Mindconnection eNL, 2016-02-28

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

Item 1. A national health care plan of sorts appears to be emerging. Anyone who knows anything about health care knows that one leg of the stool is diet (the other two are rest and exercise, but you need a seat cushion of stress management too).

Now, I am not misusing the phrase "health care" to inexplicably mean "medical care." I do mean health care, something that the lip-flappers who pushed the Unaffordable Care Act lied about.

What do I mean by my opening sentence? Increasingly, grocery stores are expanding their selection of food (defined as edibles compatible with the human body). There are even "food only" grocers (not offering poison mislabeled as food) such as Natural Grocers opening more stores every day.

That which the federal government sought to destroy is, instead, starting to bloom. And that is really good news.

Item 2. It's not clear if the criminals who run things intend to keep our current dictator in office or replace him with some other sociopath. The signs that he's not going are worrisome; just look at the line-up of retards and screw-ups on the fake D/R ballot. Even Ann Coulter, who spews bile on Democrats while seeming to give Republicans a free pass, can't take it anymore. A friend recently forwarded an item in which she lambasted the entire line up of clueless retards, screwups, and misfits running on the R side of the fake ballot.

She's not the only one to see how awful the fake "choices" are. And that's really good news. The circus has gotten so absurd in this latest fake election that people are increasingly rejecting the delusion that these fake elections mean anything in terms of a democratic process. Greater awareness of the reality of this scam brings us that much closer to replacing it with a real and viable system. Maybe the Libertarian slogan "Legalize Freedom" could become a reality in this land where the concept of civil liberty means nothing anymore.

If our current dictator is retained for another 4 years, it is unlikely the people will stand for it regardless of the "reason," since he should have been deported more than a decade ago and should be in Guantanamo now based on his high crimes of the past 8+ years during his illegal stay in this country. A year from now, things will have shaken out and maybe this long nightmare will be over.

Item 3. Apple is still resisting the illegal demands that it release records to some unaccountable federal agency. The agency claims it needs to violate civil liberties so it can "fight terrorism" which is a real crock because if that agency were actually serious about fighting terrorism it would shut down Monsanto Corporation, the IRS, and a few of our larger banks. Hooray for Apple.

Item 4. Apple is still making products that people want. In fact, with Microsoft seemingly on a jihad to eliminate the PC (desktop and laptop) via making one horrendously crappy version of Windows after another, people want Apple computers more than ever. Apple is still a consumer-driven business, but now in addition to making great products they are fighting for what we have left of our civil rights. This makes me want to run out and buy an Apple product right now!

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The kind of people who don't like to participate in either direction have a negative focus. They see other people as targets of arguing, so always look for something wrong and/or focus on the differences. You can spot these people easily enough. They start arguing right away and use dishonest tactics as they go, under the delusion they must "win" their imaginary battle. Often, they state things that flatly contradict the accepted body of knowledge on a topic (as if they have expertise, which they don't).

Their negativity stifles their learning and their stupidity annoys the people they come into contact with. Don't try to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear with such people. They are not worth your time. The other people are.

The first thing you need to do is establish mutual respect and a sense of "safe ground." Someone whose interest is, for example, arachnids probably is very hesitant to bring that up. But it can be a very interesting and even entertaining discussion topic. You may have to ask directly. "Susan, a friend said you study spiders. What makes that so fascinating? I know a little about them, but would like to hear from someone who has expertise."

As Susan begins expounding, just listen. Don't jump in with "corrections" based on your preconceived ideas (e.g., when she says they aren't insects you object to that). After all, she's been studying the topic. Active listening is best. For example, she says they are not insects you can say, "Well many people think they are. I'm not sure about the difference, can you explain that please?"

To avoid having her go on and on and boring you to tears, you can do any number of conversational moves. For example, "So arachnids really consider geometry it looks like. I find that quite interesting because I have an interest in rock climbing and geometry is really important there too. People think it's about upper body strength, but it's more about geometry." Now as you pantomime how you climb, she talks about how spiders climb.

So the general flow of getting a conversation flowing (in this modality) is:

• Establish common ground. Look for things to agree on.
• Ask a probing question, showing respect for that person's background (and education, interests, etc.).
• Listen. Let the other person share; don't jump in with objections.
• Ask intelligent questions.
• Stay relevant to the conversation, but tie it to your own interests or expertise.

There are other ways to positively engage people in sparkling conversation, not just this one. But in all of them, it's important to first seek common ground.

Here's one where the views of two people diverge:

• Establish common ground. Look for things to agree on.
• One person states an opinion or asks a question, what emerges are differing viewpoints.
• Answer the difference by reaffirming some basic fact of the subject to redirect, or say that's an interesting perspective and move on, or ask the person to explain further, or say you have a different take on it.
• Never use bullying tactics or the dishonest tactics of mindless argumentation. "Winning" is not an objective, exploring the subject is.
• If you don't know the basic facts of a subject, don't challenge the other person on statements presented as fact; instead, ask for more information. "I didn't know that about arachnids, thank you" (if the other person is knowledgeable) or "I'm having a problem agreeing with that. Can you tell me how you know this?"

Always have your BS detector on. When you encounter people who don't know anything about a topic and yet challenge statements (as opposed to asking for more substantiation) that are a priori or otherwise easily verifiable, you need to end the non-conversation. Such people are dedicated to remaining ignorant and having very little effective brainpower. They waste not just their time but yours.

We all are warned to avoid the topics of politics and religion, so what are topics to bring up instead? Really, it can be anything. But it needs to be interesting to the other person, not just you. If you've had the experience of listening to some boor drone on about something you have no interest in, you understand why this is important. Always be aware of the signals given off by the other person, so that you don't become that boor.

Think about the size of that number. It's 30 followed by 12 zeroes. It is unlikely we will actually hit that number, as getting there will likely be fatal. That is, Soetoro's jihad to bring down the USA won't take a decade. With the damage from his last 7 years of unrelenting assault, the debt has already doubled and you can see the devastating effects of that. How much more of this can we take? I don't think we can sail past $20 trillion on our way to $30 trillion.

Where is our Defense Department? They aren't defending us. Where are our representatives in Congress? They aren't representing us. Where is the Justice Department? They aren't arresting the criminals involved in this (e.g., Soetoro, Pelosi, etc.).

What can we mere peasants do in the face of this approaching train wreck?

It is unlikely that we can stop it at this point. But we can:

1. Slow it down and maybe eventually bring it to a stop. That means forcefully demanding of our (mis)representatives that they repeal any and all spending bills signed into law by Soetoro who has been clearly in violation of our Constitution every day he's been in office. Bug these people relentlessly. Write and call until they know who you are, then write and call more.
2. Adapt. This means get yourself out of debt (if you're in it), learn to grow your own food affordably, obtain tools if you don't have them already and fix things yourself, and do excellent work in your job while smiling at everyone you encounter.

Let me say a few words about that last comment. Many people think if they do sloppy work it's acceptable. Just zombie your way through the day and check off the boxes as you go. There's a misunderstanding of what "good enough" means. It doesn't mean "not excellent but it will suffice." When my dad taught me how to do things in the various skilled trades, he'd look at my work and say, "Mark, that's not good enough. Can you tell me why and how you can do it better?" He'd go over the standards and principles if needed. When I produced something that met the standards of excellence, only then was my work "good enough."

I don't believe in perfectionism. It's the enemy of progress and of getting something good done. But perfectionism is very different from perfect execution. When I learned the basics of being a machinist, I learned about methodologies and tolerances. If I needed to bore a hole to within 0.003, it wasn't "good enough" to get it to within 0.004. Nor was I expected to get it to within 0.001. I needed to hit a certain rate, and doing that meant setting up the machine correctly and then perfectly executing the operation. The results might not be perfect, but they met the standard for excellence. If I took all day to get the hole to within 0.000001, that would be perfectionism rather than perfect execution.

As this Soetoro-inflicted train wreck approaches, your best defense is to do work that is good enough. People will recognize that, because it is superior rather than mediocre. Yes, I understand that life is not a pure meritocracy and the workplace is often dysfunctional in recognizing good talent. But superior work--work that is actually good enough--is a huge competitive advantage. Think, plan, and practice perfect execution and you'll get work that is good enough.

What about all that smiling? Nobody likes a griper. People like positive energy, so emanate it. Life isn't a pure meritocracy, which is why you need a positive attitude toward others. They may be retards and screwups, but you don't have to remind them of that. And remember, it is people who will hire or retain you. It's best if they like your work and they like you. Show respect and you'll probably get it.

You can also set yourself apart from losers by paying attention to how you dress. Rather than dress like everyone else so you fit in, dress in a way that shows you respect yourself. Your need isn't to be counted as just another loser (you fit in), but to be seen as someone of substance. That doesn't mean wear a suit everywhere you go, but it does mean to put some thought into how you dress. Make sure it's good enough.

Here's an article on that:

https://blog.knowbe4.com/bid/355390/The-Antivirus-Industry-s-Dirty-Little-Secret?knowbe4-avexposedinvbraptest=

Don't waste your money on these computer-slowing, useless programs. Here is what you do instead:

• Make your Microsoft updates (if you are a Windows victim, er, I mean user) just not to Windows 10.
• Stay off of suspect sites.
• Don't open attachments to e-mails that come from people you don't know.
• Don't open attachments to e-mails that come from people you DO know, unless you know why they are sending the attachment.
• Always look at the from address in an e-mail; you can spot spoofs 99.9999% of the time. PayPal gets spoofed incessantly. Nothing wrong with PayPal, and the scammers try to take advantage of the trust that PayPal users have. Call PayPal's customer service number and listen to their anti-spoof message in the phone greeting.
• If you are on a workstation, make sure it's behind a router. Nobody can see your computer over the network, they see only as far as the router.
• Encrypt your wireless network.
• Use solid passwords and do not change them. Yes, security "experts" advise us to change from passwords that do work to ones that might not. They make their money solving security failures, so why do you think they give this bad advice? Change passwords only if you have reason to believe they may have been compromised.
• Never share your password over the phone; if you somehow break this rule, then change the password right away.
• Always log off if leaving your computer unattended.
• Log in as a standard user, unless there is a particular reason you need to log in (temporarily) as an administrator.
• Don't download "free" stuff. It often is used as bait to get you to install malware.
• Be alert to malware "offers" when installing new software, even from CD. Today, many firms are struggling to survive (thanks mostly to Obama) so they are making money by bundling scamware with their legitimate software. Proceed slowly through the installation, no matter how long that takes, and click Decline each time it comes up. The actual software won't have an Accept/Decline choice (unless it's not legitimate).

Instead of an antivirus program, run a malware program such as Malware Bytes (but only with self-protection module ticked on). I ran MB on a machine that was "protected" by Kapersky; it found over 7,000 instances of malware and removed them. Ran like a new machine after that.

I asked someone close to me to suggest the topic for this issue. She said either inconsistency or overtraining would be good topics. I think for many people, they are just opposite sides of the same coin. I'll explain more, in a bit.

My first personal trainer (back in the days before there really were personal trainers) was my childhood buddy Russell. We've known each other since 1960, having been born in the same month of that year and reared in homes on the same block.

Russ taught me a lot about physical training. One of the things he pointed out to me was the concept of overtraining.

When we were about 15, we stopped at Tom's house. Tom had a complete weight set, which made him a rarity. Tom was sure he was going to be a major bodybuilder some day, and he worked out at least two hours every day to get there.

This, Russell explained, is why "Tom will never pack on much muscle." Russell's two younger brothers didn't lift weights at all, and they were amazingly strong and looked it. If you got hit by a snowball either of them threw, you were going down.

Being only 15, Russell didn't know the exact reasons why overtraining gave poor results (I will highlight those reasons, shortly).

But he knew that you could do only so much damage before moving backwards.

People who train inconsistently don't get good results. They try to make up for it by training too hard whenever they do train. This is like pouring excess fertilizer on a plant that you have neglected. It doesn't grow any faster, but you do burn it up.

Not that he knows anything about body building, but eight-time Mr. Olympia Lee Haney (who still looks great despite being a couple of years older than I am) says you want to stimulate, not annihilate. The "secret" to improving muscular size and strength is to overload the muscles just enough to stimulate the adaptive response.

Going beyond that doesn't create a larger response, it actually mutes the response. It mutes the response by keeping cortisol elevated too long, overloading your liver, and generally giving your body a bigger job than it would otherwise have. Go beyond that, and you have the consistent soreness, etc., that the overtrained live with. Their workouts actually work against them.

So if overdoing it doesn't make up for a lack of consistency, what's the obvious solution? Be consistent. Many people find an excuse as to why they can't do this. I've had a very full schedule, much more than is normal for people, nearly my whole adult life. And yet I have not missed a workout since the summer of 1977. So whatever your excuse is, "get off your but."

Some common "but" excuses include "I'd like to train regularly, but..."

• I have too much to do.
• Sometimes I am too tired.
• I can't get off the phone.
• I make other plans.
• My work day is too much.
• I can't get to the gym.
• A friend invited me to go bowling (Russell's daughter won a bowling scholarship to college, it didn't stop him from training).
• I need to do X first (no, actually, you don't). X being "lose weight" or buy gym clothes, etc.
• And so on and so on.

Each of these excuses has a solution, and if you are serious about looking and feeling your best you will solve for these and other excuses. I know it's doable, you just need the desire to do it.

Make a schedule and stick to it. Have some flexibility, of course. Examples:

• I had squats and deadlifts (which I am doing 2x a month) scheduled for a Monday. But the previous Sunday, I had gone climbing. I awoke Monday with legs that felt tired. I moved that workout to the following Monday, and really nailed it then.
• On a particular week, back and biceps fell on Wednesday. But I wanted to fly out to see my sister on that day. Thursday was scheduled as a rest day. I swapped these, working out at a gym in her town on Thursday.

As noted in previous editions of this eNL, productive workouts are short and intense (if they aren't short, they aren't intense).

If you are focused on getting the intensity going with each rep of each set, you are going to have a very productive 15 to 20 minutes of training. People who hang out at gyms for hours at a time using momentum to toss weights around do get the predictable joint injuries, but they don't get much in the way of productive results. Some people "work out" for years and yet look no different from the newbie who just started training three weeks ago.

Last November, I visited a gym out of town. There were close to 50 people in there at the time. I completed my training in about 20 minutes. I decided to take a quick look around to see if anyone else was training in a productive manner. Usually, I see one or two people who know what they're doing. That's always encouraging. At this gym, on this visit, not one person was training in a productive manner. Not one in 50!

People were walking around with their water bottles and towels, yakking with each other about whatever, and doing exercises that don't go with the ones they were doing when I started. Not only that, their bodies didn't look any different. They physically had no reaction to their "workouts."

Hard training causes your muscles to swell up with blood. That's because the muscles actually constrict the veins, which means arterial flow comes in but blood is very slow going out. That's the pump. Hard contraction causes that to happen, and there's a color that goes with it. You can tell when someone has "the pump" and when someone doesn't. Unfortunately, I was the only one there who was pumped. Which means this gym catered to the "go to the gym but don't actually train" crowd.

I have been to other gyms where it seems like everyone is pumped. One that stands out is The Inferno, which caters to the "make every workout count" crowd. So I do have a benchmark to go by.

This was a chest and triceps day for me. After bench pressing, I did flyes. I noticed that in the time it took me to do one repetition, the woman to the right of me did an entire set. Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. Nothing accomplished there. When I hit triceps, a similar thing happened. This gym, oddly enough, did not have a French curling bar; that's a staple of triceps training. So I made do with dumbbells. I did low-rep sets, but each rep was very hard. Not for the guy next to me; whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.

It seemed like people were blasting through their sets, then simply doing more weight lifting to fill the time so they could put whatever time at the gym they "thought" was enough. This is totally unproductive training, as was evident by looking at these people before and after their sets.

At the Inferno, which I mentioned just a bit ago, I would sometimes take longer between sets just to watch somebody swell up while doing a given exercise. Such dedication. Such consistency. From everyone there. A great place to go, if you want the "get results vibe" all around you. Or just to be reminded of what good training looks like.

A great way to get yourself into consistency mode is to train properly. When you see and feel the results, you will want to train on schedule. When I walked out of that gym last November, my veins were huge and my pecs were bulging. I just got done training, after all, and that's always what happens after a chest/tri workout. I did enough to stimulate the adaptive response, and I didn't train pecs again until 5 days later (to give that response time to do its job).

If you look the same after a workout as you did when you started, you didn't work out. You did something, but you wasted your time. I can understand why people lapse into inconsistency when this happens. Why bother training, if it has no effect other than to make you feel tired and perhaps crave a fattening whey protein drink afterwards?

People who are inconsistent will often overtrain to try to make up for it. Then the overtraining makes them tired and sore, so they become inconsistent and the cycle starts all over again.

You can stop this cycle from ever happening, by making each workout count. That means doing each rep with great deliberation and focus, taking your time to stimulate the target muscles. A great tip on this: flex the target muscle just before moving the weight. That triggers the nervous system, priming the pump. Not that he knows anything about bodybuilding, but seven-time Mr. Olympia Arnold Schwarzenegger was a huge proponent of squeezing (contracting) the muscle as hard as you can, not just passively letting the weight do that for you.

Stimulate, and you get growth. Everyone who trains this way (with deliberation and focus) gets the adaptive response over the next few days. And everyone who trains this way gets the immediate response of huge vascularization and muscle pump. If you are training properly, you will see that in the mirror after each set and after the workout. If you don't see it, you didn't train properly.

That goes for women, too. The one who suggested this topic is a great example of how women can get the immediately visible response from proper training. No woosh, whoosh, whoosh or "training for tone" for her. She makes her workouts count.

For her, it's all about focus and form. No momentum. Slow, deliberate movements with hard muscle contraction. This is what she does, so she gets that pump. Granted, the pump is less for women than for men (excluding the steroid freaks, I'm talking about sustainable, healthy training methods here). But it is still noticeable.

If you just got done doing your planned sets and did them properly, you have confidence no further training is necessary or even desirable. You won't overtrain, because you can literally see there's no need to do so.

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

There is no record showing that Stanley Ann Dunham Obama was in Hawaii when her son was born. No record that this child (she was a minor at the time) traveled there, stayed there, was admitted to a hospital there, or had a baby there. Draw your own conclusions about the fraud that has been destructively perpetrated on this country.

Some people die lonely and broken, while others die surrounded by friends. Why do you think that is? How will that affect what you do going forward?