Obama raised my taxes! (or the opposite of that)

Back in 2010 my buddy Hank told me the following story:

He had gone to his Father-in-law’s house for some family function when his Father-in-law launched into a political rant that culminated with the declaration “Obama raised my taxes!” Hank said he ignored this at first but the father-in-law’s ranting continued to grow in intensity, expressing the irrational disgust that many of us are now used to when people talk politics. He repeated his previous claim several more times “Obama raised my taxes!” Finally, Hank said “What taxes are you even talking about?” The father-in-law hesitated and then repeated his statement. So Hank repeated his question. The father-in-law began evasive maneuvers with “All my taxes! Everything is more now.” Hank just frowned. “That’s bullcrap. Go get your tax statements and show me.” The father-in-law dropped the tax thing at that point and switched tracks to “Obama spends more than…blah…blah…blah”. Hank said he just got up at that point and went to see what his wife and mother-in-law were up to.

I have had this type of exchange many times over the last 8 years and it’s always a stupid move on my part. This is NOT the way to deal with an irrational, politically partisan person, least of all a FOXstafarian right wing nut job. It’s like arguing with a drunken person, until they sober up it’s a waste of breath and it ruins your evening. 

To a person like this any word that isn’t against Obama is for Obama and anything that you consider to be wrong or immoral must be caused by or supported by the Democratic party and especially Obama. He’s King Democrat. I am not now, nor have I ever been a Democrat and I’m certainly not an Obama supporter. I’d be happy to back those statements up with my personal opinions but as soon as I start one of those irrational right wingers will tell me I’m wrong and then launch into whatever Rush Limbaugh was just talking about. I am also not a moron who thinks the President is an all-powerful, demi-God, rock star who will fix all my problems or single handedly destroy my entire way of life. I’m looking at you Trump supporters. Stop choosing the lesser of 6 evils because you want something that sounds as different from the other side as possible.

I feel like, after a lifetime of watching the conservative adults around me focus on their own interests when it came to political opinions, things right now have gone off the rails for those Americans who identify as “Republican” or “conservative” and they’ve grown a group of nut jobs at least as bad as the leftist-earth-first-tofu-eating hippies we’ve been mocking for 50 years. How is it that the save the whale crowd is now more solidly conservative in their values and actions than the right wing Christians who want to reduce individual freedom because it upsets their idea of sexuality or family structure? It seems like, ever since 9/11, the right wingers are the first to rush to the senate and demand more government. I know grown men who have never spoken aloud in front of me about the government except to say it should be slashed in size and reduced in power, who now furiously demand that the government bring its powers to bear against immigrants and other religions. They used to get excited about the idea of having their own freedom and now all they want is to see others repressed and controlled.

Maybe it was always like this and I’m just now getting to these topics. Maybe I’m just now noticing how grown-ups act. Just in case that’s the truth I’ll mention that I have long been fascinated with this over-correction that people make when they feel that their opinions/beliefs are being attacked or condemned. For example I had a terrible introduction and subsequent exposure to Christianity. It scarred me deeply for years and I made a grade-A ass of myself more than once in front of people I loved because of my aggravation with the general Christian attitude to which I had been exposed. I couldn’t see how my opinion was flawed until I heard truly radical atheists online. It was like cold water down my back to see that the people who have been mistreated grew up to be abusive (not unlike me). The sad part was while they are acting like that they claim to be rational and ruled by science.  At this point I had a come-to-Jesus moment with myself and developed a better philosophy. Something I can live with. I guess when I dealt with that religious issue I really dealt with a philosophical issue and I had to address the political aspect as well.

So, that brings me full circle to the current President and the federal income tax. I did not vote for now will I vote for Obama. I don’t agree with much of his social ideology (as far as I can tell). But I do not blame him for the tax law. However, when I looked into the federal income tax brackets and standard deductions for the last 15 years I found something amazing. I pay less tax now. I don’t know what you pay because I don’t know what games you play. I get a pay check, my employer withholds based on the law and at the end of the year I actually get a little money back now. I don’t play any games, I don’t pretend to be a business, and I don’t buy stuff just for the write-off. I am a middle aged, single, middle-income American citizen and I am a little ashamed to admit that the tax code has been getting better for me. (Do not confuse this with an endorsement of our disgusting way of collecting federal income tax. That’s a topic for another day when I'm not trying to make a different point about blind hatred and irrational anger.)

What follows are real numbers calculated using the actual marginal tax rates and standard deductions for every $$ that a single person or married couple earned from 2002 – 2016. Since I didn't calculate any other deductions or consider income from other sources, my numbers are truly "conservative". I gave Uncle Sam less money and had more for me. This started with the Bush tax cuts back 2003 when we got the 10/15/25% tax brackets and it carries on to now. I don't want to hear the "Obama wanted to do away with those tax cuts". He also wanted to close Guantanamo bay and didn't want to tomahawk missile Libya back to the 1920's but we can't always get what we want and the reality is that time has passed and these things are now historical fact. My taxes went down.

If you can’t handle the fact that it happened while George Bush or Barrack Obama were the president, or if you can’t stop making excuses for how the other party didn't want this to happen and we narrowly avoided the blah blah blah, then go F^%K yourself. The G-D fact is that my taxes went down under a war monger AND a socialist. That should be a sign that the system is capable of working even if we’re too bigoted to see it. Maybe let's concentrate on the parts that work and dismantle the stuff that doesn't. Like the two party system, an uber-executive branch that distracts the voters from the legislature and the bracketed tax system that only works when a system of complex deductions are in place.

Marginal Tax rates from here: https://njaes.rutgers.edu/money/taxinfo/

A nice interactive version is here: http://qz.com/74271/income-tax-rates-since-1913/

So, lets pretend that you have some cushy salary job that pays you $50k/year. Since 2002 your tax burden dropped from almost $9,000/year to <$7,000

If you are married to someone who also makes $50k/year your tax burden on the combine $100k should have dropped from almost $19,000/year to <$14,000

Most married couples do not earn the same amount of money per person per year but when you divide the married column/2 the tax burden lines up with the single rate.  Typically one person earns the majority of the family income and the other person earns just enough to bump you up in the tax brackets and cost you money.

Here's the break down for 2006. Incomes are in the left hand column, under "single" and "married" is the tax burden at that income level. Under "married/2" is half the tax burden which correlates to half that income (theoretically)

By 2016 look at the drop across the board.

In a previous blog post I mentioned that average American income is ~$54,000/year (you can google that for yourself) but what matters when we look at things like average american household income is that our population is~319,000,000 people with ~204,000,000 working age (15-64) but only ~122,500,000 actually employed. The income tax that should hit 64% of Americans only reaches 38% by my estimation. Which doesn't matter because it looks like only half pay income tax anyway because they make too little or they play the deduction game. But assuming all that went away like magic, what happens to wages if we employ all those non working people so we can tax them? Even if we expand part time work for the young, old and students. We could let them earn a dollar and pay a dime. I could argue that would make them invested in the system. But we know that there's a bottom to the livable income scale and too many full time Americans are too close to it now. What happens to the people who are earning a good wage when the market is flooded with more money from more workers? That $100,000 married chart actually represent 20% of households in the US. Can we inflate the prices of cars that start at $25,000 and go up? Can we make more people work for less money at part time jobs, tax them and then refund all their money every year?

This week in ketosis: April 3-9

So I have just finished week 11 of my officially documented ketosis experiment. Let’ see how I’m doing:

I’ve let a few things slip like regular blood ketone and glucose monitoring but, in my defense, the ketone strips are horribly overpriced at almost $4 each. I started with a nice regular schedule but then slacked off. What I would like to do next is plan some meals and exercise; then check my levels before and after. That could yield useful information. I can say that after a 24hour fast yesterday my ketone level was 2.7 and my glucose was 67.

Also worth noting, I over did my protein a couple times last week and in each case it was with fish or shrimp.  Yummy, yummy seafood.

I have been trying to eat 1 meal per day several times per week. I drink some green tea or sparkling water during the day and have whatever the heck I want to at night. The pros are I get to cook nightly which makes me happy, the cons are it doesn’t take much to fill me up so I am right back to cooking for 2 or 3 nights at a shot. To be honest, I like eating 3 or 4 small meals (the average American would call them “snacks”) per day. Yesterday I fasted and then cooked two small chicken breasts with peppers and onions and I steamed a stalk of broccoli. I split it up into two plates and just ate one. I guess I have dinner for tonight now.

I mentioned sparking water earlier. I have stopped drinking nightly and when I do drink it’s about half as much as historically. I have done this by replacing the glass of bourbon with a glass of sparkling water. I’m drinking a quart of sparking water per day on average and I’m happy with it. I’m also smoking 1-2 cigars on the weekend instead of 1-2 per day. Less smoking, less drinking, more exercise. I’ll surely be hit by a truck next week.

Speaking of exercise, I’ve been riding my bicycle 15-30 miles per ride at least once per week and now I’m trying to work my bicycle riding up to a 50 mile circuit because that’s what they do for competitions. That seems like a daunting physical task but in actuality the worst part is finding a 50 mile circuit that is bicycle friendly. What do I mean by that? Well, one of my favorite roads to ride got resurfaced recently with large gravel that shakes my road bike mercilessly until my joints hurt and I can’t open my hands. That route isn’t really an option any more. There’s another road that is part of a good 25 mile circuit but they added rumble strips to the shoulder so I have to ride inside the white line which puts me in the way of traffic. The main road that leads to where I work and is part of my 30 mile circuit is so traffic heavy that even with the shoulder it’s dangerous. Then you add in the places with dogs that get too close when they chase you and the places with sand or dirt in the road and you suddenly have to be on the lookout at all times to keep from wrecking or getting clipped by some teenage girl on her cell phone. Those advertisements that show perfect form cyclists speeding down empty flat perfect roads are lies! Lies, I tell you! Final note about bicycling: the one real issue I am having is my saddle. It seemed fine until I picked a distance I was trying to achieve. Now I notice that if I don’t stop every 10-20 miles and walk around my legs and feet start to go numb. I made some adjustments last weekend that helped but I will work to find a better solution to this.

OK, thus ends the “Dear Diary” part of my blog and begins the “I learned something this week” part.

This week I did some reading about the USDA’s nutritional guidelines. Before I get all high and mighty let me say in their defense that the idea of trying to communicate and encourage good nutrition to an entire nation of people is a daunting task. Add in our rebellious American spirit, our free market sugar, and the political influence pedaled by the largest agricultural based businesses ever to have existed anywhere on Earth throughout the 5,000+ years of human agriculture and suddenly I realize there’s no way to do this job well, let alone right.

But let’s take a look at what our government has tried to do over the last century to help us eat right and be healthy, productive members of society. (Forgive me for using Wikipedia for so many of these but it had the most concise collections of information)

The nutritional guidelines of the past 100 years have all agreed on a few things:

• eat a variety of foods
• watch your total calories
• get lots of micro-nutrients
• avoid excess sugar, fat and starch

I don’t think anyone is going to argue those points (I’ll address the fat thing in a little bit, be patient)

The great agricultural improvements that followed the post industrial revolution growth of cities quickly led to an America populated with people who ate whatever was for sale at their local store. The stores quickly gravitated to selling what would last longest on the shelf and what people bought the most frequently. Canned foods with additives, pasteurized products, and things you could dry out and store were the top sellers for along time. By the 1930's refrigeration became wide spread and a whole new market opened up for fresh milk, meats and fruits. People left the farms and quit eating what they could grow or pick seasonally. This meant from the late 19th century to the early 20th century the average American meal got saltier, starchier, and contained fewer beneficial microbes. But hey! We needed to feed a growing nation and calories are calories! (They're not I'll get to that in a bit also)

This seems like a good place for a arbitrarily link to one of my favorite turn-of-the-20th-century grocery stories (you have those too right?)

Back to the point!

 To help Americans pick better foods off the shelves the government introduced the idea of splitting food up into basic groups so we’d know which foods we should be eating and we could be sure to get some from each group. After the Great Depression they had to alter their charts to show people how to get varied food on a budget and from dwindling options. By WWII nutrition got more complex with the new understanding of beneficial micro-nutrients (they called them vitamins & minerals when I was a tadpole). To explain this to people the USDA guides had to get more complex. The five basic food groups (meat & milk, fruit & veggies, cereal, fat, and sugar) grew in to 7 (green & yellow veggies, citrus fruits/cabbage/bitter greens, potatoes & really sugary fruits, milk & cheese, meat/poultry/fish, bread/flour/cereals, and butter/margarine.)  If this seems like they made it unnecessarily hard, keep in mind that the 1940’s were loaded with very smart people trying to make sense of the mysterious and unseen universe with very little solid data (including the molecules we consume to live).

Over the next 40 years our understanding of nutrition must have skyrocketed because we cut back to 4 groups (fruits & veggies, dairy, meats, cereals & breads) This is the streamlined logical grouping I’d expect from the people who put awesome fins on family sedans so we could all drive something that looked like a rocket. Those people had class (as long as you didn’t want civil rights).

When I was a kid this was how it was introduced to me:  4 basic food groups! I was happy and healthy and eating in a simpler world. Then, about the time I graduated high school everything changed.

In 1992 everything changed when we went to the now infamous FOOD PYRAMID!!!

It rearranged our food into 6 food groups (fats/oils/sweets, milk/yogurt/cheese, meat/poultry/fish/dry beans/eggs/nuts, fruits, vegetables, bread/cereal/rice/pasta) and listed them by how many servings you were supposed to have per day. The more servings you were supposed to eat in a day, the larger the section of the pyramid. You might expect a healthy food chart to have veggies as the largest portion but the grain, meat and dairy industries are the largest parts of US agribusiness and they are heavily subsidized by the USDA, so grains got the biggest section and meat and dairy split a level second from the top. They reserved the tip-top for sugars, fats and other bad, bad things.

Since some of those Wikipedia reference links go nowhere I thought I'd throw in a good link to substantiate the clearly ludicrous and defamatory statements I just made)

quote: “The USDA refers to fresh fruits and vegetables as “specialty crops.” Specialty crops do not receive subsidies. In fact, farmers who participate in commodity subsidy programs are generally prohibited from growing fruits and vegetables” This was apparently enacted in 1996 after the 1992 food pyramid, mentioned above, but maybe it speaks to the attitude and policies that were already in place. It's close enough to a good point for the internet.

This Washington Post article says the same basic thing. We spend billions to subsidize food we don’t eat or shouldn’t eat as much while discouraging farmers from growing the food we tell Americans they should grow. This sounds like bureaucracy at work. Remember way back up the page when I played devil’s advocate? Now I wish I hadn’t.

That makes me a little sad :(

Interesting but unrelated fact all vegetable and fruit production in the USA is publicly traded as futures except onions.

Now I feel better.

So the food pyramid wasn’t just badly organized, confusing, or based on incorrect data it was out-and-out corrupted by an agribusiness lobby that justifies billions of $$$ per year in subsidies to exist. We have been betrayed by the people who give us cheese stuffed, pretzel crust, hot wing pizza!!!

In 2005 they changed the food pyramid into My Pyramid. Now it sounds personal, like you’re helping. They have a little man walking up some stairs to represent being active. They changed the generic phrase "servings" into actual quantities. The largest percentage is still grains, followed by fruits & veggies, then dairy, then meat and lastly fatty oils.

Their recommendations are as follows:

• "Grains, recommending that at least half of grains consumed be as whole grains (27%)"
• "Vegetables, emphasizing dark green vegetables, orange vegetables, and dry beans and peas (23%)"
• "Fruits, emphasizing variety and deemphasizing fruit juices (15%)"
• "Oils, recommending fish, nut, and vegetables sources (2%)"
• "Milk, a category that includes fluid milk and many other milk-based products (23%)"
• "Meat and beans, emphasizing low-fat and lean meats such as fish as well as more beans, peas, nuts, and seeds (10%)"

Hang in there dear readers, there's one more step to go! That step is MyPlate! (Here's their guidelines) It was launched last year and I must say it's at least a symbolic improvement over the pyramid. They've kept the same basic recommendations as MyPyramid including encouraging people to get exercise. Hooray for the power of positivity.

Now let's talk about what's been wrong with all this crap since day one. These next few slides are representations of how 100 years of federal food groups have been changed and reorganized.

We kick off our government guidelines to good nutrition while in the midst of a good 'ole fashioned War-to-End-All-Wars. Don't let the kaiser get into your larder!

Then we move some stuff around and add some new foods thanks to post WWII prosperity and refrigeration.

The "sugar" category sort of goes away for a few decades and we rearrange fruit based on what countries aren't filled with Nazis and Japs. Also we get ice cream!

The more sensible people of the 1950's simplify things for the more streamlined modern kitchen. Also we can't buy food from the filthy pinko-commies so I hope you don't want authentic Cuban cuisine outside of Miami for about 60 years.

The grain group grows. We start consuming pasta and rice. Maybe those soldiers who served in the Pacific and Italy developed some new cravings....or maybe we needed to feed more people than ever before and simple grains exported from former axis power controlled countries that now need our dollars to rebuild are the most bang for the buck.

With the advent of the personal computer and the information age on our doorstep we needed to get smart about nutrition. Instead, in 1992 the government decided to make eating a more complicated game. More categories, more servings, more good foods and bad foods. They turned nutrition into an overly complex x-box game for a nation of people who are steadily becoming more sedentary, more unhealthy, and more obese. the shining diamond among the turds of nutritional policy was probably the change in attitude to trans-fats (although you can't see it on the chart) The previous decades had seen a war waged on fat and the switch to new "healthier" man-made trans-fats. Only now did we begin to see the error of our ways. In the 20 years since the 1992 grouping of foods came out we've slowly fought the idea of Trans-fats and only just outlawed them. I'm a bit concerned about that. They didn't make food illegal in 1916, 1943, or 1956 they just made suggestions.......which helped to turn us into a nation of obese, diabetic, heart attack magnets.

I will also note that in the years since the previous food groups were arranged, the average American citizen had gained the ability to finance everything including food (credit card debt for groceries is still a real thing)

So, with so much on the line, they split up fruits and vegetables into separate groups and came up with a "serving" size. I used duplicate images to represent the actual number of servings they suggested.

Where do I go from here?

Well, 100 years of food groups all agree that we shouldn't eat much fat. Except that when we removed animal fat from the average American's diet obesity and heart disease rates began to soar. CDC web page has a cool power point on the last 30+ years of this ---> link

But what about heart disease? Fat causes heart disease! Well, saturated fats do seem to be a problem if they are from the wrong sources and you eat a high carbohydrate diet. In many corners of nutritional science the opinion on fats seems to be turning around. ( example #1 example #2 example #3 example #4)

Fat intake affects cholesterol but that science is changing too with a new understanding of long and short particles of LDL cholesterol Don't believe me? Good I'm not a Dr. But these people are. (that's a very long podcast by Dr Rhonda Patrick, if you are interested in this topic, please take the time to watch it.

All the nutritional policies agreed we should avoid excess sugar but after 100 years there is more refined sugar and high fructose corn syrup in more types of foods not less. (this site doesn't differentiate between sugar types but it's kind of neat to see the piles of sugar cubes)

Simple carbohydrates do stress the living crap out of your insulin response and it looks like that's why diabetes is on the rise. I have friends who eat based solely on the glycemic index. Our nation consumes so much sugar and simple carbs that we rev our insulin response up to dangerous levels constantly. This is like driving your car everywhere in second gear (it just occurred to me that many of you might not know what a gear is). We over-rev our insulin production until it means nothing to our bodies and then BAM! Diabetes.

Or that's the ketogenic philosophy anyway.

To return to the devil's advocate roll for a minute, I found this article on bbc.com. It cites scientists who are making a very clear argument against the high-fat/low-carb diet.

To abandon the devil's advocate roll again I could argue that 19 people on a diet is an awfully small sample group and 2 weeks isn't enough time to show effective adaption to burning fat after decades of high carbohydrate consumption but I'm not a scientist so I'm just talking out of my ass. Oh well, in their own words "All diets 'work' if you stick to an eating plan that cuts calories, whether from fat or carbohydrate, but sticking to a diet is easier said than done, especially given the prolonged time it takes to lose weight." Yes, if your goal is to lose weight then just intake fewer calories than you burn up. So eat 2000 calories of just refined sugar and you too can lose weight. (That's called hyperbole, folks!)

Back to the food groups. It's hard to take a nation of hundreds of millions of people and get them to exercise regularly and eat healthy foods. Various lifestyles, income, genetics, and philosophies make is an almost doomed task but the people at the USDA keep trying. In the face of mega-corporate profits from soda and chips how do you teach a nation discipline? How do you raise your kids to be adults who eat enough dietary fiber, meat, and drink enough water every day so that when they want a greasy cheese burger or an ice cream cake it's not measurably deducting time or quality from the end of their life? I don't know. 

On that I'll leave you with one more cool link: the nutrient content of the US food supply 1909 to 1997

It's packed with interesting charts and figures that show the change in what food was available and consumed for most of the last century. You can see the changes in levels and sources of all our macro-nutrients. Some of them may surprise you. For example: We eat as many carbs now as we did 100 years ago but now they come from different sources. We eat more protein and we eat more fat. But the sources have shifted notably.

Okay, that's enough writing for today. I do have a regular job you know.

This week in ketosis: March 27 - April 3rd

Whoops. I didn't push "save & publish" on this one.

This week I transitioned to 1-meal-per-day. So, basically, every day is a 24 hour fast. I did a cup of almond milk with a tablespoon of MCT oil every morning (so not a 100% fast) but I had nothing other than green tea or water the remaining time and I felt great. I had awesome dinners of meat and veggies and I am down to 192# as of Sunday.

The next thing on my schedule was to up my bicycle riding beyond 30 miles at a whack. I scouted out circuits and had a good plan for the weekend. Friday I got off work a couple of hours early. I went to the grocery store, got a few things in town and went home. I cleaned up, had a couple drinks, made dinner and was done for the evening by 6:30PM. It was at this point that I realized I had been sitting behind a desk all week and what I really wanted to do was go for a walk. I had enough daylight left so I went to the place where I take my walks and on the way I passed a co-worker’s house. He was having a party for a former co-worker who was getting married this weekend and I got the weird urge to stop by and say hi. I’m sure you’ll recall that I’m a terribly anti-social hermit who avoids people at most costs and gets physically distressed with too many hours of human interaction. That being said, I went for my walk first and then texted my co-worker to make sure it was OK that I crashed the party.

I had already eaten so I didn’t eat and all I drank was a couple glasses of iced tea because I had my long bicycle ride planned for Saturday. I shook hands, talked to people, listened to their stories, gave them polite feedback, met their families, and tried to be as social as I could while sober. Things wound down, I went home and was sound asleep before 11PM. About 2:00AM I woke up with terrible digestive issues that kept me close to the bathroom until well after noon Saturday. Naturally, there was no Saturday bicycle ride.  My digestive issues could be from something I bought at the store and ate Friday night but everything was fully cooked. I did have some strawberries with a new brand of unsweetened peanut butter so I’ll skip that for a day or so and try it again to see what happens. My fear is that the God of Irony was trying to tell me that it was the result of leaving my comfort zone and shaking so many weird hands when I knew I should have been at home avoiding human contact. Either way I spent Saturday morning catching up on TV shows, doing a little reading and didn’t leave the house to do anything until well into the afternoon.

Sunday I felt much better, I was obviously worn down from my experience but I pushed through and got 40+ miles with just a couple short breaks (I get distracted even while riding my bicycle). The wind was gusting 5-10mph out of the WNW and always seemed to be quartering me no matter which way I rode so I didn’t set any records for speed. I was physically drained when I got home but I still managed to go shooting later that afternoon.  

So, that’s a nice summation of my week of eating less, crapping myself, and riding my bicycle when I didn’t want to. Man stuff!

Now for the girly stuff:

Having gone to the Friday night pre-wedding party and having met the grandparents, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, nieces, nephews, random friends, ubiquitous step-parents and, of course, the betrothed I feel like I want to toss in my 2 cents worth regarding marriage. But that’s a sad topic for a guy celebrating his 14th divorce anniversary this year and who hasn’t had a date in at least 4 years. Instead let’s talk about a neato experiment that was done involving the Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) and human attraction.

The oxford journal is a nice dry scientific recounting. 

Psychology today makes it more fun and reader friendly!

For those of you too lazy to click a link the MHC is a group of genes in all vertebrates that create molecules attached to our cell membranes. These molecules act as receptors which bind to pieces of pathogens that get in or around our cells. The pieces are held in place until the T-cells can come into contact with them and initiate the proper immune response. This is part of how our immune system “learns” to protect us. The trick to humans is that we have a “polymorphic” MHC profile. That means no one has all the MHC genes/receptors. When we breed we mix & match our MHC genes. This randomness keeps our immune response varied and vigorous.

Here’s the trick to the MHC genes in people and the reason for the links above. It looks like we can recognize the presence or absence of these genes by smell. This has something to do with the fatty acids and sweat but I’m not sure how deeply the scientific research has gone into this as the studies mentioned above only deal with about a hundred people.

Here’s how the experiments worked:

In the first experiment a group of men with various MHC profiles were given shirts to wear for a few days. The shirts were collected, put into bags and then given to a group of women with various MHC profiles.

In the second experiment a group of women and men with various MHC profiles wore shirts for several days. The shirts were collected, put into bags and then given to a different group of men & women with various MHC profiles.

In both experiments the second group opened the bags, sniffed the shirts, and then decided whether or not they thought the smell was pleasant. That’s simple enough.  The cool part is that in both of these experiments the people preferred the smell of someone with a dissimilar MHC profile.  

There was one interesting anomaly in both cases. Women on birth control chose men who were MHC similar to them.

The take away is that our bodies are constantly influencing our attractions and for good reason. You may not be able to trust your “heart” in these matters but your sense of smell seems like a good baseline if your goal is to raise a family of kids that don't all die from terrible diseases for no reason. If you just want to have sex with women who shouldn't be attracted to you, can I suggest women on birth control?

(I have no way of gauging how offensive that last statement was.)

My thoughts on: "Ordinary Men" by Christopher R Browning (I read a book! Don't all clap at once.)

I have never really done a book review but I felt compelled to read this book and now I want to talk about it. I haven’t got a solid format but when I started writing down my thoughts I realized that I need to break this up into a few sections. Section 1 is just a quick blurb about the book, with no real spoilers. I thought it would be nice to do this so you could decide if you want to read the book before you read my other thoughts. Section 2 is my take on several points from the book that truly interest me. It is filled with things that I did not know, things that suddenly make sense, and things that are eerily familiar to me now. Section 3 is not directly about the book; it’s about WHY I was compelled to read this book at all. I should probably have made it a different post but I just sort of kept typing.

(Ignore the book mark)

Section 1:

Ordinary Men  was suggested to me on twitter by @MartyMade (I believe his name is Darryl) from the MartyMade podcast  (check it out if you haven’t already)

This book covers, in depth the organization and utilization of the Order Police  who controlled the “civil occupied territories”  of Europe during WWII (in this case Poland).

If you’ve watched many WWII documentaries or “based on real events” movies you have probably thought that the men in uniforms where all generic Nazi soldiers. There’s no real distinction called out that I can recall when we see generic henchmen rounding up Jewish families and putting them into Ghettos, or later rounding them up again and loading them on to trains or into trucks to be shipped off to the death camps. Directors and documentarians usually only draw attention to notable characters like SS officers or secret police (Gestapo) but movies like Schindler’s list and Defiance are actually loaded with these militarized police who are carrying out the Nazi’s “Final Solution”

This book explains how these men started as reserve organizations designed to protect the German territories while the army was at the front but were reorganized into para-military police forces whose sole purpose was to find, capture, kill, and ship off all the Jews in their districts. It was not what most of them signed up for but it was what they did. Not only does the author document what they did but also how it affected them (good & bad). The subject is harsh and gritty. The endless tallies of those killed or deported becomes numbing. You will hate these men and, at some point, pity them. This is where bad guys come from.

Section 2: My personal revelations & thoughts

I have pondered more than once how Germany, a country the size of Texas with a population of ~80M people in 1939, managed to raise and army to not only conquer most of the western world, but hold it? That’s a huge area that got bigger as they went and they really didn’t win many allies in most places. Plus, they didn’t WANT allies in most places. The idea of a genetically pure German race required the young men to get married to young women and have lots of babies (that’s in chapter 18 where the author discusses some of the pamphlets given out to the men). In the mean time, how did they increase their territory by orders of magnitude and police it with people who would follow orders? Well, to start with, they employed every one they could in the effort. The entire nation was mobilized but they needed a never ending stream of fatherland loving, patriotic men (and all the young ones were busy dying on two fronts by 1941). So, men who were otherwise unfit or too old to be in the proper military were conscripted into various police groups, eventually organized and controlled by the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler. As the German military brought new areas under their control the Order Police would divide it into districts and enforce the directives of the leaders back home, in this case, the directive was the Third Reich’s infamous “final solution”.

The book starts with lots of data. The chapters are short but not simple. They are dense and packed with names, dates, ranks, populations and death tolls.  It was imposing reading the first several chapters but the book opens with a promise to tell the tale of a group of mostly unwitting men who found themselves carrying out a genocide based on orders even their commander could not stomach. I stuck with this book to get to their story and it paid off.

The author doesn’t seem like he’s trying to garner sympathy for anyone. He’s just telling it as it was recorded. Some men liked the killing, some tolerated it, some avoided it, but everyone was affected by it and after the first couple massacres only a small percentage of men openly objected. You get the sense that the war was a diseased body and everyone who touched it got sick.

No one in the book ever openly addresses the question of human equality. Some of the men report that they didn’t want to shoot children because they had children. Others let escaping Jews go rather than expend the effort for something they find distasteful. They prove this over and over by being willing to let others do the killing.

I was amazed at how compartmentalized the plan was.

Order #1: Round up the Jews.    This was done over and over, town after town, with no real hesitation or squabbling.

Order #2: Shoot anyone too slow to do what you tell them.     This meant the very old and very young. This was a problem and some men refused to participate but many of them got over it quickly enough and it soon became the standard operating procedure.

Order #3: Take everyone out of town and shoot them in the country side.    Apparently the Fuhrer didn’t want to move decent white Germans into towns full of dead bodies. This was actually a logistical problem. They started with firing squads trying to march line after line of Jews out into the woods for execution. It was very inefficient, expensive (they needed bullets for shooting the allies) and apparently the effect on the soldiers was so devastating that the Reich had to develop a better idea. This is where the camps and gas chambers came from. It was cold German efficiency (is that an insensitive stereotype?) that led to a design where by a minimum of personnel could dispatch the largest number of Jews with the least psychological effect on the police force. If that doesn’t upset you at least a little bit, you should probably keep it to yourself, Dexter.

This book also throws a sharp contrast on the words used by these men in their testimonies with the meaning of their actions. Even after rounding up and killing thousands of Jews the police men constantly use words like “relocation” “deportation”  and “transports” when what they meant was “someone else will kill them”. I got the feeling that these men had a sense of fate here. Google tells me that in German “fate” is “schicksal”. Since there is no voice for the Jews in this book I wondered if they were accepting their schicksal as well (Google;s yiddish translation didn't work right for this). Eventually the Jews figure out that there is no end but death when dealing with the Nazi’s and there are revolts, but by that time, these police men are hardened killers. I am amazed by how many thousands of people were rounded up by so few poorly trained but armed men.

There’s one story in the book about a Commissar who tries, fruitlessly, has to fend off the “relocation squads” to keep his factory workers. At the end of the day he faces a road full of carts full of ammunition and supplies destined for the soldiers and no one to drive them because all his Jewish workers are in a hole in the woods. Don’t be confused this isn’t Oscar Schindler who apparently actually cared about saving people. This man is a politician who can’t make rank if he can’t produce what the leaders want. This is a fine example though of how the policy of the Nazi’s was self-defeating. In another story they send “work Jews” out to dig a big hole, then execute another group of Jews in the hole, make the “work Jews” fill the hole in and then shoot the workers. The book doesn’t say who buried them but I am guessing it was no one.

Okay, I’ve just spewed a lot of random thoughts from the book and now I’m going to get a bit more focused and a lot more morbid. If you don’t like talking about guns, shooting and the mechanics of murdering things, please, skip the next few paragraphs.

This book deals quite frankly with the reality of the “firing squad”. More than once it addresses the instruction and execution (pardon the pun) of the firing squad’s duties. The purpose for this is to break down the “firing squad” into the men who would and would not participate in them by conveying how close and intense the experience was. There is no discussion about the mechanics of shooting someone who is running in the street or hiding in a closet because that is the independent action of the individual shooter but the firing squad was organized on the spot by whoever was in command, and had a mass effect on the whole group of potential volunteers.

Books and movies provide us with a few classic scenarios when it comes to the firing squads of WWII. There’s the disgraced officer or spy character who is given a cigarette by an effete Nazi officer before he is stood against a wall as a line of generic soldiers all take careful aim from some distance away and shoot our poor protagonist through the heart (usually to the swell of an orchestral score). Then there’s the “Nazi soldiers stand the captive Jews at the edge of a hole or ditch” scenario (that starts in chapter 7 and carries on throughout the book) like in this book. Whether they get shot in the front or the back seems to be a matter of directorial choice. Typically they have the people being executed face the camera so you can see their emotions and pain. Sometimes they have the soldiers facing the camera so you can see their cold heartless expressions. Sometimes they set up the shot so you see the faces of the executed and the killers in one shot. And sometimes they have everyone back to you because the firing squad is a set piece in the background of some other shot. The movies love automatic weapons fire so they often have a hand full of soldiers mowing down a whole line of captives (chapter 15). The movies also love the idea of the uber-hard hearted officer who pulls out his pistol and executes one particular captive for some sadistic reason (chapter 9). It’s all very dramatic and lets the movie director control the story but when the police are first organized into firing squads in this book something weird happens that I’ve never seen or heard of anywhere else but I instantly understood it.

Let’s talk about shooting things a little. A bullet is a simple tool that transfers the energy from the gun powder in the chamber of the gun to its inevitable target. The size of the powder charge decides how much energy is available to the bullet. The size of the bullet decides how much energy it can transfer. The materials used to make a bullet, how they are bonded together and the shape of the bullet all affect how well it can transfer its energy to its target. Finally, the make-up of the target decides what happens to the energy when it’s transferred. So, energy in the bullet, ability of the bullet to transfer the energy and make-up of the target all decide what happens when you shoot something.

Example: shooting something light and soft with a powerful, hard bullet usually results in the bullet going right through the target and transferring only the energy needed to punch a hole. Shooting something dense and hard with a weak, soft bullet results in the bullet disintegrating as it expels all its energy on impact.

Hunters have to carefully chose bullet sizes and types to be sure they penetrate the animals deep enough to get to vital organs, expand enough to make a large wound channel, and transfer enough energy to have a fatal effect. While varmint hunting several years ago with a small caliber rifle I was concerned about humane shots on coyotes so I was shooting them in the head. A buddy of mine assured me that my bullet had enough energy to break their backs if I shot them in the shoulder and sure enough at 300 yards my 60gr V-max .223 caliber bullet transferred enough energy on impact with a coyote’s shoulder blade to snap the neck instantly and turned them off like flipping a light switch.

(That’s a lot of words about bullets to get to the following detail.)

Based on this experience I instantly recognized what was going on in Chapter 7 when a doctor instructs some of the men on how to fix their bayonets and use them to aim at a specific point on the back of the neck. The author doesn’t explain fully but the goal was to shoot them in the spine. The 8mm Mauser round they were shooting had over 2500ft/lbs of energy at the muzzle. Even a fraction of its energy transferred up close to the upper spine or brain stem would result in a broken neck and (hopefully) instant death. The police had great difficulty with this at first and often shot their captives in the head or through the neck muscle. Bad neck shots left injured people lying in a hole with dead people and more dead people falling on top of them. Head shots resulted in brain and blood exploding in many directions at once (don’t look so surprised, the skull is basically a big egg and we’ve all broken one of those).  The men taking turns in the first firing squads often found themselves covered with blood and gore at the end of a long day of killing. By later chapters the neck shot was commonplace and the men had it down to a science. They learn to make the Jews lay down on their faces. I assume, this way you can rest the bayonet on their spine and not miss.

It’s sad to think that a lesson I learned while hunting animals was taught to these men by killing unarmed people who were deemed to be the wrong race. Many of them must have thought of the humans they were shooting as animals. There are multiple stories in the book of men who refuse to shoot Jews because they remind them of their families. These conscientious objectors would still round them up, march them to their execution, or load them on trains to death camps. It must have been around chapter 14 that I realized this was simply the reality of the world for these people.

The author spends the last chapter trying to tie up the why of this story. Why did these grown men (many of them well over 40 years old) do this? Why did so few object openly. Was it overt racism, sadism, nationalism, brainwashing, peer pressure, or are people just that easy to manipulate? He makes good points and draws his own conclusion but the quote that stuck with me was about the men testifying 25 years later.

“Subjects deny conformity and embrace obedience as the explanation of their actions.”

How much does this reflect on us and our lives? I can’t speak for you, but I’m not murdering people for my beliefs. Am I? What are we doing because everyone else is? Burning fossil fuels? Fighting over fossil fuels? Maybe. Trying to control where people go or what they do with their bodies? Could be? I don’t have the foresight to know these things definitely because I do not see all the options. But I know that I work with a man who is almost 70 and was raised in a very racist part of the deep south. He’s religious, loves his family, pays his taxes and I’ve never seen him be physically abusive to anyone but he often has a terrible time accepting women and non-whites working in certain jobs. He’s not a stupid man but he sees certain rolls in the world around him as belonging to white men. He sees certain indelible traits as belonging to genders and races. When you point out to him that what he’s saying isn’t acceptable, he throws up his hands and says “I know! I Know! Things have changed.” What are we doing right now that is just like that?

Section 3:

Why was I compelled to read this book? I was a voracious reader throughout my childhood and into my early adulthood. Then I got busy with work and family and just stopped. I even quit reading comic books. Reading is an all consuming hobby of mine and I must confess that I read this book in 2 days and have since finished a second book just because. That’s 2 books in 3 days and I haven’t read anything but websites and text books for 20+ years. Well, here’s the deal. When I was growing up history class was boring and tedious. It followed a formula that went: this date + this person + did this thing = memorize it for the test.  Teachers could rarely tell compelling stories (plus most of my history teachers where coaches who were required to teach something so they taught a class that never changed). Years later the “history channel” (which was really the WWII channel) came out and I was enthralled, like everyone else for a year or two until it became apparent they were just going to do the same stories over and over until they eventually started talking about aliens. (Norris pauses to shake his head). But now something new has happened to history. First of all, some very well funded TV shows hired real historians to try to show us more realistic historical setting than ever before. Shows like HBO’s Rome  opened up a world of interesting daily life details while still having lots of sex and killing. Also the History Channel’s Vikings  was awesome (This doesn’t make up for the alien crap and I’m a bit bugged that they crammed a couple centuries of Viking history into one king’s life time) Shows like these added a new level of reality to period pieces. How did people really dress, eat, sleep and live. What did they really think of their leaders, families, friends and enemies? It’s still fiction but it’s a long way from the movies I watched as a boy where Hollywood picked armor and swords for knights because they looked cool and not because they were from the correct country or even century.

Then came the podcasts like Dan Carlin’s Hard Core History  Danieli Bolelli’s History on Fire podcast  and now MartyMade (I know there are others but I only have so much time to listen to podcasts)

To make one of these podcast episodes, these guys pour through piles of books written by professional historians. Historians who often disagree with each other, change their minds from book to book, and can become myopically fixed on details that bore us to tears. The podcasters have to consume all this data, compile it into a big picture and then find the threads of a story that explain not just what happened and who was involved (none of which will be on the test) but what the world was like before, during and after these events.  These podcasts are making history accessible to more people by bridging the gap between the dry academic publication and the average person’s desire to hear a true story. This is one of mankind’s most ancient social activities. We gathered around the fires at night for millennia to hear someone tell us how our ancestors braved a harrowing journey, survived a terrible storm, or finally found the herds we hunt today. We want to hear how those who came before us were good or bad and what fates they met.  

This new exposure to digestible, palatable history has made me hungry, so I read a book. Good for me.

Post script: (I know this isn't a letter from the 1950's)

I must admit that I live in a very anglo, very protestant area in Texas and I don't know any Jewish people. As part of my due diligence I had to look up in what ways the term "Jew" was offensive. Apparently as long as you use it as a noun it's OK. If I screwed up somewhere please feel free to call me a Nazi since this is the internet and that's kind of the go-to.

high prices, low interest

When I was just a lad my father imparted upon me some wisdom to the effect of “If a poor boy wants something nice, he has to be able to build it.” Nowhere was this philosophy more evident or accurate than when it came to vehicles. Living in the woods it can be miles to a stop sign, let alone a store, so we depend on personal vehicles. There’s no public transport of any kind except the school bus and the ambulance (and you have to wait for them).  I became quite a competent mechanic and as such I have always had multiple vehicles. I’ve never had very nice vehicles mind you, but I’ve always had multiple, reliable cars and trucks. That is, I HAD multiple reliable vehicles. About 10 years ago I finally got myself to a position where I could buy a couple late-model, lightly used vehicles that didn’t require me to be a mechanic. It was wonderful. I had tangibly more free time because I wasn’t playing mechanic regularly. Then, two years ago, I was debating buying a new vehicle and someone convinced me the first step was selling my spare truck to a poor family in need. Now I’m a one truck man with only a bicycle for back up.
(To be fair, I have a spare bicycle in case one breaks). It physically bothers me that I have only one vehicle but the alternatives bother me more.

Alternative #1   buy a new(ish) vehicle and have a payment

Alternative #2   buy an old(er) fixer-upper and do a bunch of work to it

Both have their pro’s and con’s but that’s not how you start an important decision like getting a vehicle. You have to start with the two most important tenants of vehicular commitment. What do you want verses what do you need?

I’m a pretty utilitarian guy and I tend to be rational but I’m going to play with this list anyway. (Prepare to be bored)

My current vehicle is a 10 year old ford ranger, 4.0L V-6, 4X4. It needs some cosmetic work but is mechanically sound and perfectly meets 90+% of my monthly vehicular requirements. The only problem I ever have is that it is too small to carry multiple people (rarely a problem) or much cargo that can’t get wet (a seasonal problem). I drive it to and from work each day (~ 20 miles round trip) and at least some of every day is spent off pavement. I typically drive several miles per week across sandy, rocky or grassy terrain. Occasionally the 4x4 is a must.

I have a daughter who is off at college right now and will need a car in the next year or two (also when she comes to visit) so I was thinking I could just buy myself a new vehicle and semi-retire the old ranger until she needs it. Seems like a good way to justify a step up in vehicles for myself.

I then considered things like: Improvements in modern vehicles are such that I can buy a brand new full sized, quad cab, F150 4x4 and get better gas mileage than I get from my ranger! That’s a great argument for what I need. It ticks all the boxes and doesn’t change my daily driving much. It’s a truck and can live the same lifestyle my other truck lives. It has more room for passengers and weather sensitive cargo.

But is it what I want?

No. I want a Jeep Wrangler Unlimited (the 4 door version of the jeep wrangler). It is more than tough enough to do all the off road stuff I do, dependable enough for the on road stuff, gets slightly better gas mileage than I get now, and has more room for cargo and passengers plus all the stuff I normally carry in my small truck. Well, that settles that right? It meets my needs and my wants. I should go test drive and pick a color.

{insert record scratch sound here}

Quick note: I am about to make a horrendously over-simplified argument that assumes modern sub-6% interest rates, 4 year loans, good credit scores, and no down payments. But in my defense, I will also be ignoring the cost of housing, insurance, food, clothes, and the dream of saving for the future. I won’t even try to address the idea of raising a family. Let’s just talk dollars and cars.

Have you priced those things? They are $45,000 new in my area. A clean used one is rarely as low as $35,000. The F150 is $35,000 new and pushing $25,000 used. So that route isn’t much better.  To responsibly finance $25,000 for 4 years I’d need an extra $600/month just for the payment. (Not to mention incidental expenses like insurance). If you’re one of those people who consider what % of their monthly income they can spend on things you might say “10-15% for a car is about right” By that rule $25,000 for a car is the high end of a $4,000/month income. Well, I’m one of those people who doesn’t EVER count gross income.  I count the $$ I actually get to put in my bank. After federal withholding, social security and medicare/Medicaid I lose 25% of every paycheck. $1 = $0.75 for me. To pay that $600/month I have to earn almost $800. As these numbers escalate my blood pressure rises. Let’s talk about something else and come back to this.

I guess I could shop around for an older, cheaper vehicle with more miles on it but cash-for-clunkers seemed to have wiped most of them out of the market and paying for a 10 year old high mileage vehicle seems wrong because that’s what I have now. Before I get too anxious I’m going to look at other vehicles to see what’s going on with pricing. As of this writing average price of a car or truck in the US is almost $32,000. Going back to that 10-15% of gross income rule the average American has to earn $5,350/month to responsibly make this payment. That’s a $64,200/year job. Half of American households do not earn this much money, let alone individuals.  Most “households” still have multiple working adults in them requiring multiple vehicles and the median income per person who is working is $28,500. Let’s use that 15% of income rule again. The average person earning $28,500/year (which we already discussed is more than half of us) can afford a $350/month car payment. What can you get for $350/month? A $15,000 car.

There are a few of those out there. The Chevy Spark, Kia Rio and Nissan Versa pop up at the top of all my searches. Those are new cars you can buy on a budget. But what if you need more than a subcompact cheapo car? Well here’s the break-down of used cars in my area.

Ø  2-5 years old <50k: Cars that fall into this price range are almost all compacts. I hope you want a Ford Focus because that’s what you’re going to get. I did not have any luck locating late model, low mileage trucks available at this price point.

Ø   5-10 years old, <100k: Some mid-sized cars and SUV’s come in under the $15k at this point. I guess if you are shopping for the best value it’s probably here except for the misuse factor. Modern cars are well built but the end of their life is still decided by the beginning of their life. It’s hard to tell how a vehicle was treated at this point unless it is actively showing wear and mechanical problems. A few trucks will show up at $15k as they approach 100k but it’s usually a sign that they are in bad shape or they are plain jane models with no features.

Ø  10-15 years old, 100k+: Cars are plentiful here in the $6-8,000 range. The average “household” needs two cars anyway so this is probably the way to go for most people. Trucks are a couple grand more if they are still in good shape. The plus side to cars of this age is that the weak points have all wore out and if it was badly mistreated it will barely be running. Budget for maintenance and you might be OK here.

Ø  15+ year old, 150k+: Most vehicles here are just a few grand (except certain specialty trucks like big diesels). If you can keep them running (and don’t mind being seen in them) why not buy one?

So what happens if you really need a truck? I guess you look for a 15-20 year old mid-sized plain jane truck that looks like it’s been cared for.

What happens if you are a poor single income family with 3 kids? I guess you go through 10-15 year old super high mileage minivans until they leave home. I know families that have done just that, used minivans until the kids were big enough to drive and then used compact cars until the kids left home. They drove them until they could not fix them and then found another. But most Americans aren’t doing that.

We have 212 million drivers in the US.

We have 256 million passenger automobiles

And we sold 7.8 million new cars & trucks last year

If we extrapolate the earlier numbers half of those 212 million drivers can’t afford a new car unless it’s one of the uber-cheap sub-compacts. I can’t find a good resource for this but it looks like 1 in 15 or so vehicle sold last year was compact or subcompact. Most of those don’t fit our price point but let’s assume half of them do that means 1 out of every 30 cars was cheap enough to be purchased by 1 out of every 2 licensed drivers. So 260,000 new cars (costing <$15k) were sold last year with a 50/50 chance that any one of them was bought by one of the 106 million drivers who couldn’t afford more. 

(Again, I am assuming a bunch of things, this is bad math, and that’s not how you do statistics but stick with me here).

This means 1 out of every 815 drivers making $13.70/hour or less potentially got a brand new car last year. Does that sound like the market is working? Could Apple stay in business if it was still cranking out the 4S and selling it primarily to people who can afford a 6S? No. Their business model is to sell the cool new thing to everyone who can possibly afford it. Where is the frugal smart phone market?

Well a new iPhone is the equivalent of one median household car payment so you tell me.

Okay, if we accept that new cars aren’t priced to meet the income levels of the median household then we must have a thriving used car market. According to Edmund’s we do, to the tune of almost 40million vehicles per year with an average price of $18.5k and rising. “Used” cars are getting newer and their prices are going up.

If you scroll down that .pdf document to the category and composition page you can see the average “used” price by vehicle type. 18 of the 22 categories don’t match our <$15k requirement. Only cars in the sub-compact, Compact, mid-sized, and full sized categories routinely sell cheaply enough for median households to afford one. To be fair they represent 39% of used vehicles but for their average price to be below our price point then a notable number of them must be beyond our purchasing power.  Let’s assume some more data and see how we feel. (Please note, “assuming numbers” and “feeling ways about them” are both bad things to do, but I’m not here to make friends or sense.)

39% of 40million cars = 15.6million. We can assume that at least 1/3 of those are too expensive for our budget. That leaves 10.4 million cars. Compare that to the potential 130,000 new cars median households might have bought responsibly and then remember that there are 106million “median household” drivers. So 1 in 10 working stiffs got a new car last year. Hooray for making up numbers!

Actually a muddle all those numbers up because it doesn’t really matter. Feel free to play with the facts and the assumptions all you like. The real problem is on the “higher prices” chart of that Edmund’s report. Over 852% of cars bought last year were financed for more than 55 months. Almost 60% were financed for over 66 months. That’s 5-1/2 years of debt for a car. That’s 3 more star wars movies. Also, in the age of super low interest rates, the way to pay high interest is by financing for a long time.

Unfortunately, people tend to think “What can I afford this month?” and not “What can I afford over the next year?”. We like to forget that things are going to happen, stuff is going to break, and there will be unforeseen expenses. This is why to 10-15% rule is a good one to follow but even then, do you want to commit 10% of your monthly income for the next 6 years on a car?

In defense of the newer higher priced vehicles I could point out that they have never been as well built or technologically advanced as they are now. Every year’s batch of cars & trucks are true modern marvels. They make more power, get better mileage, pollute less, and last longer. That doesn’t forgive the cost being out of touch with the average person’s ability to pay it. This income to price discrepancy shows me that the market intends to make its money on bad financing which signals collapse. I understand that the sub-prime lending heathens left housing behind 6 years ago and moved to auto finance, I understand that American’s love their cars, but this bubble has to burst. (Not unlike some other bubbles I could mention. Cost of college, I’m looking at you.)

Having said all this and made it plain that I think the trending current price of a new or used vehicle is too high for the majority of the consumers who drive the market what am I going to do about my own car needs?

Well, first things first, I have money saved up to put down on the principle and to pay the tax title license. Don’t ever let the salesman talk you into rolling it all together. He wants you to pay INTEREST on TAXES. That’s as un-American as it gets.

Because of this I can easily buy one of those inexpensive sub-compact cars. Would they meet my needs and desires? I could drive to and from work and possibly there’s enough increased room to help out when I go to the store on rainy days but I won’t know until I sit in one and drive it if it’s comfortable and if I trust it with my life. Most likely I would be better off with a more expensive compact hatch back or something along those lines. Front wheel drive helps with stability in bad weather. They are loaded with safety features like side impact air bags and they get 10-15 mpg better than I get now.

Sound good?

How much does increased gas mileage mean to me? 15 mpg more than I get now adds up to one car payments per year in savings. That sounds worth it. So over the 48 months of the note I only pay 44 months if I manage my money and pay it towards the note.

Then I remember that I live in the country have no garage and that nice new(ish) car would be relegated to sitting under an oak tree all day so I think about other options.

I could get a slightly older truck with some miles on it and not many features but I already have one of those an no debt. Hrmmm.

Or I could shop my ass off for the jeep I wanted in the beginning, put a little more down, finance for a little longer and have the vehicle I want and need. I’d just have to go to bed every night knowing it’s an overpriced symbol of a market that is so out of whack that they can't calculate a fair price for their products, correct their ridiculous interest rates or pay me enough to participate responsibly. Decisions like this would be easier if I had something more important to do than think about them.

The last two weeks in ketosis: I missed a week somehow but, oh well here we go again.

First, experiments with fasting and strength:

It takes a while to become efficient at burning fat for energy. When Mark Sisson was on Joe Rogan he said it takes several weeks to get up to 80% and another year to get up into the 90's. He said this had to do with how long it took to build additional mitochondria in your cells to burn fat efficiently. I didn't think about what cells he meant until I heard Dr Rhonda Patrick on Joe Rogan a few weeks later talking about the transformation of white adipose tissue (WAT) where fat is stored into Brown Adipose Tissue (BAT) where fat is burned. I did some reading around the interwebs and there seems to be some disagreement with some articles insisting that your brown fat and white fat are fixed and you get what you get. While others point out that you can increase the number of mitochondria in fat cells and change them (they also point out that exercise does increase the number of mitochondria in muscle cells and make them more efficient at using energy in general. Unfortunately I am not the best resource for this technical info and I may be confusing some facts but none of that affects what I did next. Two Saturday's ago I fasted for 14 hours, jumped on my bicycle and rode a hard, steady pace around a very hilly 15 mile road coarse. I averaged 15mph (which is good for me) and, to my amazement, I arrived back home strong and ready to keep riding. No weak, shaky feeling. So Last weekend I reproduced the experiment but with a longer 30 mile coarse this time I didn't make as good an average speed but it was very windy and I ran into several obstacles. Regardless, I rode steady and hard without “running out of gas”. I arrived home strong and able to keep riding. I am planning to reproduce the 15 and 30 mile courses after longer fasts. Then I may do shorter fasts and do longer courses, I would like to see where I hit the wall.

Next up: I have been thinking about the cost of my ketogenic diet.

I was browsing back through the last couple month's worth of receipts and I feel like I am actually spending less on my weekly food now. That's weird because I am eating 90% of the same foods as before. I'm just not dumping them on top of rice and pasta. I am physically eating less and doing more with it, Now granted, I never spent $12 for a jar of almond butter before 2016 but a jar of almond butter outlasts $12 worth of bread and chips. I am going to pull all my receipts and chart this properly for next week. So, expect graphs!

Quickly back to Fasting:

I said I had fasted before riding my bike, well what I didn't say is fasting makes me feel really good now. I am noticing cyclical patterns in my desire to eat or not eat. Last Friday, Saturday, & Sunday I was simply not hungry. I planned and ate meals based on my spread sheet but I typically eat less on the weekends. Through the week things were normal by Friday I was craving snacks. Today I have no desire to eat at all. For now I am letting my body decide when and what it wants (within the constraints of my spreadsheet controlled diet) I am playing around with switching to one-meal-per-day or maybe doing a weekly 24 hour fast. I would like to try a 48 hour or longer fast. I have to plan these out but I'm excited to try.

Finally, the bane of my keto experiment:

I drink bourbon nightly and alcohol skews everything. It's extra calories that slow weight loss. It messes with heart rate, blood vessels, and blood contents (ketones, glucose, etc) It affects how you hydrate and it really stresses out the liver. I won't bother with “some studies show it's actually beneficial”. It's unhealthy but I like it. I know this sounds dumb, but you have to chose your sins carefully because you don't want to go to Hell for something stupid. I will eat better food, get exercise, get plenty of sleep and avoid dangerous exposures where ever possible but I am going to have a drink. My concession will be the quantity and regularity. So, I have started drinking carbonated water (ingredients: water CO2 and some acids for a citrus flavor) to fill the tactile place of drinking alcohol and it's worked very well for the last 2 weeks. There's no burning desire to get drunk or even have a drink because I have the glass in my hand and I'm drinking from it whenever I want. Even refilling it is a satisfying habit. It's kind of weird to realize I have this very OCD habit. For now, I still have a few drinks on the weekend after work outs are over but I've basically reset my tolerance and with fasting I can't do the heavy drinking I was doing. I am drinking half of what I was drinking 2/7ths as often. I am going to keep this up with my keto diet until I get my weight to the mid 180's. My plan at that point is to shift my diet around to find what I really like that works for me. I would like to add fruit and some small qtys of carbs back into my diet (I always did very well on pasta). Likewise with the alcohol, maybe I'll have pasta and wine night a couple times a month. The possibilities are exciting but more so because I am documenting this and I will be able to look back and say “You big 'ole liar. You hated not drinking.” We shall see.