19 May 2011 (am)

Workout notes Nothing yet; I woke up with a slight headache and mild nausea. My guess: I didn’t eat at all two days ago and ate only mildly yesterday; also I had only one cup of coffee yesterday.

It was one of those “you should eat but don’t really want to” things.

Hence I slept in and missed yoga; I’ll swim and stretch over lunch; at least that is the plan.

Racewalking: this was from July 2004; in May of that year I did my 101 miles in 24 hours:

This was from a 3K judged racewalk at a track meet; I managed 18:03 with zero calls. Note that my right knee is nice and straight. It doesn’t do that anymore, which is one reason I don’t do judged racewalks anymore; I am physically incapable of following the rules.

I still am a fan of the sport though, and I still attempt to walk long distances (marathons, etc.)

Government overreach
Strangely enough, the FBI doesn’t need a warrant to put a gps tracker to your car, even if it is parked on private property.

This is horrific: an ex marine and combat veteran is killed in a mistaken SWAT raid.

I really don’t know what to say.

msnbc video: Maher plays Hardball on the 2012 race

msnbc video: Maher plays Hardball on the 2012 race, posted with vodpod

18 May 2011 pm

I am still groggy; I haven’t done much but nap this afternoon.

In fact, I am moving a bit like this fellow (or gal):

Evolutionary psychology is often used as a pinata. Some embrace it, though it appears that they don’t know what they are embracing.
Here, Jerry Coyne critiques David Brooks’ use of it and it isn’t pretty. Bottom line: some evolutionary concepts might sound easy to explain, but they really aren’t; it is best for non-experts to not draw conclusions on their own without consulting experts.

Social I’ve always scoffed at “multi-tasking”; evidently I am not the only one. Basically it is possible to “multi-task” if one wants to do a bunch of things poorly.

Politics
Dick Morris on Mitt Romney. Note: it appears as if he is trying to rally the Newsmax crowd to his candidacy because he is the best that the Republicans have.

Talk about flip-flopping; this is way different that what Mr. Morris said earlier.

Note that Mr. Gingrich is in the race and Ms. Bachmann has yet to declare. So it would appear that Mr. Huckabee deciding not to run would enhance either of their chances, no?

18 May 2011 (afternoon)

This is prior to the procedure. Note: my doctor, who is in the 60-64 age group, ran a 1:34 half marathon last weekend.
Oh yes, all clear…see them again in 10 years.

Workout notes Nothing, but maybe a yoga DVD later this afternoon?

Elections/Republican politics
Gov. Chis Christie got booed at Seton Hall (commencement exercises). Note: I don’t approve of shouting down a speaker, even if it is a speaker that I don’t like.

Republicans
Note the baby elephant and the mention of “voter fraud”.

Note: genuine voter fraud is extremely rare. These claims really mean “too many blacks are voting”.

The loony right did get into some conspiracy stuff:

They Republicans will have to choose a Presidential candidate; with many of the higher profile names out, Mr. Romney and Ms. Palin lead the field.

17 May 2011 all over

Yep; I’ll see you a bit later. I have some stuff though:

Yes, some on the hard left are upset with President Obama. The Nation (a leftist magazine that I subscribe to) carries this article about the rift between Cornell West (a scholar) and the President. I honestly think that many on the left:

1. Don’t understand how our country is set up to resist change; remember that the Senate gives two votes to every state therefore, in Senate calculus, 500,000 people not liking a policy in Wyoming carries equal weight with millions of people in California liking it.

2. Probably put too much hope that things would change quickly; also Obama has been a pragmatist from the very start. He never campaigned as anything else.

Sports
Overconfidence can be a killer:

Politics

Newt Gingrich had a bad weekend of interviews. He said that he wasn’t ready for “gotcha” questions (e. g., questions about positions that he pushed for). Please.

Republicans: backed subsidies for big oil (3 Democrats did too, though 2 Republicans voted “no”). Surprised?

Social: here is more fall-out over the “why are black women ugly” article. Remember the “attractiveness” was rated by THREE independent people….

Hey, had I been one of the attractiveness raters, women with big butts would have scored very well.

(click to see the full sized version at Girls in Yoga Pants)

17 May 2011: some sensitive topics

Workout notes Early morning: yoga with Ms. Vickie; as usual I went with Lynn.
10:30-12:00: weights followed by 1100 yards of swimming:
Weights: I did supersets of incline presses, curls (dumbbells), lat pull downs, rows (Hammer machine), with two short breaks to do rotator cuff stuff.
Incline presses: 10 x 115, 7 x 135, 7 x 135
dumbbell curls: 15 x 20 lb, 10 x 25 lb., 10 x 25 lb.
Lat pull down: 10 x 140, 10 x 140, 10 x 140 (latter two with shoulder friendly grip)
Rows: 10 x 200, 10 x 200 (first two: medium grip) 10 x 210 (narrow grip)

Swim: 4 x (25 front, 25 swim, 25 side, 25 swim, 25 side, 25 swim)
3 x (25 sfs, 25 swim)
3 x (25 3g, 25 swim)
4 x 50 on the 1:00 (55 each…very slow!)

Note: the kicking irritates my gluteus medius just a bit.

Economy
Paul Krugman is having a field day with the Republicans. He takes his usual shot at Paul Ryan (you know; tax cuts for the wealthy benefits all of us ) and then gleefully points this out:

Via Mark Thoma, Brendan Nyhan catches the Tax Foundation trying to disappear some apparently accidental honesty.

The story goes like this: the Wall Street Journal had a deeply dishonest editorial claiming that taxes on the rich can’t help with out budget problems. (Are you surprised?) There were actually multiple problems with the editorial; Jonathan Chait pointed out that it repeatedly compared apples with oranges, that if you actually read the numbers straight the editorial disproved its own point. None of this was surprising.

What was surprising was that the Tax Foundation, which normally produces a fair bit of disinformation itself, actually published a blog post pointing out that the chart accompanying the editorial was a classic case of how to lie with numbers. Was the Tax Foundation actually taking a stand for intellectual honesty?

Well, guess what: the blog post has now vanished

But of course, no post truly vanishes on the internet.

As far as the Chait article:

A recent Wall Street Journal editorial, echoing Paul Ryan, asserts that you can’t eliminate the deficit just by taxing the rich because the rich don’t have enough money. The editorial winds up proving the opposite point. Follow the bouncing ball:

Let’s stipulate that this is a thought experiment, because Democrats don’t need any more ideas. But it’s still a useful experiment because it exposes the fiscal futility of raising rates on the top 2%, or even the top 5% or 10%, of taxpayers to close the deficit. The mathematical reality is that in the absence of entitlement reform on the Paul Ryan model, Washington will need to soak the middle class—because that’s where the big money is.

Consider the Internal Revenue Service’s income tax statistics for 2008, the latest year for which data are available. The top 1% of taxpayers—those with salaries, dividends and capital gains roughly above about $380,000—paid 38% of taxes. But assume that tax policy confiscated all the taxable income of all the “millionaires and billionaires” Mr. Obama singled out. That yields merely about $938 billion, which is sand on the beach amid the $4 trillion White House budget, a $1.65 trillion deficit, and spending at 25% as a share of the economy, a post-World War II record.

So the Journal’s argument is that reducing the budget deficit by $938 billion a year is not enough deficit reduction? $938 billion is “sand on the beach” compared with a $1.65 trillion deficit? [....]

The Journal proceeds to try the same exercise for 2005:

In 2005 the top 5% earned over $145,000. If you took all the income of people over $200,000, it would yield about $1.89 trillion, enough revenue to cover the 2012 bill for Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security—but not the same bill in 2016, as the costs of those entitlements are expected to grow rapidly. The rich, in short, aren’t nearly rich enough to finance Mr. Obama’s entitlement state ambitions—even before his health-care plan kicks in.

Notice the sleight of hand here. They’re comparing the income of the over-$200,000 set for 2005 and comparing it not to the deficit — it is way larger than the deficit — but to the cost of running most of the government. But we don’t need the rich to fund all of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Other folks earn money, too. Nobody is proposing to eliminate their taxes.

Anyway, this is what passes for “seriousness” among the polyester pants set.

Technology/Nuclear Power
The Fukushima nuclear accident is a horrible mess. Here is a detailed discussion of what is going on. An analysis of the types of radioactive isotopes seems to indicate that not only was there a meltdown but that there is still some low level fission reactions taking place.

Here is a New York Times article which talks about the temptations there are to cut corners on safety matters. In a nutshell, in nuclear power, one does have to plan for rare events and sometimes the “safety fixes” are very expensive.

Sensitive topics
I’ll be talking about obesity and race…

Obesity
There has been a major breakthrough in the fight against obesity and other diseases:

Scientists have found that a gene linked to diabetes and cholesterol is a “master switch” that controls other genes found in fat in the body, and say it should help in the search for treatments for obesity-related diseases.

In a study published in the journal Nature Genetics, the British researchers said that since fat plays an important role in peoples’ susceptibility to metabolic diseases like obesity, heart disease and diabetes, the regulating gene could be target for drugs to treat such illnesses.

“This is the first major study that shows how small changes in one master regulator gene can cause a cascade of other metabolic effects in other genes,” said Tim Spector of King’s College London, who led the study. [...]

Scientists have already identified a gene called KLF14 as being linked to type 2 diabetes and cholesterol levels, but until now they did not know what role it played.

Spector’s team analyzed more than 20,000 genes in fat samples taken from under the skin of 800 British female twin volunteers. They found a link between the KLF14 gene and the levels of many other distant genes found in fat tissue, showing that KLF14 acts as a master switch to control these genes.

They then confirmed their findings in 600 fat samples from a separate group of people from Iceland.

In a report of their study, the researchers explained that other genes found to be controlled by KLF14 are linked to a range of metabolic traits, including body mass index, obesity, cholesterol, insulin and glucose levels.

“KLF14 seems to act as a master switch controlling processes that connect changes in the behavior of subcutaneous fat to disturbances in muscle and liver that contribute to diabetes and other conditions,” said Mark McCarthy from Britain’s Oxford University, who also worked on the study.

Ok, fair enough. This is interesting and important. But, well, if you want a circus, surf to the comments.
There are the “hey, it isn’t our fault that we are fat and the rest of you are intolerant fat-phobic meanies” and the “hey fatty, quit eating so much” and the “here they go again, enabling the fatties”.

Reality: some people are more prone toward getting fat, some people can’t rely on their hunger mechanism. But on the other hand, there is an energy balance; if you eat energy than you expend, you store the excess as fat! Of course, the issue is that some people get ultra efficient at storing fat and it becomes easier to store fat…when you go on weight reduction diets. This is a cruel trick of evolution.

But, well, perhaps it is best for me to keep my big mouth shut on this issue, at least among people that I know.

Race
Psychology Today published an article titled “Why Are Black Women Less Physically Attractive than Other Women”. Yes, the article has been taken down but, as for now, you can read the cached version here.

So, the first question is: “says who”? “How is this attractiveness measured?”
Well, this is what the article says:

Add Health measures the physical attractiveness of its respondents both objectively and subjectively. At the end of each interview, the interviewer rates the physical attractiveness of the respondent objectively on the following five-point scale: 1 = very unattractive, 2 = unattractive, 3 = about average, 4 = attractive, 5 = very attractive. The physical attractiveness of each Add Health respondent is measured three times by three different interviewers over seven years.

In other words, it is the opinion of three different interviewers! OOOOOOKKKKKKAAAAAYYYYYY…..
Still, even if you did a confidential survey of a large population of, say, heterosexual males and got the same results (and you might well NOT) one would have to ask: how much of it is due to, say, poverty (poor health, bad teeth, obesity, poor muscle tone)? How much of it is due to status? What would the results be if you asked, say, Nigerian men or Japanese men?

Now I know that the article that I linked to used the procedure of “interviewing the woman, rating her attractiveness, recording the results, then analyzing the data” which is different than a survey that asks “do you find xxxx women attractive” where “xxx” can stand for Latina, Indian, White, Black or whatever.

I will add one caveat if there is some survey that asks the “do you find xxx women…” question. Were I asked that question, I’d probably respond that I find “Turkish” and “Indian” women attractive. But though I really do feel that way, that is highly misleading. As far as the Turkish women, I’ve known exactly TWO…and liked them both. That is hardly a representative sample! As far as Indian women, I’ve liked the ones that I’ve met…and they have been mainly scholars, engineers, and medical doctors. I’ve seen some…in Bollywood films. The latter would yield a highly skewed sample and the former: these are likely to be healthier women; I am not seeing the hundreds of millions that live in crushing poverty.

But my purpose of bringing this up isn’t to say that this Psychology Today study isn’t worthy of being taken seriously (IMHO, it isn’t..) but rather to take a look at the reaction to it. This is one such reaction. I happen to agree with this statement in the reaction article:

This is a long-standing problem with evolutionary psychology proponents, despite the field’s potential use in principle: there’s a desire to reduce any and all perceptions and societal norms as being the result of evolutionary selective pressures.

Yep. But I don’t see articles such as this as some sort of underhanded way to condone racism. I see it as an attempt to quantify what is all but impossible to quantify; an attempt to appear to be relevant by generating all-but-meaningless numbers and then providing all sorts of cool graphs and box plots in an attempt to appear SERIOUS.

The author of the reaction article then concludes:

Black women are beautiful.

Black. Women. Are. Beautiful.

**ck this asshole. Contact Psychology Today to express your disapproval. I think this needs to go beyond taking his article down.

I have to roll my eyes at this. I think that the author of this push-back article is taking evolutionary psychology way too seriously. And no, saying “black women are beautiful” will get this person applause and approval at Daily Kos and probably from other liberal leaning groups (e. g., Unitarian churches where this would draw a standing ovation), but I see this as a silly statement; I see it as P. C. run amok, if you will. Hey, you find attractive what you find attractive and if a certain type of woman isn’t attractive to you, don’t look. It isn’t hard.

More accurately: “some people find black women beautiful, and some don’t.” Period. In fact, one can say “some people find xxx women beautiful, and some don’t” where xxx represents any group. Period. THAT would be honest. But I get the feeling that the author of this piece was merely blowing off steam at this point.

Mike Huckabee & Donald Trump Drop Out – The Colbert Report – 5/16/11 – Video Clip | Comedy Central

ColbertNation.com video – Mike Huckabee jams on ‘Cat Scratch Fever’ with Ted Nugent before announcing that he will not seek the Republican nomination.

Mike Huckabee & Donald Trump Drop Out – The Col…, posted with vodpod

TMI alert…

16 May 2011 (morning)

Workout notes Nothing yet. It is sunny outside…and 38 F!!! (3 C). Oh yes, it is windy too (what else is new). I might walk and swim over lunch (11 am). I’ll certainly do swimming and something else. The shoulder is ok (no pain killers) and I haven’t felt the butt pain as yet.

Note: I bought another set of stretch bands so I can work both shoulders at the same time (I now have two sets of red and one set of yellow, green and blue bands). I use these when I am not going to the gym.

I also bought a long “jammer” swimsuit (they look a bit like “half-tights”); the older I get the more coverage I seek in my training suits. I do have some “conservative” cut training suits (aka “old fart cut”) that I use; this covers even more.

As far as swimming goes: I’ll spend 3 more weeks getting comfortable in the water then, shoulder permitting, begin one of the Fitness Swimming training programs (a beginner’s one that focuses on technique)

On a related note: the readers of my blog will note that I have great enthusiasm for endurance sports, but limited accomplishment and ability. I used to joke that I’d offer to pay shoe companies to NOT be seen wearing their running shoes at races! It turns out that there is some law regarding unfair competition by competing brands; for example if an unpopular celebrity is, say, using your brand of purse, you send them other brands of purses (free of charge) and encourage them to use that brand. Ok, it is a bit more complex than I am saying, but surf to the Legal Satyricon to read about it.

Mathematics Education
I was somewhat taken aback at this Daily Kos diary:

I was asked how my daughter is doing. She has 16 credits to go to her bachelor’s degree but it might as well be 2 more years. She’s up in Michigan licking her math wounds. She’s trying to gear up for what she has to do to complete her degree. She had her math ass kicked this last term – again. My daughter, the high school mathlete can’t hack collegiate Calculus II, Differential Equations or Multivariate Analysis (aka Calculus III on steroids) well enough to get a 73.5% or higher which is a requirement for her Physics B.A. degree. She can get 70% and 71%, but not the 73.5% deemed necessary. I mentioned that our current strategy is to find an instructor who’s actually teaching these classes in another school in town (we have 6 major colleges and universities in town to choose from) and transfer in the credits so she can get her degree.

Well, that statement set the mouse amongst the pooties.

How could I say that! Was I saying the instructors weren’t teaching! (That would be sacrilegious in this group.) What’s strange is that I wasn’t criticizing Chibi’s elementary, middle or high school math experience. Her high school math classes were the last classes where actual math instruction occurred. We complain about education and math education in particular, but Chibi got decent math education through to her Senior year in high school. She did well there. It’s university math outside the physics department that’s giving her trouble. She aces all her Physics & Calculus classes that require her to calculate vortexes, how moisture flows through tail pipes, predicting the sizes of hail stones or whatever; these aren’t difficult for her. It’s the math for math’s sake classes, where there’s a bare equation with no real world application or context for solving it that kicks her butt. The lack of practical application simply stymies her mathlete abilities. [...]

One thing is for certain, as long as we continue to teach collegiate math using 100 year old methods, the U.S. math competencies will remain where they are.

So do you get this: his daughter did well in high school mathematics but didn’t do well in college mathematics, so it must be the fault of the mathematics professors….ALL of them. Then he blames our position with respect to the world in mathematics education on the university mathematics faculty.

Let’s examine this for a bit:

The disappointing performance of U.S. teenagers in math and science on an international exam, in scores released yesterday, has sparked calls for improvement in public schools to help the country keep pace in the global economy.

The scores from the 2006 Program for International Student Assessment showed that U.S. 15-year-olds trailed their peers from many industrialized countries. The average science score of U.S. students lagged behind those in 16 of 30 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a Paris-based group that represents the world’s richest countries. The U.S. students were further behind in math, trailing counterparts in 23 countries.

The gap is already there by the time the kids are 15 years old….and exactly how is this the fault of university mathematics faculty?
Remember, his complaint was that his daughter got good grades in high school mathematics but didn’t get them in college mathematics…in several classes. What was the constant there? It was his daughter, of course.

In short, this person makes a sweeping claim based on the lack of success of HIS KID. THIS is part of the “helicopter parent” era.

I’ll add a few thoughts from my experience: in high school, I made A’s in foreign language but had to work to earn a C in my junior level class in college. The professor was excellent; the material was just difficult for me. Even in mathematics: I did well in analysis, algebra, topology and ok in complex variables. I struggled badly in numerical analysis. Yes, my numerical analysis professor…was quite good and I said so on the student evaluations. I just didn’t do well IN THAT CLASS. It just took a long time for that material to make sense to me.

I am not saying that there aren’t some horrible mathematics instructors: there are. That is unfortunate, but there are there. But that is not an excuse for repeated poor performance in classes.

Upshot: there are some parents who will never admit that their student really isn’t that good; the fault will always lie elsewhere.

Films We just watched The King’s Speech. It was a nice little story but, well, let’s just say that Mel Brooks ruined the idea of kings for me forever.

But Christopher Hitchens had some serious commentary on why some of the history of the film was flat out false; in real life Winston Churchill worked hard to keep the Nazi sympathizing King Edward from leaving the throne.

Religion Stephen Hawking isn’t impressed with the idea of an afterlife:

The incurable illness was expected to kill Hawking within a few years of its symptoms arising, an outlook that turned the young scientist to Wagner, but ultimately led him to enjoy life more, he has said, despite the cloud hanging over his future.

“I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I’m not afraid of death, but I’m in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first,” he said.

“I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark,” he added.

Hawking’s latest comments go beyond those laid out in his 2010 book, The Grand Design, in which he asserted that there is no need for a creator to explain the existence of the universe. The book provoked a backlash from some religious leaders, including the chief rabbi, Lord Sacks, who accused Hawking of committing an “elementary fallacy” of logic.

The 69-year-old physicist fell seriously ill after a lecture tour in the US in 2009 and was taken to Addenbrookes hospital in an episode that sparked grave concerns for his health. He has since returned to his Cambridge department as director of research.

I admit that the idea that I will die someday does make me sad at times; I suppose the reason is that I want to “know” how “it all turns out”. But philosophically I accept that I am no better than anyone else and when my time is up, well, it is time to give someone else a turn on this planet. Still…it is kind of cool to imagine my being able to “see” what happens over the next few thousand years or so….maybe.

Politics
Hard to believe, but I actually agree with Ron Paul on a couple of things. Here is one of them: legalization of drugs:

Watch at 1:50 or so; he says what I now think: if heroin was legalized, how many new junkies would there be? Hey, smoking and booze are legal yet I indulge in neither.

Note: aside from our getting out of foreign wars, I agree with Mr. Paul on little else.

I’ll post a couple of things by Paul Krugman: he has a meme he called “serious people”. These are people who are taken seriously but who really don’t offer analysis based policies; instead they offer policies based on, well, personal biases that haven’t been confirmed with data:

Which brings me to the subject of today’s column. For the last few months, I and others have watched, with amazement and horror, the emergence of a consensus in policy circles in favor of immediate fiscal austerity. That is, somehow it has become conventional wisdom that now is the time to slash spending, despite the fact that the world’s major economies remain deeply depressed.

This conventional wisdom isn’t based on either evidence or careful analysis. Instead, it rests on what we might charitably call sheer speculation, and less charitably call figments of the policy elite’s imagination — specifically, on belief in what I’ve come to think of as the invisible bond vigilante and the confidence fairy.

Bond vigilantes are investors who pull the plug on governments they perceive as unable or unwilling to pay their debts. Now there’s no question that countries can suffer crises of confidence (see Greece, debt of). But what the advocates of austerity claim is that (a) the bond vigilantes are about to attack America, and (b) spending anything more on stimulus will set them off.

What reason do we have to believe that any of this is true? Yes, America has long-run budget problems, but what we do on stimulus over the next couple of years has almost no bearing on our ability to deal with these long-run problems. As Douglas Elmendorf, the director of the Congressional Budget Office, recently put it, “There is no intrinsic contradiction between providing additional fiscal stimulus today, while the unemployment rate is high and many factories and offices are underused, and imposing fiscal restraint several years from now, when output and employment will probably be close to their potential.”

Nonetheless, every few months we’re told that the bond vigilantes have arrived, and we must impose austerity now now now to appease them.

Now we are seeing something else: these same conservatives aren’t worried if we don’t raise our debt ceiling:

The debt ceiling itself is a strange feature of U.S. law: since Congress must vote to authorize spending and choose tax rates, why have a second vote on whether to allow the borrowing that these spending and taxation policies imply? In practice, however, legislators have historically been willing to raise the debt ceiling as necessary, so this quirk in our system hasn’t mattered very much — until now.

What has changed? The answer is the radicalization of the Republican Party. Normally, a party controlling neither the White House nor the Senate would acknowledge that it isn’t in a position to impose its agenda on the nation. But the modern G.O.P. doesn’t believe in following normal rules.

So what will happen if the ceiling isn’t raised? It has become fashionable on the right to assert that it would be no big deal. On Saturday the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal ridiculed those worried about the consequences of hitting the ceiling as the “Armageddon lobby.”

It’s hard to know whether the “what, us worry?” types believe what they’re saying, or whether they’re just staking out a bargaining position. But in any case, they’re almost surely wrong: seriously bad consequences will follow if the debt ceiling isn’t raised.

For if we hit the debt ceiling, the government will be forced to stop paying roughly a third of its bills, because that’s the share of spending currently financed by borrowing. So will it stop sending out Social Security checks? Will it stop paying doctors and hospitals that treat Medicare patients? Will it stop paying the contractors supplying fuel and munitions to our military? Or will it stop paying interest on the debt?

Krugman goes on to mention how he hopes that the Senate Democrats and President Obama don’t cave…this time.

15 May 2011 (AM)

Weather: chilly (49 F, or 9 C), rainy and windy. Yep, that is Illinois spring weather!

Workout: 4 mile run in 38:51; 4 mile walk in 1:00:40 (ok, the google distance was 4.13 miles each way):

The run (9:30 ish pace) felt easy at first but it was eventually work. The walk was fine; I had to remember my posture.

Injury notes: no NSAIDS due to an upcoming (routine) medical procedure. But I’ve been looking at my symptoms and this appears to be what is happening:

Trigger points in the Gluteus Minimus are often aggravated by and confused with trigger points in the Quadratus Lumborum, Gluteus Medius, Piriformis, Tensor Fasciae Latae, Vastus Lateralis, Peroneus Longus, and the Hamstring muscles.

Pain caused by Trigger Points in the Gluteus Minimus can be very intense, like many other Trigger Points, and it can cause numbness in the referred pain areas as well, often being confused for sciatica.

Gluteus Minimus Trigger Points can cause pain while walking or standing, and they can make it difficult to get out of a chair without extreme pain. They may also cause a limp on one side and make it hard to cross the legs or roll over or get out of bed.

Note: my pain is mostly when I stand in one place or when I walk too slowly. Faster walking and running doesn’t hurt it….at the time I am doing it. What is most painful is slow, standing movements (like when one goes shopping or waiting in a line).

The article I linked to goes on to talk about how to treat this; I’ve been using one of the tips and it appears to be helping. Note: there is another trigger point listed there; it is the above one that seems to apply to me at this time.

Politics
Mike Huckabee is not a candidate; I can’t say that I was surprised. Newt Gingrich was. He has zero chance in the general.