Off to Local Fest 2012

In a bit of actual Hometown news today is local fest and I'll let Dave tell it since he's the professional writer.

The Shirt Factory in Glens Falls will be holding their inaugural LocalFest: Stuff Made Here event, on Saturday, September 8th.

The all-day festival is an exciting showcase of both the history and continued tradition of manufacturing in Glens Falls and the surrounding region. LocalFest will offer community members the chance to shop from local artisans, artists and locally owned businesses for a wide-range of unique products.

The Shirt Factory was once home to the McMullen-Leavens Company, one of the nation’s greatest shirt and dress manufacturers. Today the building provides a home to more than 70 artists and artisans, shops and creative and healing services.

Thanks Dave!

And that's how you copy and paste a post like a professor of polisci.

Give Me Big Gulp or Give Me Death

I suppose they're not mutually exclusive in the long run where we're all dead anyway. Might come a little faster with enough Big Gulps. That may not be the actual size in the link.

Anyway thanks to a junk voicemail I have been informed of the "Million Big Gulp March" taking place today in NYC to protest the latest effort by Mayor Bloomberg to impose the nanny state on freedom loving NYer's.

About 1,000 protesters chanting “Drink Free Or Die” are expected to take part in the “Million Big Gulp March” in City Hall Park at 4:30 p.m. Monday.

By my math that's a thousand Big Gulps apiece. Good luck guys. That's a high price you're paying for the cause of liberty. Maybe get a few Nathan's hot dogs while you're out and about.

Black Friday Music

 

Thanksgiving’s over. Break out the Gene Autry:

 

Who Knew?

Walking is good for you. 

Beyond the snarkiness, it is a good article and important research. I’m sure there are many worse ways to spend research dollars. SDI, anyone?

Research shows that walking can actually boost the connectivity within brain circuits, which tends to diminish as the grey hairs multiply.

"Patterns of connectivity decrease as we get older," said Dr. Arthur F. Kramer, who led the study team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

I’ve been sans automobile for going on two years and can say that part of that connectivity building is just trying to remember the bus schedules.

"The aerobic group also improved in memory, attention and a variety of other cognitive processes," Kramer said. "As the older people in the walking group became more fit, the coherence among different regions in the networks increased and became similar to those of the 20-yr olds," Kramer explained.

And here I was attributing these improvements to the tai chi. But, I do hope this is so, as I hope to be trying to assimilate to a new culture and language soon and will likely need all the cognition I can muster.

The findings come as no surprise to Dr. Lynn Millar, an expert with the American College of Sports Medicine. She said while walking might seem like a simple activity, the brain is actually working to integrate information from many different sources.

"When we walk we integrate visual input, auditory input, as well as input that's coming from joints and muscles regarding where the foot is, how much force, and things like that " said Millar, a professor of Physical Therapy at Andrews University, in Berrien Springs, Michigan.

I’m usually just trying to keep from being run over, as Queensbury is not the most pedestrian friendly town. I do have new sidewalks between apartment and work, though. Occasionally during the winter they remove the snow from them as well.

"It's that old concept: if you don't use it you lose it," she said. "In order for something to be beneficial we need to do it repetitively, and walking is a repetitive activity."

Millar, author of "Action Plan for Arthritis," said while some changes are inevitable with age, they don't have to happen as quickly as they do in some people.

This was a big motivator for me. I had blood clots in the summer 2008 and have had arthritis in my left knee and hip for five years or so. Walking was said to be good for both and, of course, I’m a cheap bastard and could save money. But, I think if you keep doing something then you keep being able to do it and I want to be able to keep walking. The Lord helps those who help themselves.

A pedometer helps quantify things. Otherwise, I think it’s likely to exaggerate how far you think you walked. This is mine and it’s fairly cheap. And this is a really cool site to record steps on, even if they are a day ahead of me.

Don’t click the video unless you like cheesy 80’s music as much as I do:

 

Why Small Investors (and pigs) Get Slaughtered

The psychology of investing leads people to invariably jump in and out of investments at the wrong time. Been there, done that.

Investors withdrew a staggering $33.12 billion from domestic stock market mutual funds in the first seven months of this year, according to the Investment Company Institute, the mutual fund industry trade group. Now many are choosing investments they deem safer, like bonds.

The recipe for loss, or at least middling returns, is to sell on type of investment on the downturn and buy another when it’s ascending. Put simply, we sell low and buy high. These people are buying into bonds as they are riding high.

Take free advice for what it’s worth, but the Occam’s razor portfolio would likely beat any managed mutual fund over the long run. It will 3 ETFs and 10 minutes of work a year.

Put 40% of your money into BND which is a total market bond ETF. Put 30% of your investment money into VTI which covers the entire US market from low to high. And put the remainder into VEU which is an index that invests in the whole world excluding the US. Choose a brokerage with cheap commissions which will re-invest dividends for you. Rebalance back to the 40-30-30 split once a year and Bob’s your uncle.

When  it comes to investing, I’ve done all the dumb things.

 

White Wheat Flour

It’s been ages since there’s been a post even tangentially related to baking, so here goes. I’ve been using this flour for some time and finally looked to see what it is. Apparently it is as healthy as regular wheat flour, and makes a much tastier bread.

Think I had hesitated because I was afraid to see that it wasn’t as good for us as the normal brown wheat flour, but:

Confusingly, it's called "white wheat," made from a naturally occurring albino variety. But the resemblance to typical bleached flour stops there. Fans say flour made from white wheat has all the nutrition and fiber of whole wheat without the taste that some find unpleasant.

Tannins and phenolic acid in the outer bran of the red wheat commonly used to make whole-wheat flour can give it a bitter taste. White wheat doesn't have those compound.

I’ve been using it half and half with white flour with good results. Now if I can find a white brown rice and fruits and veggies that taste like burgers I’ll be eating as healthy as I should.

Song for Truth101

This post is inspired by my friend Truth. Sometimes we just get too focused on the negative events of the day. Life really is wonderful and is to be celebrated. Any day that your name doesn’t turn up in the morning obits is a good one. Everyone sing along!

UPDATE: I feel I may have misjudged the tone of my friend Truth’s blog of late. But, I haven’t been spending a lot of time in the tubes lately. In any case, I’ll post another clip and just assume there is a song somewhere between Lesley Gore and Patti Smith that would be perfectly appropriate. Just not sure what it would be. Once again, feel free to sing along.

RIP Gidget

Hope you enjoyed that last run for the border.

If

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too; – Kipling (of course). 

Top officials from the Bush administration have hit upon a revealing new theme as they retrospectively justify their national security policies. Call it the White House 9/11 trauma defense. 

Being in over their heads is probably not a good excuse for the crimes of the Bush gang. Can you plead incompetence which is what WH 9/11 trauma defense sounds like?  

Cheney's admission that 9/11 caused him to reassess the threats to the nation only underscores how, for months, top officials had ignored warnings from the CIA and the NSC staff that urgent action was needed to preempt a major al-Qaeda attack.

Let this never be forgotten, along with:

Shortly after the second World Trade Center tower was hit, I burst in on Rice (then the president's national security adviser) and Cheney in the vice president's  office and remember glimpsing horror on his face. 

And you guys wanted us to think you were the second coming of Churchill.

The Bush administration's response actually undermined the principles and values America has always stood for in the world, values that should have survived this traumatic event.

Al-Qaeda did not defeat the American people, only the little men in the White House who had no trust in American values of law and justice.

Criminal, Not Political

My aim with this blog was, and continues to be, to avoid the political. I have high hopes for Mr. Obama, but I don't want to be a wide-eyed believer.

That being said, this story which continues to build is not political, it's criminal if true. Actually, I'm not even sure what the defense would be. We know there were no WMD's. We know prisoners were tortured at Gitmo. We know the CIA assessment was that Saddam had no WMD's before the war and they had witnesses to testify to that. It's not hard to infer that "evidence" of al-Qaeda and Iraq connections was tortured out of these prisoners.

"detainees interrogated at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp had revealed that Iraq had trained al Qaida operatives in chemical and biological warfare, an assertion that wasn't true."

"interrogators at Guantanamo and other prison camps were ordered to find evidence of alleged cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein — despite CIA reports that there were only sporadic, insignificant contacts between the militant Islamic group and the secular Iraqi dictatorship."

"two alleged senior al Qaida operatives in CIA custody were waterboarded repeatedly — Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times and Khalid Sheik Mohammed at least 183 times."

"A key proponent of the Iraq invasion and of harsh interrogation methods, Cheney has become the leading defender of such measures"

I have never studied law, beyond business law, but I suspect people have been indicted on less than what has so far been revealed in this episode.

Somehow, the fact that Liz Cheney and the CIA are saying there's nothing to it, doesn't put my mind at ease.

(Liz) Cheney said: "You saw the CIA come out yesterday and say, absolutely, unequivocally, waterboarding was not used to establish this kind of a link."

Fortunately, we have Michael Steele and "a lot of Republicans" calling for a truth commission.

UPDATE: I meant to mention Speaker Pelosi in the original post. Since I just saw it at PolAnimal, I'll say it now. Investigate everyone who should reasonably be investigated.

UPDATE DOS: President Obama is quickly going from the "new JFK" to being the "new LBJ."