Mindconnection eNL, 2025-12-21

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

• " White House border czar Tom Homan said more than 60,000 children who were illegally smuggled into the United States have been located by the Trump administration and that some were rescued from dire situations, including sex trafficking and forced labor." [Epoch Times]. Homan actually said 62,000. Close enough.
  
  You would think, with the communists being so hateful toward Homan and his work in rescuing sex-trafficked kids, that rank and file Democrats would switch parties. The truth is that many big donors to the "Democrat" Party are the end customers of the human slave trade and sex traffickers. We know this for many reasons, including the fact the spectacular results during the first Trump administration were not even attempted under the Brainless administration.
   
• Jasmine "Yet to say anything intelligent" Crockett has announced her run for Senator from Texas. That should chew up a lot of Democrat campaign dollars, while ensuring the Republican stays in office. It's a lot harder to cheat in a Senate race, because there's no gerrymandering of a district and you have to face the entire state's electorate. Someone this momentously stupid stands no chance of winning a debate against even a person of moderate intellect, and her opponent is pretty sharp. Let's hope the commies fund her generously, which will mean draining funds from other commie candidates.
   
• The Trump administration negotiated critical minerals pacts with nations across three continents in 2025, a pace that will accelerate in 2026 as the United States and trading partners integrate mining and processing capacities to break free from China’s manipulation of global metals markets." [Epoch Times]. Such negotiations are impossible via autopen, thus they did not happen during the Brainless years.
   
• One of the greatest disasters in US history occurred in 2020. That was the year that blatantly obvious and obviously blatant election cheating overturned the actual election (83% of the mail-in votes that came in after the polls closed were for Brainless Biden). This installed a demented pervert in the White House, enabling government-by-autopen and launching the four years of the Communist Occupation. The cost of those four years exceeded the inflation-adjusted cost of the execution of World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War -- combined. By more than an order of magnitude.
  
  Now, less than a year after Liberation Day, the DOJ has been left no choice but to sue Fulton County, GA to get the voting records. If the "election" was "fair and honest," why has there been such fierce resistance to any sort of investigation? Why were so many people destroyed at the time for seeking the truth (and they are still trying to bury Guiliani)?

• READING TUTOR: The only reading pen with learn-to-read functions, and we have six: spelling, syllabication (how the word is "built"), lookup of phrasal verbs, lookup of idiomatic expressions, colors for different dictionary fields, and it highlights words as it reads from scanned text. These combine to dramatically improve literacy and reading fluency.
• READER PEN: You scan, it reads aloud individual words and even multiple lines of text in natural voice. Helps those with dyslexia or other reading-challenges gain reading independence. Earbuds automatically mute the built-in speaker to avoid classroom stigma. Select different voices for playback, lefthand or righthand use, left or right scan direction.
• READS ANY SURFACE. Scans what you actually read from: phone, tablet, PC, other screens - not just paper. We could not find a single other reading pen that can do this. But the Rocket Pen can.
   
• MASSIVE ONBOARD DICTIONARIES: The Rocket Pen has the New Oxford American Dictionary with Oxford Thesaurus of English (Americanized) with over twice the entries of the best competing products. It also has the Oxford American Children’s Dictionary with Oxford American Children’s Thesaurus (both Americanized). The Rocket Pen scans English and French only, but also contains an English to Spanish dictionary and a French definitions dictionary (French to French).
• COMES COMPLETE. Self-contained, no computer or Wi-Fi required. Kit includes Rocket Pen reading tutor, USB charging cable, Quick Start Guide, and earphones. Meets FCC, ROHS, and CE standards, and conquers illiteracy.
• BACKED BY EXPERIENCE. The lead developers of the Rocket Pen Reading Tutor each have over 25 years of experience in reading assistive devices, and yet the Rocket Pen is the newest and most advanced reading pen on the market. And the only one with reading tutor functions.
   
• MISSION-FOCUSED. The Rocket Pen isn't loaded with other features a struggling reader doesn't need. Its focus is on helping the reading challenged master not only the texts they encounter but reading itself. This reading pen is the only one that is also a reading tutor. Unlike other products in this space, the Rocket Pen is truly a learn to read pen not just a text to speech scanning pen. It provides six different methods for users to learn how to read rather than just being read to. It's a powerful dyslexia reading tool for students and adults, and for anyone else with reading challenges. It provides six different methods for users to learn how to read rather than just being read to.
• READY TO USE, EASY TO USE. Comes ready to use, no setup needed, easily customized. 1.9 inch color touch screen; Physical buttons for screenless scan and read; Select English or Spanish user interface.

In our Amazon store you will see more offerings, including:

Disability Products:

(We are the sole Amazon seller for these)

• BlindShell phones for the blind
• RealSAM Pocket, which is a voice operated Galaxy smart phone for the blind
• SmartPens4U Rocket Pen Reading Tutor Scanning Pen | Case Bundle Black | Case Bundle Lavender
• WeWalk Smart Cane "Cane with a Brain" for the blind: 47-inch, 54-inch, 59-inch

Radios:

• Connex 10 meter radios
• Dosy meters
• Galaxy 10 meter and 11 meter (CB) radios
• President 10 and 11 meter radios
• Ranger 10 meter radios
• Texas Ranger radios (Chuck Norris not included, sorry)
• Uniden radios and scanners

Tools:

• AEM instruments
• Bahco tools
• Case tools
• CAT tools
• CPS tools
• Irwin saw blades
• Mayes tools
• Rigid Tools work lights and related
• Vessel tools
• Wera tools
• Wiha tools
• Williams tools

More:

• American Hard Bag aftermarket sound system parts for Harley Davidson motorcycles
• Centerpoint Archery devices
• Cold Steel knives
• Dead Downwind hunting products
• G5 hunting products
• Flexilla hose connectors
• Funko collectibles
• Mike Holt Electrical Exam Preparation products
• Nagy's aftermarket sound system parts for Harley Davidson motorcycles
• Paraben Consumer data recovery sticks, porn detection sticks, and similar diagnostic/ IT tools
• ROK straps
• Rostra universal cruise control kits
• Swhacker archery products

What I want to stress is the importance of recognizing distraction and dealing with it. Some people believe they can chit-chat and do good work at the same time. They are mistaken. Their lack of focus has a cost.

What you need to do is think about distraction in general and how you can reduce it, specific distractions that you can eliminate, and circumstances in which you need to focus. The less your brainpower is diluted among different calls for it, the more brainpower you can bring to bear on whatever you are doing.

I'm in three sports that require intense concentration, and my work requires intense concentration. I have also found that when speaking with someone, concentrating on that person instead of thinking of what to say next produces a satisfying conversation for at least that other person. Bill Clinton was a master of this, and people often gave him what he wanted because they felt he respected them. Which he did. And he showed that by focusing on them.

You can't have 100% focus 100% of the time. So don't try. But make a point of focusing when you are doing something where work quality, safety, athletic performance, etc. are at stake. And always focus when communicating in a relationship. I don't mean necessarily in a romantic relationship. I mean in any relationship. Especially with a child or pet, because they look up to you and the message you send about whether they are important to you really matters to them.

I see people walking their dog while yakking on their phone, as if the dog is not even there. I do not have to guess, such a person treats his wife, friends, and coworkers the same way. He can't focus on what matters, he tries to multi-task and thus fails in both tasks.

To manage tasks, I schedule things in my Outlook Calendar. For those who don't know, Outlook became the standard corporate communication suite--with e-mail, scheduling, and contacts all in one program. It hugely advanced team collaboration for multiple reasons. I have been using it since before it took the corporate world by storm. Before Outlook, we MBA types and many others managed our activities with a Franklin Covey Day Planner. The point of any such tool is you schedule things into 15 minute slots. For those 15 minutes, you don't think about anything else. This was magnificent for productivity among those who adopted it.

The alternative of trying to do everything at once is disorganized, inefficient, and error-producing. You might appear to be busier, but you are getting less done and what you do get done is less than it should be in terms of quality. That's the corrosive effect of distraction.

Lasers are powerful because they focus light instead of diffuse it. Try laser focusing on one thing at a time, and you'll see how much more you get done in any given day.

Notice I said home, not house. Your home is the usable space within that house. I sat next to a Japanese CEO on a flight from somewhere to somewhere else, and we had an interesting conversation. He was the CEO of a major brand you would recognize.

I asked him why he was flying coach. He said First Class doesn't get you there any sooner so why spend the money? At some point, he told me his house in Japan was 600 square feet. I said that is very tiny by our standards. He asked me how many square feet my bed was, and then asked me the square feet of this or that. "Add them all up. Not even close to 600 square feet." He said there is actually less space in an average American home than in his 600 square foot home, "...because you Americans fill your homes with stuff and there's no room left for you. So you buy bigger house and repeat the mistake."

You can free up some space using creative storage means, such as lazy Susans and under-bed bins. But that goes only so far. The single most effective thing you can do is get rid of stuff. Look, for example, in your clothes closet. Do you see any items you almost never wear? Typically, this amounts to half of what's in there. Get rid of the half you hardly use. You can repeat this for floor space in your living room, counter and cupboard space in your kitchen, and so on. Old lamps, tables, chairs, book cases, and books you will likely never read again are all just taking up space; get rid of them. Knick knacks collect dust and detract from clean lines; do you do a nice little accent with a few, or is it time to get rid of all but a few? Your old cassette tapes, VHS tapes, and CDs you haven't played in years? Toss them.

Some ways to get rid of stuff:

• If it is in good condition, offer it for sale on eBay so someone else can enjoy it.
• If it's in poor condition, toss it out.
• Keep a box for charity items, but only items that are in good condition. Charity organizations are not trash collectors.
• Give it to another person as a token of your friendship.
• If you have gloves that you don't wear, put them in your car and the next time you see a panhandler at an intersection, give them away. It might help to stuff a $5 bill inside.

As you remove things that you don't get much use from, your home becomes visibly larger inside and you feel less cramped.

What about consumables? The big things today are econosize and pouches. Yes, these save money. But they add to clutter and reduce the usable cupboard space in your kitchen. What I do:

• Use small glass bowls with plastic lids. You can find these at your supermarket or order from Amazon.
• From the larger container, fill a small bowl. Use masking tape and a permanent marker to quickly make a label. These will take up 1/5th the space and eliminate 100% of the mess.
• Zip the pouch shut, fold it over, and clip shut with a Bulldog clip (available at an office supply store, buy a bag of 10). Then store all of the pouches in a dry, dark place out of the way. For example, a cupboard in your laundry room.
• Refill the glass bowls as needed.

Speaking of pouches, you can buy turmeric for about $1 a pound in a pouch. It's very messy to deal with, so spoon some out to fill a glass bowl as described above. Capsules are more convenient, but you have to pull the capsule apart to get the turmeric onto your food or into your recipe or you use the capsules as intended (swallow with water). Capsules are great if you don't mind paying $45 a pound for tumeric. I mind, so I get the pouch.

5. Security tip

Let's talk a little about phone scams.

This is from Medicare: "Scammers are extra busy this time of year. They may pretend to be from Medicare or an insurance company to try to steal your personal information — or even enroll you in a plan without your knowledge. Remember, legitimate agents and brokers who represent Medicare plans need your permission before contacting you. If you get an unsolicited call, just hang up. Uninvited emails or texts? You can ignore those, too."

Other common scams:

• Quick loans. These usually are unaffordable, but presented in ways that make them seem otherwise. The emphasis is on speed, and remember that speed kills.
• Buy your house. Yep, for way less than a decent Realtor could sell it for. The emphasis here is on no-hassle speed. Be prepared to lose at least half of what your house is actually worth.
• Extended car warranty, appliance warranty, home warranty. Total rip-off.
• Job offer from some company you never heard of. Unless the job is for a position for which you specifically applied (e.g., electrical engineer, 3rd grade teacher, yoga instructor, marketing exec), it's a scam. Any job offer for a job not related to your training and experience or that pays you "at the end of the season" is a scam. Package forwarding is a scam.
   
• Microsoft Support. Microsoft does not offer support. Even if they did, that would be a scam!
• Computer virus solution providers. They claim there's a virus on your computer and then will try to con you into installing malware.
• Burial insurance. A really dumb thing to buy.
• Burial plots. The vast majority of people who buy these later relocate and cannot sell them. It's a total loss.
   
• Health insurance. As I have noted many times, there is no such product. If you are interested in medical insurance, set aside some time to shop online for it. Better yet, practice health care so you don't need medical care in the first place. Note also that "pay with cash" gets you a much lower rate, often less than the insurance co-pay amount.
• Investments in gold, movie project, oil, bitcoin, etc. All flimflam scams.
• IRS protection. Nobody can protect you from these terrorists, except a very good tax attorney. And those folks don't need to drum up business by calling random strangers.
• The IRS itself calls you. Never speak directly with anyone from the IRS, they are phishing for information to use against you. Tell them to speak with your tax attorney and then hang up. If you do not have a tax attorney, IRS won't have that attorney's contact information or a valid POA. Which means they will make more phone attempts and finally follow up with a letter to you. Then, get a tax attorney and sign a POA. Don't try to save money here, IRS can go back to your very first job even if you are 79 years old today and assess you for taxes owed plus penalties and interest (yes, they have ways to disregard statutes of limitations). IRS even goes after pre-teens for not filing, even though they are not required to file. Always, always, always, have a tax attorney deal with them.
   
• Free X inspection. Someone will come out to, for example, inspect your roof. Then they will (surprise!) find out you need a new roof. Don't fall for the free inspection traps.
• Extended car warranty. It's a fake warranty, you pay and pay until you file a claim. Then they don't pay.
• Home alarm system installer. These often come with a free promotion. These are always a scam.
• Caller ID shows a name similar to one that you trust. For example, it's a call from Dscover but not from Discover. Do not even answer it.

The sheer volume of spam calls has become punitive to just about all of us. How to protect yourself:

• Use NoMoRobo or similar.
• Use call blocking to block every spam number that calls you.
• Don't answer calls that are obviously from spammers.
• If you do get a spam call, either hang up right away or ask them to stop calling you.
• Don't agree to anything solicited by phone. Ask them for their website address, saying you'll look at it when you have time.
• If they say it's a one-time offer or phone exclusive, or use any other pressure tactic, tell them to eat your shorts. And then hang up. Or just hang up while they are still flapping their lips.
• Don't easily give out your phone number.
• Keep a whistle handy. If you get the same company pestering you, blow that whistle into the phone.

6. Health tip/Fitness tips

	Bad advice on diet continues to be rampant. Here are some things I have come across recently. Some YouTube "doctor" claims that bananas are not a good source of potassium. However, it has been well-established that they are. People who reach their 60s with reduced kidney function have low potassium numbers. Their doctor says to eat a couple of bananas a day, and subsequent blood tests show normal potassium. Even if this were not so, bananas are a nutritional bonanza and a culinary delight.   Another YouTube "doctor" is selling some supplement to treat constipation. He claims that fiber supplements don't help. This is actually correct, except in the case of people who have an ultra-low fiber diet. In my own case, I consciously try to reduce fiber where practical. Why is this? Because my diet is 100% whole-food based, therefore I get so much fiber it can be a problem. Rather than take some fiber supplement, the solution is to replace processed foods with real foods.   In a recent conversation with friends, I found they were buying the seed oils lie. The lie is that these oils aren't harmful and when you "need" a neutral-tasting oil for a recipe you should use these oils. If the oils are extracted via cold-press with no hexane or heat to damage the lipids, you can consume these oils. But the cold-pressed versions are insanely expensive because cold pressing is an inefficient and wasteful way to get the oil out. Generally, you will need to choose a non-seed oil and adapt to the flavor. Avocado oil and walnut oil are a couple of options. Coconut oil is a good option. "Olive oil" isn't always olive oil; the cheap versions and the "mild flavor" versions are cut with oleic acid and should not be consumed.   The "low carb" diet myth continues to plague us. If you are on a balanced whole food diet devoid of meat, wheat, corn, and soy, you are going to get carbs. You need those carbs to fuel workouts, fuel your brain, burn fat, etc. Rather than go "low carb" go "zero ultra-processed food" and zero "glyphosate contaminated food" and you will be fine.   Another myth is the collagen myth. Collagen is just a type of protein and protein consists of amino acids. You don't need to take expensive collagen supplements and you don't need to pay for a bone broth tea powder. If you really want collagen, buy some soup bones and make a broth that you can add to rice, beans, or both.
	Multi-day fasting. This has never made any sense, and it puts a lot of stress on your body. It's hard on your kidneys, causes a loss of motility in the colon, retards workouts, retards recovery, etc. People report that they feel better after the first 24 hours, but what is happening is they are physiologically shutting down and thus entering a false euphoric state. Their physical and mental condition is actually getting worse. Some of the damage, for example to the bones, is permanent.   Because multi-day fasting is a hard thing to sell to people who apply the smell test to the idea, intermittent fasting has been pushed as a good alternative. It's not. Instead of spreading your nutritional intake over the day, you jam it into a smaller time frame. While theoretically this will cause you to eat less by forcing you to skip meals, the same calorie reduction can be achieved through portion size reduction. Body builders and performance athletes have known this and proven this for decades. A huge downside of intermittent fasting (cramming meals into a smaller time frame) is to get adequate nutrition you overload your protein intake when you do finally eat. The body cannot store protein and can process only so much at a time. Excess protein gets converted into sugar, when then causes the pancreas to produce more insulin, which then causes testosterone to drop like a rock. Your kidney have to deal with excess byproducts of the conversion process, and the health ramifications of that are not minor. Some older gimmicks include these: Calorie-counting. This practice makes eating a chore, when it should be a pleasure. And it's totally unnecessary. I understand that Weight Watchers considers all fruits and veggies as zero points, and this underscores the point I just made. If your diet is >70% fruits and vegetables and you don't eat any junk, then by WW standards it is impossible to overeat. The other 30% might be things like beans, rice, sugar-free condiments, tea, coffee, and whole raw oats--which are not fruits or vegetables but won't make you fat.   Low fat. This is achieved by replacing healthy fats with unhealthy sugars for taste, and modified food starch for texture. Products like Yoplait Fat-Free Yogurt are advertised as healthy, when actually they are poison. Many low-fat or fat-free "foods" are made with detergent in place of the fat, this really messes with your colon by dramatically reducing motility. If your belly bulges and you are eating low fat "foods", you are actually making matters worse.
Salads. Why is it that your vegan friend who lives on mostly salads is so fat? Many salad consumers buy prepackaged salads in plastic containers, then douse them with a bottled dressing that is loaded with sugar, petrochemical products, and seed oil. The greens themselves are at the lower end of the nutritional scale (e.g., mostly iceberg lettuce) for a longer shelf life.   Whole grain breads. So they mill the flour down until it's basically sugar. Then they add back the now sterilized, enzyme-free byproduct of this and call it "whole wheat". They bake the bread using hydrogenated oil, which causes colon cancer. If you want actual whole grain you're going to have to look at expensive products such as Ezekiel bread.   Eat by color. This is one of the dumbest things anyone ever dreamed up. All it does is make people neurotic if they go this route. Allegedly, you can't eat white foods with brown foods or something like that.   Eat by blood type. This is also a dumb idea that makes adopters of it neurotic. Blood types differ based on the presence of specific antigens on the surface of red blood cells. This has to do with immunity to pathogens, not some kind of interaction with specific foods. The folks who came up with this have an elaborate system that has zero basis in reality.   Eat by ethnicity. According to this, you need to eat what your forbears traditionally ate for the past few centuries. So if you are German, you eat mostly cabbage and Italians eat mostly pasta. Humans do not evolve fast enough for anything like this to matter in any way. Eat whatever ethnicity of food you want. In fact, it's good to sample foods from other cultures and keep eating whatever you like from that culture as long as it's not highly-processed.   "Eat margarine instead of butter". The false idea behind this is that the cholesterol in the butter will raise your blood cholesterol. The reality is that cholesterol is broken down in the stomach, so it never enters your blood. Margarine is made from seed oils, the damaged lipids if those cause abrasions and leaks in your blood vessels. The liver responds to that damage by secreting cholesterol. So if you want to avoid getting high cholesterol, then you need to eat butter instead of margarine.   "Don't eat eggs". A similar concept as the idiocy behind eating margarine. Eggs are the perfect food. Many bodybuilders toss the yolk (or every other yolk) under the mistaken belief the yolk, because it contains cholesterol, is bad for you. The reality is they are tossing the most nutritious part of the egg, and the cholesterol breaks down into the building blocks of testosterone. Instead of spending big money on supplements that allegedly improve testosterone levels, bodybuilders need to just eat the whole egg.   Paleo and other diets that eliminate entire categories of whole foods. Any diet that limits foods by category is a physically, socially, and psychologically damaging diet. The promoters of these stupid diets always come up with some semi-plausible explanation that does not stand up well under scrutiny. But you don't need to scrutinize the diet, the fact that it has the limitation in the first place means it's not a diet to adopt. The exception here is lacto-ovo vegan (vegans who still eat dairy and eggs), you can eliminate meat and be perfectly healthy. But if you go vegan or a variation thereof, don't freak out because a friend serves you meat or there are ham bits in a soup that someone is sharing. Your body can handle the little bit of glyphosate you get. If it's the animal-killing that bothers you, exactly how many animals have to die for you to eat the little bit of meat that's in that dish?

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.

We are taxed to the nth degree. Not so much the 1040 tax, but all the other taxes. You pay 121 different taxes on a single loaf of bread. We need less government waste, fewer city councils blowing taxpayer dollars on status symbols, and fewer nuisance fees.