Archive for February, 2010

The F 22 killer

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

The new Russian fighter is the equal of the F 22, something the experts said would never happen. That’s why the Obama administration killed the program. Oh Oh.

Analysis of PAK-FA prototype airframe aerodynamic features shows a design which is superior to all Western equivalents, providing ‘extreme agility’, superior to that of the Su-35S, through much of the flight envelope. This is accomplished by the combined use of 3D thrust vector control of the engine nozzles, all moving tail surfaces, and refined aerodynamic design with relaxed directional static stability and careful mass distribution to control inertial effects. The PAK-FA is fitted with unusually robust high sink rate undercarriage, intended for STOL operations.

Disclosures indicate that the avionic suite and systems fit will be derived from the Su-35S design, with the important difference in the use of an very high power-aperture product X-band multimode primary AESA radar. Five AESA apertures are intended for production PAK-FA aircraft. The highly integrated avionic suite is intended to provide similar data fusion and networking capabilities to the F-22A Raptor.

The available evidence demonstrates at this time that a mature production PAK-FA design has the potential to compete with the F-22A Raptor in VLO performance from key aspects, and will outperform the F-22A Raptor aerodynamically and kinematically. Therefore, from a technological strategy perspective, the PAK-FA renders all legacy US fighter aircraft, and the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter, strategically irrelevant and non-viable after the PAK-FA achieves IOC in 2015.

Maybe some rethinking is in order.

However, future fighters are going to be mostly UAVs anyway. Like this one.

Looks kind of nasty, doesn’t it ?

They are all liars

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

One of the responses to the CRU scandal is that NASA has all the data and they agree with the global warming hysterics so the East Anglia scandal is no big deal. Well, the Competitive Enterprise Institute has had a Freedom of Information Act request for NASA data in place for two years. Finally, after two years of stonewalling, the CEI notified NASA that they would file suit soon. Probably because of the CRU “Climategate” scandal, the NSAS people finally released the data requested. And is it interesting !

The documents released via the FOIA request, however, contain admissions of data unreliability that are staggering, particularly in light of NASA’s claims to know temperatures and anomalies within hundredths of a degree, and the alarm they helped raise over a mere one degree of claimed warming over more than an entire century.

Dr. Reto Ruedy, a Hansen colleague at GISS, complains in his August 3, 2007, email to his co-worker at GISS and RealClimate blogger Gavin Schmidt:

[The United States Historical Climate Network] data are not routinely kept up-to-date (at this point the (sic) seem to end in 2002).

This lapse led to wild differences in data claimed to be from the same ground stations by USHCN and the Global Climate Network (GHCN). NASA later trumpeted the “adjustments” they made to this data (upward only, of course) in extremely minor amounts — adjustments they are now seen admitting are well within any uncertainty, a fact that received significantly less emphasis in their public media campaign claiming anomalous, man-made warming.

GISS’s Ruedy then wrote:

[NASA’s] assumption that the adjustments made the older data consistent with future data … may not have been correct. … Indeed, in 490 of the 1057 stations the USHCN data were up to 1C colder than the corresponding GHCN data, in 77 stations the data were the same, and in the remaining 490 stations the USHCN data were warmer than the GHCN data.

Ruedy claimed this introduced an estimated warming into the record of 0.1 deg C. Ruedy then described an alternate way of manipulating the temperature data, “a more careful method” they might consider using, instead.

Read the whole thing. Maybe thee people should be prosecuted. Billions of taxpayer dollars have been spent on this nonsense. The next Congress might be interested. This one certainly isn’t.

I especially like this e-mail quote:

Although in public he often used his high-profile perch for global warming cheerleading, former New York Times environmental reporter Andrew Revkin privately wrote that he was worried about the integrity of the ground stations. When still at the Times he wrote to Hansen on August 23, 2007:

i never, till today, visited http://www.surfacestations.org and found it quite amazing. if our stations are that shoddy, what’s it like in Mongolia?

Of course, that is the point and always has been.

UPDATE: Here is more evidence of the coverup, this time by Nature. They are all crooks.

Five weeks

Monday, February 15th, 2010

The “Christmas Day bomber” was interrogated for 50 minutes and then given his Miranda rights warning and allowed to retain a lawyer. He immediately stopped talking to the FBI. The President, from his vacation spot in Hawaii, described him as “an isolated extremist.” In fact, he was not isolated at all. After weeks of trying to defend the decision to treat him as a common criminal, the administration announced that he was talking after all and that his family had convinced him to cooperate. The FBI had briefed the Congressional intelligence committee members that he had begun to talk but warned them that this was top secret so that associates would not be warned. The next day, the White House began blathering about his cooperation and the blather has continued. On This Week, Sunday, Peter Beinart, a left wing blogger, was gushing about how much the “underpants bombers” was telling the administration. There is one problem. The five week delay allowed the other terrorists trained with him to scatter.

U.S. and allied counterterrorism authorities have launched a global manhunt for English-speaking terrorists trained in Yemen who are planning attacks on the United States, based on intelligence provided by the suspect in the attempted Christmas Day bombing after he began cooperating.

U.S. officials told The Washington Times that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, facing charges as a would-be suicide bomber, revealed during recent cooperation with the FBI that he met with other English speakers at a terrorist training camp in Yemen. Three U.S. intelligence officials, including one senior official, disclosed on the condition of anonymity some details of the additional bomb plots.

One of the administration’s useful idiots announced last DEcember that the 50 minute interrogation had provided all the intelligence they needed. Well, I guess that story is no longer operative.

The data about the additional terrorist plots is thought to be one factor behind alarming congressional testimony two weeks ago from senior U.S. intelligence officials, including Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair.

Mr. Blair said he was “certain” that it was al Qaeda’s priority to attempt an attack on the United States within three to six months.

That can’t possibly be correct because Vice-President Joe Biden announced Sunday on several news shows that another attack was “unlikely.” Who are you going to believe, the DNE or the VP ?

Vice President Joe Biden made his latest eyebrow-furrowing prediction Wednesday night, declaring confidently that another Sept. 11-size terror attack is “unlikely” in the U.S., despite signs that Al Qaeda and and other terrorist groups are actively planning more attacks.

I guess it depends on your definition of “massive.” One airliner is no big deal to Joe.

Paul Ryan

Wednesday, February 10th, 2010

Congressman Paul Ryan has a proposed budget plan that could avoid the looming disaster we face with Obama’s spending and taxing plans. I’ll try to analyze it briefly but we will see much more about it, especially if Republicans take Congress this fall.

Here is one analysis in, of all places, the Washington Post.

His budget road map offers many proposals, but one big vision. Over time, Ryan concentrates government spending on the poor through means-tested programs, patching holes in the safety net while making entitlements more sustainable. He saves money by providing the middle class with defined-contribution benefits — private retirement accounts and health vouchers — that are more portable but less generous in the long run. And he expects a growing economy, liberated from debt and inflation, to provide more real gains for middle-class citizens than they lose from lower government benefits.

Ryan has been proposing this plan for several years but only now is it getting serious attention.

Spending. Our budget gives priority to national defense and veterans’ health care. We freeze all other discretionary spending for five years, allowing it to grow modestly after that. We also place all spending under a statutory spending cap backed up by tough budget enforcement.

A spending freeze has been a good option for years. It was a proposal of McCain’s in the campaign. Instead, the Obama administration has increased federal employees by 153,000 in one year. The deficits, of course, are notorious.

– Energy. Our budget lays a firm foundation to position the U.S. to meet three important strategic energy goals: reducing U.S. dependence on foreign oil, deploying more clean and renewable energy sources free of greenhouse gas, and supporting economic growth. We do these things by rejecting the president’s cap-and-trade scheme, by opening exploration on our nation’s oil and gas fields, and by investing the proceeds in a new clean energy trust fund, infrastructure and further deficit reduction.

I think “clean energy” is a boondoggle but this proposal was made last spring before the “Climategate” scandal punctured the AGW balloon.

– Entitlements. Our budget also takes steps toward fulfilling the mission of health and retirement security, in part by making these programs fiscally sustainable. The budget moves toward making quality health care affordable and accessible to all Americans by strengthening the relationship between patients and their doctors, not the dictates of government bureaucrats. We preserve the existing Medicare program for all those 55 or older; and then, to make the program sustainable and dependable, those 54 and younger will enter a Medicare program reformed to work like the health plan members of Congress and federal employees now enjoy. Starting in 2021, seniors would receive a premium support payment equal to 100% of the Medicare benefit on average. This would be income related, so low-income seniors receive extra support, and high-income seniors receive support relative to their incomes — along the same lines as the president’s Medicare Part D proposal.

I have my own ideas on health care reform. The Medicare reforms he proposed are an extension of the private accounts that Bush proposed in 2005. Social Security is in somewhat better shape than Medicare but it is not sustainable long term and fixing it is easier now than in 2017 when expenditures first begin to exceed revenue. There are comments that the “trust fund” will still not be exhausted until 2037 but that trust fund consists of Treasury IOUs. On Social Security, itself, he proposes only modest changes.

In one of the most valued government programs — Social Security — our budget begins to develop a bipartisan solution to the program’s pending bankruptcy by incorporating some of the reforms advocated by the president’s budget director. Specifically, we provide for a trigger that would make small adjustments in the benefits for higher-income beneficiaries if the Social Security Administration determines the Social Security Trust Fund cannot meet its obligations. This is a modest but serious proposal which would not affect those in or near retirement, but is aimed at helping develop a consensus, across party lines, toward saving this important retirement program. We also assure that benefits for lower-income recipients are large enough to keep them out of poverty.

I think he is avoiding the serious issues here in the interest of avoiding the worst demagogues.

The key to any success is getting the annual increases to stop. We will hear a lot more about Ryan’s plans although the loudest voices will be misrepresenting it and demogoguing the topic.

Hmmmmmm

Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

CNN today has a bit of information about the death of John Murtha.

The Democratic congressman recently underwent scheduled laparoscopic surgery at National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, to remove his gallbladder. The procedure was “routine minimally invasive surgery,” but doctors “hit his intestines,” a source close to the late congressman told CNN.

That happened in December.

Then;

The National Naval Medical Center issued a statement saying Murtha was admitted January 28 for surgery, but declined to reveal additional details, citing his family’s request for privacy and federal privacy laws.

I’ve done around a thousand lap choles. When I took students to Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles to see surgery, we usually saw pediatric procedures, many of them quite unusual. One day, we were watching a lap chole on a teenager who had developed gall stones, unusual in the pediatric population. I finally had to leave the room as I watched surgeons, quite skilled in other procedures, struggling with the gall bladder.

Laparoscopic surgery involves certain skills that take a lot of practice. You look at a TV monitor and manipulate long instruments inside the abdomen. The instrument goes through the abdominal wall and that creates a fulcrum. When you move your hand to the right, the tip of the instrument goes left. When you move your hand toward the patient’s head, the tip of the instrument goes toward the feet.

Then I thought of this.

I wonder how many lap chole’s the Navy Medical Center does a year and what their complication rate is ? We’re not likely to find out. Remember this story?

Maybe they did everything right but there should not be bowel injuries from that procedure.

Is this a parody ?

Saturday, February 6th, 2010

UPDATE: Here is an interesting article examining this phenomenon in the Washington Post. And here is a nice summary by David Freddoso.

I have been mulling the question of whether this incredible article was worth responding to. When I saw the title on Real Clear Politics, I assumed it was a parody. I’m still not 100% sure it isn’t.

In trying to explain why our political paralysis seems to have gotten so much worse over the past year, analysts have rounded up a plausible collection of reasons including: President Obama’s tactical missteps, the obstinacy of congressional Republicans, rising partisanship in Washington, the blustering idiocracy of the cable-news stations, and the Senate filibuster, which has devolved into a super-majority threshold for any important legislation. These are all large factors, to be sure, but that list neglects what may be the biggest culprit in our current predicament: the childishness, ignorance, and growing incoherence of the public at large.

The writer has not considered the possibility that Obama’s economic and national security policies are detached from reality. He does not give any thought to the possibility that millions of people have been running businesses and living their lives without the benefit of government and would like to continue to be left alone.

He also ignores the fact that, as a result of tax reforms the past two decades, about 35% of the tax payers pay no income tax. Thus, there is a constituency for new spending that knows the responsibility for paying those bills will be someone elses. In fact, by 2009, that percent who pay no tax had continued to rise and is now nearly 40%.

Maybe those people who pay no income tax are the “stupid and ignorant” group he is referring to. No, he seems to think that the middle class, which pays the vast majority of income tax, is the target of his ire.

The usual way to describe such inconsistent demands from voters is to say that the public is an angry, populist, tea-partying mood. But a lot more people are watching American Idol than are watching Glenn Beck, and our collective illogic is mostly negligent rather than militant. The more compelling explanation is that the American public lives in Candyland, where government can tackle the big problems and get out of the way at the same time. In this respect, the whole country is becoming more and more like California, where ignorance is bliss and the state’s bonds have dropped to an A- rating (the same level as Libya’s), thanks to a referendum system that allows the people to be even more irresponsible than their elected representatives. Middle-class Americans really don’t want to hear about sacrifices or trade-offs—except as flattering descriptions about how ready we, as a people, are, or used to be, to accept them. We like the idea of hard choices in theory. When was the last time we made one in reality?

I tend to agree with him about California but there is one characteristic about California that he doesn’t mention. Which political party dominates California government ? In 2005, Arnold Schwartzenegger, who had been elected two years before during the recall of his predecessor, Gray Davis, attempted to pass four reform initiatives to try to get control of the runaway entitlements of California. The teachers’ unions and the SEIU mobilized against him and all four initiatives went down to defeat. Arnold quickly caved in the political left and we are now on the verge of bankruptcy.

Schwarzenegger’s proposals to curb spending and weaken unions inflamed passions on both sides, partly because of the election’s roughly $50 million cost in a state that repeatedly faces budget shortfalls.

Appearing before supporters at a Beverly Hills hotel after learning that at least two of his initiatives had failed, a smiling governor did not concede defeat.

“Tomorrow, we begin anew,” Schwarzenegger said, his wife Maria Shriver beside him. “I feel the same tonight as that night two years ago … You know with all my heart, I want to do the right thing for the people of California.”

Though some of the measures were complex, Schwarzenegger cast the election in simple terms: Support him and the state moves forward — vote no and protect a broken system of government in Sacramento.

Actually, he gave up and the state has continued its decline as middle class tax payers flee to other states.

So who has good ideas to stop the financial whirlpool the US is caught in?

I don’t mean to suggest that honesty is what separates the two parties. Increasingly, the crucial distinction is between the minority of serious politicians in either party who are prepared to speak directly about our choices, on the one hand, and the majority who indulge the public’s delusions, on the other. I would put President Obama and his economic team in the first group, along with California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Republicans are more indulgent of the public’s unrealism in general, but Democrats have spent years fostering their own forms of denial. Where Republicans encourage popular myths about taxes, spending, and climate change, Democrats tend to stoke our fantasies about the sustainability of entitlement spending as well as about the cost of new programs.

Climate change ? He still thinks that AGW is a high priority ? Wow ! Plus he thinks Obama’s $3.8 trillion budget is drawn up by “serious politicians” ? Maybe he thinks that Gorbachev was on the verge of solving the Soviet Union’s problems in 1989. He thinks the Obama who raised discretional spending by $84 billion this past year is serious about deficits with his fake spending freeze? What about the federal employee situation ? The only place in the US which is not having a recession is The District of Columbia and environs. Federal employee numbers are climbing rapidly, where the numbers are expected to increase by 153,000 in fiscal 2010. Private industry, mostly small business, has lost about 4.5 million jobs.

The political left, having lost the confidence of the electorate in record time, is unhappy with that electorate. Imagine if Obama had really tried to be bipartisan and had incorporated Republican concepts in his first big “stimulus” bill. Imagine for a moment that, instead of the famously corrupt payments sometimes in non-existent Congressional districts, to interest groups and local government, the bill had included a six month holiday from FICA taxes. That would have resulted in a similar deficit but it would have had instantaneous effect and it would have been distributed to the working tax payers. Imagine if the health care bill had included exchanges in which individuals could have purchased insurance that was tailored to their needs, high deductible for young healthy workers for example, and the mandates of the special interests had been left out. Had that been done, Republicans would have much less to complain about and Weisberg might even like us voters more. We wouldn’t be so ignorant.

Alas, the chance was wasted and now the left is angry at us “ignorant” middle class voters. James Fallows has a pretty good essay on American decline until he gets to the last two pages. Then we get back to the tired old complaints about the electoral college and the Senate and the inability of Democrat phonies like Kerry to get elected.

America the society is in fine shape! America the polity most certainly is not. Over the past half century, both parties have helped cause this predicament—Democrats by unintentionally giving governmental efforts a bad name in the 1960s and ’70s, Republicans by deliberately doing so from the Reagan era onward. At the moment, Republicans are objectively the more nihilistic, equating public anger with the sentiment that “their” America has been taken away and defining both political and substantive success as stopping the administration’s plans. As a partisan tactic, this could make sense; for the country, it’s one more sign of dysfunction, and of the near-impossibility of addressing problems that require truly public efforts to solve.

Of course, when Bush tried to deal with the coming collapse of Social Security by allowing private accounts, the Democrats demagogued it mercilessly but the Republicans are the “nihilists.”

We could hope for an enlightened military coup, or some other deus ex machina by the right kind of tyrants. (In his 700-page new “meliorist” novel, Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us, Ralph Nader proposes a kind of plutocrats’ coup, in which Warren Buffett, Bill Gates Sr., Ted Turner, et al. collaborate to create a more egalitarian America.) The periodic longing for a “man on horseback” is a reflection of disappointment with what normal politics can bring. George Washington and Dwight Eisenhower were the right men on horseback.

Here we go with the left’s fondness for military coups and authoritarian government. They can’t win elections so it is the voter’s fault and they want to try to do without those ignorant voters.

I guess it wasn’t a parody.

The trial lawyers win a big one.

Friday, February 5th, 2010

The Illinois State Supreme Court has overturned caps on “pain and suffering in malpractice cases in Illinois. The caps were $500,000 for suits against doctors and $1 million for hospitals. California has had caps of $250,000 since 1975 and it has stabilized the malpractice insurance market in the state for 35 years. Illinois was notorious as a high malpractice premium state and doctors were leaving the state when the legislature passed this law five years ago. That migration should now resume. I remember one story of an OB GYN who moved across the state line to Indiana. His patients followed him but it was an inconvenience.

Doctors incomes have declined over the past 25 years and this will make Illinois a red letter state for the recruiters from other states. I’m retired but I get job offers almost every week. Some specialties are already showing a significant shortage as medical students are choosing “life style” specialties that don’t require weekend and all night work.

It will be interesting to see what happens in Illinois.

Guidelines, best practices and rationing.

Monday, February 1st, 2010

Jerome Groopman is an oncologist who has written many articles about medicine. He has a good piece in the New York Review of Books, a generally left wing publication. He is writing about “best practices,” which are the basis for many guidelines for care.

One of the principal aims of the current health care legislation is to improve the quality of care. According to the President and his advisers, this should be done through science. The administration’s stimulus package already devoted more than a billion dollars to “comparative effectiveness research,” meaning, in the President’s words, evaluating “what works and what doesn’t” in the diagnosis and treatment of patients.

But comparative research on effectiveness is only part of the strategy to improve care. A second science has captured the imagination of policymakers in the White House: behavioral economics. This field attempts to explain pitfalls in reasoning and judgment that cause people to make apparently wrong decisions; its adherents believe in policies that protect against unsound clinical choices. But there is a schism between presidential advisers in their thinking over whether legislation should be coercive, aggressively pushing doctors and patients to do what the government defines as best, or whether it should be respectful of their own autonomy in making decisions. The President and Congress appear to be of two minds. How this difference is resolved will profoundly shape the culture of health care in America.

Best practices may be derived in two ways. One is by clinical research, usually involving randomized clinical trials. In this sort of study, two groups of patients are chosen to be as alike as possible. One group is randomly selected from the total and given a drug or other treatment under study. The other group is given a placebo. One fact to be kept in mind is that placebos are quite powerful in some situations. They will produce up to 30% measurable improvement in most diseases. This, of course, is psychological but it still works. In World War II, Henry K Beecher discovered an interesting phenomenon while treating wounded troops at the Anzio Beachhead. He found that even seriously wounded men had little pain. When he investigated this, he found that most of them had been in combat in constant fear of death. The wound was seen as an escape from that risk of death and was seen in many ways as a beneficial event. The term “Million Dollar Wound” was a common term used for a wound that was serious enough to remove the wounded man from combat but not so serious that he would die or be crippled for life.

He later studied soldiers who had been seriously injured in other settings, such as road accidents similar to civilian injuries and found that they reacted much more like the civilians than like the combat soldiers. In 1955, he published a famous book titled “The Powerful Placebo.” Those who would choose what treatment should be approved and what should be rationed would do well to keep that in mind. Furthermore, people react in many different ways to the same drug.

The other principle method of writing best practice guidelines is by “consensus.” That means a group of experts meet and discuss their opinions until the group arrives at a recommendation. This may be better than nothing but may also be influenced by the life experiences and prejudices of academics, who comprise most of these expert panels.

Groopman goes on to discuss failures in rigid guidelines and whether the Obama administration plans coercive measures to enforce guidelines that may be faulty.

Medicare specified that it was a “best practice” to tightly control blood sugar levels in critically ill patients in intensive care. That measure of quality was not only shown to be wrong but resulted in a higher likelihood of death when compared to measures allowing a more flexible treatment and higher blood sugar. Similarly, government officials directed that normal blood sugar levels should be maintained in ambulatory diabetics with cardiovascular disease. Studies in Canada and the United States showed that this “best practice” was misconceived. There were more deaths when doctors obeyed this rule than when patients received what the government had designated as subpar treatment (in which sugar levels were allowed to vary).

There are many other such failures of allegedly “best” practices. An analysis of Medicare’s recommendations for hip and knee replacement by orthopedic surgeons revealed that conforming to, or deviating from, the “quality metrics”—i.e., the supposedly superior procedure—had no effect on the rate of complications from the operation or on the clinical outcomes of cases treated. A study of patients with congestive heart failure concluded that most of the measures prescribed by federal authorities for “quality” treatment had no major impact on the disorder. In another example, government standards required that patients with renal failure who were on dialysis had to receive statin drugs to prevent stroke and heart attack; a major study published last year disproved the value of this treatment.

His conclusions are that the coercion may very well be part of the health reform bill although that bill now seems to be on hold. All the parties to these new rules, of course, disclaim any interest in reducing cost by restricting access to free choice in treatments that may not be supported by best practice guidelines. The problem is that randomized clinical trials are only possible in a small proportion of health care choices. Surgery does not lend itself to such trials for obvious reasons although a few have been done. This topic reminds us of the authoritarian tendencies of the “progressive” and the threat to free choice in healthcare.