Force Christmas down their throats and Make Em Like IT!!!!!

Last year I was lamenting on the commercialization of Christmas, until Steve V. set me straight.

No reason to participate in the "War on Christmas" angst.

Godless capitalism is what it has always been: godless capitalism. It has *always* longed to maximize spending and minimize our interest in things higher than this world. The task of keeping both Christ and Mass in Christmas does not belong to American industry, but to the Faithful.

One can certainly roll one's eyes at the naked worship of Mammon. But when you do that you should take a little responsibility too and chalk stuff like TV ads up, not to evil socialist atheists engaging in some nefarious leftist War on Christmas that has nothing to do with "conservative family values" but to good solid godless capitalism that is just trying to figure out how to shake the Money Tree more efficiently in a postmodern and dechristianizing culture.

Being disappointed and perpetually vexed because exploitive corporate entities you naively associate with childhood, Christmas and mistletoe are actually exploitive corporate entities is a waste of time.

Learn to separate out what is essential to Christmas from what has, in our culture, learned to parasitically feed off Christmas and retain your joy.

G.K. Chesterton, "Comfort for Communists"

Ours, ours is the key O desolate crier,
The golden key to what ills distress you
Left without ever a God to judge you,
Lost without even Man to oppress you.

Look west, look west to the Land of Profits,
To the old gold marts, and confess it then
How greatly your great propaganda prospers
When left to the methods of Business Men.

Ah, Mammon is mightier than Marx in making
a goose-step order for godless geese,
And snobs know better than mobs to measure
Where Golf shall flourish and God shall cease.

Lift up your hearts in the wastes Slavonian,
Let no Red Sun on your wrath go down;
There are millions of very much organized atheists
In the Outer Circle of London Town.

- G.K. Chesterton, "Comfort for Communists"

How can you tell hes a king?

88 pounds since May. A comment I oft hear is I am now 1/2 the man I was. More accurately but more cumbersome of a statement would be 2/3 the man I was. That in and of itself is a humorous deprecation of my progress. I have found quite a bit of humor in peoples reactions.

The most perplexing contrast is those who comment what great shape I have attained .vs. those who wonder if I have a possibly life threatening illness. Quite the dissimilitude! Either healthy or deathlike by sheer observation!

I am below the 200 pound mark, which is still overweight by all the various algorithmic weight scales I have found.

My TOPS goal weight is a scant 4 pounds away. My mindset body weight is 185. Which is what I weighed when I was in the best shape I can recall. I am tempering my expectations with the reality that I just might not be able to maintain that slim.

I have purged my closet and I am starting to acquire a less rotund attire. Being a size M and tucking in a size XL just does not look good...

The Thanksgiving story ala Rush!

It's time for the traditional true story of Thanksgiving, as written by me in my second best seller of 2.5 million copies in hardback: See, I Told You So. "Chapter 6, Dead White Guys, or What the History Books Never Told You: The True Story of Thanksgiving -- The story of the Pilgrims begins in the early part of the seventeenth century (that's the 1600s for those of you in Rio Linda, California). The Church of England under King James I was persecuting anyone and everyone who did not recognize its absolute civil and spiritual authority. Those who challenged ecclesiastical authority and those who believed strongly in freedom of worship were hunted down, imprisoned, and sometimes executed for their beliefs. A group of separatists first fled to Holland and established a community.

"After eleven years, about forty of them agreed to make a perilous journey to the New World, where they would certainly face hardships, but could live and worship God according to the dictates of their own consciences. On August 1, 1620, the Mayflower set sail. It carried a total of 102 passengers, including forty Pilgrims led by William Bradford. On the journey, Bradford set up an agreement, a contract, that established just and equal laws for all members of the new community, irrespective of their religious beliefs. Where did the revolutionary ideas expressed in the Mayflower Compact come from? From the Bible. The Pilgrims were a people completely steeped in the lessons of the Old and New Testaments. They looked to the ancient Israelites for their example.

"And, because of the biblical precedents set forth in Scripture, they never doubted that their experiment would work. But this was no pleasure cruise, friends. The journey to the New World was a long and arduous one. And when the Pilgrims landed in New England in November, they found, according to Bradford's detailed journal, a cold, barren, desolate wilderness. There were no friends to greet them, he wrote. There were no houses to shelter them. There were no inns where they could refresh themselves. And the sacrifice they had made for freedom was just beginning. During the first winter, half the Pilgrims – including Bradford's own wife – died of either starvation, sickness or exposure. When spring finally came, Indians taught the settlers how to plant corn, fish for cod and skin beavers for coats.

"Life improved for the Pilgrims, but they did not yet prosper! This is important to understand because this is where modern American history lessons often end. Thanksgiving is actually explained in some textbooks as a holiday for which the Pilgrims gave thanks to the Indians for saving their lives, rather than as a devout expression of gratitude grounded in the tradition of both the Old and New Testaments. Here is the part that has been omitted: The original contract the Pilgrims had entered into with their merchant-sponsors in London called for everything they produced to go into a common store, and each member of the community was entitled to one common share. All of the land they cleared and the houses they built belong to the community as well. They were going to distribute it equally. All of the land they cleared and the houses they built belonged to the community as well.

"Nobody owned anything. They just had a share in it. It was a commune, folks. It was the forerunner to the communes we saw in the '60s and '70s out in California – and it was complete with organic vegetables, by the way. Bradford, who had become the new governor of the colony, recognized that this form of collectivism was as costly and destructive to the Pilgrims as that first harsh winter, which had taken so many lives. He decided to take bold action. Bradford assigned a plot of land to each family to work and manage, thus turning loose the power of the marketplace. That's right. Long before Karl Marx was even born, the Pilgrims had discovered and experimented with what could only be described as socialism. And what happened? It didn't work!"

"It never has worked! "What Bradford and his community found was that the most creative and industrious people had no incentive to work any harder than anyone else, unless they could utilize the power of personal motivation! But while most of the rest of the world has been experimenting with socialism for well over a hundred years – trying to refine it, perfect it, and re-invent it – the Pilgrims decided early on to scrap it permanently. What Bradford wrote about this social experiment should be in every schoolchild's history lesson. If it were, we might prevent much needless suffering in the future. 'The experience that we had in this common course and condition, tried sundry years...that by taking away property, and bringing community into a common wealth, would make them happy and flourishing – as if they were wiser than God,' Bradford wrote.

"'For this community [so far as it was] was found to breed much confusion and discontent, and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort. For young men that were most able and fit for labor and service did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children without any recompense ... that was thought injustice.' Why should you work for other people when you can't work for yourself? What's the point? Do you hear what he was saying, ladies and gentlemen? The Pilgrims found that people could not be expected to do their best work without incentive. So what did Bradford's community try next? They unharnessed the power of good old free enterprise by invoking the undergirding capitalistic principle of private property.

"Every family was assigned its own plot of land to work and permitted to market its own crops and products. And what was the result? 'This had very good success,' wrote Bradford, 'for it made all hands industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been.' Bradford doesn't sound like much of a Clintonite" I wrote then "does he? Is it possible that supply-side economics could have existed before the 1980s? Yes. Read the story of Joseph and Pharaoh in Genesis 41. Following Joseph's suggestion (Gen 41:34), Pharaoh reduced the tax on Egyptians to 20% during the 'seven years of plenty' and the 'Earth brought forth in heaps.' (Gen. 41:47) In no time, the Pilgrims found they had more food than they could eat themselves.

"Now, this is where it gets really good, folks, if you're laboring under the misconception that I was, as I was taught in school. So they set up trading posts and exchanged goods with the Indians. The profits allowed them to pay off their debts to the merchants in London. And the success and prosperity of the Plymouth settlement attracted more Europeans and began what came to be known as the 'Great Puritan Migration.'" But this story stops when the Indians taught the newly arrived suffering in socialism Pilgrims how to plant corn and fish for cod. That's where the story stops, and the story basically doesn't even begin there. The real story of Thanksgiving is William Bradford giving thanks to God for the guidance and the inspiration to set up a thriving colony. The bounty was shared with the Indians. They did sit down and they had dinner, and I think they had a turkey, but it was not the Indians who saved the day. It was capitalism and Scripture which saved the day."

Primer: How to stop scientific debate.

The first source I need to point to is Linked here.

There is a danger of monoculture or groupthink that has grown up around Man Made Global Warming. In particular, Warren considers the idea of "peer review", which alarmists constantly brandish as proof of the indisputability of their findings:

"Peer review was never meant as a sort of good housekeeping seal of approval on scientific work. It is not a guarantee of correctness. It is really an extension of the editorial process — bringing scientists from relevant fields to vet whether work is really new and different and worthy of publication, to make sure the actual article communicates the work and its findings clearly, and to probe for obvious errors or logical fallacies.

Climate scientists have tried to portray peer review as the end of the process– ie, once one of their works shows up in a peer-reviewed journal, the question addressed is “settled.” But his is never how science has worked. Publication in a peer-reviewed journal is the beginning, not the end. Once published, scientists attempt alternatively to tear it down or replicate its conclusions. Only work that has survived years of such torture testing starts to become “settled.”

The emails help to shed light on some aspects of peer review that skeptics have suspected for years. It is increasingly clear that climate scientists in the monoculture have been using peer review to enforce the orthodoxy. Peer review panels are stacked with members of the club, and authors who challenge the orthodoxy are shut out of publication, while authors within the monoculture use peer review as a shield against future criticism. We see in the emails members of the monoculture actually working to force editors who have the temerity to publish work critical of the orthodoxy out of their jobs. We are now learning that when alarmist scientists claim that there is little peer-reviewed science on the skeptic’s side, this is like the Catholic Church enforcing a banned books list and then claiming that everything in print supports the Church’s position.

History teaches us that whenever we allow a monoculture - whether is be totalitarian one-party rule or enforcing a single state religion, corruption follows. Without scrutiny of their actions, actors in such monocultures have few checks and little accountability. Worse, those at the center of such monocultures can become convinced of their own righteousness, such that any action they take in support of the orthodoxy is by definition ethically justified.

This, I think, is exactly what we see at work in the Hadley [sic] emails."

Next we have Watt's Up With That, and a fascinating and disturbing trip along just one thread of the CRU emails, where the UEA is asked to release a list of the meteorological stations, and the raw data for those stations. In response, UEA essentially tell him to go and screw himself.

Eschenbach takes us through his sequence of letters and FOI requests to the university, and juxtaposes the unhelpful responses he gets with the emails flying around behind the scenes in which the climate scientists are urging each other to batten down the hatches and give nothing away. It's a long post, but I strongly recommend it to you if you haven't already seen it.

"in 2005 Warwick [Hughes, climate researcher] asked Phil for the dataset that was used to create the CRU temperature record. Phil Jones famously replied:

Subject: Re: WMO non respondo

… Even if WMO agrees, I will still not pass on the data. We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it. …

Cheers Phil

Hmmm … not good. Or as they say in “1984″, double-plus ungood. Science can only progress if there is a free exchange of scientific data The scientific model works like this:

* A scientist makes claims, and reveals the data and methods he used to come to his conclusions.

* Other scientists who don’t agree attack the claim by (inter alia) seeing if they can replicate the result, using the first scientist’s data and methods.

* If the claims cannot be replicated, the claim is adjudged to be false.

Obviously, if the data or the methods are kept secret, the claims cannot be verified. Attacking other scientist’s claims is what what scientists do. This adversarial system is the heart of science. Refusing scientific data because someone will attack it is an oxymoron, of course they will attack it. That’s what scientists do."

So I wonder, isn't that the role of a scientist?

Chasing Corporations Out Of The U.S.

This was a disturbing read for me.

"But it is not just taxation that is chasing corporations out of America. Another top consideration is access to talent. The U.S. now spends more per capita on public education than any other OECD country, but its students test in the bottom decile."

"A culture that turns a blind eye to government failure, but is quick and unrelenting to blame society's ills on business, will naturally and subliminally embrace socialist solutions. The problem is that when one intervention fails, the government attempts to fix its errors with yet more intervention"

As taxes become more punitive for the rich, those who can will relocate to a more hospitable local. A liberal blogger I know, when confronted with this stated that "The rich will not leave the US, they never had it so good."

This is not the world of the 1950's and 1960's. Well educated workforce's are luring businesses to their locations in a siren song of business friendly government. Our administration seems content with pressing forward with the idea that business needs to earn less and pay more to the government and workforce.

Everything has a price. Every choice has repercussions.

In a large group meeting, at a previous employer of mine. One of management was asking the crowd "What is it you want?" in my typical clownish style shouted anonymously "More Pay for less work." Which got a laugh and the management response of "Me too!"

Talk about human nature in action. If you took a paper and pencil out right now and started a list of things that you should be doing around your home. I am pretty sure that list would grow a life of its own as each item conjured up another. If you were to do the same exercise three months later, I bet you will list many of the same things.

As a thought experiment, what if you were to assign some compensation to the top five items on the list, a reward, if you will...

Human nature.

Morbidly Fit

BMI scale is misused by Health Care professionals.

Lloyd was a work out partner of mine. This was not by intention, rather, by serendipity. As a newly wed I got a membership to Gold Gym and would start my mornings with a robust workout. I answered a bellowing call to spot Lloyds benchpress. After that he 'helped' me with my workouts. Even now the sore muscle memory hits me.

Lloyd was a Body builder, he had some success but would complain about the drug use. Also, the politics that made size more important then symmetry and definition. Lloyd was a Natural body builder and had to put in the hours instead of the juice. This was before the steroid issues blew up. Turns out he was spot on about the overuse. Anyways, this man was genetically gifted. He stood around 6'4" and 285 lbs. at 5% body fat. He was a regular marathon runner as well. Quick read. He was in shape.

Now in the course of human events he had a kid by someone he was not married too. He had left the lifestyle in order to provide for his kid. So he was working at the Oil Fields and working out morning and night.

Lloyd had tried to get life insurance, he was denied for being Morbidly Obese. This was done by someone sitting in a cubical looking on some actuarial charts. Fighting the system resulted in him driving all over the southland visiting various doctors and then going to others to confirm that he was NOT obese.

The Body Mass Index (BMI) is a statistical measurement which compares a person's weight and height to identify weight problems within a population. It was invented between 1830 and 1850 by Adolphe Quetelet, get that 19th Century!

Dr. GJ Hamwi's developed a more comprehensive formula designed for a person with a light, medium, or heavy frame.

For medium frame men: 106 lb for the first 5 ft; 6 lb for each inch over 5 ft

or

Weight for a Male 5 ft 11.5 in Tall: 175 lb

Light Frame: 158 lb

Heavy Frame: 193 lb

No formula can predict ideal body weight accurately. There are too many differences in body types, frame size and body composition. If you want to REALLY know, do an immersion test. Find out your body composition and you are better informed.

My Spoon is too big

Well my clothes are actually...

I grabbed a favorite shirt of mine and went out to eat recently. This particular dinner has been blogged about below with pictures. My shirt looks like crap on me, because it had been on a much larger version of me.

All my old shirts are too big. This, is very annoying to me for a couple of reasons. I LIKE my old shirts but when you put on a dress shirt and its like tucking in a spinnaker sail IT LOOKS LIKE GATHERED CRAP!

It was bad enough that my Briefs had turned into Boxers (I do not like boxers). Now my shirt collection is requiring being purged! Tee-shirts can be worn big. It is even comfortable. Sweat Shirts I prefer big. It turns out there is something to be said for work shirts that fit.

Do NOT get me wrong. I am well pleased that for the first time in 30 years I am below 200 pounds. I just never took into account that my wardrobe would become obsolete.

Silly me...

Okay, I feel better (until I look at my FORMER shirts again)... So anyways. I went to the Doctors today. My NEW doctor. My old one saw the writing on the wall and opted for early retirement then face the Government Rationed Healthcare system that seems to be coming our way.

This new doctor was not born in the USA. No big deal, but I am starting to wonder if there are ANY new doctors being born in the USA... And I got a bit of a life shock, this may or may not make sense\be funny to anyone out there depending upon your age and experience.

THIS DOCTOR IS YOUNGER THEN ME! For the first time EVER! yes, it was a fundamental shift in my universe. Shocking to say the least. Doctor baby face was nice enough, he apparently enjoys his laptop computer as he spent much more time looking at it then at me. I was anxious to hear how my blood work went. Being Type II, and having shunned 88 pounds, you can understand.

He starts explaining things, with an increasingly confusing loop the loop of information:

Doc: Okay your blood test results are excellent, your numbers are at the upper range for normal.

Me: Wow, Normal? Great I was hoping to get off my medication.

Doc babyF: Well, your numbers are normal for a regular person.

Me: I have daily bowel movements, I am not sure what that has to do with...

Doc babyF: No I mean your blood work would show your not diabetic in a normal person.

Me: I'm not a normal person?

Doc babyF: You have Diabetes.

Me: Yes, but with my weight loss I was thinking I would be able to reverse that. Now you say my numbers show my blood sugars are normal! That means I'm Cured!

Doc babyF: No, it doesnt, you still have diabetes. If you Did NOT have diabetes your blood test would be normal.

Me: Did the numbers before show I had dabetes?

Doc babyF: Yes, most assuradly.

Me: and now the numbers show my blood is the same as a normal, non-type II person?

Doc babyF: Exactly correct.

Me: So the only reason I am not cured NOW is because I was diagnosed earlier?

Doc babyF: Yes, that is correct.

Me: ........................................wtf?

Anyways. My BP is phenomenal! My Cholesterol is Excellent! My weight is a tad high (according to a highly flawed calculation called BMI, but so be it).

All in all I am a much healthier human being, just in time for Christmas! Now if I just had something to wear!

Nuff Said!

WoW video

This was just such a cute short video, I had to share.

Shopping heard around the world.

Food shopping has come under my dominion. That came hand in hand with meal planning. You would not think the two are mutually exclusive. At one point in time we would look for something to make one night only to discard idea's due to a key ingredient missing. Or there would be a drive to the market prior to execution of supper.

In Europe, I understand, there is a daily shopping that occurs. While there may already be a concept for the weeks food, the bulk of items are shopped that day.

Once upon a time, going shopping would mean going to various shops. Either a Butcher, or Fishmonger, produce, canned goods and sundry items. There are quite a few people who have a nostalgia for that even view it as a superior ideal. My thinking is that idea jaundiced by retrospect. Most of the shops had very limited selection, so your meals would be a tight rotation of meat and potato's or something that was localized.

Personally I like having my two weeks of meals listed with full list of ingredients that I can check my pantry then fill in the blanks at the store.

Is it better or worse then EU or the 'good ol days'?

Having been asked:I do not think that simplistic of a question is appropriate in the complexity or in the assumption that there is an issue.