Nuclear Fear

By now we have all been sufficiently bombarded with the fear of a nuclear conflict on television and online, given the recent tensions with North Korea.

The North Korean missile program has recently been able to repeatedly and successfully launch intermediate range ballistic missiles, including a very dangerous launch over the Hokkaido island of Japan. Western intelligence agencies say that not only does North Korea now possess a missile that can reach parts of the continental United States, but that they have also been able to miniaturize their nuclear arsenal so that the nuclear payload can be delivered via such a vehicle.

On our home front, the president of the United States has not practiced effective international diplomacy to calm the tensions. In fact, he has only inflamed the situation when offering "Fire and Fury" as a means with which he plans to address the North Korean threat. We have a wide array of military assets in the Korean peninsula and have conducted military exercises with the South Korea as a show of force. None of this has worked, nor will work, to resolve the tensions.

The leader of North Korea, Kim Jung-Un, is following in his father's footsteps in attempting to flaunt his country's military in order to gain international attention and at times blackmail countries for economic concessions. However, with the escalated nuclear capabilities of the North, there is no longer an aura of invincibility for the US and its allies. There is, for the first time, substantial fear.

While we remember the days of the Cold War, when Soviet Union squared off with the United States, and its days of escalating Nuclear capabilities and countermeasures, this confrontation is quite different. In the days of the Cold War, both sides had professionals of distinguished integrity that held human life in highest regard, and intervened in order to preserve it.

One notable example is when the Soviet physicist, Andrei Sakharov, made a breakthrough in high yield nuclear ordinance in 1960. Despite demands from the Politburo for the most powerful bomb ever created, he intervened and convinced them to reduce the yield by half. As a result, he may well have saved all life on earth. While the bomb RDS-220 (commonly known as Tsar Bomba) had yield of half of the original design, the test detonation was still a devastating event that wiped out a village, was felt over a thousand miles away, and its blast wave orbited the earth thrice.

Such men of integrity and courage are rare. In fact, I am beginning to doubt that many exist anymore in today's world. I certainly doubt that there are any left in a repressive and dictatorial regime of the North Korea.

The End of Bullying?

In recent years, the effects of bully behavior in our nation's schools has become fully exposed with tragic consequences. We have seen news stories of children committing suicide, after a prolonged period of being subjected to bullying by their peers. Just this year alone in the United States the lives of Gabriel Taye, Sadie Riggs, and Mallory Grossman have been lost to consequences of bullying behavior.

But unless you're a child or a teacher, you don't really witness first-hand the extent of cruelty that children are subjected to. You are left only with second-hand accounts. But never fear, social media is here. Those second-hand accounts now appear on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, etc. The bullies themselves, as well as bystanders who enjoy the spectacle, are posting their actions online.

In the United States, the schools are attempting to correct this behavior through raising awareness and reporting measures. The theory is that once a bully is exposed, confronted, and the victim's suffering is brought to light, the likelihood of a repeat offense is less. The problem here is that these measures are built on a hypothesis that the community's stand on bullying behavior being unacceptable will discourage such behavior.

Let us dive deeper into what a bully wants to achieve. The vast majority of bullies inflict physical and mental pain on their peers in order to satisfy their sense of recognition among their peers and to highlight a difference between themselves and their victims for personal status of superiority. To a bully, the confrontation is a part of the action they seek in the process. Therefore, the reverse situation of a non-damaging confrontation inflicted upon a bully does not guarantee that his or her destructive behavior will cease.

Awareness and reporting are a great start, but they are by no means the solution. In Finland, a new system has been implemented with significant success. It is called kiusaamista vastaan, translated - against bullying. The concept is rather simple - it is to starve the bullies of the attention they seek. It involves significant training for the teachers and a new part of the curriculum that teaches students to engage the victim of bullying with caring positive attention and to ignore the culprit. Much more than sending a message to the bully, this program sends a message of support to the victim and deprives the bully.

This program involves a large amount of educators' time to implement, which works well with the Finnish education system. However, it would require a wholesale curriculum overhaul in the United States, where the teachers are forced by the system to be more concerned with the students' test scores, than they are with their mental and physical well being. In Finland, being a teacher is one of the more prestigious and lucrative occupations, for which the best of the best apply. In the United States, that's simply not the case.

But Finland is not the only nation finding success in combating bullying behavior. In China, the Beijing education authorities were severely disturbed a year ago when videos of cruel bullying incidents in schools began to surface on social media. The courts ordered the education authorities to take action in order to combat this problem. Their solution is a multi-step program that forces bullies to undergo military training (what we in the United States call boot camp), provide community service, and make speeches at schools regarding the evils of bullying. The punishment is levied in a court, just like a criminal offence, and the initial sentence has a term to it in months of service required. After the term expires, the court hears from the program administrators and the offender to rule on whether her or she is ready to rejoin their peers in civil society.

In my opinion, the Finnish solution sounds excellent but unrealistic for the United States education system in its present shape. As it stands, I am in favor of the Chinese solution and here is my reasoning. Bullying behavior is a clear and present threat to the physical and mental well being of the entire student population. As a result, we as Americans, have to extend the Bill of Rights to our children in schools and punish the offenders who infringe upon them. For adults, assault and harassment are punishable offenses that can be prosecuted in a court of law. We can do our future generations a service, by addressing these tendencies early on.

What do you think? Should we take the Finnish, Chinese, American, or a completely different approach? Leave your comments below, as I am curious to find out what creative solutions we an come up with.  

Don't Take Your Successes For Granted

One of the most incomplete, but wildly popular, sayings is that "experience is learning from your mistakes". 

First of all, let's dissect that statement. The term experience in the given context is defined as having acquired a certain degree in a practical skill as a result of repeated exposure (hands on or through observation) to the corresponding events. If experience implies learning, then the true measure of experience is defined by your successes in participation, not your failures. 

The only thing a failure will teach you is what not to repeat again. It is true that certain failures will create situations that force you to be resourceful and test you, some subsequently leading to success. But ultimately, you learn from your successes with respect to what works. 

As children, we know this to be true from a young age. From the time a child crawls, walks, uses a spoon, etc.; that child recognizes the feeling of success and repeats those successes in their continuous process of learning. 

As we get older, our goals and achievements become more complex and multifaceted. Some of these include purchasing a house, making the right investment, raising a child and advancing a career. The more items we have to cover in order to achieve success in any given goal, the more likely it is we will experience failure at some point on our way to achieving that goal. This, I suppose, is the reason why the aforementioned saying about mistakes being the source of our experience is so prevalent.

However, the greatest mistake many adults repeat is failing to learn from success. The reason for this is when we fail, we are forced to assess our failure and figure out where we went wrong, ultimately setting us on a more correct path to success. However, when we succeed, there is no pressing need to assess our success in order to figure out where we made the right choices and where other factors were in play despite mistakes. 

From personal experience, almost a decade ago, a potential promotion in an industry I love dearly fell into my lap. It is a position I earned specific graduate education for, accumulated the right industry background, and seemingly made the right impression with the company staff. Up until that point in my career, every single promotion that I had applied for, I received. It seemed so natural, that I could do no wrong, or so I thought. But despite having all the right credentials, scoring desirably on the personality assessment, and acing the interview; I did not get the job.

The job went to an external Software Development professional candidate who had no experience in the given industry. I was completely blindsided. After running through all the variations in my mind of how this could happen, the blame game, and pondering my future; I decided to research all the information on this matter I could get from my colleagues.

I discovered there were several factors that led to me being excluded from consideration for the given role. 

First, the organization I worked in acquired a reputation for promoting younger staff with limited experience to higher level positions, which made the parent company question the organization's choices. This made it less likely for me to be chosen for the role, as the local managers wanted to make a better impression with this particular hire.  

Second, I acquired the perception for being demanding of my co-workers. At the time I did not have a wife, kids or a house. I could immerse myself in work, and push as much of my energy as I could during the working hours. The adverse perception from my colleagues was that I would be as demanding of them in a more administrative role. This provided resistance from some of my colleagues, when asked by Human Resources how would I fare in this particular role.

Lastly, I was highly valued by all the department heads and my direct manager in a purely technical role. I was seen as a valuable technical resource with no viable replacement in the event of a promotion. Neither the upper management nor my direct manager wanted any part of having to replace me in the vacated position. This factor, contributed the heaviest towards this failure. 

Ultimately, I realized that in all my prior promotions and job offers, I succeeded. This never made me go through the same analytic process that I had to go through at this point in time. As a result, I always thought that my approach to getting the next job was without fault. Nothing could have been further from the truth. The mistake that I kept on making, despite the string of successes, was to focus on myself and project the person I thought the organization needed.

In reality, in order to get any job, I needed to focus on the organization, the role, and the specific profile needs of that role, in order to make sure I project the match the organization is looking for. I have been applying that principle ever since.

Most importantly, I learned not to take my successes for granted. I have learned to carefully scrutinize my successes, just as much as my failures, in order to separate where I was right and where I was lucky despite being wrong. 

I would advise everyone to learn from your successes. Go over the details of each and every step. You'll be surprised how much you can learn from them, when you stop taking your successes for granted. 

Maywheather, McGregor, Trump

When the thought of a Mixed Martial Arts fighter like Conor McGregor taking on a legend like Floyd Maywheather in a boxing ring for 12 rounds came up, a lot of sport enthusiasts laughed it off as if it would never happen. This is, of course, an educated opinion. A discipline like boxing is different and highly specialized than MMA, which is exactly as its acronym suggests - a mixed bag of disciplines.

But as the saying goes - "If it makes money, it makes sense." (Southpaw). This event is the ultimate display that hype over substance is king in this day and age.  Both Conor McGregor and Floyd Mayweather realize this fact and are ready to cash in on the gullible public. Because they can't convince the public that this is going to be a viable fight, they are resorting to building a culture of hate between each other in order to draw interest.

As if taken from the playbook of WWE's Vince McMahon, they have drummed up a blockbuster promotional tour in the biggest markets where they butt heads nightly in a vitriolic mudslinging contest and epic stair-downs. In order to convince the public to shell out $100 or more for an event that technically is almost guaranteed to be a snooze-fest, you have to try to convince the public that the fight is less predictable than it appears.

It all appears to be working, as interest in the fight has skyrocketed since the promotional tour took place. But the manner in which this has occurred, should remind us of the dangerous curve we have taken in our society as of late. The public is drawn into the dynamic between these two fighters with offensive homophobic, racist and misogynist screaming contests. Few are particularly concerned that it is wrong, because most of the public has dismissed it as part of entertainment.

Entertainment crosses over into everything. It has crossed over into the presidency and it has crossed over beyond the sport's basic definition and into an area of a freak show. It makes no sense that Donald Trump was able to successfully run for president, even less that he actually won. Much the same way, it makes no sense at all that McGregor-Maywheather is a viable fight. However, it will be promoted as such, simply because people want to be entertained and are in it for the shock value, regardless of the vile nature by which we get there...

My Weight Loss Approach

This is my weight loss approach, meaning it worked for me. The basic principles are the same for everyone, so calibrate based on how you respond - nobody knows your body better than you.

A few years ago, just after New Year's celebration, I woke up and looked in the mirror. What I saw was an unwieldy version of myself that didn't seem right. I was 250 pounds with spare tire and love handles. I was often short of breath even after a short period of strenuous activity, had a vicious acid reflux following almost every meal, and could comfortably sleep only on my side in bed.

I did quite a bit of research with respect to proper nutrition and physical training required to get where I wanted to be. I devised a three phase approach that would introduce each aspect of a lifestyle change into my daily routine. I knew that for this lifestyle change to be permanent, these phases had to be reasonable enough to be performed every day, yet effective enough to keep me moving towards the target weight and shape I desired.

1) Nutrition. It doesn't matter how active you are or how much time you spend at the gym, if you are sabotaging yourself by eating unhealthy and/or overeating (even healthy food will harm you, if you eat too much). Before I revamped my daily nutrition, I was eating in excess of 3,500 calories daily. Nothing was off limits and bad habits like soda, fast food, and my favorite sin - ice cream; were near daily staples of my diet. After the adjustment, I started to keep a 2-to-1 protein-to-carbohydrates ratio. Majority of my protein is taken from low-fat and nonfat dairy, lean chicken, fish, egg whites and raw almonds. Carbohydrates are important too for daily energy and majority of my carbs are taken from fruits, vegetables and whole grains. I am now consuming between 1,975 and 2,500 calories, depending on that day's physical activity. I avoid most fried foods, full fat dairy, foods with added sugar, foods with high salt (and sodium) content, starchy carbs and limit my intake of lean red meat to twice a week.

2) Active lifestyle. Every move we make during the day burns calories and takes us closer to a healthier version of ourselves. As such, it is important to avoid laying on the couch to watch the television after work, spending the weekend at home and leading a mostly immobile lifestyle. Before I made the switch, the above statement largely described my way of life, aside from a trip to the bar or to eat. With the change, I plan my after work activity very deliberately. Whether it is going to the mall to get some steps in, the store to walk around and pick up a few items, or walking around outside listening to an audio-book; these are all net positive gains versus the couch potato lifestyle. There are other choices I make, such as taking the stairs instead of an elevator, walking short distances instead of taking the car and taking a leisurely stroll for a half hour at lunch time. The weekend and vacation are your opportunity to shine. I started going on hikes, zoos, pick your own fruit events, etc.; virtually any activity that requires me to walk for a prolonged period of time is on the table.

3) Gym. In order for anyone to effectively lose weight and keep it off, we have to build up and maintain lean muscle mass. Up until my moment of truth, I had an on and off relationship with the gym that had limited effect because I was still doing the same old full circuit workout that I got used to my freshman year in college. That workout was strenuous and ineffective. I trained every muscle group everyday, therefore breaking down the muscle tissue and not letting it rebuild completely.  It was incredibly hard, therefore I stopped doing it just after a month of starting the program every time. This all changed, when I applied the proper rotation and rest day approach. I now employ a four day rotation system. On the first day, I do 30 minutes of cardio, upper back and biceps. On the second day, I do 30 minutes of cardio, shoulders, chest and triceps. On the third day, I do abs, quads, glutes, hamstrings and calves. On the fourth day, I rest and recover. Each exercise involves 2 sets of 12 repetitions, with the first set being 85% of max weight and the second set being max weight to fail. This allows for a shorter more intense workout that is effective, while at the same time spreading it over 3 days to keep it easy enough to stick to continuously. All three days of activity are preceded with 6-7 minutes of stretches, related to the specific muscle groups that day covers.

The Result - 55 pounds lost within 6 months after starting this approach. And while I have gained back 10 of these pounds over the past few years, the weight I gained back is lean muscle mass and not fat.

P.S. This is an approach that worked specifically for me. Everyone's body and habits are different, and nobody knows you like you. I encourage everyone to educate themselves and tailor a custom plan that is specific and effective.

Review: Wonder Woman

I personally found this movie to be entertaining, despite certain lapses and a casserole of many different points it was trying to achieve. At times I felt like the mercenary band of Indian, Scotsman, Turk and Cowboy were a construction worker short of performing the YMCA.

This film began as a well structured origin story, which provided a great backdrop for Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman. The mythology was on point during the early stages of the movie. From Wonder Woman's early childhood, the lure of belonging to the warrior culture of the island, to her training and discovery of extraordinary powers; this part was masterfully written and executed.

The plane crash entry of Chris Pine's Steve Trevor was a fitting and satisfactory transition into World War I era. The Wonder Woman's morality and commitment to justice lead her into the world of early 20th century male dominated Britain. From wardrobe, decorum, down to misogynist social interaction; the transition held true to mythology while providing enough comic relief to be entertaining.

Historical accuracy was also on point, from the invention of mustard gas and chemical warfare, to machine guns, trench warfare and uniforms. Supporting cast was not too shabby either. Danny Huston's German General Ludendorff was a charismatic competent antagonist, aided by the cold blooded phantom of the battlefield Elena Anaya's Dr. Meru.

I did not appreciate the hodgepodge team for the sake of screen diversity assembled by Steve Trevor. This film could have served the purpose of a powerful female character and highlight historic gender inequality without the gratuitous pile on of additional diversity in comic relief characters.

While Ares identification came as a twist in the end, it did not hold true to the original comics, where the Wonder Woman's principal enemy would influence humans in conflict from aside and not posing as the person. Besides, if you want to influence the greater conflict as Ares, you could occupy a more pivotal host in terms of historical significance.

The sacrifice at the end of the story provided closure to Steve Trevor's arc, while confirming Wonder Woman's belief in humanity in the end. Nevertheless, it was a bumpy, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder fueled ride to the finish.

I give this entertaining film 4 out of 5 Gummy Bears.

Absentee Congressman

We are living in an era when the leaders we elect do not uphold the rights and interest of the citizens at large. Instead, they pursue a path of self-enrichment and corruption at taxpayer expense. Nowhere is this deficiency more evident than the Congress. Here we see elected officials consistently miss votes that are inconvenient for them to participate in.

When we elect a politician, we expect that person to vote against legislation that will harm us and vote for legislation that will benefit us. However, that very politician received money from their party, private donors, corporate donors, lobbies, etc. It is those monetary contributors to their campaign (and back pocket) that they owe their Congressional votes to first, before any of us.

There is a very useful, but severely underused, tool that the government provides us with, which allows an average citizen to track the Congressional votes (or lack thereof) of their Senators and Representatives. Here is the website: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes

Based on a 2015 study, our Congress was rife with Senators and Representatives that missed a significant portion of their votes. To be fair, those dutiful elected officials that cast every single vote they are called upon drive the average absenteeism down to a palatable 4%. However, there are some that reach as high as 30% absenteeism and over 20 officials consistently miss more than 10% of their expected votes. Imagine if you don't show up for work 10% of the time? That's right - the Senators and Representatives play by a different set of rules.

But absenteeism is only a part of the problem. A lot of the time, the Senators and Representatives are present for the vote, but abstain from voting on an issue that may be problematic for them.

Let's suppose you're a Senator in North Dakota and you are asked to vote on the Dakota Access Pipeline regulation. Your voting population does not want the pipeline approved for environmental reasons. But your big money donors have a financial stake in the project and want your vote for approval. You are not going to deny your sponsor, but you will also not want to upset your voters. So you chose neither - you abstain from voting, citing the legislating is lacking, incomplete or some other irrelevant excuse. That way, you remain safe with the donors and most of the voting public.

In order for us to clean up the Washington landscape, we have to turn our votes into weapons. We must fight Congressional Absenteeism and legislative vote abstinence. Your elected officials have an important job - to vote for or against legislation on your behalf.

Take a look at your elected officials' voting record here  https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes
And if they're not doing their job, we must fire them. Don't sit on the sidelines - weaponize your votes!