U.S. losing its lead in space, experts warn Congress

America's once clear dominance in space is eroding as other nations, including China, Iran and North Korea, step up their activities, a panel of experts told the House subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics Thursday.

"Others are catching up fast,'' said Marty Hauser, vice president for Washington operations at the Space Foundation, an advocacy organization headquarters in Colorado Springs. "Of particular note over the past decade is the emergence of China's human spaceflight capabilities.''

Russia now leads the world in space launches. China recently became the third nation, after the United States and Russia, to send its own astronauts out for a spacewalk.

"China is laying the groundwork for a long-term space program with or without us,'' said Scott Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University in Washington. "We should worry if we're not out there with them.''

China's rocket launch facilities are "state of the art,'' Hauser said.

Instead of technology the US is now the country of anti-science bible thumpers, greedy Wall Street gamblers and chicken hawks who have never seen a war they didn't like. A country of ignorant bullies. This is the way empires die.

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"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." Teddy Roosevelt

Seems we aren't the only ones with housing bubbles

The head of Dragonomics, a Beijing based independent economics research firm, Arthur Kroeber says Chinese authorities have a difficult balance to strike.

"Every time you get extra money in the system as you have now, that puts tremendous upward pressure on housing prices," he said.

"So in addition to the pressure created by literally 10 or 15 million people moving into Chinese cities from the countryside every year and needing to be housed, on top of that you have this pressure from people already in the cities who want to buy their second house because that's essentially their retirement plan."

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Also relating to the great China Bubble

".... asset prices will see a steep upward trend," Wang said at a forum in Beijing. "How to prevent the explosion of asset price bubbles poses an important challenge to macro-economic policymakers."

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Soaring housing prices, check. Rampant speculation in real estate for investment purposes, check. Unsustainable liquidity bubbles, check. Sounds like a recipe for a second economic melt down to me.

Warren Buffet has been warning his investors to be cautious of China, even China has to face economic gravity eventually, and as we learned so painfully learned of asset bubbles the bigger they are, the harder they fall and the more painful when they do.

Unburied bodies tell the tale of Detroit — a city in despair

The abandoned corpses, in white body bags with number tags tied to each toe, lie one above the other on steel racks inside a giant freezer in Detroit’s central mortuary, like discarded shoes in the back of a wardrobe.

Some have lain here for years, but in recent months the number of unclaimed bodies has reached a record high. For in this city that once symbolised the American Dream many cannot even afford to bury their dead.
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Unburied bodies piling up in the city mortuary — it reached 70 earlier this year — is the latest and perhaps most appalling indignity to be heaped on the people of Detroit. The motor city that once boasted the highest median income and home ownership rate in the US is today in the midst of a long and agonising death spiral.

Detroit today has an unemployment rate of 28 per cent, higher even than the worst years of the Great Depression.

The murder rate is soaring. The school system is in receivership. The city treasury is $300 million (£182m) short of the funds needed to provide the most basic services such as rubbish collection.
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Thousands of houses are abandoned, roofs ripped off, windows smashed. Block after block of shopping districts lie boarded up. Former manufacturing plants, such as the giant Fisher body plant that made Buicks and Cadillacs, but which was abandoned in 1991, are rotting.
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Michigan’s Central Station, designed by the same people who gave New York its Grand Central Station, was abandoned 20 years ago. One photographer who produced a series of images for Time magazine said that he often felt, as he moved around parts of Detroit, as though he was in a post-apocalyptic disaster.
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Yet in recent weeks there have been signs of hope for Mr Samuels that he can reduce the backlog of bodies. Local philanthropists have donated $8,000 to help to bury the dead. In the past month, Mr Samuels has been able to bury 11 people. The number of unburied is now down to 55.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6926247.ece

Big Banks Should be Broken Up, Not 'Coddled': Fed's Fisher
By: Reuters

Banks that are considered too large to fail should be dismantled rather than "coddled," Dallas Federal Reserve Bank President Richard Fisher said on Thursday. . . .

. . .It was one of the strongest calls to date from a sitting Fed official for an actual breaking up of large financial institutions. . . .

Once in a while you get shown the light, In the strangest of places if you look at it right.

EVENT:

World Climate Summit in Copenhagen, Denmark

Dec 16, 2009

(snip)

The global potential of biofuels will be the topic when Gen. Wesley Clark, Poet CEO Jeff Broin, Novozymes CEO Steen Riisgaard and other experts from around the world and across the value chain meet in Copenhagen on Dec. 16.

At the meeting, participants will discuss how biofuels can play a role in a Copenhagen agreement in terms of reaching the overall targets, contributing to achieving the specific targets for the transportation sector and in terms of creating jobs and economic development.

http://ethanolproducer.com/article.jsp?article_id=6156