Conspiracy Theory

Quite a few recent studies have shown that – hey – that low carb, high fat diets really do work better than the fat-free high carb ones. And I’ve been puzzled about why the food industry and medical establishment keeps refusing to admit that they’ve been wrong all these years. I’ve come up with a government conspiracy, which might confirm that I'm crazy:

I contend that it is in the government’s best interest – in several ways – to keep the general population eating a high carb diet. Here's why.

First

Several studies have found that a low-fat, low-protein, high carb diet lowers testosterone levels, especially in men. Testosterone causes aggressive tendencies and muscle development, and the government wants to keep the population compliant, non-threatening, weak, tired and easy to control.

Corollary

It is also in the government’s interest to keep us fat. Fat people can’t mount a real revolution – they’d get too tired five minutes into it.

Two

Carbohydrates – grains and sugars – are cheap. If people decided to spend more on meat and vegetables, they’d have less to spend on products that have higher profit margins, like consumer electronics and silly-looking clothes they don’t need. Also, they’d have less to spend on processed foods. (Incidentally, modern processed foods are generally about starches and sugars – so if we started eating fewer carbs, the processed food industry would be hit pretty hard.)

Three

This one’s tricky, but this is the really good one, so follow along closely: Our agricultural capacity – particularly thanks to not-so-good technologies such as chemical pesticides and artificial fertilizers – is far greater than we Americans actually need. (U.S. farms grow more grains and sugar than we could ever possibly consume. That’s why they’re so cheap in the marketplace.) (By the way, some studies have also shown that pesticide-treated food tends to be harder to metabolize – it makes you fatter. Another good thing, in the government’s eyes!)

Now, you might think that this means that farms would become unprofitable and farmers would give up the farming business in favor of something lucrative. Unfortunately, farms are profitable, because the U.S. government delivers billions in farm subsidies every year. The farm lobby is powerful enough to squash any attempts to rectify this. Why is the farm lobby so powerful? Because it’s not a bunch of small-time farmers lobbying Congress: most farms are owned by one of a few major billion-dollar conglomerates – the American family farm is so rare these days it’s almost a myth.

Anyway, farm subsidies keep agribusiness corporations profitable and also result in our farms constantly producing too much food. If we started eating less grains and sugars, we’d literally run out of space to store all the surplus, these corporations would see their profits fall, and the government would have to pay even more subsidies to keep them in business. There’s already all this grain. Somebody has to eat it!

Why don’t we just let agricultural profits fall? Because we can’t picture farms run by corporation. We still think that if a farm goes under, some poor farmer and his family will go homeless and starve. All the agricultural lobby has to do is trot out some old advertising copy about how farmers toil away, at the mercy of the elements, to keep us from starving – and we get weepy eyed.

Four

All right, you say. If we have so much surplus grain, let’s ship it to hungry countries and feed the starving in, say, Africa. We could sell it for a few pennies or even give it away! Why don’t we do this? Because we like them to starve. A poor, starving nation is a nation that can’t ever become strong enough to become a threat to us. Or mount any kind of effective protest when we march in and strip them of their natural resources.

We also keep our surpluses in store as a foreign policy weapon. In the event that some starving country looks like it might develop the means to feed itself, we can swoop in, sell our surpluses at such cheap prices it forces native farmers out of business. Once their farms have been shut down, we cut off the grain supply. Then everyone starves, the country becomes/stays easy to control and … well, the cycle repeats.

Conclusion

So anyway, that’s what would happen if the government encouraged us to eat fewer carbs and more meats and vegetables. Multibillion-dollar corporations would go out of business, and many Congressmen would thus lose their jobs. Other starving countries might have a chance of pulling themselves out of poverty and getting out from under our control. And our own population would grow the backbone necessary to confront and question our government about all the other stupid and/or immoral things it does.

Family Unity

So President Bush was in Mexico last week, and Mexican President Felipe Calderon criticized U.S. immigration policies, and by extension, Bush -- even though Bush has actually attempted to liberalize immigration laws but been stymied by his own party. But forget your views on immigration (illegal and otherwise) and U.S.-Mexico border patrol for a second. The part of the story (as seen in the Washington Post) that startled me was this:

During U.S. President George W. Bush´s visit to Mexico last week, Calderón said he has relatives "working in vegetable fields" and restaurants in the United States. "They probably handle what you eat," he said.

In the interview Friday, Calderón said between "five and 20" of his relatives have migrated and that he does not know their current immigration statuses or whether they entered legally. The relatives include "cousins, uncles and in-laws," he said.

Let me get this straight: You, Felipe Calderon -- the president of your country, and therefore one of the most powerful men of Mexico -- have relatives who are doing so poorly that they're reduced to leaving their homes and travelling to the U.S. to work as miserably paid vegetable washers? And you don't even know if they immigrated legally or if they had to smuggle themselves over like so much chattel?

I haven't made up my mind about changing the laws governing how we treat illegal immigrants. But it seems to me that Calderon doesn't have a leg to stand on, morally. I mean, by his own admission, his relatives are so impoverished they had to leave the country to find work -- and he did nothing to help them. I'm not saying that he had to make them his top Cabinet officials, but surely he has a friend who'll give them a job as a waiter or a secretary or something???

Things are so bad for them, that they have to leave the country -- and Calderon cared so little about their fate that he didn't even bother to see if they had a ride to get there or if they'd have to hike their asses across hundreds of miles of desert, and he didn't have the decency to see where they ended up?

Damn, that's cold, man,

Quick Shout Out

For the two or three people who regularly read this blog:

New, cool blogs in the links section: Yesterday's Salad, Flying Fists of Ham, Rubber Buns and Liquor and Tokyo Snowlet. All worth reading for humorous and thought-provoking posts. In the case of Tokyo Snowlet, she's a pretty damn good amateur photographer, too.

Check them out.

There Are No Secrets: Internal Arts Demystified

There Are No Secrets, Part I

There’s a misconception that Taijiquan and other “internal” martial arts allow frail old men and people with little muscular strength to absorb and dissolve great quantities of incoming force and generate immensely powerful strikes.

But if you’ve ever seen an internal fighter -- a fighter, mind you, not some nancy boy in silk pajamas and white aerobic slippers -- wearing just shorts and a tank top, you realize that the truly powerful internal strikers only look frail when they’re wearing a shirt and baggy trousers – clothing that masks the oak-tree thighs, massive calves and incredibly striated posterior-chain muscles running top-to-bottom of the rear of the body. And corded forearms. Western society has trained us to equate strength with bodybuilding, so we think a guy without massive shoulders and bulging pecs isn’t actually strong -- when true functional strength is found in the areas I mentioned.

Recently, someone also pointed out that one of the reasons the old-time Taiji fighters could honestly claim not to need any “hard” strength or weightlifting training was because they did grueling farm work everyday so they could have something to eat. That’s a better workout than anything you can devise in a gym. (There’s a reason Matt Hughes is pound-for-pound the strongest UFC fighter out there: when he’s not training for a fight, he runs a small, working farm.)

Or, as one teacher I met once put it: “Hah! You really think a Taiji fighter learns how to fight by doing those stupid slow forms or moving around with soft, relaxed push hands? That’s what they show YOU guys. Then they go home, shut the door, and really train.”

It’s too bad 99.9% of Taijiquan teachers and students today seem to believe that “There’s No Such Thing As a Free Lunch.” Milton Friedman could’ve set them straight.

There Are No Secrets, Part II

Xingyiquan is one of the most aggressively martial and combat-oriented of the internal arts. Taijiquan might stress dissolving and complementing your attacker's force, Baguazhang might stress flowing around it, and neither, practiced properly, lacks power. But only Xingyiquan's stated goal is "to strike once and make him vomit blood."

One of Xingyi's primary methods of achieving this is very similar to wing chun -- take the smallest possible dissolving angle, then charge straight in with strikes. And xingyi strikes generate power from a very refined method of whole-body stepping. It turns out, in the early 1900s, in the United States, there was a Xingyi master whose name is still well known to the general public today: Jack Dempsey. Check out his book about championship boxing, and in particular, his "falling step" punching method -- chapters 7 - 10. That's Xingyi. Dempsey writes about how the jab should not be a light "set up" punch -- the way most boxers today use the jab -- but a strike that can end a fight on its own merits. And, done his way -- the xingyi way -- it can.

(Note: I've written in the past that I feel wing chun is the martial art that is closest to perfect in terms of scientific, efficient combat. Well, while it's a good idea for any martial artist to see what else is out there and try other styles out, the only one that might also, in my opinion, be worth studying from a combat perspective, is xingyiquan. Same no-nonsense philosophy, but better emphasis on power generation.)

There Are No Secrets, Part III

I mentioned Baguazhang above. That's an art that has its own particular way of generating power. If Taiji power is a chain-link whip, and xingyi power is like using a fired cannonball, baguazhang power is like the coiled steel fiber cables that support suspension bridges -- the internal tendons and ligaments twisting and preloading to release tremendous coiled power. This pre-loading combat, it came to me -- and I stress that, not really being a baguazhang adept, I could be wrong -- just a pre-loading concept that Russian strength guru Pavel Tsatsouline uses to develop flexibility, taken one step further. At least, that's how it seemed to me today as I was fooling around with a xingyi/bagua power drill today.

Here's the idea. First, every time you move, one muscle contracts, and the other extends. For instance, when you curl your arm, your bicep contracts, and the tricep extends. Your tricep has an inherent resistance built in to brake your bicep muscle -- just in case.

This idea is combined with Pavel's flexibility exercise for bagua power generation. When Pavel wants to make a given muscle more flexible, he first overcomes its inherent resistance and tension -- the tension I mentioned in the tricep above. Then he stretches it. For instance, if you wanted to stretch your hamstring, you should first do a single, extremely difficult rep of a leg curl and load up your hammie. Then, in the few seconds after you release, your muscle will be able to extend further than normal, since your nervous system is temporarily offline a little. (Through constant practice, you thus reprogram your nervous system into accepting this higher degree of possible extension and become more flexible.)

So a baguazhang guy simply loads an opposing muscle (like Pavel does) so that it can relax even more than normal. The opposing muscle can therefore generate more power with less resistance. Simplistically speaking, if you have a strike that depends on tricep contraction, you would preflex the bicep so that when it comes time to release, the bicep can offer less resistance to the power of the tricep. What baguazhang fighters learn to do is to preload and relax entire chains of muscles -- instantly, at will, without actually moving -- before releasing a strike. The adept ones do it so quickly and unconsciously that there's no time lag, yet the power amplification is still there.

So there you have it. There are no secrets to power. Not even among the ancient masters.

I'm the Master of the Universe: Have a Tip

Do all people who work in a vaguely finance-/financial services-related field have conversations like this? Or is it just me?

Mom: So, do you have any investments you can recommend?

Me: I don’t know, mom, I haven’t had time lately to really keep up with the markets?

Mom: You don’t know what’s going on in the stock market? What about ObscureCo? Do you think it will rise above 40?

Me: I’ve never heard of ObscureCo, mom. If have time this week, I’ll look it up. [translation: if I get bored with eating, having sex with my wife, watching kung fu movies, reading comics, drinking, walking around, looking up watches, and eating some more, and I’ve had my second nap of the day and there’s nothing good on TV, I’ll look it up.]

Mom: You haven’t heard of ObscureCo? But you work on Wall Street!

Me: Actually, I don’t work on Wall Street anymore, mom, but even when I did, I was a writer, not an analyst or an investment banker.

Mom: Oh, but you said your firm still works with investment banks.

Me: Yes, we do their marketing. We work with them. We don’t do investments.

Mom: But don’t you have to know about every stock in existence?

Me: No mom, I’m a marketing writer, not an investment banker or a stock analyst. Not that I would necessarily know about ObscureCo even if I was an I-banker.

Mom: But you must hear “things” at work. Couldn’t you tell me what’s going to happen?

Me: I work in marketing, mom. I don’t mastermind hostile takeovers or orchestrate IPOs.

Mom: Come on, you expect me to believe that? You can tell me! I won’t tell anyone! [translation: I will tell everyone. I will tell our relatives before I buy the stock, and if your tip pans out, I will brag about how my son gave me an insider tip that made me and our relatives thousands – millions. Then I will wonder why my son refuses to take my calls after his arrest.]

Me: Look mom, even if I did hear something, it would be illegal for me to tell you. That’s insider trading.

Mom: But what do you talk about with your coworkers around the water cooler?

Me: [mumbling] Jenna Jameson's titties and fart jokes, mostly.

Mom: What was that?

Me: Nothing.

Mom: What?

Me: What?

Mom: What did you say?

Me: Huh? What? Hello?

Mom: …

Me: …

Mom: So come on, tell me something. What do you recommend?

Me: Aargh! I told you mom! I don’t recommend anything!

Mom: Oh, so you think the market’s going to crash?

Me: I told you mom, I don’t know! Your guess is as good as mine!

Mom: [tremblingly, quietly] I don’t know why you won’t tell me. I just want to make a little money. I just want to have a little something to leave to you and Wife when I’m gone. Is that so bad? I’m not hurting anyone. It's not like I'm asking you to cut your arm off ...

Me: Damnit, I can’t tell you anything because I have no opinion of the market whatsoever!! I have no opinion of any stock whatsoever. If you want me to make a recommendation, buy some Diageo! They sell booze, and my friends like to drink a lot and get drunk, so it stands to reason they’ll make money! Buy Poop-Be-Gone! I stepped in some goddamn fucking dogshit yesterday and I'd love an easy way to get rid of the stench! All I know is that stepping in dog shit was goddamn less irritating than this conversation is right now!

Mom: OK, OK, calm down. Why are you always yelling at me? If you don’t know about ObscureCo, just say so.

Me: Fine, sorry, sorry.

Mom: So what about Miscellaneous Inc.? Do you think it might fall?

…

Shinzo Abe: Occam's Razor Triumphs

A recent article in the Economist discusses Shinzo Abe and his recent denial that Japan ever “used coercion” to “force” Chinese, Korean and Philippino women to work in sexual slavery in brothels during World War II.

First, my brief opinion of Abe’s comments: It is outrageous that years after the Japanese kidnapped, tortured, raped and assaulted these women, that the head of the Japanese government is, in effect, adding insult to injury by saying,“Heh. Boy, you bitches were such sluts.” Moreover, while I will concede that perhaps some of the kidnapped women had been prostitutes working brothels anyway, Abe is clearly implying that, “It’s OK to rape a whore, since she has no right to say no and has it coming anyway.”

The Economist notes that because Abe’s tenure as prime minister has thus far been a failure on the two key areas the Japanese public most cares about—economic growth and corruption reform, his approval ratings are dismally low.

The gist of the article argues that Abe made his unbelievably racist and disrespectful comments as a way to shore up and drum up support among his political base of conservative revisionists and hopefully raise his approval rating.

They’re missing the point.

Abe’s political base is indeed built on the support of conservative revisionists, but only because he agrees with their racist, ethnocentric views. We forget that this is a man whose grandfather, a top lieutenant of World War II generalissimio/Prime Minister Tojo and a leader in the occupation of Chinese Manchuria, barely escaped being tried as a Class A war criminal. This is a man whose father was implicated in one of the biggest bribery/insider trading scandals in Japanese history. But enough about his family …

This is a man who published a book that claimed that Japan perpetrated no war crimes during World War II, and fostered no war criminals. A man who successfully censored—against his country’s own free speech laws—a Japanese documentary that featured an opposing view to Japan’s wartime sex crimes history. A man who has argued that Japan should rebuild its military with an eye toward developing “first strike” capabilities.

This is a racist, an ethnocentric madman who, if he had his way, would return Japan to its bloodthirsty, imperialistic World War II-era plans for total Asian (and world) domination—if he could.

Sometimes, Occam is right – the simplest explanation is the correct one. Why did Shinzo Abe make such outrageous, morally bankrupt statements? Because he himself is outrageous, bigoted and morally bankrupt.

The Boyfriend Trouser: Clearly Not In the Game

So. At Yesterday's Salad, the concept of the "Boyfriend Trouser," a new Gap product for women, is stirring strong emotions -- and silly discussions.

But let's take the concept seriously. Why does Gap think the "Boyfriend Trouser" is a product women will want?

Is it because women like to commandeer the clothing of the men in their lives for themselves? From what I can tell, the thought process must've gone something like this: "Women steal boxer shorts, dress shirts, T-shirts, and even suit jackets, so often that they're now buying women's versions of these items. Therefore, I bet they probably steal men's trousers while we're not looking, and I bet, if we just made a feminine version of them, they'd buy those, too!"

But the marketing geniuses at the Gap are missing two key points. First the obvious: they've making a feminine version of men's pants for years. They're called--women's pants. Go figure.

But here's the less obvious one--women have never stolen the pants of their significant others, and there's a reason why: They look silly in them.

In contrast, when a guy sees his girlfriend or wife wearing one of his dress shirts, it causes a primal reaction.

For a guy, a dress shirt and a suit are his modern-day suit of armor. In medieval times, before a knight went to work, he put on his armor. "Avast, ye mateys! I'm off to storm the castle!" That's the message that a guy is subconsciously sending out every morning when he puts on a dress shirt. Sure, I've mixed pirate and knight expressions, but you get the point.

So when he suddenly sees his "armor" on his wife or girlfriend, it's a bit of a shock. It's suddenly not warlike. It's ... wow, she left a few extra buttons undone! If I squint, I can see ... whoa! And look, there's something missing, where are the pants ... wait, DOUBLE WHOA!

The dress-shirt effect was immortalized in the tragically short-lived TV series, Sports Night, in the episode "Shoe Money Tonight. Jeremy, who was just proven to be in the right and was clearly about to win an argument with his girlfriend, Natalie, has the tables neatly turned on him:

Jeremy: Natalie, I think it's best if we spend tonight apart.
Natalie: You're probably right. I've got no clothes at your place anyway, so I'd just end up having to wear one of your shirts, and I know how much you hate that.
(Long pause as she stares innocently up at him)
Jeremy: (slapping the table) I was never even in the game!
Natalie: (jumping up) Good night, everybody!

You get the idea.

A somewhat softer, yet still pleasant effect, can be seen when a girl steals her boyfriend's T-shirt. Soft, swaying swishiness, all that glorious exposed leg ... Yowza.

And when a woman steals a man's suit jacket? It sends a message to the world. It says, "Yes, I am wearing something so skimpy underneath this, that my body is chilled (and my nipples are hard.) That's why I need to borrow this chivalrous gentleman's suit coat."

But if a woman were to wear my pants, what it would say to me is, "My ass and my waistline are so humongous, I can't even find women's pants big enough to fit me -- I have to wear a man's pants."

And I'm sorry, but most men don't like their women ginormous. That's why the "Boyfriend Trouser" is such a stupid idea.