More stuff I'd like to write about, if I had the time.
Via Hullabaloo, a NYT story about profits, oil/gas, and the Bush administration:
But an often byzantine set of federal regulations, largely shaped and fiercely defended by the energy industry itself, allowed companies producing natural gas to provide the Interior Department with much lower sale prices - the crucial determinant for calculating government royalties - than they reported to their shareholders.
As a result, the nation's taxpayers, collectively, the biggest owner of American oil and gas reserves, have missed much of the recent energy bonanza.
The disparities in gas prices parallel those uncovered just five years ago in a wave of scandals involving royalty payments for oil. From 1998 to 2001, a dozen major companies, while admitting no wrongdoing, paid a total of $438 million to settle charges that they had fraudulently understated their sale prices for oil.
Since then, the government has tightened its rules for oil payments. But with natural gas, the Bush administration recently loosened the rules and eased its audits intended to uncover cheating.
The FDA won't approve Plan B, but it might approve some anal leakage.
But "the problem with Orlistat are the side effects," notes Johns Hopkins endocrinologist Aniket Sidhaye, co-author with Cheskin of a recent scientific review of Orlistat and other prescription weight loss drugs.
At the current recommended prescription dose -- 120 milligrams taken up to three times per day, for example up to 360 milligrams daily -- about 70 percent of users experience gastrointestinal complications, Klein says. They range from flatulence and increased bowel movements to diarrhea and anal leakage.
Make your marriage like a job:
Haltzman says that due to differences in brain structure and chemistry, men are inclined to cull the savannah for food; women maintain the cave. Women communicate; men fix. Women remember events and emotions; men remember the dimensions of the deck. Men are from cerebral cortex, women are from amygdala, so to speak.
So, if a guy doesn't have the right tools to cope with conventional marriage counseling -- yet wants a good marriage -- what can he do?
The White House had early warning on Katrina:
In the 48 hours before Hurricane Katrina hit, the White House received detailed warnings about the storm's likely impact, including eerily prescient predictions of breached levees, massive flooding, and major losses of life and property, documents show.
A 41-page assessment by the Department of Homeland Security's National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center (NISAC), was delivered by e-mail to the White House's "situation room," the nerve center where crises are handled, at 1:47 a.m. on Aug. 29, the day the storm hit, according to an e-mail cover sheet accompanying the document.
The NISAC paper warned that a storm of Katrina's size would "likely lead to severe flooding and/or levee breaching" and specifically noted the potential for levee failures along Lake Pontchartrain. It predicted economic losses in the tens of billions of dollars, including damage to public utilities and industry that would take years to fully repair. Initial response and rescue operations would be hampered by disruption of telecommunications networks and the loss of power to fire, police and emergency workers, it said.
In a second document, also obtained by The Washington Post, a computer slide presentation by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, prepared for a 9 a.m. meeting on Aug. 27, two days before Katrina made landfall, compared Katrina's likely impact to that of "Hurricane Pam," a fictional Category 3 storm used in a series of FEMA disaster-preparedness exercises simulating the effects of a major hurricane striking New Orleans. But Katrina, the report warned, could be worse.
The hurricane's Category 4 storm surge "could greatly overtop levees and protective systems" and destroy nearly 90 percent of city structures, the FEMA report said. It further predicted "incredible search and rescue needs (60,000-plus)" and the displacement of more than a million residents.
Congress helps the insurance industry to the tune of $22 billion:
House and Senate GOP negotiators, meeting behind closed doors last month to complete a major budget-cutting bill, agreed on a change to Senate-passed Medicare legislation that would save the health insurance industry $22 billion over the next decade, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
The Senate version would have targeted private HMOs participating in Medicare by changing the formula that governs their reimbursement, lowering payments $26 billion over the next decade. But after lobbying by the health insurance industry, the final version made a critical change that had the effect of eliminating all but $4 billion of the projected savings, according to CBO and other health policy experts.
Enjoy!
Posted by binky at January 24, 2006 11:42 AM | TrackBack | Posted to Random Thoughts