I'll be honest, I like reading about health, and exercise and weight loss.  The things people either write or publish can be either be enlightening, uninformed or simply ludicrous.  I enjoy the enlightened ones, scoff at the uniformed and shriek with derision at those so obviously ludicrous.  I read one of the latter ones on the MSNBC website under health.  Going back to find the link I was amazed to find that it seems to have disappeared.  The subject was on lifting weights and weight loss.  Now most people who are overweight want to lose a couple of pounds.  You know, with this economy it's less expensive to slip into last summer's duds then have to go out and buy knew ones, and the five or six pounds you put on thanks to Thanksgiving and Christmas and simply being too lazy is going to make them a snug fit.

Oops, some one's been dipping into the ice cream a little too much

The ludicrousness became apparent in the second sentence, after the authoress complained that Cardio was not helping her lose weight after having a baby.  Then she said, "and then I noticed people at the gym lifting weights."  It must never have occurred to her that a number of people go to gyms for strength training.  Maybe she thought body builders just do it in their basements, or garages.  Her reasoning to use weights to lose weight was because "after a work out your muscles burn calories for a long time."  This makes me wonder if maybe her Cardio was only cardio.  You know what I mean.  We've all seen those boneheads bouncing away on an elliptical because they're not using any resistance, or those who get off a stationary bike after windmilling their legs for a good thirty minutes without so much as a grimace.  Let me tell you, when I get off my bike my legs usually feel like rubber because I've worked those suckers.  Maybe she didn't lose weight because she didn't really watch her diet, you know those four bowls of pasta you eat after a workout help keep the thunder in your thighs.  I'm serious, because the emphasis was so overboard on weight training the article became nearly bizarre.  A smart work out incorporates both weight training and Cardio, don't rely on just one.  But as my friend Shaun said a long time ago, "your legs are the engines of your body."  

Roswell denied

Since 1947 people have been talking about Roswell.  At first there were just mutterings, but during the early 60's, something happened, Betty and Barney Hill.  That's when the alien talk took off, so to say.  There was a movie in 75 about them and then those dear little aliens showed up in Close Encounters.  Suddenly you weren't anybody unless you happened to have seen a UFO.  Jimmy Carter saw one.  Then, of course, there were the abductions.  It was almost like "be the first on your block to be hypnotized and discover you've been abducted."  Most of this was horse shit; people needing to be recognized as having had to deal with an anal probe.

As you can tell, I'm not truly impressed by most of the so called authorities and their invented data.  This doesn't mean I don't believe there might be UFO's, in fact, I suspect there probably are, however the logic takes over.  If they are real and they are being observed, then they want to be observed.  Which brings me back to Roswell.

This is a picture of some of the debris which since been declassified by the government as some sort of weather balloon (read possibly spy balloon).  That's what it looks like.  My main problem with the whole Roswell alien crash is that what superior species would design a craft to travel light years through space only to have it crash in Arizona?  Remember, this is a superior species so the idea of their  craft crashing is a bit ludicrous.  We can't even send men to Mars, yet they can send them light years.  Maybe they used a wormhole and didn't have to worry about going faster then the speed of light.  How many wormholes do we know of?  No matter how much you want to believe, the logic thing keeps it from working.  These ideas were formulated in a much more simpler time and place.  Some people want to believe.  That's fine, what ever makes them happy.

Republican Reality

It's funny listening to the Republicans waffle.  Some of them understand there is something wrong with their party, some of them don't.  I suspect a lot of them are simply parroting what their leaders want them to say without even taking the time to try and comprehend what their words mean.  A few of them know they need to start down the path of change, but change is difficult.  They're blaming Romney for running a bad campaign, but they were all behind it.  They're blaming the polls.  Franklin Graham is blaming the Evangelicals.  This party likes to point fingers at everybody but themselves.  They like to point to past Republican presidents citing their accomplishments without bothering to note that these presidents did not lean far to either left or right but were, rather, centrist presidents.  This election cycle they tried pointing to the Founding Fathers as representing traditional beliefs without bothering to explain how Liberal those beliefs actually were, like Freedom of Religion.  They're not acknowledging that if it hadn't been for the racist vote Romney would have ended up with what, 39%?  Guess what, the racists are slowly dying off.  America is changing and they're being left behind.  Their Party Platform was so far to the right and they thought people would jump on board.  They don't understand that candidates like Akins and Mourdoch are 60 years too late.  Now they're accepting the fact that revenue needs to be on the table to avoid the fiscal cliff they helped design and they are bit happy.  Why?  Because they are all wealthy and it's their own taxes they're going to have to raise by cutting out loopholes.  That's why they stand around looking like they've been sucking on lemons.  This election has shown them just how unspecial they are.  I think Mitch McConnell looks particularly sour.  Could be he has discovered he's standing there with a diaper full of shit.

Time for a diaper change?

I saw where Mitt Romney made some sour grapes comments alleging Obama's victory had more to do with gifts to young blacks and Latinos then anything else.  Doesn't this sound a bit racist, especially when coming from an older white guy?  I suppose he must be appealing to all of those racists whose whose election night tweets were a reflection of the ugly side of America.  Like so many Republicans he is in denial.  In their minds there is no logical way they could have lost this past election which means they need to blame somebody or something.  This is quite normal with Republicans.  There is never a moment when they look at themselves in the mirror and admit to screwing up.  No, they are like that aging woman who paints her face with pounds of make up in order to convince herself she is still a porcelain beauty.  Like that old woman, they will eventually die still unaware the porcelain has cracked.  While there is some apparent bipartisanship jockeying right now history tells us the Republicans will shit it away because in their minds they can not be wrong.  If  you see anything even remotely resembling change it will only be one faction attempting to throw another faction under the bus.

Has the GOP already lost?

And you can bet they are already plotting the next presidential election.  I suspect they will run a white man for president and a token black, Latin, or woman as vice president.  Why?  Because they've tried using that playbook before:  McCain and Palin, a party ticket made in hell.  They don't understand.  For some reason they feel all they need to do is run a token to get votes.  People aren't that foolish.  They're not going to fall for the bait and switch.  Unless the GOP begins roasting some of the far right chestnuts no one is going to believe they've moved even marginally to the center.  What I suspect you'll see is more blame.  They may need to lose three elections in a row before they stop hitting the snooze button on realities alarm clock.

Is the Republican Party dead in the water?

I pretty much think so.  Do a search on "racial tweets?"  Holy crap!  I was stunned when I saw much hate there is in the Republican Party, it's like a cancer in their bones.  Now you have some 34,000 in Texas wanting to secede from the United States.  You do know these are the same people who, back when Bush wanted to go to Iraq, damned every one who disagreed as unpatriotic.  When Obama was elected for his first term, instead of taking a step back and analyzing what had gone wrong and what they needed to do to put themselves on an even keel, the Republicans moved farther to the right.  They just don't seem to understand the electorate moves right down the center line, swaying a little to the right but then back again to the left, but just a little bit.  The electorate knows if they go too far to either left or right this ship is going to capsize.  The Republicans don't understand this at all.

I was going to use a picture of the Titanic but too many people lost their lives with that one, the Yorktown is better, it was dead in the water but survived.  Actually, I believe the Republican Party needs to decided if they're going to be on the Titanic and sink or on the Yorktown and float.  If they're going to float they're going to need to something about the racism.  The only way they're going to win another presidential election is by incorporating blacks or / and Latinos and the racists, well, they'll probably have to find another party.  The GOP might split into two  parts, or three parts: social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, and the Tea Party.  In order for the Republicans to put another man in the white house I suspect one of those three groups is going to get the shaft.  I'm betting it's the Social Conservatives.  

Simply put, Rosetta Stone is pretty damn difficult

A long, long time ago, when I was going to Lebanon Valley College, I had to take a foreign language.  Notice, I said take, not learn since you were not really expected to become fluent in that tongue unless, of course, you were a language major.  In high school I had tried Spanish and didn't like it so I chose French and liked it.  When I graduated I was three credits short of it being a double major.  A few years ago, after I was laid off by xpedx so they could out source my job to Poland, I took part of my severance package and went to France.  To my surprise the French I thought I remembered quite well didn't quite jive with what the locals were speaking.  I thought about this for a long time, I mean, how could I be so bad at something I had enjoyed so much.  Then I saw one of the many commercials for Rosetta Stone.

For those of you who don't know, this is what the real Rosetta stone looks like.  What did it do?  It allowed archaeologists to translate Egyptian hieroglyphs into other languages they had already translated.  This rock allowed them to understand just what the ancient Egyptians were painting on the walls of their tombs and carving into their statuary.  However, this is not what I ended up buying.

I bought this instead.  Most people have seen their commercials on television and they do make it seem like a foreign language is easy to learn.  They are, however a bit misleading.  Rosetta Stone works on the immersion theory where if you immerse yourself in, say French, comprehension will be simple.  Wrong.  For myself, I didn't find it that difficult but then I have a background.  For an individual who is starting from scratch it may be overwhelming.  They don't tell you that you should set up a class schedule or that if you're doing less then three or four hours a week you're going to fail.  There is a lot of memorization which needs to take place.  You don't hear something three times and repeat it three times and remember it forever.  The program does work.  They do, however, need to stop implying you can learn a new language in a couple of weeks simply by sitting in front of your computer.  They need to tell the unsuspecting public that if they want to immerse themselves it has to be more then an hour or so a week.  People spend a lot of money on this program with out understanding just how much work is involved.  That's a flaw for Rosetta Stone which should be fixed.

Is Jenna Lee just another brick in the wall?

I'll be honest, I don't normally watch Fox News.  Why watch conservative pundits constantly attack anything and everything they deem to be liberal?  Yesterday, I watched for about 2 hours and it was like entering into the Twilight Zone.  I unfortunately got to watch Jenna Lee in what I supposed was to be a discussion with 3 women, only one of whom was single, as to why single women voted for Obama.  One of the went so far as to say she would tell single women about all the good things conservatives have to offer.  Don't these people realize it's the things they want to take away from single women that most effected their vote?  There was also this bizarre inference that if you were married you would have voted for Romney.  I've heard more relative conversations between bricks then I heard between those 4 women.  They still don't understand why they lost the election.  Perhaps it is impossible for them to even acknowledge how off kilter they are.

Just another brick in the wall

And Laura Ingram made some sort of silly comment yesterday about the GOP possibly having to get back into the trenches.  Duh, doesn't she realize that unless there are Blacks, and Latinos, and Gays and Single Women in those trenches with them they're wasting their time?  If you take her words literally she is advocating trench warfare against every single soul who doesn't bow down and kiss the boots of conservatism, or at least the conservatism she advocates.  Instead of them saying that perhaps they should re-evaluate and possibly move a little more to the center, they seem to be driving themselves farther to the right.

Fox News is killing the Republican Party

Democrats are ecstatic and Republicans are devastated.  What else can you say about the recent election?  I'll also go so far as to say most Republicans now find themselves in a quandary; how to regroup and proceed when statistically they alienate women and minorities.  I actually work with an associate who was claiming in the break room that Obama won "because the Democrats were loading people into vans, registering them, and taking them to vote."  When I started listing voter polling results he claimed "that's all from the liberal media, who lie," though I'd actually seen the information on number of websites from the Washington Post, and Bloomberg, to MSNBC.  Oh, wait, I'm wrong, there is a bastion of Conservative Honesty on the airwaves and it's called Fox News.  As soon as this associate said that I knew Fox News would kill the Republican Party.  Why?  Ratings!

I'd first read, a number of years ago, the Republican Party playbook was based on the ancient television show Leave it to Beaver and that the family values represented by that fictional family were those they wanted all Americans to aspire to; it doesn't work.  There was a time when the Republican Party was, like the Democratic Party, more centrist.  This is where the majority of Americans sit, leaning a little right here, veering a little left there, but never really straying too far to either side.  The Democrats get this, the Republicans don't.  Fox News doesn't either.  They mistakenly believe, based on high television ratings, that the American People accept Fox as an authority.  While some, like the associate I work with, might, most Americans vote their gut instincts, not the way some news organization wants them to vote.  We are not sheep, well, most of us aren't.

As for the Republican Party?  They've sutured themselves to Fox and as a result are in a terrible dilemma.      They have shut out most Women, Black, and Latino voters because they did not fit in with their Leave it to Beaver playbook.  And, things are only going to get worse for them.  During this past election Puerto Rico voted to apply for statehood.  When this gets ratified there will be even more Hispanics the Republicans will need worry about.