Mindconnection eNL, 2019-03-03

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Item 1. The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) has made several bad rulings in the past 10 years, and when Justice Scalia was alive he wrote scathing dissents. Many of these have involved civil liberties, such as the 4th Amendment cases the SCOTUS failed to decide lawfully or even rationally.

Civil liberties got a lift from the SCOTUS in a recent 8th Amendment case that Reason Magazine wrote about before the SCOTUS decided to hear it. Now that the case is decided and the SCOTUS actually upheld the rule of law for a change, we have very good news. Read the full story here:
https://personalliberty.com/supreme-court-says-constitutional-ban-on-excessive-fines-also-applies-to-states/

Item 2. Thanks to the long overdue Tax Reform Act, millions of Americans are getting big refunds on their 1040 payments this year. Since the 1040 system costs vastly more than it takes in, both the victim payers and the Treasury would be way ahead if we could scrap it.

If we scrap this revenue-negative system, what about all those IRS employees? Well, criminals belong in jail. Those "working" in the Collections department should simply swap places with the innocent people who went to prison for violating illegal drug laws. That would be justice and it would be good news.

Item 3. Penn State Hershey Medical Center has ended live animal use. According to the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, the dean of the Penn State College of Medicine said, “There are no plans to use live pigs in training our emergency medicine residents in the future. In a news release, PRCM said, "The medical center now joins the 95 percent (253 of 267) of surveyed emergency medicine residencies in the United States and Canada that exclusively use human-relevant training methods." If you're interested in supporting this committee, you can find them at www.pcrm.org.

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1. Read. Arguably, nothing has more brain boosting ability than reading does. Reading builds brainpower in multiple ways, including positive effects on the physical brain itself.
2. Sleep. When you're sleeping, your brain is able to offload its organic waste. If sleep is inadequate, your brain function is impaired. The relationship isn't linear; a little sleep deprivation has a big effect.
3. Discuss. Find intelligent, informed people to have discussions with. While the discussions don't always have to be deep, avoid wasting that time talking about the weather or professional sports or anything else meaningless.
4. Respect. You may be surprised to see this one on the list. But people who don't respect others tend to get left out of information loops and tend to argue instead of listen.
5. Eat. The brain requires energy. Lots of it. Skipping meals and other forms of eating dysfunction not only have deleterious effects on your health and appearance, they make you dumber.
6. Think. For most people, thinking just never happens. They react to the barrage of inputs they receive all day long, but slow down to carefully think about anything. It takes focus, patience, and dedication to make thinking a habit.
7. Discern. Rather than treat all inputs as the same (importance, value, veracity, etc.) evaluate the differences and similarities between those inputs so you can correctly characterize them. For example, when is something a fact rather than an opinion an vice-versa?

I happen to live above one of the world's largest aquifers, the Ogallala. It stretches from South Dakota into Texas, and from Colorado and New Mexico to eastern Kansas. Much of the water pumped from the Ogallala is used to grow toxic wheat in arid western Kansas.

Once water hits a tipping point in the supply, prices will skyrocket. That day for most people isn't decades away, it's years away. And, yes, that includes people in the USA.

What you can do:

• Conserve water now both to lower your current water bill and to help delay the disaster that is coming.
• Alert others to the problem. Look online and/or obtain relevant documentary films from your library system, so you are prepared to discuss the reality of this situation.

Some ways to conserve water:

• Don't double wash your dishes. Yes, rinse eggs and other "it won't come off in the dishwasher once it dries on there" stuff from plates. But generally, either wash by hand or use the dishwasher. Not both. And you do not even need to rinse dishes before putting them in the dishwasher, so don't do that.
• Set the dishwasher to use less water. Better models have econo modes and water-saver cycles.
• When using the faucet, open it halfway or less rather than all the way.
• Don't run the tap while brushing your teeth. Run it to rinse, then shut it off until you need to rinse again.
• While distasteful to some, the "if it's yellow, let it mellow" approach to our toilet use can hugely save water.
• Don't water your lawn just to keep it green. Water it only if it's been 10 days with insufficient rain; then, soak one inch and stop watering.
• If you replace your clothes washer, get a front loader.
• Repair or replace any leaky faucets.
• If you live in a hard water location, keep a spare toilet tank repair kit on hand. That way, you can stop the water waste without first having to make a trip to the store for the kit.
• Use a water-saving shower head. The cheap ones just restrict water, giving you a poor shower experience. The good ones add air to the water, so you don't get that "it's spitting on me" feeling yet you still save water.

More ways to conserve water:

• Reduce the amount of meat you eat, or eliminate it from your diet entirely. Meat is very water-intensive to produce. If you replace the meat with beans, rice, kale, bok choy, and other amino acid rich foods, you'll save a few hundred gallons of water waste every week (look it up, the figures are staggering).
• Totally eliminate "processed food" from your diet. Once it's processed, it's no longer food. It takes huge amounts of water to treat the diseases caused by eating debauched former food, and it takes huge amounts of water to debauch the food in the first place.
• Write to Bill Gates. Seriously. Mr. Gates has decided to solve the toilet problem. Today's toilets waste water, especially if they are "water saving" versions. And they have other faults that we're all well aware of. I'm not sure Mr. Gates will come up with a reliable design that is a pleasure to use. After all, he left us with Microsoft Windows which is unreliable and not a pleasure to use. But maybe he will have better luck with toilets.

https://blog.avast.com/7-tips-for-the-online-shopper

• Stretch.
• Take a preworkout supplement.
• Consume an energy drink.
• Do cardio.
• Eat or carbo load.

These are all mistakes. Let's see why, and then what to do instead.

• Stretch. Then you're going to turn around and compress that same muscle? This makes no sense. But the real problem is that when you stretch (elongate) a muscle, you make it weaker; this endangers your joints when you then put force through them.
   
• Take a preworkout supplement. There's nothing in a preworkout supplement that you can't consume much earlier. Or, as in the case of creatine, should consume long before a workout. Most of these supplements actually contain nothing that will improve your workout yet do contain ingredients that can impair it (such as massive doses of caffeine).

Photo taken about one week before 40th High School Class Reunion

• Consume an energy drink. I don't like the phrase "energy drink" and if you read the ingredients of these "worse than useless" products you will see why. Typically, these are loaded with massive amounts of caffeine, which means you're going to be high when working out. In the preworkout supplements mentioned earlier, you may see "Increases focus" or similar on the bottle; this is code for "outrageous amounts of caffeine". You actually lose focus, not gain it, when overdosing on this stimulant.
   
• Do cardio. First of all, if you train correctly there is no need for "cardio" (treadmill, cycling, spinning, jogging, etc.)Second, why would you want to use up energy just prior to training when intensity requires energy?
   
• Eat or carbo load. While it's true you need energy for a good training session, it is not true you need to eat or "carbo load" prior to training. A meal right before training is likely to degrade the quality of the session. The idea of carbo loading is you get the energy of the meal without the downside of having to digest one; but this practice is counterproductive. Your body's response to the carbs is to secrete insulin. Insulin is antagonistic to testosterone. So instead of getting the desired adaptive response from your endocrine system, your hard training gets you zip.

So how should you prepare for a workout? Here are the steps, in the correct order:

• Get your mind in gear. This is the first, and most important, step. If you can't be fully there during your training, your training will suffer. And your chance of injury is greater. You need to focus as you train. If your mind is wandering, you are wasting much of the session.
   
• Review your training plan. What exercises are you going to do in this session? How many sets, and in what order?
   
• Inspect the equipment. If you have a home gym, just make sure things are set so you can work out efficiently. If you are using a public gym, make sure any equipment you will need is available and in safe working order.
   
• Align joints. This is important for older athletes and/or those with specific joint issues. For example, people who have had frozen shoulder would do well to push their shoulder blades back using the door jamb exercise. See your chiropractor or physical therapist if any of this applies to you. It's not the same as stretching, so don't confuse the two.
   
• Do a proper warm-up. This doesn't mean get generally warm. It means to activate the target muscles with specific exercises. Vince Del Monte offers a good activation guide on video at a bargain price; if you don't do activation now, you should get Vince's video.

You can see there is a profound difference between the first list and the second one. Most people never get their mind in gear, don't even have a training plan to review, don't think about the equipment until they go to do an exercise that requires it, don't think about joint alignment, and don't warm up to get activation.

But if you do these things, your workouts will be safer and more productive.

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

Drinking soda (soft drinks) is the cause of nearly every case of esophageal cancer.