However, I was struck by the urge to tinker with the Web site today. Even if no one reads it, I still enjoy tweaking it. I mostly upgraded various components of the blog to their most recent versions; thus, most of the changes are not very noticeable. I also implemented a new login system. You can now log in with Google/Facebook/twitter/OpenID, or you can use your existing FoC login if you would prefer — you should be able to associate the existing FoC account with a third party login. Let me know if you have any trouble.

I also wanted to write something today because a subject came up (other than health care reform, about which I lack the perseverance to write) that I thought was well suited for regular blogging rather than microblogging.

A few days ago, a leading climate change research center was hacked. Among other things, their private e-mails have been spread around the Internet. Many climate change deniers have latched onto certain portions of these e-mails as proof — not just the smoking gun, but the mushroom cloud!! — that climate change is a big hoax.

The most talked about passage stated,

“I’’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”

Words like “trick” and “hide” certainly have a negative nuance, hinting that something untoward took place. However, based on my understanding of the matter, this was not the case. Although I feel silly having to cite the definition of a commonly known word, it is probably the simplest way to approach the first commonly cited point in the e-mail.

“Trick: A convention or specialized skill peculiar to a particular field of activity.”

Was this definition the intended meaning of “trick”, or does it instead refer to malicious deception? The answer to this question depends on the meaning of “hide the decline”. Many climate change deniers seem to interpret “hide the decline” to mean that global temperatures are actually decreasing and that any reported rise in global temperatures is the result of manipulation of data — a hoax dreamed up by Al Gore and George Soros. However, surely an enterprising scientist somewhere would notice this, right? Never mind the fact that decreasing temperatures would conflict with numerous separate observations, for example, sea ice thickness, weather patterns, and species extinction.

Therefore, I think it is safe to conclude that the scientists were not hiding declining real global temperatures. So, what were they hiding?

Climate scientists use a variety of proxies instead of actual temperature measurements, such as tree-ring growth and the isotopic composition of polar ice cores. These proxies are necessary to construct models of the global climate thousands of years in the past, since frequent, accurate, and widespread measurement of temperature is a fairly recent occurrence. However, these temperature proxies are not perfect. For example, the tree ring “divergence problem”, whereby the strong correlation between tree-ring growth and temperature considerably weakened after 1960, is well know. It has been reported that in the e-mail, “decline” referred to the decrease in the modeled temperature obtained by using tree-ring data.

In order to deal with large and complex data sets, various statistical treatments must be applied. In this case, tree-ring growth provides good data up to 1960. However, since the correlation subsequently weakened, the “decline” needed to be “hidden”, not because they were twisting the data to fit their political agenda, but because they were constructing a model to fit the observed data.

* 25-30% of Americans are in the incredibly shrinking republican base. These are the people convinced bush was a resounding success, Obama wants death panels, etc. If obama walked on water, they say he was afraid to swim, that it was proof of his kenyan birth, and showed his sympathy for Nazi-style euthanasia. This chunk puts a cap on obama’s popularity. Considering he was at around 65% approval, he was basically near the maximum. Nowhere to go but down or at best holding steady.

* health care is a real test. Obama has had to wade into the muck. Is anyone surprised voters don’t like the stink?

* Obama is probably going to succeed. Regardless of the details, I think the finished product, rather than the process by which it was crafted, will prove to be popular, thus giving Obama a boost.

* comparing the approval ratings and progress health care, Obama is doing much better than Clinton at this point.

• If you lose your job, your health care is rationed.
• If you have a pre-existing condition, your health care is rationed.
• If your insurance company decides your care has cost too much, your health care is rationed.
• If you cannot afford insurance, your health care is rationed.

Under the Obama health care plan:

• We will stop health care rationing based on your employment status.
• We will stop health care rationing based on pre-existing conditions.
• We will stop health care rationing based on annual or lifetime caps on coverage.
• We will stop health care rationing based on the affordability of coverage.

As for substance, I’m very happy with everything so far, which isn’t surprising since most everything he has done was promised on the campaign trail — so, of course, it is nice to see the promises starting to be implemented. The more striking thing for me is the contrast in style between Bush, Clinton, and Obama. Obama seems to be hard working, engaged, disciplined, and dynamic. Clinton (obviously) lacked the discipline, whereas Bush seemed to lack Obama’s level of engagement and dynamism. For better or worse, Bush liked routine and order, and Clinton was freewheeling; maybe Obama strikes just the right balance between the two.

Other things I’m happy with — Hillary seems to be taking to her role as secretary of state, and keeping Gates at the Pentagon is looking like a good move. Hillary seems to be doing a lot of substantive work, and has also, on occasion, effectively used her political celebrity. (For example, the smack down of Dick Cheney the other day probably got a lot more mileage coming from Hillary than from a less well-known official). As for Gates, the pentagon budget is much more sensible this year than in the past. He, nevertheless, stirred up a hornets’ nest in Congress, but his bipartisan credibility should go a long way towards helping with that.

On Iraq, Afghanistan, detainee policy, and other foreign affairs, Obama is quickly instituting rather significant changes without them feeling rash or ill-considered.

All and all, I’d give Obama a solid “A”, with points having been taking off for some of the bank bailout/toxic asset stuff that I’m not really sold on yet.

So let me get this straight.  Banks pay an assessment (aka insurance premium) on all deposits, and the assessment is based on institution risk.  Overall, the average assessment looks in the range of 1% to 1.5% of insured deposits.  So banks pay this amount, and then feds guarantee the deposits in the event the bank fails, so that customers aren’t wiped out, or so that customers don’t think they’ll be wiped out and cause a run on the bank, and then get wiped out.

In some ways, consumers are the ones that reap the ultimate benefit of FDIC insurance, but banks also benefit in that they get to take more risks with depositors’ money in search of profit than if they had to assure customers that they would have access to their money at any time without any deposit protections.  So while both banks and consumers benefit from deposit insurance, banks are the ones that make the decisions that put deposits at risk; and the FDIC insurance premium depends on the banks capitalization and other factors.

So now that lots of banks are failing, the deposit insurance fund is dwindling, and Senator Dodd (D-Iowa temporarily lol but typically D-CO/Banks) wants to use taxpayer money to subsidize the insurance fund (through a “loan”).

I say fuck that.  If skydiving and knife-fighting became all the rage among the American citizenry, resulting in massive injuries and virually bankrupting the health insurance industry, there would be no bailout.  The health insurance industry would have to adjust, and quickly.  You want to skydive and get stabbed?  Great!  You premium is now 300% more expensive.  Thanks for calling Blue Cross Blue Shield!

So for banks…oh you want to leverage your deposits 12 to 1 and take massive risks and give loans to people that lie about their income and not bother to check it?  Great.  You probably need to pay higher FDIC premiums you greedy jack-asses!  Thanks for calling the FDIC!

But apparently that’s not how it works.  People with preexisting conditions and proclivities towards skydiving have to pay for their risk for health/life insurance, but banks don’t.  Surely we don’t want to impose costs that hurt businesses!  Even if they’ve self-destructed and the entire US banking system is basically insolvent because of liberal lending and capitalization.

So on top of everything else in the ballooning deficit (some of it good, if it stimulates the economy), does the federal government really need to be loaning money to banks for FDIC insurance that it might not get back?  The banks have demonstrated that they will take risks to earn a profit, and at some point in this string of bailouts it has to be shown that those risks have consequences.  No one complained when the market was booming, but now the party’s over.  Banks have no one to blame but themselves.  If the fund isn’t keeping up with the demand to cover deposit losses for failed banks, then the FDIC needs to raise the fee charged to banks to reflect the actual risk of insuring a banks deposits.

This is his first real test.  He can’t blink.  He has to show the weather prognosticators and terrorists that he won’t back down; that he has the toughness needed to confront a late winter snowstorm like a true Chicagoan.  So unless Obama personally trudges through a foot and a half of snow to drop his girls off at school and then ice skates down Pennsylvania Avenue to slam his budget through Congress, the War on Winter is lost and the economy will be doomed to slip into an even worse recessionary-deflationary-wintery spiral.

It’s 3AM.  Where are your snowshoes?!

My favorite (well…actually least favorite…) examples of wasteful construction in Japan are tetrapods, the eye sores that line every beach in Japan.  Supposedly they prevent erosion, but I’m not sure if that’s true or not.

Japan has many chronically underfunded needs and problems.  For example, their is not enough affordable day care for working mothers.  This is one of serveral reasons why Japan has such a low birth rate, and as a result, women are choosing to have fewer children and having them later in life.  If Japan spent more money on day care,  it would provide direct economic stimulus by employing  more people in the child-care industry while providing further benefits from the  increased productivity of women in the workforce and helping to ease Japan’s demographic problems.

Unfortunately, Japan’s unelected, unaccountable, and very powerful bureaucrats, along with their political benefactors decided to throw money at a $250 million dollar airports that now has two flights a day and bridges that no one uses.

So who can Obama appoint? First, he might have to appoint two people…one to manage the Department of Health and Human Services, and one to be the point person for health care reform. I’m not sure who else is out there that could do both. But if Obama goes with two people, he better line them up in tandem and be sure they are on the same page…you don’t want some recalcitrant bureaucrat railroading stuff from DHS, while Obama and his health care reform point person are trying to get shit through Congress.

(AND WILL THE NEW HHS PERSON HAVE CRAZY GLASSES?!?!?!?!?  OBAMA BETTER NOT LET US DOWN!!!!!)

I thought his speech was very good — maybe not his best, but nonetheless eloquent, powerful, and most importantly, it set the tone and the agenda for his incoming administration.

It was less soaring rhetoric than his 2004 keynote address or his “Yes, we can” New Hampshire speech, but it wasn’t as workman-like as his nomination acceptance speech in Denver, either.

Over at Politico’s Arena, the reviews are nearly universally positive.

I wonder which, if any, lines will become famous like “ask not what your country can do for you…”. Nothing really jumped out at me as being quite at that level, but I here are what I thought were some of the highlights of the speech:

What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them—that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply. The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works.

This echo’s his 2004 DNC speech, and also nicely frames his pragmatic approach to governing.

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.

This line will surely please many people, especially liberals, as it rejects some of the worst policies of the Bush administration, but also offers a new way to move forward the debate on security vs. civil liberties.

We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.

Firm resolve instead of blustering, tough talk.

To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect. To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society’s ills on the West—know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy. To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.

Nicely matches with the foreign policy “smart power” outlined by Hillary at her confirmation hearing.

This is the price and the promise of citizenship.

A catchy line to capture his call for service and responsibility. Not quite “Ask not what your country…”, but still pretty good.

Of course, it may be a comforting notion,  despite being rejected by your contemporaries, that history will judge you more kindly.  But the analogy strains to the breaking point.

Where is Bush’s Marshall Plan?  Does wasting aid in Afghanistan only to see it crumble again count?

Sure Korea is divided to this day and the Korean War definitely didn’t go as well as planned, but I have a feeling that Baghdad and Iraq will be very different in 50 years compared with Seoul and South Korea today.  I doubt that in 50 years Americans could safely and freely travel to Baghdad in 2059.

The Truman Doctrine was in place for 40 years.  The Bush Doctrine  won’t even be in place for the next administration because it was such a disaster in Iraq (I agree with Charlie Gibson that it means preemptive war…even though there is some confusion on this point, and some claim that the Bush Doctrine means  not letting a country harbor terrorist and overthrowing them, but this isn’t necessarily a new idea, just a new situation for instigating regime change, which isn’t Bush-specific).

And if the PATRIOT Act and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security count as key accomplishments, not even history can save you.