If you subtract "chat, messaging, blogging and wall discussions" from a social networking site, and prevent employing the features of the site to approach other users, what exactly do you have left? A static Web page? What is the point behind creating guidelines for use of social networking sites that forbid any social networking?

But looking a little closer, we see that the one of the reasons cited for the guidelines is "to ensure that plan sponsors are not using these social networking sites in ways that... violate the Medicare Marketing Guidelines."

And that seems to be the key. As Dawn Teo reported last September in the Huffington Post private Medicare providers have been notorious scare-mongers on the topic of health care reform. Some have sent mass mailings to their plan beneficiaries warning them off all sorts of horrible things that might happen after reform -- benefits cut, drugs no longer subsidized, et cetera. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services does not look fondly on such behavior.

Teo:

According to a source with inside knowledge of the way CMS regulates marketing guidelines, Medicare providers are only allowed to communicate with plan members about the benefits they have now, not about possible changes to benefits. They are also not allowed to use plan-related communications to lobby for policies or legislation.

So the draconian guidelines on social networking seem at least partially designed to prevent Medicare Advantage providers from using those networks to do what they do best: spread viral messages intended to rally support for an agenda. We'll see how well that works.

And yet, neither Obama nor Geithner get much credit for this feat, from either the left or the right. The reasons are obvious: Unemployment is holding steady at near ten percent, the future prospects for economic growth are, at best, uncertain, the general public's understandable desire for vengeance against the titans of Wall Street has not been satisfied at all, and efforts at financial regulatory reform seem half-hearted and unlikely to achieve much, even if pushed through. As both profiles stress, the Obama administration, with Geithner as its economic policy point man, may have prevented further economic collapse, but did so in such a way as to "lose the public." The political costs have been immense.

But we knew that already. Geithner's multi-magazine profile explosion is clearly calculated to reverse that impression, to rebuild his reputation. It's going to be an uphill climb. The storyline has been set. No amount of spin or media management at this point is likely to change how he is viewed, no matter how articulately the Treasury secretary jousts with smart financial reporters.

And articulate he is. Both Green and Cassidy get great quotes from Geithner, who has been a model of preternatural control and calm, publicly, through his entire tenure as Treasury secretary. Here is Geithner telling Green why seeking to stabilize the financial situation was more important than getting revenge, or scoring political points.

Geithner plainly has no patience for what he describes as the obdurate unwillingness of colleagues to subordinate their desire for superficial impact to the larger vision. "That's exactly the dilemma," he said. "The stuff that seemed appealing in terms of sharp discontinuity, Old Testament justice, clean break, fix the thing, penalize the venal, would have been dramatically damaging to the basic strategy of putting out the panic, getting growth back, making people feel more confident in the future -- solving it without putting trillions of dollars of the taxpayers' money at risk unnecessarily."

Or try the closing quote to Cassidy's piece:

"Why do policymakers screw up financial crises?" he said before I left his office. "They screw up financial crises because the politics are horrible, and that deters action. They are slow and late and tentative and weak because they are scared to death of the politics. But sometimes a policymaker has to say, I'll take pain now against pain later."

In both cases, Geithner is making the case that he did what was best for the larger economy without regard to the political (or personal) cost. That he made the hard choice, not the easy one.

That's a questionable statement on many levels. Wouldn't the hard choice be going all in on real reform, rather than tinkering at the edges? Wouldn't the hard choice be demanding more accountability from the banks whose bacon got saved, rather than worrying endlessly about how investors, and marketers, would react to any harsh move?

Geithner faces an unresolvable dilemma. He's an elitist in a populist era. We heard exactly the same kind of we know what's best rhetoric on the topics of deregulation and financial sector innovation -- often delivered by men who were Geithner's mentors. There's less patience right now, on both the left and the right, for government rationalizations than I can ever remember seeing. I'm no particular fan of Old Testament justice, but my guess is that having been denied satisfaction from the current administration, the people will wreak some of their own justice at the polls in November. And the heat on Geithner will only notch up.

The central plot conceit of "Mother of Storms" is that catastrophic climate change is set into motion when nuclear missiles detonated near Alaska's North Slope melt vast deposits of methane clathrates on the Arctic seafloor. When I read that novel 15 years ago, it was the first time I'd ever encountered the fact that thousands of gigatons of frozen methane deposits were just sitting around the planet waiting for the right conditions before transforming into potent greenhouse gas. I can't be the only one who saw the report from Alaska and thought, uh oh, at least partially based on memories of Barnes' fiction.

It turns out, methane clathrates are a recurrent theme in sci-fi pop culture. While googling for the words "John Barnes" and "methane" I found a copy of an old Wikipedia page that included a hilarious list of fictional references. I will cite one just to delight in its whacked out poetry.

In "The Great Sea Battle," an episode of Zoids: Guardian Force, the Ultrasaurus was able to fend off an attack from the Death Stinger by using depth charges to ignite an undersea pocket of methane hydrate.

Go Ultrasaurus!

Now, I'm not going to argue that as a society we should be taking policy cues from science fiction novels. But my world today is already packed with so many science fiction tropes from my youth that I'm not willing to rule out any scenario unconditionally, good or bad.

Which brings me to an entirely different subject. At Grist, Todd Woody has has written the best, most complete article I've read so far on the debut, earlier this week, of the Bloom Energy Server, a fuel cell that will supposedly deliver affordable electricity with low greenhouse gas emissions. The product of a stealth startup that has sucked up hundreds of millions of dollars of venture capital from Silicon Valley's biggest names, the "Bloom Box" attracted equal amounts of hype and skepticism in its first week.

New technologies come and go in the Valley. Some do change the world, but most don't. I make no prediction as to the prospects of the Bloom Box. But one passage, near the end of Woody's piece, caught my attention.

The pressure will be on Bloom to build cleaner and cleaner versions of its fuel cell if they are to be placed in cities and, as the company predicts, in backyards one day.

For instance, Bloom has patented and tested a next-generation fuel cell that would tap solar electricity from a rooftop array to produce hydrogen that could be stored and used to generate electricity at night or when the sun does not shine.

"That's the killer app," said Sridhar.

Imagine -- an affordable solar-powered fuel cell that wouldn't need to be connected to a transmission grid but provided all the power we needed to run our homes. Without doubt -- clearly the stuff of science fiction. And maybe the physics (or economics) are impossible. But if you look back just at the last 100 years of technological progress, you have to concede that we humans are capable of extraordinary things. My day started with a nightmare of human-induced ecological disaster. I prefer to end it with a vision of a clean energy killer app.

I'd be happier if the Bureau of Labor Statistics had provided any guidance at all at what the impact of the snow might have been on payrolls, but the number crunchers basically threw their hands up and said "we haven't got a clue." So what did the private forecasters know that the BLS didn't?

Maybe California can throw some light on the issue. The state released its January labor numbers today, and they seem to confirm previous indications of a positive turnaround.

Even though California's unemployment rate rose by two-tenths of a percent to 12.5, payrolls increased by 32,500. That's welcome news in a state that led the rest of the country into the recession, and now, let's hope, is leading the way out. It will be very interesting to see what California's February numbers look like, because Snowmaggedon, obviously, is unlikely to have had much of an impact out West. If California is regaining its footing, maybe March will usher in a spring to remember.

From "China Prepares For an Ice-Free Arctic," an exceedingly well-sourced monograph by Linda Jakobson, the Acting Program Director and Beijing-based Senior Researcher of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute's China and Global Security Program: (Thanks to Ben Muse for the link.)

Because China's economy is reliant on foreign trade, there are substantial commercial implications if shipping routes are shortened during the summer months each year. Nearly half of China's gross domestic product (GDP) is thought to be dependent on shipping. The trip from Shanghai to Hamburg via the Northern Sea Route  -- which runs along the north coast of Russia from the Bering Strait in the east to Novaya Zemlya in the west -- is 6400 kilometers shorter than the route via the Strait of Malacca and the Suez Canal. Moreover, due to piracy, the cost of insurance for ships travelling via the Gulf of Aden towards the Suez Canal increased more than tenfold between September 2008 and March 2009.

Since the prospect of climate change isn't a hotly contested political football in China, the country is free to pay serious attention to the real-world implications of rising temperatures. China has no territorial rights to the Arctic, but nonetheless boasts "one of the world's strongest polar scientific research capabilities," writes Jakobson.

Chinese research remains primarily focused on how the melting Arctic will affect China's continental and oceanic environment and how in turn such changes could affect domestic agricultural and economic development. However, a small number of Chinese researchers are publicly encouraging the government to actively prepare for the commercial and strategic opportunities that a melting Arctic presents. Li Zhenfu of Dalian Maritime University has, together with a team of specialists, assessed China's advantages and disadvantages when the Arctic sea routes open up. "Whoever has control over the Arctic route will control the new passage of world economics and international strategies," writes Li, referring both to the shortened shipping routes between East Asia and Europe or North America and to the abundant oil, gas, mineral and fishery resources presumed to be in the Arctic.

Hmm, maybe we'd better send Senator James Inhofe to Beijing, to tell them about how the whole climate change thing is a crock. He's doing a pretty good job at stalling action on climate change in the U.S., so perhaps he can also prevent the Chinese from controlling "the new passage of world economics and international strategies."

Now comes this, from a paper to be published today in Science:

A section of the Arctic Ocean seafloor that holds vast stores of frozen methane is showing signs of instability and widespread venting of the powerful greenhouse gas, according to the findings of an international research team led by University of Alaska Fairbanks scientists Natalia Shakhova and Igor Semiletov.

The research results, published in the March 5 edition of the journal Science, show that the permafrost under the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, long thought to be an impermeable barrier sealing in methane, is perforated and is leaking large amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.

Matthew Yglesias is funny:

It's a good thing this is all part of some giant conspiracy, because if I thought scientists at the University of Alaska were undertaking good-faith scientific research I'd be really worried ...

Joe Romm has more. A lot more.