Rise of the Man Child

In 1959 a Swiss psychologist, Marie-Louisa von Franz, noticed the increasing trend in people who mature physically but remain psychologically stunted, especially among the male population of the western world. She coined the term for these people ‘eternal child’, today we call it the man child.

It’s not unusual for the man child to live at home or have moved back home in his thirties and even forties, middle aged. His mom still washes his clothes and cooks his meals, makes his bed and cleans his room. It gives his mom an ongoing sense of value, being needed, in her golden years so she gladly takes care of him like he’s still a child. Some studies estimate that 35% of adult men live at home now, the highest percentage in 80 years, and the trend is on the rise. Remember when being a “momma’s boy” was considered weak and girly, now it’s almost the norm.

For those that do eventually move out and have their own home, it’s not a man’s home. A man’s home used to have a library, a place of study and learning for acquiring knowledge and wisdom. Filled with both fiction and non-fiction books, travel guides, 12-year-old scotch and Cuban cigars. A mahogany desk, a leather chair, a banker’s lamp and pen and pad for writing letters. The man child, on the other hand, has a ‘Man Cave’ with a home cinema size TV for watching football, surround sound, cinema style seating with cup holders and a refrigerator stocked with ‘mmmm’ beer. There’s a dart board, popcorn machine, bobble heads of their favorite athletes and sports paraphernalia hanging on the walls. It’s a place for ‘hanging out’, escaping reality and getting ‘wasted’ with other beer-bellied jock sniffers.

The man cave is also a place to hold their fantasy football draft. There was a time when men played tackle football without pads in the park but the man child only fantasizes about things in life that he can’t actually do himself. Like staying up till all hours ‘gaming’ online against other man children and actual children. Pretending to be the super hero in some virtual reality online video game. Locked away in his mom’s basement or his man cave with his VR glasses on, controller in hand, and his big gut hanging out while stuffing Cheetos down his gullet and swilling Red Bull.

The man child doesn’t try to hide his adolescent mindset and childlike behavior. He proudly displays it for all to see at work. His cubicle is adorned with ‘Star Wars’ and ‘The Hobbit’ posters, desktop action figures of Obi Wan Kenobi, Indiana Jones and the Starship Enterprise. His screensaver is Harry Potter, his ringtones are the Star Wars and Star Trek theme songs, depending which of his Comic-con friends is calling. Comic-con is a convention where grown adults dress up in the costumes of their favorite action hero comic book characters to party and talk about comic books. They argue which characters could beat the others, as if they are real. It’s the man child’s mecca, the pilgrimage must be made.

It’s similar to the Civil War re-enactors who dress up like Civil War era soldiers and pretend fight. There’s a disturbing and obvious trend of men living a pretend life, creating a fantasy existence in all aspects in which they can immerse themselves to escape reality and they are legion. The man child is a hit at the box office, Hollywood picked up on it decades ago back in the late eighties and early nineties beginning with the series of ‘Pee Wee Herman’ movies, ‘Arthur’, ‘Dumb and Dumber’, ‘Ace Ventura’, ‘Grandmas Boy’, ‘Billy Madison’, ‘Big’, ‘Elf’, ‘TED’, ‘Step Brothers’, ‘Old School’, ‘Failure to Launch’ to name a few from a very long and infamous list. Actors like Jim Carrey, Will Ferrel, Adam Sandler, Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn have made a career perfecting the man child in cinema. Network TV has claimed its share as well with animated series like ‘South Park’, ‘The Simpsons’ and ‘The Family Guy’ all of which use adolescent potty humor to make adults laugh. Where have all the real men gone?

Textual Encoding of Numbers

I always felt like there should be a way to read numbers like we read words and have them make sense and easy to remember. Every now and then, when I had some free time, I’d try to come with a method to do so.

I tried assigning a consonant and a vowel to each number 0-9. Zero would be ‘ze’, One would be ‘On’, Two would be ‘to’, Three ‘te’, Four ‘fo’, Five ‘fi’, Six ‘si’, Seven ‘se’, Eights ‘eg’ and Nine ‘ni’. So a number such as 723 would be ‘setote’ which makes no sense whatsoever.

Then I wrote the numbers in block for and concatenated them together so for example, 770 would be ‘TO’ which seemed to be promising but nine numbers taken three at a time comes to 504 different permutations, most of which make no sense.

Then I decided to look at the numbers upside down and I noticed something interesting. All the numbers – except for 8 – are a letter when upside down. 0 is ‘O’, 1 is ‘I’, 2 is ‘Z’, 3 is ‘E’, 4 (written in goalpost style) is ‘h’, 5 is ‘S’, 6 is ‘g’, 7 is ‘L’ and 9 is ‘b’. So I tried to make words out of the letters for each number. For example, 723 upside down would be EZL which doesn’t make sense. Then I replaced ‘Z’ for 2 with other letters because ‘Z’ is used so infrequently but still didn’t make much sense.

Then I tried using the letter for each number as the first letter in a word. For example, 723 would be three words, the first one beginning with ‘L’, the second with ‘W’ ( I chose ‘W’ for 2 instead of ‘Z’) and the third with ‘E’. Maybe ‘Last Weeks Event’ or ‘Lazy Won’t Exercise’ both of which represent the number 723 and they make some contextual sense. But in order to make it more meaningful, I also put auxiliary words where needed to make the phrase more contextual. An auxiliary word is any word that begins with a letter that doesn’t represent a number. So: c, d, f, j, k, m, n, p, q, r, t, u, v, x, y, z. Note: I chose ‘a’ to represent 8.

For example: ‘Landlord with excellent seaside dwelling, excellent WiFi, excellent garage, taking offers’ is the sentence for the phone number on a for sale banner of an apartment across from mine at the beach. Decoding it resolves to the number: 723 532 360. ‘Dwelling’ and ‘Taking’ are auxiliary words used to give the sentence contextual meaning. When I think of the apartment for sale across from mine, I think of ‘Landlord’, ‘Dwelling’, ‘Seaside’ etc. so it makes it easy to remember the sentence, then I can just decode it and I have the number.

‘Let me explain something, good beer barley prevents a lousy beer’ is the sentence for the number on an advert for a bar. The number is: 735 699 879 with auxiliary words ‘me’ and ‘prevents’ to clarify the context. I created that encoding weeks ago and I still remember it. You can substitute any letters you want for 2 and 8 but ensure you use the same ones all the time or it will mix up the numbers. The more you employ this method the easier it becomes and the encoding remains with you for a long time.

Human Evolution

There seems to be two distinct evolutionary variations of human beings emerging, a distinct fork in the human evolutionary road too profound to be attributed to simple cultural or generational differences. One variation that is emotionally driven and one that is rationally driven. These aren’t matters of maturity or ignorance like we so often want to believe but an actual evolutionary variation in people’s psychology where either emotions or rational is the predominant psychological driving force in one’s life.

The emotional variation, E-type, is characterized by a lack of mental attention, consistency, curiosity, courage, and effort resulting in irrationality, gullibility, and emotionalism.

E-types value feelings above all else. They tend to suffer more from emotional problems such as anxiety, depression, low self-esteem and emotional volatility. They tend to be more creative, artistic and come across as loving and compassionate. They are more trusting and therefore more likely to fall for scams and cons. They are not good problem solvers, they only consider one side of a problem that is emotionally pleasing while ignoring the consequences of the emotionally displeasing side. They tend to be on the below average half of human intelligence and of lower social and economic status but don’t take responsibility for that status, it’s always the fault of someone or something else and therefore see themselves as a victim and believe they are entitled. They see society as a collective of nameless, faceless people stripped of their individuality with everyone dependent on and responsible for everyone else rather than a society of independent individuals. They look to an authority for social and moral guidance and will sacrifice the truth and doing what’s right for the sake of someone’s feelings. They tend to have a lot of friends and represent the overwhelming majority of humanity.

The rational variation, R-type, is characterized by reason, rational, logic and common sense.

R-types value facts and the truth. They tend to be more critical and inquisitive, they are excellent problem solvers. They solve problems holistically and reason them out by applying logic, rational and past experiences including all the information available. They tend to be more stable socially and professionally regardless what life throws at them. They are more willing to take chances, fail, and learn from those experiences. They take responsibility for themselves, good and bad, and understand the consequences of their actions. They see society as independent individuals not as a collective. They are difficult to con or scam and they do not look to an authority for social and moral guidance, they know the difference between right and wrong and will not sacrifice the truth or doing what’s right for the sake of someone’s feelings. They tend to have fewer friends.

These variations are so distinct that it is almost impossible for them to communicate effectively in any meaningful way anymore. They see and process the world around them in completely different ways so any attempt at communication is immediately conflated. These are not subjective cultural differences but objective inter-generational human differences.

Inferior Humanity

I remember the feeling years ago when I realized that the government, at all levels, is nothing more than a common criminal gang writ large. I also remember the realization that the global financial markets are fraudulent, creating counterfeit money out of thin air and laundering it by loaning it out. Two revelations that changed my view of the world and the people in it.

Although I always believed that most people were idiotic it never really affected me so live and let live. But, the last two years has revealed to me that most people really are of an inferior level of intelligence, dullards and it has affected my life tremendously.

George Carlin said: “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” He was referring to the idea that human intelligence is normally distributed, a bell curve, which means that half the population is of below average intelligence and it is on display every, single, day.

These are the people that I never really paid much attention to or just shrugged them off as foolish. But now I realize they have a much more profound effect on humanity as a whole.

These are the people who have trouble stepping on a moving escalator or constantly hesitate in moving traffic because they can’t properly process the situation. They have road rage if someone drives in the left lane or dares to ‘cut them off’. These are the people who believe there are more than two genders and you can change your gender if you want. These are the people who are obese but can’t stop shoving food down their gullet even though it’s killing them. Then they put on a bathing suit and go to the beach with their big, fat slovenly belly hanging over so far they can’t see their feet because they have no self-respect, no shame. These are the people who chain smoke or self-medicate with weed or booze just to make it through the day. These are the people who have children in order to receive more money from welfare. These are the people who ride their bikes 5 mph on their neighborhood street wearing a helmet, elbow pads, knee pads and a bright yellow vest. These are the women who inject Botox directly into their lips and look like a duck. The women who spend billions on makeup and clothes and shoes and jewelry in order to put on a costume and create a false persona before going out in public. The women who play sports in women’s sports leagues and demand as much money as the men never realizing the reason they have their own leagues is because they can’t compete with the men and people don’t want to watch them. These are the people who get so many tattoos that it looks like a shirt sleeve on their arm, and that’s why they got so many tattoos. These people are the man-child with pictures of Harry Potter or the Hobbit up in his cubicle and a man-cave at home instead of a library. The jock sniffer who plays fantasy football and has bobble-head dolls of his favorite players. These are the people with their noses constantly stuck in their phones, taking dozens of selfies a day and ignoring their children and life around them. The people who can’t put air in or change a tire, can’t change the oil, fill the radiator or the window washing fluid of their own car, they have to pay someone to do it for them. These are the people who borrow $100,000 for a Ph.D. in Sociology, History — insert any ‘social science’ subject here — and are working customer service at Walmart. They are the people who believe the earth is flat, gods are real and honor American soldiers for killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people in the middle east. These are the people who argue about politics like it matters. Cocks in a chicken fight being taunted by the farmer but they’re mad at each other rather than the farmer. These are the people who have accumulated so much debt, they are always working to earn money they’ve already spent, paying one credit card bill with another. They are the sweet old grandma who always sees the glass as half full because she just doesn’t want any trouble so she chooses to ignore anything she doesn’t like even, especially, the most egregious acts of inhumanity, conscious ignorance etc.

For the last two years, these are the people who covered their faces with surgical masks believing they were protecting themselves from a virus, only to take them off when they smoked, drank, ate, got a haircut, a shave, went to the dentist, worked outside, went to the gym, beauty parlor, spoke in public, played college or professional sports, made a Hollywood movie etc. These people are not able to understand the obvious irrational inconsistencies of it all, unable to process the world around them in a rational way and they are legion. The majority of the human race was like this and still is. The moment the TV tells them to mask up again they will, the moment the TV tells them to get another experimental shot, they will. They are the dummies, the dolts, the fools, the below average half of all human intelligence, some four billion people.

We are surrounded by them every day. They are the ones who are just smart enough to survive another day and hold down some menial job like a taxi driver or garbage man, construction worker or janitor, bus driver or short order cook, cashier or flight attendant, customer service rep or mall cop, secretary or street sweeper, all government workers who would otherwise be unemployed etc. The average IQ is believed to be around 100, borderline mentally handicapped is 80.

Humanity has no hope.

Environmental Religion

When I was a child growing up in the 60s and 70s, I remember TV commercials and Public Service Announcements saying that using aerosol spray cans was creating a hole in this thing called the Ozone layer. More specifically, Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) emitted by spray cans, refrigerators and air conditioning. None of us had any idea what an Ozone layer was but we were told that without it, life on earth was not sustainable. That is to say, something as simple as a hole in this thing represented an existential threat to life on earth. An invisible, existential threat that nobody understood but for some reason nobody questioned either. Ever notice how the existential threats we’re told to be afraid of are always invisible and unconfirmable by the average person? We’re told to just ‘trust the authorities’ and give them more money and more power and they’ll keep us safe. So, in a quest to be seen as socially responsible and cultural heroes by the politically correct, some made a commitment to make drastic, unprecedented changes in their daily lives. For example, instead of spray can deodorants, they started using roll-ons. Yep, solid roll-ons, they believed that roll-on deodorant was the solution to an existential threat to life on earth.

Fast forward 50 years and – like von Braun and other former Nazis recruited by NASA – you don’t hear much about the hole in the Ozone layer anymore. Actually, you don’t hear about it at all, I doubt anyone younger than 40-years-old has ever heard of it. Did roll-on deodorant really save life on earth? That’s a pretty big deal isn’t it? Why weren’t we told the threat was over? How do we know it really is? Did it just disappear? Radio silence for decades now, almost as if, almost, it was never really a threat in the first place. There are those desperate to preserve their culturally heroic reputations by conjuring up an explanation as to how the existential threat to life on earth was not only real but was successfully averted, saved by political policy and roll-on deodorant.

They’ll massage your mind with logical fallacies and appeal to your emotions and your sense of the ‘greater good’ in order to persuade you of the potency of government control on preserving life on the planet. They’ll try to convince you that since there was a problem with the Ozone and the government implemented policies and now there’s not a problem anymore, then clearly it was because of the political policy. It’s the old lions and rose petals parable. If you put rose petals in front of your door, they will keep the lions away. The fact that you haven’t seen any lions since you started putting the rose petals out proves it was the rose petals keeping the lions away. Correlation and causation fallacy writ large but good enough for the weak of mind and constitution.

Regardless, like all politicized issues, the hole in the Ozone lost its celebrity status and wasn’t getting the job done anymore so it was unceremoniously replaced by a newer, shinier, more comprehensive threat called ‘Anthropogenic Global Warming’ and the whole thing started over again. ‘Anthropogenic Global Warming’ means human activity – namely using carbon based or ‘fossil fuels’ — is causing the planet’s average temperatures to get warmer and since the 1980s we’ve been told the new threat is the melting of the polar ice caps. If the polar ice caps were to melt, the sea levels would rise by 20 feet and much of the current land masses would be underwater. Florida, Hawaii, Maldives even NYC would no longer be there. This was back in the 1980s. Fast forward 40 years and the seas haven’t risen, everyone’s fine and real estate development in Florida exploded over the same time period. Insurance companies have actuaries who are experts in calculating risk and for the past 40 years they’ve never advised a client against real estate development in Florida due to melting polar ice caps, and they were right, Al Gore and the politicians were wrong again, or more likely just outright lying again. Al Gore owns numerous mansions consuming tons of ‘fossil fuels’ per year and flies to ‘climate summits’ in a private jet. Even so he won a Nobel Peace prize for his outspoken policies to fight this new existential threat that even he doesn’t seem to believe in and which appears to not exist.

Anyone who’s ever done scientific research knows that you need to be able to mathematically model the system you want to analyze. You have to know billions of variables and how those billions of things interact and affect one another. Then you have to be able to collect unbiased data on all those variables and run it through the model. There is not a person on the planet that can model the global environment like that much less find the data for it. The complexities of the environment are simply unknown and the data for it all doesn’t exist. New species of animals, plants and other natural phenomenon are being discovered every day. Things scientists thought to be true for hundreds of years are being proven wrong. Even if it were possible to build the model and collect the data, it would take decades to run the models and as soon as a new species or plant or natural phenomenon were discovered, the model would have to be rebuilt, new data collected and it would have start all over again. Any models the ‘researchers’ claim to be using are grossly insufficient and the data is grossly incomplete.

That’s probably why the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) felt the need to fudge their data and fabricate results for the politicians to use in support of their political policies. Then they were stupid enough to send emails to one another about what they did which is how they got caught. The IPCCs unprofessional and unethical tactics is why some respected atmospheric scientists have quit the field. Dr. Judith Curry, for one, was head of the Atmospheric Sciences Department at Georgia Tech University for years. Well written, published and respected in her field and a former member of the IPCC. It was her time working with the IPCC that opened her eyes to the fraud being perpetrated for political expedience. Instead of compromising her professional ethics for prestige and money like so many others had done, she was one of the many whistle blowers to come forward and expose the scam. For honoring the truth in science and protecting her professional and personal integrity, she was fired from her position at Georgia Tech and ostracized by the scientific community. If there really is an existential threat to the planet, then why the need for censorship of dissenting voices? Why are respected scientists considered a threat?

Then there’s the ‘Great Plastic Patch’ that we are told is in the Pacific Ocean choking off sea life and disrupting ‘keystone’ species and ecological processes. Ask to see pictures of it and you’ll be told that’s not possible because it’s made up of ‘micro-plastics’, microscopic particles of plastic too small for the human eye but believe us, it’s there. We’re told that trees and forests are being destroyed for wood and paper and need to be replenished by man. As if trees don’t reproduce on their own as they’ve done for millions of years. There are trillions of trees in the world despite humanity, not because of it. Governments are subsidizing Electric Vehicles (EV) as if electricity is harvested from lightening or Thor’s hammer and not produced by electrical generators that use carbon based fuels. EVs are for cultural heroes, virtue signalers who ostensibly appear to be morally and socially superior but who, in reality, are false prophets.

False prophets because “Man-made global warming” and all the other politicized environmental issues have become a fully functional religion. There is not even ordinary evidence of this supposedly extraordinary phenomenon and all the doomsday prophecies have failed to materialize but, like with any religion, the faithful still believe. They sit outside day after day, year after year, in the sun, under blue skies, with green trees and chirping birds, lamenting how man is killing the planet while they enjoy all the natural benefits the planet has to offer just as people did 40 years earlier. Literally nothing has changed, if anything the planet is greener and healthier. Of course they’ll tell you again that it’s because of government policy and carbon credits and the like. The same correlation and causation fallacies and appeal to emotions because that’s literally all they have. They have no real evidence, they couldn’t have.

The religion of environmentalism has succeeded in indoctrinating people to believe that carbon dioxide (CO2) is a poisonous gas which must be eliminated when in reality it is an absolute necessity for life on earth. Plants consume CO2 and covert it to O2 (oxygen) via photosynthesis. Without CO2 all life on the planet dies. Commercial greenhouse farmers buy CO2 generators to increase the yields of their plants. There is no limit to how much CO2 plant life can consume and covert to O2. The more they consume, the larger they grow and the more oxygen there is. The blinding irony of the ‘green movement’ which campaigns for zero carbon emissions is that carbon fuels are the green fuel and zero carbon emissions is the existential threat, the exact opposite of what the cultists would have you believe.

Kilimanjaro

I wanted to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro for the life experience like skydiving or going up in a hot air balloon. Climbing mountains seems to be such an innate part of our humanity and I needed one that was accessible to a complete amateur. I knew if I just kept putting one foot in front of the other for 6-7 days the laws of physics would dictate I reach the top eventually. I trained the winter in the Carpathian mountains doing just that and I always reached the top, go figure. Although Kili has some technical parts it’s not a technical climb per se.

I had a few known problems to manage including a left knee that’s been operated on three times and a back that reminds me from time-to-time who’s the boss. But I spent the winter focusing on strengthening them both and by the time the climb came around they felt better than they’ve felt in years. Now I just had to be careful on the mountain not to hurt them inadvertently.

The one big variable was the altitude. The amount of oxygen saturation in the atmosphere declines rapidly from 3000 to 4000 and 5000+ meters. Over 5000 it’s only about 47% of what it is at sea level. Lack of oxygen causes a number of different problems with the human body including headaches, nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, dizziness and loss of appetite. It’s impossible to train for high altitude and it’s impossible to know how one’s body is going to react since everyone reacts differently. Our guides explained how to manage it with Diamox – which has the same active ingredient as Cyalis – lots of water, eat good, sleep good and pole-pole (slowly, slowly). So that’s exactly what I did and had little to no high altitude issues other than a little indigestion which was easily treated with an antacid.

So with all the issues under good management, we reached the summit. Now for the good, the bad and the ugly of it all.

The Good

We couldn’t have hand picked a better collection of people to climb with. All of our personalities clicked immediately. A Russian gal, a Brooklyn-ite, two girls and one guy from the UK, a medic from Saudi Arabia and a little French guy. Nine in total counting me and my buddy Lee. God we laughed so hard, I had some of the best gut wrenching laughs I’ve had in a long, long time.

The porters who carry the gear and food are super human, seriously! The routine was that we’d leave camp each morning, the porters would strike all the tents and pack everything up, head out on the same trail as us, overtake us and get to the next camp ahead of us, set everything back up and have fresh water and food waiting for us. They had full packs on their backs and packages on their heads totaling 50 kgs or more. The Barranco Wall is a stone wall that you have to climb on the route we took – Machame route known as the ‘Whiskey Route’. The wall has thin ledges and gaps that have to be traversed. The porters did this with ease and without hesitation with all that weight on them. And they were little guys, skinny but strong as mules and had no problem with the altitude. The moral of the story is: don’t fuck with a Tanzanian porter, he will fuck you up.

Since we camped above the clouds and there were no ground lights, you could see every star in the sky, the entire universe, it was amazing.

The Bad

Everyone’s appetite was affected by the altitude but you had to force the food down since you needed the energy and the food was horrible. Shit you wouldn’t normally eat anyway. What should have been hot and juicy was cold and dry and what should have had a thick consistency was runny. The only drinks we had available all week to wash it down were water, tea and instant coffee. I usually felt fine until I saw the food, that’s what made me most nauseous.

The Diamox is a diuretic so we peed a lot including 3-4 times during the night which means you had to get dressed, go out in the cold and pee. Then you had to immediately start drinking water again. I drank 4-5 liters per day.

We had no shower facilities so we wiped down with wet naps. By summit night we were all pretty ripe.

The Ugly

The toilets on Kilimanjaro are shit holes, and I don’t mean that as an adjective, I mean it as a noun. They were wooden closets with a hole cut in the floor to shit in. And if someone missed the hole then the shit and piss just stayed there. The ammonia smell was overwhelming so I just started peeing with the door open. I did close it to take a shit.

Summit night started at 12 am and we summited at 11:10 am. During the night it was -20 C and we encountered wind gusts with rain and snow that could almost push a full grown man over.

Conclusion

My overall opinion of the experience is that I am glad I did it but I will never do anything like it again. No human being should live like that. The summit was admittedly anticlimactic for me since we suffered so much just to reach a fucking sign and take a picture. At one point on the descent our Russian colleague looked at me and said with a bitter tone “it was just a fucking place. ” which echoed my sentiments perfectly.

We all got together back at the hotel for dinner afterwards and some said they got emotional at the top and asked me if I did too. I replied “yea I got emotional, I was fucking pissed. “

Electric Vehicles

Electric vehicles (EV) are not new, they have been around much longer than Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) vehicles. The first ones appeared around 1828 to 1840 in Europe. Now 180 years later they are still not economically viable solutions and there’s a reason why: physics. The energy density, cost, weight, and size of onboard energy storage can’t even come close to matching that of ICE vehicles and never will, it’s a physical impossibility. This means EVs will always be the inferior market choice.

Most current EVs use lithium-ion batteries that store no more than the equivalent of 16-24 kWh of energy in a single charge, short of the 36kWh of energy in a single gallon of gasoline. The Tesla, currently among the most powerful PEVs on the market, can store the equivalent of 53 kWh when fully charged. If you do the math, a subcompact car with a 10-gallon gas tank can store the energy equivalent of 7 Teslas, 15 Nissan Leafs or 23 Chevy Volts.

Batteries suffer from four limitations, limited range, heavy weight, long charging time and limited charge-discharge cycles. In order to compensate for the heavy weight, EV manufacturers look for ways to make the cars lighter by limiting the size, the materials they use and using adhesives, glues, rather than welding parts together. In October 2020 a new Tesla owner had his roof blow right off on the road and another had his entire rear bumper fall off.

There is also an inherent danger of fire in car batteries due to ‘thermal runaway’ exacerbated by high voltage ‘quick’ charge which only takes 10-20 minutes rather than the normal four hours that people don’t want to wait for. EVs have spontaneously burst into flames and tens of thousands have been recalled.

The large discrepancies between ICE and EV vehicles is why so many automobile manufactures have scaled back their investments in EV and allocated more resources towards hybrids. It’s also why all EVs are subsidized by government. The private venture capital markets have billions to invest and are experts at assessing risk and potential return yet EV manufacturers must go to the state for financing because the private venture capitalists won’t invest the necessary amounts. That tells you everything about the market right there. They enjoy low interest loans, subsidies, tax breaks and receive carbon credits by law from manufacturers that don’t produce EVs. Only after securing the insurance of government subsidies will private venture capitalists risk their money.

Eric Peters, a respected car reviewer, writes that GM and Tesla are both lobbying the Biden administration to literally ‘pay consumers to buy their cars’. Neither company has ever made a market profit because the market simply doesn’t exist at current market costs.

Ostensibly, it seems like a good thing to have financial support from the government but there are potentially serious problems as well with committing resources in a government controlled market. It makes the manufacturers and their suppliers dependent upon and beholden to political policy which has nothing to do with cars or the market but politics. They can and have changed their minds on a whim as to what they will continue to support and how they’ll support it. And if support gets to the point that even with the subsidies it’s not viable, then those resources have to be reallocated at the company’s expense.

Bottom line is that EVs can never be economically viable and profitable on their own. After 180 years they are still always ‘right on the edge’ of the next great breakthrough in technology if they can just get a few more billion dollars. The ability to ‘profit’ from them is a matter of finding ways to get the state to ‘throw more money at them’ but in the long-run it looks like a money pit.

A Healthy Lifestyle

Habits as a Lifestyle

A habit is just something that you do on a regular basis without thinking about it, it’s something that has become a part of your life through repetition, it becomes a part of who you are. Your lifestyle is just a collection of habits, good and bad. What, when and how we eat and drink, what, when and how we exercise or don’t exercise, how we see the world around us etc. The good news is that since they are habits they can be broken, reshaped and reformed and it’s easier than you might think to do so.
There’s a reason why people who ‘diet’ specifically to lose weight, tend to gain the weight back and enter a physically and emotionally destructive and unhealthy cycle of weight loss and weight gain. When you diet successfully and lose weight, weight loss becomes a habit. All the things you did to lose weight become a part of your day-to-day life through months of repetition and you feel good about it. People compliment you, you buy new clothes, everyday activities are easier, you take up new hobbies, it’s like a new lease on life. Problem is that the only new habit you formed was how to lose weight and this habit is unknowingly reinforced by you and others so you feel good continuing it. What you didn’t learn was how to stop losing weight and maintain it. So you either have to continue losing weight until you are unhealthily thin, which happens, or break the new habit which leads to weight gain again. Voila`, the vicious cycle of dieters.

You should never diet and losing weight should never be the goal but rather forming new, healthy habits, living a healthy lifestyle should be the goal and losing weight will be a consequence of that lifestyle. An unhealthy lifestyle is a collection of unhealthy habits and a healthy lifestyle is a collection of healthy ones.

Forming New Habits

Exercise
Forming a new habit just means doing something repeatedly every day. It doesn’t matter when you do it, where you do it or how much you do, all that matters is that you do it. So the most important thing in forming new, healthy habits is to just start doing something new and healthy every day and remember: it’s a marathon not a sprint! The goal is not to lose weight but to form new, healthy habits that define a new and healthy lifestyle and your body will equilibrate its weight accordingly.

A common mistake is that people try to do too much, too fast and they find it physically hard and psychologically discouraging so they give up. Remember, how much you do is irrelevant, it’s forming the new habit that matters. For example, walking is a great low impact exercise to strengthen your cardiovascular system and burn calories so getting in the habit of walking every day is an excellent new and healthy habit to have.
Every day after work, take a walk, it doesn’t matter how far, just take a walk. Start out by walking down to the end of the driveway and back, seriously. Easy enough and your mind is creating the new habit of walking every day. Then when you feel comfortable increase it a little bit, say walk down to the end of the street and back. Still easy enough, your new habit is being reinforced, your body is already beginning to change and your progress is encouraging. You don’t feel intimidated by the walk. Doesn’t matter how many weeks or months you spend walking no further than the end of the block because forming the habit is what matters. Remember it’s a marathon not a sprint! When you feel comfortable increase the distance a little but do so in small increments to ensure you don’t try to do too much too fast and get discouraged.

It’s not a problem if you take a break from time to time. If you are feeling overwhelmed, if you are sick anything it’s okay. Better to take the break than to give up. You’ll notice that once you have the new habit formed, your mind and body will miss it when you take a break and it will feel good when you get back to it.

Eating
Water
Water is a necessity of life and plays a key role in metabolism which burns calories and produces energy. Most people don’t drink anywhere near enough water every day which slows their metabolism, deprives them of energy, sucks water from other organs and leads to fat storage. So, we need to form a new and healthy habit of drinking more water. Don’t think that there’s a particular amount of water you should drink every day because then that’s setting possibly unrealistic expectations that you can’t meet which will be discouraging. It’s the new habit that is important so you can start with something as simple as making it a habit to drink one glass of water each day. Even though you might already drink water in different settings, make this one glass a day a priority so it becomes a new habit. You can fill a glass at night and set it on the nightstand and drink it while you’re getting ready for work. You can put a glass on your desk at work and drink it throughout the day. You can put a glass in the cup holder in your car and drink it on the commute but make it a habit to drink one glass every day. And here’s an important point: don’t drink it from a bottle, drink it from a glass. It’s easier to drink from a glass and you get more water in every drink which makes it easier to finish. Small but important point.

After a while, when you feel comfortable that you’re in the habit of drinking a glass of water every day, increase it to one and a half, then two etc. until you feel hydrated all the time. You’ll find that even without making any other changes in your life you will already have more energy and start losing weight.

What to eat
I don’t think it matters what you eat as long as you eat it in moderation. There are healthy people who are meat eaters, others who are vegetarian or keto, still others who follow the old school food pyramid. When it comes to food better to eat what you enjoy in order to keep the process positive and not come to dread eating things you don’t like. If that happens then you’ll end up cheating anyway so what’s the point?
There are some common sense practices to keep in mind:
 Eat a variety of foods
 Limit sweets and alcohol
 Only eat portions of food, don’t eat munchies (If you can’t count everything you ate in a day then you’re not eating portions, you’re munching)

When to eat
Eat when you are hungry and stop eating when you are no longer hungry. If you are hungry first thing in the morning then eat something until you are no longer hungry. If you are hungry mid-morning then eat something until you are no longer hungry. If you are hungry at noon, mid-afternoon, evening then eat something until you are no longer hungry. Forget all the cultural rituals of breakfast, lunch and dinner, nobody even knows where they came from.

The only reason not to eat at night is because your sleep will be disrupted by your body’s metabolism and will cause weird dreams and restlessness so you won’t sleep well. You’ll be more tired during the day which can affect your exercise routine and how much energy you have.

Sometimes we like to use foods as a reward and see it as a guilty pleasure or an escape even from our problems or even to fill the void of boredom. This is a principle habit that needs to change. Eating only when we you’re hungry and putting the fork down when you’re satiated is key to forming new healthy eating habits. When you eat out and they serve you with a portion big enough for two, eat till you’re not hungry anymore and ask to take the rest in a doggy bag. It will be weird or hard at first but once it becomes a new habit you won’t even think about it because that’s what a habit is.

How to eat
Yes, it matters how you eat. Make a point of focusing on your eating habits. Sit down somewhere, eat one bite at a time, put the fork down and chew that bite thoroughly before swallowing. By eating one bite at a time and chewing thoroughly you give your body more time to feel ‘full’ and make it easier for your body to metabolize the food. Don’t let anyone or anything interrupt your meal.

God and Country

It starts at home as soon as we are aware of our existence and before we ever step foot into a public institution. As early as 3 or 4-years-old we see people flying flags in their yards, veterans at Waffle House wearing their military ballcaps. We see police cars, sheriff’s deputies, state troopers, military vehicles on the street, political and religious statues in parks, war memorials and monuments. We watch children’s programs that tell us to obey the authorities, 4^th of July parades replete with patriotic symbols and fireworks. Our parents take us to churches to worship invisible gods, make us pray before we eat and say ‘thank god’ every time something good happens. They take us to museums with paintings of conquering kings and angels coming down from heaven. Sporting events where uniformed military bear flags and we all stand, put our hands over our hearts and sing the national anthem. They show us dollar bills with pictures of famous politicians and nationalistic and religious slogans like ‘United States of America’ and ‘In God We Trust’. Driving through any town there are churches with their placards out front expressing how you are going to hell for all eternity if you don’t join. There are billboards with pictures of policemen telling you not to do drugs or to snitch on your neighbors. Uniformed public school buses and US mail trucks. By the time we reach school age we already believe that the government is authority and there’s an invisible man in the sky watching everything we do. Our minds have been properly prepared for the next phase of social engineering.

Those early years are the passive phase, the active phase begins when we enter the public education system which can be as early as 4 or 5-years-old. That’s when we are subjected to daily doses of nationalism and religion. Every morning for twelve years we pledge allegiance to ‘One Nation under God’. We join the Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts and pledge ‘On my Honor, I will do my duty, to God and my Country’. The Boy Scouts even have religious awards you can earn. Every Sunday we attend church services and ‘Sunday school’.

From as early as anyone can remember you’ve been marinated, sauteed and shaked and baked in political and religious beliefs and for good reason. Since institutions like the Church and State don’t produce anything, they depend on being able to control people in order to generate revenue. But they don’t have the resources or ability to control billions of people by force, so they have to control people’s minds, convince people to voluntarily surrender their free-will and dignity and open their pocketbooks. For thousands of years they’ve been doing this with fear and 2020 demonstrated just how easy it is for ‘the authorities’ to control the world. Not your city, your state, your country but the entire world. And to do so without firing a single shot, but by controlling people’s minds, a psychological coup d`etat of humanity.

The next time you’re outside in public somewhere, anywhere doesn’t matter, at the grocery store, the mall, in the park, at the beach casually look around you and pick any random, arbitrary adult you see and realize that that person, regardless of their age, sex, ethnicity or education probably believes in at least one imaginary phenomenon in their life. Something so extraordinary but for which there isn’t even ordinary evidence to suggest it’s real. Something for which there is absolutely no rational or logical explanation but which they believe is as real as their own existence and would bet their lives on it. Something that, to a large degree, defines their lives and drives their day-to-day decision making processes but nonetheless can’t be intelligently classified as anything other than an illusion, something they just choose to believe in like a child believes in Santa Claus.

Look at the next person and realize they too harbor such beliefs, and the next and the next and so on. The overwhelming majority of human beings hold unexplainable beliefs that create an unconscious human web of like minded people, people who have never met one another but whose remarkably inexplicable beliefs unconsciously bind them together. Beliefs that they never made a conscious effort to acquire, beliefs they may not even know they have and beliefs they never question. It’s a study in human nature to try and explain how such an extraordinary social phenomenon can exist. How everything that makes us human: reason, rational, logic and common sense, can be abandoned by billions of people like that and assume the consequences of doing so.

Depending on the source, imagination is defined as the ability to create ideas and images in the mind that don’t exist at present or haven’t happened yet. Before human evolution developed the parts of the brain that control what’s considered modern imagination about 70,000 – 100,000 years ago people would just leave someone lay when they died. There were no death rituals because those earlier species of humanoids didn’t understand what was happening and didn’t have the ability to imagine an explanation for it. They didn’t even know what death was or the distinction between it and life.

Fear is a consequence of that imagination. Fear is imagining a future that hasn’t happened yet and concern over its potentially harmful consequences. The inability to imagine potentially harmful future consequence, the inability to understand the concepts of life and death meant those early humans didn’t experience fear. Their decisions were driven by an innate survival instinct no different than how a worker ant fights off an intruder in the nest, a cod fish tries to evade a pursuing seal or a guard dog attacks a stranger. They weren’t frightened by an erupting volcano simply by the nature of the phenomenon because such fear would require the ability to imagine why it was happening and the potential consequences. Their reactions to such things came from personal experience of prior eruptions and hot lava pouring into their village and destroying their huts and their fellow villagers. They took action based on past knowledge and known consequences not on imagined ideas and potential future consequences.

In anthropology circles it’s said that the development of this ability to imagine was a great leap forward in human evolution but I’ll argue that depends on how you define ‘great’. In terms of human individuality, dignity and freedom, imagination is the Achilles heel that keeps humanity enslaved, impoverished and psychologically diseased. Human imagination and the fear it creates is the soft underbelly of the human condition that is exploited by the powers that be to control society without ever firing a shot. It’s used to psychologically condition and socially engineer people, stripping them of their free-will and humanity. Creating dutiful little worker bees, obedient members of the collective, a social hoard of zombies who are no longer in control of their own minds and actions but unconsciously connected to a social continuum while simultaneously believing they are free. It creates a very real alternative reality for them with egregious, shameful and inhumane consequences for mankind that are justified by their beliefs.

These beliefs alienate friends, family and coworkers in order to ensure their survival. They infect the individual’s psyche and transform him into a nameless, faceless member of the hive. Although they are just beliefs, they are extremely sophisticated and have evolved their own built in defense mechanism that protects them when they feel threatened to the point of evoking anger and even physical violence if deemed necessary. When confronted with dissenting information the person becomes mentally confused and disorientated causing the defense mechanism to be activated. That’s why people avoid discussing religion and politics, but I repeat myself.

Password Automation and Declination

Introduction

Password policies are becoming more and more complicated all the time. Most policies nowadays require at least 8 characters both upper and lower case letters, at least one number and a special character. Some organizations can require up to 16 characters. The policy also requires that the password be changed on a regular basis and you cannot reuse any of the previous passwords or any parts from previous passwords.

What typically happens is people have a number of different long and complicated passwords for several different applications that they change fairly often so in order to keep track of them, they write them down somewhere where they won’t forget, undermining the purpose of having passwords. Even then there are times when we forget the passwords altogether and can’t find a note anywhere and we either have to go through the ‘forgot password’ process or we get locked out of our account.

The problem is how to have any number of arbitrarily long and complicated passwords, that have to be changed on a regular basis and not have to write them down, not worry about having to remember them and at the same time, make it as difficult as possible to interfere with social engineers looking over our shoulders.

“Password Automation and Declination” is a procedure which automates entering passwords which is complemented by augmenting the password entry with a declination pattern. In other words, the password entered is not in its final form, but rather its form must decline or be altered to find its final form.

Password Automation

In order to automate the introduction of the password, we can create a batch file with the following commands: ‘echo YourPasswordHere | clip’. This will automatically copy your password to your systems clipboard that you can then paste into the password field. Then you can create a shortcut to the batch file and assign a short-cut key combination that makes mnemonic sense. For example: CTR + ALT + B for your bank password or CTR + ALT + M for Gmail. The batch file and the short-cut can be hidden anywhere on your computer and they do not have to be together. Automation allows your password to be absolutely anything and when it has to be changed you just change it in the batch file.

Declination Pattern

The declination pattern is meant to add an additional authentication factor making it difficult for social engineers ‘looking over your shoulder’ to steal your credentials even if they are looking right at you. The declination pattern can be anything you want and should make sense to you so it’s easy to remember. Regardless what your password is, you can use the same declination pattern. A declination pattern means altering the original form of the password, the password template, in a particular order to produce the correct password before submitting it. It’s a set of ordered key: value pairs composed of indexes and actions denoted {index:action}. The declination can be deleting something, adding something or changing something at chosen indexes.

Let’s say you choose declination indexes 1 and 7, the indexes mean that after you enter your password in the password field, you will then decline the password form at index 1 and index 7 in that order. Let’s say delete the character at index 1 and add a character at index 7 in order to give us the correct password form for submission. Declination pattern {1:del, 7 ‘y’}. Applying the declination pattern in order matters since deleting characters can change the numbering of the indexes.

For example, if your password is ThisIsMyPassword2021!, then in the batch file you would put a valid password template for your chosen declination pattern. *ThisIsMPassword2021! is a valid template for the password ThisIsMyPassword2021! and declination pattern {1:del, 7: ‘y’} but anything that has a deleteable character in position 1 and is missing the ‘y’ at position 7 is valid. Applying the declination pattern {1:del, 7: ‘y’} then produces the password ThisIsMyPassword2021!. Password fields on web forms hide the characters in the password so the declination pattern is applied without anyone being able to see what characters in the password you are affecting. Your password could be any absurd, arbitrary monster like:

jdkf avyLLfldk adfj!@#$daj;f897 then a valid template for declination pattern {1:del, 7 ‘y’} to put in the batch file would be *jdkf avLLfldk adfj!@#$daj;f897 and that’s it. You never have to remember a single thing about it, just the short-cut keys and the declination pattern which haven’t changed.

Conclusion

Regardless how long and complicated a password is, all the user has to remember is the short-cut key to automatically copy the appropriate password template to the clipboard and the declination pattern. Even when the password changes to something completely new and long and complicated, there is nothing new to memorize. Just tailor the new password’s template in the batch file to fit your existing declination pattern and you can use the same short-cut keys.

The two factor nature of the procedure addresses the fact that, even if a social engineer sees which short-cut keys you use for the automation, it only gives him the password template and will be rejected if he tries to submit it. He would also need to know your declination pattern which is much more difficult for someone to pick up since they can’t see the password in the password field. The declination pattern is a pseudo-biometric in that it’s not something that has to be written down but rather just something meaningful to you that you remember.

This method not only accommodates large and complicated passwords that tend to change a lot, it invites them. The larger and more complicated the more effective the declination pattern.

If at any time the user thinks either his short-cut keys or declination pattern have been compromised he can simply change them. Declination patterns are extremely sensitive so the slightest change will prevent access.