. You may have heard the saying, "He who controls the ballot controls the election." This has been attributed to Stalin, but his actual statement was different (he was referring to counting votes).

In the USA, the demopublican party controls who gets on the ballot. Have you ever wondered why all of the choices stink? And why some are so stinky that you are forced to choose one stinker so that another, worse stinker doesn't get "elected?"

What if a creep came up to you and asked, "Should I bash in the left side of your head or the right side?" Personally, my answer would be to make a choice other than what's presented to me. In an "election," the same logic applies. You do not have to choose between the left and right sides of the same, monolithic party that always increases spending, regulation, bureaucracy, and taxes. If you want change, vote anything but the demopublican party. If you are afraid of Hillary, don't worry--her future is assured despite how you vote in the "election." She's "running" against straw man "opposition" and at this date of publication carries a 99.999% chance of winning.

Given that scenario, whether you vote for the her Republican "opponent" or her, you will be voting for the same failed policies, excessive taxation, rampant spending, and other stupidity. The only exception is if Dr. Ron Paul gets on the ballot as a Republican.

I'm not advocating political positions here, just financial ones. The demopublicans have never done anything but hurt you financially. Don't tell them at the polls that you think this is OK.

The roads are slick, and the car suddenly starts fishtailing. You almost keep it on the road. But not quite. When the car stops, you're in a deep ditch and there's no way you can drive back out. The car can't be seen from the road. What would happen?

Would you get out in the subzero weather and hike to God knows where? That wouldn't be wise. At one time, such a situation was almost a hopeless one. Today, that's not the case.

If you have a GPS, and I try to ensure I always have one in a rental car, you will know your location. If you don't have a GPS (of your own or as part of the rental), let's hope you were paying attention to the exits and the mile markers.

Just about everyone has a cell phone, these days. You should have some numbers programmed into yours. Your local Sheriff's Office (or city police office) is one such number. If you put a "0" in front of the entry name (e.g., "0Sheriff"), it will be at the top of your list. Do not use the 911 number. It serves a different purpose.

But if you're renting a car, you should have the rental company's number in your phone. It might also be on the paperwork, but do you really want to fumble with paper and dial by dome light? Call the rental company's number and explain what happened. I don't know about every rental car company, but the major ones have 24 hour switchboards.

For other situations, you can dial the Sheriff/police number. Tell the dispatcher you are a resident of (wherever you live), but are currently traveling and have only this number with you. Explain the problem and ask the dispatcher if s/he can patch you through to the local police.

http://www.supplecity.com/articles/foodsafety.htm

1. Federal Reserve notes are printed on cotton, not paper. But less than 2% of the money supply is printed at all.
    

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