We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
One of my daughters Ubered to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center yesterday afternoon with sharp abdominal pain and a mild fever. Appendicitis, unless ruled out.
Of course, it was appendicitis. Three or four hours later they took the disgusting thing out laparoscopically and sent her home in an Uber a couple of hours later. No stitches, just a couple of steri-strips.
This month’s Harvard magazine has an article on just this topic. Scroll down to the section titled, ‘Eating to Excess: Metabolic Inflammation’.
“The metabolic stress that is a hallmark of modern life, the stress that the body has not evolved to handle, is constant eating, he continues. When people eat, energy and nutrients enter the body rapidly, are processed, produce in turn a lot of by-products, and then need to be reduced to “functional substances that are distributed throughout the body, and then disappear very quickly. Many cells and tissues actually undergo a huge amount of stress during this process,” he explains, “as they store appropriate nutrients and dispose of harmful intermediates.” Part of this process also involves mounting an immune response. “The pancreas, for example, must secrete four to five hundred milliliters of enzymes every day” to be able to manage the incoming energy load with every meal. “If you place these organs under constant stress, they start malfunctioning.” The consequence is that “right now, one out of every 10 individuals has diabetes. One out of every four individuals has fatty liver disease. And if you reach a certain age, one out of every three individuals will develop neurodegenerative disease.”
The metabolic stress that underlies these conditions comes from the daily imbalance between how much energy people consume and how much they need, and can process in a healthy manner. The long-term consequence of overconsumption, combined with lack of sufficient expenditure, is stored energy—the accumulation of fat...”
Also interesting in that article is a bit about the benefit of muscle inflammation due to stressful exercise. Muscle damage, of course, is how we build strength.
We can predict that colleges will over-spend on the appearance of facilities, because that factors heavily into the decision of the high school student. We can predict that colleges will under-spend on classroom instruction. Market failure.
The public policy response should be to tax college facilities and/or subsidize quality classroom instruction.
Activist Massachusetts Judge Who Helped Twice-Deported Illegal Alien Evade ICE Arrest is INDICTED
James Clapper Knew There Was No Evidence of Trump-Russia Collusion In 2016. President Obama’s top intelligence official stated categorically that no evidence existed of Trump-Russia collusion. So why did Rosenstein appoint Mueller two months later?
We have written about habitual, ritual, compulsive, and recreational eating several times. Except for growing kids, manual laborers, distance hikers, and people who lift, all the talk about "the most important meal" was nonsense.
Yet we hear it all the time. For most people nowadays, the best way to get fat is to eat three meals/day.
Written in 1918. Best national song for the USA. OK, I am a Yankees fan, sort-of, but they should be banned for their racist history. Along with all of the slave owners on our currency.
When I was working for Roger Ailes, he'd tell us stories about what it was like to be working with Nixon. One story he told was the advice he gave to Nixon when the Watergate story broke, which was (remember, it was his story and I'm telling it second-hand) "Tell the truth, you had nothing to do with this, it was overzealous campaign members going overboard. The American people have a great capacity for forgiveness."
That story was one I heard about 23 years ago, and I can't confirm it ever happened, but based on the (limited) interactions I had with Ailes it was probably fairly accurate. I was raised to believe most people have a great capacity for forgiveness if you're sincere, if you're honest, and you're willing to make amends.
I no longer think that's as true as it once was, and it certainly is not true with Progressives (unless, of course, you are a Progressive and they need to protect you). This is why Confederate statues are coming down, history is being rewritten to suit their feelings, people are castigated for views they had, behaviors they employed, and words they used which no longer are 'acceptable' in this overly PC environment today. This is why social media outlets like Facebook or Twitter are employing questionable means and methods to block speech.
Recently, my favorite hockey team, the Philadelphia Flyers, removed Kate Smith's statue because it suddenly came to light that she sang a few song with racist lyrics in them. Kate's dead, and can't defend herself, let alone apologize. So what option do we have to deal with this? Expunge history. Make her disappear. She is a horrible person who is irredeemably terrible and nobody should know about her.
Kate played a large, if indirect, role in the Flyers' winning the Stanley Cup in 1974 and 1975. But today she's persona non grata for doing things which, in her time, were deemed perfectly acceptable. From my perspective, it's a learning moment. Keep her history alive, and do teaching sessions around who she was, what she did, and why she's still an important part of the team's history regardless of whether we find a few of her song off-putting.
Today's America is about forgetting our past - pushing it aside, and not allowing for any forgiveness whatsoever. That is, in what is Progressive America. You know, the urban elitists and academics who have a good portion of the political upper class in their sway. Naturally, if THEY do something wrong, they'll find a way to apologize, expunge or set aside the misbehavior - maybe even vote one of their own into power, despite having done something 'wrong'.
Extramarital affairs have tradtionally been normal among the social class extremes: the wealthy and aristocratic, and the poor. An interesting sociological topic might be why so many ordinary people do not see this as a good idea.
The cited motives listed are these:
Top Reasons for Men:
His wife’s libido has dropped after marriage, children, etc. His wife is more preoccupied with being a mother than a partner. His wife no longer makes him feel sexy, masculine, virile. He is nostalgic for his free and wild youth The relationship is dull. Same conversation over and over again, same position over and over again, etc.
Top Reasons for Women:
Her husband no longer makes her feel sexy/desirable. Wants to explore sexual desires (kinks) she was too immature or unaware of in her youth. Her husband views her as a caregiver not a sexual being. Her husband initiates sex like she is a robot. No slow burn. No romance. No passion, excitement, thrill.
Strong arms seem to be a biological signal to females that a male might make a good sexual/reproductive partner. It's primitive, a sign of power, vitality, and virility.
Well, all guys want strong arms for either signaling or functional purposes, but curls are not the most sensible way to approach strength: they are more about hypertrophy. We prefer compound exercises over single-muscle exercises. More time-efficient. After all, the hands are connected with the arms, the arms to the shoulder, and the shoulder to chest and back.
I'll assume that few of our readers are Body Builders who focus mainly on the size and definition of muscles, but are, rather, regular, function-oriented fitness people.
What about the ladies? All of our exercises are valuable to ladies' fitness, but ladies can not develop bulging muscles under ordinary circumstances. Big muscles do not equate with strength.
However, we do single-muscle-group exercises as accessory exertions when there is time for them. Thus hand and forearm exercises, calf exercises, upper arm exercises, leg raises and leg contractions, etc.
Let's list both focused and compound exercises which can build stronger arms while mostly stressing other muscle groups at the same time:
- Pullups and cable pull-downs (biceps, forearms, back) - Bench press (triceps, biceps, chest, shoulder) - Cable push-downs and skull-crushers (triceps) - Dumbell and barbell curls (biceps and brachioradialis) - Pushups (triceps, chest, shoulder) - Overhand curls (forearms and biceps) - Grip exercises like rope climbing, grippers, farmer walks, deadlifts
NB: Sometimes you will see a guy in the gym with muscles bulging all over the place. That guy is juicing. A bad fitness plan.
Lindsey Graham tells Trump to 'expect impeachment proceedings' - But the end result of the proceedings, he predicted, would be Mr Trump’s re-election in 2020
Shrew skulls 
30 Common, English Idioms 
Strong arms seem to be a biological signal to females that a male might make a good sexual/reproductive partner. It's primitive, a sign of power, vitality, and virility.
Dog-Walking