The national fusion facility will be dedicated this week. Nobody knows whether it will work. I hope it does. Endless fountains of clean energy sounds good to me, as does any free lunch.
This should be a huge scandal, if true.
It's all about me! Kristol on Obama's character and the presidency.
Related: Obama and the I word. Roger Simon
Princeton reinstates tough grading standards. Let's hope it's a trend.
MIT panics despite global cooling. Al Gore continues to panic about his investments in indulgences. Meanwhile, the Greenies are becoming subjects of humor on TV.
Seven bad ideas for medical reform: Cato
Krugman: Blame Repubs for California's mess. Huh?
Did you read the hilarious story of the Europeans who went to join the Taliban in Paki?
The tyranny of our FICO scores is just a measure of our addiction to credit.
Jules on the O:
...power hates a vacuum.
Put another way, geopolitics hates a wienie. So does history.
OK, so is Obama another Jimmy Carter? We get to watch this history unfold before our eyes, and it seems to unfold a quicker these days. My quick take. Not exactly. What we’re seeing is really a more aggressive Carterism.
Indeed, the O's manhood is being tested all over right now. Norks threaten military strike on S. Korea
Rotterdam update: It's a Muslim city now.
Phony grassroots for Health Care
The death of literary studies. Protein:
To return to my original point, where has the pleasure of the text gone? It’s been sublimated into pleasure at one’s own superior ability to wrest unauthorized meaning out of the text by passing it through an ideological meatgrinder. Congratulations! You’re now ready to deliver papers to at any number of conferences with clever titles about “firing the canon.”
What if Bush had...
Related: Media bias, golf edition:
Imagine what the media would be saying if John McCain were president and he didn’t cancel his golf game on the day North Korea launched missiles and tested a nuclear bomb. They’d roast him.
The attempt to link the recession with medical costs was everywhere last week. Makes no sense.
Quoted at Thompson:
Those who prize social unity and order will tend to believe that people’s deepest feelings and beliefs should be accorded respect. But respect for ideas is never an entitlement. It depends on their intellectual resilience in public debate. No free society can treat people’s deepest beliefs as sacrosanct. They are fair game for hostile and derisive criticism. That is how knowledge advances. […]
No one has a right to the protection of feelings. If politics concerns itself with mental states, there is no limit to how far legislation can intrude on people’s lives. The task of progressive politics is to protect liberty, not least by attacking the accumulation of bad ideas. Yet to many on the Left, the individual, inquiring mind is of far less importance than the representation of designated groups.
