Ben Robertson

REVIEW: CONVICT CONDITIONING

Mon, 13 Aug 2018 12:00:59 GMT

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This book is about how to use calisthenics and bodyweight to develop strength and build muscle. The program requires no equipment, only the will to do the exercises and attention to detail. As one video blogger noted, pen and paper are the only tools you need to do convict conditioning, and that is exactly why I wanted to learn about this program of strength training.

Last year, I decided I wanted to gain weight so I started researching how to gain muscle mass. At the time, I was 47 years old and weighed 132 pounds. I am 5' 8.75" tall, so this put my BMI at 19.5, near the bottom of the healthy BMI range of 18.5 to 24.9.

When I was 20, I ran track and lifted weights and hit a peak weight of 143 pounds, putting my BMI at 21.1. Eleven years later, drinking beer pushed me to an all-time peak weight of 148 pounds, all in the gut, pushing my BMI to 21.9. I stopped drinking beer years ago, part of how I lost the weight, but figured exercise could at least get me back to 143 pounds.

One key finding in my research was that men lose muscle mass as they age due in part to declining levels of testosterone, so I decided that it was also important to do what I could to raise my testosterone. For me, this meant getting more and regular sleep, drinking less alcohol, drinking nettle tea, and finding ways to further avoid and ameliorate exposure to BPA, an estrogen-mimicking pthalate common the food supply.

Avoiding BPA is something that I was already doing by avoiding food that touched plastic. This means no plastic cups, straws, or packaging. But because it is impossible to completely avoid plastic, I also began taking activated carbon to absorb BPA and other toxins in my gut.

In the first 6 months, I only gained 2-3 pounds and was disappointed in my progress. Then I met an Army medical officer who told me that the key to gaining muscle is protein and if I wanted to gain weight I should consume more protein, a lot more protein. To do this, I began consuming more kefir, like 1/2 a gallon to a gallon a day, as well as other high protein foods like eggs, cheese, fish, tofu, tempeh, rice bran pasta, oatmeal, hemp nuts, and chia seeds.

You can see a list of my favorite super foods below, with links to Amazon.

As a result of increased protein intake, my weight increased another 6 pounds over the next 5 months. This was double the weight gain I experienced before and in less time. But at 141 pounds, BMI now at 20.8, I was hungry to gain more muscle.

This is when I started researching exercise equipment I could use in my home and thinking about adding exercises to my routine, without going to a gym and lifting weights. There is a ton of different equipment out there and I was especially intrigued by straps, like the ones from TRX. The only problem was that the more I learned about equipment, the more confused I got.

You see, I am a minimalist, so it was important to me that if I bought equipment, I buy only the right equipment, not too much and not too little. The struggle to do this is what lead me to then look at books on bodyweight training to see what the experts recommended.

The great thing about Convict Conditioning is that it requires no equipment. This means I can save money and avoid cluttering my life with more stuff.

REVIEW: SJW'S ALWAYS LIE

Mon, 13 Aug 2018 12:00:59 GMT

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This is a well written analysis and tactical plan for how to fight Cultural Marxism, also known as political correctness.

Vox Day shares stories and insights gained from incidents publicized in the media to shed light on the destructive impact of political correctness. Along the way he provides specific strategies to help those who would rid our society of this modern day witch hunting and its many adherents.

The details of Gamer Gate are shared to give an example of how one group effectively did this in the science-fiction and gaming community. The inside ball was sometimes more than I cared to know but it was illustrative and I did enjoy learning about Game Gate.

Perhaps the most important point illustrated is the one contained in the title, which is that SJW's always lie. The attack on Western Civilization is not a quest for truth, but rather for power.

Mao said, power comes from the barrel of a gun.

Mao was wrong. The truth is the most powerful weapon human beings shall ever wield. We love the truth. Jesus said, the truth shall make you free.

We might have to use guns to fight for our freedom but power comes from the truth, not from the guns.

This is why we say that the pen is mightier than the sword and history confirms this is true.

When confronting tyrants, good people often make the mistake of assuming that the other side would agree with them if they only knew the truth. Vox Day makes clear that we must see the tyrannical tactics of the Cultural Marxists for what they are - tools of control used to force submission.

Cultural Marxists hate freedom of speech because it exposes their lies. Labelling free expression as hate is a tactic used to suppress debate and allow lies to remain unchallenged.

Free speech is the first line of defence and a much preferred to guns but in America we have the freedom to exercise freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and the right to bear arms in defense against threats foreign and domestic. These rights are guaranteed by the First and Second amendments of the United States Constitution.

Vox Day does a good job using his pen to help us win the battle for freedom with the First Amendment so we do not have to resort to the Second.

REVIEW: WHAT'S WRONG WITH CHINA

Mon, 13 Aug 2018 12:00:59 GMT

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Paul Midler wrote a good book about China and I loved reading it. (Full disclosure - Paul is a friend since we first met in Taipei in the late 1990s and he sent me a copy of his book as a gift.) I was an East Asian Studies major in college and lived and worked in China and Taiwan for 6 years and was happily surprised by how much I learned from reading What's Wrong with China.

Paul is a great story teller and keeps getting better as a writer. I first read his work in 1997 sitting at the bar at O'Ginny's in Taipei. He shared with me an essay he wrote for graduate school about riding his scooter in Taipei. When he got into Wharton, and I did not, I attributed his success in part to that well-written and entertaining essay.

The laugh-out-loud funny parts of this book are Paul's stories about working with factories in China. There are also some hilarious stories about cab drivers. What makes these stories so funny is the cultural analysis that provides a Westerner's understanding of a Chinese perspective.

Factory owners flatter, emote, yell, bribe, cheat, lie, steal, and even cry to get to the equilibrium point of fair trade. While many foreigners have lost their shirts and thrown up their hands in exasperation, Paul suggests that success is possible for those willing to fight fire with fire.

What's Wrong with China is one of at least three previous works by the same name. Throughout the book we learn about many books written by past observers like Arthur Smith, Abbe Huc, and Lucian Pye and this depth of historical perspective was for me a revelation. I read Chinese history in school but none of these first hand accounts, perhaps because many of them are so unflattering.

Perhaps the biggest gap in my education was the Boxer Rebellion, described in my recollection of a history class called Modern China as a failed religious rebellion against British imperialism. The perspective taught in that class was consistent with the Chinese government view that colonialism was bad and China was a victim. While this may be true, I was grateful and saddened to learn that the Boxer Rebellion included the slaughter of 400 men, women, and children, mostly missionaries from the United States and England.

Through detailed accounts of his own experiences, references to the work of others, and historical context and analysis, Paul provides important insight for both business and foreign policy negotiations. Among the more disturbing foreign policy moves by China in recent years is the building of islands in the South China Sea to establish historical claims to territory. Based on Paul's analysis, and my own, this is a bluff but only in so far as the United States has the will to say no.

The other important insight is that not saying no will likely lead to worse conflict in the long run. The danger of China's cat's paw approach to foreign policy, that is using others as a proxy for its own ambitions, can be seen clearly with North Korea. As a puppet of the Chinese Communist Party, North Korea is threatening its neighbors with nuclear attack, and providing what some in Beijing might consider a happy distraction from the South China Sea.

It is odious to think that Beijing might be using North Korean nuclear capabilities as a bargaining chip to further its ambitions in the South China Sea but it is also not out of the question.

What's Wrong with China is an ambitious book that left me wanting to know more. The issues of Communism and brainwashing are mentioned but I would like to have known more about how Chinese culture might have changed since 1949. As much as I grieve for the missionaries killed in 1900, the murder of Christians, Falun Gong practitioners, political dissidents, and others in modern times is just as disturbing.

The book focuses a great deal on the American and British experience in China but China shares its borders with 14 countries and I think it would also be interesting to know more about these neighbors, especially Russia and India. For example, I found the discussions of Japan's relationship with China invaluable, like how Japan refuses to apologize for its actions in China during World War II but has done so in Korea.

What's Wrong with China is a good book and an excellent introduction to modern China.

REVIEW: ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA

Tue, 18 Apr 2017 14:46:51 GMT

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Wonderful adaptation of Plutarch's Antony. I read Plutarch first and then read Shakespeare's adaptation and knowing how the story ended actually helped me enjoy the Shakespeare version more.

Given a choice, I have to say that Plutarch remains for me the more enjoyable of the two, perhaps because it tells the whole tale of Antony's life rather than just the end. In Plutarch we get a richer knowledge of Antony including his many victories and his popularity with his soldiers.

I recommend reading both to see how two masters handle the same material in different genres.

TOOLS AND APPS FOR WRITING WHITE PAPERS AND EBOOKS

Mon, 08 Feb 2016 14:47:26 GMT

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Writing eBooks and white papers for corporations encouraged me to develop processes and workflows specific to this type of work. These are topical pieces used as marketing collateral in what is known as content or inbound marketing, where the provider’s goal is to attract readers who will download the piece, and opt-in to receiving marketing messages via e-mail. As a writer, I find producing these pieces interesting and demanding as it requires me to develop an informed point of view on topics like cyber security, online reputation management, and the psychology of design.

Mastering a large body of information and writing against a deadline is made easier by the use of tools and apps like Evernote and Scrivener. It is also made easier by having tools for formatting and editing like Microsoft Word. And, when it comes time to share the work and collaborate on edits, Google Docs is a godsend.

Here are the tools and apps I use to produce the work.

THINKING WITH PEN AND PAPER

For me, everything begins with pen and paper. These analog tools have not been improved upon since the 19th Century advent of paper made from wood pulp and the ballpoint pen . Nothing replaces the immediacy of writing by hand and putting thoughts on paper.

RESEARCH WITH EVERNOTE

Evernote is my go to app for collecting research. My Evernote note organization is based primarily on tags, which I use to identify web content, blog posts, academic papers, articles from newspapers and magazines, and notes related to the work, like the outline. Evernote Web Clipper is particularly useful, as it allows me to simplify the formatting of web content, giving me clean, easy to read text with no advertising or other distractions.

You can get free versions of Evernote for iOS and OS X. I also recommend Scannable, the free document scanning app from Evernote.

OUTLINING WITH SCRIVENER

For word processing, I prefer Scrivener, mostly for the chapter outlining features. I begin my work in Scrivener by organizing my chapters, sub-headings, and approximate word counts for each section. Once I begin writing, the chapter outline and word counts help me make sure I cover the topics I need to cover, do not cover extraneous topics, and meet my deadline (most of the time.)

WRITING ON APPLE HARDWARE

During the writing process, I often have Evernote and Scrivener open at the same time, with Evernote on the left side of my screen, and Scrivener on the right. I am able to work this way with an 11” MacBook Air and on an Apple Thunderbolt display . Given the productivity advantages of having more pixels, I expect at some point to upgrade to a MacBook with retina display , but so far the MacBook Air works fine for libraries and coffee shops.

FORMATTING AND EDITING WITH MICROSOFT WORD

When my drafts are complete in Scrivener, I compile the chapters and export to Microsoft Word, which is my preferred word processing program for formatting and editing. I will typically edit several drafts in Word, before having a draft that I can present to my client for final review. Word remains the gold standard for word processing, as far as automated editing like spelling and grammar checks, and for documents that can be easily shared across platforms.

I recommend subscribing to Office 365 to get access to Word and other Microsoft apps for as little as $9.99 a month.

Pro Tip: When working in Word and Scrivener, save each draft as a separate version, with the file name ending in “v#”, as in “Tools and Apps for Writing eBooks_v3”.

GOOGLE DOCS FOR SHARING AND EDITING

When I have a good draft, I save my Word document on Google Drive and share it with my client as a Google Doc. Writing is often a collaborative process, especially writing for hire. And when it comes to collaborating on a text document, Google Docs has several useful features.

My favorite feature is that versions are saved automatically, no "v#" required, and these can easily be viewed and referred to when making changes. The commenting feature is also useful, especially when someone wants to say, “Hey, do this,” or “Check this out.” If other people work on the piece, like a graphic designer, Google Docs also allows me to stay in the loop via e-mail updates.

REVIEW: READY PLAYER ONE

Sun, 11 Oct 2015 14:47:20 GMT

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Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One is a fun, sci-fi adventure that may be the ultimate literary mashup of Eighties pop culture references. It’s the year 2044, though, and the Eighties is the setting for an online game and virtual universe called the OASIS. The story is told by Wade Owen Watts, a high school kid, who is a poor orphan in Oklahoma City and one of the leading gamers in a contest to find an Easter egg within the OASIS, and win control of not only the virtual universe but the company that owns it.

I enjoyed the journey back to the games, music, books, movies, food, language, and culture of my youth, with Wade as my guide. Wade is a great, likable kid, with a good heart. He is also an intrepid hacker who fights for the nerd, the geek, his friends, and the girl he loves.

Wade took me back to the first time I played Advanced Dungeons & Dragons at the Rec Center, and the countless sessions that followed in the kitchens, dining rooms, and basements of my friends in Keene, New Hampshire . I revisited the hours I spent playing Asteroids , Tron , Pac Man , Centipede , Battlezone , Defender , Galaxy , and Joust , in the darkness of the Electric Dream Factory on Railroad Street, where we would meet after we finished our paper routes. We colored the black and white pictures of the monsters in the Monster Manual and painted lead figures of our players, while images from The Hobbit , The Lord of the Rings , The Sword of Shannara , Conan the Barbarian , and Excalibur , filled our minds, with what it might really be like to be a monk, or a wizard, a ranger, or a paladin, as we sat on one side or the other side of a Dungeon Master’s Screen.

But the key image from Ready Player One for me is standing in an arcade and playing a video game. From the time I entered middle school in 1980, to the time I graduated from college in 1990, I have memories of playing games in arcades, beginning with Space Invaders at a Ray's in Manhattan, and ending with the Terminator 2 pinball machine in a student center game room in Middletown, Connecticut. Put your quarter in the glowing red slot marked $0.25, press Player One, and get ready.

Ready Player One’s strongest recent influences from my own reading are William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash . The OASIS is perhaps the ultimate Eighties homage to cyberpunk and the depiction of cyberspace developed in those groundbreaking novels. Cline takes it a step further by filling it with a Wikipedia-like catalog of trivia from the Eighties, and the early Nineties.

Cline writes in clear, simple prose, with a focus on description and plot. His characters are simply drawn and he often leaves out unnecessary description in favor of moving his story along. I learned a lot and the few times I was worried the historical trivia would get to be too much, the story quickly picked back up again.

Getting rights to such a vast catalog of pop culture seems to me like a huge challenge and I am interested in seeing how it works out for the movie. Steven Spielberg, an Eighties icon referenced many times in the book, is directing the film, and Zak Penn, who grew up in the Eighties and has done related work like Atari: Game Over , is adapting the screenplay. Ready Player One is a generous, well-written book, and I hope to see it on the big screen in 2017, like I totally would not miss it.