Oh for crying out loud!…and Echoes

It’s a miserable problem for some of us (maybe not you because you’re one of those weirdos who can seem to function without much sleep, or so you say or want to believe). I believe you are fooling yourself.

Scientists and researchers know that sleep is a very big deal. Think about it. They have created sleep centers. I have visited them, twice. The gadgets and gizmos they wire you up to surpass futuristic thinking. Wires are stuck to your head, your hair, your temples, your arm pits, navel (well ok forget that one), feet, ankles, calves, chest and neck. Then an oxygen recorder is placed on your finger. Abdominal belts and chest belts complete the ensemble! Next you are told to get into a bed that sits in the middle of a room with no windows (and no clocks) located in the basement of a facility that has not seen fresh air in eons! Eerie looking long corridors with closed doors dotting every few feet alert you to the realization that there are comatose, wired-up weirdos like me in them.

“Now sleep,” they say. And, just as soon as you have finally found a way to lay comfortably so that nothing is choking you, or pulling your hair or toe nails off, or beeping, with your head on a pillow made of lumpy stuff that is way too flat, they wake you up and say, “go to sleep, you’re not sleeping yet.” No kidding!

Well, I failed their test both times. In fact, one of the technicians in charge of my visit asked if I had been practicing to fail since I did it so well!

I have this intolerance to stupid. It’s not nice I know, I have tried really to be more tolerant. I just can’t. And, you can’t fix stupid either! These places dress people up in all this electrical stuff in a strange place where they don’t want you to know what time it is, don’t give you anything to help, in a bed that’s not yours with a mattress with springs that squeak, and expect you to sleep. Oh, and you can’t roll over for fear of electrocution and or stabbing.

Researchers at Harvard and in the UK, brilliant people they say these researchers are, have figured out a few things about sleep. One of those things they have determined is that we need it. Yup, we do not function well without it. Brilliant.

Actually, they also decided doctors should prescribe it to their tired patients or to the immunodeficient. Patients need at least the bare minimum of 7 hours, in a row, not broken up. Yes, that’s 7 hours at Least of good sleep. More is even better (or you will die by age 60. Hey, I read it on the internet!)

Mathew Walker is the genius behind these findings. He’s a phenom in research, just ask him (unless you’re on a plane and ask him what he does for a living, and he doesn’t want to talk about it, then he says he’s a dolphin trainer.)

Now back to sleep, it is a serious issue. Lack of enough of it can kill you. Another way we know it is a big thing, congress has appropriated money for it. I was watching the State of the Union a few years ago and a Supreme Court Judge was getting some shut eye right there. Smart lady.

Babies do a lot of it and see how it helps them! Yup, they sleep a lot and are the smartest they may ever be. They learn to do everything, quickly and well because they sleep a lot. Babies get crabby when they don’t get enough of it and so do adults! They get mean, cranky, have road rage and become yelling thugs. They all have one thing in common. They are sleep deprived.

Babies learn languages, music, numbers, speech, talking, walking, exercising and completely controlling adults, all by the age of 2. Another thing, no one calls them lazy because they sleep a lot.

Walker found out that old people still need just as much sleep as their younger counterparts. It’s a myth that they don’t. Some older people have health issues and parts wear out. There’s less of that if they slept more. Lack of sleep is also a big “no no” if you’re driving a vehicle, operating machinery or making decisions at work. Your productivity will nosedive. However, if you are always sleep deprived and that has become normal for you, then no one may notice. You will just be viewed as being in your normal state.

The above, of course does not apply to doctors. Doctors in training are always subjected to sleep deprivation, then told to make life or death decisions. No, I am serious. More people die from medical errors every year than from all 3 major health diseases combined: Heart, Cancer, and Accidents.

The government is being asked to get involved, to tell people to sleep more and they will be brighter; to start school days later and have parents prove their children all got their ZZZZ’s in for the proper amounts of time, or else. Else what, they don’t know, but little Johnny will be retarded.

In all seriousness it is turning out to be a really important health giving component to our lives. So turn off computers, tvs and phones. Get rid of LED or blue lights in your bedroom. Dark is needed, your brain has important things to do and you are bothering it. Go to sleep and know this: Our sleep is cycular. We sleep in 3-hour cycles and we need several cycles each night. So you’re not lazy.

It is not laziness or slothful to require 9 to 10 hours of sleep a night. We’re each unique, some of us need early to bed and early to rise, about 30% of us actually. Then there is another 30% who go to sleep later and wake later. It’s ok, leave us alone.

President Trump and others who get by on less are harming themselves. Lack of sleep causes memory and cognitive issues, not good ones either. Sleep deprivation has even been related to Cancer and Alzheimers. Think of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Both claimed to need very little sleep, they both died from Alzheimers.

So, sleep tight. Apparently, swaddling helps, hence weighted blankets! Who knew..? Babies knew……

THIS IS A MUST READ ARTICLE…a real eye opener

“Everyone Is Smart, Except Donald Trump:”
– Rabbi Dov Fischer
October 19, 2018 by Ronald Yates
Friends and followers. This is well worth the read, which is why I am posting on my blog today. Rabbi Dov Fischer makes good sense. Who is Rabbi Dov Fischer? Rabbi Dov Fischer is an attorney and adjunct professor of law, a Senior Rabbinic Fellow at the Coalition for Jewish Values, congregational rabbi of Young Israel of Orange County, California, and holds prominent leadership roles in several national rabbinic and other Jewish organizations.

He has been Chief Articles Editor of UCLA Law Review, clerked for the Hon. Danny J. Boggs in the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and served for most of the past decade on the Executive Committee of the Rabbinical Council of America. His writings have appeared in the Weekly Standard, National Review, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Jerusalem Post, American Thinker, Frontpage Magazine, and Israel National News. READ ON!

Everyone Is Smart, Except Trump
By Rabbi Dov Fischer
It really is quite simple. Everyone is smart except Donald J. Trump. That’s why they all are billionaires, and all got elected President. Only Trump does not know what he is doing. Only Trump does not know how to negotiate with Vladimir Putin. Anderson Cooper knows how to stand up to Putin. The whole crowd at MSNBC does. All the journalists do.
They could not stand up to Matt Lauer at NBC. They could not stand up to Charlie Rose at CBS. They could not stand up to Mark Halperin at NBC Nor up to Leon Wieseltier at the New Republic, nor Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone, nor Michael Oreskes at NPR, at the New York Times, or at the Associated Press. But — oh, wow! — Can they ever stand up to Putin! Only Trump is incapable of negotiating with the Russian tyrant.
Remember the four years when Anderson Cooper was President of the United States? And before that — when the entire Washington Post editorial staff jointly were elected to be President? Remember? Neither do I.
The Seedier Media have never negotiated life and death, not corporate life and death, and not human life and death. They think they know how to negotiate, but they do not know how. They go to a college, are told by peers that they are smart, get some good grades, proceed to a graduate degree in journalism, and get hired as analysts. Now they are experts, ready to take on Putin and the Iranian Ayatollahs at age 30.
That is not the road to expertise in tough dealing. The alternate path is that, along the way, maybe you get forced into some street fights. Sometimes the other guy wins, and sometimes you beat the intestines out of him. Then you deal with grown-ups as you mature, and you learn that people can be nasty, often after they smile and speak softly.
You get cheated a few times, played. And you learn. Maybe you become an attorney litigating multi-million-dollar case matters. Say what you will about attorneys, but those years — not the years in law school, not the years drafting legal memoranda, but the years of meeting face-to-face and confronting opposing counsel — those years can teach a great deal. They can explain how to transition from sweet, gentle, diplomatic negotiating to tough negotiating. At some point, with enough tough-nosed experience, you figure out Trump’s “The Art of the Deal” yourself.
Trump’s voters get him because not only is he we, but we are he. We were not snowed flaked-for-life by effete professors who themselves had never negotiated tough life-or-death serious deals. Instead, we live in the real world, and we know how that works. Not based on social science theories, not based on “conceptual negotiating models.” But based on the people we have met over life and always will hate. That worst boss we ever had. The coworker who tried to sabotage us. We know the sons of bums whom we survived, the dastardly types who are out there, and we learned from those experiences how to deal with them. We won’t have John Kerry soothe us by having James Taylor sing “You’ve Got a Friend” carols.
The Bushes got us into all kinds of messes. The first one killed the economic miracle that Reagan had fashioned.
The second one screwed up the Middle East, where Iraq and Iran beautifully were engaged in killing each other for years, and he got us mired into the middle of the muddle.
Clinton was too busy with Monica Lewinsky to protect us from Osama bin Laden when we had him in our sights.
Hillary gave us Benghazi and more.
And Obama and Kerry gave us the Iran Deal, ISIS run amok, America in retreat. All to the daily praise of a media who now attack Trump every minute of every day.
So let us understand a few things:
NEGOTIATING WITH NATO
NATO is our friend. They also rip off America. They have been ripping us off forever. We saved their butts — before there even was a NATO — in World War I. They messed up, and 116,456 Americans had to die to save their butts.
Then they messed up again for the next two decades because West Europeans are effete and so obsessed with their class manners and their rules of savoir-faire and their socialist welfare states and their early retirements that they did not have the character to stand up to Hitler in the 1930s. Peace in our time. So they messed up, and we had to save their butts again. And another 405,399 Americans died for them during World War II. And then we had to rebuild them! And we had to station our boys in Germany and all over their blood-stained continent. So, hey, we love those guys. We love NATO.
Nato Leaders. Who is paying their fair share?

And yet they still rip us off. We pay 4% of our gigantic gross domestic product to protect them, and they will not pay a lousy 2% of their GDP towards their own defense. Is there a culture more penny-pinching-cheap-and-stingy than the delicate constituents of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization? These cheap baseborn prigs will not pay their fare. They are too cheap. They expect America to send boys to die for them in one world war, then another — hundreds of thousands — and then to pay for their NATO defense even a century later. And then they have the temerity to cheat us further in trade
Long before Trump, they set up tariffs against us for so many things If the average American knew how badly Europe has been ripping us off for decades with their duties, no one in this country would buy anything European again. We would say, as a matter of self-respect and personal pride, “I no longer will buy anything but American, no matter what it costs.”
Every American President has complained about the cheating and imbalance — the NATO penny-pinching-cheapness, the tariff and trade imbalances. In more recent years, the various Bushes complained about it. Even Obama complained about it. But they all did it so gently, so diplomatically. They would deliver the sermon, just as the pastor predictably tells the church-goers on Sunday morning that he is against sin, and the Europeans would sit quietly and nod their heads — nodding from sleeping, not from agreeing — and then they would go back out and sin some more. Another four years of America being suckered and snookered. All they had to do was give Obama a Nobel Peace Prize his ninth month in office and let Kerry ride his bike around Paris.
So Trump did what any effective negotiator would do: he took note of past approaches to NATO and their failures, and correctly determined that the only way to get these penny-pinching-cheap baseborn prigs to pay their freight would be to bulldoze right into their faces, stare them right in their glazed eyes with cameras rolling, and tell them point-blank the equivalent of:
The Nations of Nato
“You are the cheapest penny-pinching, miserly, stingy, tight wadded skinflints ever. And it is going to stop on my watch. Whatever it takes from my end, you selfish, curmudgeonly cheap prigs, you are going to pay your fair share. I am not being diplomatic. I am being All-Business: either you start to pay or, wow, are you in for some surprises! And you know what you read in the Fake News: I am crazy! I am out of control! So, lemme see. I know: We will go to a trade war! How do you like that? Maybe we even will pull all our troops out of Europe. Hmmm. Yeah, maybe. Why not? Sounds good. Well, let’s see.”

So Trump stuffed it into their quiche-and-schnitzel ingesting faces. And he convinced them — thanks to America’s Seedier Media who are the real secret to the “Legend That is Trump” — that he just might be crazy enough to go to a trade war and to pull American boys home. They knew that Clinton and Bush x 2 and Kerry and Hillary and Nobel Laureate Obama never would do it. But they also know that Trump just might. And if they think they are going to find comfort and moderating in his new advisers, John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, alongside him. Nuh-uh.
So CNN and the Washington Post and all the Seedier Media attacked Trump for days: He is destroying the alliance! He attacks our friends!
Baloney. Obama was the one whom the Left Echo Chamber… Chamber… Chamber — never called out for attacking our friends — Israel, Britain, so many others — while cozying up to Hugo Chavez, bowing to dictators, and dancing the tango for Raul Castro. Trump is just the opposite: He knows who the friends are, and he wants to maintain and strengthen those friendships.
It is no different from a parent telling a 35-year-old son: “I have been supporting you for thirty-five years I put you through college by signing four years and $100,000 PLUS in Loans. You graduated college fifteen years ago. For fifteen years I have been asking you nicely to look for a job and to start contributing. Instead, you sit home all day playing video games, texting your friends on a smartphone I pay for, and picking little fuzz balls out of your navel. So, look, I love you. You are my flesh and blood. But if you are not employed and earning a paycheck — and contributing to the cost of this household — in six months, we are throwing you out of the house.” That boy is NATO. Trump is Dad. And all of us have been signing for the PLUS Loans.”

NEGOTIATING WITH PUTIN.
Putin is a bad guy. A really bad guy. He is better than Lenin. Better than Stalin, Khrushchev, Kosygin, Brezhnev, Pol Pot, Mao. But he is a really bad guy.
Here’s the thing: Putin is a dictator. He answers to no one. He does whatever he wants. If there arises an opponent, that guy dies. Maybe the opponent gets poked with a poisoned umbrella. Maybe he gets shot on the street. Maybe the opponent is forced to watch Susan Rice interviews telling the world that Benghazi happened because of a YouTube video seen by nine derelicts in Berkeley and that Bowe Berghdal served with honor and distinction. But, one way or another, the opponent dies.
Trump knows this about Putin. And here is what that means: If you insult Putin in public, like by telling the news media just before or after meeting with him that he is the Butcher of Crimea, and he messed with our elections and is an overall jerk — then you will get nothing behind closed doors from Putin. Putin will decide “To heck with you, and to heck with the relationship we just forged.” Putin will get even, will take intense personal revenge, even if it is bad for Russia — even if it is bad for Putin. Because there are no institutional reins on him.
But if you go in public and tell everyone that Putin is a nice guy (y’know, just like Kim Jong Un) and that Putin intensely maintains that he did not mess with elections — not sweet little Putey Wutey (even though he apparently did) — then you next can maintain the momentum established beforehand in the private room. You can proceed to remind Putin what you told him privately: that this garbage has to stop —or else. That if he messes in Syria, we will do “X.” If he messes with our Iran boycott, we will do “Y.” We will generate so much oil from hydraulic fracturing and from ANWR and from all our sources that we will glut the market — if not tomorrow, then a year from now. We will send even more lethal offensive military weapons to Ukraine. We can restore the promised shield to Eastern Europe that Obama withdrew. And even if we cannot mess with Russian elections (because they have no elections), they do have computers — and, so help us, we will mess with their technology in a way they cannot imagine.
Tump knows from his advisers what we can do. If he sweet-talks Putin in public — just Putin on the Ritz — then everything that Trump has told Putin privately can be reinforced with action, and he even can wedge concessions because, against that background, Putin knows that no one will believe that he made any concessions. Everyone is set to believe that Putin is getting whatever he wants, that Trump understands nothing. In that setting, Putin can make concessions and still save face.
Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin
That is why Trump talks about him that way. And that is the only possible way to do it when negotiating with a tyrant who has no checks and balances on him. If you embarrass the tyrant publicly, then the tyrant never will make concessions because he will fear that people will say he was intimidated and backed down. And that he never will do. Meanwhile, Trump has expelled 60 Russians from America, reversed Obama policy and sent lethal weapons to Ukraine, and is pressing Germany severely on its pipeline project with Russia.
THE BOTTOM LINE
At the end of the day, Donald Trump is over seventy years old. He has made many mistakes in his life. He still makes some He is human. But Trump likewise has spent three score and a dozen years learning. He has seen some of his businesses go bankrupt, and he has learned from those experiences to be a billionaire and not let it happen again. No doubt that he has been fooled, outsmarted in years past. And he has learned from life.
Trump is a tough and smart negotiator. He sizes up his opponent, and he knows that the approach that works best for one is not the same as for another. It does not matter what he says publicly about his negotiating opponent. What matters is what results months later.
In his first eighteen months in Washington, this man has turned around the American economy, brought us near full employment, reduced the welfare and food stamp lines, wiped out ISIS in Raqqa, moved America’s Israel embassy to Jerusalem, successfully has launched massive deregulation of the economy, has opened oil exploration in ANWR, is rebuilding the military massively, has walked out of the useless Paris Climate Accords that were negotiated by America’s amateurs who always get snookered, canned the disastrous Iran Deal, exited the bogus United Nations Human Rights Council. He convinced Canada and Mexico that he would walk out of NAFTA if they didn’t negotiate a new and fair trade agreement (they did), and he has the Europeans convinced he would walk out of NATO if they don’t stop being the cheap and lazy parasitic penny-pinchers they are
He has slashed income taxes, expanded legal protections for college students falsely accused of crimes, has taken real steps to protect religious freedoms and liberties promised in the First Amendment, boldly has taken on the Lyme-disease-quality of a legislative mess that he inherited from Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama on immigration, and has appointed a steady line of remarkably brilliant conservative federal judges to sit on the district courts, the circuit appellate courts, and the Supreme Court.
What has Anderson Cooper achieved during that period? Jim Acosta or the editorial staffs of the New York Times and Washington Post? They have not even found the courage and strength to stand up to the coworkers and celebrities within their orbits who abuse sexually or psychologically or emotionally. They have no accomplishments to compare to his. Just their effete opinions, all echoing each other, all echoing, echoing, echoing. They gave us eight years of Nobel Peace Laureate Obama negotiating with the ISIS JV team, calming the rise of the oceans, and healing the planet.
We will take Trump negotiating with Putin any day.4You and 3 others4 SharesWowCommentShare

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