JUST SAYING
BY RAUL HERNANDEZ
It is brutality served up with a smile. Torture by inspiration. Sweat and more sweat.
Grueling exercises while getting the psyche pumped up by a steady stream of pep talks.
It is a workout as music booms and blends with occasional grunts and groans. Fast paced, strong and sweet. 15-second breaks come between the 45-second repetitions, eight in total in four sets.
Short-term results: sore, aching muscles. Total exhaustion. Long-term results: strength, stamina and a mountain of confidence.
Kalvin Henry runs the show. He is a personal trainer at L.A. Fitness in Ventura and is the CEO of his own brand “Raise the Bar in Ventura.”
Kore by Kal is his own unique style of workout that jump-starts the body with volts of pure energy. It combines aerobics with light weights.
But Kal is more than that. He leads by example, perspiration and inspiration.
Inspiration comes by way of short, pre-workout recordings of other buffed up motivational speakers who urge those within earshot to climb higher mountains, chase the biggest dreams and aim for the heavens with every breath they take.
Kal also dispenses his own physical fitness and life’s philosophy fueled by encouragement and offered with an endless smile.
Surprisingly, the classes can be habit-forming. But not everyone subscribes to this grueling pace or even survives it. It has grown from two or three people when it started eight months ago to 35 to 40 on Saturdays.
Getting to Kal’s classes is the easy part. I get up at 6 a.m., drive 30 miles to make the Tuesdays and Thursdays 7 a.m. classes. The Saturday sessions begin at noon.
Since mid-January, I’ve racked up 62 training sessions. I do Kal’s classes along with rowing and the weights to stave off diabetes. I am borderline.
I told a friend and fellow gym rat Vincent that I was only going to do a couple of classes. That’s it, I emphasized. Adding, a week or two at the most.
That was 64 training sessions ago since mid-January. I plan to make my personal goal of 100 and do it by September.
I’m definitely hooked.
The Russian Thing
Suppose you went to an “adoption” meeting and Russian spies and former intelligence officers came out of the woodwork?
Or if you attend a spy meeting with KGB agents and everyone said they were just there to talk about adoptions?
Believable? In Trump’s world, all things are possible and often defy reality and cold facts and even gravity.
The truth about the Russian meeting will surface after federal prosecutors show stacks of boxes full of evidence to Paul Manafort, Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, publicist Rob Goldstone, Russian-American lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin along with Michael Flynn.
Eye-opening stuff that will cause the usual suspects to fold and save their keisters from long prison sentences on charges of conspiring to sabotage and undermine American elections.
Akhmetshin has a dual citizenship and will want to keep his U.S. citizenship. So he will be long on details including, perhaps, little unknown facts about Russian thug Putin and his cronies who are stealing the Russian people blind out of billions of dollars. Where they are being laundered by shady banks where the Trump family has accounts.
Sean Spicer still insists that the Donald Trump Jr. meeting was about adoptions.
Seriously, how can this weasel sit at the dinner table look at his children in the eyes and talk to them about being honest, living with integrity and telling the truth? How can Trump supporters and enablers also do this? Mindboggling.
Mindboggling.
Spicer is a disgraceful and unscrupulous being who should be ashamed of selling whatever shred of dignity and self-respect he has have left for a paycheck and little power.
Robert Mueller and his wrecking crew of top-notch lawyers and investigators are going to come up with a mountain of evidence against the Trump Organized Crime Family’s shady financial dealings, especially those involving Russian loans and Deutsche Bank.
This is going to explode when it hits the fan.
Trump Competing with Whales
Trump’s approval ratings are competing with whale sh*t in the race to the bottom.
A new Washington Post/ABC News poll released Sunday indicated that only 36 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s job performance, slightly down from 42 percent in April. Only 25 percent strongly back Trump.
Still, Trump’s propaganda machine — Fox with head cheerleaders Hannity, Bolling, and Doocy — are cranking out a steady stream of lies, half-truths, and conspiracies.
The Russian thing is real and most people are beginning to wake up as to how dangerous this mentally unstable man, his family, and cronies are to this nation’s security and interests.
Also the GOP’s standard bearer is now a cartoon character, a punchline to a political joke, and embarrassment in the United States and throughout the world.
But there is hope. There is some light at the end of Fox’s long, dark tunnel. The black hole where knowledge and facts are sucked up and incinerated.
Among the penlights of truth who are emerging in the distance are conservative Columnist Charles Krauthammer and Fox TV host Shepard Smith
Recently, Columnist Charles Krauthammer admitted that the Russian thing is real after months of stroking Trump’s ego.
Krauthammer once again criticized Donald Trump Jr. for meeting with a Kremlin-linked lawyer in 2016 after being promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton obtained by the Russian government.
Krauthammer recently said on “Special Report With Bret Baier” on Fox News that the emails Trump Jr. released “totally undermine a six-month story from the White House … that there wasn’t any collusion.”
He added, “This was a bungled collusion. This was amateurish collusion. This was Keystone Kops collusion. But it doesn’t change the fact that it was attempted collusion and it undoes the White House story completely.”
Smith has been pissing on the Fox parade that the Russia story is “fake news” or “starting to fall apart” as it grows like a raging wild fire while “Fox and Friends,” Sean Hannity, Steve Doocy and Eric Bollings are trying to put out the flames with a garden hose.
Smith, last week, swung harder at the Trump administration, saying that it was lying, being deceptive and trying to cover up the truth.
Shepard Smith is no stranger to challenging the administration and occasionally launching into personal editorials — including one about refugees back in 2015. But on Friday afternoon, he took it a step further, repeatedly accusing the administration of lying, deception and engaging in a cover up.
In other words, pointing to the obvious. But at Fox “News,” the obvious and reality are difficult to run through a maze of lies, half-truths and denials along with the daily regurgitation of GOP talking points and a ratings driven network agenda.
Profits first and foremost.
Of course, Fox wouldn’t be Fox if it reined in Hannity’s wild and crazy conspiracies, the network’s talking heads spewing paranoia and heaping helpings of fact-free political propaganda.