This is an interesting little graphic.

Amanda Cox:

A chart of industrial production -- the output of manufacturers, miners and utility companies -- suggests that the economy is poised to turn around, but that the climb out of the current downturn will be a long one.

I'm not going to include all of Noteworthy's links in my version of this post, but in light of the graphic, this one is priceless:

Matt Taibbi:

If America is now circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain.

Turning a Corner?

Anxiety prompts the release of a chemical that bypasses conscious experience, automatically triggering similar feelings in anyone who sniffs it. This may allow fear to spread quickly and speed our ability to flee danger.

Fellow students smell your exam fear - life - 04 July 2009 - New Scientist

Martin Wolf:

The UK's fiscal position, with a deficit of 14 per cent of gross domestic product forecast by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development for 2010, is radically unsustainable. Big spending cuts and tax increases, relative to GDP, are inevitable.

Paul Krugman:

Lost decade, anyone?

Mike Shedlock:

Today, Riksbank, Sweden's central bank cut the deposit rate to -0.25%, effectively charging savers interest on deposited money.

Ruins of the Second Gilded Age:

Martins, who creates his images with long exposures but without digital maniupulation, traveled from rural Georgia to suburban California, visiting large construction projects that began during the speculative boom years and then came to a sudden halt, often half-finished, when the housing and securities markets collapsed.

The abandoned or stalled developments -- and Martins's photos of them -- can be seen as signs of the hubris (and occasional criminality) that typified the boom and the economic and human damage that remained in its wake.

Tom Vanderbilt:

Sure, people were gullible, living beyond their means as Edmund Andrews admits to doing. But as Alyssa Katz reminds us, the real estate bubble was also a crime scene. The only trouble is delineating where crime ended and social policy began.

Richard Florida:

One thing we know about crises is they frequently bring about significant changes in the system of housing tenure. The Great Depression and New Deal innovations in housing finance and housing policy, plus the post-war boom and infrastructure building, brought a massive shift toward single family homeownership. My hunch is it's time for new hybrid forms of housing tenure which mix the benefits of ownership with the flexibility of renting.

Michael Spence:

What can we expect as the world’s economy emerges from its most serious downturn in almost a century?

Lower growth is the best guess for the medium term. It seems most likely, but no one really knows.

It is not inconceivable that the baby will be thrown out with the bath water.

Joel Stein:

There is so much you can't know about your spouse when you get married, like that one day she will want to eat her placenta.

A Dish Best Left Uneaten

In light of Obama's failure to address the critical issue of laptop border searches in a timely manner, as promised by his Secretary, I am going on blog strike. I will not be posting to MemeStreams for the next week. This is very difficult for me.

Senator, if I give you a timeframe and don't meet it you will be unhappy with me but let me suggest within the next 45 days.

Its been more than 45 days. I am unhappy.

Obama fails to deliver revisited laptop policy on time.

Rape is violent, destructive, and a crime—no less so when the victim is incarcerated. Until recently, however, the public viewed sexual abuse as an inevitable feature of confinement...

Congress affirmed the duty to protect incarcerated individuals from sexual abuse by unanimously enacting the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003.

I'm glad to see the government taking this problem seriously, although I have to agree with Reason's take:

The recommendations read more like a desperate plea for basic competency in prison management.

To my mind, there are two possibilities here. Either the commission has wasted years of funding and produced a vanilla, restatement-of-the-conventional-wisdom report, or the extent of safety problems in America's prisons beggars belief, making a novelty out of even the most conventional policy proposals.

Its the later.

National Prison Rape Elimination Commission - Publication - Report - Executive Summary

A team of journalists investigating the global electronic waste business has unearthed a security problem too. In a Ghana market, they bought a computer hard drive containing sensitive documents belonging to U.S. government contractor Northrop Grumman.

Don't throw out hard drives without destroying them.

Reporters find Northrop Grumman data in Ghana market | ITworld

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a school's strip search of an Arizona teenage girl accused of having prescription-strength ibuprofen was illegal.

In an 8-1 ruling, the justices said school officials violated the law with their search of Savana Redding in the rural eastern Arizona town of Safford.

Good.

Court Says Strip Search of Ariz. Teenager Illegal - ABC News

The reason we generally like markets is that the profit incentive spurs useful innovations. But in some markets, that's not the case. We don't allow a bustling market in heroin, for instance, because we don't want a lot of innovation in heroin creation, packaging and advertising. Are we really sure we want a bustling market in how to cleverly revoke the insurance of people who prove to be sickly?

Rescission

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