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I can't help but to notice that there are more subscribers to this feed, which no one is updating, then there are to my actual current, active blog.

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On the top right corner of the screen, subscribe by RSS, email, or with Google Connect.  All super simple, one click methods.
You can always take it back later if you get sick of me.

Follow this link:

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If you are reading this post, that probably means you are subscribed to this blog.
Well, this is the last thing I will ever post here.
Not there is anything particularly wrong with this one, but it is not, and never really was, mine.  It was meant to be a shared project, but never really got off the ground, and I didn't want to litter it with all of my old stuff, which meant the old stuff was trapped on MySpace, sad and lonely and unread.

So click the link above for more great random content from the brain of Bakari Kafele (and the old content, better organized and more readable)

At the top right you will find easy buttons to subscribe to the new one via email or RSS.

Enjoy

Finally upgraded to my own blog

http://biodieselhauling.blogspot.com/

I have known I should do this for years, but I have been too lazy.

My business website's blog server has a ridiculously restrictive 4000 total character limit, which makes it practically useless.

My main content has been MySpace since July of 2006, back before Facebook even existed, when I finally gave into making an account so I could blog, thereby ending my very bad habit of reading and writing and responding to posts on CraigsList Rant 'N Rave section.

I also have content on the blog section of FairCompanies.com (who filmed and host my most well known thing on the internet, the video about living in an RV in order to save both money and natural resources: http://www.faircompanies.com/videos/view/living-small-when-home-is-a-150-square-foot-rv/

And I have been sharing a blog with my friend Beth who now lives in Taiwan, though neither of us has been very active on it.

Having been inspired by a request for a used bike buying guide and having no good place to post it, I have finally started my own blogger account.

Dramatically reduce unemployment - with no cost to government - by instituting a 35 hour work week

NOTE: The White House webpage is buggy. It has some issues related to Flash and/or Javascript, and you may not be able to sign up smoothly. I assure you, however, that it does in fact work, even if it takes more than one try.


Please sign my federal petition: http://wh.gov/TWN

If it hits 150 "signatures" (clicks) it will be featured on the White House's petition page. Then it will take another 25,000 to be guaranteed to be viewed by the Obama Administration and given an official response. Whatever the response is, it will at least bring this issue to the attention of American politics which is the first step toward action.
It may never happen, but it will get people thinking about things they take for granted; like the purpose of the economy, production, employment, unemployment, distribution of wealth, etc.

It has become common practice when talking about the economy or the market to treat them as though they were an end in and of themselves, and inherent good regardless of their effects. We seem to have completely forgotten that the whole point of having an economy in the first place is to serve and better the lives of actual people. Over the past half century improvements to the economy have not translated to improvements in the lives of the majority of Americans. We all need to stop, step back a moment, and ask the question: in that case, what is the point?
When individual citizens are asked to make sacrifices for the sake of "the economy", that means citizens are here to serve the markets, instead of the markets being here to serve the citizens.

Be Healthy, part 2 (sub-section: fat management)

As I mentioned in the main "Be Healthy", I found when writing it that this subsection of overall health was just too large to fit comfortably in with the rest (no pun intended). While not one of the basic fundamental pillars of health any more than any other specific ailment, given that the majority of individuals in our culture have unhealthy body fat percentages, maybe it is actually worthy of its own essay. Just keep in mind that everything to follow is meant to be considered from within the context of the main "Be Healthy" essay.
(Since blogs are listed with the most recent entry on top, the main essay is immediately below this one. If you have not already, read that one first)
Having below a certain percent body fat does not automatically make you healthy...

Be Healthy, My Friend

The word "Health" has become almost meaningless.

This is due to a number of factors, but one of the chief ones, I suspect, is marketing.
It helps to sell things as "healthy" if there is no clear idea what that actually means.
I will resist the temptation to get into that whole topic...

What I do want to do is try to remove some of the abstraction, by breaking it down into its constituent parts. While the term itself eludes a single precise definition, there's a list of components that are part of it, and those parts are reasonably concrete.

-A lack of, resistance to, and/or ability to recover from, infection (by viruses, bacteria, protozoa, fungus, or parasite)

Even a healthy person may get the occasional cold, but they will get better more quickly

-A lack of, resistance to, and/or ability to recover from, (non-infectious-agent - such as diabetes or angina)
-A lack of, resistance to, and/or ability to recover from, injury
-Longevity (how long you live)
-General fitness*
-Mental/emotional health - I wholeheartedly acknowledge that this is a very important part of overall health; however there is so much to cover just considering physical health that I won't mention it here any further than this sentence.

Many people seem to get obsessively caught up on just one or two components, sometimes to the complete exclusion of considering the others. And as a result there are raw-foodists who can't do a single push-up, athletes who eat junk food, people who take all manner of drugs and vitamins, and others who take herbs and supplements and "superfoods", both thinking health can be reduced to just what you ingest.

When someone, be it a friend or an ad or even a doctor, claims that X food, Y herb, or Z activity, is "good for you" or "unhealthy" or whatever, ask exactly in what ways does it contribute to health? Which of these elements does it affect, and how? Personally, I suspect that extremely few of the millions of things passed off as healthy stand up to that sort of test.

Just to complicate things again, some of these components can sometimes conflict with others. For example, while strength leads to resistance to injury and pathogens, the process of exercise itself is sometimes the cause of injury, and intense exercise (which is the only effective kind) tends to lower immunity (although only temporarily). Similarly, exercise lowers the risk of most non-communicable disease, but at the same time higher metabolism rates accelerate aging.

Since some components can be considered in conflict with each other, it would be hard to say in absolute terms what is the healthiest a person can possibly be. None-the-less, there is clearly a range, from someone who is sick all the time, can't walk far without being winded, and dies at 50, to the people who are still running marathons at 70.

There was a time when pathogens were the single greatest threat to human life. Undeniably, since the advent of cities, modern sanitation has made all the difference in human health. Closely following sanitation in significance would be the discovery of vaccines. Between these two, communicable disease has gone from the largest threat to all human existence to (at least in the developed world) mostly just an annoyance. While there have been times in the not-all-that-distant-past that viruses or bacteria might have killed 1 out of every 3 people you knew, about the only experience we have with them is getting a cold or flu for a few days a year. Modern medicine has effectively eliminated the risk of death, allowing us the luxury of fighting symptoms instead of the disease itself, and even of (ironically enough) rebelling against modern medicine and deliberately returning to the superstition cures of yesteryear.

Granted, there are legitimate problems with mainstream modern medicine - namely, that it has become nearly 100% for-profit, which means making money takes precedence over making people healthy. Research is biased. Unfortunately, alternative medicine, instead of rejecting the for-profit model, instead rejects science and research in favor of superstition. And so you have little white pills for $10 each made by Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline on the one hand, and homeopathy, acupuncture, and chiropractors on the other. And as it stands today, at least in the US, those are pretty much the only options.

We have come a long long way since Smallpox killed 50% of the population of an entire country. We have basically stagnated, having cured nearly all deadly diseases, and making little progress on the rapidly mutating cold and flu viruses. There is extremely little by way of drugs (pharmaceutical or natural) that can do anything at all about infection. Before exposure, there are vaccines - the opposite of a cure, they are a small sample of the disease itself, and are designed to teach your own immune system how to kill it if it ever sees it again. For bacteria based diseases there are antibiotics. That's it.
For viruses there is nothing. Cold medicine does not fight the cold itself. It fights the symptoms. And the symptoms are actually your bodies way of fighting the virus. You get a fever because viruses thrive at 98 degrees, and don't operate as well at 101 degrees. You get a runny nose because the mucus helps block any other viruses from getting into your body while it's busy fighting whats already there. You feel tired because your body's energy is going into fighting the cold. Your body wants you to lie in bed and recover. When you take something - whether its OTC cold medicine, herbal tea, grandma's secret recipe, or even a netty pot, which reduces the symptoms so that you can feel better (in the moment) you are actually fighting your body. Which means, essentially, that you are helping the virus. The more you fight the symptoms, and try to carry on with life as though you weren't sick, chances are, the longer it will take for you to actually get better. For some reason we have gotten it into our minds that it is absolutely imperative that we feel comfortable at all times, even to the point where treating our symptoms leads to us actually staying sick. The full list of substances which actually make you better, faster, is extremely small. Vitamin C. That's it.

Aside from ‘C’, the things which help our bodies fight viruses are simply sleep and water.

With all of our technology, humans have not figured out a better way to fight viruses than natural evolution already did. Sanitation is really just an issue of us not making things worse. Vaccination stimulates the bodies own immune system. And Vitamin C doesn't actually attack the virus itself, but, again, supports the body's immune system.
While we can't actually cure sickness, what has been shown to prevent it, and minimize it when it does occur, is overall health and fitness*.

There are some things that modern medicine can do better than nature. Before the defibrillator was invented, a heart-attack was a guaranteed death sentence, while now people live on to have several heart-attacks in a lifetime. Vaccines have essentially eliminated the threat of true epidemic. If you have appendicitis, having it surgically removed can save your life. We have invented glasses and hearing aids and prosthetic limbs, antibiotics can cure infection. Prior to the advent of modern medicine, one of the largest killers was being born; a major threat to both mother and infant. For these reasons and many more, access to quality medical care is a extremely significant factor in the ability to stay healthy. However, like with the common cold, the vast majority of medical interventions deal with treating symptoms, not with curing the disease itself. They make the patient feel more comfortable, while not making them any healthier. With limited exceptions, modern (or traditional) medicine can't do better than the 5 billion years of evolution (or God, if you prefer) that created our bodies.

Many (non-infectious) diseases have a large genetic component. Some are entirely genetic. Some are caused or exacerbated by fetal or early childhood environmental conditions. Obviously we, as individuals, have no control over that (and as a society, unless eugenics ever becomes politically feasible, we have no control on any level).
However most of the common ones - heart disease, stroke, diabetes, asthma, and most forms of cancer - are determined primarily by individual choices.

One of the largest factors that determines how quickly a person recovers from a broken bone or a deep cut is age. But overall health is a significant factor as well. In addition, the stronger and more flexible a person is - at any age - the less likely they are to suffer injury in the first place.

Obviously longevity can not be definitively determined in advance. It is, none-the-less still a measure of how healthy you were.

Some people say that they would rather have shorter lives of full enjoyment rather than long lives on dialysis, but in reality, the people who die young have the same health problems as people who die old - they just have them sooner.

Significant caloric restriction is the one and only thing that has been scientifically proven to extend life span (by as much as 40%!). Good news for anyone trying to lose excess body fat, but a problem for athletes eating more in an attempt to gain muscle.

*Fitness is a component of health. But the word has become just as abstract as the term "health" itself. What is fit? How do you determine who is and who isn't? Well, to start with, consider the word itself. In any other context, it is meaningless without context. Something can be fit for a particular purpose. A compact car is fit for commuting. An SUV is fit for traveling off-road. It would make no sense to ask "is this car fit?" without knowing what task you have in mind for it.
In the same manner: who is more fit: a power-lifter who can bench-press 400lbs, an ultra-marathoner who can run 52 miles in one day, a gymnast who can do a double back layout, or a sprinter who can run a 100meters in 10 seconds?

It's a silly question. What would be more telling would be to ask whether the sprinter would be better at lifting weight than the power-lifter is at running; vice-versa and etc.

But what ultimately matters is what a person can actually do in real life. Outside of competitive sports, there is no reward for extreme specialization. The reality is day to day tasks require strength AND stamina AND flexibility AND agility AND balance. Emergency situations even more so.
Going back to the question of "fit for what", the answer is: "fit for real life. Fit for emergencies. Fit for everything."

Getting "in-shape" isn't about one's shape (or at least it shouldn't be). It shouldn't be about appearance or even what your doctor says you should do. It is about quality of life. Fitness can't be measured just in terms of mile times and weight lifting totals, nor in terms of fat percentage or aerobic capacity. All of those things are related, all of them are factors, but it comes down to a question of: what can you do?

Not everyone needs to be an athlete. Fitness is a quality of life issue. A person should be able to carry a big bag of groceries in each hand and walk home from the store. You should be able to sprint two blocks for the bus when you see it pulling up to your stop. To carry a baby around all day. To walk up 17 flights of stairs when the elevator is out. Open a jar that's stuck on really tight, move the furniture around, climb a fence. Join in on a random game of pick-up soccer with your friends at the park. Fitness is being able to land on your feet if you fall off a shaky ladder, or the agility to dodge out of the way when you're crossing the street and a drunk driver runs the red light. Fitness can mean the difference between escape/fighting back and being a victim. Fitness can mean the difference between saving lives in an emergency, or being one of the people who needs saving.

As those examples demonstrate, fitness itself needs to be broken down into just as many separate categories as the term "health" to be meaningful:

-Strength (of ALL of the major and minor muscle groups, including stabilizers)

-Aerobic capacity

-Endurance
-Flexibility
-Agility, Coordination and Balance

Being fit means having ALL of them. Having a lot of one does not imply having the others. Which means it is very possible to have a power-lifter, ultra-marathoner, or sprinter who isn't really "fit" in the general sense of the word. A great many exercises - including many that are very common - won't improve general fitness. Some don't improve any area of fitness at all.

The thing to look for is well rounded forms of exercise. The key word is "functional". Gym machines and exercise classes tend not to simulate anything you would ever do in the real world. In fact, most gym machines, developed with body-building in mind (which is mostly about looking strong, not actually being strong) deliberately isolate body parts.

The following chart has an absolutely excellent set of strength tests that correlate directly to being able to move around and do things in the real world, and it scales to anyone because the levels are in terms of your own strength-to-weight ratio, not some arbitrarily static number of pounds to lift:

http://www.crossfitnorthatlanta.com/total-capacity-levels/

or

http://www.crossfitseattle.com/Skill%20Levels%20poster.pdf

Unless you plan to compete in the Olympics, there is really no point in trying to get to 'level 4'. Even level 3 will be out of reach of all but the most dedicated athletes. However, everyone should be able to do the items in level one, just as a minimum level of fitness. Below that will affect quality of life in ways which a person may get used to and notice, but will be significant none-the-less. Once a baseline of fitness is established (if you can accomplish some things on level 1 but not others, focus on improving the weak points before moving on) striving for level 2 is a reasonable goal.

Crossfit is a chain commercial gym (or class within established gyms) which better exemplifies the concept of functional exercise than any other system (not counting their many copy-cats). If you were planning to join a gym anyway, it's what I would recommend. However, you don't have to spend any money to get fit. They have many great resources online (including in-depth essays on the principals of fitness, daily suggestions for exercises, and YouTube videos which show exactly how to do each exercise.) I personally like their style. Whatever you do, the important things are that it includes both aerobic and strength training, and that it vary at different times in order to activate different muscle groups. Stay away from all weight or aerobic machines which artificially constrain you to a fixed range of motion. Focus on exercises which use multiple different body parts at once. Especially if you are just starting out, calisthenics will provide plenty enough resistance without investing in any equipment. Push-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups, dips, squats, handstand push-ups, lunges, burpees... with zero investment in equipment, classes, or memberships, it is entirely possible to gain well rounded fitness that will improve health and allow you to do more activities in daily life with ease - all from the comfort of your own home. That truth right there eliminates a whole lot of excuses. You just have to do it! I can't make you do it.

There is lots of information online about number of repetitions, sets, ways to make exercises easier or harder (scaling), recovery time, etc. In particular, look up "Tabata", a technique for getting some intense exercise in just 4 minutes. You can do any exercise tabata style. You can get a free tabata timer online:

http://www.beach-fitness.com/tabata/

Truth is, it doesn't matter which theory you end up using, as much as that you actually do it, and do it consistently. Whatever exercise, what ever style you go with, do it intensely and be consistent!

Don't injure yourself working out - if the point is improving fitness and health, injuring yourself by over-training is totally counter-productive. Being competitive can be a great motivator for many people, but it also tends to encourage over-training.

If it is comfortable, you aren't doing it right. If, immediately after you finish an exercise, you can still do more, you weren't doing it right.

Most people - especially those who are sedentary - would be surprised to find out just how much exercise is recommended, not for athletes, but for regular everyday people, just to maintain minimum levels of general health and fitness. Not for competing, not for losing weight*, just to be an ordinary healthy person. The CDC recommends a MINIMUM of 75 minutes per week of intense aerobic exercise, in addition to regular strength exercise. They go on to say that what would be better is 150 minutes of vigorous exercise in addition to strength training. This breaks down to 20 minutes a day, 7 days a week (or 30 minutes a day, 5 days a week), of running, swimming, basketball, etc, plus weight-lifting and/or calisthenics a few days per week, for at least as much time. I say that this should be the minimum everyone demands for themselves.
Every single day?
Yep.
Like, not just until I lose 5 lbs or can run a 5 minute mile, but, forever?
Like clock work.
(I mean, you do brush your teeth every day, right?)
Really, it's not that bad. Think of it as preventative health care.

That volume is to maintain health. If a person is trying to get stronger, or faster, or lose weight*, or whatever, that amount needs to be increased even more.

We want it to be something we do every now and then, when we feel like it, when we "have time". It doesn't work that way.

The truth is, everyone, no matter how busy, has time. 30 minutes a day really isn't that much. Even if a person has a full-time job, is a student, and has a long commute, there are three 10-minute slots of free time somewhere in a day, currently filled by TV or internet or getting ready a little slow or waiting for something or someone. Spend 15 minutes eating on a lunch break, and it leaves 30 minutes for a little exercise. Riding a bike to work or running to the bus instead of walking combines commute time with work-out time.

It comes down to priorities. There are many things we do to take care of ourselves every single day. We don't just skip eating because we don't have time. We use the bathroom every day, no matter how busy we are. We sleep everyday. It is the priority. The other things in life get scheduled around it. We brush our teeth every single day, not because all our teeth will fall out over night if we don't, but because we care about the long term health of our teeth. We make time for it. The health of our bodies shouldn't be any different. If we decide that we are going to exercise 30 minutes a day, 5 days a week, then other things in life have to work around that, and that's just it. Friends come to visit, parents call, boss wants you to work late? You wouldn't skip meals or sleep for them. Don't skip exercise either. Other things can wait.

Total time spent is really important. It can't be substituted for. Doing one really intense hour on the weekend simply isn't enough to provide tangible benefits.
But simply spending enough hours isn't enough either.
Those 75-150 minutes of cardio and 45-90 minutes of weight-lifting or calisthenics exercises per week need to be intense.
A lot of what passes for exercise isn't challenging enough to stimulate improvement in the body.

As the great Hunter Thompson said, if a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing right. No where is that more true than fitness. If you don't put forth the full effort, you won't really improve. And in that case, what really is the point? You end up sweaty and tired, with nothing to show for it.

The potential benefits, not just to fitness, but to overall health, in just about every component, are outstanding! It extends from there to the ease of completing everyday tasks, like the list I had above, which improves overall quality of life. It makes a person feel better about themselves, increases the feeling of well-being in general. It has, for example, a direct, measurable effect on depression - not far behind prescription drugs for effectiveness (and with lots of positive side-effects). And if getting sick less often, being able to do more things, reducing risk of disease, recovering from injury faster, living longer, and feeling happier all weren't enough, as an added bonus it even makes a person look better too.
That's a lot of benefit.

Fortunately, it requires less sacrifice than it may seem like at first. The two main reasons people who acknowledge the benefits don't exercise enough anyway is 1) how unpleasant it is, and 2) lack of time. Time I addressed already. There is always time; the only issue is what one chooses to prioritize. The perception of unpleasantness has some basis in the physical feeling of being exhausted and sweaty and sore, but much of it comes from the sort of exercise that dominates popular culture because they are what make commercial gyms the most money.

A lot of why people burn out on exercising and give it up is because these activities are terribly boring, and on top of that they fail to produce significant results. Fortunately those exercises - repetitively moving weight machines' handles back and forth or going for miles on a treadmill or exercise bike - aren't really productive from a perspective of comprehensive fitness. In fact, even just in terms of burning calories to support weight* loss, they are not a very productive use of exercise time. Good, well balanced, comprehensive exercise tends to be much more complex (and interesting). It should actually be fun. Things like sports or martial arts, rock climbing or CrossFit. For some people, especially if they get endorphin induced "runners high", can zone out and enjoy running. Some people get into cycling for the new scenery or the camaraderie. Whatever it is, it should be something a person looks forward to, not dreads.

Another reason for the sense of unpleasantness is that modern American's, through money and technology, have the option to totally eliminate discomfort from life, and as a generation that has grown up with this option, we feel we should be comfortable at all times. We can get through life rarely if ever feeling too hot, too cold, hungry, thirsty, or tired.

I personally never really noticed how accustomed I am to the luxury of being comfortable until I spent 2 months at military bootcamp. I learned that it is actually quite tolerable to be uncomfortable. You stand in formation in full uniform in 95 degree heat. You stand there, perfectly still, while it is pouring rain and just over 40 degrees with wind chill. You stand and experience mosquito and gnats land on your face, take their meals, and fly off, without swatting at them. At bootcamp when you are hungry, too bad, it isn't meal time. And you deal with it. If it is time designated for running, or swimming, or whatever, it doesn't matter if you feel tired, you just do it. What you feel is irrelevant. And to people who have always had the ability to feel comfort, it may sound like pure hell, but the reality is that it is very easy. It is uncomfortable, to be sure. But it is temporary. It doesn't kill you.

And in the end, when you felt like you might throw-up or pass-out and you just kept pushing anyway, a little bit faster, a little bit farther, and in the end you don't collapse, you make it, you have an unparalleled feeling of accomplishment. It makes the idea of "willpower", of "mind over matter", into a real life thing. It means YOU have control over your life, over what you do, not the whims of your feelings.

I recently read a statistic that said that only 7% of people who attempt to stop smoking actually last a full year smoke-free before relapsing. That says something about our will power. But what was more interesting is that of those who do successfully quit, 80-90% of them quit 'cold turkey'. Quitting cold turkey is more effective than all other methods combined. No drugs. No replacement nicotine in the form of gum or patches or vaporizers. No gradual tapering down to fewer cigarettes over time. The physical withdrawal symptoms are very real, tangible, not only uncomfortable, but with measurable effects on the body. All of the various methods are designed to lessen those withdrawal symptoms as much as possible, to make a difficult process more tolerable. And yet, the people who experience the most intense withdrawal of all are also the people most likely to get through it. Instead of trying to feel comfortable, they acknowledge from the outset that it is going to be hard. They just jump right in and do it. They feel like shit, and they keep doing it anyway, and they come out the other end victorious. It isn't even about willpower, per say. Its about mindset.

The same thing applies to every area of life where modern life makes excess more easily available than it has been ever before in human history, whether it's choosing not to take something to easy cold symptoms, exercise, dieting, or impulse shopping.

Never before in history have humans needed to go out of their way to exercise. In the past exercise would be in the form of getting from place to place (even the bicycle is a recent invention), gathering and chopping firewood, digging and plowing and harvesting in the garden, pumping or carrying water, hunting... today we have machines to walk for us, to do manual labor for us, we have computers and internet that allow us to potentially never leave our rooms - at all! Heck, I'm on a computer right now! We even have remote controls so we don't have to walk all the way across the room to change the channel when we're sitting passively watching TV. We have headsets so we don't have to reach all the way into our pockets to retrieve a ringing phone, and then have to hold a heavy cell phone to our heads. We have power steering so that, even when we already have a car doing our running for us, we don't have to make the effort of turning the steering wheel. We have machines to wash our dishes, our clothes, our cars, and even robots to vacuum the floor. What isn't fully automated, if we can afford it, we hire someone else to do. At the hardware store the other day I found about 200 devices designed to make it easier to open a tight jar. Our technology has made us extremely lazy.

But it is what it is, and we are where we are. The only question is if that is what you want for yourself. Since most of us aren't going to abandon the city and become Luddite farmers, we have to take the time to make sure we get exercise. And if we are going to do that, we may as well do it smart.

The best way to tell, over a long period of time, whether what you've been doing is really helping, is to keep records. Push ups and sit ups in a minute, mile times, weight* and measurements (you need to take measurements to determine fat percentage - weight alone is meaningless because muscle weighs more than fat), maximum press and bench and deadlift and clean weights, even things like medical complaints or overall outlook on life. Taken over a long period of time, looking back at old notes and seeing the trend of improvement can be a major motivator to continue.

In the short term there are simple benchmarks: for strength exercises, you should be at least a little sore the next day. If you aren't at all, you weren't really working out. You were just doing repetitive movements and killing time. For aerobics the feedback is even more immediate: you should be sweaty and out of breath. If you can hold down a conversation, you aren't working hard enough.

A few very common things which really don't count as exercise:

-walking
-yoga
-lifting weights so light that you can easily do 15 or more reps without rest
-anything which is supposed to encourage "tone, not bulk"
-treadmill, elliptical, or stationary bike at a low resistance or low speed

-cruising around on a bicycle on flat roads, coasting half the time

This isn't to say these activities have no value at all. Burning some calories is better than none at all, and yoga has significant benefits to flexibility (and for many people for stress reduction). But they aren't exercise. You could do them for 5 hours a day and you won't increase your aerobic capacity or get any stronger. You would burn a few calories, but less than you would from doing a more intense activity for a smaller amount of time. And there are only so many hours in the day.

An efficient exercise gets you as tired as possible in your limited work out time. It activates major muscle groups, core stabilizer muscles, and the cardio-pulmonary systems all at once.
A short list of examples of real exercise, (along with the calories they burn in an hour of continuous activity):

running upstairs/hill (1000)
running (600-1000 depending on speed)
rock climbing (650)
jump rope (600)
burpees (550)
boxing / martial arts (400-600)
elliptical/stationary (400-600 on high resistance, at high speed)
mountain biking (500 cross-country)
rowing (500 roughly 2min/500m rate, level 5/med)
aerobics (450-500 depending on the class)
jogging (430)
moving furniture (400)
swimming (370)
yoga (300)
sex (300)
skating (300)
bicycling (250 road, flat-lands, non-racing)

weight lifting (150-350 depending on weight)

stationary machine (100-200 at low to moderate intensity)

All of the calorie burn levels vary by weight and gender and fitness level, but the relative values stay the same. Plus, more intense activities tend to raise metabolism for longer and longer times after the activity is over (up to several days!) so that the net totals are even higher.

Muscle burns calories even when at rest, so having a higher percentage of muscle means your overall calorie use rate goes up permanently. For this reason lifting weights (or doing push-ups and the like) considered over the long-term belongs much further up the list.

Rather unfortunate, then, that so many people spend their time on stationary gym aerobic machines at low to moderate intensity for the specific purpose of burning calories. For gaining aerobic capacity, improving overall fitness, or losing weight*, stay near the top of the list (or find other activities which are as much work, like a game of soccer, being a forest fire fighter, or military bootcamp). Again, this is not to say that low intensity exercises don't have value. But don't expect to get results by taking the easy route. And then again, it is perfectly possible to make the activities lower on the list intense... its just that it is very easy to do them less than all out, to coast on the bicycle, to swim at a relaxed pace, while running up hill or doing burpees is inherently challenging, even if you try to do them slowly.

Spend some time doing the highest intensity exercises for 30 minutes without resting, to get a feel for what real exercise feels like.

(NOTE: if you are over 40, have been totally sedentary for years, or have medical issues, you may want to consult a doctor, or at least a personal trainer, first)

Once you know how it should feel, you can substitute pretty much any activity, so long as you do it at a level that is equally as difficult. And it is ok to occasionally do low impact work as well. Just keep in mind that if an exercise is 1/4th the intensity, you have to do it more than 4 times as long to get the same benefit.

Sometimes, though, it makes more sense to do moderate intensity exercises. Say you are going for a hike anyway, or doing some gardening or running around with small children. All movement and everything active counts. Its just that it only counts for half as much time toward the total. If you have an active enough life, such that you spend an hour a day or more doing moderately intense activities (you can have a conversation, but not sing) you can get away with only doing more intense exercise a couple days a week (along with the strength building exercise a few days a week).

If your goal is to not just maintain health but to increase athletic performance and/or lose weight*, than total time and intensity level become even more important. Increase the minimum at least 50%, AND make all the work intense.

***There was originally a sub-section here on managing excess fat. Because it is such a complex subject, and so relevant to the health of most Americans today, it quickly grew too long to just be a sub-section. So, it has been removed from this essay all together, and will be posted separately as part 2

Nutrition is touched on briefly in part 2, because it is especially important for anyone deliberately limiting food intake to pay attention to nutrient density and making sure to get enough of what the body really needs. But everyone needs to eat! It seems the only people who really pay attention to nutrients are dieters, athletes, and those obsessed with health. The latter group, in particular, often seems to think that what one eats is the only thing that determines health, which is just plain silly (hopefully I have demonstrated that by now).

Maybe it is another symptom of our easy answers culture. If health is just a question of eating the right superfoods, we make sure to eat some of it each day, and blam, instant health!

Sometimes it seems that there isn't much room for middle ground - either someone is obsessed with nutrition, or else they don't give it a second thought. Which is unfortunate, because its really important, and its also really simple.

Until relatively recently, most foods which exist in the world weren't available in most places. For most of human history cultures have survived on a small variety of local staples, and for the most part they lived perfectly healthy lives. No one food can possibly be vital if people in most places for most of time have got along just fine without it.

Each time some new food fad comes out, this anthropological fact gets forgotten, as every health conscious person scrambles to buy acai / coconut oil / algae / quinoa / goji / soy / bee pollen / pomegranate / and of-course (though we all know its mostly a convenient excuse) wine and dark chocolate. All of these things are local to a specific region. Until a few years ago, they were simply unavailable in most of the world.

Not to mention a plethora of vitamins, oils, and herbs which are partially the all natural equivalent to the pharmaceutical industry making pills to block symptoms instead of addressing causes, and are partially nothing more than marketing by the companies that make them.

There are some things marketed as health food which have no effect on us at all. A perfect example is enzymes. We do not need to eat enzymes. The body produces its own enzymes. In fact, enzymes which are ingested get broken down by the stomach anyway, so the only function they can possibly have is digesting some food in the stomach before they are destroyed. The only time this is useful is if a person is eating something they have no natural enzymes for; most commonly lactose pills for those who can not digest dairy. Another solution, of course, would be to simply avoid eating dairy.

True, eating vegetables and plants and (low mercury) fish and whole grains - instead of food filled with sugar and butter and mammal meat - will have an enormous impact on just about all measures of health, from disease resistance to fat percentage. But there is no particular magic bean that can do something no other food can do. As long as a diet is well balanced, and contains more food that are dense in nutrients than foods that are dense in calories, a person will get proper nutrition. With limited exceptions, if you need to take anything in pill form, that's a sure sign you aren't eating the right foods.

It is possible for an adult human to stay alive for years on nothing but glucose drippings. It would not be an ideal life, nor would it be healthy by any definition of the word, but it demonstrates that we will not simply drop dead from a few days without any specific nutrient. People have gone on fasts for various health, religious, and political reasons throughout history with no ill effects if done for a moderate amount of time. The human body evolved in a world where no one food source was ever guarenteed, and so, at least to some extent, it evolved the ability to ration. Over the long-run it is important to get all of the vital nutrients. Getting each and every one in every meal is not.

There was a time when nutrition deficits were a genuine threat. Before the days of refrigeration sailors on long sea voyages would get scurvy, from a lack of vitamin C in the diet, because they would eat no fruits at all for months at a time. A severe lack of vitamin D, especially in childhood, will cause rickets. A lack of iron causes anemia and lack of iodine causes goiters. Not having enough B3 in the diet leads to pellegra. Chances are you have never heard of pellegra. This just goes to show how small the threat of malnutrition actually is in this country, even though we have the worst diets in the world.

(American's eat more fast food per capita than any other country)

What we lack in nutritional density we make up for by eating more food total. As long as a diet is at least reasonably balanced we eventually get the nutrients the body needs - it just takes more calories to get there. The body keeps feeling hungry until it's nutritional needs are met, whether it has enough calories or not. The reason for eating nutrient dense food is not that we will be malnourished without it, but rather that we can meet our needs with fewer excess calories.

What those nutritional needs are has been known for a long time by nutrition science, but is still often misunderstood by lay people.
We need two essential macro-nutrients: Protein and fat.

(Carbohydrates are also a macro-nutrient, but there is no essential minimum intake)

We need 13 vitamins: A, B (8 kinds), C, D, E and K. But we only need a tiny amount of each. Ingesting more than the required amount usually won't do much harm (although too much of some can be toxic); but having more than the tiny amount present in a healthy diet doesn't do any good either.

We also need 13 trace minerals, primarily potassium, chlorine, sodium, calcium, phosphorus, and magnesium (in that order). The other 7 we need only in tiny amounts. (4 others, in even smaller amounts, may have some function)

Most of us actually get more of many nutrients than we actually need. The excess just gets filtered out by the kidneys in the case of vitamins and minerals (leading to the quote by a nutrition doctor about American's having "the most expensive pee in the world") or stored as fat in the case of fats and proteins.

Protein, in particular, gets a lot of attention as an essential nutrient, especially by athletes and vegetarians. Its certainly true that we need a certain amount of protein daily. What fewer people know is that American's actually consume far too much protein, at a level which is actually mildly toxic. A full grown adult only needs 60 - 120 grams of protein a day (depending on age, size, and activity level, with the high end only applying to hardcore athletes). There is protein in almost every food, not just the meat and soybeans that immediately come to mind.

If over the course of the day you eat one pancake, a cup of fruit, half a cup of yogurt, two pieces of bread, a 1 ounce slice of cheese, a slice of avocado, a small vegetable salad with no toppings, a cup of pasta, a cup of vegetables, and a baked potato, you have had about 65 grams of protein, already more than enough for most people.

That's without eating a single so-called "protein" source!!
Unless you are vegan, pregnant, a bodybuilder, or anemic, there is never any need to make a point of eating a "high-protein" food with every meal, or even every day.

There are different amino acids (the building blocks of protein) which the human body needs, and which not all plant proteins have. However, unless one eats literally just one type of food, the American diet is varied enough to cover it without making a point of it.

Getting enough of each amino acid is as easy as eating rice with one’s beans, so even for vegans who eat no processed food, it requires only minimal thought and effort.

I personally am vegetarian. To be honest, this is more out of habit than anything else. There are a lot of very important environmental and ethical reasons I could argue for vegetarianism, but this specific essay is about health. There isn't really any health reason to eliminate all meat from the diet. However, the volume American's eat most certainly is unhealthy. Its inclusion in the diet should be limited, sort of like this:

http://www.drlam.com/pictures/pyramid/pyramid_web.gif

(Please note that no diet will keep you from aging. Only a time machine, cryogenics, or some sort of freeze ray can do that. The only thing which has been shown to increase longevity is calorie restriction. Also, as covered previously, a healthy diet should not need supplements.)

or this:

As this pyramid notes, the foods highest in nutrients just happen to be those lowest in calories. Another thing to notice is that it is almost the exact inverse of the typical American diet! Then we make up for it with vitamins and supplements. Or, we make up for it by eating a whole bunch, because even with junk food, once you eat enough of it, you get your nutritional needs met. Eating food which is low in nutrients (even if it is low-calorie "diet" food) mean you need to eat more to get the minimum intake of vitamins and minerals.

Just to show how futile it is to try to find the “perfect” diet, consider the existence of anti-nutrients. These are (naturally occurring!) compounds which destroy or draw needed nutrients such as minerals or proteins out of the body. They are found in otherwise healthy foods. Some, such as bio-flavanoids (the active ingredient of green tea, dark chocolate, and wine, with supposedly magic health powers), have been shown in some studies to prevent cancer… and in others they have been implicated in potentially causing it! Certain vegetables known to be high in calcium may drag more calcium out of the body than they add to it. And yet, despite the contradictory nature of food, people are able to be healthy.

The overall point is that there is no need to stress over the details of nutrition.

Common knowledge covers it. If a person eats a varied diet, based primarily on vegetables, fruit, seeds/nuts and grain, (whether eaten straight or cooked / processed into something) with occasional (not necessarily daily) animal products, one will get their basic nutritional needs met. If a diet has regular hamburgers, pizza, ice cream, comes from fast food restaurants or the snack food section of a convenience store, it will either have to few nutrients, too many calories, or both.

Eating junk food (whether home made or purchased) once or twice every few months won’t do any particular harm. We all know the consequences of eating it more often than that. No one needs some blogger to write a section on nutrition to go into the details.

So that’s about it.

Nothing revolutionary:

• Get enough sleep.
• Exercise a lot more. For most of us, a whole lot more.
  (For a few - those who workout so much as to cause occasional injury - a little less. You know who you are.)
• Eat lots of healthy food, and minimize unhealthy food.
• Don’t smoke, and avoid most or all alcohol and drugs.
• Avoid stress.

Start young, while you are still healthy, because it is MUCH easier to maintain than it is to rebuild!

Skip the 1001 gimmicks that promise to instantly transform your body using the “latest secret” in diet / exercise machine / magnetic massage stress relief…

(seriously, I just saw that in a catalog!)

and the pills and supplements and anti-oxidant drinks.

Use the money saved to invest in a tax-advantaged health savings account in case universal health insurance never does go through and you lose your commercial coverage someday.

Get regular doctor (and dentist) check-ups, just to make sure you don’t have something going on inside that you can’t see or feel.

But if you follow the advice above, the chances are much better that there will be nothing much for your doctor to find.

For many people some of this may seem like an overwhelmingly big step.

If you choose to ignore everything you just read, you’ll get no disrespect from me.

To each their own.

My recommendation is to try it, just for one month. Eat right, go to sleep early, and exercise, 7 days a week, for 4 weeks. If you don’t feel better, physically and emotionally, by the end, write or call or add a comment to my blog to tell me I am an idiot. I may even take you out to the junk food place of your choice (offer limited to people I actually know – also, you have to have actually done it for 28 consecutive days).

Ultimately, no matter what restrictions genes, luck, and age have put onto you, much of your health is in your own control.

Like saving money for retirement, healthy choices is an investment in your future happiness.

Do what makes you happy, but choose wisely.

Be healthy, my friend.

DeepWater Horizon

As you may have heard, an oil rig has exploded off the Southern Coast of the US, causing a spill almost certain to be the worst in human history, with a potentially devastating impact on the local environment and everything that lives in it (which would be everyone that is alive).

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100502/ap_on_bi_ge/us_gulf_oil_spill

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_drilling_rig_explosion

In the news, and in political emails, and among people's conversations, there is talk about what BP did wrong, how they might have prevented it, whether the government response was quick enough, how consumers should react....

But the truth; which almost no one wants to admit is:

This is OUR fault.
If you drive a car, ever, for any reason, you are personally responsible for the spill.

If you don't own a car, but sometimes you borrow one, or get a ride with a friend, or take the bus, or take a long-distance train, if you fly or travel by ship, that oil was being drilled for you.
If you are a hard-core oil abstainer, never travel long distances, do all short trips by bicycle, nearly everything you buy, food, clothes, books, paper, your bicycle, the computer you are reading this on right now, was both produced and transported with the help of oil.

We don't get to blame oil corporations, or government, or BP executives, and the capitalist economy. It is US. All of us.
Instead of writing angry letters or boycotting a particular company, how about taking this opportunity to use a little less oil yourself. However much that is, make at least a little change, and use a little less.

Buy something used which you would normally have bought new.
Ride public transit, a bicycle, or walk, when you don't have that far to go.
When you do drive, drive a little slower.
And stop accelerating toward red lights - it won't get you where you are going any faster anyway.

Awareness of white privilege VS actually working to change it

A couple friends of mine are taking a class on being a "white ally" - race awareness and relations, power and privileged, and counteracting racism.

One of them mentioned to me some critical feedback she had offered and it got me to thinking in more detail what has always bothered me about those sort of discussions, but up until now never quite pinned down.

The following is not a commentary on that class in particular, as I know essentially nothing about it, but rather a critique of a few general ideas I have heard and read on the topic in the past:

1 There is no such thing as "people of color"
-The impact of past racism (including slavery) and present racism does not effect all races equally, nor all in the same way.
- A black american and a white american likely have more in common with each other than with a fresh-off-the-boat Vietnamese person. A white american whose family has been in the US for generations likely has more culture in common with a black american than with a first generation eastern european immigrant with whom they share skin color.
-The very term "people of color" encourages white people to think in terms of a false dichotomy of 'us' (all white people) and 'them' (everyone else). It not only homogenizes all other races, it also makes everyone not white into an "other".
-Lumping all non-white cultures into one category, while giving white an entire separate category in itself suggests a type of superiority.
-This dichotomy also discounts the existence of mixed race individuals (officially 2% of US society, but really much higher - most surveys, as well as society, force people to choose one identity, even if they are in fact mixed)

2 Historical racism is the single largest cause for modern black poverty, and poverty does generally correlate with crime. However no historical or sociological factors can excuse individual behavior. No matter what circumstances a person is born into, they have a choice about their own behavior. Apologizing for, ignoring, discounting, or explaining away black crime rates, drug rates, or general anti-social behavior (e.g. boombox on a crowded train) does nothing to increase equality, and does not bring less conscious white people about as allies.

3 Discrimination is explicitly illegal. Talking about "institutionalized" or "systemic" racism does not address the issues which are most relevant today. While there are still white supremacists in the US, their view has become as unacceptable in mainstream society as it once was only among civil-rights activists. The president of the US is 1/2 African. This does not mean that the conversation about race is over. However, it does mean it is time to change that conversation.

For example, talking about power hierarchies is mostly nonsensical today. If racism = racism + power (as is often claimed by race activists), this does not imply that only whites can be racist, because whites do not have any particular power over other races. There are minorities in the role of police officer, judge, congress person, boss, professor, etc. as well as whites in poverty, in jail, or otherwise powerless. If you ignore all individual circumstances and look only at the whole society, then no one can be racist, because society is no one person.

4 Rarely is it explicitly acknowledged how much - and in what way - individuals (primarily, but not exclusively, white) continue to benefit from past racism. This nation was taken by force from the American Indian, built largely by African slaves (as well as Asian indentured servants) and thanks largely to not only racism, but also inheritance and locally funded education, past disparities directly result in present disparities. Even if one's own ancestors never killed Indians or owned slaves, the mere fact of living in this country means you personally benefit from those who did.

5 Not all non-white people are poor. Not all white people are middle class or wealthy. Class and race are not interchangeable. To speak about them as if they were interchangeable represents a stereotype - it implies a universal truth based on a statistic. The implication itself is racist.

Replacing discussions of poverty, economics, and class with discussions of race is a tool those with power (white, yes, but a special subset of white people - wealthy conservatives) use to polarize the working class. They emphasize criminals and welfare recipients (read: blacks) or immigrants (read: hispanics) and leave unspoken as a given the unity between white Americans of different classes. This helps prevent what should be a natural alliance of the lower class against those who exploit them.

6 What keeps the racial status quo in our society is not a social issue, but rather an economic one.
What too few people talk about is the way in which the condition of one generation affects the next.
After slavery blacks were supposed to get land. This was not a hand-out, but merely a way to compensate, to allow them to begin to catch up. This never happened.
Since poverty is inherited just as surely as wealth, the only way to level the playing field short of paying reparations (with 145 years interest) today would be a strict inheritance tax on not only the wealthy, but the middle class. This would include not only cash, but things such as houses and family businesses.

The single largest factor in predicting an individuals success in life is their education. Pre-school is the best indicator of how well a child does in school. It will be impossible to ever have a equal society without universal, mandatory, publicly financed pre-school. Schools in America are funded 50% or more by local taxes. This system guarantees that schools in poor areas are underfunded and schools in wealthy areas have better resources and an easier time keeping good teachers. Locally funded public schools is an amazingly effective method of retaining the status quo, while appearing on the surface to be neutral and fair. To counteract generations of inherited poverty, ignorance, and a cultural mindset of being separate from society, America should be offering fully funded college for all low-income high-school graduates. And because poverty and ignorance are inherited no matter one's color, this should be extended to anyone who can't afford it.

Racism, in the sense of individual people with power holding stereotypes about a race and acting on that prejudice against individual members of said race, is a relatively small factor in modern America. Formally institutionalized racism is a thing of the past.
Were all of society, at all levels, to suddenly become "color blind", the trends set in motion hundreds of years ago would continue none-the-less. For this reason educating individuals about the existence of "white privilege" can not do much to change anything. If energy is going to be invested into change, it should be invested where it will do the most good.

Its one thing to be aware of culturally insensitive language. It is another all together to recognize that the economic system we take for granted perpetuates the impact of slavery, and that no matter how aware one is in their personal relationships, you directly benefit from the current system - and then work to change that system, even if it means undermining your own economic advantages.

This would mean advocating significant increases in middle class taxes, to fund more social programs. This would mean taking the time to counter the "tea-party" people, pointing out that true justice demands a redistribution of wealth. It would mean protesting to get colleges fees raised, in order to pay for scholarships. This would mean, instead of donating money / time / materials to your own children's school, donating that same time and money to the poorer district a few miles away.

Me personally, I have been called ni**er on more than one occasion. But (not counting by other black people who use it casually - that is whole different topic) it has been in each case by a meth addict (one disowned by her family, and the other evicted from a trailer park). These are people with no power, no influence. These are people so low on the social strata, all they have left to feel even mildly good about themselves is to find someone to hate, for any reason they can. As much as it roils the blood to hear it, they are harmless. The people and ideas that maintain the status quo - including associations of particular races with poverty, drug use, crime, etc - are not overtly racist; in fact, in most cases not even necessarily sub-consciously racist. Racism set up the status quo, but economics is what maintains it. Capitalism, the free market, individualism, and the republic system of government (as opposed to true democracy) all play a part in maintaining the present as it was in the past. If we want a just society, those are the things that we need to look at first.

Response to "Turning Hustlers into Entrepreneurs"

"Turning-Hustlers-into-Entrepreneurs" discusses the possibility of increasing micro-credit in order to support independent "black market" business people. As someone who has been running a successful off-the-books business for several years, I believe the major obstacle is not a lack of credit, but rather a government which is geared toward big business.

As the examples in the article illustrate, people are already doing what they are doing, without capital. What they lack is official legitimacy. Many entrepreneurs, such as myself, would love to "go legit", but it is not a realistic option.
I understand and support the idea that government regulate business to protect consumers. The problem is that government does not take the size of a business into account in the requirements it imposes on operating legally.

For example, a single guy with a pick-up truck doing local deliveries pays the exact same state license fee as a company with a fleet of semi trucks. The least insurance available to him is a million dollars of coverage with a 1-2 thousand dollar annual premium, even if he never comes close to transporting a million dollars worth of goods. Every city he works in requires its own separate business license. If he needs to hire a subcontractor on occasion, he needs to buy worker's comp insurance at a minimum, and possibly more. Being self-employed, he pays an additional tax (which an employer would otherwise cover). And of course by staying underground, he avoids paying any income tax on his business revenue.

All of this can easily add up to thousands of dollars. That sum may be inconsequential to a corporation with annual sales in the millions of dollars, but to a small independent, going legit would cost me about 20% of my entire net revenue, more than two months income.

The solution to this is not to finance small business to help them pay for theses fees - these fees are annual, and taking loans only increases risk. The solution is to have license fees proportional to net revenue, instead of being fixed amounts, requiring insurance companies to offer a full range of coverage options, including (potentially less profitable) low limit policies, and restructuring tax code so there isn't a penalty to being self-employed. Similarly, laws making it difficult or illegal to run certain types of business from home could be relaxed, (for example, allowing small scale retail in otherwise residential districts), eliminating the need for a dedicated store-front, a major on-going expense.

Reducing the government imposed costs of running an independent business legally would , without the additional risk incurred (for both the investor and the entrepreneur) by accepting loans or the costs incurred by providing grants. It would also increase tax revenue, by encouraging existing underground businesses to come above the radar and join the mainstream economy.

Global Warming Revisited

The following was a "letter to the editor" I submitted to a progressive magazine in response to articles on global warming:



In "American Psychosis" you point to the many people who acknowledge global warming, but do not change much, if anything about their destructive lifestyles, and in "Hot Air" talk about the point of view of skeptics and deniers.

I run a certified green hauling business. I modified my delivery truck to get 30mpg (from 15mpg) and run it on 100% biodiesel made from recycled veggie oil. I also work part time supporting people who bicycle to work (at a business which runs at a loss because our main service is free). I live in a 250square foot home and use less than $5 worth of electricity most months.
I also have some background in science, including degrees in earth science and biology, and generally track down sources for claims I read.

Having read arguments on both sides, I am not convinced that humans are significantly contributing to climate change. While I admit I haven't kept up with the latest research, I have yet to see several points addressed:

1 The climate naturally goes through cycles of extremes. The current climate reflects roughly where it is expected to be. Our methods of determining past temperatures are not precise enough to tell us the rate of change over small periods of time in the past, and so it is difficult to determine if what we see today is abnormal.
2 Geologic data suggests that in past periods of climate change, temperature has always changed first, with CO2 levels changing as a result of temperature change, not the other way around. This does not necessarily indicate it is what is happening this time, but it could account for what we are seeing.
3 Climate predictions are only as good as the models they are built on, which in turn are only as good as the computers that run them. We simply do not have computers powerful enough to accurately model something as complex as the earth's climate. Last I heard, in order to reduce complexity to a manageable level, most models omit details such as water vapor (arguably the single most important variable) all together.
4 Human caused climate change is frequently referred to (particularly in liberal media sources) as having "scientific consensus". According to Pew Research center 86% of scientists concur. While 86% is clearly an overwhelming majority in a democracy, in science 14% is too large a minority to simply ignore.

But here's the thing:
It doesn't make one bit of difference if humans are contributing to global warming or not.
Whether we are causing it or not, its happening (that doesn't take predictions, just measurements - its happening)
Therefor we should prepare for it.
Even more important: independent of global warming, our lifestyles are harming the ecology of our planet. Even if an individual feels no moral reason to care about life other than humanity, it is undeniable that we are totally dependent on the environment for our own survival.

Regardless of climate change, our driving and electricity generation cause air pollution, which in turn causes cancer, asthma, acid rain and many other air quality issues. Drilling for oil and mining for coal (or uranium) causes massive destruction - when things are running as they should - never mind the occasional catastrophic accident. Vehicle manufacture itself takes an enormous amount of raw material (as well as energy) all of which must be mined/refined/transported and which carries an ecological price tag. Auto accidents are the number one killer of all Americans below 40 and remains one of the top causes of death and injury at all ages. Their is evidence that the lack of exercise associated with driving is the number one factor in the obesity epidemic. The fact that we consume far more energy than we can produce domestically puts us at risk, both politically, economically, and militarily.

All of these problems would remain if we switched to electric (or fuel cell) cars. Most would remain even if we discovered cold-fusion or some other unlimited supply of cheap energy.
And of-course all would also remain if humanity decided to combat global warming with a grand geo-engineering project.

The exclusive focus on "human-caused climate change" makes it easy for people to write off environmentalism, because the science is not, in fact, conclusive (as of yet). It also encourages the idea of using technology to "solve" the issue, with potentially unintended consequences. And it completely ignores all of the other real, urgent, indisputable problems that our lifestyle has created.

Whether it turns out humans are accelerating climate change or not, our course of action needs to be the same:
One way or another, the earth will eventually get warmer, and people need to be ready to adapt.
One way or another, the American lifestyle is destructive and unsustainable, and we need desperately to downsize our extravagances: give up the car, stop flying, eat vegetarian / organic / local, cut electricity use, buy less stuff, shop locally (when buying is necessary), waste less water, and live in locales that are naturally hospitable to humans (i.e. not the desert)

We can either focus on gradually changing those things now, voluntarily, or we can ignore them and have them changed for us in the future, in which case the change will be very unpleasant, and likely include violence.
Addressing climate change does little to address any of those issues, and where it does it is only incidental.
While I understand the good intention behind keeping environmental issues on the forefront of everyone's minds, I believe that the single-minded focus on global warming is actually counter-productive - even if it does turn out to be true.

Christmas Lights

So many people, when the subject of christmas lights come up, they acknowledge they are nice, but go on to add "but they are a waste of energy".

As someone who feels strongly that American's use of energy and resources is morally unacceptable, I would like to be very clear about this:
Christmas lights are NOT a waste of energy.

That 80% of car trips have only the driver or a driver and one passenger, yet seat from 5-7 people is a waste of energy. That we live, on average, 20 miles from our jobs is a waste of energy. Uninsulated attics and unweather stripped doors and windows in houses and power steering and air conditioning in cars, all electric kitchens, and cars that weigh 50% more than they did 20 years ago and have 200% more power are all enormous wastes of energy.
Buying enormous amounts of crap that no one really needs and that get shoved into a closet or thrown out after a few weeks wastes energy in manufacture and transport.

Not one of those things provides any significant increase in quality of life. None of them make people happy to be alive. At most they provide a tiny increase in convince. At worst they do nothing but cost money. None of them create joy.

In a land where profit is considered the only motivating factor for nearly everything in life, filled with people who don't know their neighbors, where 50% of people can't be bothered to take the effort to use their turn signals, for a few weeks a year people do something with no financial benefit, no increase in comfort or convenience, no direct personal benefit.
You don't even see them from inside the house. Everyone else passing by sees them.
They turn an ordinary neighborhood into a magical place.
They create joy.
Which makes them one of the few valid uses of energy in this country.
Because ultimately, making it enjoyable is really the only point there is to life.

So go ahead and enjoy those giant flashy displays and don't for a second feel guilty about it.
Put up your own even.

You can get a strip of LED lights for less than $10 that use less than 5 watts of power, (far less than a single florescent light bulb).
I even found a set for under $5 that runs for days on just (rechargeable) AA batteries.

But LED or no, the lights are worthwhile and good.

A world without christmas lights is not a world worth saving.

The Wine Barrel (population and parenthood)

The Earth has been around about 5 billion years, life about 4 billion.
Half a billion years for animals, 200 billion for mammals.
200,000 years of humans.
For the first 192,000 years or so, the human population was under 10 million people world wide.
Increasing 10 fold took 6000 more years.
We rocketed from 100 million to a billion in just over 2000 years.
The next billion only took 120 years.
And then 30.
And since the 1950s, we have added a billion people every 13 years or so.

We are at around 6.75 billion people now.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/Population_curve.svg

Its estimated that it will hit 9 billion in about another 30 years.
That new 2 and a quarter billion people will be our children.

We like to point to the 3rd world, to Asia and Africa, but in the measure that matters, the US is by far the most overpopulated country in the world, as well as one of the fastest growing.

Population is only an issue because of the finite resources the Earth can provide. If we had unlimited resources there wouldn't be any reason not to keep increasing indefinitely.

If everyone used the same amount of water, land, and energy, and caused the same amount of pollution as the average person in the third world, we would all be ok for a long time to come. Due to lack of ability, what we call poverty, people in the third world tend to use less than their share of world resources.
The average person in the first world uses 5 times more than the overall world average.
The average American uses 20 times more. Each of us uses about 20 times more water, 20 times more fuel and electricity, 20 times as much land to produce our food, produces 20 times more waste and pollution.
Which means that in the big picture, each of us counts for 20 people.

So our 305 million population may as well be 6.1 billion, far more than China's 1.3 billion. They would have to increase some combination of actual population and consumption per person by far before we could legitimately point the finger at them.

It also means that each child we have counts as 20 people, turning our fertility rate of 2.1 (already above the replacement rate of 2) into the equivalent of 42 per woman, 6 times higher than the highest rate of any third world country - and almost 17 times higher than the world average.

In the US alone there are 200,000 children waiting to be adopted.


It is one of the most basic and universal desires is to reproduce. How could it be any other way? Because if that drive weren't passed along genetic lines, our ancestors wouldn't have bothered, and we wouldn't be here to think about it.

There has been a widespread assumption that because it is natural and universal that therefor it should be considered a human right.

Our modern world does not resemble the savanna we evolved on. We also have biological instincts to eat whenever food is available in case it isn't tomorrow - and the result is rampant obesity - and a good number of us making the conscious choice to go against instinct and manipulate ourselves in ways that take into consideration the reality of our world. Violence is natural and universal, but we agree as a society that the costs are not acceptable and make the conscious decision to repress it, both as individuals and as communities.
Because, we can do that, we can think, and make choices.

To make wine or beer, you start with grape juice or grains and add microorganisms.
For them it is an incredible feast! Sugar and carbs as far as the eye can see, no predators, no competition, perfect weather. So of course they have a really good time, girl fungus meets boy fungus, there's plenty to feed the babies and things just couldn't be better. And then after a while they literally die from drowning in their own waste products as the population gets completely out of control.
(And then we drink that waste product, but that's another topic entirely)

Human beings, in theory, are a lot more intelligent than yeast. They don't even have brains. As individuals we can choose not to have children. But as a whole, an outside observer would not see much difference between the species. As a whole, we continue to breed at a rate related only to the resources available today, with little or no regard to how sustainable those resources are.

A great many people - including liberals and environmentalists and those who are childless by choice - become indignant when this topic is brought up. Reproduction is considered by many to be a fundamental (God-given?) right, and suggesting otherwise brings to mind eugenics programs, or the murder of female infants when China first instituted its one-family/one-child program when sons were the only form of social security the society had. Those are not inevitable outcomes.

As a specie all societies choose to discourage some of our natural instincts in such a way that slight personal restrictions result in a far happier society over all. It may be perfectly natural for me to want to punch some annoying person right in the face, but the government isn't going to give me a tax break for doing it.
Just the same, it is only natural that I want to have my own kids, related to me by DNA, but if it is going to end up making life that much more difficult for all of the people who are already here, perhaps a tax penalty is more appropriate than a credit.

Average cost for fertility treatment is $12,000, and 12% of US couples seek it. In about 1/2 the states this is covered by insurance.
Given the 200,000 existing children who need homes, I find this immoral. Think what medical services could be provided to people who are already here with that $4 billion.


Governments could encourage this simply by removing tax breaks for kids.
I don't actually think that is going to happen.

But you and I can still choose on our own to act, even if everyone else isn't likely to fall in line. Its been calculated time and again that simply having a baby has greater impact than all the imported GMO processed food and single-person commutes in SUVs could ever hope to have. From an ecological standpoint, it would be better to drive a hummer and eat at Mickey Ds but adopt your child then to live the hippy lifestyle in a solar powered yurt with a grey-water garden and create 3 brand new babies of your own.

And now we get to the real crux of the matter.
Being aware of this, just how much personal sacrifice are we willing to make? I want the experience of creating a child. I also want to avoid being an amoral hypocrite. (A moral hypercrite? Yes. I aspire to be a hypercrite someday.)
Like most people, I have developed a defensive rationalization to allow me to not feel guilty about doing what I wanted to all along, even though I really know better.

The way I see it, I personally can't be expected to be held responsible for or make up for the excessive consumption of everyone else around me. I couldn't if I wanted to. I personally have a sustainable ecological footprint (i.e. if everyone on the planet used the same level of resources as me, we'd all be set indefinitely). If me and my hypothetical future partner have 2 kids, once we die, overall, the population hasn't gone up. If we have just one, its gone down by one. That seems like a decent compromise to me. I'd like to have one, and adopt one. (As a bonus, I can choose to have one of each gender, and more precisely choose the age spread).

Many people object to ideas around population control as an emotional response to implied guilt about already having children, and feeling defensive about kids that are already here. A potential person has nothing in common with a real human being who is actually here. Acknowledging that resources have a finite rate of renewal is not a personal attack on you. No one is saying your child isn't wonderful or that you made any "wrong" choices. All I am saying is, however many blessings you have, stop now.

Similarly some people in these discussions suggest that if any one who advocates population control should kill themselves if they really mean it. This equates the mere idea of a person, a hypothetical, potential person, with an actual specific person who is here right now, thinking and breathing and feeling. We aren't talking about abortion here. Not having a kid is not killing by any definition. Any discussion about who a person who does not exist might possibly become is equally ridiculous. That kid who could someday be is no more likely to become the next president than it is to be a serial killer who enjoys torturing victims.

Bottom line is, having less children today will be much less painful than wars of dwindling resources some number of decades in the future.

Spoiled: The Economic Downturn, Luxury as Necessity, and "Struggling" in the Modern Economy.

My original comment was not meant to imply I don't believe that there are tangible effects on people (most notably unemployment, which is certainly up compared to a few years ago).
All I said was that media and politicians largely made it up. I think it is a self-fulfilling prophesy to an extent, where in people hear constant messages that times are tight, therefor they cut back on consumption, therefor retail markets fall, therefor manufacturers cut back, and employers start laying people off. Which fuels the beginning of the cycle even more. This is why business analysts track "consumer confidence". In fact, to a large extent it is what the stock market is all about. Its less a question of how well a company is doing and more one of how popular are they. If people think its doing well, they buy, which itself drives the stock price up. It works both ways, so if everyone is convinced the market is doing bad, they sell so they don't lose too much by waiting, and then companies don't have the capital to invest.

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I think it is totally unreasonable to adjust what it means to be "poor" based on those around you.
If we did that, billionaires could claim to be poor if those around them are multi billionaires. In fact, everyone except for the single richest person in the world would be "poor".
Clearly there should be some objective standard of poverty.
I think the only reasonable one is the point at which you have a reasonable fear of not being able to provide the basic necessities for oneself and family. Food, shelter, clean water. If you can afford so little food that it affects your health, you can claim to be poor.

It doesn't have to be a "big" car. If you own a car, you aren't poor. Period. Never mind that most people in the world couldn't even afford the up-front purchase price of a car. Much higher than that in the long run is costs for fuel, insurance, parking and tolls, maintenance, tickets...
For hundreds of thousands of years of human existence even the wealthiest people in the world could not buy cars.
Only in the US do people honestly believe that they are a "necessity".
All over the country people claim to be struggling who are paying for cable TV. They eat out and buy $2 cups of coffee. They have cell phones and internet connections. These are things most people and the world can't afford. They are not basic necessities.

Supposedly a person in the bay area needs 3 times the federal poverty level in order to live "comfortably"
http://articles.latimes.com/2007/oct/17/business/fi-wages17
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/10/17/MN0ISQEFP.DTL

They take it for granted that everyone needs a car.
And since when does every 6 year old need her own room?!
In the case of the 2nd article, I have no contempt for the person they profile. She (rightly) considers herself middle class.
(Hopefully, after having been interviewed she doesn't change her own standards).
Now, going into collection, obviously a problem. Thing is, that is another of those uniquely American things: living beyond your means.
The whole recession started because of people deliberately buying beyond their means with interest only loans. The whole idea being, buy something you can't afford and assume that the market will go up enough to cover it. Then, surprise! The people who were living beyond their means defaulted on their loans.
Consider that the size of an average new home has increased 250% over the past half century.

Then banks didn't want to lend. "Credit crunch". Well, again - the solution to a credit crunch? Don't live beyond your means. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/harry-moroz/forget-the-squeeze-the-mi_b_263100.html

Thing is, poor people don't get lines of credit extended to them in the first place. Because they are poor. The people who go to Labor Ready for temp work, the people who live here in the trailer park, they don't get loans for houses or new cars. They don't have credit cards. Most of them don't even have bank accounts. They pay rent with money orders and bring paychecks to check cashing places.

This is poverty: http://www.utne.com/Politics/Squatter-Villages-Tent-Cities-Informal-Urbanism-Economic-Crisis.aspx
And it was around long before the foreclosures on sub-prime loans started piling up.

In my line of work, between my low rates, and my green focus and good reputation, I end up having a huge range in terms of the incomes of my customers (hence the sliding scale idea).
I get students and people on SSI who genuinely can't afford more than me. I get others who live in 6 bedroom 3 story houses in the hills. I have been nonchalantly handed $100 tips on more than one occasion.

I also work with day laborer sometimes. These are people who will work for pretty much whatever you offer to pay them, work incredibly hard, and never complain. I ask them about work, about home, they invariably tell me: they are getting very little work here. Very little. But it is still better than the situation back home. That's why they are here. They work for less than minimum wage since they lack language skills and legal papers.
A customer yesterday mentioned her mother used to work for Nike in Vietnam. The company ships the product clear around the world because the people will work for a fraction of the US minimum wage. But she said it was a very decent salary compared to other options available to the people there.

The worldwide average income for an adult is roughly $7000.
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2006/MateNagy.shtml (note, this is over a decade out of date - the inequality has grown since)
That's including the 1st world; including the US.
This is in "purchasing power parity" - accounting for not only exchange rates, but what you can actually buy with a given amount locally.
$7000.

Over 80% of the worlds population has an annual income below that rate.
The world median income is $1700.
http://www.boston.com/news/world/articles/2007/10/07/average_earnings_worldwide/

So, yeah, I do think that is pretty much just the homeless who have a legitimate claim to poverty in this country.

There are plenty claims that the economic downturn hits the poor hardest: but then, they are putting people who own $290,000 4-bedroom townhouses in the category of "working class"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/16/AR2008101603605.html

The truly poor don't have far to fall. A recession can not possibly affect them as much as someone who has tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of annual income to potentially lose.

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The last thing I wanted to mention is about how profit distribution ties in to unemployment.
In this country it has always been accepted as a given by almost everyone that 100% of the increase per worker in productivity due to advances in technology goes to the owners of the company, and not to the employees.
For example, say someone invents a machine that allows a worker to produce 2 times more widgets per hour.
What happens is (since the market for widgets hasn't grown, so they don't need to produce twice as many) the company lays off half it's work force, produces the same amount of widgets, sells them at the same price, and increases its profit substantially (paying half the wages, but making the exact same revenue).

There is no inherent reason that they couldn't instead reduce all of the workers hours 50%, while increasing wages 100%. Neither the employees nor the company loses any money. They both make exactly the same as they did before. The only change is the workers have half the work hours, and can use the rest of that time however they choose.
In the 2nd option no unemployment is caused.

In actuality productivity per worker has increased roughly 20 fold over the past century.
Over the same time (adjusted for inflation) wages have only increased 7 fold. The entire rest of that increase has gone to profit - ultimately to the upper class, who own the means of production.

Profit is after business expenses and costs and taxes, after wages, even after salaries to the CEO and upper management, often in the millions (even among companies that are losing money - even ones that got federal bail out money paid million+ salaries.)
Profit is what is left over after that. It goes to people who do literally no work for it at all.
There are industries which make as much as 20% profit margins.
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/global500/2009/performers/industries/profits/

So when companies claim they "have to" lay off workers because they are making less revenue, I say they are full of crap. If they are making ANY profit, anything over breaking even, they have no justification for laying people off. If they are paying upper management 6 digit incomes, there is no justification for laying off their lowest wage earners.
In many European countries (and Canada) that is actually illegal. The government can (and will) sue a company for laying off workers unnecessarily. In these places it is understood that the whole purpose of the economy is to serve the needs of the people, not to make people with investment capital even richer.

We could reduce unemployment to the minimum possible by having overtime kick in at, say, 35 hours a week. Then to maintain current levels of production, companies need to hire 15% more people just to get back to the level they were at before.

There is nothing inherently good about creating wealth (or widgets for that matter) just for its own sake.
Going from multi-millionaire to billionaire will cause no overall long-term increase in happiness.

But instead of increasing the income of the destitute and struggling up to the level of secure in basic necessities, as a society we have been allowing - even encouraging - all of the increase in wealth to go to the top levels of society. The ranks of middle class conservatives and libertarians push for this hardest of all: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090128071009AADfUVw
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2009/09/snapshots-tea-party

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It's human nature to want more than whatever one has, and to want more than everyone around you.
And everyone wants to believe they earned what they have, no matter how strong the evidence against it, because its easier on the conscious than admitting being greedy and amoral.
Its what explains the "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" myth.
You can see it in everyone who rallies against illegal immigrants. They will insist it has to do with following laws for the sake of laws, but suggest making all immigration legal, and you find out its really about allowing them government benefits and taking American's jobs. The only way to justify it would be to claim that some people "earned" being born in a first world country. (People always have the "us vs them" xenophobic mentality that makes benefiting at the expense of others ok as long as they are "others")
I think that, just like with laws to discourage violence, or the use of birth control, discouraging some of our basic instincts is better for everybody; the desire to always have more, on a planet with finite resources, is what makes people who live extravagant lives in this country think they are poor. I think that's not ok.

The economic downturn means that people who lived excessively unsustainable lives now live moderately less unsustainable lives. It's actually not enough, but its a start.
I think that's a good thing.