The BBC has a nice little article on the screw-up that was used to justify austerity/deficit hysteria: Reinhart, Rogoff… and Herndon: The student who caught out the profs.

Read how a grad student at UMass-Amherst [University of Massachusetts at Amherst] discovered the problems quickly but spent a lot of time reviewing what he found because he couldn’t believe that two economics professors at Harvard University could be so sloppy.

But it gets worse. At Next New Deal Arindrajit Dube, a UMass-Amherst economics professor, did some additional work on the R-R data and wrote Reinhart/Rogoff and Growth in a Time Before Debt.

It is a very technical post, but the bottom line is that debt doesn’t seem to cause the lower growth, lower growth appears to raise the debt. Basically, the cause has to precede the effect, and Reinhart/Rogoff’s data shows that the lower grow starts before the rising debt, not after.

That is one of a group of North American B-25 Mitchell bombers that took to local skies in celebration of the 71^st and final reunion of the Doolittle Raiders, the group and mission depicted in the movie, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo.

The Doolittle Raid was really a psychological warfare operation as it wasn’t able to actually damage much of Japan’s military effort, but it gave a boost to American morale, and pinned down a segment of the Japanese military to defend the home islands against further raids.

The Raid was originally scheduled for April 19^th, 1942, the anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, but at to be advanced because the aircraft carrier Hornet that was carrying the aircraft was spotted by a Japanese submarine.

The Reunion was held locally because the training for the Raid took place on Eglin Air Force Base. This is the last year because the few survivors are currently in their 90s.