Flap's Blog – FullosseousFlap's Dental Blog

• Climategate Computer Codes Are the Real Story
  So far, most of the Climategate attention has been on the emails in the data dump of November 19 (see here, here, and here), but the emails are only about 5 percent of the total. What does examining the other 95 percent tell us?

  Here’s the short answer: it tells us that something went very wrong in the data management at the Climatic Research Unit.
  1. They didn’t want to release their data or code, and they particularly weren’t interested in releasing any intermediate steps that would help someone else

  2. They clearly have some history of massaging the data — hell, practically water-boarding the data — to get it to fit their other results. Results they can no longer even replicate on their own systems.

  3. They had successfully managed to restrict peer review to what we might call the “RealClimate clique” — the small group of true believers they knew could be trusted to say the right things.

  (tags: Climategate)
• Obamacare: You Call This A Compromise? The Public Option
  As the Senate debates the health care bill put together by Majority Leader Reid, the scramble is on to come up with a new compromise regarding the public option–the public health insurance plan modeled after Medicare that will be offered within the new health insurance exchange to Americans who lack workplace health insurance (and to workers in small firms that decide to buy coverage through the exchange).

  The goal of the current effort is simple: to get sixty votes to overcome a filibuster and pass a bill. Four of the sixty Senators who caucus with the Democrats have expressed, with varying degrees of certainty and specificity, that they don’t like the public option in the current bill. So the search is on for a compromise, any compromise, that will bring on these four, or allow one or two of them to be bypassed by picking up the support of Republican senators Olympia Snowe or Sue Collins.

  (tags: Obamacare)
• Climategate: Were Russian security services behind the leak of 'Climategate' emails?
  Suspicions were growing last night that Russian security services were behind the leaking of the notorious British ‘Climategate’ emails which threaten to undermine tomorrow’s Copenhagen global warming summit.

  An investigation by The Mail on Sunday has discovered that the explosive hacked emails from the University of East Anglia were leaked via a small web server in the formerly closed city of Tomsk in Siberia.

  The leaks scandal has left the scientific community in disarray after claims that key climate change data was manipulated in the run-up to the climate change summit of world leaders.

  (tags: Climategate)
• Obamacare: Obama Silent On Public Option In Speech To Senators
  As President Obama finished his speech to the Democratic caucus in the Capitol's Mansfield Room on Sunday afternoon, Joe Lieberman made his way over to Harry Reid.

  The independent who still caucuses with Democrats wanted to point something out to the Majority Leader: Obama didn't mention the public option.
  "Well, it was interesting to me — of course everybody hears with their own ears — that he didn't say anything about the public option," said Lieberman. "In other words, when he outlined how far we've come on the bill, he talked about the cost-containment provisions; he talked about the insurance market reforms; and he talked about enabling 30 million more people to get insurance. He said these are historic accomplishments, the most significant social legislation, or whatever you call it, in decades, so don't lose it."

  (tags: Obamacare)
• Sarah Palin cracks wise at Gridiron dinner
  The Gridiron Club's usually low key winter meeting was anything but this year as the politican who's defined herself in opposition to Washington elites and the mainstream media stood before the Washington media elite

  A crowd of 195 — about double the average attendance of Gridiron members and their guests — came to hear Palin along with Rep. Barney Frank, a liberal, openly gay Democratic congressman from Massachusetts.

  Palin, in a smart black suit with what appeared to be a fur-lined purse, showed up to burnish her political credentials after a stop in Fairfax for her nationwide tour to flog her bestselling book, “Going Rogue.”
  +++++++
  Loved the Joe Biden Rogaine joke

  (tags: sarah_palin)
• The Fiction Of Climate Science – Why the climatologists get it wrong
  While scientists march to the drumbeat of grant money, at least trees don't lie. Their growth rings show what's happened no matter which philosophy is in power. Tree rings show a mini ice age in Europe about the time Stradivarius crafted his violins. Chilled Alpine Spruce gave him tighter wood so the instruments sang with a new purity. But England had to give up the wines that the Romans cultivated while our globe cooled, switching from grapes to colder weather grains and learning to take comfort with beer, whisky and ales.

  Yet many centuries earlier, during a global warming, Greenland was green. And so it stayed and was settled by Vikings for generations until global cooling came along. Leif Ericsson even made it to Newfoundland. His shallow draft boats, perfect for sailing and rowing up rivers to conquer villages, wouldn't have stood a chance against a baby iceberg.

  Those sustained temperature swings, all before the evil economic benefits of oil consumption, suggest there are

  (tags: Climate_Change)

With Obamacare legislation before the United States Senate, Carly Fiorina goes national.

Carly Fiorina is getting some national exposure Saturday after Senate GOP czar Mitch McConnell tapped her to give the GOP weekly Republican address today.

Mitch’s assignment was to address the health care debate. Talking directly into the camera in front of a plain background, Carly puts her battle with breast cancer into the political context of the health care reform battle currently going on in the Senate….

Here is the text of her remarks:

Hello. This is Carly Fiorina. And today I’d like to speak to you as one of the more than two and a half million women in America who have been diagnosed with breast cancer — and beaten it.
 
Like everyone else who’s diagnosed with cancer, I never thought it would happen to me. I was fit, healthy, and active. I even got regular check-ups. But earlier this year, just two weeks after a clear mammogram, I discovered a lump through a self-exam.
 
Soon after that came the diagnosis, the surgery, the long and difficult treatment regimen, and the painful experience of wondering whether I would make it, whether I’d pull through.
 
I’m fortunate to live near one of the greatest cancer centers in the world. I’m fortunate to have the incredible love and support of family and friends. And my diagnosis gave me time to think about my future — because one of the things that happens when you have to face your fears, including the fear of dying, is that you can face your future with renewed hope and enthusiasm.
 
My doctors tell me I have won my battle with cancer. And, I realize that this makes me one of the lucky ones. Last year alone, more than 40,000 Americans died from breast cancer. Aside from lung cancer, breast cancer is the most fatal form of cancer for American women. Nearly 200,000 new cases were reported last year alone.
 
That’s why a recent recommendation on mammograms by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, a government-run panel of health care professionals that makes recommendations on prevention, struck such a nerve. The task force did not include an oncologist or a radiologist, in other words cancer experts did not develop this recommendation. They said that most women under 50 don’t need regular mammograms and that women over 50 should only get them every other year. And yet we all know that the chances of surviving cancer are greater the earlier it’s detected. If I’d followed this new recommendation and waited another two years, I’m not sure I’d be alive today.
 
What’s more this task force was explicitly asked to focus on costs, not just prevention. As it turned out, costs were a significant factor in this recommendation. Will a bureaucrat determine that my life isn’t worth saving?
 
All this takes on even greater urgency in the midst of the ongoing health care debate in Washington. We wonder if we are heading down a path where the federal government will at first suggest and then mandate new standards for prevention and treatment. Do we really want government bureaucrats rather than doctors dictating how we prevent and treat something like breast cancer?
 
The response we’ve gotten to these questions has been less than encouraging. In the face of a national outcry over the recent task force recommendations, the Secretary of Health and Human Services said the Preventive Services Task Force doesn’t set federal policy. The real question, though, is whether bodies like this would set policy under the $2.5 trillion, 2,074-page plan that’s now making its way through Congress?
 
Unfortunately, the answer to that question isn’t encouraging either. The health care bill now being debated in the Senate explicitly empowers this very task force to influence future coverage and preventive care. Section 4105, for example, authorizes the Secretary of Health and Human Services to deny payment for prevention services the task force recommends against. Another section requires every health plan in America to cover task force recommended preventive services. In fact, there are more than a dozen examples in the bill where this task force is empowered to influence care.
 
There is a reason American women with breast cancer have a higher survival rate than women in countries with government-run health care. Unlike those countries, our government doesn’t dictate what prevention and treatments women can get.
 
While some defend the idea of a government task force, my experience with cancer tells me it’s wrong. Cutting down on mammograms might save the government some money that it will then spend on something else. But it won’t save lives. And isn’t that what health care reform was supposed to be all about?
 
This is just one in many examples of serious problems with this healthcare reform legislation. Rather than remaking the entire national healthcare system at the cost of higher taxes and exploding deficits, we should build on what works, such as expanding access to integrated care and to community clinics that will give those most in need appropriate care at a reasonable price.
 
Congress should reform medical malpractice to match what we have in California where frivolous lawsuits are a thing of the past. We should permit consumers to purchase health insurance from any company in the country, expanding consumer choice and driving down cost and unnecessary mandates.
 
People want to know that their care will stay where it belongs: in the hands of doctors and patients. Unfortunately, the path Congress is on in this debate is not giving us the confidence that it will.

Thank you.

This is a significant address and crystallizes on a personal level the Republican objections to Obamacare. Look for more from Carly regarding health care reform as Obamacare makes its way through the legislative process.

No wonder Dingy Harry Reid is behind in the polls for his 2010 re-election race.

Can you beleive this MORON hyping the loss of more jobs and then saying we have made great progress?

Dingy Harry needs to go away now……