20 June 2011 (noon)

Workout note
Stretching, PT, leg weights (glute push-back machine, hip adduction, hip abduction: 2 sets of 10)

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a photo of some spandex clad woman using this.

Then I swam 2000 yards; the longs swim I’ve had in about a year. It wasn’t that intense:
5 x (25 3g, 25 swim), 5 x (25 fist, 25 free)
5 x (25 front, 25 free (fins)), 5 x (25 free, 25 back)
Then 10 x 100 (alternate 100 free, 100 pull) total 19:10

I felt a few tingles.
But on the whole, the butt/piriformis/whatever is feeling better; this rest plus therapy should do it some good.

Posts
Economy: Paul Krugman sees a “lost decade” of growth.

Remember that President Obama didn’t take office until 2009 and his stimulus bill wasn’t passed until midway. Yes, this is ugly. But this drives home a point: we are NOT climbing out of the recession (in terms of employment; the net job gains barely make up for those entering in the workforce). But the Republicans are offering us the same remedies that put us into that gray area to being with.

Krugman has some things to say about Medicare. Sure, costs have gone up, but they have gone up by less than private insurance (what the Ryan plan wants to put us in). Of course, the Republicans claim that we can really control costs by not insuring anyone at all...

Here is the real Republican Medicare plan:

Ok, ok, this is an exaggeration. Basically the Ryan plans would set up a health insurance exchange and allow old people to buy policies; it will provide subsides to some poor seniors. Problem: private health insurance costs are rising faster than Medicare costs and this plan only adjusts for inflation, not actual policy costs.

Oh yes, the “magic free market”: problem is that it might not make good business sense to sell policies to a group of people which has a large subset which is all but guaranteed to get sick. The profit motive just doesn’t work in every case.

Science
Evolution
Why hasn’t evolution given us a way to never get sick? Here is Jerry Coyne’s summary of a talk that explains why. Roughly speaking, evolution cares about reproductive fitness so there is no reason to evolve protection against diseases that mostly kill later in life. One has to consider that some bad things give us momentary protection from worse things (evolution is fine with something that will prevent you dying now but will kill you later, after you’ve had kids) and remember that the organisms that give us the disease are also evolving.

Of course we might wonder why our favorite deity won’t work magic on our behalf; we can see how well this deity did when implored by Gov. Rick Perry (Texas) to stop the Texas drought:

Before the prayers:

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