I’m a conservative because I believe that taking stuff from people against their will is wrong and that abortion is wrong.  So in an ideal world I would be against things like high taxes and Medicare.   But an ideal world is not the one we live in.  Can we conservatives admit that this game is rigged?  I would like to say that people need to take responsibility for their own finances by saving and investing.  But really what’s the point when the conservative appointed Federal Reserve chairman is going to make your savings worthless through inflation (did you know they’ve tripled the amount of money since 2008) and Federally supported banks are going to blow up your investments while walking away with hundreds of millions for themselves.

First let’s talk about the great conservative hero Reagan.  Before I start with the bad stuff I do want to say that I believe his inaugural address is one of the greatest speeches in history.  But I don’t think he lived up to it.   Reagan did reduce taxes initially, particularly on the top earners, but then proceeded to make eleven tax increases.  Appointing the Federal Reserve chairman is one of the most, if not the most, important job the US President has.  Carter had appointed the best Federal Reserve chairman in our country’s history.  Reagan fired him and appointed the worst Federal Reserve chairman our country has ever had.  Plus he spent a ton of money, particularly on the military.  Why exactly is this guy a conservative icon?

Now onto the military.  Does the US really need to spend almost as much on defense as the rest of the world combined?  Hello!  The Cold War is over.  Is this really about protecting our nation or are we padding the pockets of military contractors?  What protection are we getting for the $660 billion spent this year?  Wouldn’t we be as safe or safer spending say $200 billion?  Why is the defense budget this sacred untouchable thing?  $1.4 trillion deficit, but don’t touch the sacred cow.

Now onto taxes.  Hypothetically I’m against taxes except ones that go to protect my freedoms.  But again we don’t live in a hypothetical world.  We have to pay for all the money the conservatives spend.  Who should do that – the rich who benefit from the system or the poor who get screwed by it?  By my wording, you can of course tell what my answer is.  The rich should; at least more than they are now.  Let’s take John Paulson as an example.  Last year he made $5 billion dollars.  Now I don’t have a problem with him making that much as long as he didn’t cheat, which as far as I know he didn’t.  But let’s look at his tax bill.  He will pay somewhere between 0% and 15% federal tax on that $5 billion.  I don’t know about you, but my tax rate is higher than that.  Can we conservatives admit that this might not be a fair tax system?

What about the thorny issue of the Bush tax cuts and capital gains taxes.  Democrats see the inequality and the unfairness of the system and rail against the Bush tax cuts and 15% capital gains tax.  The problem is that their solutions aren’t very well thought out.  They propose increasing capital gains, sighting the billionaires, but forget to mention that this same higher rate will also apply to lower middle class people like me.  To me the solution seems simple.  Instead of taxing people who make $1 billion and people who make $400,000 a year the same, why not add a few more layers?  I would argue that the person making $400,000 a year is already paying enough taxes.  How about keeping the rate for those people the same and adding layers of higher rates for people who make $5 million a year, and $10 million, and $100 million, and so on?  This would protect the small business owner while reducing the deficit.  Take the same approach for capital gains.  Don’t attack people like me, just trying to pay off my mortgage and save a little.   Go after the guy with $1 billion capital gains, who is trying to win a real world game of Monopoly and will never be able to spend his money even if he tried.

Now I want to touch on regulation.  Unless you are an anarchist you believe that we need some rules.  So off the bat we can’t rule out regulation entirely.  The conservative concern is that the government will come up with damaging unethical regulations, which in my mind is a justified concern.  But we do need some.  Can we admit that not all people are saints?  Some people will knowingly hurt others if it makes them a buck.  There are people out there who literally have the power to bring down nations.  Do we conservatives really want to give them free reign?  In my mind, the reason environmental regulations are needed is that when someone pollutes the air he is not only damaging his property but everyone else’s as well.  To me the same principle applies to banking and health care.
I suppose what I’m saying is that before conservative leaders impose their conservative principles on the poor and elderly they first need to fix the mess they’ve helped create.  Sound money.  Fair banking regulations.  Regulated insurance industry (the insurance industry isn’t regulated by the way.)   Fair tax system.  Pay for what you spend now, not down the road.  Then we can talk about the conservative ideal.

For the uninitiated, if your boys are teenagers and are wanting to excel at sports they should be at least doing heavy squats and bench presses.  I’m hoping they’ll do a series on deadlifting soon as that is the other basic power move.

Both the links below are part 1 of a series of videos. You can follow the links to see the next videos in the series.

So You Think You Can Squat – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkF9QD7oCIA
So You Think You Can Bench – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byOk4OE_6uI

It’s unfortunate that the fitness advice women have received over the last forty years has been almost exactly the opposite of what women should do. They are told to eat diets that resemble what farmers use to fatten their livestock. Then women are told to exercise in a way that tears up their joints, causes them to lose muscle, and takes a large portion of their free time. Then when the women can’t lose weight they think they have failed, when it was really the diet and exercise program that failed. That’s why I’m writing this.

Let’s pretend that we’ve never heard any health advice before and create a diet and exercise program that makes sense. Let’s start with diet. Our macronutrients options are fat, proteins, and carbohydrates. Of the three, which is the lowest calorie? Protein. Of the three, which will make you full the longest? Protein. Of the three, which will make you hungry the quickest? Carbohydrates. Of the three, which will help raise your metabolism the most? Protein. Given this info, what would be a sensible diet? Quite a bit of protein, 0.7 – 1 gram of protein per pound of lean body weight (.7 to maintain muscle, 1 to add muscle). Enough healthy fats, not trans or vegetable fats, to get you near your calorie total for the day. And then add some carbs to fit how you feel. As an example, I’ll make up a daily diet for myself. For me this comes out to 140 grams of protein a day, 110 grams of fat a day and 100 grams of carbs a day. This is around 1950 calories a day.

Let’s compare my breakdown to what the FDA recommends. For a similar calorie level the FDA recommends 50 grams of protein, 65 grams of fat and 300 grams of carbs. Remember above when I said that the recommended diet is similar to what a farmer feeds his hogs to fatten them up. What are hogs and cattle fed? Quick digesting carbs. What does the government recommend we primarily eat? Quick digesting carbs. A piece of whole wheat bread will raise your blood sugar faster than spooning table sugar into your mouth (it has a higher glycemic index).

To eat the way I’m suggesting you should if you want to be a healthy slim woman you have to get over the government dogma we’ve been fed for decades; they made it up. Saturated fat is not bad for you. Protein does not hurt your kidneys. Cholesterol is not bad for you, actually it’s essential and self regulating. Unhealthy cholesterol comes from processed carbs.

Simply put, eat meat and don’t be afraid of the fat, eat as many non-starchy vegetables as you want and, if you want some carbs, eat some potatoes or rice.

Now onto the exercise part of the equation. The primary exercises recommended for women trying to lose weight are aerobics and running. My concern with these exercises is that they are hard on our bodies. The forces on our joints during these exercises are enormous. Plus the whole concept doesn’t make sense to me. To burn a piece of bread a person needs to walk up about thirty flights of stairs. Doesn’t trying to out stairmaster our diet seem like a losing battle? Instead shouldn’t the goal be to raise our metabolisms so that we are burning more all the time? We do this by getting more muscle. A pound of muscle burns 30-40 calories a day. That adds up quick. This is especially important for women who lose muscle as they get older.

If you look at distant runners, and I would assume serious aerobics instructors, they look gaunt. That is exactly the opposite of what we want. Women should be doing exercises that add muscle. The added benefit of moving from cardio based exercise to strength based exercise is the time savings. Instead of doing cardio for hours a week you can work out for 45 minutes twice a week and get on with living your life. You’ll get stronger, slimmer, have better joint health, have stronger bones and have more free time.

Many women seem to think that lifting heavy weights is a man thing. It’s not. There is nothing inherently feminine about being weak. Most men and women don’t find large muscles on women attractive, but that is not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about adding some muscle. If you are lifting and you feel your muscles are as big as you want them, go lighter or take a break from that body part for a while. Simple.

Ok. I don’t read political books and certainly haven’t read any but this one this year. But I can’t imagine there being a better one out there than Griftopia. It’s one of those books that make you think that those who haven’t read it shouldn’t hold strong political opinions, because they can’t possibly understand what is really going on.

The great thing about Taibbi is that he isn’t an ideologue. In the first chapter of the book he explains why the simplistic ideological positions we fight over don’t work anymore. “Our world isn’t about ideology anymore. It’s about complexity. We live in a complex bureaucratic state with complex laws and complex business practices, and the few organizations with the corporate willpower to master these complexities will inevitably own the political power.” Personally I come from a libertarian bent because they are philosophically correct. You can’t argue with them. The problem is simplistic philosophy, like simplistic economics, doesn’t work in the real world. For example, when reading this book I was reminded of the anarchist/libertarian idea that governments shouldn’t own roads. There is a chapter in Griftopia about state and local governments in the US selling roads, parking meters, and the like to foreign monetary funds. What happens? Users are charged out the wazoo for use of the roads and parking meters and the good of the people isn’t considered anymore, not to mention the governments probably aren’t paid nearly enough.

In his conclusion Taibbi summarizes the political scene wonderfully, “If the people must politick, then let them do it in the proper arena, in elections between Wall Street-sponsored Democrats and Wall Street-sponsored Republicans. They want half the country lined up like the Tea Parties against overweening government power, and the other half, the Huffington Post crowd, railing against corporate excess. But don’t let the two sides start thinking about the bigger picture and wondering if the real problem might be a combination of the two.” That’s what I’m beginning to understand. Sometimes Democrats can be right. Both sides have a point.

My favorite chapter was the one about the Obama health care bill. Before quoting anything I should point out that as far as I can tell Taibbi voted for Obama, although he didn’t say. To understand the health care bill you need to know about the McCarran-Ferguson Act. According to Wikipedia “The McCarran–Ferguson Act, 15 U.S.C. §§ 1011-1015, is a United Sates federal law that exempts the business of insurance from most federal regulation, including federal anti-trust laws to a limited extent.” I had no idea insurance was exempt in this way. Taibbi says “…you won’t understand exactly how bad a deal Obamacare is until you can grasp the subtext of the whole so-called health care reform effort, which was to pass a ‘health care reform bill’ without touching McCarren-Ferguson.” The point is that if the politicians genuinely wanted to help people, as opposed to helping Insurance and Pharmaceutical companies, they would have repealed this act. A couple people tried, as Taibbi describes, but they didn’t so much as amend it. This brings me to one of the money quotes of the chapter “Obamacare had been designed as a coldly cynical political deal: massive giveaways to Big Pharma in the form of monster subsidies, and an equally lucrative handout to big insurance in the form of an individual mandate granting a few already-wealthy companies 25-30 million new customers who would be forced to buy their products at artificially inflated, federally protected prices.” Taibbi then goes on to describe how the politicians got campaign funding for the next two cycles in return for passing the bill.

Taibbi also has chapters on Greenspan, the Housing Bubble, the Commodity Bubble and the Tea Party. A cautionary note about the book is that Taibbi writes for Rolling Stone and his language reflects that, although not too often, so if that bothers you should probably not read the book.

After reading the book I looked online to see what other people thought of the book. One reviewer dismissed it because Taibbi doesn’t offer any solutions. I disagree, because to me the starting point to affecting change is for people to understand what is really going on and teaching people to think about issues sensibly, which is what Griftopia is about.

I’ve been researching “health” quite a bit lately and wanted to compile some of what I’ve learned.

Step 1. Don’t drink your calories
The easiest way to lose weight is to stop drinking things that have calories. One of the reasons Americans on average are so heavy is that we drink 50 pounds of sugar a year. Ok, that number is made up, but it’s probably pretty close since we ingest 100 pounds a year. Keep in mind that in studies people who’ve switched to diet soda have actually gained weight, so don’t do that. Drink more water. You probably need to drink more water anyway.

Step 2. Skip breakfast and take a walk
If you want to burn fat you need to put your body in a position to burn fat. The popular health advice to eat six high carb meals a day puts your body in carb burning mode all the time. Unless you are doing cardio like crazy you are going to hold on to your fat. No, what you need to do is not eat for a while so your body has to use your fat stores for energy. Then, instead of eating breakfast, go take a walk or ride your bike to burn some of that fat. By the way, the six meal a day recommendation is a myth. Eating more often doesn’t raise your metabolism. Hunger should only be an issue if you are eating too many processed carbs which we will talk about in the next step.

Step 3. Don’t eat processed carbs
The western diet is founded on processed carbs. It’s good to keep in mind that the USDA’s mission is not to make you healthy, but to sell more processed carbs. That’s their mandate. It’s no surprise, then, that processed carbs are the base of the USDA’s food pyramid. And who pays for medical research – the USDA and the processed carb companies. Don’t be surprised if the nutritional advice you hear is a bit skewed. Processed carbs are mostly empty calories that jack up your insulin levels and make you hungry (insulin is what makes you hungry). A piece of bread has a higher glycemic index than a snickers bar. Try to stay away from grains and sugary foods as much as you can. In my opinion, fructose and gluten are the two substances causing the most health problems in the West. As Michael Pollan says, “eat leaves, not seeds” and I would add in meat and vegetables.

Step 4. Lift weights really heavy once or twice a week
Muscle is a wonderful thing. It raises your metabolism, makes you stronger, makes your bones stronger, and, as long as you don’t have too much, makes you look better. A pound of muscle burns about forty calories a day just existing. That adds up quick. As we get older we naturally lose muscle. This is particularly true for women who lose roughly half a pound of muscle a year.

So getting more muscle is important. How do we get more muscle? We lift heavy things. Since our goal is to be healthy, we want to minimize impact on our joints. That means putting as much load on your muscles as you can while minimizing the amount of movement. When you lift then, lift as heavy of a weight as you can for only a few slow reps. I don’t care if you are a seventy-year-old woman. If you want to be healthy you should train like a power lifter. Don’t want to look like a power lifter? Well then don’t. You don’t do one set of bicep curls and have biceps like Arnold Schwarzenegger. If your muscles in a particular area are becoming larger than you’d like, work that muscle less frequently.

Step 5. Eat a lot of protein
To add more muscle you need to eat protein and because the Western diet is based on processed carbs you probably aren’t eating enough protein. The rule of thumb for gaining muscle is a gram of protein for every pound of body weight. For me that’s 180 grams a day. If you are like me you only eat a third of that amount. Maybe you don’t want to eat that much protein. I’m not sure I do. Regardless, eat more than you are now. Additional benefits to eating more protein is that it takes the more energy to burn than carbs or fat, which gives you a metabolic advantage, and it helps you feel full.

Step 6. Take vitamin D and fish oil
This step is more of a general health recommendation than anything to do with being thinner. Because of the Western lifestyle we don’t get enough sun and our Omega 3 to Omega 6 fatty acid ratio is way out of wack. To remedy this take 2,000 to 4,000 IU of vitamin D a day and two or three tablespoons of krill or cod liver oil. This will cost you about fifty cents a day which is a very low price to pay to be healthier.

Step 7. Don’t do cardio unless you really want to
This may sound counter-intuitive, but cardio hurts your joints, puts stress on your hormonal systems, and wastes tons of time. Besides you don’t need cardio to be thin and healthy. If you do these other steps you can get down to less than 10% body fat with no cardio.

Step 8. Binge on carbs once a week
This is kind of an advanced step called carb re-feeding. Once a week, you should eat a more like an American. That means you can eat all those things you avoided but were craving. This resets some of your hormonal levels, keeping your body primed for fat loss and it helps you resist temptation for the rest of the week because you know you get to pig out later.

Step 9. Take creatine
The last step is to take creatine. This is one of the few supplements out there that actually works with no side effects. Basically, creatine gives you more energy, makes your muscles bigger, and helps the muscles repair themselves faster. Again, it costs about fifty cents a day. Not essential, but helps you achieve your goal more easily without much expense.