Organization “Inside Google” Runs Ads About Google CEO’s Big Brother-Like Attitude

Most parents understand that the Internet is NOT their friend. Companies like Google are making billions by tracking everything you do online… and then selling that information to the highest bidder. Worse, they are tracking everything your children are doing as well… up to and including using the GPS in their cell phones to track their movements.

Fortunately, the public is FINALLY waking up — and fighting back. The organization “Inside Google” is now running ads on the Times Square Jumbotron lampooning Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s famous comment that, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” Schmidt could have worked for the East German Stasi with that attitude. Between corporate sleazebags like Schmidt and Big Brother totalitarians in the U.S. government, Americans will soon have their every movement watched, online and off.

On a more practical level, Inside Google offers a number of privacy tools on its website that can help you get started taking back your life from corporate totalitarians like Schmidt. Go to…

http://insidegoogle.com/takeaction/privacy-toolbox/

It’s not just a matter of disabling “cookies.” Hundreds, even thousands of websites –especially those that use Flash Video — place tracking programs on your computer that monitor everything you do. These tracking programs — known as LSOs or Local Shared Objects — remain in place even when you delete your cookies.

To get rid of LSOs, you can add a special plugin to your Firefox browser. You can get this plugin, Better Privacy, by clicking here…

More later.

Why I Don’t Trust Doctors (or Most “Experts” for That Matter…)

In bioethics, politics and law, oftentimes we must rely upon the opinions of so-called “experts,” particularly those in the medical professions.  But as anyone who has ever dealt with doctors knows, they are frequently wrong — but almost NEVER admit it.

The problem is, their arrogance can get people killed or cause serious harm. That’s one of the reasons why you should never trust doctors or any other expert. Or rather, you should follow Reagan’s Dictum: Trust… But Verify.

Take this recent case from Australia. A woman, Kate Ogg, delivered twins and was told that, after 20 minutes of resuscitation efforts, that the male child wasn’t going to make it. The hospital staff lay the lifeless body of the premature infant on the mother’s chest so she could say goodbye.

The problem is, the baby began to stir. “Just reflexive movements,” the doctor sniffed dismissively.

The parents trusted the doctor knew what he was talking about — always a problematic assumption — and continued to nuzzle the baby as it squiggled around. They assumed he was dying.

They kept asking the doctor to re-examine the baby, but he refused. Repeatedly refused. He had decided. He had made up his (arrogant) mind. Too busy filling out his forms to bother taking another look. This attitude is rampant in medicine.

Here’s what happened next as reported on MSNBC.com:

Jamie [the baby] continued to come around as he lay across Kate’s chest. He began grabbing at his mother’s finger, as well as his father’s. And when Kate put a dab of breast milk on her finger, Jamie eagerly accepted it.

Kate finally began to believe her baby was actually alive. “We thought, ‘He’s getting stronger — he’s not dead,’ ” she said. But the family wasn’t getting any encouragement from their doctor. While the Oggs urged hospital personnel to summon him, they were repeatedly told what they were seeing was still just reflex from a baby already declared dead.

Kate Ogg told Curry they had to “fib” to get the doctor to return to her bedside. “We kept saying, ‘He’s doing things dead babies don’t do, you might want to come and see this,’ ” she told Curry.

But the skeptical doctor still didn’t return. “So David said, ‘Go and tell him we’ve come to terms with the baby’s death, can he just come and explain it.’ That made him come back.”

Kate Ogg told the London Daily Mail the doctor was in disbelief when he arrived back at the bedside. “He got a stethoscope, listened to Jamie’s chest and just kept shaking his head. He said, ‘I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it.’ ”

The problem with experts is not that they don’t have expertise. It’s that their expertise blinds them to what is right in front of their eyes. Their expertise actually creates a bias.

I don’t mean to pick on doctors. My brother is a doctor. I have friends who are doctors. But I take almost everything they say with a gigantic grain of salt… especially when it’s really serious. The parents in this case now worry that the arrogance of this particular doctor may have resulting in their child suffering unnecessary brain damage. Had the doctor bothered to listen to what the parents were saying, the hospital staff might have been able to administer oxygen and take other measures to help the struggling baby.

Trust but verify indeed.

The Earthy Mysticism of William McNamara

In the late 1970s, while studying philosophy in college, I discovered the “earthy mysticism” of William McNamara. For more than 30 years, it has remained the dominant spiritual influence of my life and is partly the reason I remain, despite everything, a committed follower of Christ and a stubborn (if not very pious) Catholic.

A charismatic retreat master and former Carmelite friar, McNamara espouses a gritty, life-affirming, no-nonsense approach to Christian spirituality that is unique and, to me, exhilarating. Despite having encountered over the years a wide assortment of gurus and spiritual teachers from many different religious traditions, I have never found a spiritual synthesis quite like that of McNamara’s Earthy Mysticism.

McNamara’s approach is both very traditional and, at the same time, strangely radical. His heroes are the classic Carmelite mystics such as St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross, but also literary figures such as Zorba the Greek and philosophers like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Abraham Joshua Heschel.

For McNamara, mysticism is not an otherworldly flight from reality but the opposite: a robust and courageous immersion in life in all its fullness and, through that immersion, an encounter with the Source of all (revealed, for Christians, in the person and work of the carpenter of Nazareth). With his long black (now grey) beard and full head of hair, McNamara looks like a wild-eyed rabbi or biblical prophet: a “disciplined wild man,” his term for a mystic.

In the 1970s and ’80s, McNamara’s message was challenging, defiantly anti-establishment: He insisted that all human beings, and certainly all followers of Christ, are called to be authentic contemplatives (mystics). Asceticism, the gradual sloughing off of pettiness and cheap thrills, is merely a way of whetting our appetites for the main meal of life.

The hustle and bustle of modern society is not such much sinful as it is deadening: or rather, it is sinful because it is deadening… or deadening because it is sinful. In his classic 1974 book, The Human Adventure: Contemplation for Everyman, written in the midst of the allegedly bohemian counter-culture, McNamara described the insipid dullness of materialistic society:

There are few towering pleasures to allure me, almost no beauty to bewitch me, nothing erotic to arouse me, no intellectual circles or positions to challenge or provoke me, no burgeoning philosophies or theologies and no new art to catch my attention or engage my mind, no rousing political, social, or religious movements to stimulate or excite me. There are no free men to lead me. No saints to inspire me. No sinners sinful enough to either impress me or share my plight. No one human enough to validate the “going” lifestyle. It is hard to linger in that dull world without being dulled.

Ultimately, Earthy Mysticism is an invitation to the radical amazement that comes with being fully, ecstatically alive. It is not a series of programs, methods or techniques but an attitude towards life, a willingness to ride the wild roller coaster of being a human being — with its rapturous joys and overwhelming sorrows.

McNamara’s brand of Earthy Mysticism seeks to reawaken in us a primordial astonishment at the real world and the God who is revealed in and through it. It seeks to help us recapture our original awe. When we pray, McNamara says, we enter the cave of a lion and do not know if we’ll come out alive. “God is not a nice or comfy thing to be possessed” through meditative techniques, he writes in his most recent book, Wild and Robust: The Adventure of Christian Humanism. “God is an earthquake.”

Michelangelo hid brain stem in God’s throat… or not.

You know the old expression, “To a hammer, all the world looks like a nail?”

I couldn’t help thinking that today when I read a news report about two medical researchers who believe that the great Renaissance artist Michelangelo embedded an anatomically correct drawing of the human brainstem in his drawing of the throat of God in one of the paintings of the Sistine Chapel.

Two researchers — one a neurosurgeon and the other a medical illustrator — published their theories in the May issue of the journal Neurosurgery.

“We speculated that having used the brain motif successfully in the Creation of Adam almost a year earlier, Michelangelo wanted to once again associate the figure of God with a brain motif in the iconographically critical Separation of Light from Darkness,” wrote authors Ian Suk (the medical illustrator), and Dr. Rafael Tamargo, both of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

MSNBC pointed out that this is not the first time that over-eager doctors have seen evidence of their own field in the great artist’s work.

“In an article published in 1990, Frank Lynn Meshberger, a gynecologist, identified an outline of the human brain in the Creation of Adam,” the website pointed out. “Among other details, he noted that the shroud surrounding God had the shape of the cerebrum, or the upper part of the brain. A decade later, another researcher pointed out a kidney motif.”

It’s true that experts say Michelangelo put hidden messages in his paintings of the Sistine Chapel.  Two Jewish scholars, for example, believe that Michelangelo painted Jews into his portraits of heaven, making the (then daring) theological point that Jews, too, would be saved.

But I’m not convinced about the brain stem.  It’s a little too much like the images of Jesus routinely found in flour tortillas in California.

Evolution, Creation and Adam and Eve, Part II

People often ask me why I remain a Roman Catholic – given all the scandals over homosexual pedophiles in the Church, the Peter, Paul and Mary liturgies, and so on.

They’re not asking me for the party line reason but my own, very personal reason.

And this is what I usually say: Whenever I really look into a question – an ethical, political, scientific, religious, Biblical, historical question – whatever it is – whenever I really dig deep and wrestle with all the issues involved, from abortion to Biblical studies – I find myself inevitably concluding that the “official,” even papal position ends up being correct.

I mean that very sincerely.

Over a lifetime, such independent investigations develop a certain amount of trust – the same kind of trust you might feel toward, say, your father, despite his annoying idiosyncrasies.

Evolution, Creation and Adam and Eve is just another example of this.

Whenever I am goaded by my Protestant friends or in-laws to, once again, really look into the controversies over evolution and creation, I find that, as usual, the Catholic position ends up not only making the most sense exegetically (in terms of the Biblical texts) but is also, amazingly enough, supported by strong scientific evidence.

And that brings us back to Adam and Eve.

For years, I believed that the world was basically covered by overgrown chimpanzees… and that, maybe 50,000 years ago, Cro-Magnon Man suddenly appeared to chase down Woolly Mammoths and drag their wives by their hair into the cave.

But we now know that isn’t the case.

Human-like (hominid) species flourished on earth up to a million years ago – and they looked a lot more like Raquel Welch in the film “One Million Years BC” (a big favorite with my classmates when I was in fourth grade) than they did like Cheetah.

Anthropologists now keep pushing the dates for proto-human groups back hundreds of thousands of years – as far back, in fact, as 800,000 years ago. The scientific evidence for these groups is overwhelming (which isn’t, by the way, the same thing as evidence for Darwinian natural selection).

Nearby is an artist reconstruction of some hominid forebears of ours, Homo heidelbergensis (”Heidelberg Man”), an extinct species of human that may have lived around 600,000 years ago. This is not the knuckle-walking semi-semian many people assume, but a genuine cave man who stood about six feet tall, walked upright and had a brain as big as that of modern humans. There is evidence that Heidelberg Man used primitive tools, buried his dead and may have possessed a language.

An even earlier species, so-called Homo antecessor, fossils of which were discovered in the 1990s in Sierra de Atapuerca region of northern Spain, may have lived as long ago as 1.2 million years ago. This early human species also stood about six feet tall with the males weighing about 200 pounds but had a 20% smaller brain.

There weren’t a lot of these creatures roaming the world back then – as few as a few thousand, perhaps. Our genuine cave man ancestor, Homo heidelbergensis, is considered by anthropologists to be the ancestor of both the extinct species of Neanderthals and modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens). Neanderthals lived in the period from 600,000 years ago until around 30,000 years ago, when they mysteriously became extinct. DNA evidence suggests that there was some, although very limited, inter-breeding between Neanderthals and modern humans.

Anatomically modern humans, known as homo sapiens sapiens, first appeared around 200,000 years ago in Africa. In Europe, they are called Cro-Magnon Man

Now, with all of these various proto-human groups running around the world between 1 million and 30,000 years ago, how likely is it that we are all descended from a single historical human couple, an Adam and Eve?

After all, doesn’t it make more sense that there were many ancestors of the human race?

Well, here’s what fascinating… and what makes any effort to reconcile the Biblical account of creation with what passes for scientific anthropology even more difficult.

The DNA evidence actually does show that all human beings alive today do descend from a single mother – so-called Mitochondrial Eve. Different DNA evidence also suggests we are all descended from a single male – Y-chromosomal Adam.

What isn’t clear is whether the genetic Adam and Eve lived at the same time. It’s possible that they could have literally founded the current human race… but it’s also possible that Eve was an older woman (by tens of thousands of years!).

The bottom line is that the scientific evidence tends to support monogenism, the unity of the human family, which is what Pope Pius XII insisted upon as a key point of Catholic doctrine vis a vis any scientific theory of evolution in his encyclical humani generis.

8 Easy Ways to DOUBLE Your Opt-In Response Rates

A “squeeze” or “opt-in” page is the web page that visitors land on after they click
on a search engine keyword.

The only purpose of an opt-in or squeeze page is to elicit a specific response from a website visitor — usually to give a name and an email address in exchange for specific information. Smart marketers often have visitors land on a squeeze page first… before being redirected to a sales page.

In recent months, Internet marketers have been complaining about declining opt-in rates… but the truth is that many web developers ignore proven, tested techniques when creating their squeeze pages. Fortunately, just a few simple changes can dramatically boost your results — often doubling or even tripling your opt-in rate.

Step 1: Make sure your headline matches keyword search terms exactly. Fully 50% of people who visit your site after clicking on a search engine keyword make their decision to stay or go within the first 2 seconds. Their only question when looking at your web page is: Is this the right place? If they think it might be, they’ll linger for a few more seconds. Your first and most important job is to help them realize that, indeed, your site is the right place. If the dominant keyword for your product is “seaweed shampoo,” then the words “seaweed shampoo” better be in the headline of your squeeze page and found throughout the body copy.

Step 2: Tell your visitors EXACTLY what you want them to do and tell
them immediately. If you want visitors to sign up for your free e-zine, then the sign-up box should be front and center and “above the fold.” Smart Internet marketers put links and sign-up boxes throughout the body copy of their squeeze pages. You want people to always know what you want them to do.

Step 3: Show your product immediately. We call this the “hero shot” because your product or service is the “hero.” Again, this should be done above the fold. If you’re selling a service, then you must graphically represent the service with photos. The purpose of the hero shot is to convince visitors that they’ve found the right spot.

Step 4: Make sure you have a privacy statement right next to your sign-in or purchase box. The world loathes spam. If you don’t convince your visitors that you respect their privacy, right from the get-go, they’ll be gone Johnson.

Step 5: Use tables or bullets instead of text to describe the benefits of your product or service. As a copywriter, I never thought I’d say this… but on squeeze pages shorter copy is better than longer copy. You still can have body copy and sales copy, but 50% of people who opt in probably won’t read it. They’ll be convinced solely by your headline, hero shot, bullets and privacy policy.

Step 6: Ask only the minimum necessary for a sale or opt-in. Too many marketers ask visitors to their site for everything from their mother’s maiden name to their fax number. Keep it brief. Don’t frighten people off unnecessarily.

Step 7: Add audio or video to your squeeze page. It’s 2008. If you’re not using video or at least audio on your squeeze pages you’re badly hurting response. There are dozens of free or inexpensive tools available now that make online video a snap. If you don’t know how to add video to your site, ask your web developer. It’s now easy as pie.
Step 8: Use graphical credibility enhancers — again, “above the fold.” These credibility enhancers include your best testimonials… Better Business Bureau icons… any industry logos or association logos your company is authorized to use… and so on. You need to communicate immediately that your site is credible. You should try to do that as much as possible without words but with graphical elements.

I’ve used all of these steps for my clients – with amazing results. One project I worked on had a slightly less than 2% opt-in rate on a free offer. It was a long sales letter with an opt-in box at the bottom. After implementing the steps above, the opt-in rate skyrocketed to 15% and higher. That’s an amazing difference.

Bottom line: The only purpose of a squeeze page is to capture leads. It’s not there to sell a product… build brand identity… or tell prospects about your company. When you keep that in mind when designing your squeeze page, it will make an enormous difference in the results you get.

How to Create “No Brainer” Offers That Double, Even Triple Your Revenue

Years ago, a friend of mine… who built up a $200 million travel club business from scratch… told me his entire philosophy of direct response marketing could be reduced to just two words:

The Offer.

He told me he has tested every variable imaginable both online and offline - copy, lists, colors, text sizes, formats, you name it. But when push comes to shove, he said, nothing — absolutely NOTHING — produces sales like an irresistible, no-brainer, “you’d have to be crazy not to accept it” offer.

That was his specialty. He would cobble together 50% to 75% discount offers from airlines, car rental agencies, luxury hotels, restaurants, and cruise lines and put them all together into a package that he’d sell for something like $49.95 a year.

The offer was simply incredible. If you liked to travel, you’d have to be crazy not to accept it. Why pay $350 a week for a car rental when you could get the same car for $125? You’d pay for his service with a single coupon!

So, what does this have to do with marketing non-travel products?

Well, too manymarketers spend a lot of time on every other element of their marketing campaign and very little time thinking through their offer. You have to really ask yourself some tough questions: What’s in it for the customer? Is the offer you’re making something that is SO GOOD — such an incredible deal — something that provides so many overwhelming benefits — that he or she would be insane not to accept it?

The best resource I can think of for health marketers to bone up on creating superb offers is Mark Joyner’s now-classic The Irresistible Offer: How to Sell Your Product or Service in 3 Seconds or Less (John Wiley, 2005). You can pick this up used at any decent bookstore or order it from Amazon.com.

I don’t have time to go into all of Joyner’s theories right now, but let me just summarize a few key points. For Joyner, the Irresistible Offer has three basic elements:

1. An incredibly HIGH Return on Investment (ROI) for the buyer…

2. What he calls a TOUCHSTONE or instant summary of your offer… and

3. Believability.

The TOUCHSTONE is what is unique about Joyner’s approach - and which is difficult for marketers to achieve.

Examples are Domino’s Pizza’s “Pizza in 30 minutes or it’s free” or Columbia House Records’ “10 CDs for 1 Cent.” Another good Touchstone is Federal Express’s: “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.” That tells you immediately what they are offering - and, if you have a package that HAS TO BE THERE, it’s irresistible.

Believability is something everyone understands. If I offer to make all your wrinkles disappear overnight, I have to have some pretty heavy credibility enhancers. But if I can tell you I can make your wrinkles FADE in just 7 days, you might believe me - especially if I’m an MD and I have loads of studies to back me up.

The final point that Joyner doesn’t really discuss is the target audience. The best offer in the world will flop if you make it to the wrong group of people. You can’t sell ice to an Eskimo, as the saying goes, but you CAN sell ice… a lot of ice… to a thirsty crowd. All you have to do is give them a taste… and then offer them a second glass.

I recommend you check out Joyner’s book. He has dozens of valuable insights about such essential copywriting elements as offer intensifiers, risk reversal tactics, pricing tricks, viral marketing and more.

Take the time to master these secrets of top-level copywriting, and you can have orders flying in from every which way! Coming in via call centers, email, your website, fax machine, FedEx, mail, etc.

Copywriting is the ultimate security in a very un-secure world. Your ability to produce cash on demand for your business, through the power of persuasive words alone, is truly the modern-day equivalent of alchemy.

And it all begins with those two words: The Offer.

The Daily Discipline of Pushups

The first thing I do every morning when I get out of bed is to do 40 pushups. It’s also the last thing I do every night before I climb into bed. That may not sound like a very “yoga” thing to do, but it’s a discipline I adhere to that I believe has been very good for me.

I’m 51 years old so, if you’re younger, you can do more. I will probably gradually work up to my age or so just to show off but 40 is plenty for conditioning purposes.

To some, 40 may sound like a lot… so I want to share how I worked up to that number. I used a very simple method that I use for most difficult things: I did started with something very easy that I knew I could do: One pushup.

I used to do a lot of pushups when I was younger, but around the age of 45 or so I noticed a lot of what doctors call crepitus in my shoulders – horrible, crunching sounds from wear and tear on my joints – whenever I did pushups. It bothered me. Yet I found that if I did pushups, it actually reduced the crunching noises, as though the exercises free up the tissue adhesions and let the shoulders move more freely.

That’s when I decided to start doing regular pushups. As I said, I started one month and, on the first day of the month, I did one pushup first thing when I got out of bed and another single pushup before I got into bed. My wife chuckled at my rigorous exercise program. But like the old Greek story of the farmer who lifted the baby calf onto his shoulders everyday… until, when the calf grew into a bull, he found he could still lift the bull… I kept doing as many pushups as the days on the month went along. On Day 2, I did 2 pushups. On Day 3, I did 3 pushups. By the time I reached Day 30, I was doing 30 pushups in the morning and 30 at night.

I stopped at 40 because I didn’t want to make it too hard. I’ve found that if I push myself too hard in my yoga practice or anything else, I start to procrastinate and avoid things. For me, forty pushups is just about right: hard enough to work my chest and shoulder muscles, not so hard that I am tempted to skip a day.

For me, hatha yoga – the physical side of yoga — is all about the creation of daily exercise, cleansing and stretching habits like this.

I have many of them which I will be sharing periodically on this site. But for beginners, I believe people will benefit from starting with one, very un-yoga-like but highly beneficial exercise: daily pushups.

Men, especially, like this exercise because it gives them a hard, chiseled, defined chest and strong arms; but women, too, can benefit from daily pushups. The trick is to start slowly… just one a day, two times a day… and build up slowly. If you think 30 pushups will be too difficult, try adding another pushup every other day. Or even every third day. The key, as in yoga, is consistency and daily practice.

Jump out of bed, stretch, and then drop and give me twenty! You’ll be glad you did.

Studies Find Aerobic Fitness Equals Independence in Later Years

The folks at Cenegenics have taken a hard look at the benefits of aerobic fitness for people in their 60s, 70s and 80s. They’ve reviewed recent medical studies and concluded that, yes, aerobic fitness matters – particularly if you want to live independently in later years. Not only that, but the recent studies show that overall mortality is cut by as much as 70% among the “highly fit” elderly.

In fact, a significant study of more than 15,000 veterans whose average age was 60, published in the January 2008 Circulation (a journal of the American Heart Association), found that men who were “highly fit” had a 50% - 70% lower mortality risk than their “low-fit” counterparts.

Lead author on the study Peter Kokkinos even stated that to attain the associated health benefits, it only takes “moderate levels of physical activity like 30 minutes a day, five days a week of brisk walking.”

But it’s also well documented that maximal oxygen intake decreases between 20 to 60 years old and is projected to deteriorate at a similar rate into retirement. The faculty of Physical Education and Health and Department of Health of Public Health Sciences along with the faculty of medicine at the University of Toronto, (Ontario, Canada) examined the “likelihood that a deterioration of aerobic fitness will lead to a loss of independence in old age.”

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The Lost Secrets of Health & Fitness After Age 50

July 18, 2010 by Robert Hutchinson  
Filed under Health, Over 50

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Here’s the bad news: You lose up to 5% of your strength, flexibility and balance for every decade after age 20. But here’s the good news: With a little effort and determination, you can maintain 90% of the strength, flexibility and balance you had at age 20 well into your 60s, 70s and even 80s.

It sounds incredible… but it’s true! That means that if you could do 60 pushups when you were 20, you could actually do a mere 54 when you’re 65 (90% of 60). If you could get up at 5:00 a.m. and surf for two hours, you could, at age 70, get up at 6:00 a.m. and surf for only an hour and a half. (After all, you must make some concession to age!)

How is this possible? The answer lies in TRAINING FOR AGING.

As you age, you can maintain your strength, flexibility and balance… but you must train to do that. You must develop an exercise program that seeks to develop the very capabilities that we know you will lose as you age.

One way I do this is with the esoteric Japanese martial art of Aikido. I love Aikido because it trains all three of the physical attributes you lose with age — strength, flexibility and, most neglected of all, balance. If you want to fight, try Brazilian jujitsu. But if you want to age with grace and dignity and agility, try Aikido. There is nothing like it.

I also lift weights, do yoga, run on my treatmill while watching the news, and practice a little Tai Chi. I’m an ugly, crotchety old bastard… but I can do more pushups than many 20-year-olds I know and I’ve never felt better in my life.

Tags: Fitness over 50

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