Static Electricity

A Shocking New Understanding of Static Electricity - Douglas Main

But Northwestern University researcher Bartosz Grzybowski led a study that appeared in Science last week that found things are not so black-and-white. His team's close examination of statically charged objects shows that both contain pockets of negative and positive charges. It is only the net total charge of each object that leads to their attraction. Furthermore, he found, static electricity is not caused solely by a migration of electrons or ions from one item to the other. In fact, Grzybowski says, static electricity may arise from a significant transfer of materials such as surface molecules.

Grzybowski admits it's bizarre to find a huge surprise in a topic that has been studied since Greek polymath Thales of Miletus first rubbed amber on wool in 600 B.C., and found it could then attract light objects like feathers. Leading lights such as Nikola Tesla and Michael Faraday have studied the phenomenon, but they too reached the same conclusion. "One assumption common to all these models is that one material was positively charged, and one negatively charged," Grzybowski says. "This is actually not true."

Alternative Energy

Is Fusion Power Finally For Real? - Elizabeth Svoboda

If fusion works as proponents claim, it could produce enough clean energy to power the world for hundreds and hundreds of years to come. One of the first hurdles is the tiniest component, the fuel: Hydrogen isotopes, such as deuterium and tritium, adamantly resist uniting, regardless of the amount of heat and steel and funding thrown into the effort.

But this past fall, physicists at NIF, based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, made an important advance with their elaborate building and enormous laser: They fired 121 kilojoules of ultraviolet light into the $3.5 billion facility's target chamber, causing deuterium and tritium nuclei to fuse into helium atoms, releasing 300 trillion high-energy neutrons. Even though NIF and other labs have created fusion before, the achievement brings researchers a step closer to conquering the ultimate challenge: a fusion reaction that produces more energy than is required to start it.

Small Nuclear Reactor Site Planned - Randall Parker

Small nuclear reactors might be the ticket to restarting growth of the US nuclear power industry.

This week the Tennessee Valley Authority signed a letter of intent with nuclear-reactor maker Babcock & Wilcox to work together to build up to six small reactors near Clinch River, Tennessee. If the plan goes ahead, these could be the first small modular commercial nuclear power plants.

Babcock & Wilcox has a long history of making nuclear reactors for US Navy ships. This gives them an advantage in the small nuclear reactor market. Whether this advantage can translate into a competitive product remains to be seen. In theory small reactors can be made in a manufacturing plant that can reach much higher levels of productivity than a construction site for a big nuke could hope to achieve.

Small Nuclear Reactors Get a Customer - Kevin Bullis

The plan comes at a time when many nuclear projects are stalled because of safety concerns and also for reasons of cost. Babcock & Wilcox's modular reactors require less capital than conventional ones, and they have some safety advantages as well.

Federal Red Ink, Part 3

Entrepreneur warns against dangers of government in economics - Doug Robinson

During the process of establishing a car company, Kirkham had several experiences that shaped his political views about socialism and the merits of a free-market system unfettered by government. When Kirkham visited the Polish MiG factory for the first time in 1995, the lights were off and the machines silent — there was not enough money to pay the electric bill. Each morning, thousands of men came to work, dressed in rags, and did nothing all day. They simply stood by their machines until it was time to go home. Kirkham was so moved by the experience that he took a photo of the darkened factory, only to have a guard point a machine gun at him, forbidding him from taking more photos.

The Cold War and socialism had collapsed a few years earlier, but Poland was still trying to dig its way out of the past. "All the laws and legacies of socialism were still there," says Kirkham.

A couple of years later, he watched as 20,000 employees were ordered to leave the MiG factory — they were officially out of work. "I watched them get on their bikes and pedal home in the snow," says Kirkham. "This company that couldn't fail, failed. This factory was government run and government supported. The next few days, I had 100 men line up outside my door, begging for work."

If that didn't cement Kirkham's opinion of government intrusion during his early years in Poland, then an illness did. He contracted systemic strep infection, which left him with a temperature of 105 degrees. For the second time, he found himself at the mercy of government health care in a foreign country. After Kirkham was placed on a stretcher at the factory, Polish workers stuffed cash in his pockets so he could bribe doctors. He was forced to lie in a hospital hallway because no rooms were available. The nearest antibiotics were two hours away.

"Socialist hospitals are terrifying," says Kirkham. "They wont treat you unless you bribe them. In truth, though, they never asked me for a bribe — I was an American and employing a lot of people."

Federal Red Ink, Part 2

Federal budget deficit on track to eclipse $1 trillion for third year - Vicki Needham

Still, through eight months of the 2011 fiscal year the nation is facing its third straight $1 trillion-plus deficit -- totaling $927.4 billion so far compared with $935.6 billion during the same period in 2010, about $8 billion less, according to the report.

...

The nation started out 10 years ago, when President George W. Bush took office, with a surplus of $127 billion in 2001. Projections at the time showed the federal budget was expected to run $5.6 trillion in surpluses through the decade.

Instead, the country began battling growing deficits, hitting a record $454.8 billion in 2008, following the approval of tax cuts, a new Medicare drug benefit program and funding for the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Bush administration then passed the $700 billion TARP during a financial crisis in the fall of 2008 while the Obama administration tacked on a $787 billion economic stimulus package in February 2009 as a way to accelerate the nation's economic recovery.

In December, Congress and the White House agreed to an $858 billion comprehensive package for a two-year extension of the 2001 and 2003 Bush-ear tax cuts for all income levels, as well as an extension of federal unemployment benefits through the end of 2011, which could push the fiscal 2011 budget deficit to $1.4 trillion, about the same as the record level in 2009, up from last year's $1.3 trillion.

Historical Amount of Revenue by Source - taxpolicycenter.org
This is a simple chart which indicates that tax receipts have been relatively stable over the last decade. Our financial troubles are entirely due to excessive spending.


Fanniegate: Gamechanger For The GOP? - Walter Russell Mead

The Tea Party WMD stockpile is currently stored in book form: Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon. By Gretchen Morgenson, one of America’s best business journalists who is currently at The New York Times, and noted financial analyst Joshua Rosner, Reckless Endangerment gives the best available account of how the growing chaos in the mortgage and personal finance markets and the rampant bundling of dubious loans into exotically toxic securities plunged the world, and millions of American families, into the gravest financial crisis since World War Two.

...

Fannie Mae, a historically staid and predictable government linked company, needed to turn into a cutting edge speculative growth engine to make the hundreds of millions Johnson wanted. Since taxpayers stand behind Fannie Mae’s debts, Johnson needed to get the politicians to back his desire to turn this milkwagon into a Porsche. Fortunately for him — and unfortunately for the country and the world — he found a way.

Fannie Mae would adopt the goal of increasing the percentage of Americans who owned their own homes, targeting the inner city poor who, allegedly, were blocked from home ownership by racial discrimination. (A bogus study to this effect was widely circulated; devastating criticisms and rebuttals quietly ignored.) This is where such luminaries of the American political scene as ACORN and La Raza get into the act. They served as cheerleaders for Johnson’s self-enrichment plan, camouflaging a Wall Street rip-off by hymning its benefits for the poor.

The purpose of no doc, no money down loans wasn’t, Heaven forbid, to generate rich fees and high interest rates for mortgage brokers and Wall Street. No, the smarmy defenders of the Great American Rip-off told us, those features were necessary to make sure that poor people (so cruelly, unfairly locked out of mortgages because they didn’t qualify for the stuffy old-fashioned kind) could participate in the American Dream. Anybody who opposed Jim Johnson’s get rich scheme was a racist who hated the poor. Political correctness married Wall Street chicanery as Maxine Waters, Chris Dodd and Barney Frank led the band; crooked accountants and clueless rating agencies performed the ceremony; big government dowered the couple with a debt guarantee and bankers dressed as flower girls showered the happy pair in a confetti of junk mortgages and junk bonds.

Fannie Mae and the housing market were off to the races — and where Fannie Mae led the way, the financial markets followed. Regulators were captured by the interests they were supposed to regulate; favors were dispensed with a lavish hand; taxpayer-provided money was used to assemble a vast lobby focused on extracting more money from hapless taxpayers to make James Johnson even richer. In the process, millions of financially unsophisticated low income people were stuck with obscenely unfair mortgages, honest whistle blowers were subjected to savage personal attacks, home prices lost all touch with reality, taxpayers were stuck with losses that may approach one trillion dollars, and financial markets were poisoned almost beyond repair.

When Government Jumps the Shark - Walter Russell Mead

Read the whole thing. Described are the four stages of the government program life cycle: Great White Hope, Great White Father, Great White Elephant, Great White Shark.

The fourth stage of life comes when the Great White Elephant morphs into a Great White Shark: a man-eating terror of the deep that ruthlessly attacks anyone who gets in its way. At this stage the government program has moved beyond being wasteful and has become unsustainable. Fannie Mae goes from providing mortgages to creditworthy households to providing vast numbers of mortgages to uncreditworthy households, poisoning the financial system with bad loans. Medicare is unsustainable in the medium term and hugely expensive day to day — even as the procedures and regulations of Medicare warp investment decisions across the entire health care system.

But even as these programs become unsustainable, they have become so powerful — there are so many interests and industries that grow rich on these programs, and so many families for whom these programs have become the cornerstone of what little financial security they have — that they cannot be touched. One way to tell when an elephant has morphed into a shark: when pundits and politicians start describing a government program as a ‘third rail’: you touch it, you die.

The Great White Shark is a menace that cannot be controlled. The program has gone rogue: the Army Corps of Engineers isn’t just building pointless dams. It is building bad dams. The agricultural subsidies aren’t just encouraging farmers to plant wasteful crops; by subsidizing corn ethanol they are contributing to food price inflation that threatens political stability in countries like Egypt. But just as the programs are most in need of reform, reform becomes impossible. If you try to stop Fannie Mae from tempting poor urbanites into ruinous mortgages that will leave them worse off than before while bringing the global economy to the edge of ruin, the race lobby (aided and abetted by the real estate lobby) will attack you as a racist and an enemy of the American Dream.

The problem today is that we are looking not just at one or two government programs that have succumbed to elephantiasis or turned into sharks; the progressive complex of social and economic policy as a whole has reached this point. Today many of our New Deal and Great Society programs are either elephants or sharks. They either lead us to misallocate scarce resources in ineffective ways or they threaten us with ruin by becoming politically untouchable budget busters.

Democrats' Tax-And-Spend Insanity - IBD Editorial

Indeed, few ideas have been so thoroughly discredited as the one that says more government spending will increase jobs. As the chart above shows, government outlays climbed more than 40% between 2006 and 2011. At the same time, the employment figure has dropped by almost 5 million.

The Cato Institute's Mark Calabria, who pulled the data together for the chart, is quick to point out that just because there's a correlation between rising government spending and falling jobs doesn't mean there's a causal relationship.

However, he says, it does "suggest to me that continued massive government spending is not going to turn around the job market."

Calabria is being overly cautious.

In our view, the chart doesn't just suggest anything. It practically screams that government spending won't create jobs. If it did, there's no way we'd see so many unemployed today after wildly increasing federal outlays.

What Did You Just Say?

Male Brains Aren't Designed To Listen to Female Voices - StyleCaster

Apparently, the vibration and number of sound waves in our voice makes it harder for men to decipher what we're saying. When it comes to processing a woman's voice, they use the more complex auditory part of the brain that processes music, not human voices. But the guys in the study could easily hear and understand other men’s voices as speech because that uses a simpler brain mechanism at the back of the brain.

.... My suggestion would be to speak slowly and get to your point fast.

Texas Business Climate

The Lone Star Jobs Surge - WSJ Editorial

What explains this Lone Star success? Texas is a big state, but its population of 24.7 million isn't that much bigger than the Empire State, about 19.5 million. California is a large state too—36.9 million—and yet it's down 11,400 jobs. Mr. Fisher argues that Texas is doing so well relative to other states precisely because it has rejected the economic model that now prevails in Washington, and we'll second that notion.

Mr. Fisher notes that all states labor under the same Fed monetary policy and interest rates and federal regulation, but all states have not preformed equally well. Texas stands out for its free market and business-friendly climate.

Capital—both human and investment—is highly mobile, and it migrates all the time to the places where the opportunities are larger and the burdens are lower. Texas has no state income tax. Its regulatory conditions are contained and flexible. It is fiscally responsible and government is small. Its right-to-work law doesn't impose unions on businesses or employees. It is open to global trade and competition: Houston, San Antonio and El Paso are entrepôts for commerce, especially in the wake of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Rick Perry vs. Jean-Jacques Rousseau - Roger Kimball

Here’s an statistic worth pondering: 45 percent of net U.S. job creation in the last two years comes from Texas.

Yes, Texas: the state that is the poster child for right-wingery, the state with no state income tax whose population is growing at about 1000 per day (see a connection?) while bankrupt behemoths like California are bleeding jobs and people.

Companies Leaving California in Record Numbers - Mark J. Perry

California currently ranks #49 among U.S. states for "business tax climate" (Tax Foundation) and #48 for for "economic freedom" (Mercatus). It shouldn't be any surprise then that companies are leaving the "Golden State" in record numbers this year (see chart above) for "golder pastures" and more business-friendly climates in other states.

From Joe Vranich:

"Today, California is experiencing the fastest rate of disinvestment events based on public domain information, closure notices to the state, and information from affected employees in the three years since a specialized tracking system was put into place. Out-of-state economic development officials are traveling through the state to alert frustrated business owners and corporate executives to their friendlier business climate versus California's hostility toward commercial enterprises.

Career Prospects

It's All in the Risk for Silicon Valley Job Seekers - Joseph Walker

It's an exciting and lucrative time to be a computer scientist. Computer science graduates received more offers than their accounting counterparts for the first time since 2008, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers. Meanwhile, veteran engineers are also being recruited heavily by startups and established companies alike.

Your Well-Paid, Middle-Class Job Is in Danger - Ruth Mantell

While technology may replace some workers, it also creates opportunities to use new skills.

"Some types of engineers won't be doing the type of engineering they are doing now if someone comes up with a technology that makes what they do obsolete," Hallock said. "But they are likely to do something related."

To succeed, a worker should "be an active learner," Manpower's Joerres said.

"Taking on responsibility for invention and innovation gives you a better chance of remaining in a position than the person to your right or to your left," Joerres said.

Obamacare Ripple Effect

Remember all of those promises about being able to keep your current coverage under Obamacare? It was just baloney.

Firms to cut health plans as reform starts: survey 30% of companies say they’ll stop offering coverage - Russ Britt,

Once provisions of the Affordable Care Act start to kick in during 2014, at least three of every 10 employers will probably stop offering health coverage, a survey released Monday shows.

While only 7% of employees will be forced to switch to subsidized-exchange programs, at least 30% of companies say they will “definitely or probably” stop offering employer-sponsored coverage, according to the study published in McKinsey Quarterly.

The survey of 1,300 employers says those who are keenly aware of the health-reform measure probably are more likely to consider an alternative to employer-sponsored plans, with 50% to 60% in this group expected to make a change. It also found that for some, it makes more sense to switch.

Federal Red Ink

Medicare: $24.8 trillionObligation per household: $212,500 - Dennis Cauchon

This demographic burst — combined with the addition of a prescription drug benefit in 2006 and rising health care costs generally — has created an unfunded liability of nearly $25 trillion over the lifetime of those now in the program as workers and retirees. That is the taxpayers' obligation, beyond what Medicare taxes will bring in or seniors will pay in premiums for Medicare Part B — also called supplemental coverage — that helps pay for doctor visits and other expenses outside the hospital.

That $25 trillion is likely an underestimate, Medicare's actuaries say, because it counts on 165 cost-saving changes in the health care reform law. Many of these are unlikely to occur — such as cutting physician payments 30% by 2012.

Even with savings, Medicare's financial hole grew $1.8 trillion last year, more than the federal deficit.

U.S. funding for future promises lags by trillions - Dennis Cauchon

The government added $5.3 trillion in new financial obligations in 2010, largely for retirement programs such as Medicare and Social Security. That brings to a record $61.6 trillion the total of financial promises not paid for.

This gap between spending commitments and revenue last year equals more than one-third of the nation's gross domestic product.

Medicare alone took on $1.8 trillion in new liabilities, more than the record deficit prompting heated debate between Congress and the White House over lifting the debt ceiling.

Social Security added $1.4 trillion in obligations, partly reflecting longer life expectancies. Federal and military retirement programs added more to the financial hole, too.

Installing Linux, Part 3

Continued from Installing Linux, Part 2.

After rebooting, you get a welcome screen indicating that you have a few more steps to do to complete the installation. Click Forward.

At this point you create your own user id and password. I clicked the checkbox to add my user id to the Administrator group.

At the next screen, confirm that the system has the correct date and time set. And finally, I elected to send my machine profile back to the Linux folks. This helps them identify the types of machines and internal devices using their downloads. Click Finish. The install is complete and you can login.

First Login

After logging in with my new user id, I was able to use Firefox to access the internet. I was not able to view YouTube videos, I need a Flash plug-in for that. We'll leave that for later.

I looked around to see what files were available. The Windows C: drive shows up as /WINDOWSXP, which is nice. My external hard drive also shows up.

Rebooting the System

Now it's time to reboot back to Windows. Click Logout -> Reboot.

Everything seemed to shut down fine and then restart as usual. At the first 'To interrupt normal startup, press Enter' screen, I press Enter. After that, I see the usual screen to select the load source. Hmm. I select the hard drive and hit Enter. The machine then goes to a blank screen with at blinking cursor in the upper left hand corner. This looks bad. After waiting a while, I figure that it must be hung and power off with the power button.

So then I power back up. This time I don't do anything to interrupt the reboot, just to see what happens. It boots up Linux just fine, which is a relief. At least that much works. I'll have to figure this out later.

Rebooting to Windows

In the meantime, I've received inquiries from the family:

• Dad, what's wrong with the computer? (Ans: Wrong? Nothing is wrong with it. It's functioning perfectly normally.)
• Dad, why can't I watch YouTube any more? (Ans: I'm working on that. There's another computer upstairs. How about you use that one?)
  
• Dad, what happened to Windows? (Ans: I believe it's still in there somewhere. I just have to figure out how to get to it.)
• Dad, when is the computer going to be working again? (Ans: It's working now. All you have to do is log in with the userid/password that I've provided for you. See? Right there.)

You get the idea.

Anyway, in the Fedora Installation Guide there is a section on GRUB, the GRand Unified Bootloader. Here is the relevant information (click to enlarge):


The gist of it is that you want to get to the GRUB boot menu. In order to do that, you need to do nothing during the 'To interrupt normal startup, press Enter' screen. After that you get the initial Fedora screen. At that screen, you've got three seconds to hit the Shift Key. If you do that in time, you get the GRUB boot menu, which allows to you select the operating system to load. My list currently says:

• Fedora
• Other

If I select Other, Windows boots up as expected and everyone is happy.

Reading elsewhere, it sounds like GRUB has a configuration file which allows you to change Other to something meaningful, like Windows XP. You can also set the wait time to something longer than three seconds.

ToDos

Meanwhile, I've collected a list of things that I need to figure out:

• How to boot to Windows
• How to put the system in standby mode.
• Find Adobe Flash plug-in
• Find PDF plug-in
• ITunes?
• Find VNC Server/Viewer download
• Find Lexmark printer driver download
• Download OpenOffice
• Tunneling software?
• Customize GRUB
• Download Perl
• Download git
  

Just on the basis of the Flash, PDF and printer drivers alone, I have a strong (and vexing) suspicion that Microsoft does not have to worry about being pushed out of the home user market. But maybe it's easier than I think it is.

EU in Financial Trouble

The Eurozone Crisis Won’t Just Go Away - Dave Schuler

The eurozone confronts a choice between two intolerable options: either default and partial dissolution or open-ended official support. The existence of this choice proves that an enduring union will at the very least need deeper financial integration and greater fiscal support than was originally envisaged. How will the politics of these choices now play out? I truly have no idea. I wonder whether anybody does.

Obamacare in Court

Obama solicitor general: If you don't like mandate, earn less money - Philip Klein

President Obama's solicitor general, defending the national health care law on Wednesday, told a federal appeals court that Americans who didn't like the individual mandate could always avoid it by choosing to earn less money.

Neal Kumar Katyal, the acting solicitor general, made the argument under questioning before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati, which was considering an appeal by the Thomas More Law Center. (Listen to oral arguments here.)

The Economy - June 2011

"Bad news" articles on the economy are plentiful at this point.

Editorial: Obama Recovery Still Feeble After Two Years - IBD Editorial

But the fact is that the Obama recovery is one of the worst ever. Certainly the worst since the Great Depression. It's so bad, in fact, that even 24 months after the recession officially ended there are few places beyond the stock market and corporate profits that have shown much, if any, improvement. A few examples:

• Jobs: The number of people with jobs has barely changed since June 2009 — up just 0.4%.

• Unemployment: While the unemployment rate has dropped a bit, the number of long-term unemployed is up by a third, and the average length of unemployment is now a staggering 38 weeks.

• Earnings: Median weekly earnings are down slightly between Q3 2009 and Q1 2011, after adjusting for inflation, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

• Housing prices: The National Association of Realtors reports that median price for existing home sales dropped 10% since June 2009.

• Gas prices: Pump prices climbed 52% over the past two years, according to the Department of Energy.

Pro-Obama media always shocked by bad economic news - Michael Barone

Unexpectedly!

As megablogger Glenn Reynolds, aka Instapundit, has noted with amusement, the word "unexpectedly" or variants thereon keep cropping up in mainstream media stories about the economy.

"New U.S. claims for unemployment benefits unexpectedly climbed," reported CNBC.com May 25.

"Personal consumption fell," Business Insider reported the same day, "when it was expected to rise."

"Durable goods declined 3.6 percent last month," Reuters reported May 25, "worse than economists' expectations."

"Previously owned home sales unexpectedly fall," headlined Bloomberg News May 19.

"U.S. home construction fell unexpectedly in April," wrote the Wall Street Journal May 18.

Those examples are all from the last two weeks. Reynolds has been linking to similar items since October 2009.

Obama’s worst nightmare: The slow economy slows some more - Jennifer Rubin

The Wall Street Journal headline reads, “May Data Indicate Slowdown.” Many Americans didn’t know things had previously picked up. The economic picture is, in any event, far from rosy:

The U.S. manufacturing sector slowed sharply in May, according to data released Wednesday by the Institute for Supply Management. Price pressures lessened.

Separately, private businesses barely added jobs in May as large companies cut workers, according to a report released Wednesday. The news is sure to raise further fears about the second-quarter U.S. economy.

The ISM’s manufacturing purchasing managers’ index fell to 53.5 in May from 60.4 in April. Readings above 50 indicate expanding activity.

The job picture is alarming as well. “Private-sector jobs in the U.S. rose by just 38,000 last month. . . . Economists surveyed by Dow Jones Newswires had expected [payroll giant Automatic Data Processing Inc.] to report a much larger job gain of 190,000 last month. The April data were revised to show a rise of 177,000 versus 179,000 first reported.”

All of that comes on top of gloomy data from the housing market.

Stocks Fall 279 Points—Mainstream Media, Google Search: It Didn’t Happen? - Rovin

But, let’s give credit where credit’s due. Patrick Allen posted this story at CNBC dot com with a title that just has to have the liberal media cringing:

“Horror for US Economy as Data Falls off Cliff”

Adding another post by Reuters that CNBC posted to their site, (and dared to mention “a failed stimulus”), might be a recipe to call into action President Obama’s “rapid response coordinator” Jesse Lee, (see Morrissey’s related post), to put a stop to what Douglas Borthwick calls “a sugar-high wearing out”:

The sugar high that has buoyed the U.S. economy over the past six months is wearing out, and there is little in economic growth or foundation to show for it,” said Douglas Borthwick, a managing director with Faros Trading in Stamford, Connecticut.

In a related story that had to be found across the pond, Nile Gardiner at the Telegraph filed this story, (including a quote from none other than the New York Times’ Robert Reich) that will (most likely) never be written by an American Liberal News Agency:

Why Barack Obama may be heading for electoral disaster in 2012
By Nile Gardiner

……Ultimately, the 2012 presidential election will be decided by the state of the economy, and new data released this week makes grim reading for the White House. In fact you cannot watch a US financial news network at the moment, from Bloomberg to CNBC to Fox Business, without a great deal of pessimism about the dire condition of the world’s biggest economy. 66 percent of Americans now worry the federal government will run out of money in the face of towering public debts.

After 29 months of the most left-wing presidency in US history, the American superpower is heading towards the economic abyss - Nile Gardiner

Under President Obama unemployment has remained above 8 percent for every single month, with the exception of January 2009 when he entered the Oval Office, rising as high as 10.1 percent in October 2009. By any measure, this is a terrible track record, and as even The New York Times acknowledged earlier this week, “no American president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt has won a second term in office when the unemployment rate on Election Day topped 7.2 percent.”

The dire jobs figures are just part of an extraordinarily grim picture for the US economy, nearly two and a half years into the Obama presidency. As ABC News reported yesterday, “a cascade of negative economic reports this week is leaving Americans wondering if this is really a recovery from the recession that officially started December 2007 and ended June 2009.” And the housing market, in which 67 percent of Americans have a stake, is in serious trouble, with home prices sinking to their lowest levels since 2002, falling by 4.2 percent in the first quarter of 2011 and for eight straight months in a row.

US house price fall 'beats Great Depression slide' - Stephen Foley

The ailing US housing market passed a grim milestone in the first quarter of this year, posting a further deterioration that means the fall in house prices is now greater than that suffered during the Great Depression.

The brief recovery in prices in 2009, spurred by government aid to first-time buyers, has now been entirely snuffed out, and the average American home now costs 33 per cent less than it did at the peak of the housing bubble in 2007. The peak-to-trough fall in house prices in the 1930s Depression was 31 per cent – and prices took 19 years to recover after that downturn.

The latest Case-Shiller house price index was just one of a slew of disappointing economic data from the US yesterday, which suggested ebbing confidence in the recovery of the world's largest economy. The Chicago PMI manufacturing index showed a sharp slowdown in the pace of expansion in May, missing Wall Street forecasts and sending the index to its lowest since November 2009.

Employers add fewest jobs in eight months; unemployment jumps to 9.1 percent - Brady Dennis and Neil Irwin

Employers added 54,000 jobs in May, the Labor Department said Friday, down from 232,000 in April. The unemployment rate rose to 9.1 percent from 9 percent. That deterioration in the labor market marks only the latest in a slew of recent signs that the economic recovery is losing momentum.

It is the second time that growth has stumbled; a similar scenario played out last summer, reflecting the long, uneven process of clawing out of a recession spurred by a financial crisis.

Employers from coast to coast describe a situation in which tepid economic growth alone isn’t enough to prompt them to add to their payrolls. Sales have been rising, but slowly and tenuously. Doubts about the future have continued to chip away at confidence and prevented many business people from taking the leap of faith required to expand and hire new workers.

Sleep and Health

A Good Night’s Sleep Isn’t a Luxury; It’s a Necessity - Jane E. Brody

A good night’s sleep is much more than a luxury. Its benefits include improvements in concentration, short-term memory, productivity, mood, sensitivity to pain and immune function.

If you care about how you look, more sleep can even make you appear more attractive. In a study published online in December in the journal BMJ, researchers in Sweden and the Netherlands reported that 23 sleep-deprived adults seemed to untrained observers to be less healthy, more tired and less attractive than they appeared to be after a full night’s sleep.

Perhaps more important, losing sleep may make you fat — or at least, fatter than you would otherwise be. In a study by Harvard researchers involving 68,000 middle-aged women followed for 16 years, those who slept five hours or less each night were found to weigh 5.4 pounds more — and were 15 percent more likely to become obese — than the women who slept seven hours nightly.