American Success Story- Running Man

Interview with Meb Keflezighi: Running Man

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704204304574545691839032268.html

Obama Union Rules - The Wall Street Journal.

Obama Union Rules

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703932904574511742551540938.html

The Miracle Of Birth

Miracle of birth

For Veteran's Day

Betsy McCaughey: What the Pelosi Health Care Bill Really Says - The Wall Street Journal.

Betsy McCaughey: What the Pelosi Health Care Bill Really Says

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704795604574519671055918380.html

Super-Cutler-Fragilisticexpialidocious

The No-Cost Path to Cheaper Health Care - The Wall Street Journal.

The No-Cost Path to Cheaper Health Care

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704013004574517961189341646.html

Charles Gasparino: Three Decades of Subsidized Risk - The Wall Street Journal.

Charles Gasparino: Three Decades of Subsidized Risk

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703363704574503404180541392.html

Strassel: The Chicago Way - The Wall Street Journal.

Strassel: The Chicago Way

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704224004574489563238177126.html

Job Creation 10

Job Creation 101

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703298004574459341050610398.html

The Nobel Hope Prize

The Nobel Hope Prize

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703746604574463142879190358.html

Paul Cutler

801-390-3444

The Meaning of Nummi

Jenkins: The Meaning of Nummi

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703298004574457242497429898.html

Fwd: How Teachers Unions Lost the Media - The Wall Street Journal.

How Teachers Unions Lost the Media

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204488304574426991456414888.html

WSJ archive on Obamacare

(for reference)

A real life hero who influence millions of lives

If you want to make a real difference in this world....don't become an environmentalist or a politician. Become an agriculturalist like Norman Borlaug.

The Man Who Defused the 'Population Bomb' -- One of America's greatest heroes remains little known in his home country.

If you believe hard enough....you can overcome reality, right?

A nice bit of Comedy on our Friends in Washington DC. If you believe hard enough....you can overcome reality, right?

How Bad is the Economy Really?

Here is a snippet from this interesting article:

Employment
The indicator that has been garnering a lot of attention recently is the national jobs count. The 3.57 million jobs that have been lost since the recession started in December 2007 are a significant number. However, at 2.6% of the total jobs in the U.S., these losses are not as large as have been seen in previous recessions. Figure 1 compares job losses in each recession since 1945.

Figure 1: Recessions and U.S. Job Losses-A Historical Perspective 1945-Present
Recession	Number of Months	Peak Employment	Month Peak Employment Obtained	Number of Jobs Lost During Downturn	Lost Jobs as a Percent of Total Jobs	Number of Months to Return to Pre-Recession Employment
Feb-Oct 1945	9	41,903,000	Feb-45	3,305,000	7.9%	9 (Jul-46)
Nov 48-Oct 1949	12	45,194,000	Nov-48	2,244,000	5.0%	9 (Jul-50)
Jul 53-May 1954*	11	50,536,000	Jul-53	1,571,000	3.1%	13 (Jun-55)
Aug 57-April 1958	9	53,128,000	Aug-57	2,102,000	4.0%	12 (Apr-59)
Apr 60-Feb 1961	11	54,812,000	Apr-60	1,256,000	2.3%	10 (Dec-61)
Dec 69-Nov 1970	12	71,453,000	Mar-70	1,044,000	1.5%	10 (Sep-71)
Nov 73-Mar 1975*	17	78,634,000	Jul-74	2,115,000	2.7%	11 (Feb-76)
Jan 80-Jul 1980	7	90,991,000	Mar-80	1,159,000	1.3%	6 (Jan-81)
Jul 81-Nov 1982*	17	91,594,000	Jul-81	2,838,000	3.1%	11 (Nov-83)
Jul 90-Mar 1991*	9	109,775,000	Jul-90	1,579,000	1.4%	23 (Feb-93)
Mar 01-Nov 2001*	9	132,500,000	Mar-01	2,678,000	2.0%	39 (Feb-05)
Dec 07-Present	14	138,152,000	Dec-07	3,572,000	2.6%	TBD
Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Employment Series (CES), Seasonally Adjusted Data and National Bureau of Economic & Business Research, Business Cycle Dating Committee
*Jobs in these recessions hit their low point after the recession was official declared over. For most, this low point was within a few months. The 2001 recession is the exception--jobs did not reach the trough until August 2003, when total nonfarm jobs reached a low of 129,882,000.

As the chart shows, the current recession is now one of the longest since 1945—exceeded only by the downturns of 1973 and 1981. The current jobs losses are not nearly as severe as those experienced during five previous recessions, when measured as a percent of total jobs.

WSJ: America and the new financial world

A very thoughtful article that our Senators and Congressman should be forced to read.

NY Times op ed on Bandwidth Cartel

This is a little two left wing for me, but the author raises some very good points that it is poor policy that is partially to blame for both the Oil and Bandwidth problems in America.

--------------------------------------

Op-Ed Contributor

OPEC 2.0

By TIM WU

Published: July 30, 2008

AMERICANS today spend almost as much on bandwidth — the capacity to move information — as we do on energy. A family of four likely spends several hundred dollars a month on cellphones, cable television and Internet connections, which is about what we spend on gas and heating oil.

Just as the industrial revolution depended on oil and other energy sources, the information revolution is fueled by bandwidth. If we aren’t careful, we’re going to repeat the history of the oil industry by creating a bandwidth cartel.

Like energy, bandwidth is an essential economic input. You can’t run an engine without gas, or a cellphone without bandwidth. Both are also resources controlled by a tight group of producers, whether oil companies and Middle Eastern nations or communications companies like AT&T, Comcast and Vodafone. That’s why, as with energy, we need to develop alternative sources of bandwidth.

Wired connections to the home — cable and telephone lines — are the major way that Americans move information. In the United States and in most of the world, a monopoly or duopoly controls the pipes that supply homes with information. These companies, primarily phone and cable companies, have a natural interest in controlling supply to maintain price levels and extract maximum profit from their investments — similar to how OPEC sets production quotas to guarantee high prices.

But just as with oil, there are alternatives. Amsterdam and some cities in Utah have deployed their own fiber to carry bandwidth as a public utility. A future possibility is to buy your own fiber, the way you might buy a solar panel for your home.

Encouraging competition is another path, though not an easy one: most of the much-hyped competitors from earlier this decade, like businesses that would provide broadband Internet over power lines, are dead or moribund. But alternatives are important. Relying on monopoly producers for the transmission of information is a dangerous path.

After physical wires, the other major way to move information is through the airwaves, a natural resource with enormous potential. But that potential is untapped because of a false scarcity created by bad government policy.

Our current approach is a command and control system dating from the 1920s. The federal government dictates exactly what licensees of the airwaves may do with their part of the spectrum. These Soviet-style rules create waste that is worthy of Brezhnev.

Many “owners” of spectrum either hardly use the stuff or use it in highly inefficient ways. At any given moment, more than 90 percent of the nation’s airwaves are empty.

The solution is to relax the overregulation of the airwaves and allow use of the wasted spaces. Anyone, so long as he or she complies with a few basic rules to avoid interference, could try to build a better Wi-Fi and become a broadband billionaire. These wireless entrepreneurs could one day liberate us from wires, cables and rising prices.

Such technologies would not work perfectly right away, but over time clever entrepreneurs would find a way, if we gave them the chance. The Federal Communications Commission promised this kind of reform nearly a decade ago, but it continues to drag its heels.

In an information economy, the supply and price of bandwidth matters, in the way that oil prices matter: not just for gas stations, but for the whole economy.

And that’s why there is a pressing need to explore all alternative supplies of bandwidth before it is too late. Americans are as addicted to bandwidth as they are to oil. The first step is facing the problem.

Tim Wu is a professor at Columbia Law School and the co-author of “Who Controls the Internet?”