5 April 2011 (AM)

Workout notes
Yoga. Later: 4.2 mile hilly walk in 55:07 It was sunny, windy and chilly (high 30′s; maybe 1-2 C).
Yoga: I admit that I have not been giving much of an effort; the good news is that the vertigo has diminished enough for me to get into headstand. It is still there though.

I had to cut this short due to blood work at the doctor’s office, which didn’t amount to much.

Posts
Here is my biggest criticism of President Obama: he seems too keen to compromise for the sake of compromise with the Republicans. I sure hope that he stands up to people like Paul Ryan who are offering a plan to ruin Medicare:

Matt Yglesias has a very good point: the supposed transition strategy under the Ryan plan, in which everyone currently under (sic; he means “over”) 55 gets Medicare as we know it, while everyone younger than that gets vouchers that won’t be enough to buy adequate insurance, sets up an unstable political dynamic. In fact, we can be sure that whatever happens, it won’t be what the plan says will happen.

If the Medicare Advantage precedent holds, what will happen in 2022 or a bit later is that Congress will react to the fury of younger seniors — who see that those born just a few years earlier have vastly better benefits than they do — by increasing the vouchers. And the end result, in that case, would be that the Ryan plan substantially increases Medicare costs; remember that the payment increases that were part of the 2003 Medicare bill, introduced to rescue failing Medicare Advantage programs, have resulted in large overpayments, adding hundreds of billions to the program’s costs.

On the other hand, if the vouchers aren’t increased, a furious group of new seniors will demand that the current Medicare get cut.
Either way, Medicare is trashed…which is the point. Remember that the Republican goal is to dismantle government safety nets.

4 April 2011: Politics and other topics

President Obama: what has he done anyway? Surf here to play the “what has Obama done” game.

I have to question myself: I actually agree with Rush Limbaugh on something! (ok, I agree with him on a very narrow issue)

“These protests are now entering their fourth day. Never mind that nobody even knew about the burning of the Koran – it happened more than two weeks ago – until these devout Muslims brought it up. Never mind that the Koran gets burned all the time when Muslims blow each other up in their mosques. And never mind that the US burned Bibles in Afghanistan back in 2009.”

Non-political frauds Schneier on Security discusses two different kind of e-book frauds:

Currently there are two types of fraud. The first is content farming, discussed in these two interesting blog posts. People are creating automatically generated content, web-collected content, or fake content, turning it into a book, and selling it on an ebook site like Amazon.com. Then they use multiple identities to give it good reviews. (If it gets a bad review, the scammer just relists the same content under a new name. That second blog posts contains a screen shot of something called “Autopilot Kindle Cash,” which promises to teach people how to post dozens of ebooks to Amazon.com per day.

The second type of fraud is stealing a book and selling it as an ebook. So someone could scan a real book and sell it on an ebook site, even though he doesn’t own the copyright. It could be a book that isn’t already available as an ebook, or it could be a “low cost” version of a book that is already available. Amazon doesn’t seem particularly motivated to deal with this sort of fraud. And it too is suitable for automation.

A political fraud: Tim Pawlenty:

Wow. So Tim Pawlenty is using something I said on yesterday’s This Week in a new ad.

So, to clarify: nobody in Washington is doing anything about job creation. However, Republicans are working quite hard on job destruction.

And Pawlenty — who knows so little about the whole subject that he fell for a well-known zombie claim (killed by facts, but still shambling along) about soaring government employment — is hardly qualified to lecture anyone else on the issue.

It isn’t as if Mr. Pawlenty hasn’t gone on and one over stuff he knows nothing about before.

More on the economy

Remember the overriding GOP plan: the goal is to dismantle anything resembling socialism. That is why the idea that they are pushing for Medicare will make it even more expensive. The idea is to get rid of it.

Now if we really want to fix the debt…we have to TAX THE RICH:

Here’s the truth: The only way America can reduce the long-term budget deficit, maintain vital services, protect Social Security and Medicare, invest more in education and infrastructure, and not raise taxes on the working middle class is by raising taxes on the super rich.

Even if we got rid of corporate welfare subsidies for big oil, big agriculture, and big Pharma – even if we cut back on our bloated defense budget – it wouldn’t be nearly enough.

The vast majority of Americans can’t afford to pay more. Despite an economy that’s twice as large as it was thirty years ago, the bottom 90 percent are still stuck in the mud. If they’re employed they’re earning on average only about $280 more a year than thirty years ago, adjusted for inflation. That’s less than a 1 percent gain over more than a third of a century. (Families are doing somewhat better but that’s only because so many families now have to rely on two incomes.)

Yet even as their share of the nation’s total income has withered, the tax burden on the middle has grown. Today’s working and middle-class taxpayers are shelling out a bigger chunk of income in payroll taxes, sales taxes, and property taxes than thirty years ago.

It’s just the opposite for super rich.

The top 1 percent’s share of national income has doubled over the past three decades (from 10 percent in 1981 to well over 20 percent now). The richest one-tenth of 1 percent’s share has tripled. And they’re doing better than ever. According to a new analysis by the Wall Street Journal, total compensation and benefits at publicly-traded Wall Street banks and securities firms hit a record in 2010 — $135 billion. That’s up 5.7 percent from 2009.

Yet, remarkably, taxes on the top have plummeted.

4 April 2011; workouts and woo

Today’s workout: am: 4 mile run on the treadmill (10 minutes warm up, then 15 x 1 minute harder, 1 minute easier, plus 30 seconds for 40:30).
pm: weights:
Squats (smith): 10 x 135, 10 x 165, 7 x 185 (less depth), 10 x 135
Incline press: 10 x 115, 10 x 125, 3 x 135, 5 x 130
curls: 3 sets of 15 x 20 dumbbells
rows: 3 sets of 10 with 200 (Hammer machine)
pull downs: 3 sets of 10 x 120 (shoulder friendly grip)
sit ups: 4 x 25 (inclines)
ball (hamstring) 3 sets of 15.

Note: the vertigo, while much reduced, is still there (slightly). I feel much better but not quite at 100 percent.

Shoulder: still achy at times; I’ll see how it feels when the infection is completely gone. And the weather has threatened to be rainy.

Woo
Repeat after me: “woo” doesn’t work! Too see practitioners of woo get totally owned:

Here some BS artist (who claims to be able to knock people over without touching them) gets his behind kicked by an MMA fighter.

India: fake holy men

(hat tip for the India related videos: Mano Singham)

Of course, he have our own form of ignorance in the west: astrology, homeopathy, etc. Probably the best known one is “religion”.