I’m going to propose an idea that isn’t actually possible but, just imagine it was. Suspend reality temporarily.

Let’s say we could apply wealth redistribution to health. Hear me out.

There’s more fat people in America than there are poor people. In fact, even poor Americans are fat. This is a problem. A massive problem. Possibly, a bigger problem than poverty. The cost to care for all the ailments that inflict fat people are enormous. The money we could save by avoiding the diseases tied to obesity would instantly make poor Americans richer!

Everybody wins.

So let’s imagine we solve the obesity problem the same way many folks recommend to solve the problem of poverty or to shrink the gap between the rich and the poor. We’ll take good health from the minority of Americans who have lean physiques, exercise regularly, and watch what they eat and give that good health to the majority of Americans who are carrying a few small children in extra weight, barely exercise, and eat Chinese takeout while watching TV.

Absurd?

Why would you think this is absurd? I told you to imagine. Forget that we can’t actually take health from one person and give it to another. Just imagine we could.

Isn’t it unfair that some people are just born with good genes?! They eat whatever they like and don’t exercise yet, they look like Greek gods and goddesses! The nerve! It is only fair that we should take their health and give it to those who are less fortunate. Those who have bad genes.

The other hoarders of good health who meticulously watch what they eat and exercise religiously? Well, it isn’t fair that they are able to have such self control and determination. Other people just don’t have that kind of mental fortitude. We should take their health as well and give it to others who just aren’t able to work that hard!

Health redistribution. Just imagine the kind of America we could have if we were actually able to redistribute health!

Before I discovered the paleo diet, I wouldn’t have thought for a second to consult with evolution or ancient cultures to deal with or help shed light on modern health issues. It seems like common sense now that we should look at how humans have lived, thrived, and evolved in order to understand what good human health ought to be. That’s how we study every other creature on the planet: we observe what they do in their natural environment.

The natural next step after modeling diet around evolution is to see what other things can also benefit by applying the same ideas. A paleo-style diet works wonders so it is logical to suspect similar benefits can be achieved in other parts of life like physical fitness, sleep, activity levels, and even sex. It is important that we remember this isn’t paleolithic times. The objective isn’t to imitate cavemen and ignore modern science but, to use what we know about human evolution to guide us.

I came across this post at Hunt Gather Love about the sexual practices of two indigenous tribes in sub-Saharan Africa through one of Mark’s Daily Apple’s Weekend Link Loves and it intrigued me! Yes. Sex interested me. Shocker! I even read the entire text of the study. I read the full text of a lot of studies and papers so this isn’t something strange but, this was more entertaining to read about than a study on how vitamin D3 supplementation affects bone density and prevents fractures in seniors. As much as I love vitamin D, sex is just more interesting!

There’s a few charts in this study and one that stood out is this one about frequency of sex in a week:

This is a comparison between married couples and not the overall population of the United States and the people from the Aka and Ngandu tribes. There’s plenty of jokes in the modern world about couples having virtually no sex once they’re married and this data for Americans seems to support it! It looks spectacularly worse compared to these African tribes. So, what the hell? Are we not doing it enough? There’s plenty of studies that point to more sex correlating to better health. Whether these studies have any merit is another story but, why would anyone ignore any piece of science that tells them to have more sex?!

This chart makes married Americans look like sexless prudes but, are these indigenous peoples really having that much sex? And if they are, why? And how are they doing this? Sex eight times a week is no physical feat to scoff at. I’m sure larger waist sizes in America isn’t helping our cause but, if we’re not having enough sex, are they having too much sex? The Ngandu tribe seems to have a much more reasonable and desirable amount of sex. Why the disparity between the two tribes?

Monogamy or Polygamy?

Firstly, some folks will look at that graph and immediately assume that these tribes practiced polygamy or were otherwise sleeping around a lot. However, the study reports that “only a few members in each ethnic group were in polygynous relationships so we were unable to determine the impact of polygyny on sexual behavior.” These two tribes also have a cultural belief called the “post-partum sex taboo”:

The post-partum sex taboo is a cultural belief that a husband and wife should abstain from sexual activity after the birth of a child until the child is walking well. If a parent sleeps with someone else the child will get a specific illness, called ekila dibongo (taboo/illness of the knees), and potentially die.

The Aka tribe that reported the greatest sexual frequency also reported the least likelihood of looking for a different mate in this post-partum period while the Ngandu males almost always looked for another mate:

Some Aka men did not believe in the post-partum taboo and continued to sleep with their spouse while most Aka men believed and respected the conditions of the taboo and did not seek out other women. About one-fourth of the Aka men said they would seek out other women, but these were primarily males under 25. It is not clear if this is due to changes in cultural beliefs or a function of their age. Ngandu men on the other hand, almost always searched for other women during this time regardless of their age.

The women of both tribes generally followed the taboo and believed or hoped their husbands did:

All Ngandu and 72% of Aka women said they followed the taboo and said that their husbands either followed or women hoped their husbands respected the taboo.

So while there is evidence that Ngandu men sleep around in the post-partum period, it doesn’t necessarily equate to having multiple partners prior to that period. The study also had fewer Ngandu participants in comparison to the size of the tribe. Ngandu villages range in size from 50 – 400 individuals while the study included 21 participants split evenly by gender. The Aka villages consist of 25 – 35 individuals and the study included 35 Aka participants split evenly by gender.

The data collected about the Aka is therefore likely more reliable and indicative of the tribe as a whole opposed to the Ngandu data. While the data can’t conclusively determine monogamy or not, the Aka data is more reliable and points in that direction. Of course, different tribes have different customs, traditions, and beliefs that may make monogamy or polygamy the norm. Any data that sways one way or the other doesn’t conclusively prove anything except to dispel assumptions that all cavemen slept with every cavewoman he could find as an evolutionary explanation to infidelity or other such weakly supported ideas.

Ancient Sex as Play or Work?

Sex eight times a week is quite a lot by any measure and especially by modern measures. So the logical first question would be whether these indigenous tribes were doing it for fun or as a means to another ends? Both tribes have a child mortality rate of 35 – 45%. With that in mind, it becomes obvious that having as many children as possible would be a priority. And it is. Women give birth 5 – 6 times on average. The chart above demonstrating frequency of sex also shows that frequency declines in the age group that is no longer looking to produce offspring: 40 – 45 years.

According to the participants interviewed, they are primarily interested in children:

One young Aka male said “I am now doing it five times a night to search for a child. If I do not do it five times my wife will not be happy because she wants children quickly.” Aka females had similar feelings as expressed by one woman “I had sex with him to get infants, not for pleasure, and to show that I loved him”. Another Aka woman said, “It is fun to have sex, but it is to look for a child.”

They even go as far as to say:

Ngandu had similar views as one male said “Having sex three times a night is to look for a child NOT for pleasure”

An Aka male even refers to what he’s doing as work:

A 25 year-old man said, “It is work to find children and get children to make a large camp like my father.” He reported having sex 4–5 times a night.

The study goes on to discuss that:

… having sex was often viewed as bila (work). Some of following comments from Aka men and women emphasize this point. “The work of the penis is the work to find a child.” “I am always looking for a child, it is pleasurable, but it is a big work.” “Bila na bongedi” (sexual desire is work). Several informants compared the work of getting food and the work of searching for a child. “Getting food is more difficult, but both are lots of work. Sex life is not as tiring as work during day; the work at night is easier because can make love then sleep.”

Of course, this isn’t to say that they didn’t experience pleasure while doing this work:

Sex was seen as pleasurable, but pleasure was secondary or tertiary to searching for a child or to demonstrate love towards a mate. Ngandu men and women were somewhat more likely than Aka to mention pleasure as an important part of sex life. Ngandu women said “Sex is pleasure, work, sign of love and necessary for infant growth” and “Sex is for pleasure and for work to find kids.”

When it comes to frequency of sex per night and days of rest in between:

The data imply that, on average, 18–45 year-old Aka have sex about three times per week and three times per night. Ngandu 18–45 year-olds have sex about twice a week and two times per night.

So in the case of these two tribes–and likely all indigenous peoples–sex is firstly an act of work to produce children and secondly or thirdly an act of play for the sake of pleasure alone. This shouldn’t really be a surprise as it is only in the modern world that child mortality is low enough for couples to plan for children and largely expect every child born to survive into adulthood.

While this is a great conversation topic to have at ready, we really only care what this means for us in the modern world.

Sex and the Modern World

It is hard to imagine that anyone needs scientific evidence to believe sex is good for them. The sex itself can be good or bad in terms of satisfaction but, no scientific study is going to change that one way or the other–there’s also no shortage of articles on improving sex in men’s and women’s magazines every month.  The question that I want to answer is how much sex is likely optimal for health and longevity.

From a health perspective, I don’t think one can have too much sex. I’m not sure it’s even possible in all but the most extreme circumstances to have too much sex.

An article in Forbes had these snippets to say about the issue:

The best that modern science can say for sexual abstinence is that it’s harmless when practiced in moderation. Having regular and enthusiastic sex, by contrast, confers a host of measurable physiological advantages, be you male or female.

Dr. Claire Bailey of the University of Bristol says there is little or no risk of a woman’s overdosing on sex. In fact, she says, regular sessions can not only firm a woman’s tummy and buttocks but also improve her posture.

Women who abstain from sex run some risks. In postmenopausal women, these include vaginal atrophy. Dr. Winch has a middle-aged patient of whom he says: “She hasn’t had intercourse in three years. Just isn’t interested. The opening of her vagina is narrowing from disuse. It’s a condition that can lead to dysparenia, or pain associated with intercourse. I told her, ‘Look, you’d better buy a vibrator or you’re going to lose function there.’” 

“Yes,” says Dr. Eid, “It is possible for a young man who is very forceful and who likes rough sex, to damage his erectile tissue.” The drugs increase rigidity; moreover, they make it possible for a man to have second and third orgasms without having to wait out intermission.

So as long as you’re not contracting STDs or using drugs like Viagra as a performance enhancing drug, there’s little to worry about. There is effectively no ceiling on how much sex is good for you but, there might be a floor. Having no sexual activity of any kind seems to be unnatural in the sense that all creatures on this Earth have the innate objective to pass their genes on to the next generation. And the only biological way to do that is through sex.

Of course, we’re usually not looking to produce any babies when we engage in sex today. Unlike the Aka and Ngandu, sex is for play and showing affection. If we assume that these tribes act and behave as humans would have thousands of years ago or if we just didn’t have all this technology then the one group that demonstrates sexual frequency when child bearing is not a concern is the 40 – 45 age group.

They have sex anywhere from 2 – 5 times a week while Americans barely do it more than once. It is generally acknowledged by modern medicine and research that sex lowers stress, fights depression, is good exercise, boosts the immune system, and more. So what does modern research say about how much sex we need at minimum to get these benefits?

Dr. Stephen Juan shared these insights on The Register from various studies and experts:

According to Dr Carl Charnetski of the Department of Psychology at Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, people who reported one or two sexual “episodes” per week enjoyed higher levels of Immunoglobin A. This is an antibody that helps fight disease.

According to a study by Dr David Weeks, a clinical neuropsychologist at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital in Scotland and co-author of Superyoung (1999), men and women who reported having sex an average of four times per week looked approximately 10 years younger than they really were.

WebMD notes a study in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health that noted “having sex twice or more a week reduced the risk of fatal heart attack by half for the men, compared with those who had sex less than once a month.” That same article also quoted a study in the British Journal of Urology International that found ”men who had five or more ejaculations weekly while in their 20s reduced their risk of getting prostate cancer later by a third.”

If we combine the study of the Aka and the Ngandu with modern scientific research, it seems to show that sex 2 – 5 times a week provides all the health benefits and would be a natural occurrence for humans not looking for offspring.

Reality Check

Of course, no matter how many studies we can point to or data we collect about the benefits of sex and frequency of sex, we can’t actually show that sex causes things like improved health and longevity. There are no controlled studies to demonstrate this nor would any such study really be possible. All available studies are dependent on what people remember and claim they did. There can also be sample bias where healthy people just happen to have more sex opposed to sex being the reason they are healthy.

This is a case where the science is there for fun and decoration more than anything else. We can determine for ourselves whether sex is good or not based on how much we enjoy doing it. I’d make the case that we generally feel good during and after sex and we like to think about sex before we have it. If the logic holds that we should do more of the things that are good for us then we should have as much safe sex as we can.

That’s probably what our ancient ancestors did. They liked sex as much as we do. While they weren’t being chased by saber tooth cats, hunting bison, foraging for root vegetables, making shelters, tending fires, sharpening tools, or doing other things for survival, they probably had sex or some other play activity. Which is what we should strive to do more of in the modern world: play.

We should play as much as we can. And as all the science and generations of human experience seem to suggest: sex is a great candidate for play. The number of times is probably not nearly as important as the quality of the experience. Great sex fewer times probably has more benefits–and is more satisfying–than mediocre sex many times. But, we shouldn’t take the quality over quantity argument to the extreme. It should be good like a home-cooked meal and it should happen more frequently than appearances of a full moon.

There are so many things that I want to write about that I can’t sit still and write about any single one of them. It’s a problem. Instead, I’m watching Weeds on Netflix! Great show. You need to watch it if you haven’t seen it before. And speaking of Netflix, I don’t have any problems with a single thing they’ve done in the last few months. Everyone else appears to be fuming and Netflix’s stock price has sunk like a faceless corpse tied to a stone. I don’t get it. Why are people still renting DVDs?!

Anyway, I poured myself a hefty glass of merlot–a little more than a quarter of a whole bottle. I figured it was going to help me with these allergies I’m having. Changing of seasons always tends to be slightly problematic. I’m not sure if it helped since I’ve also turned on my air purifiers. That probably actually did something. Oh well, the wine has other effects and since I didn’t eat much of anything today, there’s a magnified effect! I’m writing this a little buzzed. That’s where the best writing comes from!

What Hunger Should Feel Like

One of the things I wanted to write about is the feeling of hunger. I’ve been experimenting–trying, practicing, or whatever one would call it–intermittent fasting since the beginning of the year. I feel like I’ve mastered the idea of it. Intermittent fasting is exactly as it sounds. Fasting for short periods of time. In this oddball world where conventional wisdom tells us we should be eating small meals more frequently, why would I bother trying something so antithetical to the mainstream?

That’s actually a silly question since I’m all about trying things that are against conventional wisdom. I’m hesitant to just believe without some first hand experience on the matter. I’m all about making my own decisions. It’s the rugged individualist inside.

It’s a theme in my life which I’ll get back to in a little bit but, before I get way off track: hunger. Since January, I’ve been eating 2 or fewer meals a day. No, I’m not starving myself. I haven’t told you what my 2 or fewer meals consist of. You’d probably think I’m stuffing myself if you knew! The reality is that I am neither starving nor stuffing myself. My improved body composition–bigger, stronger, leaner–can attest to that.

It will probably be difficult for most people to imagine how it would feel to not have hunger control their lives. It used to control mine. I am sitting here right now having had some cheese, an apple, and two cups of coffee. It’s late in the afternoon and that’s all I’ve eaten today. It isn’t because I’m not hungry. At least, not hungry as most people understand it. I wouldn’t mind eating but, I am not crippled by this feeling of hunger.

See, the feeling of hunger that I generally have now is completely different than the feeling of hunger that I used to have before I found the paleo diet and learned about how the human body works. I don’t get pains in my stomach and I’m able to focus on other tasks while my body would like some nourishment. I generally eat something in the morning. Sometimes, I skip breakfast altogether! Don’t tell the Obesity Police or they might arrest me!

If I had a large dinner–which happens quite often, again, don’t tell the Obesity Police!–then I usually don’t wake up feeling like I really need any food in the morning. I am aware of all the studies that say eating breakfast is the key to staying lean but, let’s be honest with ourselves: eating breakfast does not cause you to be lean. There happens to be some high correlation which means we should look into why there is a correlation. Eating breakfast alone doesn’t guarantee you’ll be lean. I’m lean and I skip breakfast. There’s many people who are lean and do the same. Granted, there’s many who carry a few pounds too many and also skip breakfast. So this tells us eating breakfast doesn’t mean you’ll be lean or fat one way or the other. Don’t let pseudo science trick you!

So my hunger feeling is more a sense of heightened alertness. I am actually more alert during these periods of fasting when my body would like to eat but, doesn’t necessarily have to. I don’t let my body get to a point where it has to or it’ll die–that’s just stupid–but, I don’t let meal times dictate my day. I am so much more efficient not having to take lunch in the middle of the day.

I believe that’s how humans should feel when it comes to hunger. Chronic hunger is bad but, not this heightened sense of alertness. It’s hard to explain until you feel it yourself and the key to get to such a place is to stop eating bread, grains, processed foods, and carbs. Once you get lean–low teens or less–you can eat as many carbs as you want like tubers but, not bread or potato chips. Until then, you want to chow down on lots of fat and protein–err on the side of fat. Your body will then adjust to using fat for energy and you’ll be able to go hours and hours without eating. I did it. Many others have as well. A body that runs on sugar–carbs–is a very inefficient body. You want to run on fat; it frees you from having to eat every 2 – 3 hours and from feeling grumpy just because you missed a meal.

It’s a wonderful thing.

Occupy Occupy Occupy!

And now back to the rugged individualist thing. Occupy Wall St is still going strong. I’m a little surprised that there’s so much momentum behind this thing. I’m not a supporter of all the messages that are coming out of there but, I support the people’s right to assemble and freedom of speech. I’m not going to get into scum-on-the-bottom-of-a-barrel behavior and make fun of them like many Liberals/Leftists/Democrats decided to do with the Tea Party. I have my own gripes with the modern day Tea Party but, there is much in common between the Tea Party and Occupy Wall St.

I don’t want to get into that exactly but, I was an original Tea Partier. Back in 2007 when Ron Paul supporters donated $6 million to his campaign in a single day on December 16th–the day of the Boston Tea Party. That’s where the Tea Party originated. It was then co-opted by Fox News, Neoconsertives, and the far Right. It was sad. I was disappointed but, what can you do?

So with Occupy Wall St, I’ve been trying to convince some individuals that the focus should be on the real problems and not the symptoms and I’m not really sure I’m getting through. But, whatever. There’s an ideological divide that I have with the core of the movement and that is the idea of the 99%. I really hate collectivism. I’m all about being me. I love being me. I don’t like being another faceless person in the crowd.

Which, if I was in the 99%–and technically I am–then I would be just another faceless person and I’m really not willing to give up my individualism. That doesn’t sit well with me and I know I am a lot different than the folks who thought up this 99% thing. Firstly, I’m not out there protesting and I have a damn good reason not to. I don’t believe in protesting. I don’t see the point. I can’t change minds but being out there annoying the crap out of other people. If I want to change hearts and minds–and that’s what I want to do–I need to convince people without annoying them to death. It’s not so showy but, I think it works better if I can change their minds by listening, talking, sharing, and understanding where they’re coming from and why they believe what they do. And maybe I’m wrong but, I’ll never know if all I’m doing is out there making noise that will leave 99% of the people I’m trying to inform annoyed, disgusted, and generally displeased.

Marketers should understand what I’m saying.

I don’t like playing the victim. Yes, I know that these big corporations got a lot of bailout money. I hate that. I hate this corporatist system we have where Big Business is in bed with Big Government. This is all terrible and I shine the light of criticism on it daily–my Facebook friends can attest to that. But, I’m not just going to sit and complain hoping that something magical will happen. Yes, I see how incredibly broken this world is and the only thing I can do is work around it. I’m going to work my ass off and do what I can. I will take the information I have and make the best of it. I will not go and lobby for handouts just because other people got handouts. No chance in hell. I’m going to do it right.

And that might just be my biggest gripe with Occupy Wall St. The protestors are largely looking for something. They want to end all the corporate welfare–which is a good thing–but, they also think they deserve some kind of welfare. Whether it be their student loans being forgiven or free health care or more free education or whatever. These are people who want to abolish one form of welfare and replace it with another. I can’t support that but, I will absolutely fight for those people’s rights to express themselves and assemble peacefully.

The Fall of Men?

Now enough of that, let’s go to an entirely different topic. I’ve come across a few articles recently about the fall of men or basically how women are improving their standing in society–collectively–and men are falling behind. The fact that these are all things that take men and women as collective groups annoy me already but, I can understand the usefulness of it when it comes to studying groups.

The whole idea that men are in trouble and that women are leap frogging us is ridiculous. It makes for great books and editorials but, that’s about it. There is only a story here because we have separated people into two teams: males and females. If we just combined the two groups and viewed it as how the United States population doing, it would be good news. Apparently, good news doesn’t sell so we need to somehow make a story out of this and you can’t have a story without a conflict. So, let’s use the oldest rivalry known to man: Man vs Woman.

Does no one else see this?

It really couldn’t be more apparent. Why is this a story? Men and women have had different roles all throughout human history. In some cultures, women are on top. In others, men are. And if we were to look even further, gender roles change constantly. There are times when women were viewed as equals to men and other times when women were held in higher or lesser regard. So what? This isn’t some kind of danger for men nor is it a danger for humanity.

What is a danger for humanity is that we’re playing this game of dumbasses where we want separate into two different teams when in reality, there’s one team: human kind. Men and women have worked together for hundreds of thousands of years to get to where we are today so this tiny blip in human history–and in this country specifically–is meaningless in the grand scheme of things.

Whatever roles men and women are going to play in our collective future is likely going to be the right ones. It is a reaction to a changing society than a sign of the end of civilization as we know it. And for all the hardcore feminists: no, you cannot continue the human race by yourselves. So try not to use this fabricated story to gloat too much. I know you folks like to degrade men because you feel men have degraded your kind in the past but, how about you grow the hell up? You cannot make things right by doing wrongs. Also, your concept of history is entirely too narrow. Expand your understanding of how human beings have lived since the dawn of time and you’ll discover that neither gender owes the other anything.

A Shortage of Good Men?

On a similar topic, I’d like to address this other asinine idea that proponents of the men are doomed theory that there are no good single men out there. You’ve heard, I’ve heard it, your mother has heard it, everyone has heard it. There’s a shortage of good men out there!

And that might be true. I don’t know, I’m not out looking for men. However, I happen to have the insight of someone looking for the other sex! Of course, no one thinks the opinion of men in these editorials are important. I’m not sure why. You’d think these authors and editors would want both sides of the story–unless they’re fabricating a story, of course.

Let’s say there really are no good men out there. Well, I hate to break it to you but, there are also no good women out there. Well, okay, not none but very few. I’ve never complained that there’s few good women out there. Why? Because this is nothing new! Are we just expecting that every person we meet is going to be awesome? What kind of fairy tale story are we trying to live? To find that one person who is the most amazing, you’re going to need to look a while and meet a lot of people who suck–how else would you know what awesome is?

And, for the most part, it isn’t because awesome people only exist in small quantities and only a few lucky ones are going to ever find such a rarity. How could that possibly make sense? How could everyone in the world be looking for the same thing and only a few people hold such qualities? The idea itself is absurd.

But, that’s the idea we’re given and told to believe. Well, I have a different idea: maybe the problem is that we don’t understand ourselves. That we aren’t sure who we are so we don’t know what we’re looking for. It is impossible to find what you want if you don’t know what it is that you want! And it is close to impossible to know what you want if you don’t know who you are.

Yes, I am bringing this all back to the idea of individualism. Maybe it’s just my own bias but, I don’t believe there is someone else out there that “completes me”. I am a whole person by myself. Another person would not make me whole, she would make me two. One plus one is two. One plus one is not one–and no, multiplication wouldn’t make sense.

This isn’t to say I don’t believe in love. I believe in it just fine. I’m probably more of a romantic than most people. I just don’t believe in stupid senseless shit–how’s that for alliteration? I’m not some expert of relationships or love or any of that. I just happen to be a living person and I tend to distrust experts when my life experience tells me otherwise.

In a future day, I will elaborate on all of this. Until then, I’m going to leave it at that. But, speaking of living…

Look Amazing and Have a Life?

I have finally tried going to the gym only twice a week for a month. It wasn’t easy. I wanted to go more often. I still want to go more often but, I had to try this experiment. If I am able to make solid gains by just going twice a week then I have to ask myself why I bother wasting time going more often. There’s so many other things that I could be doing and I’ve been able to do some of them in the last month.

It’s a beautiful thing. The verdict so far is that I am making solid gains. I haven’t turned into a pile of weak mush or gained fat. I am as lean as ever and it does appear I’m putting on muscle. I know I’m getting stronger because the weights are going up. I also feel great because I am fully rested and recovered every time I hit the gym. It really is amazing that two times a week is able to garner results.

I will continue this twice a week plan because it frees up time for me to do other things while allowing me to make progress in body composition and strength–that’s why I go to the gym. I’ve had to be more creative about how I train because I can’t just bombard myself with more days. I need to do the most efficient exercises, rep/set scheme, etc. in order to get the most out of just two days.

If you really don’t know what you’re doing at the gym, a twice a week plan will make it glaringly obvious. The key? Big compound movements and intensity. There’s a little more to it but, that’s the core concept. My plan is simple and could probably use more improvements but, so far this is what I’ve come up with:

Warm Up Complex

• hang snatch x 5
• overhead squat x 5
• military press x 5
• hang clean x 5
• front squat x 5

This complex is performed as many times as I want. Usually, I just do it once since twice seems to affect my other lifts.

Front Squats

• 4 sets of 5
• 1 set of max reps at a solid weight

A solid weight is something that I can rep at least 5 times but, could also do more. The idea is to blast the last set with volume to trigger more hypertrophy than if I just did another set of 5 reps with a heavier weight.

Dead lift

• 5-3-2 set scheme

Bench Press

• 4 sets of 5
• 1 set of max reps at a solid weight

A solid weight is the same idea as for the front squat.

Pull-ups

• 50+ in shortest time
• temporary failure on every set

My 3000 in 30 experiment showed that going to failure on every set made the most difference in muscle growth and strength so leave nothing in the tank. I just chose 50 because after doing over a hundred a day for 30 days, anything else seems too little. You can scale it to whatever number best suits you. I also try to do them in the shortest amount of time possible because I can either do a lot of reps or do fewer reps in less time. Just tweaking the variables there.

That’s all for this edition of General Musings. It was scattered but, there was a lot swirling in my mind. I didn’t even get to all of them! Almost everything I talked about here deserves it’s own in-depth blog post and perhaps they’ll get one eventually.

At age 56, Steve Jobs has passed away. It was quite shocking even though the state of his health was no mystery. I found out through a text message from a friend. It was sad news and the Internet quickly swelled with quotes and memories of Steve Jobs. The man will not be soon forgotten.

It wasn’t too long ago that I called myself a PC. Not that it really meant anything, I didn’t know why I didn’t like Apple products. I didn’t know much about Steve Jobs aside from the fact that he headed up Apple and Bill Gates headed up Microsoft. Microsoft was the champion of Team PC and Apple was the champion of Team Mac.

I used PCs all my life so I was on Team PC.

I grew up with Windows based computers. That’s what my parents understood because that’s what they used at work. My parents aren’t particularly computer savvy. I am often reteaching them how to do things with their laptop, digital camera, digital camcorder, digital picture frame, etc. that they promised to remember and understand if I taught them once.

I’ve used Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows ME, Windows ME Second Edition, and Windows XP. I’ve toyed with Windows Vista and Windows 7 but, I haven’t owned a PC with Microsoft’s latest OS offerings–Vista was also terrible so I stuck to XP like a lot of other people did. Microsoft and Windows in particular underscored my technological life from my first computer until I got an iPhone–the 3GS model.

That was the trojan horse that will forever change the way I appreciate technology.

One would be hard pressed not to appreciate the attention to detail and glaring pride in workmanship that went into every inch of the iPhone. I work in the technology industry and develop software. I do a lot of work for iOS nowadays and that has only strengthened my ability to see the difference in a piece of software written by Apple for OSX and software I used to use on Windows: it’s a non-comparison. Both pieces of software will work if you know how to use them but, the Apple version will be beautifully designed, thought out, and user-friendly.

Apple’s approach to their products has changed how I view software and how I view what quality work looks like. I can make things that work  or I can make things that work beautifully. The first is easy and any competent person can do it. The second is what fascinates and gets wide-eyed reactions.

I’m naturally opposed to mediocrity. I had a teacher in high school who often railed against mediocrity. I don’t remember if he taught chemistry or physics but, I will always remember his message to never settle for mediocrity. And for as long as I can remember, I always try to outdo myself or some other standard whenever I can.

So while Apple’s marketing was never able to convince me to buy a Mac because I was so ingrained with how Windows worked, I had no such baggage with smartphones. I also owned a first generation iPod Nano but, that didn’t convince me of much more than that Steve Jobs knew how to deliver a keynote.

The iPhone combined with Microsoft’s inability to produce a solid operating system and the surge of work brought about by the Apple App Store took me from being pro-PC and anti-Mac to respecting, appreciating, and loving Apple’s business model, business practices, and their products. I bought a MacBook Air recently and I love it.

When my parents ask me what new computer they should get, I tell them to get a Mac.

In my journey from PC to Mac, I’ve also learned a lot more about Steve Jobs. There’s a lot about the man that I like. In fact, the more I learn about him, the more I like him. I love his dedication to hard work. To constantly improve upon what he’s done. To never settle. His 2005 Stanford commencement speech is one of the best speeches I’ve ever listened to.

I secretly wish that Apple has clones of Steve Jobs in their top secret underground bunker and are just waiting to bring one to life. The world has so much to benefit from his genius. The world is already immeasurably better off because Steve Jobs existed. People may not realize it but, our lives would all be drastically different–and generally poorer–if it was’t for these little boxes we call computers. Steve Jobs pioneered the personal computer. Those iPhones are tiny computers that we can have with us at all times. Steve Jobs had a very visible hand in that.

The man has done a great deal to benefit mankind and made a fortune in the process. That’s how we know his affect on the world was great. Not because he signed legislations into law or started public programs with no means of measuring effectiveness. He gave the world advanced machines that could only be conceived of in science fiction films a few decades ago. Machines that you aren’t even aware is making your life better, easier, or more convenient until you no longer have access to them.

Steve Jobs is also partly responsible for my job. I know that I am most responsible for my job but, it is because of the App Store, iPhone, and iPad that I have a job doing what I’m doing. Apple’s products–under the direction of Steve Jobs–has created an ecosystem that is responsible for more jobs than any government stimulus program. I could very well just be doing something else if Apple never released iOS devices but, it’s been the biggest boom in business in the last two years as the economy continues to tank. I–along with thousands of others–could very well be unemployed if Apple didn’t release the products that ended up creating these jobs that no one could have predicted would exist.

And that’s the true magic of Steve Jobs and people like him: their work benefits others in ways that no one could predict.

I only wish I had known more about Steve Jobs earlier but, there’s little one can do to change the past. I’m just glad Jobs’ genius touched me while he was still alive. The way I see the world, work, and life has changed greatly since the days I played for Team PC. It wasn’t all because of Apple, Jobs, iPhones, and Macs but, they all contributed to it.

The culture and mindset–Think Different–that Steve Jobs cultivated at Apple compliments my beliefs and views tightly and that’s largely why and how I became a Mac.

Things are clearly escalating and getting out of hand with this protest. I support everyone’s right to a peaceful assembly and I am strongly against police abuse of power. The police are not above the law even if they think they are. I read an article about Marines and other members of the United States armed forces joining the protestors to protect them from police brutality. I support all of that.

But, it appears this is all getting out of hand.

I’m not entirely sure what is being protested. Bailouts? Unemployment? Jobs? What exactly is being protested?

From what I’ve seen on YouTube and read on OccupyWallSt.org, it appears people are angry that Wall Street is making a lot of money while everyone else is unemployed or underemployed. If that is what this protest is about then I really can’t support the reasoning for the protest.

Wall Street is making a lot of money while the rest of us aren’t. I don’t work on Wall Street. I have nothing to do with Wall Street. But, Wall Street weren’t the ones who forcibly took money from me and gave it to themselves in the form of huge bonuses while their companies were financially unsound. They are still financially unsound. Nothing has been fixed. The big banks will be asking for more bailouts again.

I know that Wall Street took dirty money. They took money stolen from you and me. They took it to continue living their lifestyle of plenty while the rest of us are barely getting by. I get it. It’s happening. I see it.

However, it wasn’t Wall Street that did this to us. Even if we were to blame the economic downturn entirely on the housing bubble, Wall Street didn’t create the bubble. Wall Street merely profited from the bubble and the subsequent bursting of the bubble. Those aren’t commendable actions and if Wall Street had more moral fiber, they wouldn’t have done what they did. Clearly, they don’t but, having poor character isn’t a crime.

Stealing my money, your money, your grandmother’s savings, and the money of people yet to be born: those are crimes. Wall Street didn’t do the stealing, they just took the stolen money. The thieves are in DC. Don’t let the bright white buildings in the capital blind you, the only entity in the whole country that has the power of legalized theft is in Washington, DC. The Congress and the President–the current one and the previous one–stole money from you, me, your grandmother, and still-nursing children to give to their friends on Wall Street and elsewhere.

Wall Street took it. Wall Street obviously isn’t an angel but, they also aren’t the source of the problem. Their influence on Washington, DC is a problem but, why does Washington, DC have the power to legally steal from anyone anyway? No one else has this power.

Maybe–just maybe–Washington, DC has gotten too big and has too much power? Think about it.

While, I think it’s refreshing to see people motivated to do something. To show their distaste for what is happening today. I would suggest Occupying Washington, DC instead. Or, occupy the Federal Reserve Bank in New York–it’s right there by Wall St–or the main Federal Reserve building in DC. If there’s an entity possibly more guilty of this reverse Robin Hood theft than the politicians in Washington, DC, it’s the money changers at the Federal Reserve.

I hope that all those involved with Occupy Wall Street takeaway one thing from my message:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Our Founders were wise and we should try to channel them from time to time. Ignore the fools who dismiss them as slave-owning white folks. No one is perfect in any time period but, even flawed individuals can produce at least one insight of genius in their lifetime. We have theirs written down in our Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Federalist Papers–rarely mentioned with first two but, just as important.

Government derives it’s power from the consent of the governed. That’s us but, we haven’t consented to this. We didn’t consent to bailout Wall Street. And even if we did, the Americans who are yet to be born didn’t and this government has taken their future wealth and prosperity as well.

We don’t need violent revolutions and I am weary that Occupy Wall Street is becoming too violent. I don’t want to see European-style riots in America. No one needs to get hurt or worse. Our Republic, even in this dilapidated and crippled state, still offers us the means to fix the problems that plague us: an out of control and gigantic Federal government.

Stay safe. Stay peaceful. The solutions to our problems lie with Liberty and the rest of our founding principles.

One of the reasons people try vegetarianism is to boycott the inhumane treatment of animals. Namely cows, chickens, and pigs. Spectacular documentaries like Food, Inc have shed light on the horrible living conditions of these animals in factory farms. There is no reasonable person who would question how cruel and disgusting our conventional livestock farming system is.

But, the moral question isn’t and shouldn’t be the only unacceptable reason. Animals raised in these filthy and cramped conditions are substantially poorer in nutrition and kept alive by drugs to combat the illnesses they develop because of the unsanitary living conditions. It is no coincidence that a population eating these nutritiously inferior and sick animals are also themselves nutrient deficient and sick.

The old saying is right: you are what you eat.

The fight to raise livestock humanely is not solely a vegetarian cause. In fact, vegetarians have little affect on the food producers compared to those of us who consume meat. Which is why choosing to become a vegetarian for moral reasons is misguided and unhelpful to the cause of improving the living conditions of livestock.

Imagine you wanted to change the way farmers–all farmers–grow their vegetables. You want pesticide free, organically grown, and non-GMO produce because it doesn’t have harmful pesticides, is more nutritious, and isn’t genetically modified. Would you stop eating vegetables? Of course not! That wouldn’t do anything to change their practices. If we opt out of doing business with them, we have no pull with them. We are no longer in the market.

Instead, we chose to buy vegetables that were organically grown, pesticide free, and non-GMO. And this has created an industry of better farmed produce.

That’s the most effective way to affecting change in farming practices. You reward the farms and companies who are inline with your beliefs. This idea should be applied to changing the way cows, pigs, chickens, and other livestock are raised.

Even though I don’t believe vegetarianism is a healthy diet choice, I am not interested in debating that. If you believe that a vegetarian diet is best for your health then who am I to tell you otherwise? Only you can decide what’s best for you and I accept that. But, on the issue of morality, deciding to boycott meat does nothing to change the system.

Imagine the size of the market of vegetarians who decided to become vegetarians for moral reasons and other people in the growing whole foods movement. Together, we are a powerful incentive for big farms to cater to our wants. There’s substantial market share to be had and that’s what every business wants.

We saw it with produce and we’ll see it with meat but, we can get there faster if those who chose vegetarianism for moral reasons can see that it is not helping the cause of raising livestock humanely. I would urge those considering vegetarianism for moral reasons to reconsider. The logic is there. Boycotts are rarely effective. Companies tend to cave due to the negative press but, there is no negative press associated with your choice to not eat meat. Vote with your dollars by rewarding those who are doing the right thing opposed to withdrawing completely and indirectly punishing the farmers doing the right thing.

And besides, when was the last time you salivated over a piece of lettuce? Just the thought of a delicious steak cooking on a grill is mouth watering. There’s a reason for that.

“We should make the poor uncomfortable and kick them out of poverty.” —Benjamin Franklin

It is socially popular and acceptable to take punches at capitalists and businessmen who create jobs, wealth, and keep society running but, any jokes at the expense of poor people on welfare who are clearly abusing the system has to be said quietly or under one’s breath. You never know when a self-appointed do-gooder is within earshot and ready at a moments notice to jump down your throat for saying something so dastardly! After all, it is distasteful to make poor people the butt of our jokes or have a laugh at their expense.

Everyone knows that it’s not the poor person’s fault for their state of poverty! Why, it’s the businessmen! The white man! The weather. The internet. The illegals. Those damn immigrants! An act of God–or gods. To so much as suggest that a poor person should get off their ass and find a job is unthinkable–there is obviously some other explanation for their sad state like the alignment of the planets or the migration of the whales.

People who say these things on TV or in their political campaigns might believe this nonsense but, ordinary people who go to work to support themselves and their families despise and ridicule welfare freeloaders in private and among friends and family. And the Great Recession has made everyone much less willing to turn a blind eye to supporting these societal parasites.

I have certainly grown to hate seeing beggars on the NYC Subway system and in the streets. I don’t know whom among these people are really incapable of working due to physical handicaps. The freeloaders have gone so far as to manufacture physical deformations and injuries to garner more charity from subway riders and the commuting public. As far as I’m concerned, the con artists have killed any sympathy for people who are truly in need of help.

The Con Artists

There is a man near my place of work who stands in front of a grocery store asking patrons coming out of the store or just passing by for “a little help”. I’ve seen him sit there with an electric wheelchair and a warm winter jacket on cold days. The man isn’t in rags nor is he handicapped–the wheelchair may suggest otherwise but, I’ve seen him standing without help.

There’s also been men and women–who do not appear to be homeless–who get your attention in the street as if they were in need of directions and then ask if you can spare any change. The first few times I responded with a, “sorry”. I now just look away as if they weren’t there. These freeloaders don’t deserve so much as a thought from me let alone a word of acknowledgement.

Just the other day, I saw the man who pesters people in front of the grocery store for help walk into the store–with no cane or wheelchair–and walk out with a can of Budweiser. I was standing in the doorway waiting for a sudden rainstorm to pass. Now you tell me, does this man deserve anything from me? Or you? The sad fact is: he’s not alone. A few blocks away from this grocery store is a similar store. And at this store, there is another man who stands there asking for “help”. I’ve also seen him in an electric wheelchair. It’s a beggar’s racket!

So what does this have to do with welfare freeloaders? A few blocks away from where I work is a government housing complex. This neighborhood used to be little more than empty buildings but, has seen a revitalization recently with the construction of luxury apartments. Luxury apartments attract people who are well off so trendy shops, bars, restaurants, and an organic market have opened here too. It would be no understatement to say that things are a bit expensive here.

An economy has been built here because evil rich people were enticed to the area. We moved our offices to this neighborhood last year because we liked the vibe and the environment. It’s outside of the busy Manhattan crowds but, only a single train stop away. It’s near the water and offers a magnificent view of downtown Manhattan. There’s a ton of creative people in the area and it’s a growing neighborhood. All good attributes for a small, artistic technology start up like ourselves.

There is little doubt that the shops and businesses that have opened up in this neighborhood have provided jobs to people in the surrounding area like the poor people who live in the nearby government housing complex. This is what is known as job creation and the only effective means by which poverty has been eliminated for hundreds of years.

The Disease of Entitlement

Unfortunately, the system of welfare in this country has gotten to a point where there’s a large swath–possibly an overwhelming majority like the moon passing over the sun in a solar eclipse–of the welfare population who–not only don’t feel a need to get a job–feel entitled to a comfortable existence without adding to the welfare of society. And I use the word welfare as it was originally intended and not as it has been perverted to mean.

I mean welfare as in the well being of taxpayers and hard working individuals of society–the people who keep the wheels turning–who are compelled by force of law to hand over a third or more of their hard earned money so that the growing welfare population can shuttle themselves on electric wheelchairs wrapped in a warm jacket during the chilly New York winter to loiter in front of grocery stores to harass the same hard working, tax paying people for more handouts.

The pervasiveness of these practices and this mindset should leave no one in the United States scratching their heads as to why the country is on a death spiral while the Chinese are poising themselves to be the economic superpower of the world by working hard, saving, and investing. The thought of future generations–or if things spin out of control even faster: ourselves within the next decade–having to learn Mandarin should motivate every American into returning to habits of working hard, self-reliance, and kicking mediocrity in the face at every opportunity.

If my personal anecdotes of daily occurrences in New York City haven’t convinced you of the welfare problem, here’s something that clearly points out the ineffectiveness of welfare and the detrimental impact of the disease of entitlement:

This is where we are. This is what America has become.

For the obnoxious do-gooders who have pushed for the ever growing welfare State by loudly and proudly shaming others–who had the good sense to know that laziness shouldn’t be rewarded–by throwing around terms like racist, bigot, heartless, careless, monster, or whatever other phrase that has been rendered meaningless by its overuse like the development of insulin resistance after years of chronic overproduction of insulin from a sugar-heavy diet: I am not making a case against the welfare State from atop an ivory tower.

Poverty is a Temporary State of Being

My parents are immigrants to this country who worked as hard as they could to make a life they would have otherwise never had. I know little of how my Mother grew up but, my Dad’s stories of poverty in Hong Kong has no comparison in modern America. His stories of poverty when he got to America and lived in the slums of Harlem also have no modern rival. My parents now live comfortably but, are far from being classified as rich. These are people who barely have a high school education and surely no college education. They were given nothing except the opportunity to work for a better life. This story applies the same to my Aunts, Uncles, and just about everyone in my family as well as thousands and millions of other Americans who came here and worked their asses off to escape poverty.

And lets not forget everyone who has ever moved here by boat, airplane, or swam here in the last two hundred years. All of them came here with nothing and made something of themselves while turning America into most prosperous nation in the world.

People didn’t flock here in the last two centuries for a free lunch, dinner, breakfast, or mid-afternoon snack. Today, a minority of people do come here for our welfare but, the majority still do not. The beacon of hope, prosperity, and freedom in America is being drowned out by the hoard of welfare freeloaders who take as much as they can from society while adding nothing to it without thinking twice or considering the consequences.

And me? I grew up in a neighborhood with it’s own set of government subsidized housing. My parents purchased a house with the help of government incentives that lowered the cost of owning a home. These homes were built around the government housing complexes to improve the neighborhood. The city has been trying to improve the neighborhood for as long as I’ve been alive. While I no longer live there, I was there up until I was an adult as recognized by law.

I didn’t grow up in the same poverty stricken existence as my father but, I also didn’t grow up in the quiet neighborhoods with neatly mowed lawns and two cars parked in the driveway that you see in Hollywood movies. I went to public school. Both of my parents worked because there was no other way to support a family of four. I didn’t get all the toys I wanted or wear expensive clothes. I grew up like most people did. I didn’t know if I was rich or poor or what difference it made. How in the world would I have known? The only life I could have known was the one I was living and there was nothing to compare it to.

Thinking back, my parents were probably somewhere in the lower-middle class. Nowadays, they’d be classified to be in the middle class with their increased income and without a mortgage or kids to take care of. They take a lot more vacations now as they deservedly should.

I didn’t grow up with a silver spoon in my mouth or with much more than what most poor people grow up with today. My parents weren’t irresponsible or incompetent and that’s a blessing I’ll probably never truly appreciate but, my story is a common one. There are people who had it better than me who are worse off and people who had it worse than me who are better off.

I am not speaking against the welfare State from a position of poverty ignorance like most who advocate for ever expanding welfare. In fact, my childhood experiences are much less meaningful than those of my adult life. I didn’t know anything as a child but, I know difference between rich and poor as an adult. I’ve been in worse economic straits during certain periods in the last 6 years than I ever had in my childhood. Things are not so dire now because I worked through it. I’m still not as successful as I want to be–measured monetarily or any other way–but, I’m working my ass off to get there.

I know exactly what it feels like to have to prioritize money spending and what it feels like when credit overwhelms your ability to service it. Unlike the morons running around Washington, D.C. trying to come up with a scheme to raise the nation’s debt limit in order to avoid having to make tough decisions of prioritizing payments and cutting spending, I’ve been there and done that.

So, I will not give people–whose only obstacle to getting a job is their own laziness and refusal to take any job they can find–a break of any kind. They abuse the welfare system and the more prevalent the system, the greater the number of these freeloaders as if a zombie infection had taken hold. Rarely, do the people who deserve welfare actually need it or will even use it. And as sure as the day comes after night, they never stay on welfare for long. The people who deserve welfare would find a way even if welfare didn’t exist–that’s why they deserve it.

Society should not feel as though making fun of welfare freeloaders is taboo. In fact, it’s a good thing that should be encouraged. Societal parasites, on the other hand, should be ridiculed, discouraged, and shamed. Such an existence should not be acceptable or subsidized during good economic times or bad economic times.

The audacity of welfare freeloaders cannot be allowed to flourish if we care at all about our own future or the future of generations yet to be born.

“Nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come”  - Sir Victor Hugo, 1852

Life is all about ideas. It’s the lens through which we see our world. It’s how we choose whom to build relationships with. It’s how we form opinions. And at any given point in life, we are in a battle of ideas.

Whether the idea is something as inconsequential as iPhone vs Android or important as organic foods vs processed foods, the battle of ideas is taking place all the time and everywhere. There is no escaping it, hiding from it, or ignoring it. As long as you are a thinking human being, you are in it.

I am one who often finds himself in the minority or controversial side of the battle of ideas. I do not believe in a low-fat diet to prevent the diseases of civilization. Instead, I subscribe to an evolutionary diet that is generally high in fat. I believe the science is there to support it. I’m also on the side of climate change skeptics. I don’t believe man’s output of CO2 has any meaningful impact on the warming or cooling of the planet. I believe man does pollute but, CO2 does not cause warming or cooling. I believe there’s science to show that increased sun activity has warmed the Earth as it has every other planet in the solar system along with other forms of evidence. I also don’t believe in doing cardio to lose weight and get in shape. No matter what age or sex, I believe the key to increased physical health is through lifting weights. The science is there as well.

All of those ideas except the last is quite controversial. Environmentalists wouldn’t think twice about stoning me and mainstream doctors and nutritionists think I’ve fallen off my rocker. And the majority of public opinion on both of those issues aren’t on my side so there is little shelter from looks and opinions of shock, disgust, and/or confusion when my views are made known.

Of course, that’s only the tip of the iceberg in my battle of ideas that will throw people for a loop. Regardless of any hostility that I may receive from expressing such views, I am incapable of expressing any other. It is who I am. The summation of these ideas make me who I am. The thought of betraying myself to pacify others is preposterous.

It is largely preposterous because of another idea that I have. The idea of Liberty and individual freedom. The idea that people should be free to live their lives as they see fit based on their views and beliefs. This doesn’t sound controversial until you take it to it’s logical conclusion: there is no place for the use of government force in the way of laws to enforce behaviors that are acceptable to the majority at large or loud minority.

Even that sounds perfectly reasonable until you get into the issues. I live in a blue State and City that often elects Republicans to office. New York City has had two Republican mayors since I’ve been old enough to remember. However, New York City is considered liberal and sympathetic to liberal causes such as climate change, planned parenthood, gay marriage, welfare for the poor, etc.

Since I don’t stand with either of the two sides, I often clash with anyone who is politically minded. But, not because I support legislations that oppose their views. There are few bills that I do support and those are rarely hot topics. This, for the most part, also tends to confuse people as they can’t seem to see the issues in any other way than a for or against paradigm.

There’s a mountain of popular issues that I can use as an example but, let’s take the issue of gay marriage for it’s recency in the news and because I’ve had a recent discussion relating to it. New York has recently made gay marriage legal and the LGBT community is ecstatic about it. Those sympathetic are also happy about it.

I am sympathetic to the idea that an individual can marry any other individual they want. I am also sympathetic to the idea that 3 or more people can marry each other. My definition of marriage is the union between two people but, I am in favor of defending and supporting private contract rights that don’t necessarily agree with my personal biases.

However, I am not necessarily in favor of the bill that makes gay marriage legal. This is not because I am a closet homophobe and merely stating my support for gay marriage while at the same time being unsupportive of a law that would allow it. I have no fear of expressing unpopular opinions.

By not necessarily being in favor of the bill, I do not mean that I wouldn’t have voted for it if I was in a position to. I would eliminate the government’s involvement in marriage completely. It is not up to the government to define what a marriage is and it is not the government that grants rights. Two individuals had the natural right to marry each other in NY before the bill was passed and still have it after the bill was passed. It was merely the government who blocked the rightful exercise of that right to begin with.

So it is the height of absurdity that they should look like heroes for remedying a problem of which they were the cause!

On the one hand, it is good to see that a segment of society has been reunited with a right that they should have had and on the other, I am wary of future problems that this course of action will bring about. The problem being one where we further ingrain the belief that government is the source of our rights. Maybe you and I don’t believe in polygamy–just as there are those don’t believe gays should get married–but, there are those who do and their natural rights to form a contract is still denied. We haven’t so much restored a right or progressed society as much as we’ve allowed overlords to pacify us and frame the idea of rights as something they bestow upon us.

And let’s not forget, the next election cycle can bring in new politicians and they can overturn that law just as quickly as it was voted for. And then what? Are we to continue fighting the same battle forever hoping for some miracle that all those who are elected into power share the same beliefs as we do?

That’s an impractical strategy. It is also unproductive and prone to failure.

The solution is to allow people to believe whatever they want and do whatever they want so long as it doesn’t harm you or your property. A community in the Bible Belt who believe gays are going to hell and are inflicted with some horrible disease can believe that as long as they aren’t out there using the force of law to violate the natural rights of gays. And from their perspective, the City of New York with all it’s vices and evils should be allowed to exist as it does as long as New York doesn’t violate the natural rights of bible thumpers. As long as the Federal government isn’t taxing them to pay for something over here or we’re taxed here to pay for something over there.

The solution is not more government. The battle of marriage equality is not finished when every State in the Union legalizes gay marriage. It is in fact a detriment to marriage equality because we’ve further ingrained the idea that it is up to government to allow us to marry. Ingrained the idea that we belong to the government instead of the other way around. The government belongs to us. It is here because we’ve decided to grant it some of our power and sovereignty as individuals in order to remedy and protect us from the violation of our natural rights from other individuals, foreign governments, corporations, and the government itself. It is not here to grant us rights.

This idea of Liberty is the biggest in the battle of ideas. No other battle can result in allowing those who disagree with me to force their ideas on me or those who agree with me to force our ideas on those who disagree. But, as with all other battles of ideas, the fight for Liberty can only be won by presenting a solid case and changing hearts and minds peacefully.

The idea of Liberty underscores the health and viability of all other ideas.

I’ve had an insane last couple of weeks. I lived on much less sleep than I would have liked due to an unfortunate and unforeseen circumstance. I slept about 25 hours from Friday night to Sunday morning to make up for it this past weekend. It wasn’t even by choice. I was just super tired. It was what my body wanted.

I had a work crisis that required a superhuman effort to fix. And by superhuman, I mean forgoing sleep and everything else. I credit the paleo diet for keeping me energetic and functional throughout the insanity. I didn’t eat any bread or crap either. I didn’t even have coffee. Just tea. Not that coffee isn’t paleo but, I’ve been limiting my coffee exposure as of late. I was starting to rely on it and I don’t think that’s good. I still love it and will have it as long as I’m not using it as a replacement for adequate sleep.

I Hate Incompetence

In the last couple of weeks, I essentially learned that I really–and I mean really–hate incompetence. I can’t even begin to count the hours of work I put in over the span of five days. I had no more than 24 hours of sleep in that span and even that might be generous.

My birthday fell in the middle of this crisis and I refused to let an idiot screw up my birthday. I celebrated, saw friends, complained about work, and had a good time overall. I’m glad that my friends listened. I felt like I was just bitching and no one likes a whiner. I did try to make it an interesting story! Using whatever storytelling techniques I knew of. I tried.

We hired a developer to work on an iPad app for one of our clients. He royally screwed the pooch. He had worked on this app for a month and a half. He showed us progress. It looked like progress. I don’t know how he managed to show us progress and actually accomplish nothing. It’s mystifying but, we haven’t had a chance to investigate.

In the end, I really don’t care how he managed to pull of this Wizard of Oz trick. I just know that the client was furious and I’ll be damned if I’m going to be associated with incompetence and poor quality. That is not my brand message.

Long story short, my boss and I worked an insane amount of hours, we fired the moron, and the client isn’t furious any more. I still don’t like the fact that we created any distress for the client but, the past can’t be changed.

Revolution 2012

Ron Paul announced his 2012 presidential campaign and I am glad that he did. This is probably going to be the last time he runs. I’m sure it’s incredibly exhausting to run and even though he is in magnificent health, there is no reason why he should endure more stress.

I am all over the campaign this time. I was a relatively early supporter in the 2008 campaign but, I was younger and dumber and all sorts less useful than I am today. I donated money last time and I will as well this time but, I intend to do more.

Ron Paul’s following has never been stronger and whether the rEVOLution ends up in the White House or not, I know that we’re all going to give it as much as we can. The cause of Liberty is worth the effort.

A Tech Boom

You might have read about it or overheard someone talking about it. I think we are in the midst of a technology boom. I don’t know if it’s a bubble but, there is definitely a noticeable explosion of work.

A lot of this is due to Apple’s iPhone and iPad. Everyone wants an app and I don’t think it’s a fad. These apps are replacing other things. Print is going to die faster than ever with the advent of apps for news and magazines.

The mobile games space has exploded for the same reasons. Games are reaching a larger audience than ever before. Established game companies are scared. Games on the App Store are $.99 and games you buy at GameStop are $60. The games aren’t of the same caliber but, industry veterans are still jittery.

Can you imagine living without your smartphone and all the apps you have? I love the iTrans NYC subway map app. It gives me train schedules and lets me figure out where I can connect to other trains. I’m a native New Yorker but, that doesn’t mean I know the subway system backwards and forwards. I generally only know the route I take.

I can’t imagine going out without my phone. How would I find out where I’m going? Where the restaurants and bars are? Without Google Maps at my fingertips, life would be much less convenient. It would be livable but, why?

I can’t say that there’s no bubble since we have company valuations in the tens of billions but, unlike in 2000, these companies are actually making money. There’s a business model in place. It’s not just about eyeballs. There might be a bit of a bubble but, nothing that will lead to a catastrophic crash.

Or I could also be wrong. The Federal Reserve is inflating like crazy and the money doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere but, what if it was going into technology? Then this might be a bubble. Hard to tell. We should just End the Fed and we would never have to worry about bubbles that destroy the world when it pops.

I do know that everyone is looking for app developers. I can’t find anyone competent as you can tell from my first musing but, there’s a need for developers. The scare that India was going to steal all development jobs was greatly exaggerated. India can’t produce a quality app to save their lives from what I’ve seen.

It is Okay to Fail

If you’ve already fallen off the horse or think you might fall off the horse a week from now, it doesn’t mean you can’t get back on the horse. You haven’t messed everything up and you would not be better off forgetting the whole thing.

You might want to rationalize it to yourself this way but, you know it’s ridiculous. Every day you make mistakes and you try again. They are usually very tiny like a typo. Yes, that counts as a mistake. We don’t decide that we should stop typing and just leave the document half finished do we? We hit backspace and try again.

That’s how you should approach all goals including your new year’s resolutions. Maybe you decided to go gluten free or go to the gym in the morning. Eating a piece of bread or sleeping in one morning is not the end of the world. Tomorrow is another day for you to keep your goals. Failing doesn’t mean it’s the end.

Accountability Through Social Networks

Just because you can fail doesn’t mean you should fail over and over. At some point, failing does mean it’s the end. After you lose all your hearts, coins, rings, or health points: it is game over. The objective is to allow room to fail but, still remain accountable.

This is where the wonderful world of social networks fits in handsomely. Our Twitter streams, Facebook statuses, etc. are more or less public–at the very least, your friends can see them. Declare your resolution online and then periodically mention it as you succeed.

This works fantastically well with “going to the gym” resolutions: use Facebook Places to check-in to your gym. You are telling all your friends that you went to the gym and after a while, you’ll feel like you need to go because your friends are watching. Even if you don’t give two squares about checking in, you should use it just for this.

There are more ways to use social networks to keep your goals. If you resolved to do more writing this year, sharing your works on a regular basis gives you incentive to keep writing because your friends are watching.

Whatever the resolution is, shedding light on it through social networks will help you keep them because someone will be–or you’ll think someone is–watching. Sometimes, being paranoid can keep you on the straight and narrow.

Track Something

Often times, the biggest reason we don’t stick to our resolutions is because we can’t tell if we’re going somewhere or if we’re just running in place. That’s why we need to track something. Anything. Track some data point that can be plotted as a graph later for you to analyze.

Sounds almost ridiculous but, data aggregated from months are fascinatingly interesting and motivating. We like to see how we’ve improved and that keeps us motivated. It is hard to know if we’re making any progress day to day because those changes tend to be microscopic at best while changes over months are more pronounced.

Fitness goals are easy to track. You can track your calorie consumption, macro-nutrient consumptions, weights lifted, miles ran, etc. There are many tools for doing this like DailyBurn and a plethora of iPhone and Android apps.

Taking a picture of your half–of completely–naked self in front of the bathroom mirror once a month is also a good way to track body composition goals.

If you resolved to write a book, you can track how many days a week or month you spent at least 30 minutes writing. You don’t need fancy computers or mobile apps to track things. A good old pen and calendar will do.

30 Minutes is Enough Time

You don’t need to spend hours a day working towards your resolution. Just 30 minutes is plenty. In fact, I wrote this post in a series of 30 minute sessions. Sometimes, it was less than 30 and sometimes it was more but, the key is that we don’t need to set aside large blocks of time to work towards our goals.

When we look at gym sessions as being something we need to spend an hour or more doing, we’ll come up with a million and one reasons why we don’t have time. We don’t need to spend 8 hours a day working on that book we’ve always wanted to write or that world changing Internet service that we’ve tossed around in our heads.

It would be nice to be able to put the same amount of effort as we put into our full time jobs but, we don’t need to and almost all of us can’t afford to.

But, we can set aside 30 minutes where ever we can spare it to work towards our resolutions. Our gym sessions can be 30 minutes–and probably should be. It only takes 30 minutes a day in front of the computer writing a few paragraphs to finish the next great American novel. We can spend just 30 minutes a day designing the next Facebook.

30 minutes isn’t as intimidating as hours. In fact, minutes are at least 60x less intimidating than hours–just do that math! Spending just 30 minutes a day will give you over 3 hours a week. Are you spending 3 hours a week working towards your resolutions now? Probably not so you have nothing to lose.

Drop Some Resolutions

Often times, we make too many resolutions and it just becomes impossible to do them all well or at all. The natural tendency is to kick the whole thing to the curb as if it was an all or nothing situation.

It is not.

When some of your resolutions are interfering with the success of others, you need to cut some of them loose. There might be a contradiction amongst your resolutions or you just have no way of allotting enough 30 minutes to satisfy them all–no matter what clever strategy we use, there’s still only 24 hours in a day.

That’s fine. It just means you need to scale back. You can’t do everything at once so pick the ones that are most important and forget about everything else. You are better off accomplishing a couple than failing them all.

The power of focus should not be underestimated. While multitasking will sometimes get more things done faster, it can also cause nothing to get done ever.

Armed with these five resolution keeping strategies, you should have no excuses not to look, feel, and be a better person 12 months from now. Hop to it!

The blizzard solved that for me.

I don’t live in a place where I have to shovel snow and there really is no need to go outside. I called my gym and no one answered so I guess they are closed too. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to brave the gusty winds and mountains of snow so high that cars are half submerged if they didn’t have to.

So after procrastinating by browsing Facebook, Twitter, and doing some online shopping, I figured it was time to write this up. Mad Men Season 3 on Amazon Video on Demand and Donkey Kong Country Returns are both highly alluring but, they’ll have to wait.

2010 Review

From where I’m standing, 2010 was a pretty damn good year. I’d go as far to say that it has been the best year in my adult life–most of the awesomeness fell into the second half of the year. I ended 2009 with these thoughts and, looking back, they were a pretty solid spring board for what became of 2010.

I talked about doing the opposite and I won’t say that I consciously tried to do everything that way but, I entered the year open to thoughts and ideas that were counter to prevailing wisdoms. I like to think that I’m always open to contrary thought but, it’s always easier to just follow the herd and not have to think. We’re all only human.

I was–with little doubt–much more focused in 2010. Just looking at this blog shows a greater effort in terms of quantity and quality of content. It’s easy to look back at what one has done over the course of a year and marvel at all that was done but, it was a planned effort throughout to do each piece little by little.

I don’t remember all my resolutions for 2010 but, I do remember a few: work less, play more, do more of my work, and get to 10% body fat. I failed pretty spectacularly in the first two because I worked more and played less. I did do more of my work as all my personal branding should show and I made it to 10% body fat–according to skin caliper measurements used to track progress throughout the year.

While I failed at the first two resolutions, I can’t say the year would have benefited from less working and more partying. Those two resolutions don’t fit with my umbrella goal of being highly successful. So naturally, a year that was predominately productive wouldn’t have played out any other way. We, at TinyMantis and SMASHWORX, released Propaganda Lander–our first publicly available game that we built from design doc to shipped product–and had the best financial year since I’ve been there. I am damn proud of what we did this year and can’t wait to make 2011 even better.

2011 Outlook

With everything that I’ve learned in 2010 from new ideas to new habits, I can’t see how 2011 is going to be bad. That doesn’t mean I’m going to sit on my hands. I still have some lofty resolutions for 2011.

2011 will be the year that I turn 25. I thanked God in 2010 that I was just 24 and not yet 25. For some reason I didn’t want to get any older then. I don’t really care right now. I don’t see what difference it really makes. Come hell or high water, I intend to be more awesome year after year.

Years ago, when I was younger–maybe 17, I made a vague goal to myself to be in incredible shape at 25. A body that could grace the covers of Men’s Health would probably fit the bill. I never forgot this objective I had set for myself although the prospects looked pretty bleak in the two years prior. I would have understood if I just considered such a goal childish naivety and tossed the whole thing aside but, even if I’ve done everything else wrong, I’ve made sure to keep quality people, friends, and acquaintances around me to act like  bumpers in a bowling alley.

When it comes down to it: we really are only as good as the company we keep.

Thanks to great friends and the paleo diet, I feel like I can achieve any fitness goal I put my mind to. 2010 saw a reboot for my passion in weight lifting and strength training. I put in serious gym time and–more importantly–resumed my quest for knowledge on the subject. 2010 might be the only year that I didn’t skip going to the gym for months at a time.

In 2011, I resolve to attain the coveted six-pack/washboard abs. I think that’ll satisfy my teenage dream. Quantitatively this means I’ll have get down to sub-10% body fat–around 8%. This won’t be a walk in the park but, I’ve never been closer or had more tools at my disposal.

I won’t bother resolving to work less because that’s an absurd resolution in the greater scheme of things. I will, however, resolve to play more but, in the sense that I’ll see my friends more often. All work and no play does make Tommy a dull boy.

I will further continue my personal branding endeavors and do it better in 2011. I was–mostly–feeling around in the dark in 2010. I had no idea what or what I wanted my brand–SuperTommy–to stand for. I still haven’t really figured it out yet but, I have a much clearer picture and learned from a barrel full of mistakes.

While physical fitness highlighted 2010–and will probably highlight 2011 publicly, 2011 is going to be a year where fiscal fitness plays quarterback. In the past, I have been terrible at managing money and curbing impulse spending–or spending in general. My creditors received a great deal of my money in 2010–technically their money that I spent in the past. I intend to completely break up with my credit cards in 2011. We were on and off–mostly off–in 2010 anyway. I don’t like to drag on relationships that clearly aren’t working out.

Despite economists in ivory towers telling us that we need to spend in order to fix the economy, I will save and monitor the Federal Reserve like a hawk in case they decide to devalue the dollar spectacularly–yes, even more spectacularly than they are now.

Writing this all down and making it public keeps me accountable. It’ll be interesting to see where I’m at when I read this over for the 2011 year in review. It could fall short or exceed. It’s impossible to know and that’s the excitement I live for.

This Christmas, I was looking at photos on this magical memories device and saw pictures of myself from the first half of 2009 and I was appalled. Appalled that I was a whale.

The best description of my reaction would be a disgusted WTF?!

I couldn’t believe I had ever let that happen! I’ve always been health conscious but, you’d never have guessed it looking at these photos–you’d think I was Twinkie conscious. I was also never aware that I had become that much of  a fat ass. And no one told me. Nobody. Okay, that’s not entirely true. One person did and that might be the only reason why I’m not a Sea World attraction right now.

My parents didn’t tell me and if they won’t be brutally honest, who will? So I told them to tell me next time and don’t worry about my feelings. My Dad said he thought I liked it. WTF?! I also thanked my one friend who gave it to me straight and to do it again if I ever wander down that path.

The key takeaway isn’t that I can’t believe I let myself become a fat ass. Shit happens. 2008 – 2009 was a challenging time. Not necessarily my best years. We all have those. Life isn’t a bouquet of lollipops.

The key takeaway is that I didn’t have a clue while it was happening. While living my life as a whale, I didn’t know I was a whale. I couldn’t see it. I was blind to reality. It wasn’t like I had no mirrors or didn’t see pictures of myself. I did: the mirror daily and pictures here and there.

So, WTF?!

I can only conclude that while we are in the thick of it, we cannot think or see objectively. This is why we need other’s to tell us what we don’t want to hear. Our perception is colored with a biased distortion. Whether it’s our physical appearance, our work, our ideas and opinions, or anything else that we’re engaged in, our ability to see clearly is inversely related to how deeply in the thick of it we are.

What we all need are people who aren’t afraid to sit us down and tell it to us straight. Hurt feelings or embarrassments are not good reasons to purposely and consciously distort reality.

I am thankful that someone had told me. The photos don’t lie. Every photo in the first half of 2009 had me as a whale. I rejoined a gym in May of that year and a year later I looked acceptable. Today, thanks to a grainless diet, I’ve never looked or been better.

Now, for your entertainment, an embarrassing picture of myself and two other pictures documenting my journey from Whale to Wow with a shout out to the epicenter of Internet vanity.

All we need someone to kick us in the ass from time to time.

A life without such things to pursue is immensely boring and unfulfilled. One day you are born and one day you will die. If you’ve left no mark of your existence, did you exist? Who would know? Who would care? Besides the air you’ve breathed, the food you’ve eaten, the water you’ve drank, and other resources you’ve consumed, what would denote your existence?

There are essentially two paths to a life lived–a life that leaves a mark proving you’ve existed. One path is to do meaningful work and hone one’s craft like a well tempered sword one would take to a dragon slaying. The other is to kiss your way up to the top through incessant networking that replaces time otherwise spent honing one’s craft.

Kissing Your Way Up

Everyone loves a good people person and it is not a skill to be treated as less than any other. It is just not a skill that should supplement one of production. One where the end result is tied unquestionably to the effort exerted. Where success isn’t tied to the mysticism of the position of the moon and its affect on the tides or the whim of people’s often irrational emotions of the moment.

Being able to work a room should be a complementary skill to one of production.

When it comes down to competing amongst those with similar skill sets, it will be the ability to win friends and influence people that will decide the winner. But, this is not the way to achieve anything real, worthwhile, or meaningful.

Or what is considered all show and no substance.

Putting any majority of one’s efforts into this tactic is a waste of time when the alternative is considered: the path of steadily, diligently, and persistently honing one’s craft.

Honing Your Craft

This is little more than the tale of the tortoise and the hare repackaged but, the timeless story has not lost it’s relevance. You will always be better off spending most of your efforts improving and refining your skills until you’ve produced something truly meaningful and worthwhile.

You will know when you have because you will feel it and others will tell you so. The more strangers that tell you, the more you know it is true. In some areas this is quantified by sales. In others: downloads, views, clicks, interviews, reviews, published articles, number of search results, etc.

You don’t go around chasing people with impressive names and positions at every networking event you can find and try to explain to them why you are good at what you do. An elevator pitch.

Instead, you labor over your work improving it day in and day out. Taking it one step at a time and developing a skill set that could not be obtained any other way. At the end of that road you will have created something worthwhile. Something that proves you existed.

And once you get there, all those people who you tried to connect with but, never gave you the light of day will be knocking on your door. You won’t have to find them, they will find you.

This is the path to life you should take.

The smile merged into a soft, good-natured chuckle, as if the question involved no problem for him, no painful secret to reveal. “There’s a way to solve every dilemma of that kind, Mr. Rearden. Check your premises.” He sat down on the floor, settling himself gaily, informally, for a conversation he would enjoy. “Is it your own first-hand conclusion that I am a man of high mind?” “Yes.” “Do you know of your own first-hand knowledge that I spend my life running after women?” “You’ve never denied it.” “Denied it? I’ve gone to a lot of trouble to create that impression.” “Do you mean to say that it isn’t true?” “Do I strike you as a man with a miserable inferiority complex?” “Good God, no!” “Only that kind of man spends his life running after women.” “What do you mean?” “Do you remember what I said about money and about the men who seek to reverse the law of cause and effect? The men who try to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind? Well, the man who despises himself tries to gain self-esteem from sexual adventures–which can’t be done, because sex is not the cause, but an effect and an expression of a man’s sense of his own value.” – Francisco d’Anconia, Atlas Shrugged

But, in fact, a man’s sexual choice is the result and the sum of his fundamental convictions. Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life. Show me the woman he sleeps with and I will tell you his valuation of himself. No matter what corruption he’s taught about the virtue of selflessness, sex is the most profoundly selfish of all acts, an act which he cannot perform for any motive but his own enjoyment–just try to think of performing it in a spirit of selfless charity?–an act which is not possible in self-abasement, only in self-exaltation, only in the confidence of being desired and being worthy of desire. It is an act that forces him to stand naked in spirit, as well as in body, and to accept his real ego as his standard of value. He will always be attracted to the woman who reflects his deepest vision of himself, the woman whose surrender permits him to experience–or to fake–a sense of self-esteem. The man who is proudly certain of his own value, will want the highest type of woman he can find, the woman he admires, the strongest, the hardest to conquer–because only the possession of a heroine will give him the sense of an achievement, not the possession of a brainless slut. He does not seek to .. What’s the matter?” he asked, seeing the look on Rearden’s face, a look of intensity much beyond mere interest in an abstract discussion. “Go on,” said Rearden tensely. “He does not seek to gain his value, he seeks to express it. There is no conflict between the standards of his mind and the desires of his body. But the man who is convinced of his own worthlessness will be drawn to a woman he despises–because she will reflect his own secret self, she will release him from that objective reality in which he is a fraud, she will give him a momentary illusion of his own value and a momentary escape from the moral code that damns him. Observe the ugly mess which most men make their sex lives–and observe the mess of contradictions  which they hold as their moral philosophy. One proceeds from the other. Love is our response to our highest values–and can be nothing else. Let a man corrupt his values and his view of existence, let him profess that love is not self-enjoyment but self-denial, that virtue consists, not of pride, but of pity or pain or weakness or sacrifice, that the noblest love is born, not of admiration, but of charity, not in response to values, but in response to flaws–and he will have cut himself in two. His body will not obey him, it will not respond, it will make him impotent toward the woman he professes to love and draw him to the lowest type of whore he can find. His body will always follow the ultimate logic of his deepest convictions; if he believes that flaws are values, he has damned existence as evil and only the evil will attract him. He has damned himself and he will feel that depravity is all he is worthy of enjoying. He has equated virtue with pain and he will feel that vice is the only realm of pleasure. Then he will scream that his body has vicious desires of its own which his mind cannot conquer, that sex is sin, that true love is a pure emotion of the spirit. And then he will wonder why love brings him nothing bu boredom, and sex–nothing but shame.” – Francisco d’Anconia, Atlas Shrugged

Thanks to a lovely technology known as the Kindle, I am able to easily highlight and clip quotes from Atlas Shrugged to be reviewed later. And in my case, “reviewed later” means “turned into a blog post”. Unfortunately, I still need to type them by hand instead of simply copying and pasting–there might be a way that I am just unaware of. Some of the longest quotations I have are from Francisco d’Aconia. He might just be my favorite character in the whole book but, I’m only 60% of the way through so I can’t yet say for sure.

Needless to say, I despise all the looters, politicians, and Washington-men wrecking havoc in the book. But, I simply adore the protagonist and other central characters.

There’s a lot in the book that I firmly and fundamentally believe but, have been unable to express in words as well as Ayn Rand has through these characters. Turning these excerpts into blog posts is a great second choice until I find the words myself.

“You know, Dagny, Thanksgiving was a holiday established by productive people to celebrate the success of their work” – Henry Rearden to Dagny Taggart in Atlas Shrugged

I am still reading Atlas Shrugged and I am enchanted by it. It is more than safe to say that I have longed for a book like Atlas Shrugged but never got around to it even though I knew of its existence. I always found fiction to be little more than a waste of time so I picked up most of the theory and background behind Rand’s thoughts in the works of classic economists and liberals–not today’s loons.

My critiques of current economic policy do not hide the fact that I subscribe to the Austrian school of economics. My political opinion pieces are little short of radical libertarian by today’s standards. While Rand railed against the libertarians of her time–as I would the libertarians from the Libertarian Party of today–I believe the sect of libertarians that I associate with would have been good friends of hers.

I am finally little more than half way through Atlas Shrugged and it appears to just get better and better. Outside of the political and moral, Atlas Shrugged is a fantastic and addictive story. This was also the year that I finished–for the first time–1984 by George Orwell and Brave New World by Auldos HuxleyAldous Huxley. While both are dystopian classics, neither gave me the sense of imminent fear like Atlas Shrugged. Imminent fear in the sense that the atrocities the political class commits in this work of fiction are all to similar to reality.

There’s a whole bunch of blog posts–serious ones–that I want to write but haven’t found the time for between work, my race to 10% body fat in 2010, and reading Atlas Shrugged. I know excuses are lame but, I am managing to squeeze this in without much editing so I expect typos, grammatical errors, and such–at least more so than usual.

My only real intention for this post was to share this post by John Stossel about the origins of Thanksgiving. Hint: it’s a celebration of the principles of capitalism and free trade.

I will cap this off with another excerpt from Atlas Shrugged–I’m enchanted, remember?

“Miss Taggart, do you know the hallmark of the second-rater? It’s resentment of another man’s achievement. Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone’s work prove greater than their own–they have no inkling of the loneliness that comes when you read the top. The loneliness for an equal–for a mind to respect and an achievement to admire. They bare their teeth at you from out of their rat holes, thinking that you take pleasure in letting your brilliance dim them–while you’d give a year of your life to see a flicker of talent anywhere among them. They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors. They don’t know that dream is the infallible proof of mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of achievement would not be able to bear. They have no way of knowing what he feels when surrounded by inferiors–hatred? no, not hatred, but boredom–the terrible, hopeless, draining, paralyzing boredom.”

Not that it is of any importance but, I will be celebrating Thanksgiving with family at a casino: Foxwoods. It really is a rather ironic thing to do after I just explained the origins of Thanksgiving but, I have no pipe dreams of chance riches at a casino–the odds are stacked highly unfavorably. What I do need is a vacation and that’s how I’m going to view this; if I happen to come back with extra money good for me and if I come back with less money: it was a vacation.