Mindconnection eNL, 2015-08-16

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

In this good news column, I typically bring unusual items that you just don't read about in the mind-manipulating state-run "mainstream" (mudstream) media. Things like developments in the use of graphene, or advances in laser technology. You know, actual good news versus the politician PR and hype you get exposed to from mindless sources.

I didn't find many very interesting good news in any of my normal sources, this time around. It happens. Mostly, that's because I've been super-busy and have a big stack of magazines in my "to read" pile.

Here's yet another good news item about, you guessed it, graphene:

A new graphene technique could power a faster transistor:

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/540231/how-tiny-ribbons-of-graphene-could-power-a-faster-transistor

This is just in time for Windows 10, which, according to some brave souls who've tried it and come to me in tears, firmly ensconces the Microsoft User Frustration Team in the Pantheon of Psychopaths. With this new transistor, Windows can ruin your workday even sooner. But, maybe not. Several of my more IT-capable friends have fled this insanity for Apple (complete product, no user frustration team involved) and a PC running some form of UNIX. They've all told me their productivity has doubled or better.

Microsoft clearly does not want people using desktop machines, but they forget that they no longer have a monopoly. We do have other choices. My advice is to follow the lead of corporate IT, the same bunch who refused Vista, W7, and W8. They grudgingly accepted W7 after MS pulled their "no support" extortion trick. I don't think that's going to work again, and now instead of the stick they are using the carrot. It's a "free" so-called upgrade to W10, but you must act soon or you'll pay for it. Hmm.

The good news in response to MS's latest attack on the PC workstation is we do not have to use Windows at all.

More good news?

Despite this apparent disparity of "meta" good news, I don't think a day went by since our last issue when I didn't have good news personally. There's something good happening every day. Every day.

How about you? Do you even notice the many good news items that occur all around you every day? I hope so. Here are some places to look:

• You got great service from a store or other company you did business with.
• You walked into a place, and people were happy to see you.
• You had a meal that was just outstanding.
• Your workout that went right in every possible way. What an upper!
• Work went great. New idea made the boss smile. Or you met a goal you were striving toward.
• On a car trip, not one person acted like a total idiot. This is rare, but it does happen! It's good news if you encounter only 5 or 6 total idiots. Be on the lookout for a low idiot count!
• A younger person asked for your advice. And appreciated the counsel!
• Your friend mentioned an old song, and you both started singing it.
• Your cat or dog loves you. And shows it.
• Grandma gave you a hug.

Anything that makes you feel good about life, even if just for a short while, is good news. Good personal discipline and attention to making smart choices will reduce bad news and create many of those good news moments. Even when national news is disastrous (Obama still not indicted, for example), you can make good news in your own personal space and in the space of those around you.

When there's good news of the sort I report, that is pretty nice. But what happens on a personal scale for you is probably what really matters. Think of ways to create positive energy and do things that matter. You will make good things happen.

Mini Gadgets BB2Outlet Bush Baby Hidden Camera Wall Outlet

This wall adapter is perfect for just about any location. Its built in camera on the front is positioned so that this ordinary looking object can be hidden almost imperceptibly in any room which makes it perfect for a nanny cam or extra home security.

Not only does this device contain a 1280 x 960 resolution camera, but all of the outlets are still fully functional so you can use this device just like any other outlet expansion. The addition of two USB charging ports and the integrated cell phone holder make charging your phone as simple as possible.

It has full color VGA quality video and full motion detection and up 64GB MicroSD cards allowing you to store over an entire day's worth of video. Turn on with the flip of a switch and use the standard BushBaby remote control to turn on continuous recording, motion detection recording, or snap a photo.
 

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Mini-Gadgets-BB2Outlet-Bush-Baby-Hidden-Camera-Wall-Outlet-/321823873371

Here's a review posted just days before this eNL came out (13AUG):

I really feel more secure now that the BB2 Outlet is watching my stuff. After running a few tests, I was quite impressed at the quality of the video .Love the motion detection feature as it saves storage & keeps me from reviewing monotonous video.

When I first opened the box, I was struck by how aesthetically pleasing this was for something that plugs into my wall. Rather than stand out as some cheap plastic looking thing, it really fits into my décor. It doesn't look like some faked-up thing. It looks like it belongs there. And that's exactly what I needed, nobody knows they are being watched. The workmanship is solid, so this investment will last a long time.

he instructions that came with it were actually in English! Very clear and easy to understand. It was a snap to set this up so that it could collect the videos that will help protect my property.

I showed it to a friend who is looking for a way to stop the pilfering at his small business. It was like a light bulb came on in his head. He's going to order one, so he can identify the employee and protect his assets.

Do you actively make a point of thinking, or do you surrender that function to others? Be careful with your answer.

Let me pose a question. Do you have a soul that lives on after death? Nearly anyone you ask will say yes. But why that answer? Is it because they have thought things out or were so inculcated with the idea that they accept it without thinking?

Let me offer something for you to think about in relation to this soul question. Consider the brain disease called Alzheimer's. The basic modality of this disease is the brain dissolves. It AD brain gets smaller and smaller as the disease progresses. The brain loses a significant volume of tissue during this process.

Many people mischaracterize AD as a memory disease. It's not. Yes, memory goes. But so do many other things. Among those are those aspects of your thoughts and personality that make you who you are. Your likes and dislikes change dramatically, your sense of being changes dramatically, your self-awareness diminishes steadily, and on and on it goes.

That vivacious, smart, disciplined person who kept a clean home and organized life regresses into someone unrecognizable. Someone with a dull perspective on life, largely disinterested. This person gets dumber and dumber, less and less disciplined, messier, smellier, less hygienic, and increasingly disorganized. It's not just "as if" these are two different people, they are two different people. Two different souls, if you will.

To sum up, as AD progresses the original person morphs into some entirely other person. One who is cruelly disabled for sure, but the point is this is not the same person.

So when did the soul of the original person depart and leave this imposter behind? Or is the human soul really a product of what the physical brain does? Or is there a soul at all?

I'm not saying there is a right or a wrong answer to the opening question. I am merely pointing out that most of us don't think our way to what we believe. We surrender thinking to other "greater minds" (e.g., so-called leaders in social, political, and religious fields).

Generally, we don't question our own beliefs. We don't contrast them to the physical world and ask pointed questions. In other words, we accept what we've been told rather than think about the proposition. Politicians and other "ruling parasites" count on this very thing. They rise to power only because so many other people do not think.

On the soul question, there may be ways to reconcile the idea against what goes on with AD. But have you given that any real thought? Again, no right or wrong answer to the question itself. This is all about the thinking aspect. Most of us simply do not do think. Partly, that's because thinking is hard work! But there are other reasons, also.

Thinking can be dangerous, precisely because it's not something people do. If you think, you are different from others generally. That is more good than it is bad, but people who don't really think about what it means to be different tend to fear being different.

Thinking is tremendously liberating and empowering. Yet, it is not automatically done unless you have invested considerable effort into conditioning yourself to automatically begin the thinking process any time you are confronted with new information (or, as is often the case, disinformation). And you need to think about old information, too. Especially old information.

One reason so few people think is that we (the entire peasant class plus many others) have been conditioned to not think. Try to recall that brain-deadening experience you had called "school." I was totally bored through most of this. I got in trouble for reading Reader's Digest Condensed books in 2nd grade instead of going along with the idiotic "lesson" the "teacher" was blathering on about.

What are you mainly taught? To sit down and shut up. Disengage. Be passive. Do what you're told.

This same modus extends well into adulthood for most people. Many companies inflict their employees with torture sessions called "meetings" in which some unprepared dolt reads poorly prepared PowerPoint slides at (not to) a group of people who are desperately trying to stay awake through the proceedings.

What happens if you pretend you have a legally protected right to criticize the "government" simply because you misunderstood the fact that the First Amendment no longer applies in the USA? You may get "audited" by psychopaths or find yourself in trouble some other way.

What happens if you decide to engage in conversation that's intelligent and meaningful instead of the normal blather about sports, television, fake politics, and the weather? People might have to think, and that makes them uncomfortable. So they change the subject back to something meaningless.

What happens if you speak in plain English rather than in clichés and the latest movie-speak? Omigosh, you might drag someone into an actual conversation, which means the threat of thinking! Oh, the humanity of it all!

So there is much incentive to NOT think.

My advice is to ignore those incentives. They are provided by those who either do not wish you to be fully human or who have no such desire for themselves.

Make the choice to think. Do it well, and do it often.

http://www.youtube.com/v/4FrGxO2Fn_M

Something people don't take into consideration is that the criminal cabal posing as our federal "government" does not force overseas competitors to pay a fee to make up for the regulatory and IRS burdens they don't incur by being in the USA.

That is, our own "government" subsidizes companies in other countries at the expense of jobs in this one. Because we lack a government that actually is accountable to those being governed, foreign competitors can take advantage of this situation to compete unfairly against American manufacturers. That is, in fact, the main reason Chinese goods cost so much less and displace American goods on American shelves.

Another factor in the loss of USA jobs is the apparent fact that US Customs won't hire anybody with an IQ beyond a single digit. Those folks have messed up quite a few of my imports, for no reason other than their own gross stupidity and ignorance. They are never held accountable for the financial damage, no matter how significant. This, also, is an example of a badly broken federal "government" that is not accountable to those being governed.

Part of the solution is to refuse to surrender your vote at each fake election. Instead, use it to vote in the affirmative for law and order (that means vote Libertarian, the only major party whose platform based on following the law rather than egregiously breaking it).

Another part is to use your only real vote, the one that is your vote as a consumer. Boycott bad corporations and their products, and buy American-made even if that means you pay a little extra (often, it doesn't). Generally, American-made goods are safer to use and of higher quality than their Chinese counterparts, so factor that in as well.

• Change your password often. This does apply in an environment where people are transitory or where a password is shared. This does not apply to a single user, such as you at your home where nobody else has access to your computer or is using your password. Changing from a longish, fairly robust password that has not yet been cracked means you're taking a chance on changing to one that will be cracked.
   
• Run an antivirus program. This does apply in an environment in which employees or others may defy the rules and bring in freeware (specifically games) on a USB stick. There are almost no other conditions in which it makes any sense. These programs cause a raft of problems, including the hogging of resources and difficulty administering your system. They became obsolete with the release of Windows XP, assuming you do your regular Windows updates (no longer available for XP) and don't do stupid things like click the Accept box when crapware is offered as part of a software install.
   
• Never write your password down. Guess what? If it's a strong password, you will have to write it down. If you don't write it down, you'll take steps to make it easy to remember. And to crack. These days, we typically have dozens of passwords, a problem exacerbated by the idiots who spew the "change it often" advice to those who run the various sites you're passworded on.
   
• Close all open programs before letting someone else use your computer. This advice does apply if, for example, you have Quicken or another such program open; why show people your financial data? But other than that, it doesn't protect you. The real solution is to always log off (which does close your open program) and log them in as a Guest or some other profile that doesn't have admin privileges. Actually, you can stay logged in if your login password is strong and not written down anywhere nearby and you don't bypass logon during startup and you're not an admin; do these conditions sound impossible? Then log off!
   

Now, for some real solutions in addition to the one I just gave you.

• Use strong passwords. If you can remember a password, it's not strong enough.
   
• Do your Windows updates (or whatever OS you run) often. Stay up to date!
   
• Don't open attachments that are from people you don't know.
   
• Never click on a link in an e-mail allegedly from your bank, PayPal, eBay, etc. These companies will NEVER ask you to verify anything that way.
   

And here's the number one solution. The single most effective hacking technique isn't digital at all. It's personal. It's called "social engineering," and it means the hacker uses social methods to get information.

So someone pretending to be with your bank calls you and asks for your user name, saying they are checking security on your account. You're so smart, you know they need the password too, so no harm in giving them your username. Actually, the one thing they needed was a valid username.

Don't give away information, except on a verified need to know basis. Any little bit, no matter how innocuous sounding, is too much. The hackers and scammers can piece disparate bits together. Picture your access credentials as being a note on a piece of paper. Tearing that paper into a few bits does make the note harder to read. But not impossible. If nobody ever gets any bit of that note, then nobody can ever read the note. That's effective data security in a nutshell.
 

One of our readers watched several Youtube videos that seemed to conclusively prove that microwave ovens destroy all the nutrients in foods and wanted to know what I thought about that.

It helps to understand how a microwave oven heats up food. Mainly, it excites the water molecules thus causing food to heat rapidly from the inside. This is convenient, but one of the worst things you can do to food is overheat it (or heat it too rapidly). High heat is how you destroy nutrients and create carcinogens.

So it's not that microwaves impart "radiation" into the food and render it nutritionally void. It's that microwave users tend to heat up everything on the high setting, causing very high local temperatures within some areas (but not others) of the food.

Because the uneven heating in the early days of these ovens resulted in foul-tasting food and thus a poor reputation for microwave ovens, microwave oven manufacturers added things like slowly rotating turntables. But there's no stopping stupid, so the ultimate solution was to just make the ovens too small to really cook much with.

The microwave oven, to me, is not much different from a stovetop heating surface or an electric oven. I am very careful to control temperature. Heating slowly is what brings out the flavor without destroying the nutrients. You can render almost any food nutritionally void (and/or tasteless) by overcooking it or cooking it at too high a temperature. I cannot recall ever using my range burners at a setting higher than 5 (except very briefly, as in 60 seconds, when boiling a big pot of water). Never have I used the highest setting; what reason could there be for such a high temperature? It exceeds the safe limits of the cookware, too!

So don't worry about using a microwave oven if doing so assists you in making nutritious meals. I use mine to cook rice and sweet potatoes, among other things. The rice comes out with full flavor and full body (it's whole grain, of course). The sweet potatoes taste no different from ones baked in the electric (resistance heating element) oven. The key is I don't zap them with a high setting.

One video uses a strange sort of photography to show that microwaving "kills" the food. I noticed this video did not use a "control"; that is, there was no comparison to other types of cooking/heating. Nor did the video makers say anything about using the appropriate setting for the food in question. As to "killing" the food, I really do prefer dead food to live food. My intention with any food is that it's dead before I eat it.

A couple other videos said the microwaves destroyed the enzymes in the food. That, also, is a function of misuse.

No matter what the cooking method, if it's used improperly the food won't come out right. The assumption that a microwave oven can safely overheat food until it's "done" is the problem, not the microwave oven itself. At least, that is the case according to any valid research I have seen. Thought experiments also seem to validate that position.

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

Men's shirts have the  buttons on the right, but women's shirts have the buttons on the left. Congress sticks it to both of them, right up the middle.

Thinking happens because you choose to think rather than be on autopilot.