For the first time since 1965 an SEC school has journeyed north of the Mason Dixon (or west of the Mississippi) to play a road game at a non-neutral site against a top 20 opponent and WON!

Congrats to Alabama who topped PSU 27-11 in Happy Valley.

Yuck.

Last wednesday I broke 30 for 3 miles.  A milestone of sorts.  The days leading up to it we decent runs and I had three or four that were sub 31's.  Thursday was an off day (13 hours at school.)  Friday and Saturday runs sucked.  Sunday/Monday off for Labor Day.  Tuesday was another 13 hour day.  Wednesday run sucked.  Thursday run sucked.  Took Friday off.  Todays run sucked.

So what do I do?  After 3-4 months of steady progress September has been one big wall.  No IDEA what to change up.  Route?  Not really feasable and don't think that'd make a difference.  Back to the weight room?  Only have a couple months of good running left so I hate to make that change.  And it seems to be a cardio problem that won't get "fixed" in the weight room.  WAS thinking about changing things up in October anyway but was hoping to have a decent base by then.   Was going to do a Cooper Test to get a baseline.  Figure I shoud be about average.  Current V02max is 35.66.  Avg.  But that indicates only more slow running for me.

Any tips from my occasional readers would be appreciated.

another beautiful illustration of what's wrong with Keynsianism.....from Robert P Murphy

To illustrate what's wrong with the typical Keynesian view of the economy, in the debate I told the spectators to imagine that one night, mischievous gnomes decided to rearrange all of the capital goods and skilled laborers in the country. The next morning, brain surgeons who were supposed to report to a hospital in Albuquerque would wake up in Miami. Factory owners in Trenton would open their doors and see that their assembly lines were gone, replaced by defecating cows. Farmers in Iowa, for their part, would be baffled to see drill presses and computer servers sitting in their empty fields.

Suppose the Keynesian statisticians in this absurd thought experiment could make perfectly accurate measurements of their standard variables. What would they say? In the first place, they would be horrified to report that "real GDP" — the flow of newly created goods and services — suffered the worst collapse in world history. The annualized rate of real output in one day would have fallen perhaps 99 percent. Factories would be idle, and workers would be wandering the streets in a daze. Official unemployment statistics would be 90 percent or higher in the days immediately following the gnomes' evil prank.

The government and the public would demand that the elite economists explain this calamity. The Keynesians would check the various aggregates and consult their models. Was it a "supply-side" disturbance? It wouldn't appear to be so: the total stock of capital goods was the same as it had been the week before, and the same would be true of the supplies of various types of labor. It wasn't as if the economy had been struck by an earthquake or a plague; the same "productive capacity" was still there. Furthermore, there wasn't any negative "technology shock," as far as the Keynesians could ascertain. The recipes for turning inputs into outputs would all still work, just as they did the week before.[1]

Depending on the specifics, the Keynesians might conclude that the tremendous fall in output was the result of flight to safety combined with "sticky prices" and nominal debt contracts. After all, when people awoke to find themselves plunged into near autarky overnight, they panicked and began to hoard their cash balances. Even though the output of goods and services plunged, it's conceivable that their unit prices quoted in dollars would fall too.

All in all, it would not be surprising in this fanciful thought experiment if most of the Keynesian economists concluded that the problem originated on the demand side. There was no physical reason for a bottleneck in production. For some inexplicable reason, workers and capital goods weren't getting together to crank out consumer goods and services desired by the public. This was clearly a gigantic market failure, demanding a massive burst of monetary inflation and large deficit spending to rescue the economy.

Exactly what country does New York Times columnist Paul Krugman actually reside in?

Before you answer, consider the following sentence from his article Monday:

Although you'd never know it listening to the ranters, the past year has actually been a pretty good test of the theory that slashing government spending actually creates jobs.

For the past year to be a good test of this theory, there would have needed to be a slash to government spending, right?

Was this the case?

Hardly.

In fiscal 2010, total federal outlays were $3.72 trillion. In fiscal 2011 which ends September 30, we're projected to spend $3.83 trillion. That's a $111 billion increase.

Yet this Nobel laureate in economics thinks government spending was slashed.

fron Noel Sheppard over at Newsbsters.com

Nature Journal of Science, ranked as the world’s most cited scientific periodical, has just published the definitive study on Global Warming that proves the dominant controller of temperatures in the Earth’s atmosphere is due to galactic cosmic rays and the sun, rather than by man. One of the report’s authors, Professor Jyrki Kauppinen, summed up his conclusions regarding the potential for man-made Global Warming: “I think it is such a blatant falsification.”

That is NOT going to go dow well in many circles.