Just the Facts, Ma'am

For you fans of the straight shooting 1950s, here's the grim reality of the 1997-2008 world. It makes me homesick for the good old days when work was rewarded and the memories of the Great Depression kept the government honest. The follow graphs are from Brad DeLong's web site:


The Bush "boom years" resulted in a lower income than the decade earlier during the last years of the Clinton presidency. This despite the fact that the overall economy actually grew over this period! In short, the workers were shafted so that that big shots got more gravy on their potatoes. So that trillion dollar "tax cut stimulus" that Bush delivered did nothing for the average American (details here). But if you are one of the 20,000 top American families you still have Bush's portrait over the mantel and genuflect to it each morning. Bush was a saint. He delivered. And, oh how it would be grand to get the third Bush into the presidency!

DeLong's got an additional graph showing how medical insurance coverage has changed: companies have dropped coverage by 5% while various federal programs have picked up coverage by 4% so there is an overall drop of 1% in coverage. Without the government aid, the situation of medical care in the US would be worse than the current disaster. But the plucky Republicans keep giving that Alfred E. Newman response of "What me worry?".

Global Warming, Again

There has been a lot of blogging about a flawed data set, the Yamal tree ring data, that has been used to "sell" the idea that we are into a run-away global warming period. There is an excellent article in the Financial Post on the controversy by Ross McKitrick, professor of environmental economics at the University of Guelph in Canada.

Beginning in 2003, I worked with Stephen McIntyre to replicate a famous result in paleoclimatology known as the Hockey Stick graph. Developed by a U.S. climatologist named Michael Mann, it was a statistical compilation of tree ring data supposedly proving that air temperatures had been stable for 900 years, then soared off the charts in the 20th century. Prior to the publication of the Hockey Stick, scientists had held that the medieval-era was warmer than the present, making the scale of 20th century global warming seem relatively unimportant. The dramatic revision to this view occasioned by the Hockey Stick's publication made it the poster child of the global warming movement. It was featured prominently in a 2001 report of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), as well as government websites and countless review reports.

Steve and I showed that the mathematics behind the Mann Hockey Stick were badly flawed, such that its shape was determined by suspect bristlecone tree ring data. Controversies quickly piled up: Two expert panels involving the U.S. National Academy of Sciences were asked to investigate, the U.S. Congress held a hearing, and the media followed the story around the world.

The expert reports upheld all of our criticisms of the Mann Hockey Stick, both of the mathematics and of its reliance on flawed bristlecone pine data.

But two data series have reappeared over and over that do have a hockey stick shape. One was the flawed bristlecone data that the National Academy of Sciences panel said should not be used, so the studies using it can be set aside. The second was a tree ring curve from the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia, compiled by UK scientist Keith Briffa.

The article goes on to discuss how flawed data sets, particularly Yamal, are still being used to sell global warming. The article is well worth reading.

US Taxpayers Dollars at Work

The idiocy of the Bush administration's treatment of Guantanamo prisoners now continues under Obama. Here's a posting by LizardBreath, a New York lawyer, on the Unfogged web site:

This Is Shameful

US District Judge Colleen Kottar-Kelly just ordered the release (don't get excited, it's not going to happen unless the Justice Department decides not to appeal) of Fouad al-Rubiah, one of the prisoners at Guantanamo. Read the opinion -- there are a lot of redactions, so you can't get the details, but we took a middleaged aircraft engineer who flew to Afghanistan for charitable purposes a short while before 9/11, cobbled together some insane story out of interrogations from unreliable informants, and tortured him into confessing to it. If I follow the course of events correctly through all the redactions, we then continued to torture him because the story we told him to confess to didn't make any sense. And now we've asked a judge to keep him imprisoned on the basis of the confessions that the US interrogators found unbelievable.

Particularly grotesque was this quote from al-Rubiah, explaining one of the arguments interrogators used to convince him to confess:

In about August 2004, shortly before my CSRT hearing [an administrative review of Al Rabiah's detention], my interrogators told me the CSRT was just a show that would allow the United States to 'save face.' My interrogators told me no one leaves Guantanamo innocent, and told me I would be sent home to Kuwait if I 'admitted' some of the false things I had said in my interrogations. The interrogators also told me that I would never go home if I denied these things, because the United States government would never admit I had been wrongly held.
In case anyone was wondering, the hearing that Judge Kottar-Kelly is referring to in the opinion, in which the Justice Department took those irresponsible and indefensible positions, took place in August '09. On Obama's watch. This has to change somehow.

Afterthought: Remember, the fact that this case made it to a habeas hearing means that it's one of the US Government's strongest cases -- they've let some people go, and are dragging their feet even harder on other cases. This evidentiary pile of garbage was pretty close to the best we've got against any of the detainees. Who've been imprisoned and tortured for better than seven years now.

Think about the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on these farcical "judicial" cases. This makes the French treatment of Captain Alfred Dreyfus look like kid gloves. The joke is that the US government is running huge deficits, but they think this political "show trials" are worth the money. Nonsense.

I have no special insight into the case, but I'm with LizardBreath. I suspect this guy is innocent and the victim of a system that can't admit its errors. Even with the "change you can believe in" Obama administration, nothing has changed.

Here's the Wikipedia page on Fouad Mahoud Hasan Al Rabia. Notice that LizardBreath's spelling is different: Fouad al-Rubiah. Notice that the actual US District Court's spelling is different: Fouad Mahmoud Al Rabiah. This gives you an appreciation why those "no fly lists" are close to useless. These guys don't have "definitive" names.

The US's thrashing about on the Guantanamo issue reminds me of the Canadian government's thrashing about on its "commitment" in Afghanistan. A previous government backed us into a "commitment" and the current government knows it is very unpopular with the population but has to keep one steely eye on the Americans because pulling out too "precipitously" would anger the Americans. So idiot government flails about and talks about "commitment" and "staying the course" and "duty" and other cut-to-fit concepts.

Police Thugs

This is an good example of how police let their power go to their head. This cop should have simply told the kids that what they were doing was illegal and tell them to go on their way. Instead, he lets his ego get involved and starts threatening everybody:



I know that being a cop is not a fun job. But they need to hire guys who don't have a tendency to be thugs. At least this cop doesn't go ballistic when these kids push his buttons, but he does step over the boundary in terms of bullying these kids. He shouldn't argue with them. He should simply tell them to disperse and if they don't, then cite them for that. Instead, he lets them verbally spar with him and his anger gets him to go too far in dealing with the one kid, then he ends up writing tickets for the whole crowd. That isn't good "crowd management" technique. Again, I realize his job is tough, but this guy needs more training.

The Guy on the Side of the Ordinary Folk

It is funny to hold up an academic as "people's hero" but as far as I can tell, the one guy who really does care about the average worker is not the Obama "team" or leftist propaganda groups. It is Paul Krugman. This guy is amazingly right about a lot of things. Here's his take on the economy.

From the opening bit of his latest op-ed in the NY Times:

Mission Not Accomplished

Stocks are up. Ben Bernanke says that the recession is over. And I sense a growing willingness among movers and shakers to declare “Mission Accomplished” when it comes to fighting the slump. It’s time, I keep hearing, to shift our focus from economic stimulus to the budget deficit.

No, it isn’t. And the complacency now setting in over the state of the economy is both foolish and dangerous.

Yes, the Federal Reserve and the Obama administration have pulled us “back from the brink” — the title of a new paper by Christina Romer, who leads the Council of Economic Advisers. She argues convincingly that expansionary policy saved us from a possible replay of the Great Depression.

But while not having another depression is a good thing, all indications are that unless the government does much more than is currently planned to help the economy recover, the job market — a market in which there are currently six times as many people seeking work as there are jobs on offer — will remain terrible for years to come.

Indeed, the administration’s own economic projection — a projection that takes into account the extra jobs the administration says its policies will create — is that the unemployment rate, which was below 5 percent just two years ago, will average 9.8 percent in 2010, 8.6 percent in 2011, and 7.7 percent in 2012.

This should not be considered an acceptable outlook. For one thing, it implies an enormous amount of suffering over the next few years. Moreover, unemployment that remains that high, that long, will cast long shadows over America’s future.

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Look, I know more stimulus is a hard sell politically. But it’s urgently needed. The question shouldn’t be whether we can afford to do more to promote recovery. It should be whether we can afford not to. And the answer is no.

All these "deficit hawks" who want to cut back on spending are the same folks who caused the FDR to cut spending in order to follow "sound money policy" and watched the economy lurch down in another bad recession.

Here's a bit from Jim Jubak of MSN Money:

Will US repeat mistakes of 1937?

The specter of 1937 hangs over the economy and the stock market.

That's the year when overconfidence that the Roosevelt administration had whipped the Great Depression and that it was time to balance the federal budget led to another deep recession that wiped out three years of growth and sent the economy reeling back to the Depression depths of 1934.

...

1937 was the year, students of the Great Depression know, that everyone from the president on down got so confident that the bad times were over that they tipped the country back from recovery to depression.

Unemployment, which had marched down from its Depression high of 25% to a low of 14.3% in 1937, climbed again, hitting 19% in 1938. Personal income dropped 15% from its 1937 peak. And manufacturing output fell 40% from its 1937 peak, all the way back to the levels of 1934.

In other words, 1937 was the year that the V-shaped recovery from the depths of the Depression turned into a W-shaped one. The economic growth of 1934 (17%), 1935 (11%), 1936 (14%) and 1937 (10%) that had succeeded the economic collapse of 1930-33 came to a grinding halt. In 1938, the U.S. economy actually returned to negative growth, shrinking 6.2%.

What happened? Buoyed by the economic numbers and a landslide in the 1936 election -- Franklin D. Roosevelt had defeated Republican Alf Landon of Kansas by an Electoral College vote of 523 to 8 -- the Roosevelt administration declared victory over the Great Depression.

The declaration was a bit premature. Yes, unemployment was down from the horrifying 25% levels of the worst of the Depression, but it was still horrendous at more than 14%. The economy had begun to grow again, but 1937's gross domestic product of $88 billion was still lower than it had been in 1930 ($97 billion).

The emergency seemed to be over, however, and many in the New Deal, including Roosevelt's Treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau, were deeply uncomfortable with the idea of running what looked very much like a permanent budget deficit. The annual deficit had peaked at $5.9 billion (yes, I know how quaint these numbers are in the days of trillion-dollar deficits), but it was still a shockingly high $5.5 billion in 1936.

You have to do a bit of number crunching to realize exactly how high a $5.5 billion annual deficit seemed then. It represented 7.7% of GDP and a huge 110% of the federal government's total annual revenue.

As they say, history never repeats, but it sometimes rhymes. I sure hope we aren't seeing the Obama team giving in to pressure and trying out their ability to make rhymes.

Reich on Under-Employment

Robert Reich has a post on his blog that needs repeating. Here is the key bit and I've bolded the essential part of this:

In other words, ten percent unemployment really means twenty percent underemployment or anxious employment. All of which translates directly into late payments on mortgages, credit cards, auto and student loans, and loss of health insurance. It also means sleeplessness for tens of millions of Americans. And, of course, fewer purchases (more on this in a moment).

Unemployment of this magnitude and duration also translates into ugly politics, because fear and anxiety are fertile grounds for demagogues weilding the politics of resentment against immigrants, blacks, the poor, government leaders, business leaders, Jews, and other easy targets. It's already started. Next year is a mid-term election. Be prepared for worse.

So why is unemployment and underemployment so high, and why is it likely to remain high for some time? Because, as noted, people who are worried about their jobs or have no jobs, and who are also trying to get out from under a pile of debt, are not going do a lot of shopping. And businesses that don’t have customers aren’t going do a lot of new investing. And foreign nations also suffering high unemployment aren’t going to buy a lot of our goods and services.

And without customers, companies won't hire. They'll cut payrolls instead.

Which brings us to the obvious question: Who’s going to buy the stuff we make or the services we provide, and therefore bring jobs back? There’s only one buyer left: The government.

Let me say this as clearly and forcefully as I can: The federal government should be spending even more than it already is on roads and bridges and schools and parks and everything else we need. It should make up for cutbacks at the state level, and then some. This is the only way to put Americans back to work. We did it during the Depression. It was called the WPA.

Yes, I know. Our government is already deep in debt. But let me tell you something: When one out of six Americans is unemployed or underemployed, this is no time to worry about the debt.

When I was a small boy my father told me that I and my kids and my grand-kids would be paying down the debt created by Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Depression and World War II. I didn’t even know what a debt was, but it kept me up at night.

My father was right about a lot of things, but he was wrong about this. America paid down FDR’s debt in the 1950s, when Americans went back to work, when the economy was growing again, and when our incomes grew, too. We paid taxes, and in a few years that FDR debt had shrunk to almost nothing.

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But if government doesn’t spend more right now and get Americans back to work, we could be out of work for years. And the debt will be with us even longer. And politics could get much uglier.

The sad fact is that the Republicans are very, very busy making sure this message is not heard. They are pulling out all the stops to put fear into people about "deficits" and are working overtime on the false morality of "sound budgets". But Republicans are hypocrites. When Bush destroyed the Clinton surplus and began running up record deficits, not a word of protest was heard. Now when deficits are essential to get the economy running again, these ideologues are doing every thing they can to stop the recovery by stopping federal spending. The so-call "patriots" are in fact enemies of the people. But too many people don't know enough to recognize this fact. Sad.

Meet the Relatives

Carl Zimmer has a fairly informative blog posting on the latest hominid relative added to our line:

Some 4.4 million years ago, a hominid now known as Ardipithecus ramidus lived in what were then forests in Ethiopia. Fifteen years ago, Tim White of Berkeley and a team of Ethiopian and American scientists published the first account of Ardipithecus, which they had just discovered. But it was just a preliminary report, and White promised more details later, once he and his colleagues had carefully prepared and analyzed all the fossils they had unearthed. “Later,” it turned out, meant 15 years.

...

But then, with the discovery of Ardipithecus and a few other hominid fossils, the record of our ancestry got pushed back millions of years. The oldest fossil that’s been identified as a hominid, Sahelanthropus tschadensis, dates back between 6 and 7 million years old. But scientists have only found pieces of the Sahelanthropus skull. Another species, Orrorin tugenensis, is 6 million years old; it’s represented by little more than a leg bone.

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At first, Ardipithecus ramidus was yet another scrappy pre-Lucy fossil. The first report offered details about part of a 4.4 million-year-old jaw bone–a remarkable jaw bone, but just a jaw bone nonetheless. Soon after, White’s team found more fossil bones, from the hominid’s hand, skull, pelvis, feet, and on and on–110 pieces all told.

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White and his colleagues found so many teeth of different Ardipithecus individuals that they could compare male and female canines with some confidence. The male teeth turn out to be surprisingly blunted. This result suggests that hominids shifted away from a typical ape social structure early in our ancestry. If this was a result of males forming long-term bonds with females and helping raise young, this shift was able to occur while hominids were still living a very ape-like life. Ardipithecus existed about 2 million years before the oldest evidence of stone tools, suggesting that technology was not the trigger for the evolution of nice hominid guys.

Update 2009oct10: Here a Discovery channel bit over the reconstruction of Ardipithecus: