Finding out what’s in it: The CEO of Aetna says that Obamacare will double health care premiums.
I think he is underestimating the rise in costs. He is also not mentioning the almost certain decline in care that will happen as well.
The day of reckoning looms: The federal government will hit the debt ceiling on December 31.
The treasury will do things to stall the inevitable crash, but in the end, our elected leaders – backed by the voters — are doing nothing to solve this debt problem. (On this note, consider the absolute refusal of this Democrat to consider any spending cuts in negotiations with the Republicans.) The crash is coming.
An evening pause: From Mean Mary James, a Christmas song.
The uncertainty of science: Half the facts you know are wrong.
Facts are being manufactured all of the time, and, as Arbesman shows, many of them turn out to be wrong. Checking each one is how the scientific process is supposed to work; experimental results need to be replicated by other researchers. So how many of the findings in 845,175 articles published in 2009 and recorded in PubMed, the free online medical database, were actually replicated? Not all that many. In 2011, a disquieting study in Nature reported that a team of researchers over 10 years was able to reproduce the results of only six out of 53 landmark papers in preclinical cancer research.
In 2005, the physician and statistician John Ioannides published “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False” in the journal PLoS Medicine. Ioannides cataloged the flaws of much biomedical research, pointing out that reported studies are less likely to be true when they are small, the postulated effect is likely to be weak, research designs and endpoints are flexible, financial and nonfinancial conflicts of interest are common, and competition in the field is fierce. Ioannides concluded that “for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias.”
Or in other words, anyone who claims the “science is settled” on any major scientific issue that other scientists are hotly debating is lying to you.
Transparency: Complaints about compliance with Freedom of Information requests jumped 28 percent during the Obama adminstration’s first term.
This is not to say that the Bush administration was transparent. They were not, as they, like all governments, didn’t want the public to poke into their operations. The issue here is the absurd claim by Obama that his administration would be different. Poppycock. If anything, the Obama administration has been more abusive, draping itself in a veil of purity that they do not deserve in order to hide their illegal behavior.
Sadly, their partisan Democratic supporters — including the press — have blindly accepted these claims of purity and allowed the illegal behavior to be ignored.
The investigation into the failure of the Proton rocket’s Briz-M upper stage on December 8 has pinpointed the failure to a turbopump.
While it is a good thing that they have found the cause of the failure, this is not the same component that failed previously. Moreover, after the previous failure the Russians had said they would dismantle and inspect all Briz-M stages under production. It is obvious that they did not find this turbopump problem then.
All told, these issues do not recommend the Briz-M upper stage or the Proton rocket that depends on it. What else might be wrong with this upper stage that they might be missing? Until they can reassure potential customers that this question has been answered, the Russians are going to have a serious problem competing in the increasingly competitive launch market.
Modern American tolerance: An atheist billboard opposing religion was ripped to shreds on Sunday in New Jersey.
An evening pause:
The day of reckoning looms: Obama’s proposal to avoid sequestration would increase spending 55 percent over the next decade.
I can’t understand how is it that anyone takes anything this guy says seriously.
SpaceX’s Grasshopper rocket successfully did a vertical take off and landing to a height of 130 feet last week. With video.
This is very cool engineering, but I remain skeptical any first stage rocket could carry enough fuel to both return to Earth vertically and also provide its payload enough thrust to get into orbit.
What the future was supposed to be like.
An evening pause: From Meet Me in St. Louis (1944).
An evening pause: How about something serene and beautiful?
Many of the posts here at Behind the Black are not much more than me providing my readers a link to what I consider to be an important story, what I categorize as a point of information. Ever so often, however, one of these posts will touch a nerve and generate a great deal of comments and discussion, most of which is generally well written and thoughtful.
In December two posts in particular resulted in a lot of debate. Because these comments were part of a point of information, however, they ended up being lost amid the many similar posts. I have decided to highlight both threads here on the front page because I think it worthwhile for others to read what was written.
» Read more
The Philadelphia high school student who was ridiculed by a teacher for wearing a Romney t-shirt is suing the teacher and the school district.
An evening pause: Below is a compilation of the twelve most spectacular solar flares of 2012, in chronological order. A detailed explanation of each can be found here.
Though the Sun continues to go through the weakest sunspot maximums in more than a hundred years, we now have some very sophisticated instruments in space that are able to observe whatever happens. And the Sun is still a raging inferno of billions of hydrogen bombs, all going off at once and continuously. Even during a weak minimum it still is more powerful than we can imagine. Consider: The Earth would be nothing mores than a small dot in each of these flares.
You can relax: New data has confirmed that asteroid 2011 AG5 will not hit the Earth in 2040.
The day of reckoning looms: Seven charts that outline the true and terrible state of the economy.
The Soyuz capsule with ISS’s new crew of three astronauts has successfully docked with the station.
NASA successfully completed a set of tests of the parachutes for the Orion capsule on Thursday.
