Space Station Viewing

Links for International Space Station viewing times:

• From southern Minnesota
• From anywhere

The assembly video:



International Space Station trivia:

• Average speed: 17,240 mph
• Orbital period: 91 minutes
• Altitude: 220 miles
• Current size: 167 by 357 feet

Wikipedia: International Space Station

Hurricane Prep

Hurricane Season Can Make a Storm Shudder - Dave Barry

We're entering the heart of hurricane season. Any day now, you're going to turn on the TV and see a weatherperson pointing to some radar blob out in the Atlantic and making two basic meteorological points:
* There is no need to panic.
* We could all be killed.

The Economy - August 2011 (part 3)

David Stockman: Rick Perry Is Right, the Fed Is “Totally Wrong” - Peter Gorenstein

Wait! There's more:

One more on the looming Eurozone crack-up:

A Reagan Quote

They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong. There are no easy answers, but there are simple answers. We must have the courage to do what we know is morally right.

Ronald Reagan

Bad Luck

BARACK OBAMA MUST BE A ROBERT HEINLEIN FAN! - Glenn Reynolds

Robert Heinlein:

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as “bad luck.”

Barack Obama:

“We had reversed the recession, avoided a depression, gotten the economy moving again,” Obama told a crowd in Decorah, Iowa. “But over the last six months we’ve had a run of bad luck.”

WOLF: The bad-luck president - Dr. Milton R. Wolf

Mr. President, you didn’t run into bad luck. You created it.

America is indeed blessed, but it’s not by some accident that previous generations were able to create the most prosperous nation in the history of humankind. Our founding principles of constitutionally limited government, individual liberty and free-market capitalism have unleashed the powerful American engine of prosperity. This engine is fueled by individual players’ investments of labor and capital, and both are supplied directly in proportion to their confidence of realizing reward.

Americans will have enough confidence to invest themselves in our economy only when the basic tenets of the free market are observed. Chief among them is private property, the guarantee that the government will not seize a citizen’s belongings through confiscatory taxation or other means. Consumer sovereignty is the individual’s right to freely use his purchasing power, which in turn signals to suppliers what and how much to produce. Fair competition is the even playing field where all Americans play by the same rules and are judged by the same standards.

Tax Policy

Taxing Warren Buffett - Samuel Gregg

He doesn’t seem to be able to help himself. In the New York Times (of course), Warren Buffett has — once again — insisted that America’s “mega-rich” are not paying their fair share. In fact, he claims, they are paying less than some middle-income earners.

This is a broken record that Mr. Buffett has taken to re-playing over the past five years. What’s different this time is that it coincides with a tour throughout America’s Midwest being taken by President Obama, in which the chief executive is echoing the same theme.

But you only need to look at the Congressional Budget Office’s figures to see that, contra the Obama-Buffett school of economics, America does in fact have a progressive tax system. As the CBO stated in late 2010: “In 2007, households in the bottom fifth, or quintile, of the income distribution paid about 4 percent of their income in federal taxes, while the middle quintile paid 14 percent, and the highest quintile paid 25 percent.”

What’s more, the CBO is also clear that those who earn more have been paying an increasing share of the tax burden. “The share of taxes paid by the top fifth of the population,” it states, “grew sharply between 1979 and 2007.” Indeed, this group was paying almost 70 percent of federal taxes by 2007.

College Tuition

Pop Quiz: Why Are Tuitions So High? - David Hogberg

An IBD analysis of data from the National Center for Education Statistics shows that from 1989-2009 the number of administrative personnel at four- and two-year institutions grew 84%, from about 543,000 to over 1 million.

By contrast, the number of faculty increased 75%, from 824,000 to 1.4 million, while student enrollment grew 51%, from 13.5 million to 20.4 million.

The disparity was worse at public universities and colleges, where personnel in administration rose 71%, faculty 58% and student enrollment 40%. Private schools also saw administration and faculty growing faster than student enrollment, although faculties slightly outpaced administration increases.

Two From England

If we are to survive the looming catastrophe, we need to face the truth - Janet Daley

The Tea Party faction within the Republican party was demanding that, before any further steps were taken, there must be a debate about where all this was going. They had seen the future toward which they were being pushed, and it didn’t work. They were convinced that the entitlement culture and benefits programmes which the Democrats were determined to preserve and extend with tax rises could only lead to the diminution of that robust economic freedom that had created the American historical miracle.

And, again contrary to prevailing wisdom, their view is not naive and parochial: it is corroborated by the European experience. By rights, it should be Europe that is immersed in this debate, but its leaders are so steeped in the sacred texts of social democracy that they cannot admit the force of the contradictions which they are now hopelessly trying to evade.

No, it is not just the preposterousness of the euro project that is being exposed. (Let’s merge the currencies of lots of countries with wildly differing economic conditions and lock them all into the interest rate of the most successful. What could possibly go wrong?)

Also collapsing before our eyes is the lodestone of the Christian Socialist doctrine that has underpinned the EU’s political philosophy: the idea that a capitalist economy can support an ever-expanding socialist welfare state.

In this grave crisis, the world's leaders are terrifyingly out of their depth - Peter Oborne

The events of the past few days have been momentous: the eurozone sovereign debt crisis has escaped from the peripheries and spread to Italy and Spain; parts of the European banking system have frozen up; US Treasuries have been stripped of their AAA rating, which may be the beginning of a process that leads to the loss of the dollar’s vital status as the world’s reserve currency.

There have been warnings that we may be in for a repeat of the calamitous events of 2008. The truth, however, is that the situation is potentially much bleaker even than in those desperate days after the closure of Lehman Brothers. Back then, policy-makers had at their disposal a whole range of powerful tools to remedy the situation which are simply not available today.

First of all, the 2008 crisis struck at the ideal stage of an economic cycle. Interest rates were comparatively high, both in Europe and the United States. This meant that central banks were in a position to avert disaster by slashing the cost of borrowing. Today, rates are still at rock bottom, so that option is no longer available.

Second, the global situation was far more advantageous three years ago. One key reason why Western economies appeared to recover so fast was that China responded with a substantial economic boost. Today, China, plagued by high inflation as a result of this timely intervention, is in no position to stretch out a helping hand.

But it is the final difference that is the most alarming. Back in 2008, national balance sheets were in reasonable shape. In Britain, for example, state debt (according to the official figures, which were, admittedly, highly suspect) stood at around 40 per cent of GDP. This meant that we had the balance sheet strength to step into the markets and bail out failed banks. Partly as a result, national debt has now surged past the 60 per cent mark, meaning that it is impossible for the British government to perform the same rescue operation without risking bankruptcy. Many other Western democracies face the same problem.

Eric Cantor

A Wall Street Journal interview with Eric Cantor.
From: Eric Cantor: “Our country is suffering” - Scott Johnson

The Economy - August 2011 (part 2)

Labor Force Participation Rate Drops To 63.9%, Lowest Since January 1984 - Tyler Durden

... the labor force participation rate, and the reason why the general unemployment rate declined to 9.1%, just dropped to 63.9%, the lowest in 16 [ed. 26] years, or matches the participation rate from January 1984.

Capitol Journal: U.S. budget ax hangs over California - George Skelton

The dirty little secret is that California's current state budget is not $85.9 billion, the size of the much-debated, deficit-plagued general fund. You've got to add in the special funds ($34.2 billion) — much of them fed by fees dedicated for specific purposes — plus bond money ($9.4 billion). That totals $129.5 billion, but it still ignores federal dollars.

The real state budget includes an additional $79.2 billion in federal largesse, representing 38% of total state spending. This brings the grand total to $208.7 billion.

So the state of California is getting a nearly $209-billion spending program while putting up less than $130 billion itself.

Scary Mary

I liked this, and according to the viewer statistics, so do a lot of other 45-55 year old U.S. males:

The Economy - August 2011

Nightmare on Wall Street: Dow Plunges 513 - Adam Samson

According to preliminary calculations, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 513 points, or 4.3%, to 11,384, the S&P 500 tumbled 60.2 points, or 4.8%, to 1,200 and the Nasdaq Composite slid 137 points, or 5.1%, to 2,556. The FOX 50 tumbled 37.5 points, or 4.2%, to 864.

Tension on Wall Street was extremely high on Thursday. Traders piled up into Treasury bonds, seen as one of the safest non-cash assets during tumultuous times. Indeed, Treasury yields on 10-year Treasury securities dipped well below 2.5% -- the lowest since November.

"The mood is pervasively negative," said Peter Kenny, managing director at Knight Capital Group. "It would take quite the imagination to come up with a silver bullet" to re-instill confidence in the economy.

The VIX, sometimes referred to as a gauge of fear, spiked 36%. The Dow, S&P 500 and the Nasdaq all plunged into correction territory and into the red for the year.

U.S. incomes fell sharply in 2009 - David Cay Johnston

U.S. incomes plummeted again in 2009, with total income down 15.2 percent in real terms since 2007, new tax data showed on Wednesday.

The data showed an alarming drop in the number of taxpayers reporting any earnings from a job -- down by nearly 4.2 million from 2007 -- meaning every 33rd household that had work in 2007 had no work in 2009.

Average income in 2009 fell to $54,283, down $3,516, or 6.1 percent in real terms compared with 2008, the first Internal Revenue Service analysis of 2009 tax returns showed. Compared with 2007, average income was down $8,588 or 13.7 percent.

Average income in 2009 was at its lowest level since 1997 when it was $54,265 in 2009 dollars, just $18 less than in 2009. The data come from annual Statistics of Income tables that were updated Wednesday.

Analysis: Obama, Bernanke out of ammo to boost jobs, growth - Alister Bull

"It seems we've thrown everything at it. We've had QE1 and QE2, Stimulus 1 and Stimulus 2, and the unemployment rate is still 9.2 percent," said John Makin, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. "Maybe there are just not many options here at this point," he said.

World stock markets shuddered after disappointing U.S. growth and manufacturing numbers and investors rushed to buy long-dated U.S. Treasury bonds in a move that suggests deep concerns about the economic outlook.

Data on Friday is expected to confirm the U.S. unemployment rate remained stuck at 9.2 percent in July.

Lawrence Summers, a top Obama adviser until last year, wrote in a Reuters column on Tuesday the odds of another U.S. recession were 1 in 3. Goldman Sachs has said a slight tick up in the unemployment rate could provide a strong recession signal.

US borrowing tops 100% of GDP: Treasury - AFP

US debt shot up $238 billion to reach 100 percent of gross domestic project after the government's debt ceiling was lifted, Treasury figures showed Wednesday.

Treasury borrowing jumped Tuesday, the data showed, immediately after President Barack Obama signed into law an increase in the debt ceiling as the country's spending commitments reached a breaking point and it threatened to default on its debt.

The new borrowing took total public debt to $14.58 trillion, over end-2010 GDP of $14.53 trillion, and putting it in a league with highly indebted countries like Italy and Belgium.

...


The last time US debt topped the size of its annual economy was in 1947 just after World War II. By 1981 it had fallen to 32.5 percent.

Ratings agencies have warned the country to reduce its debt-to-GDP ratio quickly or facing losing its coveted AAA debt rating.

Moody's said Tuesday that the government needed to stabilize the ratio at 73 percent by 2015 "to ensure that the long-run fiscal trajectory remains compatible with a AAA rating."

The Debt Deal

Fine! Call My Bluff! - James Taranto