13 December 2009 (I)

Workout notes I didn’t feel like getting to the Riverplex at 7 am so I decided to get to the Markin Center (university gym) at 9 instead. I lifted weights for about half an hour and then did 5 miles on the AMT (59 minutes) and then 5 more on the elliptical (55 minutes).

My legs were heavy but the workout didn’t aggravate the injury.

Weights: I was astonished at how weak I was. I did 2 sets of 10 on the benchpress with 135, 2 sets of 7 with 135 on the partial squat (didn’t quite get to parallel), 2 sets of lat pull downs (140 is too much, 120 is right), a couple sets of 4 pull ups, 2 sets 10 of dumbbell bench presses (40, then 50), 2 sets of 7 military press (30, then 35), 2 sets of 10 with curls (25 pounds).

Note: I tried some leg presses but had injury pain upon straightening the leg the whole way; THAT is the crux of the injury.

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Feminism...and plastic surgery?

During the Senate’s debates over who should bear the cost of the nearly $900 billion healthcare bill, there emerged a surprising suggestion: plastic surgery patients. A proposed tax, dubbed the “Bo-Tax” after the wrinkle-reducing injections, would add a 5 percent additional charge to elective cosmetic procedures. The tax could help raise $6 billion over the next ten years to offset the cost of health reform. It was included in the original healthcare bill the Senate considered, and it is likely to make it into the modified bill, when the details of the newly brokered Senate compromise are finally announced. Apparently breast enhancements and liposuction can be channeled to benefit the public good. [...]

Ok, the plastic surgeons are fighting this. No surprise there. But…the National Organization of Women (NOW) is fighting this too!

These harsh economic times, however, call for a different ideology. Or so says Terry O’Neill, NOW’s new president. Middle-aged women are struggling to compete in the job market, and cosmetic surgery can help them appeal to employers. “They have to find work,” she told the New York Times. “And they are going for Botox or going for eye work, because the fact is we live in a society that punishes women for getting older.”

NOW has not taken to the streets to campaign for affordable access to face-lifts, and it is unlikely that the group will do so. But by framing it as a women’s issue, NOW’s president has given cosmetic surgery giants like Allergan, which makes Botox, a social grievance and one of its strongest arguments. Where companies and plastic surgeons might have only been able to whine to Congress about lost profits, they can now claim they are campaigning against a tax that unjustly targets women. The Bo-Tax, Allergan’s spokeswoman explained to me without detectable irony, is about “a woman’s right to choose.”

Ok…sure…

The real issue here is not whether women should have the choice to get plastic surgery. It is not a ban on plastic surgery that has been proposed, only an excise tax. What is of greater concern is that the leader of the most prominent feminist organization in the US could speak out on a topic of such minor concern when there are so many feminist issues at stake in the healthcare debate, like reproductive rights and insurance coverage of mammograms. Botox should not be further from feminists’ minds. Aligning feminism with the cause to keep plastic surgery costs low reinforces the notion that feminism is a movement for white, middle-aged, middle-class women. Feminism has needed to lose that label for more than a century.

Religion: here is a non-argument against the existence of a deity.

I’ve never understood arguments of the following type: there is no god because this or that evil exists.

Why is that an argument against the existence of a deity? The deity of the Jewish/Christian Bible not only permitted evil, it actively took part in it! Example: read the Book of Joshua. That deity killed innocents by the truckload without an ounce of remorse. Why would this deity treat modern humans of any group any better?

I don’t believe because there is simply no evidence for a deity; the existence or non-existence of evil has nothing to do with it.

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