17 July 2011: Pain in the Butt…and some hot/cool charts!!!

Workout notes it was warm by Illinois standards (85 F, 67 percent humidity in the morning) but I went out to try an 8 mile walk. 35 minutes into it, my butt/hip was killing me. So I decided to walk home (about .7 miles away) after stretching first.

The stretch took the pain away so I finished my walk on the West Peoria track. Was I ever slow; 31:30 per 2.1 mile (5 laps). Oh goodness; but I lasted 2:10-2:12 for 8+ miles.

But the fact is that I am months of rehab away from being able to do long walks that don’t make me suffer for days afterward. BUT I can still run easily, do PT/Weights and swim (in moderation) and the butt/piriformis IS getting better in that I no longer have pain when I swim.

It is just that when I don’t walk, it doesn’t hurt and then I forget to do my regular stretches and hip hikes.

Posts:
Watch this Bill Maher post before it gets nuked.

Climate Change: 7′th warmest June on record

Global Temperature Highlights: June

• The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for June 2011 was the seventh warmest on record at 60.94 F (16.08 C), which is 1.04 F (0.58 C) above the 20th century average of 59.9 F (15.5 C). The margin of error associated with this temperature is +/- 0.13 F (0.07 C).

• Separately, the global land surface temperature was 1.60 F (0.89 C) above the 20th century average of 55.9 F (13.3 C), which was the fourth warmest June on record. The margin of error is +/- 0.23 F (0.13 C). Warmer-than-average conditions occurred across most of Russia, Europe, and China, the Middle East, eastern Canada, Mexico, and the southern United States. Cooler-than-average regions included the northern and western United States, part of western Canada, and most of Australia.
The June global ocean surface temperature was 0.85 F (0.47 C) above the 20th century average of 61.5 F (16.4 C), making it the 10th warmest June on record. The margin of error is +/- 0.07 F (0.04 C). The warmth was most pronounced across the central north Pacific, equatorial west Pacific, the Labrador Sea, the equatorial Atlantic, and much of the mid-latitude southern oceans.

Economy
This is a comment about the stimulus that President Obama sought:

Mark Thoma sends me to Jonathan Schwarz making the case that Obama knew perfectly well that the stimulus should have been bigger. I’m not sure that lets his advisers completely off the hook; there’s a big difference between saying, well, the macroeconomic case says this should be bigger, but smaller is OK, and saying — as they should have, and maybe some did — that a weak stimulus runs a large risk of setting us on a path toward a lost decade.

Never mind. What really struck me was this quote from Obama that Schwarz found:

Well, we are still in consultation with members of Congress about the final size of the package. We expect that it will be on the high end of our estimates, but [it] will not be as high as some economists have recommended because of the constraints and concerns we have about the existing deficit.

Aside from the fact that Obama was being cautious about the deficit when he really, really shouldn’t have been, think about how this has actually played out. A weak stimulus together with caution on other fronts, including mortgage relief, led to a weak economy in 2010. This led to a big GOP victory in the midterms. And this led to Republican success in getting the high-end Bush tax cuts extended for two years and quite possibly indefinitely — which will do far more damage to the US debt position that a bigger stimulus in 2009 would have done.

I wonder about this: perhaps getting a larger stimulus would have had the same result on political capital and not only lead to the 2010 losses but also to no health care reform?

This isn’t all that Krugman said; here he refutes the old “we are just like Greece” canard:

So the US has much less debt than Greece. Also worth noting is the pattern over time. Greece ran up debt relative to GDP at a fairly good clip even during good times, while the United States — despite the Bush administration’s best efforts — did not. So America does not have a comparable record of sustained fiscal irresponsibility; we’ve only developed large deficits in response to the crisis, which happens to be exactly when we should be running large deficits.

And that’s not even to get into the issue of us having our own currency.

One more thing: even if you believe, despite all this evidence, that we resemble Greece, what does that say? Fiscal austerity in the face of a depressed economy does little to improve your long-run debt position, and may even hurt it. One thing the advocates of austerity never mention is that it isn’t working anywhere right now.

Wisdom from Republicans (??)

No, I am not snarking Sarah Palin here. Seriously, some Republicans have some interesting things to say.

David Brooks was flamed at Daily Kos for this post, but he does make some correct points here.

Basically, much of the health care expense comes at the end of life, and much of the money is spent after things are completely hopeless (e. g., for the elderly, and for the terminally ill). Yes, this means “rationing” and yes, the shrill will scream about “killing granny” and “death panels”. But is it really worth 100K for an extra month in the ICU while hooked up to a ventilator if that is ALL one can reasonably hope for?

David Frum Presents this chart and points out that workers are getting a smaller and smaller share of the economic prosperity. He sees this AS A PROBLEM. I can’t imagine any Republican being bothered by this!