Category Archives: Media Criticism

ObamaCare

approaches its day of reckoning. As do its authors, in November.

Rarely has one law so exemplified the worst of the Leviathan state — grotesque cost, questionable constitutionality and arbitrary bureaucratic coerciveness. Little wonder the president barely mentioned it in his latest State of the Union address. He wants to be reelected. He’d rather talk about other things.

And no celebration of its two-year anniversary. I guess it wasn’t as much of a BFD as Joe Biden said it was. Or perhaps it is, but not in the way he thought.

[Update a few minutes later]

Happy second birthday, ObamaCare! “Now let’s destroy it, root and branch.”

[Update a while later]

Five things
the Democrats (politically) got wrong on ObamaCare. Did they get anything right?

[Mid-morning update]

Heh: “Democrats so misjudged everything about Obamacare, you would think they never read the bill or something.”

[Late morning update]

WSJ: Liberty and ObamaCare.

Is Climatology Pseudoscience?

Some thoughts from Judith Curry (and indirectly, Gary Taubes).

I think that it’s become pretty clear that regardless of the status of climatology per se, many of its leading practitioners, or at least, most-public proponents, have shown themselves to be pseudoscientists. And specifically, I mean Michael Mann, Phil Jones, and James Hansen among others (not to mention the disgraceful and disgraced Peter Gleick).

Reinventing The Busemann Biplane

Here we go again. Folks at MIT are proposing a low-drag low-boom supersonic aircraft, but this is a head scratcher to me:

Through calculations, Busemann found that a biplane design could essentially do away with shock waves. Each wing of the design, when seen from the side, is shaped like a flattened triangle, with the top and bottom wings pointing toward each other. The configuration, according to his calculations, cancels out shock waves produced by each wing alone.

However, the design lacks lift: The two wings create a very narrow channel through which only a limited amount of air can flow. When transitioning to supersonic speeds, the channel, Wang says, could essentially “choke,” creating incredible drag. While the design could work beautifully at supersonic speeds, it can’t overcome the drag to reach those speeds.

If the design “lacks lift” (which it does — that’s the problem with a Busemann biplane) how does it “work beautifully at supersonic speeds”? What holds the airplane up?

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?