Apparently the Obama administration is pro torture. All the complaints about torture aren’t now, and never were, about torture. It was pure Bush derangement. Now that The One has ascended, no problem.
Britain Turns Ever More Orwellian
A woman has been prohibited from, and arrested for, “noisy s3x.”
As I noted a few days ago, modern “liberals” are the ideological descendants of the Puritans. Except usually it isn’t about sex. In this case, it is.
“Limits To Growth”
A critique. With a lot of ignorant (and often ad hominem) comments in the comments section.
Rebuilding Joints
I suspect that this, not crude surgery, is the wave of the future:
The scaffold has two layers, one that mimics bone and one that mimics cartilage. When implanted into a joint, the scaffold can stimulate mesenchymal stem cells in the bone marrow to produce new bone and cartilage. The technology is currently limited to small defects, using scaffolds roughly 8 mm in diameter.
Bring it on. It’s only going to get better.
You’ll Be As Shocked As I Was
…to learn that the president has no class:
Wanda Sykes isn’t of any interest to me. The fact that the American president was five feet away from her and had to laugh about her joke was of interest. A comedian wishes a citizen dead and the president laughs?
I can’t imagine such a “joke” being told about (say) Michael Moore during a Bush WHCD. I thought that the idea of the WHCD was supposed to be a “roast,” with those being lampooned in attendance, not a vicious attack on the president’s absent political enemies. And had such a thing had occurred, I can’t imagine the former president laughing at it. But with this president, we don’t have to imagine it. In many ways, it’s a return to the juvenile antics of the White House during the Clinton years. But it apparently gave Chris Matthews an extended leg tingle (shameful that, too, because Rush used to let him guest host for him back in the nineties), so I guess that’s all right.
Obamacare
And your doctor:
Doctors will consolidate into larger practices to spread overhead costs, and they’ll cram more patients into tight schedules to make up in volume what’s lost in margin. Visits will be shortened and new appointments harder to secure. It already takes on average 18 days to get an initial appointment with an internist, according to the American Medical Association, and as many as 30 days for specialists like obstetricians and neurologists.
Right or wrong, more doctors will close their practices to new patients, especially patients carrying lower paying insurance such as Medicaid. Some doctors will opt out of the system entirely, going “cash only.” If too many doctors take this route the government could step in — as in Canada, for example — to effectively outlaw private-only medical practice.
These changes are superimposed on a payment system where compensation often bears no connection to clinical outcomes. Medicare provides all the wrong incentives. Its charge-based system pays doctors more for delivering more care, meaning incomes rise as medical problems persist and decline when illness resolves.
So let’s expand Medicare to everybody. Great.
Obviously, The Answer Is “No”
Madam Speaker, have you no decency?
It’s kind of hard to run a witch hunt when you’re the lead witch.
[Tuesday morning update]
Some questions for the Speaker:
You said that you concurred with the letter written by Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) that raised concerns about waterboarding. Is there any documentation to back that up? Did you sign the Harman letter? Were you aware of it in real time, or only later, when it was declassified? Did you send your own letter? Did you ever express your concerns with President Bush during any of your meetings with him between 2002 and 2008?
As I say in comments, I’m all for a truth commission, as long as it’s a whole-truth-and-nothing-but-the-truth commission. Bring it on.
[Bumped]
Biohackers
This may not end well:
A man saying he was doing research for the U.S. government called with a few polite, pointed questions: How did she build that lab? Did she know other people creating new life forms at home?
The caller said the agency he represented is “used to thinking about rogue states and threats from that,” recalls Ms. Aull, a recent Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate.
I’ll bet they are.
The Myth That Won’t Die
Once again, scramjet proponents are touting them for space access:
Officials hope the engine eventually will provide a speedier transition between conventional aircraft in the atmosphere and rockets in outer space for deployment of satellites, and reconnaissance or strike missions.
“The long-range goal of this for the Air Force is access to space,” said Charlie Brink, an Air Force Research Laboratory propulsion directorate official who manages the X-51 program from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
I wonder if he’s actually done any systems studies to see whether that’s going to pan out? I have.
I’m all in favor of scramjets — they have lots of interesting and useful military applications, but it is very unlikely that they will be helpful for space access. I won’t repeat what I wrote the last time this issue came up (geez was it really five years ago?), but you can go read it here:
Proponents claim that by allowing airbreathing up to high Mach numbers, there is no need to take along as much oxygen for the rocket engines, because they can gather it for “free.” This argument assumes that space transportation is expensive because propellants are, but those aren’t the cost driver. If they were, space would already be affordable, because liquid oxygen is actually about as cheap as milk. Propellant costs are such a tiny fraction of launch costs that they’re down in the noise. If we ever get to the point where they become a real issue (as they are for airlines), we’ll have solved the problem.
Their argument also fails on the grounds that collecting oxygen isn’t really “free.” As the old joke goes, there’s no free launch.
If your space transport were to be single stage, you’d now need three propulsion systems — conventional jet, scramjet, and rocket for when you left the atmosphere (which you must do by definition to go into space). It may be possible to have a scramjet lower stage and a rocket upper stage, but the bottom line is that time spent in the atmosphere (necessary to utilize the scramjet) is time spent fighting drag, defeating the purpose. Rockets want to spend as little time as possible in the atmosphere, and carrying two other kinds of engines along and spending enough time in the air to utilize them, just to save on a propellant as cheap as oxygen, just doesn’t make design sense.
In addition, a scramjet engine is designed to operate at a specific vehicle speed, and has poor performance in “off design” conditions, rendering it a poor propulsion choice for an accelerating vehicle.
Henry Spencer debunked airbreathers to orbit earlier this year as well.
I Like The Rail Option, Myself
Thoughts on how to pay for Obamacare.
Also, Tigerhawk on taxes:
I’ve clipped some inflammatory excerpts for your morning indigestion, but it is worth scrolling through to get a sense for the breadth and nature of the proposal. The short version is that President Obama is pushing absolutely staggering increases through the corporate and business tax systems. Direct taxes on business are, in general, inefficient and economically disruptive, but they are also peerless in their complexity, which means that few voters and essentially no reporters will make the effort to understand what is being done to them.
Trust me on this: something awful is being done to you.
That rail option’s looking better and better. With tar and feathers, of course.
[Update a few minutes later]
Obama Trek: the search for more money.
Boldly going where no American fascist president has gone before.
[Update]
They just keep on spending:
If not treated promptly, FSD, like alcoholism, leads inevitably to complete physical breakdown, loss of homes, jobs, cars, respect, everything. The breakdown is not limited to the sufferer, however. Like the alcoholic who must drink hard liquor every waking moment, massive budget deficits are the key symptom of late-stage FSD. The alcoholic dies, but with FSD, the nation, not the spenders, goes bankrupt. Even today, with Obama just beginning to manage the government, Geithner’s Treasury department must offer higher interest rates on bonds it sells to finance planned deficits because bondholders worry about Washington’s future repayment ability if taxes are not soon hugely increased. But those increases would kill economic growth, sending government revenues spiraling downward and eventually leaving Washington only one choice – repudiation of debt or bankruptcy. Either way, American prosperity will be a distant memory for generations to come. Intervention cannot come too soon.
But at least we’ll all be equal in our poverty. And that’s what’s important, right?