Saturday, December 31, 2011
Friday, December 30, 2011
Marc Andressen, Predictions for 2012
Interesting read. I've never heard the concept of software eating up companies before, but upon reflection, it does make sense. Marc is the founder of Netscape.
BTW, the picture? Totally unrelated, but it's cool.
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Monday, December 26, 2011
If I Could Recommend Two Books
If I could recommend two books to read, it would be The China Study by T Colin Campbell and The Pleasure Trap by Doug Lisle and Alan Goldhamer.
These two books though aren't just to be read. They are to be masticated. To be read over and over again. There is so much wisdom in these books, it can't be comprehended in a casual read. And while reading, the truths that are shared are so mind-boggling, that thought must be rendered in what is shared. For while what they say is true, that it's backed up with scientific studies, and that it all makes complete intuitive sense, it's something we've never heard before. And what it could do to our lives if we put their recommendations to service, would change our lives in the most profound ways.
So I beg you, if you were to read only two books this following year, let it be The China Study and The Pleasure Trap.
Friday, December 23, 2011
Arabic Schools Teach To Chop Off Hands
The Arabic school textbooks which show children how to chop off hands and feet under Sharia law
By LEON WATSON
Last updated at 10:26 AM on 23rd December 2011
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Barbaric textbooks handed out in Saudi Arabian schools teach children how to cut off a thief's hands and feet under Sharia law, it has emerged.
The shocking books, paid for and printed by the Saudi government, also tell teenagers that Jews need to be exterminated and homosexuals should be 'put to death'.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2077658/The-Arabic-textbooks-children-chop-hands-feet-Sharia-law.html#ixzz1hNXism6B
For more
Another Invention From Saudi Arabia
‘Fantastic Voyage’ through the digestive track
December 19, 2011 by Editor
Illustration of an endoscopic capsule, propelled by magnetic swimming tails (1). The capsule payload is a micro-camera (5) and tool for biopsy (4). The power source is non-magnetic batteries (2). There is also electronics for command and control and communication (7), an antenna (3) for the RF transceiver, and housing (8). (Credit: Gábor Kósa et al.)
In a scene out of the movie Fantastic Voyage, Dr. Gabor Kosa of Tel Aviv University has developed a wireless “capsule endoscope” that can be remotely steered through the digestive tract to detect problem like hidden tumors or wounds, or allow for treatments such as biopsies or local drug delivery.
However, rather than miniaturized people (the technology is not quite there yet), the device is remotely controlled by the magnetic field of a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine and electronic signals.
To help the capsules “swim” (fish-like), flexible plastic “tails” about 20 mm long and 5 mm wide are vibrated by the magnetic field via copper coils, achieving a speed of several millimeters per second.
Electronics and microsensors embedded in the capsule allow the capsule’s operator to guide the movement of the device.
Ref.: Gábor Kósa, Péter Jakab, Gábor Székely and Nobuhiko Hata, MRI driven magnetic microswimmers, Biomedical Microdevices, 28 October 2011
Thursday, December 22, 2011
Monday, December 19, 2011
Carbs Are Bad
BULLSHIT! And I hate the word "Carbs" too. It's been awhile now, but the in-thing is to say "I don't eat carbs". Most of us living in US think carbohydrates are bad for our health.
When some use the word "Carbs" I wonder if they even know it's short for the word carbohydrate?
Carbohydrates supplies the body with the energy it needs. Your thought, "Jesus, this guy don't know shit" to your muscles contracting is done because of carbohydrates. Carbohydrates are the body's main source of fuel. Carbohydrates consists of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. It is carbon that makes life possible for all creatures.
Take the lowly potato. It is filled with vitamins and minerals, low in sodium and only 1% fat. Now, take that potato, process it by dropping it in oil and now a 1% fat vegetable becomes 50% fat. Not only is it a bad kind of fat, but it's 50 times what it was before it was processed. I'd like to do that with my money--process $10K into $500K in 10 minutes.
But then, what happens? The french fries get eaten and weight is gained. The potato is relegated as being unhealthy while a product that is 100% fat, no vitamins or minerals, and it's deemed a health food.
Carbohydrates can be split up into two simple categories, unrefined and refined. 75% to 90% of the carbohydrates consumed are refined. Refined, yes--it's bad. Unrefined, let it make up the majority of your diet.
Sunday, December 18, 2011
Saturday, December 17, 2011
Nanny State, Sad State of Affairs
The National Transportation Safety Board wants a complete ban on cellphone use while driving, even on hands-free calls. Some will protest this as yet another government encroachment on freedom, but we should think twice before rocking the boat here.
After all, have you considered how lucky we are that the government lets us drive cars at all?
Imagine if cars hadn’t been around for a century, but instead were just invented today. Is there any way they’d be approved for individual use? It’s an era of bans on incandescent bulbs; if you suggested putting millions of internal-combustion engines out there, you’d get looks like you were Hitler proposing the Final Solution.
Angry Birds: Out-computing Apollo.
Even aside from pollution, the government wouldn’t allow the risks to safety.
“So you’re proposing that people speed around in tons of metal? You must mean only really smart, well-trained people?”
“No. Everyone. Even stupid people.”
“Won’t millions be killed?”
“Oh, no. Not that many. Just a little more than 40,000 a year.”
“And injuries?”
“Oh . . . millions.”
There’s no way that would get approved today.
Driving is basically a grandfathered freedom from back when people cared less about pollution and danger and valued progress and liberty over safety.
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/hey_they_still_let_us_drive_yj0UXYTPoMAOGyf4AuFRiI#ixzz1goC3rCGC
Read more:
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
Sunday, December 11, 2011
My Low Density Thoughts
One of the things I'd like to say is how we have in our power to do even better than these long lived peoples in the previous post. The great benefit about caloric density is instead of looking to cut calories, or eat less food, one may look at eating the same or actually even more food, but food that has a lower caloric density. Here's an exaggerated example, but I believe celery has 20 calories per pound, oil has 4200. What would be more filling, eating (drinking) one pound of oil or eating 210 pounds of celery? This is the magic of eating foods low in caloric density.
Often I've been eating my low dense foods feeling sorry for myself while smelling the smoke coming from the exhaust of burger joints. I've been a meat eater my whole life and to make this transition has been arduous. But it has been worth it. I would say it's one of the most wonderful things I have ever done in my life. And I'm very thankful to people like Nathan Pritiken, Dr McDougall, Jeff Novick, Dr Esselstyn, Dr Campbell and Dr Furhman.
But with this knowledge and discipline to eat foods that are high in nutrition, in our rich country the possibilities become dizzying.
Imagine, as you see in a previous post, a chart how obesity is on this terrible march upward. Imagine if the trend turns around. And if it does turn around, it will turn around for good. For we'll have the knowledge and that cannot be taken away from us.
Now I can rest in the knowledge that I'm doing what is best for my health. Yesterday I was admonished by a friend that I'm getting too thin. Before I go farther, let me say that I am thin by today's American standards, but if one were to look at a BMI chart, I'm smack dab in the middle of what is considered normal weight. I'm 6 feet tall and I weigh 158 pounds. Again I say, to many that is too thin, but what is considered normal in US is deceptively skewed.
So as my friend is telling me how I'm not healthy, he himself is obese. And as we know, being obese one has a greater predilection to heart disease, cancer, type 2 diabetes and myriad other health problems. But I do as I always do, I keep my mouth shut.
During Thanksgiving Dinner with all present, I'm told by doctor how he feels sorry for me that I'm not eating meat. It was meant in jest, but still it was said.
The obesity trend cannot keep going up. When something is wrong, the truth will eventually have to prevail. No matter how much disinformation is peddled, the truth will have to come out. Little by little people are realizing that a meat/dairy centered diet is deleterious to one's health. It takes courage to change, but eventually we'll get sick and tired of being sick and tired.
Things will change. I look forward to the day when I go to a Mexican restaurant and it will be normal to get a bean burrito with whole beans. Last night we went to a Vietnamese restaurant in Little Saigon and after my company ordered I asked if they had anything vegetarian. The waiter said "no". They brought me a broth with noodles and later a small dish with peas and carrots. A 6 to 8 page menu, and not one item on it that contained vegetables. Times will change.
Often I've been eating my low dense foods feeling sorry for myself while smelling the smoke coming from the exhaust of burger joints. I've been a meat eater my whole life and to make this transition has been arduous. But it has been worth it. I would say it's one of the most wonderful things I have ever done in my life. And I'm very thankful to people like Nathan Pritiken, Dr McDougall, Jeff Novick, Dr Esselstyn, Dr Campbell and Dr Furhman.
But with this knowledge and discipline to eat foods that are high in nutrition, in our rich country the possibilities become dizzying.
Imagine, as you see in a previous post, a chart how obesity is on this terrible march upward. Imagine if the trend turns around. And if it does turn around, it will turn around for good. For we'll have the knowledge and that cannot be taken away from us.
Now I can rest in the knowledge that I'm doing what is best for my health. Yesterday I was admonished by a friend that I'm getting too thin. Before I go farther, let me say that I am thin by today's American standards, but if one were to look at a BMI chart, I'm smack dab in the middle of what is considered normal weight. I'm 6 feet tall and I weigh 158 pounds. Again I say, to many that is too thin, but what is considered normal in US is deceptively skewed.
So as my friend is telling me how I'm not healthy, he himself is obese. And as we know, being obese one has a greater predilection to heart disease, cancer, type 2 diabetes and myriad other health problems. But I do as I always do, I keep my mouth shut.
During Thanksgiving Dinner with all present, I'm told by doctor how he feels sorry for me that I'm not eating meat. It was meant in jest, but still it was said.
The obesity trend cannot keep going up. When something is wrong, the truth will eventually have to prevail. No matter how much disinformation is peddled, the truth will have to come out. Little by little people are realizing that a meat/dairy centered diet is deleterious to one's health. It takes courage to change, but eventually we'll get sick and tired of being sick and tired.
Things will change. I look forward to the day when I go to a Mexican restaurant and it will be normal to get a bean burrito with whole beans. Last night we went to a Vietnamese restaurant in Little Saigon and after my company ordered I asked if they had anything vegetarian. The waiter said "no". They brought me a broth with noodles and later a small dish with peas and carrots. A 6 to 8 page menu, and not one item on it that contained vegetables. Times will change.
Caloric Density Revisited
I've mentioned Caloric Density in previous posts. I want to return to this subject because I believe in the near future, it will be a hot topic concerning health. Below I copy and pasted the full article from this web page.
Also in the article the author mentions the Vilcabambas. I looked it up and found this interesting article written in 1974.
If you'll notice, one of the glaring items is that the longest lived peoples get most of their calories from grains, or another way of saying, a starch based diet. Dr John McDougall is currently working on a book and it will be about the starch based diet.
Here's the full article on Caloric Density:
Whether one wants to lose weight, gain weight, or just be healthy, the concept of caloric density is an important one to understand.
The caloric density of a food is the numbers of calories that are contained in 1 gram of that food. For instance, brown rice has a caloric density of 1.2, which means that brown rice has 1.2 calories per gram.
That's a relatively low caloric-density food. Most fruits and vegetables are. For instance, an apple has a caloric density of 0.59—it has only 0.59 calories per gram. A carrot is 0.44. A banana is 0.6. A potato is 0.76.
By contrast, a rib roast has a caloric-density of 3.31. A chicken thigh is 2.12. A pork chop is 2.28. Processed meats such as liverworst (3.32) or salami (4.20) are even higher. Bacon is 5.56.
It's a little oversimplified, but largely true: in general, foods from the plant kingdom tend to have low caloric densities and foods from the animal kingdom tend to have high caloric densities.
So what? Why is that important?
Let's take an example: Suppose we want to lose weight but we're eating mostly high caloric-density foods. What this means is that it doesn't take much of such foods to give us a lot of calories. Conversely, if we try to cut down on the calories, we won't feel full. We'll feel hungry. And eventually, that will cause us to leave the diet and binge, gaining back whatever weight we've lost.
If we want to lose weight, the smart thing to do is to eat mostly foods of low caloric density, like fruits and vegetables and grains, not just as a temporary diet but as a lifetime diet.
These foods also just happen to be, in countless epidemiological studies, the healthiest foods—and also the foods eaten by the four healthiest peoples in the world (the Hunzas, Vilcabambans, etc.).
But I should mention a very interesting phenomenon whereby foods of low caloric-density (CD) get transformed into high caloric-density foods: In general, it's when foods get ground up or refined.
For instance, potatoes, as mentioned before, have a caloric density of 0.76. But when ground up into potato flour and made into potato pancakes, the CD goes up to 6.51. Wheat bread (where the grain has been ground) has a CD of 2.61.
And, too, fats often get added into foods made of ground-up grains. Thus crackers have a caloric density of 4.46. Corn muffins have a CD of 4.14. And so on.
In fact, corn provides a very good illustration of this phenomenon. Corn as corn kernels or corn-on-the-cob, whether fresh or steamed, has a caloric density of only 0.92. You can eat a lot of fresh corn without gaining weight (as well as adding to your health).
But corn bread has a CD of 4.27, a taco shell has a CD of 4.55, and corn chips have a CD of 5.46. See the difference? You don't have to eat much of those before you've started packing in the calories.
In general, grains (and foods in general) are best eaten in the whole state. Besides the issue of caloric density, there are other issues, such as rancidity. As soon as a grain is ground, for instance, its germ is exposed to the air and it begins to go rancid. (Or the germ and bran are refined out, as in white flour, in which case the food loses nutrients and becomes an "empty-calorie" food.)
On the whole, then, we'll be healthier and trimmer if we eat our grains (and foods) in their whole form, such as when we cook brown rice or millet (or eat a baked potato instead of french fries or chips). This is only a subset of the more general principle that foods are healthiest in their unrefined state, that is, when they're closest to the way nature made them.
—jim sloman, for 2/18/02
=============================================
Also in the article the author mentions the Vilcabambas. I looked it up and found this interesting article written in 1974.
If you'll notice, one of the glaring items is that the longest lived peoples get most of their calories from grains, or another way of saying, a starch based diet. Dr John McDougall is currently working on a book and it will be about the starch based diet.
Here's the full article on Caloric Density:
Whether one wants to lose weight, gain weight, or just be healthy, the concept of caloric density is an important one to understand.
The caloric density of a food is the numbers of calories that are contained in 1 gram of that food. For instance, brown rice has a caloric density of 1.2, which means that brown rice has 1.2 calories per gram.
That's a relatively low caloric-density food. Most fruits and vegetables are. For instance, an apple has a caloric density of 0.59—it has only 0.59 calories per gram. A carrot is 0.44. A banana is 0.6. A potato is 0.76.
By contrast, a rib roast has a caloric-density of 3.31. A chicken thigh is 2.12. A pork chop is 2.28. Processed meats such as liverworst (3.32) or salami (4.20) are even higher. Bacon is 5.56.
It's a little oversimplified, but largely true: in general, foods from the plant kingdom tend to have low caloric densities and foods from the animal kingdom tend to have high caloric densities.
So what? Why is that important?
Let's take an example: Suppose we want to lose weight but we're eating mostly high caloric-density foods. What this means is that it doesn't take much of such foods to give us a lot of calories. Conversely, if we try to cut down on the calories, we won't feel full. We'll feel hungry. And eventually, that will cause us to leave the diet and binge, gaining back whatever weight we've lost.
If we want to lose weight, the smart thing to do is to eat mostly foods of low caloric density, like fruits and vegetables and grains, not just as a temporary diet but as a lifetime diet.
These foods also just happen to be, in countless epidemiological studies, the healthiest foods—and also the foods eaten by the four healthiest peoples in the world (the Hunzas, Vilcabambans, etc.).
But I should mention a very interesting phenomenon whereby foods of low caloric-density (CD) get transformed into high caloric-density foods: In general, it's when foods get ground up or refined.
For instance, potatoes, as mentioned before, have a caloric density of 0.76. But when ground up into potato flour and made into potato pancakes, the CD goes up to 6.51. Wheat bread (where the grain has been ground) has a CD of 2.61.
And, too, fats often get added into foods made of ground-up grains. Thus crackers have a caloric density of 4.46. Corn muffins have a CD of 4.14. And so on.
In fact, corn provides a very good illustration of this phenomenon. Corn as corn kernels or corn-on-the-cob, whether fresh or steamed, has a caloric density of only 0.92. You can eat a lot of fresh corn without gaining weight (as well as adding to your health).
But corn bread has a CD of 4.27, a taco shell has a CD of 4.55, and corn chips have a CD of 5.46. See the difference? You don't have to eat much of those before you've started packing in the calories.
In general, grains (and foods in general) are best eaten in the whole state. Besides the issue of caloric density, there are other issues, such as rancidity. As soon as a grain is ground, for instance, its germ is exposed to the air and it begins to go rancid. (Or the germ and bran are refined out, as in white flour, in which case the food loses nutrients and becomes an "empty-calorie" food.)
On the whole, then, we'll be healthier and trimmer if we eat our grains (and foods) in their whole form, such as when we cook brown rice or millet (or eat a baked potato instead of french fries or chips). This is only a subset of the more general principle that foods are healthiest in their unrefined state, that is, when they're closest to the way nature made them.
—jim sloman, for 2/18/02
=============================================
Obesity Trends US--CDC
This is a chart depicting obesity in US starting in 1985 and culminating in 2010.
You can take your time on the site by clicking "Previous, Next, Play or Stop" as you peruse the chart. It'd be nice to say it's all BS, but it's frighteningly true what has happened to our health in such a very short period of time.
You can take your time on the site by clicking "Previous, Next, Play or Stop" as you peruse the chart. It'd be nice to say it's all BS, but it's frighteningly true what has happened to our health in such a very short period of time.
when no sense makes lots of sense
Below is an article by Eric from Classical Values. I'll bet you didn't hear about this:
I hate it when important details news in events go unreported, especially when it seems that they are being deliberately unreported. Last night when I read about a gunman at Sunset and Vine shooting people at random, I figured he was either a nut or a Jihadist (which is a distinction, even though there is considerable overlap in the categories). Shootings like this don’t make sense, so naturally we want to make sense out of them. Whether it makes sense to want to make sense out of random shootings is a topic beyond the scope of this post, probably involving complex issues of human psychology, and even the survival instinct.
But either way, fool that I may be, I Just. Wanted. To. Understand
For the rest:
I hate it when important details news in events go unreported, especially when it seems that they are being deliberately unreported. Last night when I read about a gunman at Sunset and Vine shooting people at random, I figured he was either a nut or a Jihadist (which is a distinction, even though there is considerable overlap in the categories). Shootings like this don’t make sense, so naturally we want to make sense out of them. Whether it makes sense to want to make sense out of random shootings is a topic beyond the scope of this post, probably involving complex issues of human psychology, and even the survival instinct.
But either way, fool that I may be, I Just. Wanted. To. Understand
For the rest:
Eat This, It's Healthy!
My friend likes to drink Bud Lite with lime. He sincerely believes because it has lime it's a health food. His average intake used to be 5-6 beers per day. Now he's on to an even healthier drink--red wine. Red wine has resveratrol, an agent believed to prolong life. And of course red wine is good for the heart, it has antioxidants.
Last night coming home from dinner out, we stopped to get a berry pie. It's healthy, its got berries in it. I'm not going to look into what the ingredients are and its quantity, but rest assured that the pie comes with lots of saturated fat, salt, white flour and processed sugars. The berries are the side show.
Salad at the Soup Plantation. The salad itself is less than 50 calories. After the dressing is applied the salad is over 500 calories and the majority of its calories is fat.
Ever notice how when we're given something it's offered with the pretense that it's healthy? Most foods, if they were to be eaten in their original state would indeed be healthy and that would be the end of it. But we're too sophisticated to eat foods simply. We'll add our sauces and turn it into a food that is deleterious to our health.
French fries. If I take a potato, cut it up and eat it, it causes raised eyebrows. But if I take that potato, cut it up into sticks, drop in oil and then serve it, it's considered normal. A food that starts at 1% fat and low in calories is turned into a food that is 50% fat and high in calories. Potatoes are the most consumed vegetable in the US. And a baked potato is healthy too. But after the sour cream, butter and bacon bits are mixed in, the potato becomes a nutritional nightmare.
Look at some of the foods that are presented to you. Though they are often presented and sound like healthy foods, take a second to think what actually is in it.
Friday, December 2, 2011
Early Retirement Extreme Is Retiring
Jacob, who owns and writes the blog Early Retirement Extreme has just written his last post.
Early Retirement Extreme has been my favorite blog on the internet. I used to highlight his blog on my own blog.
Well Jacob is on to another stage in his life and I wish him the best. Bless you Jacob and thank you for sharing your ideas with the world.
Early Retirement Extreme has been my favorite blog on the internet. I used to highlight his blog on my own blog.
Well Jacob is on to another stage in his life and I wish him the best. Bless you Jacob and thank you for sharing your ideas with the world.
Thursday, December 1, 2011
A Friend Went On A Diet
A friend went on a diet. Nothing knew. Most go on a diet on a weekly basis. In fact in America going on a diet is our #1 preoccupation.
She was all revved up for this diet. Here it is Monday and she's going to start the new week right. But she ended up eating fried onion rings and a shake, so maybe tomorrow she'll try again. She posted about it on Facebook and received the obligatory funny comments after her confession.
Dieting, or thinking about dieting has become such a part of our thought process, that we expect to fail and have to rah-rah ourselves into trying again. It's a never ending process. We actually don't expect to be successful. Dieting is something we talk about, lament our failures, and go on and try again. Repeating and beating ourselves up, over and over again.
How can we ever be successful by suppressing our natural instinct to eat to satiety? Maybe one can be successful for a day, a week, a month, and some even longer. But eventually we give in, and binge.
This is a crazy thought, but what if we actually never had to worry about diet the rest of our lives? Is that even possible? Do animals in the wild worry about their missed appointment with Jenny Craig?
Here's our problem, and it's very simple: We eat foods high in caloric density and low in nutrient density. If we could just shift that around, eat foods low in caloric density and high in nutrient density, we'd never have to worry or even give a thought about diet. Ever again. Just to be freed from that alone is a Godsend, forget about the benefits of no diabetes, heart disease, digestion problems and auto immune diseases.
Dieting, via the suppression of appetite, is not going to be successful. We are only setting ourselves up for failure. We need to eat to satiety, but eat foods our bodies were designed to eat. And of course what are they? Vegetables, fruits, grains, legumes, nuts and seeds. Whole foods. No animals, dairy or processed foods.
Is it difficult? Yes, at the beginning. It's hard for someone to quit smoking, drugs or alcohol too. They feel like shit at the beginning and so will anyone that eats a healthy diet. We're caught in a Pleasure Trap and we don't even know it. How can we escape the trap when we don't even realize we're in it?
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Woman, 15 Kids--U Gotta See This
"Somebody needs to pay for all my children. Somebody's got to be held accountable"
Save yourself some time. Go to around 2:15 in the video and see for yourself. This is part of America--an ungrateful, make someone else take care of me and my kids, no shame whatsoever woman.
Bill Ayers Hosted Obama Fundraiser
Please go here for the complete article
Ayers’ impact on America cannot be underestimated. While many have exposed and condemned his leadership in the radical and violent Weather Underground – and the group’s efforts to terrorize the country in the 1960s and ’70s – he has done far more damage to our students’ minds.
Ayers, a retired college professor, and his progressive comrades have come to the conclusion that shaping young minds in the liberal direction will have more impact than blowing up a few buildings. After all, what are a few building repairs to a massive federal government? Thus, he’s been busy promoting radical indoctrination of school-age students.
That’s why he teamed up with the likes of Peterson, who has been openly calling on public school teachers to include left-wing propaganda in their daily lessons. Ayers and Peterson are soul brothers in the effort to fundamentally move America to the left.
Ayers’ impact on America cannot be underestimated. While many have exposed and condemned his leadership in the radical and violent Weather Underground – and the group’s efforts to terrorize the country in the 1960s and ’70s – he has done far more damage to our students’ minds.
Ayers, a retired college professor, and his progressive comrades have come to the conclusion that shaping young minds in the liberal direction will have more impact than blowing up a few buildings. After all, what are a few building repairs to a massive federal government? Thus, he’s been busy promoting radical indoctrination of school-age students.
That’s why he teamed up with the likes of Peterson, who has been openly calling on public school teachers to include left-wing propaganda in their daily lessons. Ayers and Peterson are soul brothers in the effort to fundamentally move America to the left.
Monday, November 28, 2011
Jeff Novick, Calorie Density
Penn State has done a number of studies regarding calorie density. This is the idea of eating foods that are less calorie dense. Here's an article from the Pritikin Longevity Center.
BTW, Jeff Novick has an excellent Facebook page. After I've made a comment there, he's often followed it up with a comment of his own.
Sunday, November 27, 2011
Debt Abyss
Mark Steyn
In the course of a typical day I usually receive at least a couple of emails from readers lamenting that America is now the Titanic. This is grossly unfair to the Titanic, a state-of-the-art ship whose problem was that it only had lifeboat space for about half its passengers. By contrast, the SS Spendaholic is a rusting hulk encrusted with barnacles, there are no lifeboats, and the ship’s officers are locked in a debate about whether to use a thimble or an eggcup.
A second downgrade is now inevitable. Aw, so what? We had the first back in the summer, and the ceiling didn’t fall in, did it? And everyone knows those ratings agencies are a racket, right? And say what you like about our rotten finances, but Greece’s are worse. And Italy’s. And, er, Zimbabwe’s. Probably.
The advantage the United States enjoys is that, unlike Greece, it can print the currency in which its debt is denominated. But, even so, it still needs someone to buy it. The failure of Germany’s bond auction on Wednesday suggests that the world is running out of buyers for western sovereign debt at historically low interest rates. And, were interest rates to return to their 1990-2010 average (5.7 percent), debt service alone would consume about 40 percent of federal revenues by mid-decade. That’s not paying down the debt, but just staying current on the interest payments.
And yet, when it comes to spending and stimulus and entitlements and agencies and regulations and bureaucrats, “more, more, more/how do you like it?” remains the way to bet. Will a Republican president make a difference to this grim trajectory? I would doubt it. Unless the public conversation shifts significantly, neither President Romney nor President Insert-Name-Of-This-Week’s-UnRomney-Here will have a mandate for the measures necessary to save the republic.
Saturday, November 26, 2011
Yelp Reviews
My best friend has the same kind of business I do. He lives in the Seattle area. He got a Yelp negative review. He did everything to pacify this customer, all to no avail. Eventually the customer admitted the problem was not even caused by his business, but would not change her Yelp review.
Which brings me to this: Sometimes I go in a business and I'm awed by what they do. Case in point is Buffalo Wild Wings in Brea. It's a new business and they have both indoor and outdoor service. In fact, for you smokers they even have a designated smoking area. It's a two story building with over 120 TVs. It's a beautiful place.
So I go to Yelp and look at the reviews for BWW and some offer only 1 star. Of course I understand the service could have been bad, didn't like the food, or whatever. But sometimes the negative review can be more a reflection of the person writing the review than the business itself.
Which brings me to this: Sometimes I go in a business and I'm awed by what they do. Case in point is Buffalo Wild Wings in Brea. It's a new business and they have both indoor and outdoor service. In fact, for you smokers they even have a designated smoking area. It's a two story building with over 120 TVs. It's a beautiful place.
So I go to Yelp and look at the reviews for BWW and some offer only 1 star. Of course I understand the service could have been bad, didn't like the food, or whatever. But sometimes the negative review can be more a reflection of the person writing the review than the business itself.
John Mackey--CEO Whole Foods
Below is an article by Melanie Moore about John Mackey. What I love is Mr Mackey isn't doing this as some kind of marketing ploy. This is something he totally believes in, and I would bet it is one of his life's greatest passions.
Also what makes me very excited is CEOs of most food companies want you to eat their junk foods. Not John Mackay, even though that's where the profit is. I look forward to the day when an owner of McDonald's says "Enough, I will not feed this to my patrons."
-----------------------------------------
Visit with John Mackey for a few minutes and you first get a tutorial about backpacking, not nutrition. You’ll learn about hiking trails, ultra-light backpacking gear, and you, too, will begin referring to the Appalachian Trail (the trail that runs from Georgia to Maine), as “the AT.” The avid backpacker and Founder and CEO of Whole Foods Market was just back from a hike in the White Mountains of New Hampshire—a trek he “figured [he] might as well do” during the week he had between a meeting in Boston and a speech at Dartmouth.
“They describe New Hampshire as one big rock with patches of dirt,” he said. “I think that’s pretty accurate. Still, it’s got the most spectacular views of any place on the AT.” He’s hiked the AT twice and in the past nine years has hiked a total of more than 10,000 miles.
“Generally on the AT, I average about two miles an hour and that includes breaks,” he said, describing the more difficult conditions in the White Mountains. “There, we were averaging about 1.2 miles per hour; it’s so rugged.” He hikes with ultra-light gear totaling 15 pounds, including food and water. “You’d be surprised how much more enjoyable it is when you’re packed really light. Not only can you do more miles, but they’re more pleasurable miles because you’re not always thinking ‘when’s the next break so I can get this pack off my back?’”
His favorite trails are in the United States. “The most beautiful trail I’ve done is the Pacific Crest Trail that goes from Mexico to Canada up through the Sierras and the Cascades,” he said. “There’s a trail they call the John Muir Trail; the Pacific Crest Trail and the John Muir Trail share 192 miles, and that is so beautiful. You do three national parks—Kings Canyon, Sequoia, and Yosemite. You’re up over 10,000 feet for most of the hike. It’s just spectacular. I’d also say the Colorado Trail is beautiful. There are unmatched backpacking opportunities in the United States.”
While he can talk trails and gear, technical hikes and elevation like an expert, it’s not long before he moves the conversation to his passion: whole food nutrition and how diseases can be prevented and reversed with a healthy diet.
“What surprised me, and I just think it’s the most exciting news in the world, [is] the human body really wants to be healthy and it’s far more resilient than I realized,” he said. “That people are able so quickly to get off all these medications, to lose weight so quickly, to have their cholesterol drop. We have so many stories.” Mackey is sharing the fruits of his “intellectual binge” (reading voraciously about nutrient values of foods and how the human body is impacted by everything one eats).
“I want to create a culture of wellness at Whole Foods,” he said, explaining the incentive-based programs for Whole Foods employees to monitor their biomarkers for improvement with vigilance. “We’re going to make these programs available to the public,” he said.
“Here are the gruesome facts,” he said. “Two thirds of Americans are overweight. Over half of those are obese, and the trend lines are horrible. The obesity rate’s doubled in the last 30 years. If I showed you on a state-by-state basis over the last 40 years, it’s just horrible. And our children are now obese. Americans are killing themselves. We spend 80 percent of our healthcare dollars on diseases nobody should ever have. No one should ever get (type 2) diabetes. We’re doing it to ourselves out of ignorance and, mostly, out of food addictions. We get addicted to sugar. We get addicted to fat. We get addicted to salt. I might make the case we get addicted to high inputs of protein as well.
“There’s not going to be a vaccination for cancer. There’s not going to be a pill you can take to prevent heart disease. We do all these high-tech interventions on people,” he said, pointing out that 10 percent of Medicare expenses go to putting heart stints into people with heart disease. “These are radical interventions we’re doing for people that don’t fundamentally work. You’ve got to protect yourself.”
He’s putting his money where his mouth is, providing generous incentives for employees who take the responsibility to monitor their bodies and their biomarkers and work toward improvement. He says getting discipline in one aspect of your life (diet or exercise, for example) leads to improvement in other areas and to a continuum of improvement that he calls “the virtuous circle.”
While he’s careful to point out that with 62,000 employees at Whole Foods, it will take a while to fully realize the “culture of wellness,” he identifies three key initiatives that are significant steps in that direction.
“One [step] is the discount card program. I’ll explain how it works: if you work for the company, you automatically get a 20 percent discount by just being on the team. Then we’ve got four levels of additional discounts you can get: bronze, silver, gold, and platinum. [The levels] are based on four objective biomarkers that you can measure. One is whether you use tobacco in any form; we test that. If you do, that disqualifies you; you can’t have nicotine in your blood or you’re not eligible. The second is we do your best score between your BMI, and because some body builders complain about that, we also do a height to waist ratio (although most of the people that were complaining about the BMI failed the height to weight ratio, too. It helped a few people but, in general, it took away the excuse). And then [we test] cholesterol and blood pressure. We bring the labs to the stores, and I think it costs us $71 a person to go through that test.
“The best thing about it is, we had a big improvement in 2011 over 2010; a lot more people qualified for some kind of discount. I think we had 7,500 the first year, and I believe over 10,000 in 2011. Of course not everybody takes the test, but we had more participation and more people that qualified for additional discounts.
“The team members that do it are proud of it. It’s a badge of honor. I’m boasting, I am platinum, so I’m pretty proud of that, and the team members notice that when I travel around and get into one of our stores and buy something, they see it. A lot of them will tell me, ‘I’m platinum too’ or, if they qualify for their card, they talk about it.” He estimates that after the program has been in place five years there will be as many as 25,000 employees qualifying.
The second initiative, which Mackey says has had even more important results than the discount cards, is a program called Total Health Immersions. For that he’s created an Advisory Council, made up of physicians who use dietary changes to prevent and reverse heart disease, diabetes, and other life-threatening diseases brought on by obesity, high cholesterol, and other conditions resulting from foods patients eat. (See also the box on “The Nutrition Prophets”)
Whole Foods works with four different immersion programs: Rip Esselstyn’s Engine 2 diet, Dr. Joel Fuhrman’s Eat To Live program, Dr. John McDougall’s program, and Eat Right America’s program. Both Engine 2 and McDougall’s programs are vegan; the others allow two or three moderate serving a week of animal foods.
Mackey is clearly proud of the results: “We’ve had over 1,200 team members go through [immersion] programs. It costs us over $3,000 per employee; we’ve invested close to $4 million in that program.
“But the results… I mean, every time I travel to the stores, I have team members come up, a lot of them with tears in their eyes, and tell me it’s completely changed their lives. We’ve had dozens of team members lose over 100 pounds in 8 or 9 months from being on the program. We’ve seen people completely not only lose weight but reverse diabetes. And they say type 2 diabetes is a disease that you can’t cure. It’s nonsense. You can cure that disease. Most of it can be cured in 30 – 90 days. People get off all their medication and normalize their blood sugar.”
The results are dramatic, but so are the dietary changes required by these immersion programs. And the changes must be permanent to keep the biomarkers normalized.
“Joel [Fuhrman] said it best,” Mackey counters. “He said, ‘people call this diet radical, but don’t you think having your chest cracked open is radical? Isn’t taking 17 prescription medications a day radical?’ This diet is not radical. It’s just eating whole foods that are mostly plants. A lot of these [doctors] have been saying this for a long time but nobody would listen to them. It’s not a message people want to hear.”
While he’s seen amazing results from employees who have had transformational experiences, he says there is still a reluctance to try it.
“At first, we had a lot of skeptical team members,” he said. “They’d say ‘well, I guess if they’re paying for it, I’ll do it.’ Or it’s easy to dismiss Rip—‘sure that guy’s a world class athlete, he’s Superman.’ But [it’s different] when you have some guy you work with who has lost 120 pounds and his cholesterol and blood pressure have plummeted and he’s gotten off all medications in less than a year and that guy is in there telling you what a difference it can make.”
According to Mackey, team members now are enrolling in the immersion programs with a better attitude and more determination.
“We’re going to open that up in 2012 to the public. Rip’s doing a public immersion right now and we’re going to open all these up to our customers because it’s such a revolutionary thing.”
The third initiative, Wellness Clubs, are completely for Whole Foods customers.
The third initiative, Wellness Clubs, are completely for Whole Foods customers. The concept is putting the ideas from immersion into a club. The price ($45 a month), is not insignificant, and Mackey immediately lists the benefits of membership. “First of all, you have unlimited classes not only on healthy eating but on exercise, on stress management, yoga, how to sleep better, and lots of cooking classes. We also give you a 10 percent discount on all of our healthiest foods, which ends up being about 5,000 items in a typical store: all of our fresh produce, fruits and vegetables, 100% grass-fed beef, some seafood, some chicken, and then all the healthy bulk foods that we sell, lots of the our Health Starts Here selection of items, and prepared foods.” The Health Starts Here foods are selected based on Fuhrman’s nutrient density scoring system, or ANDI.
The Wellness Clubs also include membership in a supper club modeled on one of Mackey’s favorite Austin restaurants, Casa de Luz. Anyone can participate, but Wellness Club members get a $5 discount on the meal.
Interestingly, Austin did not volunteer to be one of the initial pilots for the Wellness Clubs. However, the regional president of the southwest, Mark Dickson, is one of the success stories of the immersions.
“Mark is an amazing guy,” Mackey said. “But his weight had crept up to where he was pretty seriously obese. He didn’t want to go to the immersion program because he just thought he was going to fail at it. But finally, partly because I kept nagging him about it, he did the McDougall one. This was last April. I visited that immersion. In only seven days, he’d dropped 10 pounds, his blood pressure dropped 30 points, and his cholesterol dropped 40 points. He was excited because of those results, but the most important thing was he said, ‘John, I’ve stuffed myself every meal. I’ve never been hungry. I’ve loved the food. I’m going to do this for the rest of my life.’ And now, six months later, he’s lost 75 pounds. And he’s dropped all his medications. You’ll not recognize the guy. I’m thinking about calling him Slim. It’s amazing.
“So when the regional president has such amazing results, obviously that filters through the rest of the region. The Wellness Clubs with all those benefits, combined with these public health immersions, [are] the two major pillars for our educational initiatives.”
Mackey personally became a vegan eight years ago and thought he was healthy. “I just assumed that [being vegan] made me healthy. I was addicted to olive oil. As long as it was vegan, I ate a lot of junk food.” His wakeup call was a cholesterol test. “My cholesterol was 199 and I said, ‘How can it be 199? I’m a vegan.’” His blood pressure also had begun to creep up. He turned to books: first, “The China Study,” Dr. Esselstyn’s book, then Joel Fuhrman’s books, and McDougall’s. “Suddenly it all fit together. And then I watched my blood pressure plunge and my cholesterol dropped really low. So I had my personal experience with it.” He acknowledges that it takes time to improve. “I’m still on a journey. I think everyone is. I don’t think my diet’s perfect. I don’t hold it up as perfect. I’m doing a lot better now than I was a year ago, and I was better a year ago than I was two years ago.
“I don’t do any oil at home,” he said. “My wife’s on the same program so that makes it easier. But I travel more than half the time. Every time you go to a restaurant, even if you can avoid the oil, you’re still going to get a lot of salt. The chefs don’t know how to cook without oil. I say, ‘Just sauté it with water,’ and they say ‘I can’t do that.’
“This is why the obesity crisis has become what it is,” he said. “People eat more and more meals out and restaurants don’t have to list their ingredients. They use oil or butter or cream because they know that’s what sells. It’s not like it’s a plot; they’re partly meeting a big part of what the market wants. [People] want rich food because that’s what their palate has gotten used to.
“We eat an amazing amount of fried foods, potato chips, and soda. When I was a kid, Cokes were in those little six-ounce bottles. My parents didn’t let me have a Coke every day; it was a special treat, if I was good, and that did limit it right there to a certain extent. Now people buy Cokes in two-liter bottles and I’ve seen people drink one of those every single day. People are into cheese; they tend to eat cheese every day. A hundred years ago, per capita, we ate three pounds of cheese per year. Now we eat 36 pounds of cheese per person per year. And cheese is 70 to 80 percent fat, most of it saturated fat.”
Even in the face of these daunting trends, Mackey is optimistic about the prospects for turnaround both within the individual and in the American culture.
“The good news is, and that’s the hope, is that the human body can heal itself fairly quickly. I wouldn’t have predicted that, but I’ve seen it happen over and over again and I’ve experienced it myself.
As for the culture, he’s optimistic there as well. “There’s an old saying, an economist said it, and that is ‘if something doesn’t work, it will stop.’ I think people are really waking up to this issue. Don’t underestimate America’s ability to respond. We’re not dead yet. Americans are sick of being sick. People are very interested in food and we’ve reached a dead end. There are not going to be any high tech solutions.
“People fear, and rightly so, being decrepit. People are focused on their lifespan; but we want to increase our healthspan. I don’t think you ever have to be decrepit--maybe if you live to 110 or 120. We should have a long life and a long healthspan. But right now, we seem to be programmed to self-destruct; we like to put it off as long as possible.
“Here’s the good news: people could be so much healthier,” he says, buoyant in his optimism. “People think that if you’re fit, you’re healthy. Fitness is important but equally important, or more important, is what we’re putting into our bodies every single day. If people could better inform themselves and start to take their biomarkers on a regular basis, they will be able to make better choices; you’ve got to know your numbers.
A former runner, he compares biomarkers to race times. “I learned that lesson early, when Jim Fixx dropped over dead with a heart attack....They did the autopsy on him and some of his arteries were closed up 98 percent. So I actually think diet is more important than exercise.
“[Knowing your biomarkers] is kind of like a game, like ‘I’m going to run a marathon in under three hours.’ It’s the same way with your biomarkers. You want to get your cholesterol down, your blood pressure, your weight. It’s kind of fun, and if people took those numbers as seriously as they took their times, they would see their health and their vitality and their longevity increase…and,” he adds, “they’d have a happier life.”
He’s not finished with his revolutionary initiatives. Mackey said he and Whole Foods Market are working on a solution for lower income people living in “food deserts,” like the Del Valle area near Austin where there is not a grocery store.
“I’m not going to tell you,” he said. “We’ve got a very exciting idea that can make healthy foods accessible to a lot of the poorest people [in the nation]. We’re going to be doing some experiments in that regard in the next few years, but we’re not ready to talk about it yet. It’ll be ready for prime time in a year or so.”
Also what makes me very excited is CEOs of most food companies want you to eat their junk foods. Not John Mackay, even though that's where the profit is. I look forward to the day when an owner of McDonald's says "Enough, I will not feed this to my patrons."
-----------------------------------------
Visit with John Mackey for a few minutes and you first get a tutorial about backpacking, not nutrition. You’ll learn about hiking trails, ultra-light backpacking gear, and you, too, will begin referring to the Appalachian Trail (the trail that runs from Georgia to Maine), as “the AT.” The avid backpacker and Founder and CEO of Whole Foods Market was just back from a hike in the White Mountains of New Hampshire—a trek he “figured [he] might as well do” during the week he had between a meeting in Boston and a speech at Dartmouth.
“They describe New Hampshire as one big rock with patches of dirt,” he said. “I think that’s pretty accurate. Still, it’s got the most spectacular views of any place on the AT.” He’s hiked the AT twice and in the past nine years has hiked a total of more than 10,000 miles.
“Generally on the AT, I average about two miles an hour and that includes breaks,” he said, describing the more difficult conditions in the White Mountains. “There, we were averaging about 1.2 miles per hour; it’s so rugged.” He hikes with ultra-light gear totaling 15 pounds, including food and water. “You’d be surprised how much more enjoyable it is when you’re packed really light. Not only can you do more miles, but they’re more pleasurable miles because you’re not always thinking ‘when’s the next break so I can get this pack off my back?’”
His favorite trails are in the United States. “The most beautiful trail I’ve done is the Pacific Crest Trail that goes from Mexico to Canada up through the Sierras and the Cascades,” he said. “There’s a trail they call the John Muir Trail; the Pacific Crest Trail and the John Muir Trail share 192 miles, and that is so beautiful. You do three national parks—Kings Canyon, Sequoia, and Yosemite. You’re up over 10,000 feet for most of the hike. It’s just spectacular. I’d also say the Colorado Trail is beautiful. There are unmatched backpacking opportunities in the United States.”
While he can talk trails and gear, technical hikes and elevation like an expert, it’s not long before he moves the conversation to his passion: whole food nutrition and how diseases can be prevented and reversed with a healthy diet.
“What surprised me, and I just think it’s the most exciting news in the world, [is] the human body really wants to be healthy and it’s far more resilient than I realized,” he said. “That people are able so quickly to get off all these medications, to lose weight so quickly, to have their cholesterol drop. We have so many stories.” Mackey is sharing the fruits of his “intellectual binge” (reading voraciously about nutrient values of foods and how the human body is impacted by everything one eats).
“I want to create a culture of wellness at Whole Foods,” he said, explaining the incentive-based programs for Whole Foods employees to monitor their biomarkers for improvement with vigilance. “We’re going to make these programs available to the public,” he said.
“Here are the gruesome facts,” he said. “Two thirds of Americans are overweight. Over half of those are obese, and the trend lines are horrible. The obesity rate’s doubled in the last 30 years. If I showed you on a state-by-state basis over the last 40 years, it’s just horrible. And our children are now obese. Americans are killing themselves. We spend 80 percent of our healthcare dollars on diseases nobody should ever have. No one should ever get (type 2) diabetes. We’re doing it to ourselves out of ignorance and, mostly, out of food addictions. We get addicted to sugar. We get addicted to fat. We get addicted to salt. I might make the case we get addicted to high inputs of protein as well.
“There’s not going to be a vaccination for cancer. There’s not going to be a pill you can take to prevent heart disease. We do all these high-tech interventions on people,” he said, pointing out that 10 percent of Medicare expenses go to putting heart stints into people with heart disease. “These are radical interventions we’re doing for people that don’t fundamentally work. You’ve got to protect yourself.”
He’s putting his money where his mouth is, providing generous incentives for employees who take the responsibility to monitor their bodies and their biomarkers and work toward improvement. He says getting discipline in one aspect of your life (diet or exercise, for example) leads to improvement in other areas and to a continuum of improvement that he calls “the virtuous circle.”
While he’s careful to point out that with 62,000 employees at Whole Foods, it will take a while to fully realize the “culture of wellness,” he identifies three key initiatives that are significant steps in that direction.
“One [step] is the discount card program. I’ll explain how it works: if you work for the company, you automatically get a 20 percent discount by just being on the team. Then we’ve got four levels of additional discounts you can get: bronze, silver, gold, and platinum. [The levels] are based on four objective biomarkers that you can measure. One is whether you use tobacco in any form; we test that. If you do, that disqualifies you; you can’t have nicotine in your blood or you’re not eligible. The second is we do your best score between your BMI, and because some body builders complain about that, we also do a height to waist ratio (although most of the people that were complaining about the BMI failed the height to weight ratio, too. It helped a few people but, in general, it took away the excuse). And then [we test] cholesterol and blood pressure. We bring the labs to the stores, and I think it costs us $71 a person to go through that test.
“The best thing about it is, we had a big improvement in 2011 over 2010; a lot more people qualified for some kind of discount. I think we had 7,500 the first year, and I believe over 10,000 in 2011. Of course not everybody takes the test, but we had more participation and more people that qualified for additional discounts.
“The team members that do it are proud of it. It’s a badge of honor. I’m boasting, I am platinum, so I’m pretty proud of that, and the team members notice that when I travel around and get into one of our stores and buy something, they see it. A lot of them will tell me, ‘I’m platinum too’ or, if they qualify for their card, they talk about it.” He estimates that after the program has been in place five years there will be as many as 25,000 employees qualifying.
The second initiative, which Mackey says has had even more important results than the discount cards, is a program called Total Health Immersions. For that he’s created an Advisory Council, made up of physicians who use dietary changes to prevent and reverse heart disease, diabetes, and other life-threatening diseases brought on by obesity, high cholesterol, and other conditions resulting from foods patients eat. (See also the box on “The Nutrition Prophets”)
Whole Foods works with four different immersion programs: Rip Esselstyn’s Engine 2 diet, Dr. Joel Fuhrman’s Eat To Live program, Dr. John McDougall’s program, and Eat Right America’s program. Both Engine 2 and McDougall’s programs are vegan; the others allow two or three moderate serving a week of animal foods.
Mackey is clearly proud of the results: “We’ve had over 1,200 team members go through [immersion] programs. It costs us over $3,000 per employee; we’ve invested close to $4 million in that program.
“But the results… I mean, every time I travel to the stores, I have team members come up, a lot of them with tears in their eyes, and tell me it’s completely changed their lives. We’ve had dozens of team members lose over 100 pounds in 8 or 9 months from being on the program. We’ve seen people completely not only lose weight but reverse diabetes. And they say type 2 diabetes is a disease that you can’t cure. It’s nonsense. You can cure that disease. Most of it can be cured in 30 – 90 days. People get off all their medication and normalize their blood sugar.”
The results are dramatic, but so are the dietary changes required by these immersion programs. And the changes must be permanent to keep the biomarkers normalized.
“Joel [Fuhrman] said it best,” Mackey counters. “He said, ‘people call this diet radical, but don’t you think having your chest cracked open is radical? Isn’t taking 17 prescription medications a day radical?’ This diet is not radical. It’s just eating whole foods that are mostly plants. A lot of these [doctors] have been saying this for a long time but nobody would listen to them. It’s not a message people want to hear.”
While he’s seen amazing results from employees who have had transformational experiences, he says there is still a reluctance to try it.
“At first, we had a lot of skeptical team members,” he said. “They’d say ‘well, I guess if they’re paying for it, I’ll do it.’ Or it’s easy to dismiss Rip—‘sure that guy’s a world class athlete, he’s Superman.’ But [it’s different] when you have some guy you work with who has lost 120 pounds and his cholesterol and blood pressure have plummeted and he’s gotten off all medications in less than a year and that guy is in there telling you what a difference it can make.”
According to Mackey, team members now are enrolling in the immersion programs with a better attitude and more determination.
“We’re going to open that up in 2012 to the public. Rip’s doing a public immersion right now and we’re going to open all these up to our customers because it’s such a revolutionary thing.”
The third initiative, Wellness Clubs, are completely for Whole Foods customers.
The third initiative, Wellness Clubs, are completely for Whole Foods customers. The concept is putting the ideas from immersion into a club. The price ($45 a month), is not insignificant, and Mackey immediately lists the benefits of membership. “First of all, you have unlimited classes not only on healthy eating but on exercise, on stress management, yoga, how to sleep better, and lots of cooking classes. We also give you a 10 percent discount on all of our healthiest foods, which ends up being about 5,000 items in a typical store: all of our fresh produce, fruits and vegetables, 100% grass-fed beef, some seafood, some chicken, and then all the healthy bulk foods that we sell, lots of the our Health Starts Here selection of items, and prepared foods.” The Health Starts Here foods are selected based on Fuhrman’s nutrient density scoring system, or ANDI.
The Wellness Clubs also include membership in a supper club modeled on one of Mackey’s favorite Austin restaurants, Casa de Luz. Anyone can participate, but Wellness Club members get a $5 discount on the meal.
Interestingly, Austin did not volunteer to be one of the initial pilots for the Wellness Clubs. However, the regional president of the southwest, Mark Dickson, is one of the success stories of the immersions.
“Mark is an amazing guy,” Mackey said. “But his weight had crept up to where he was pretty seriously obese. He didn’t want to go to the immersion program because he just thought he was going to fail at it. But finally, partly because I kept nagging him about it, he did the McDougall one. This was last April. I visited that immersion. In only seven days, he’d dropped 10 pounds, his blood pressure dropped 30 points, and his cholesterol dropped 40 points. He was excited because of those results, but the most important thing was he said, ‘John, I’ve stuffed myself every meal. I’ve never been hungry. I’ve loved the food. I’m going to do this for the rest of my life.’ And now, six months later, he’s lost 75 pounds. And he’s dropped all his medications. You’ll not recognize the guy. I’m thinking about calling him Slim. It’s amazing.
“So when the regional president has such amazing results, obviously that filters through the rest of the region. The Wellness Clubs with all those benefits, combined with these public health immersions, [are] the two major pillars for our educational initiatives.”
Mackey personally became a vegan eight years ago and thought he was healthy. “I just assumed that [being vegan] made me healthy. I was addicted to olive oil. As long as it was vegan, I ate a lot of junk food.” His wakeup call was a cholesterol test. “My cholesterol was 199 and I said, ‘How can it be 199? I’m a vegan.’” His blood pressure also had begun to creep up. He turned to books: first, “The China Study,” Dr. Esselstyn’s book, then Joel Fuhrman’s books, and McDougall’s. “Suddenly it all fit together. And then I watched my blood pressure plunge and my cholesterol dropped really low. So I had my personal experience with it.” He acknowledges that it takes time to improve. “I’m still on a journey. I think everyone is. I don’t think my diet’s perfect. I don’t hold it up as perfect. I’m doing a lot better now than I was a year ago, and I was better a year ago than I was two years ago.
“I don’t do any oil at home,” he said. “My wife’s on the same program so that makes it easier. But I travel more than half the time. Every time you go to a restaurant, even if you can avoid the oil, you’re still going to get a lot of salt. The chefs don’t know how to cook without oil. I say, ‘Just sauté it with water,’ and they say ‘I can’t do that.’
“This is why the obesity crisis has become what it is,” he said. “People eat more and more meals out and restaurants don’t have to list their ingredients. They use oil or butter or cream because they know that’s what sells. It’s not like it’s a plot; they’re partly meeting a big part of what the market wants. [People] want rich food because that’s what their palate has gotten used to.
“We eat an amazing amount of fried foods, potato chips, and soda. When I was a kid, Cokes were in those little six-ounce bottles. My parents didn’t let me have a Coke every day; it was a special treat, if I was good, and that did limit it right there to a certain extent. Now people buy Cokes in two-liter bottles and I’ve seen people drink one of those every single day. People are into cheese; they tend to eat cheese every day. A hundred years ago, per capita, we ate three pounds of cheese per year. Now we eat 36 pounds of cheese per person per year. And cheese is 70 to 80 percent fat, most of it saturated fat.”
Even in the face of these daunting trends, Mackey is optimistic about the prospects for turnaround both within the individual and in the American culture.
“The good news is, and that’s the hope, is that the human body can heal itself fairly quickly. I wouldn’t have predicted that, but I’ve seen it happen over and over again and I’ve experienced it myself.
As for the culture, he’s optimistic there as well. “There’s an old saying, an economist said it, and that is ‘if something doesn’t work, it will stop.’ I think people are really waking up to this issue. Don’t underestimate America’s ability to respond. We’re not dead yet. Americans are sick of being sick. People are very interested in food and we’ve reached a dead end. There are not going to be any high tech solutions.
“People fear, and rightly so, being decrepit. People are focused on their lifespan; but we want to increase our healthspan. I don’t think you ever have to be decrepit--maybe if you live to 110 or 120. We should have a long life and a long healthspan. But right now, we seem to be programmed to self-destruct; we like to put it off as long as possible.
“Here’s the good news: people could be so much healthier,” he says, buoyant in his optimism. “People think that if you’re fit, you’re healthy. Fitness is important but equally important, or more important, is what we’re putting into our bodies every single day. If people could better inform themselves and start to take their biomarkers on a regular basis, they will be able to make better choices; you’ve got to know your numbers.
A former runner, he compares biomarkers to race times. “I learned that lesson early, when Jim Fixx dropped over dead with a heart attack....They did the autopsy on him and some of his arteries were closed up 98 percent. So I actually think diet is more important than exercise.
“[Knowing your biomarkers] is kind of like a game, like ‘I’m going to run a marathon in under three hours.’ It’s the same way with your biomarkers. You want to get your cholesterol down, your blood pressure, your weight. It’s kind of fun, and if people took those numbers as seriously as they took their times, they would see their health and their vitality and their longevity increase…and,” he adds, “they’d have a happier life.”
He’s not finished with his revolutionary initiatives. Mackey said he and Whole Foods Market are working on a solution for lower income people living in “food deserts,” like the Del Valle area near Austin where there is not a grocery store.
“I’m not going to tell you,” he said. “We’ve got a very exciting idea that can make healthy foods accessible to a lot of the poorest people [in the nation]. We’re going to be doing some experiments in that regard in the next few years, but we’re not ready to talk about it yet. It’ll be ready for prime time in a year or so.”
Friday, November 25, 2011
Leo Tolstoy--The First Step
Not long ago I had a talk with a retired soldier, a butcher, and he was surprised at my assertion that it was a pity to kill, and said the usual things about it's being ordained. But afterwards he agreed with me: `Especially when they are quiet, tame cattle. They come, poor things! trusting you. It is very pitiful.'
This is dreadful! Not the suffering and death of the animals, but that a man suppresses in himself, unnecessarily, the highest spiritual capacity -- that of sympathy and pity towards living creatures like himself -- and by violating his own feelings becomes cruel. And how deeply seated in the human heart is the injunction not to take life!
Once, when walking from Moscow, I was offered a lift by some carters who were going to Serpukhov to a neighbouring forest to fetch wood. It was Thursday before Easter. I was seated in the first cart with a strong, red, coarse cartman, who evidently drank. On entering a village we saw a well-fed, naked, pink pig being dragged out of the first yard to be slaughtered. It squealed in a dreadful voice, resembling the shriek of a man. Just as we were passing they began to kill it. A man gashed its throat with a knife. The pig squealed still more loudly and piercingly, broke away from the men, and ran off covered with blood.
Being near-sighted I did not see all the details. I saw only the human-looking pink body of the pig and heard its desperate squeal, but the carter saw all the details and watched closely. They caught the pig, knocked it down, and finished cutting its throat. When its squeals ceased the carter sighed heavily. `Do men really not have to answer for such things?' he said.
So strong is humanity's aversion to all killing. But by example, by encouraging greediness, by the assertion that God has allowed it, and above all by habit, people entirely lose this natural feeling.
I only wish to say that for a good life a certain order of good actions is indispensable; that if a man's aspirations toward right living be serious they will inevitably follow one definite sequence; and that in this sequence the first virtue a man will strive after will be self-control, self-restraint. And in seeking for self-control a man will inevitably follow one definite sequence, and it this sequence the first thing will be self-control of food. And if he be really and seriously seeking to live a good life, the first thing from which he will abstain will always be the use of animal food, because, to say nothing of the excitation of the passions caused by such food, its use is simply immoral, as it involves the performance of an act which is contrary to moral feeling -- killing.
"But why, if the wrongfulness of animal food was known to humanity so long ago, have people not yet come to acknowledge this law?" will be asked by those who are accustomed to be led by public opinion rather by reason. The answer to this question is that the moral progress of humanity -- which is the foundation of every other kind of progress -- is always slow; but that the sign of true, not casual, progress is its uninterruptedness and its continual acceleration.
And the progress of vegetarianism is of this kind. That progress is expressed in the actual life of mankind, which from many causes is involuntarily passing more and more from carnivorous habits to vegetable food, and is also deliberately following the same path in a movement which shows evident strength, and which is growing larger and larger -- viz. vegetarianism. That movement has during the last ten years advanced more and more rapidly. More and more books and periodicals on this subject appear every year; one meets more and more people who have given up meat; and abroad, especially Germany, England, and America, the number of vegetarian hotels and restaurants increases year by year.
This movement should cause special joy to those whose life lies in the effort to bring about the kingdom of God on earth, not because vegetarianism is in itself an important step towards that kingdom (all true steps are both important and unimportant), but because it is a sign that the aspiration of mankind towards moral perfection is serious and sincere, for it has taken the one unalterable order of succession natural to it, beginning with the first step.
One cannot fail to rejoice at this, as people could not fail to rejoice who, after striving to reach the upper story of a house by trying vainly and at random to climb the walls from different points, should at last assemble at the first step of the staircase and crowd towards it, convinced that there can be no way up except by mounting this first step of stairs.
Connecting Google Calendar to Maps
I use Google Calendar everyday. All appointments go there, and whatever else I need to be reminded of. A few of the reasons why I like Google Calendar is that not only are all my appointments stored there, but if I ever need to find someone or something, I can just type in a "keyword" in the "search" box and anything with that word in in will pop up.
Also, if I want to move an appt around, all I do is click on it and move it. And I like being able to view my calendar from either a day's, week's or month's perspective.
Here's how Calendar is good for my business. When I'm on the road (I do AC and appliance repair) I can just touch the customer's phone number in my calendar and it will dial for me.
But here's something else I figured out how to do and this is really a cool feature. (Too bad Google doesn't automatically offer this.) Let's say I have to go to your house and fix a clothes dryer. Now I can go to your appointment in my calendar and click on this link and it will give me a map to your house.
And here's how I do it. Once you learn this, it becomes yours too. (And it might seem complicated but it's not.)
1. Go to Google Maps and enter in the address, then press "Enter"
2. Google Maps will then display a map of that address. In the upper right hand corner of that web page, you'll see a picture of a link. It's kind of small, but there will be 3 boxes next to each other, and the one on the right is the box with the link. Click on that link with your mouse.
3. Highlighted in blue is the link that you want to copy. Hover your mouse over the highlighed link, right click your mouse and then press "Copy". (You now have that link saved on your clipboard.)
4. Go to you appointment in Calandar, and in the box that says "description", paste in the link saved to your clipboard. How you do that is by going to the "Description" box, left clicking your mouse inside the box, then right clicking your mouse and then click "paste" to put the link in the "Description" box.
Then, when it's time to go to the appt, just click on the link in the box and a map will display showing you where you need to go. Sounds complicated, but do it a couple of times and it will become easy.
Also, if I want to move an appt around, all I do is click on it and move it. And I like being able to view my calendar from either a day's, week's or month's perspective.
Here's how Calendar is good for my business. When I'm on the road (I do AC and appliance repair) I can just touch the customer's phone number in my calendar and it will dial for me.
But here's something else I figured out how to do and this is really a cool feature. (Too bad Google doesn't automatically offer this.) Let's say I have to go to your house and fix a clothes dryer. Now I can go to your appointment in my calendar and click on this link and it will give me a map to your house.
And here's how I do it. Once you learn this, it becomes yours too. (And it might seem complicated but it's not.)
1. Go to Google Maps and enter in the address, then press "Enter"
2. Google Maps will then display a map of that address. In the upper right hand corner of that web page, you'll see a picture of a link. It's kind of small, but there will be 3 boxes next to each other, and the one on the right is the box with the link. Click on that link with your mouse.
3. Highlighted in blue is the link that you want to copy. Hover your mouse over the highlighed link, right click your mouse and then press "Copy". (You now have that link saved on your clipboard.)
4. Go to you appointment in Calandar, and in the box that says "description", paste in the link saved to your clipboard. How you do that is by going to the "Description" box, left clicking your mouse inside the box, then right clicking your mouse and then click "paste" to put the link in the "Description" box.
Then, when it's time to go to the appt, just click on the link in the box and a map will display showing you where you need to go. Sounds complicated, but do it a couple of times and it will become easy.
Thursday, November 24, 2011
Fasting for 6 Weeks
Happy Thanksgiving.
This is a book about fasting. It's a fascinating read, and it's free.
If fasting might seem like a taboo subject, or not mentally stimulating, I assure you this book you will find compelling.
This book is not only about the act of fasting, but a look at our medical complex and how this man, a doctor himself, overcame his own misbeliefs and saved his life.
This is a book about fasting. It's a fascinating read, and it's free.
If fasting might seem like a taboo subject, or not mentally stimulating, I assure you this book you will find compelling.
This book is not only about the act of fasting, but a look at our medical complex and how this man, a doctor himself, overcame his own misbeliefs and saved his life.
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Obama Voter, OWS Protester
This is the quintessential Obama supporter:
To go along with the quintessential OWS protestor:
Do you see any similarities?
BTW, I had to go back in and add this last paragraph. And I do mean this sincerely, not tongue in cheek. No, when I say similarities, I don't mean because they are both black.
To go along with the quintessential OWS protestor:
Do you see any similarities?
BTW, I had to go back in and add this last paragraph. And I do mean this sincerely, not tongue in cheek. No, when I say similarities, I don't mean because they are both black.
Sunday, November 20, 2011
Playing With The Neighbors' Kids
Today I lost a dollar. I bet the kid across the street that a race to the white van I would beat him. The odds were in my favor. I have a Harley 1200 Sportster and he's on a skateboard. He won.
I like playing with these kids. They're fun and like to play. I get a chance to be a kid too. I have a movie theatre type popcorn machine and the other day I brought it outside and cooked up a whole bottle of popcorn. All the kids tell me now is when am I going to make popcorn again.
But here's the problem and this is what this post is about. Though I get along well with all the parents of the kids that I know, in the back of my mind I can't help but think that they think I might be a pervert. It's not natural for an 'ol geezer to have fun with kids. Besides the parents kids, no other adult would even think of actually coming out to play with the kids. I am definitely an exception to the rule.
And in our state of what I would call "hyper-sensitivity", I would think that most people, even if they would like to spend time with the kids, probably say why bother, I'll just be labeled as some kind of freak.
So yeah, that does go through the back of my mind, and I'm very careful on my bounds around the kids. It'd be easier to just say screw it, and not bother. But I'm robbing myself of the joys of being around these great kids, and I know when I was a kid, I always loved to hang out with the adult.
Saturday, November 19, 2011
A Case For Home Gym
Let's say a goal would be to work out 2% of the day. Rounded off, that's 30 minutes/day of exercise. My guess is that more than 95% of us do not do this on a daily basis.
So, what about joining the 1% club? Fifteen minutes per day of exercise rounds off to 1% of our day devoted to exercise. (Add a few minutes because we think about it too;)
So if we made it a goal to be part of the 1% exercise club, the reality is, it's not worth our time to drive all the way to the gym to exercise for only 15 minutes. It'd be a waste of gas and time going to and fro.
So get on over to Craigslist and buy a piece of gym equipment that we'll use in the house for a limited time each day. It'll add up and our body will thank us.
So, what about joining the 1% club? Fifteen minutes per day of exercise rounds off to 1% of our day devoted to exercise. (Add a few minutes because we think about it too;)
So if we made it a goal to be part of the 1% exercise club, the reality is, it's not worth our time to drive all the way to the gym to exercise for only 15 minutes. It'd be a waste of gas and time going to and fro.
So get on over to Craigslist and buy a piece of gym equipment that we'll use in the house for a limited time each day. It'll add up and our body will thank us.
Friday, November 18, 2011
Dwolla and Google Takeout
This post should actually be 2 posts, but since they're both computer related, here you go.
This first link is about a company called Dwolla. It's only a 2 year old company that charges a quarter to move money, no matter how small or large the transaction. If Dwolla is successful, though you may not of heard of it now, we will be using it in the future in our everyday lives.
This from PC Mech A complaint I’ve had for a good long time concerning any web site where you post anything be it status updates, photos or the like is that there is no way to go to a specific part of the site, hit a button and download a copy of everything in your account for archive purposes.
Fortunately, Google has stepped up to the plate and truly does have a 1-click download-everything way to backup a bunch of your stuff. Not everything, but it’s better than nothing.
The super-easy backup Google offers is called Google Takeout.
This first link is about a company called Dwolla. It's only a 2 year old company that charges a quarter to move money, no matter how small or large the transaction. If Dwolla is successful, though you may not of heard of it now, we will be using it in the future in our everyday lives.
This from PC Mech A complaint I’ve had for a good long time concerning any web site where you post anything be it status updates, photos or the like is that there is no way to go to a specific part of the site, hit a button and download a copy of everything in your account for archive purposes.
Fortunately, Google has stepped up to the plate and truly does have a 1-click download-everything way to backup a bunch of your stuff. Not everything, but it’s better than nothing.
The super-easy backup Google offers is called Google Takeout.
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Facebook Business Page
I've just created a Facebook (FB) business page for my appliance, ac and heating business. And I'm excited about it.
Here's why:
My customers can go to their FB page and if they have "liked" my FB business page, whenever I post they will see it on their wall. Since I operate my business out of my home instead of an actual storefront, this is the best home I've ever found for my business.
#2. I don't have to worry about emails and bother my customers with mass emails. While this would most likely engender antipathy, posting compelling ideas on my FB page creates interest. I stay in front of the customer and the customer knows where to find me if he or his friends need appliance/heating/ac service.
BTW, if you "like" me on my FB business page, I'd be grateful.
America Lazy
During a weekend trip to Hawaii to attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, President Obama had some tough words for his own country. “We’ve been a little bit lazy, I think, over the last couple of decades,” he said.
That didn’t sit well with Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, who fired back on Monday’s “Special Report” on the Fox News Channel. According to Krauthammer, Obama is willing to point out everyone’s shortcomings except his own.
“No one is asking him to go out there and to be a jingoistic cheerleader,” Krauthammer said. “But when you call your own country ‘lazy’ when you are abroad, and call it ‘unambitious and soft’ when you are home, I think what you are showing is not tough love, but ill-conceived, ill-concealed contempt.”
Krauthammer then blamed Obama, rather than the American people, for the poor state of the economy.
“Look: Why are people reluctant to invest?” he asked. “We have the highest corporate tax rate in the world — in the industrialized world. Obama has spoken about it. It’s the one issue on which the Republicans would have agreed on lowering that rate, eliminating the loopholes. And in three years in office, he has done nothing.”
Krauthamer also directed blame toward the National Labor Relations Board, charging the agency with “trying to shut down a $1 billion plant that was constructed as a favor to Obama union allies.”
“People look abroad and say, ‘This isn’t a place I want to do business,’” Krauthammer huffed. ”It’s his issues, his overregulation, over-taxation and all the red tape he has added. And now he blames Americans’ laziness? I think it’s unseemly.”
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2011/11/14/krauthammer-rips-obamas-ill-conceived-concealed-contempt-for-u-s-its-unseemly/#ixzz1doyh6w7E
Monday, November 14, 2011
Little Genius or Just Smart
This kid develops apps for the iPad. Here he is giving a talk at a TED conference.
My Diet
Here's a video by Jeff Novick, one of my favorite guys, about reading food labels. Now I know you'd think reading a food label is boring, but I challenge you to watch this and not have your jaw drop.
In my nutritional journey it has taken a lot of zigs and zags. I started thinking about foods that I eat in its relationship to health around my later twenties. Nutrition or what I eat is definitely a fundamental part of my life.
Here's where I'm at presently in my diet. I abstain from alcohol. Also I don't eat any animal products. This means steak, chicken, pork, fish, milk, ice cream, cheese and yogurt. Also I'm avoiding most processed foods--chips, white breads, cookies, candy, white rice, carbonated drinks--you get the idea.
Now I'm learning about the deleterious effects of salt. I've always been borderline hypertensive, at least for the last 30 years. I've pretty much kept it under the 140/90 range of what is then considered high blood pressure. Even though I've read and heard many times about salt's ill effects, I've only now taken it to heart.
Here are some of the facts that I have read: Our recommended intake is about a teaspoon per day, which is 2300-2400 milligrams. Or 2.3 to 2.4 grams. The average American gets 3500 milligrams, and for some it's much higher than that. Our actual requirements for sodium is 350-400 milligrams/day, so says the Institute of Medicine, a branch of the National Institute of Health. That means we're getting 10Xs the sodium per day that we need.
By watching Jeff Novick and his videos, he recommends that when one is buying a food product, look at the ingredients, and not have the sodium number higher than the calorie number. In other words, if the calorie content per serving is 250 calories, the sodium content should not be over 250 milligrams. If you adopt that as your standard, there will be a lot of food tossed.
I thought being vegan was radical. Try eating a low sodium diet, now that's radical. What I'm finding is that I'm being drawn to eating not only more whole foods, but fresh whole foods. Look at a can of tomato sauce and look at the amount of sodium. And remember, that's only what they call one serving. And listen, I'm not even thinking of going organic. I don't even want to see a movie about that;)
In my nutritional journey it has taken a lot of zigs and zags. I started thinking about foods that I eat in its relationship to health around my later twenties. Nutrition or what I eat is definitely a fundamental part of my life.
Here's where I'm at presently in my diet. I abstain from alcohol. Also I don't eat any animal products. This means steak, chicken, pork, fish, milk, ice cream, cheese and yogurt. Also I'm avoiding most processed foods--chips, white breads, cookies, candy, white rice, carbonated drinks--you get the idea.
Now I'm learning about the deleterious effects of salt. I've always been borderline hypertensive, at least for the last 30 years. I've pretty much kept it under the 140/90 range of what is then considered high blood pressure. Even though I've read and heard many times about salt's ill effects, I've only now taken it to heart.
Here are some of the facts that I have read: Our recommended intake is about a teaspoon per day, which is 2300-2400 milligrams. Or 2.3 to 2.4 grams. The average American gets 3500 milligrams, and for some it's much higher than that. Our actual requirements for sodium is 350-400 milligrams/day, so says the Institute of Medicine, a branch of the National Institute of Health. That means we're getting 10Xs the sodium per day that we need.
By watching Jeff Novick and his videos, he recommends that when one is buying a food product, look at the ingredients, and not have the sodium number higher than the calorie number. In other words, if the calorie content per serving is 250 calories, the sodium content should not be over 250 milligrams. If you adopt that as your standard, there will be a lot of food tossed.
I thought being vegan was radical. Try eating a low sodium diet, now that's radical. What I'm finding is that I'm being drawn to eating not only more whole foods, but fresh whole foods. Look at a can of tomato sauce and look at the amount of sodium. And remember, that's only what they call one serving. And listen, I'm not even thinking of going organic. I don't even want to see a movie about that;)
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
India Skyscrapers Sewage
Friday, November 4, 2011
Veg Source Beginning
I've gone to this expo around six, seven times. These people are responsible for changing my life. Not changing my life is some small way, but in ways I could never have dreamed of. And as the years pass I daily give thanks to this door that's been opened to me. Though the vegsource people know me only in passing, their influence on my life can never be diminished.
The video is Jeff's opening talk at the Healthy Lifestyle Expo--it's a wonderful video. Below is an email I sent to Jeff after watching the video.
Wonderful video Jeff, it brought tears. I really enjoyed learning the genesis of vegsource. No doubt you folks have change my life in a most wonderful way. I'll be posting this on my blog.
Sunday, October 30, 2011
We Are The 1%
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Website on Health
This website is the best website on health. And it's free. The gentleman who hosts this is from Australia, and it's definitely a labor of love.
Profits
Profits are the payment for risk taking, innovation and decision-making. As such, they are a cost of business just as are wages, rent and interest. If those payments are not made, labor, land and capital will not offer their services. Similarly, if profit is not paid, entrepreneurs won't offer theirs. Historically, corporate profits range between 5 and 8 cents of each dollar, and wages range between 50 and 60 cents of each dollar.
For the rest:
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Who Lost The World--Wash Post
Moammar Gadhafi’s death last week prompted the Obama administration to trumpet the president’s competence as commander in chief and the superiority of his “small footprint,” “lead-from-behind” approach to waging war over the more traditional - and costly and messy - one pursued by George W. Bush. The bloom came off that false rose on Sunday when Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, chairman of the National Transitional Council, repeatedly declared his government’s fealty to Shariah, Islam’s brutally repressive, totalitarian political-military-legal doctrine.
For more
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Andrew Klavan--The Mark of Fascism
But that such lowlifes have risen up in a time of trouble (a time whose troubles have been so badly exacerbated by the left-wing policies of the current administration) is no surprise. What is more depressing is the support they are receiving not only from this desperate failure of a president and his fellow travelers but from any number of ordinary liberals and Democrats who feel OWS expresses a vital and proper anger against the powers that be. This is nonsense. The fact that Wall Streeters have given more money to Obama than to all the GOP candidates combined should be a dead give-away that the true voice of protest in this country, the true opposition to the current cronyism between Washington, D.C. and Wall Street, is the peaceful, non-racist, liberty-loving Tea Party, which these same liberals despise.
For More
Saturday, October 22, 2011
Lech Walesa OWS
Using biggovernment.com plus other news sources, rapidly we painted an accurate picture of the groups training, leading, and organizing the “movement.” The movement is organized by anarchists, Code Pink, the American Communist movement, jihadists, anti-Israel, socialist, and anti- free enterprise interests. OWS folks are politically to the left of President Barack Obama
more
Friday, October 21, 2011
Kurzweil Responds--Singularity
Kurzwel Responds: Don't Underestimate The Singularity
Last week, Paul Allen and a colleague challenged the prediction that computers will soon exceed human intelligence. Now Ray Kurzweil, the leading proponent of the “Singularity,” offers a rebuttal. — Technology Review, Oct. 10, 2011.
Although Paul Allen paraphrases my 2005 book, The Singularity Is Near, in the title of his essay (cowritten with his colleague Mark Greaves), it appears that he has not actually read the book. His only citation is to an essay I wrote in 2001 (“The Law of Accelerating Returns“) and his article does not acknowledge or respond to arguments I actually make in the book.
When my 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, was published, and augmented a couple of years later by the 2001 essay, it generated several lines of criticism, such as Moore’s law will come to an end, hardware capability may be expanding exponentially but software is stuck in the mud, the brain is too complicated, there are capabilities in the brain that inherently cannot be replicated in software, and several others. I specifically wrote The Singularity Is Near to respond to those critiques.
For the rest:
Last week, Paul Allen and a colleague challenged the prediction that computers will soon exceed human intelligence. Now Ray Kurzweil, the leading proponent of the “Singularity,” offers a rebuttal. — Technology Review, Oct. 10, 2011.
Although Paul Allen paraphrases my 2005 book, The Singularity Is Near, in the title of his essay (cowritten with his colleague Mark Greaves), it appears that he has not actually read the book. His only citation is to an essay I wrote in 2001 (“The Law of Accelerating Returns“) and his article does not acknowledge or respond to arguments I actually make in the book.
When my 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, was published, and augmented a couple of years later by the 2001 essay, it generated several lines of criticism, such as Moore’s law will come to an end, hardware capability may be expanding exponentially but software is stuck in the mud, the brain is too complicated, there are capabilities in the brain that inherently cannot be replicated in software, and several others. I specifically wrote The Singularity Is Near to respond to those critiques.
For the rest:
What Exactly Is Healthy Food?
The reality is we don' know. And there's much debate to what is health food. Much of the confusion is purposely done by groups with their own financial interests in mind, not the interests of the average American citizen.
We are designed to eat mostly a carbohydrate rich diet. Lots of fruit, grains, vegetables and beans. Most people think carbohydrates are the foods most to avoid. The complete opposite of what is true. Yes, avoid processed carbohydrates such as potato chips, white bread and cookies. But eat to one's heart's content unprocessed carbohydrates. That is where we get the fiber that is most needed in our diet. Fiber gives bulk to our food that allows peristalsis, the action of moving food along in our intestinal tract. The break down of carbohydrate is carbon and water, a simple process.
Meat and dairy, considered the corner stone of good health is the exact opposite. Meat and dairy are high in protein. Dr T Colin Campbell did experiments showing just by feeding mice a diet that contains 20% casein, the main protein in milk, cancer would develop. When Dr Campbell would reduce casein to 5% total calories, the cancer was shut off.
Also meat and dairy has no fiber. Therefore no bulk in these foods (fiber) and hence the eventual need to strain to pass the remnants of digestion. This eventually causes the stomach to be pushed in the chest cavity (hiatal hernia). Problems are also compounded with diverticulitis and hemorrhoids.
Also, by eating so much meat and dairy we get too much protein. And the byproducts are not simply water and carbon as in wonderful carbohydrates, but acid. Protein is a combination of amino acids that need to be broken down. And to neutralize these acids, we need calcium. Where does this calcium come from, our bones. And calcium in our bodies can be measured through a simple urine test. There's more calcium that comes out of bodies than what we take in on a meat/dairy diet. And BTW, taking calcium supplements doesn't somehow force calcium into our bones. Ever wonder how America has the highest calcium intake in the world and we suffer the greatest amount of hip fractures? And women in Africa can bear 8 kids, take no calcium, yet have healthier bones among women the same age that are in America.
And drinking the milk of another species was not the way we were meant to get our nouishment. Cow's milk is designed to take a 60 pound newborn calf and turn it into a 400 pound toddler in one year. Cow's milk not only has the dangerous protein casein, but the percentage of protein to total calories in cow's milk is 15%. And it takes a newborn calf 3 months to double in weight.
Human mother's milk is 5% protein and it takes a human newborn 6 months to double in weight. As an aside, a rat's offspring will double in weight the first week and the mother's milk is 50% protein in relation to total calories.
So that's why menarche used to be around 17-18 at the turn of the century and today it's 9-11 years old. It's by eating this high animal/dairy protein/fat diet that was never intended for us to eat. We are just flat out not designed to eat the diet that we eat today on a daily basis.
Try this immersion program for 28 days and prove it to yourself. Forget about the studies, just see for yourself.
Pavlov's Dog--Temptation
Strip away modernity/civilization and let's go back in time. Let's even forget our hunter/gatherer ancestors, but go back to when we learned how to cultivate the land. Most of our food was in the form of grains, leaves and some fruits. In fact, if it wasn't for grains, civilization would never have developed. The foods we ate back then were unprocessed. Foods tied to the land. Just as we look to animals in the wild today, one sees no obesity, for eating the foods that nature provides allows these creatures to thrive.
Biologically, all creatures are designed to seek pleasure, avoid pain and conserve energy. Fast forward to today. Come lunch time, we drive to our local fast food restaurant. It's not even necessary to get out of our car. In a year our two, we won't even have to talk into a speaker when ordering food, just past our phone over a sensor and it will read what we want for lunch (conserving energy).
As humans, food comes to us in three macro nutrients: protein, carbohydrates and fat. In premodern times that meant most of our nutrients were from carbohydrates, grains. Today our diets are high in processed foods, meats and dairy.
Enter in Pavlov's dog. Whenever Pavlov would feed his dog, he would ring a bell. Eventually he could ring the bell, and even though no food was available, the dog would salivate. Pavlov's dog is used to describe someone who merely reacts to a situation without critical thinking.
So as we're driving around town during lunch, we have many Pavlov's dogs barking at us. All the neon signs, the smells of smoke exiting the grills make us start to salivate. And our critical thinking does not kick in. Plus, since we're biologically designed to seek pleasure, avoid pain and conserve energy, it's near impossible to avoid all these temptations.
Especially when we look around and see how overweight and sick our fellow neighbor is. It's normal to take pills, to constantly tell ourselves how we need to lose weight.
Imagine though if you could apply critical thinking. That instead of eating these foods that make you sick and overweight, you ate only foods that create health. That the idea of how much food you eat gets banished from your mind. You're naturally healthy because you eat what nature and your body intended.
True health is really possible. But not if you're stuck in the pleasure trap. If you want to read a great book that describes more of what I'm saying, please read a most wonderful book called "The Pleasure Trap" by Dr Lisle and Dr Goldhammer.
Thursday, October 20, 2011
Things Only A Black Man Can Say
Black women should look outside their race for a successful man, says Stanford law professor
By DAILY MAIL REPORTER
Last updated at 12:56 PM on 20th October 2011
Stanford law professor Ralph Richard Banks says black women should be more willing to marry men outside of their race
Black women are surging ahead of black men both socially and economically, leading to a ‘relationship crisis’, says a professor of family law.
According to Ralph Richard Banks, as black men fall behind in education and income, they become less compatible with women of the same race, leading to black females becoming the ‘most unmarried’ group in American society.
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I would disagree though. You want to find marriage material ladies? You want to marry up? Ride the Blue Line Metro from Compton to LA.
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Alinsky-Obama
From Protein Wisdom
Alinsky rode into town on a one-trick pony that the Left has since turned into its warhorse: Agitate one side’s grievances, and appeal to another side’s decency and gullibility in order to provoke the establishment, whose reaction will unite the other two. Then the community organizer charges in on his nag-turned-steed and proceeds to set the rot in motion under the banner of “progress.”
It is the very devil’s work, and Alinsky certainly made a splendid devil: unctuous and whiny at the same time, and always casting himself as the real, heroic victim standing for progress, when in fact he was a particularly nasty, cowardly kind of cultural vandal. [...]
[...]
[...] the key to Alinskyism is the whipsaw, a constantly shifting “moral center” that can argue both sides of an issue at the same time. Thus Alinsky’s love child, Barack Obama, can boast of being rich and siding with the “99%” simultaneously; attack him as one and he’ll say he’s “really” be the other. Just look what the Obama administration is doing now, claiming to suspend the “CLASS” act of Obamacare while the president swears to defend it. Intellectually absurd — but emotionally pitch-perfect: Barry as the eternal outsider, battling dark forces inimical. For Alinsky always needs a villain, even if the villain is Alinskyism itself. But what do you expect from a political philosophy that claims up is really down, in is really out, and black is really white?
Alinskyism forces the Right to always be on the defense, shadow-boxing in a hall of mirrors against a foe whose moral turpitude it refuses to credit. If Alinsky stood for anything, it was, like Lucifer, destruction; the Left’s rage is animated by its lust for demolition, and the sooner the Right stops accepting its pretensions, the quicker the real battle can finally be engaged.
For more:
Alinsky rode into town on a one-trick pony that the Left has since turned into its warhorse: Agitate one side’s grievances, and appeal to another side’s decency and gullibility in order to provoke the establishment, whose reaction will unite the other two. Then the community organizer charges in on his nag-turned-steed and proceeds to set the rot in motion under the banner of “progress.”
It is the very devil’s work, and Alinsky certainly made a splendid devil: unctuous and whiny at the same time, and always casting himself as the real, heroic victim standing for progress, when in fact he was a particularly nasty, cowardly kind of cultural vandal. [...]
[...]
[...] the key to Alinskyism is the whipsaw, a constantly shifting “moral center” that can argue both sides of an issue at the same time. Thus Alinsky’s love child, Barack Obama, can boast of being rich and siding with the “99%” simultaneously; attack him as one and he’ll say he’s “really” be the other. Just look what the Obama administration is doing now, claiming to suspend the “CLASS” act of Obamacare while the president swears to defend it. Intellectually absurd — but emotionally pitch-perfect: Barry as the eternal outsider, battling dark forces inimical. For Alinsky always needs a villain, even if the villain is Alinskyism itself. But what do you expect from a political philosophy that claims up is really down, in is really out, and black is really white?
Alinskyism forces the Right to always be on the defense, shadow-boxing in a hall of mirrors against a foe whose moral turpitude it refuses to credit. If Alinsky stood for anything, it was, like Lucifer, destruction; the Left’s rage is animated by its lust for demolition, and the sooner the Right stops accepting its pretensions, the quicker the real battle can finally be engaged.
For more:
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