Mindconnection eNL, 2012-01-15

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In the USA, employers added 200,000 jobs in December. This was up from 100,000 jobs the previous month.

Source: The U.S. Labor Department.

The number exceeded analysts' predictions. The public sector, which lost jobs through most of 2011, continued to lag. Overall, 12,000 government jobs were lost last month.

What it means

Now, here's a little test. What is the relationship between the government jobs "lost" in 2011and the 200,000 new jobs in the private sector in December alone?

It's a thing all business owners are keenly aware of. It's called "overhead." Whether your overhead is internal (utilities, nonproductive labor, compliance costs) or external (government employees), it's overhead. By reducing the government payrolls, we see a corresponding rise in private sector jobs. But it's at a ratio far greater than 1:1. And those government employees who lost their jobs were among those available to be hired into the vastly more numerous new jobs.

Back in the 1980s, various think tanks and analysts showed that one job in the federal government costs, on average, 50 private sector jobs. There are exceptions to this ratio, of course. In some cases, a government job exists to perform a function that enables more private jobs to exist. In other cases, as in the IRS Collections Department, one federal employee can do such massive damage that thousands of private sector jobs evaporate.

But generally, a reductio in government jobs causes all employment boats to rise.

Notes:

1. The BLS does not report net new jobs. If Wal-Mart moves into a community and destroys 10,000 good-paying jobs but creates 110 subsistence wage jobs, it's true there are 110 new jobs but in this case there's a huge net loss.
2. The BLS, sometimes referred to as the BS, often provides flawed data. For example, forty-two thousand of the reported jobs are the result of a glitch in the BLS seasonal adjustment model that produces a false jump in December couriers and messengers jobs. On the other hand, BLS doesn't count many small business startups as jobs especially if they are proprietorships that haven't yet reported their existence. What we have to do is look at the general trend. And when the burden of govt is reduced, there are more jobs. We just don't know exactly how many.

Zap and protect.

Discontinued.

This hand held stun gun is the perfect choice for someone concerned about ensuring personal safety without using lethal force. Safely disable an attacker, without the mess caused by a shotgun (including the legal mess). Save your family and your carpet at the same time!

Security personnel find this to be the perfect companion to our scanning wand. Mothers with small children to protect will find this the perfect companion to their trusty 9mm or other personal protection device.

The way a stun gun works is it uses a rapid pulsing high voltage to cause a person's muscles to rapidly spasm.

The muscles then exhaust their stored energy (glucose, ATP, etc.), and can't contract until they "recharge" again. This takes several minutes. During those minutes, you can escape to safety, summon help, or further disable the attacker.

Just two ways you can use your library to boost your brainpower:

• Watch nonfiction documentary videos (DVD or, depending on your library, via download). I watch these fairly often, and it's amazing what you can learn.
• Listen to audio books (typically today, you download and listen on MP3 player). I can go to university while pulling weeds in my yard or doing housework. I use this resource intensively.

Your library is no doubt strapped for funds. Help them out. Here are some ways:

• Buy a movie they don't have. Watch it, then donate it.
• Consider volunteering. If you can spare a couple of hours for a couple of evenings a week, they will have plenty for you to do.
• Be careful with library collection items. Handle DVDs by their edges. Treat books with utmost care, and never eat or drink while reading them.
• Don't reserve items that are already at your branch, unless the need is urgent. This is poor impulse control. Reserve items that are at other branches, yes. But if you can't wait a few weeks for something, you have discipline issues that create unnecessary work for others.
• Watch your county government for wasteful spending, and object to it. That means less cutting of the library budget if they listen and act accordingly.
• See what's at your library and talk it up to friends and neighbors. The more patrons a library has, the more political clout it has. My library, for example, keeps usage and patronage statistics for budget justification. And when that doesn't work, a few thousand phone calls from library patrons tend to get the county board's attention.

Read that again, please. Let the full impact sink in.

Just how rich are the members of CONgress? In 2010, members of CONgress had a collective net worth of over $2 billion. That does not include offshore accounts, home values, or money-laundering operations.

How can you work toward reducing this rampant crime, this robbing of your hard-earned money? A few things you can do to help:

• Inform others. Most people are under the delusion that their member of CONgress somehow is "elected" and somehow "represents" them. If either fantasy were actually the case, the USA would not spend more on military than the other 95% of the world's population combined, nor would it hold 50% of the world's prison population. Nor would the vast majority of what the federal govt does be so blatantly illegal (see the 10th Amendment). Tell other people how much these reprobates steal.
   
• Contact your misrepresentative once each month. Go to his/her Website, and send a short message asking him/her to vote against any new spending measure from this point forward, because we simply cannot afford even more debt.
   
• Avoid voting Demopublican. The shenanigans of the power brokers at The Party are well-documented, going back to the 19th century, so it should not be "news" to any intellectually curious person that this system is extremely corrupt.
   
• Boycott the companies that have the most members of CONgress on their payroll. Sure, members of CONgress don't wear corporate logos the way NASCAR drivers do (though they should), but it isn't hard to figure out where your stolen dollars are headed by way of CONgressional "spending." When you boycott a company, they probably won't notice because so many zombies still buy from them. To fix this, write a letter to that company's board of directors, one letter individually addressed to each member of the board. This is remarkably powerful for individual problems. We need to make it remarkably powerful for larger problems, and that means more of us need to do it.
   
• Join the National Taxpayer's Union, www.ntu.org, so that you can be informed. This is an amazing organization, and I say that after having followed them since the 1980s. The NTU is not, as some of the brainwashed assert, a "tax protest" group. Not by any definition. The NTU's primary focus is on what's done with your tax dollars after they are taken.

You can protect yourself with a bug detector or camera detector.

This hidden camera detector finds hidden wired and wireless video cameras (dead or alive) and alerts you in one of three ways: an alarm, silent LED, or vibration. It detects laser IR plus it has a wide-band RF bug detector that will sniff out the most likely variety of sound bugs.

So if someone is spying on you, this handy gadget will allow you to find and destroy their illicit spy cameras and surveillance bugs.

Well, Keith, I think you should change your focus from how much you can bench to how well you work your pecs. If you do that, your bench press will increase. But if your form is wrong, then you'll have to decrease the weight until you can actually handle it.

Typically, a person doing the "bench press" is doing a modified form that produces little, if any, benefit. They are "benching" twice or better what they can actually do with correct form. I've seen people who "bench" 210lbs unable to raise 90lbs when I manually pin back their shoulders to keep their front delts out of the exercise.

Their normal "bench press" is mostly a shoulder exercise, and not a very good one at that. Rather than focus on giving the pecs an intense workout that stimulates the body's adaptive response, they essentially waste the workout.

In the mirror, some guys who bench this way see "big pecs" but the reality is they have low testosterone and are sporting breast tissue (fat) on top of small pectoral muscles. This can be verified by grasping the pec "blade" and squeezing.

Age 50.

My maximum bench? I don't know and don't care. I'm six feet tall and lean; someone my weight but fat, weaker, and a foot shorter could have a much higher maximum bench than mine because of the benching advantage provided by his shorter arms. So what does this number tell you?

For my own chest workout, I actually work chest twice on chest and triceps day.* For that second workout, I do several sets of xtremely slow flyes. I might do 2 or 3 reps per set, and each rep might take a full minute. Excruciating, but the pump is awesome--my pecs blow up to at least double their normal size.

Some experts advocate doing no bench press at all, but just doing flyes. Arnold Schwarzenegger didn't go to this extreme, but he relied on flyes and look what that did for him.

You might want to visit Scooby's Workshop online, sometime. Scooby is an engineer and amateur noncompeting bodybuilder. He's from the flyes only school, and his pecs are huge. I really like what Scooby's doing.

It's important to stretch those pecs after working out and again the next day. And you absolutely must pull those shoulders back. You want your chest to look "open" rather than scrunched up, for one thing. That not only gives you a more powerful look, it optimizes your mechanical advantage for maximum strength. Bad posture makes you weaker.

Another reason to keep those shoulders back is so you don't shorten the tendons of the pecs and lengthen the muscles in your upper back. This is the recipe for back pain, neck pain, and knee deterioration. It will cause your entire spine to be off. And in that condition, you'll accelerate arthritis of the spine, while dramatically reducing both its load bearing and shock absorbing ability.

This posture thing applies whether you work out or not. With proper posture, you look your best in all directions and you enjoy proper mechanical advantage plus the health benefits of an alignment that's reasonably within design limits.

*There is an exception to this second workout. If chest and triceps day happens to fall on a climbing day, I skip the second workout (as was the case last week). I simply don't have the energy to do a second hit on my pecs, and I use triceps heavily on routes that require pressing movements. These would be things like corners and "chimneys."

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.