Mindconnection eNL, 2014-12-21

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In this issue:
Good News | Product Highlight | Brainpower | Finances | Security | Health/Fitness | Factoid | Thought 4 the Day

Half of the senators who betrayed this country by voting for the Unaffordable Care Act will not be US Senators in 2015. This means a whole lot of voters bent over, grabbed their ears, and pulled firmly. It's really too bad that didn't happen in 2012 when the Arabic from Kenya was running for re "election." But at least now we finally have a glimmer of hope. I say a glimmer, because what's basically happened is control of the Senate has passed from the Crips to the Bloods. We just have to hope the Bloods want to prove they can be decent human beings.

Item 2

Making the first item even better news, the Crips lost control of the House to the Bloods the year after the UCA was illegally inflicted upon this country. So will this other gang of hoodlums, lowlifes, and ne'er do wells try to show they can be decent human beings now that they form what appears to a second branch of government in our one-branch system?

Item 3

It's Carter, but the good news is it's not Jimmy Carter:

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-examiner-obama-taps-carter-as-defense-secretary/video/bc-3926329596001

Item 4

The first two items had to do with toxic waste removal. So does this one, but it's not related to what's going on in that cesspool known as the District of Corruption. No, this is about a different sort of garbage problem.

The 29NOV2014 issue of Science News reports that modified vegetation may soon be cleaning up toxic pollution. They aren't aiming to clean up CONgress with this development, but are instead aiming at such things as oil spills and air pollution. Researchers say the plant-based methods could reduce costs by 90%.

The expense of current cleanup methods makes it almost prohibitive in some cases. So many waste sites are simply deserted, or you get situations like the BP fiasco in which BP is just hoping the massive pollution will just escape notice. Of course, getting an oceanographer fired for doing a good job of assessing the damage has helped them but what if they could have cleaned up their mess instead?

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This issue’s brainpower tip is less about the IQ aspect and more about mental health. Something that bodybuilders have believed for decades was recently reported in the 2014 November issue of Science News. That is the idea that hard workouts benefit the brain.

The gist of the article is that when the body is subject to “a good workout”, muscles respond by producing a compound called PGC-1alpha. This is a very beneficial compound, and it’s a mood elevator.

What the article leaves out is what bodybuilders know about the adaptive response. It’s not just that PGC-1alpha elevates your mood. It’s that the entire hormonal system changes dramatically in response to “a good workout.” This is why cortisol plummets and testosterone is elevated following “a good workout.”

Notice, I’ve used that phrase "good workout" in quotes three times now. That’s because the key to the adaptive response, which includes production of PGC-1alpha, is you have to do intense exercise. Intensity is effort / time. People who work out with intensity are a tiny minority, thus it follows that the typical workout is not a good one.

Something like walking doesn't produce the adaptive response (too little effort in the time allotted). Long-distance running doesn’t do it, either; in fact it has the opposite effect. Sprinting hard does produce this, which is why bodybuilders love interval training (multiple sessions of running hard for short distances, with short rest periods between).

This dynamic is also why you don’t see great results among the people who hang around the gym all day playing on machines (too much time for the effort exerted).

A few sets of squats or deadlifts, however, will get you there. Better than anything else. Do them every other week, and make them brutal. You'll feel better.

The tip in this issue is that we need to keep reminding our misrepresentatives in CONgress that abolishing the IRS is a necessary and urgent task. The sooner there is no longer an IRS with the power to destroy, the better.

Below is an interesting case history that illustrates why this agency does not deserve to exist. I don't know where I got this from; I vetted it at the time and have kept it for this newsletter. I can tell you this sort of thing is typical for these whackos. The number of documented cases similar to this is rather large. The title of the original piece was, "48 Cents: It's a Federal Case."

Jerome Norris couldn't come up with the money to pay his 2002 income tax on time and entered into an installment agreement in which he agreed to pay (and the IRS agreed to accept) two payments of $13,348.24 in full payment of his obligation. On the agreed dates, Norris paid $13,348.00, apparently in the mistaken belief that the rounding conventions used in preparing tax returns would apply to these payments. So technically he failed to comply with the installment agreement — by a total of 48 cents.

The IRS sent him a bill for 48 cents, plus a late payment penalty of $175.44 and interest of $264.08, for a total of $440.00. Yeah, read those numbers again. Are these people insane? Never mind, that was a rhetorical question. You know the answer.

Norris disputed the amount due, discussing the matter with an IRS appeals officer. Then he received another notice saying that interest and penalties continue to run until the tax is paid in full. Despite the small amount involved, Norris (a lawyer) took the IRS to tax court rather than pay up.

In tax court, the IRS claimed the added penalty and interest would have been due even without the underpayment of 48 cents, but the court didn't see how that could be true when the parties had entered into an installment agreement, and Norris had otherwise satisfied his obligations under that agreement. Calling this collection effort an abuse of discretion, the Tax Court ruled for Norris.

The truly amazing thing here is the number of people at the IRS who had to act stupidly in order for this case to get to court. The original bill could have been an innocent mistake, automatically generated by their software. But what was the appeals officer thinking when he or she rejected Norris's challenge? What was the IRS lawyer thinking when he or she decided to see the case through in court rather than drop the matter? And how much money in staff time and court costs went into this idiotic effort?

Wasting huge resources like this is par for the agency. The people who have jobs there simply do not care. The obvious solution is to eliminate those jobs. Every last one of them. We will all be better off, and maybe those folks can find something useful to do with their lives. But implementing the obvious solution (which is also the sensible one) is not going to happen unless we keep reminding the nitwits who misrepresent us that we want it to happen.

Visit the Website of your misrepresentative once a month and let them know that abolishing the IRS is urgently needed. Anyone who bothers to work out the math quickly realizes this means more, not less, federal revenue and more, not fewer, jobs. Every IRS job probably costs 150 jobs in the private sector. You want to create a few million jobs? Abolish the IRS!

Keeping good records and using a good tax software program will help you reduce that 1040 tax bite. So will planning things, if you have good guidance in doing so.

But if you want to ruin your life, give the psychopaths at the Institute of Reprobates and Sociopaths an actual reason to come after you. True, they routinely destroy the lives of innocent people for no particular reason at all. That doesn't mean you should give them a reason to destroy yours.

Most of the tax-saving schemes that you may be tempted to bite into are simply cons that are using a tax-savings angle to get you to bite. So you get ripped off, then the psychopaths at the Institute come along shortly thereafter to rip you up.

Simple fact: There is nobody who has "insider secrets" or some magic way around the tax requirements. Note that I did not say Tax Code. The psychopaths at the Institute use their own manual, not the Tax Code. Their own manual makes no allotment for alternative interpretations of the Tax Code. In some cases, it incorrectly interprets the Tax Code but they go with their manual anyway despite being clearly wrong.

So even if you see the rule in black and white and think to yourself, "Hey, I can prove I'm right" stop. At best, you'll spend $3 million to go through Tax Court and a few years after the Institute has seized your assets you'll get them back.

At worst, you will find yourself deeply in debt and unable to find decent-paying work. The psychopaths will ensure you lose your job, your personal reputation, your home, nearly all of your friends, all of your business associates, all of your assets, and most of your credit. If you're married, they'll go to extremes to destroy that too.

And all of this damage is just a warm-up. They will harass you, day and night. They will contact your neighbors and other people who know you, making threats about associating with you and making strongly derogatory statements about you.

Then, if you have grown children, they will go after them. After this, they get really nasty--that's right, this is only the beginning. Thousands of victims of the Hoyt Fiasco and the Amcor Atrocity endured exactly this sort of treatment, despite not having given the Institute any real reason to go after them.

Does such a scenario terrify you? It should; instilling terror is why these psychopaths engage in such criminal and immoral activity.

So it's very important that you give the Reprobates no real reason to go after you. Yes, they can pick your name at random. More commonly, they use association. Be very careful about whom you associate with; for example, don't associate with people who tell you how they "got one over on the IRS" because doing so puts a target on your own back.

Even if you don't do anything wrong and don't associate with those who do, you can be a target of a baseless assault. A good way to protect yourself from a baseless assault by these thugs is to use a tax filing program and stay within its guidelines.

All of these programs have the Institute's approval and cases abound in which the taxpayer was let off the hook because the gray issue was permitted in the tax software. I personally underwent an audit, and the auditor didn't even want to examine anything the program produced. He just wanted to verify my documentation. Since I keep good records, I walked out unscathed. It also helped that I lucked out by getting a decent human being as my auditor; the Institute does have decent human beings among its employees, though they are a tiny minority.

We need to abolish the 1040 system, since it serves no financial purpose to the Treasury and, in fact, costs the government more than it takes in. We also need to disband the terrorist group that is so closely associated with this insane system.

Letting your misrepresentative know you want this done is OK. Cheating on your taxes is not only not OK, it's a huge security risk. It's just not worth it, and the Institute has made sure of that by engaging in terrorist assaults that are way out of proportion to the tax offense (real or made up by them). We need to restore the rule of law, not provide these morally depraved criminals with excuses to engage in their reprehensible behavior. Protect yourself by not giving them an excuse to come after you. Not a real one, anyhow.

Great calves make a body stand out. I notice a woman's calves right away; small ones make her much less appealing to me. Similarly, guys look incomplete with anemic calves. But it's not just looks at stake. I'm a climber and a martial artist. In both areas, powerful calves make a huge difference.

Due to the emphasis I put on calf development, I have "Popeye" calves. Sorry, I don't have good photos of those.

If you don't have well-developed calves, how can you fix that?

Separate the work

First, don't do calves as an afterthought. I devote one workout to abs and calves. My calf workouts are high-intensity, meaning they are short and brutal. For that reason, I do them every other week at most. More often than that would be, at least for me, overtraining.

It's more traditional to work calves on "leg day." I don't see how this is a good strategy. Working your quads and hamstrings takes a lot of energy out of your body. I work mine incidentally, by doing squats; contrary to popular opinion, squats are not a "leg exercise".

Yes, they do work the legs; but if you do them correctly, you are working several other large muscle groups and many small ones as well. Doing any training after doing squats means you are simply going to lack the energy to do that training well (unless you are extremely gifted genetically or taking very expensive steroids).

Your calves do get some work when you're doing squats, though it's not the full range of motion and it's not enough to really stimulate the adaptive response. And this does leave them a bit too depleted for seriously intense work; add in the general depletion from the squats, and the energy equation just does not come out right for a proper workout. This is why you usually see small calves on folks who take this approach.

Take it off autopilot

Watch people train calves, and you see a sort of hypnotic motion going on. Up, down, up, down, the person's in a daze going through the motions.

I've found the calves respond best when I'm fully involved in the exercise. I don't do two seconds up, four seconds down. I flex my calves to keep them under tension, and I vary the speed all over the place; I use "feel" to determine if I'm getting it right. I also just look at my calves; after just one set, they are blown up to much larger than their normal size. I go all the way down (toes above heels) and all the way up, but along the way I might slow down or speed up. All the while, I'm keeping in mind that I want to get THE BURN as soon as I can achieve it, and I want to maintain it through the rest of the set. Generally, the slower you go--the quicker the burn comes.

Something I personally don't do much of but many trainers recommend, is to finish each set (or maybe the whole routine or maybe one set) with explosive movements. Some say to do this without using weights; for example, just stand on stair steps and quickly rise up then slowly lower all the way down then rise up again. Others say to add more weight (to your seated calf raise machine) and force the weight up quickly. I can get an intense burn either way, but am very uncomfortable with the second technique.

I say I don't do much. What I mean is I'll do a few reps of this and that's usually it. You can experiment to see what works best for you.

Full range

Notice in the preceding discussion, I mentioned going all the way down. This is critical. So is going all the way up. You need to recruit all of the muscle fibers and you also need to ensure you're not shortening your Achille's tendon. Do calf work with the full range of motion or don't do it at all.

Yes, you can get a pretty good "pump" by cheating and doing partials. But this has many drawbacks, including the fact it produces calves that just look wrong and calves that are susceptible to injury.

Going in the full range also provides some stretching of the fascia and of the calves themselves, which is important for growth. Make sure you stretch your calves after your workout, too. But do not stretch before your workout.

Go heavy

People are often surprised to learn that I work calves with about 350 lbs. This is more than twice my body weight. It isn't safe for me to do standing calf raises with this much weight; I use a seated calf machine. I also supplement with standing calf raises, typically with just my body weight (and very slow motion).

Now, you may be thinking that's a huge change from 350 lbs. It's not so huge when I'm working only one calf at a time with that weight. The single calf workout is also a solution if you don't have a seated calf machine and don't have a place to put one. I tried single calf workouts with the barbell also, but this did not feel safe to me so I don't do those.

Calves can take very heavy loads. They need really heavy loads to trigger an adaptive response. Arnold used 500 lbs in his early Mr. Olympia days. He complained to another pro that he didn't like his calves and felt they might cost him the title the next time he took the stage. The other bodybuilder suggested that Arnold double the weight. He did, and the results were stunning.

Don't be intimidated by these poundages. I mention them to give you a sense of scale. If you haven't been working your calves and you want to start doing so, start out by using heavy weight and low reps. It's better to do 3 or 4 difficult reps with heavy weight than to use a weight you can lift for 8 to 12 reps. If  the weight is so heavy you can do only one rep, rest a full minute and do another rep with that weight. Then reduce the weight slightly and continue.

The key thing to remember about calf training is you don't get results unless you really challenge them. If you're not focused on achieving that during the entire training session, you'll get poor results. Keep your mind on what you're doing, and your challenged calves will make themselves powerful and eye-catching.

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

Do you know the names of the three wise monkeys? Not, they aren't Larry, Mo, and Curly. They are Mizaru (See no evil), Mikazaru (Hear no evil), and Mazaru (Speak no evil).

If you don't have a sense of humor, you probably don't have any sense at all.