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While there’s no doubt that the right diet, strength training and cardio routine will help you shed the pounds, there are some other secrets to a smaller waistline that may just surprise and delight you.

Mike’s Goofy

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Orgasms & Other Surprising Ways to Lose Weight

 

Have more orgasms: A 2002 report from a large British population of men said researchers found a 50 percent reduction in overall mortality in the group of men who said they had the most orgasms. The Journal of the American Medical Association, has also reported that “high ejaculation frequency was related to decreased risk of total prostate cancer.” Having regular orgasms can increase your life span. Every time you reach orgasm, the hormone DHEA increases in response to sexual excitement and orgasm. DHEA can boost your immune system, improve cognition, keep skin healthy, and even work as an antidepressant. DHEA also helps you burn fat. Therefore, the added health benefit is that you will feel – and look – younger longer.

Get to bed earlier: More than half the respondents to a National Sleep survey reported they are morning people with higher energy earlier in the day, while 41% considered themselves night owls. Evening people were more likely than morning people to experience symptoms of insomnia, sleep apnea, enjoy less sleep than they felt they needed and take longer to fall asleep. Staying awake into the wee hours causes hormonal imbalance because it increases cortisol, decreases leptin and depletes growth hormone. This causes us to eat more and wreaks havoc with our metabolism. Cortisol naturally begins to increase during the second half of your sleep – a small boost at 2 a.m., another at 4 a.m. and the peak at around 6 am. If you’re just getting to bed immediately beforehand, you’re missing out on your most restful period of sleep. I advocate getting to bed between 10 -11 p.m. for this reason. Of course, hitting the sack earlier will also help you achieve the fat loss tip above.

……read more HERE

The Most Exciting Retirement Haven

Posted by International Living

on Friday, 28 September 2012 2:07

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Let’s get this out of the way…none of our picks are boring places, it’s just that some have more to offer than others in terms of the range of amenities and entertainment options to keep you busy.

If variety is the spice of retired life, than Paris, Panama City, the expat communities of Mexico, Medellin in Colombia, and Bangkok, Thailand, should be top of your list. Here you’ll find something different every night…choose from catching a concert, seeing a movie or eating out with friends for a fraction of the cost back home.

“Thai food is amazing,” says Jason Gaspero, “But if you get tired of it, you can find restaurants with food from all over the world.” In Medellin’s El Poblado district you’ll find Japanese, French, seafood and Italian restaurants within a block of each other.

In Malaysia you’ll catch a movie in English for $4…before it comes out in the U.S. In Punta del Este, Uruguay, artists like Shakira don’t just perform there, they live there, too.

If you love the sea, then Placencia and Amergris Caye in Belize, Roatan, Honduras, and Panama’s Caribbean Coast make sense. Scuba diving, fishing, sailing, kayaking and snorkelling, they’ve got it all. And if surfing is your passion, catch the best waves on Nicaragua and Costa Rica’s Pacific Coasts.

For foodies in love with culture, Spain and Italy offer a menu of delights unmatched anywhere else, even the smallest villages ooze history and art is everywhere. You’ll find delicious three-course meals for less than $20 in both countries, too.

Of course, you might be content with amazing new views, meeting friends down the boardwalk and a homecooked meal. “If you’re looking for exciting night clubs, Kentucky Fried Chicken, or a night at the opera, Bahia, Ecuador, is not for you. But for peace, simplicity, a dish of Pingüino ice cream, and soothing natural beauty, this is heaven,” says Patricia Farmer. “You would be hard-pressed to find such tranquillity in any beach resort town in the U.S. Even the wealthiest people inhabiting fortress-like beach homes on the hills of Malibu have to spend much of their lives sitting in rush hour traffic, breathing in smog, and feeling the crush and pressures of a type-A culture.”

Article by International Living – more article HERE

Or, in the case of Detroit 2 free houses for every child 

Now for Mike’s Goofy!

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Detroit Math

by Captain Capitalism

St. Paul public schools spend $17,000 per pupil per year.  This translates into $221,000 per pupil over the course of their k-12 career, and that does not include baby-sitting school…er…I mean “pre-school.”

This got me thinking.

“What if we just gave the kids the $221,000 instead of educated them?  Wouldn’t they be better off?  I mean, I never had $221,000 in my name in my LIFE.  But by the age of 18, you could buy a house FOR CASH and never have to pay rent again.”

So I looked up the median price of a home in St. Paul.  $197,607 (though this may change of course).

It’s actually CHEAPER to BUY A HOUSE in St. Paul than educate one of their precious chllllllldrnnnnnnn.  You could buy 1.1 houses per pupil instead of sending them to school.

And let’s not forget the cities where pupils could not only own their own home, but start off with a second investment property

Detroit                  2.09 Houses Per Pupil
St. Louis               2.69 Houses Per Pupil

….read the entire article HERE

Ed Note: With Governments broke, Public Pensions underfunded, Public Unions on frequent warpath, and technology in existence that makes it possible for one of the finest teachers on the planet to teach 10’s of thousands of students at a time……something is going to ultimately break. Outside the box thinking like the above might just end up getting employed if we cannot make adjustments….

A couple of mind boggling numbers out of the states. Annual spending in the US exceeds the 2007 levels by a trillion dollars a year, which causes me to believe its going to be next on plate for a sovereign debt crisis. Keep in mind though, despite the increase in spending they have a slow economy so the revenues basically haven’t really changed since 2007 despite the dramatic increase in spending. So what do you get when you increase spending by a trillion a year, year after year when your revenues don’t increase? Dramatic budget deficits thats what you get. 1.4 trillion in 2009, 1.3 trillion in 2010, 1.3 trillion 2011, and another 1.3 trillion forecast for 2012.

That 4 year increase in borrowing, to make it a little more real, amounts to $55,000 per US  household. Or to put it another way, a broke US government bought 100 million Americans a brand new luxury car with that 5.3 Trillion in budget deficit borrowed money.

US treasury is trying to borrow all its money short term because short term interest rates are low. Wait till those rate go up, and they will at some point. President Obamas budget this year was voted down by the entire Congress both Democrat and Republican by 414-0. Nor has a budget been passed in the US for 3 1/2 years, The U’S has now has a debt to GDP ration of 80%, double what it was in 2008. And that doesn’t include state and municipality debt!  What’s interesting about that is its a larger percentage point increase in debt to GDP than Greece from the end of 2008 to today. Greece is supposedly the planets basket case and the US is doing worse!.

Germany has gone further down the ‘renewables’ path than any country in the world, and now it’s paying the price.

On Friday, September 14, just before 10am, Britain’s 3,500 wind turbines broke all records by briefly supplying just over four gigawatts (GW) of electricity to the national grid. Three hours later, in Germany, that country’s 23,000 wind turbines and millions of solar panels similarly achieved an unprecedented output of 31GW. But the responses to these events in the two countries could not have been in starker contrast.

In Britain, the wind industry proclaimed a triumph. Maria McCaffery, the CEO of RenewableUK, crowed that “this record high shows that wind energy is providing a reliable, secure supply of electricity to an ever-growing number of British homes and businesses” and that “this bountiful free resource will help drive down energy bills”. But in Germany, the news was greeted with dismay, for reasons which merit serious attention here in Britain.

Germany is way ahead of us on the very path our politicians want us to follow – and the problems it has encountered as a result are big news there. In fact, Germany is being horribly caught out by precisely the same delusion about renewable energy that our own politicians have fallen for. Like all enthusiasts for “free, clean, renewable electricity”, they overlook the fatal implications of the fact that wind speeds and sunlight constantly vary. They are taken in by the wind industry’s trick of vastly exaggerating the usefulness of wind farms by talking in terms of their “capacity”, hiding the fact that their actual output will waver between 100 per cent of capacity and zero. In Britain it averages around 25 per cent; in Germany it is lower, just 17 per cent.

The more a country depends on such sources of energy, the more there will arise – as Germany is discovering – two massive technical problems. One is that it becomes incredibly difficult to maintain a consistent supply of power to the grid, when that wildly fluctuating renewable output has to be balanced by input from conventional power stations. The other is that, to keep that back-up constantly available can require fossil-fuel power plants to run much of the time very inefficiently and expensively (incidentally chucking out so much more “carbon” than normal that it negates any supposed CO2 savings from the wind).

Both these problems have come home to roost in Germany in a big way, because it has gone more aggressively down the renewables route than any other country in the world. Having poured hundreds of billions of euros in subsidies into wind and solar power, making its electricity bills almost the highest in Europe, the picture that Germany presents is, on paper, almost everything the most rabid greenie could want. Last year, its wind turbines already had 29GW of capacity, equivalent to a quarter of Germany’s average electricity demand. But because these turbines are even less efficient than our own, their actual output averaged only 5GW, and most of the rest had to come from grown-up power stations, ready to supply up to 29GW at any time and then switch off as the wind picked up again.

Now the problem for the German grid has become even worse. Thanks to a flood of subsidies unleashed by Angela Merkel’s government, renewable capacity has risen still further (solar, for instance, by 43 per cent). This makes it so difficult to keep the grid balanced that it is permanently at risk of power failures. (When the power to one Hamburg aluminium factory failed recently, for only a fraction of a second, it shut down the plant, causing serious damage.) Energy-intensive industries are having to install their own generators, or are looking to leave Germany altogether.

In fact, a mighty battle is now developing in Germany between green fantasists and practical realists. Because renewable energy must by law have priority in supplying the grid, the owners of conventional power stations, finding they have to run plants unprofitably, are so angry that they are threatening to close many of them down. The government response, astonishingly, has been to propose a new law forcing them to continue running their plants at a loss.

Meanwhile, firms such as RWE and E.on are going flat out to build 16 new coal-fired and 15 new gas-fired power stations by 2020, with a combined output equivalent to some 38 per cent of Germany’s electricity needs. None of these will be required to have “carbon capture and storage” (CCS), which is just an empty pipedream. This makes nonsense of any pretence that Germany will meet its EU target for reducing CO2 emissions (and Mrs Merkel’s equally fanciful goal of producing 35 per cent of electricity from renewables).

In brief, Germany’s renewables drive is turning out to be a disaster. This should particularly concern us because our Government, with its plan to build 30,000 turbines, to meet our EU target of sourcing 32 per cent of our electricity from renewables by 2020, is hell-bent on the same path. But our own “big six” electricity companies, including RWE and E.on, are told that they cannot build any replacements for our coal-fired stations (many soon to be closed under EU rules) which last week were supplying more than 40 per cent of our power – unless they are fitted with that make-believe CCS. A similar threat hangs over plans to build new gas-fired plants of the type that will be essential to provide up to 100 per cent back-up for those useless windmills.

Everything about the battle now raging in Germany applies equally to us here in Britain – except that we have only fantasists such as Ed Davey in charge of our energy policy. Unless the realists stage a counter-coup very fast, we are in deep trouble.

Only warmists could pass this A-level

While Michael Gove tries valiantly to remedy our dysfunctional exam system he might take a look at some recent papers, such as that set last June for A-level General Studies students by our leading exam body, AQA. Candidates were asked to discuss 11 pages of “source material” on the subject of climate change. Sources ranged from a report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to The Guardian, all shamelessly promoting global warming alarmism. One document from the Met Office solemnly predicted that “even if global temperatures only rise by 2 degrees C, 30-40 per cent of species could face extinction”. A graph from the US Environmental Protection Agency showed temperatures having soared in the past 100 years by 1.4 degrees – exactly twice the generally accepted figure.

The only hint that anyone might question such beliefs was an article by Louise Gray from The Daily Telegraph, which quoted that tireless campaigner for the warmist cause, Bob Ward of the Grantham Institute, dismissing all sceptics as “a remnant group of dinosaurs” who “misunderstood the point of science”.

If it were still a purpose of education to teach people to examine evidence and think rationally, any bright A-level candidate might have had a field day, showing how all this “source material” was no more than vacuous, one-sided propaganda. But today one fears they would have been marked down so severely for not coming up with the desired answers that they would have been among the tiny handful of candidates given an unequivocal “fail”.

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