NEWS YOU CAN USE: Beware the Nympho Librarian. The illustration is classic.

AT AMAZON, top deals on printers.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Beyond Blue Part Three: The Power of Infostructure.

The quest for a new social model has to start with economics. America could survive without growing prosperity and rising standards of living, but it would not flourish — and it would not be living up to its potential to create a better life not only for Americans but for people all over the world. Green dreamers and communitarians disagree, often eloquently but always futilely; the drive for economic prosperity is deeply planted in American politics and society. When the economy isn’t performing well, politicians lose their jobs while the public looks for alternative ideas.

The quest for economic prosperity helped make the blue social model, and the failure of that model to deliver continuing prosperity in contemporary conditions is both a symptom of and a leading reason for its decline.

Read the whole thing.

HOW TO HIDE FROM GOOGLE.

AT YALE, it’s Sex Week vs. True Love Week.

LESBIAN DIVORCE SHOCKER: Same-sex marriages between women are considerably more likely to end in divorce than either same-sex male marriages or heterosexual marriages, according to a study of Norway and Sweden. Well, women initiate divorce twice as often as men, so it stands to reason that a marriage composed of nothing but women would be more likely to split.

SCIENCE: To Compare Human and Monkey Brains, Humans and Monkeys Watch a Clint Eastwood Film. Sadly, it wasn’t one of the ones with the orangutuan.

PUTTING THOSE 40 MPG Claims To The Test.

LIST: Vegetable and Herb Gardening 101.

NO POSTHUMOUS PARDON for Alan Turing.

IN THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, Naomi Schaefer Riley reviews Andrew Rosen’s Change.edu: Rebooting For The New Talent Economy. Key bit:

For-profits have largely opted out of the prestige game. The schools are not looking to turn away students. Their professors are engaged exclusively in teaching, not research. No one has tenure, so incompetence means dismissal. Teaching is quality-controlled and student performance strictly measured.

The for-profit schools can track “learning outcomes” because much (though not all) of their education is online. For a book with a “dot” in the title, Mr. Rosen’s “Change.edu” does not spend a lot of time defending this mode of education—it’s just, well, the future. And maybe it is. He is careful not to overstate the value of online learning, acknowledging that there is plenty to be gained in the traditional, seminar-room, residential model of college—he calls it the “meandering” model. But there are many students who want a “direct route” to knowledge and skills. Mr. Rosen makes a strong case that for-profits, when properly run, are ready to provide it.

My interview with Rosen is here.

BIG MARKETER IS WATCHING YOU: Surveillance Video Becomes A Tool For Studying Customers.

TERRY TEACHOUT on turning 56.

CHANGE: Civilian drones to fill the skies after law shake-up.

The US Federal Aviation Administration allows for recreational use of remote-controlled air vehicles, but the Columbia Packing case blurs the line because the UAV became a surveillance tool. Commercial use is also illegal – last week real estate agents in Los Angeles, California, were ordered to stop using helicopter drones to shoot aerial movies of properties they are selling. “Although the FAA allows hobbyists to fly model airplanes for recreational purposes, that authority does not extend to operators flying unmanned aircraft for business purposes,” the Air Division of the Los Angeles police department reminded the California Association of Realtors.

That could soon change. The FAA plans to unveil a new set of rules this year that will cover the burgeoning interest in flying commercial and private UAVs.

Hey, I saw the drone photo-shoot on Selling L.A. How can they outlaw that? It’s an outrage!

Related: A pro-civilian-drone editorial. “The first powered, fixed-wing aircraft ever to fly was an uncontrolled steam-powered drone built by American aviation pioneer Samuel Langley. That was in 1896. It’s high time we got our drones back.”

MY WASHINGTON EXAMINER COLUMN HAS VANISHED, and people have been writing me. I inquired and got this response: “We’re transitioning to new CMS, new design and everything is totally screwed up at the moment.” I assume it’ll reappear at some point later today.

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Study: Nanodiamond Coatings Safe For Implants. “Nanodiamonds designed to toughen artificial joints also might prevent the inflammation caused when hardworking metal joints shed debris into the body, according to an early study published this week in the journal Acta Biomaterialia.”

BRIDGET JOHNSON: Eric Cantor: ‘Not Washington’s Role to Somehow Pick Another Way to Jack Up the Economy.’

HYBRID UPDATE: Toyota boosts fuel-economy rating for Prius Plug-in to 95 MPGe.

JOAN HEMINWAY: Thoughts on the Corporation as a Person for Purposes of Corporate Criminal Liability.

IN THE MAIL: The Oxford Introductions to U.S. Law: Income Tax Law and Federal Income Taxation: Model Problems and Outstanding Answers.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: The War For Oil . . . And Squid?

Sending Prince William and a few top-of-the-line ships to the islands have been passed off as routine, but nonetheless these events, coupled with Prime Minister David Cameron’s Iron Lady-like statements of resolve with respect to the Falklands, suggest Britain is standing firm. The Argentinean government, on the other hand, has long used the “Malvinas” (as they call these cold and barren islands in the stormy South Atlantic) either as a distraction from other more pressing issues—like a slowing economy—or as a way to rally citizens and force neighboring countries to join in—Brazil, most importantly. Both reasons are at play here, and so too is the prospect of oil in the waters surrounding the Falklands.

Read the whole thing.

ANNOUNCING THE WINNERS of the PJ Media Nostradamus contest.

CREDENTIALISM: “Our last president had a Harvard MBA. Our current one has a Harvard JD. If Romney is our next president, he will bring to office—both.” And, of course, Bill Clinton had a Yale JD, an even more superior degree.

WHAT TEA PARTIERS ARE DOING: Operation Counteract and Counterweight.

UNTRUSTWORTHY: WaPo/ABC ends sample transparency in national polling.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Are You “Them?”

Until the appearance of Barack Obama on the national scene, I knew of “them” only from an old sci-fi movie in which huge ants (“Them!”) ate people.

But there are new monsters in America, and I am starting to wonder whether I am to be considered among them: those of the uninvolved and uninformed lives, the bar-raisers, the downright mean ones, the never deserving of respect ones, the Vegas junketeers, the Super Bowl jet setters, the tuition stealers, the faux-Christians who do not pay higher taxes, the too much income makers, the tormenters of autistic children, the polluters, the enemies deserving of punishment, the targets to bring a gun against, the faces to get in front of, the limb-loppers, the tonsil pullers, the fat cats, the corporate jet owners, the one-percenters, the stupidly acting, the not paying their fair sharers, the discriminators on the “way you look”, the alligator raisers and moat builders, the vote deniers, the clingers, the typical something persons, the hunters of kids at ice cream parlors, the stereotypers and profilers, the cowards, the lazy and soft, the non-spreaders of money, the not my people people, the Tea party racists, the not been perfect and mistake makers, the disengaged and the dictating, the not the time to profiteers, the ones who did not know when to quit making money, and on and on.

My God, man, how did Barack Obama & Co. conjure up so many demons?

Because they don’t stand a chance in November if people think about what they’ve actually done.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Richard Vedder on the Failings of Higher Education. “The big problem is that higher education consumes a huge amount of resources and provides inadequate value.” Indeed.

AT AMAZON, 20% or more off select MP3 players.

Also, today only: Panasonic Vortex Arc 4 Multi-Flex Wet/Dry Nanotech Electric Shaver, $159.99.

THE ROMANCE OF CAMELOT: “I could see that mischievous look come into his eye. ‘Mimi, why don’t you take care of my baby brother? He could stand a little relaxation.’”

HOMELAND SECURITY LEXICON: Love the Constitution? Hate government regulations? New DHS “lexicon” brands you a “militia extremist.”

STACY MCCAIN: Newt’s Narcissism Problem (And Ours). “Let’s pause, my friends, to recognize that what I write on this blog, and what you reply in the comments, will never change anything about the Republican presidential primary campaign. And we would be guilty of exaggerating our own influence if we thought otherwise.”

In a nutshell, that’s why I haven’t seemed very interested — as various emailers have noted from time to time — in the Republican primary process. Nobody really excites me, but I’ll be quite happy to vote for the nominee, whether it’s Romney, Paul, Santorum, Gingrich, or Zeeba, over Barack Obama. Nor do I think the race is likely to turn on what gets written here.

THINGS YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED THIS WEEKEND:

Takers vs. Makers: My Sunday Washington Examiner Column. Drawing on Charles Sykes’ A Nation of Moochers.

Lamar “SOPA” Smith (R-Hollywood) Has A Primary Opponent.

Friday Night Document Dump: White House Turns Over More Solyndra Emails.

Cecil Adams on the light bulb ban.

James Pethokoukis: Why the official 8.3 percent unemployment rate is a phony number—and what it means for Obama’s reelection.

Sex Smears And The Rule Of Law At Yale. More of the former than the latter.

“Shop” Is Not A Four-Letter Word.

The surprising benefits of post-breakup sex.

Harry Reid: Budget? We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Budget!

Milwaukee man with a concealed-carry permit shoots a robber in a store… but the store had a sign prohibiting weapons.

Nanny-stater Mike Bloomberg and his nest of felons.

Obama Goes “Christianist” on Tax Policy.

Ross Douthat on the media’s abortion blinders.

Is there anything it can’t do? Stopping Nosebleeds With Bacon.

WASHINGTON EXAMINER: Coming soon: Individual mandate to buy Chevy Volts. Well, that’s what it’ll take to make it a success.

THE U.S. GOVERNMENT AS CORPORATE TOOL: US threatens Sweden with trade sanctions unless The Pirate Bay is prosecuted.

THE NATURAL RESULT OF THE BLUE MODEL: Cory Doctorow: On The Horrors of Getting Approval For An Ice Cream Parlor In San Francisco. Yet the lesson from this continues to elude.

CUI BONO: On Keystone pipeline, GOP plays Buffett card to counter Dems’ Koch claims.

THE HILL POLL: Voters willing to see US attack Iran over nuclear weapons.

ALWAYS GLAD TO HELP: Reader T.J. Buttrick writes: “After having dropped from a lifetime high of 173 lbs to 163 and then hitting a wall for a few months, I happened across your link to the Eades’ The 6 Week Cure for the Middle-Aged Middle and decided to give it a shot. Started Dec 11 at 162.8 lbs and today weighed in at 146.2 Thanks for making me aware of this plan!”

WHY HAS THE COLLAPSE OF COMMUNISM HAD SO LITTLE IMPACT ON POLITICAL DISCOURSE IN THE LEFT? Because the lessons to be learned about the role of government would not favor the dominant narrative.

SCIENCE: Putting the Electrical Patterns Created by Brain Waves to Use.

ANGLETON WEIGHS IN: The Shape of the War to Come–The View from Beyond.

LIST: Car Care and Repair References for Everyone.

CLINT EASTWOOD LOSES RESPECT: “Would Dirty Harry ask for a handout?”

MICHAEL YON IS still on the Medevac issue.

#OCCUPYFAIL: Occupy Protesters Heckled Outside Super Bowl.

TEN YEARS AGO ON INSTAPUNDIT: “PAUL KRUGMAN is now writing that the Bush Administration is Enron writ large. I think he’s just hoping for another fifty grand.”

PUSSY RIOT: Feminist Punk Band Become Unlikely Putin Foil. (Via Ann Althouse).

“I’M A BIGOT — BUT FOR THE LEFT.”

EUROPE: Greece has reached the latest of many last ditches this weekend.

UPDATE: Greeks Inch Closer To Default. “On one level, this is entirely amazing. As has been exhaustively explained everywhere, including this blog, Greece is currently running a primary deficit–meaning that even if they defaulted, their budget wouldn’t balance. And since defaulting would cut off the flow of credit, they’d actually be worse off than with almost any of the austerity plans proposed by their creditors. So watching them threaten to walk away is somewhat reminiscent of that famous moment from Blazing Saddles.”

SO IF A MAN GETS DRUNK AND SLEEPS WITH A WOMAN HE WOULDN’T HAVE SLEPT WITH SOBER, it’s humorous grist for jokes about “beer goggles” and “coyote ugly.” But if a woman does the same thing, woe unto anyone who suggests it wasn’t “date rape.” It’s nice to see people pointing out the contradiction in the comments.

UPDATE: A reader points out that that’s not the only double standard:

A former high school teacher has admitted to raping one of her students , but she won’t be serving time behind bars nor will she be forced to register as a sex offender.

On Thursday Brenda Ray pled guilty to three counts of rape.

Ray was arrested last summer for supplying a 16-year-old boy booze, cocaine and pot in addition to having sex with him off-campus on at least three occasions.

Officials say the victim was in Ray’s English class back in 2007 at Rio Rancho High School.

Ray taught at Cleveland High in addition to RRHS before she quit last summer before her arrest.

Ray pled guilty to the charges against her on Thursday and as part of her plea deal she was sentenced to three years probation.

While prosecutors asked she have to register as a sex offender Judge George Eichwald gave her a pass.

No double standard there. I’m sure a male teacher would have gotten exactly the same punishment for the same behavior.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Melissa R. writes:

I read the Frisky column you linked last night regarding date rape and it made me sick to my stomach. I’m a woman, and the selfish mindset of so many of my fellow women is despicable. There is no thought given to the plight of the man in question, nor to the ACTUAL victims of rape whose victimization is cheapened thanks to this insufferable cult of victimhood.

As evidence of the double standard that exists between men and women and what constitutes “rape,” I wanted to draw your attention to the 2002 “romantic comedy” 40 Days and 40 Nights. It starred Josh Hartnett as a young man who decides to give up all types of sexual gratification for Lent. The entire movie is about Hartnett’s character trying to maintain his celibacy while his friends try to trick him into having sex (they even set up a betting pool). The situation culminates in what I consider one of the most disgusting scenes in the history of film, when the ex-girlfriend of Hartnett’s character cuffs him to a bed and has sex with him on the fortieth night, thus forcing him to break his vow and lose the bet (and cheat on his new girlfriend taboot).

I stress again, this is supposed to be a “romantic comedy,” so the scene is supposed to be funny. “Ha ha, the guy who’s been obsessed with sex for the past forty days is going to get it, even though he doesn’t want it with this girl! ha ha!” If the gender roles had been reversed and it had been Vinessa Shaw’s character who was tied up and made to “lose her bet,” courtesy of her ex-boyfriend, it would be fodder for the Lifetime Network. But since it’s Josh Hartnett on the receiving end, it’s geared toward Comedy Central.

It’s disgusting. Anyone who actually laughed during that scene needs their head examined.

So if anyone tries to deny that such a double standard exists, I always point them toward this movie and tell them to watch that scene, then ask themselves, “If his character were to go to the police to claim date rape, would he get a fair hearing? Or would he be laughed off?”

It’s nice to see the discomfort on their faces when they realize that yeah, it would be the latter.

Gee, I’m sorry I missed that film. . . .

THIS LOOKS COOL: Chicks With Guns.

LOVE LESSONS FROM the 4Chan crowd. (Via Parijata Mackey on Facebook.)

IS GRATITUDE THE SECRET to avoiding a marital rut?

AT AMAZON, Gift Ideas and Markdowns for Valentine’s Day.

CECIL ADAMS ON LIGHT BULBS:

1. Although halogen bulbs don’t offer much of an energy savings over ordinary incandescents, compact fluorescents sure do, and you’d be a fool not to use them whenever you could. Me, I’ve got ‘em all over the house, including right here in the desk lamp.

2. Telling me I have to use them — production and import of conventional 100-watt incandescent bulbs were effectively banned Jan. 1– is a pointless intrusion on my personal rights. . . . The net social benefit of legislating incandescent bulbs out of existence is likely to be negligible.

Well, not entirely pointless, as big contributors have invested heavily in “green” replacements. But there’s still time to stock up until supplies run out.

I also notice that Cecil has found, as I have, that the lifespan of CFLs hasn’t lived up to the promises.

ALTRUISM: “The research shows that good deeds among men increase when presented with an opportunity to copulate. Theoretically, this suggests that a good deed is the human equivalent of the peacock’s tail. Practically, this research shows how societies can encourage selfless acts.”

DAVID OLSON: Supreme Court Should Limit Congress’s Copyright Power. Indeed.

Rob Merges and I had a piece on this a while back.

ADVICE ON dating while in grad school.

ARMADILLO AEROSPACE got to 82km high. Pretty cool.

APPARENTLY, MY “MAKERS AND TAKERS” COLUMN SUCKS, and I should kill myself or something.

UPDATE: Reader Tad Wert writes: “You might as well give up. When your critics start throwing “nuance” at you, you know they’re not hearing a word you’re saying.” Well, mostly I’m surprised that a professor of political science seems entirely ignorant of Mancur Olson.

Also, see my Is Democracy Like Sex? piece, though in retrospect I think I was a bit too optimistic there.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Bill Quick is less surprised.

WHEN THE HR OFFICE addresses restroom etiquette.

AT AMAZON, bestselling audiobooks.

DRINK A GLASS OF RED WINE WHILE SITTING IN THE SUN (CONT’D): Lack of Sunlight, Vitamin D Tied to Stroke Risk. “The sun gets a bad rap, but sensible sun exposure is probably the way to go.”

Related: Study finds high prevalence of vitamin D deficiency in seniors.

SEXIST OPPRESSION: Men Will Spend Twice As Much As Women For Valentine’s Day.

NSFW: A gallery from the topless Davos protest by Ukraine’s Femen protesters.

11 MILLION SLICES: Inside Domino’s Super Bowl Day Pizza War Room.

FAMOUS PHOTOGRAPHERS pose with their most iconic image.

BIGOTRY WILL SLIP OUT: CNN’s John King calls Romney, ‘Governor Mormon.’

IN THE MAIL: Golden Reflections.

MY SUNDAY WASHINGTON EXAMINER COLUMN: It’s Takers vs. Makers and the Takers Are Winning.

Inspired by Charles Sykes’ A Nation of Moochers.

HMM: Nigeria oil line on fire; militants claim attack.

MICHAEL BARONE: Obama’s isolation leads to skewed decisions. “Obama prefers getting information and making decisions by staying up late and reading memos rather than meeting with people — a temperament that’s a liability because face time with the president is one of his major sources of political capital.”

GWYNETH PALTROW Enters the Mommy Wars: ‘Compromise…To Be a Wife.’

Gwyneth Paltrow has stepped out of a magazine’s pages and into the mommy wars.

In a new interview with Harper’s Bazaar, the movie star and mother of two, revealed that she advised a girlfriend — an unnamed fellow actress — that she needs “to compromise…to be a wife.” She also talks about being home when her husband returns from work as a way to maintain her marriage and family.

Her words are rubbing a number of moms the wrong way, with some accusing Paltrow of being judgmental and out of touch.

Funny, but nobody seems to think there’s anything wrong with saying that you have to compromise to be a husband. . . .

GREEN PAYOLA? Sierra Club took $26M from gas industry to fight coal-fired plants. It’s like they’re just political mercenaries or something. Next they’ll be taking Arab money to oppose Canadian oilsands development.

IS THERE ANYTHING IT CAN’T DO? Stopping Nosebleeds With Bacon. “A new medical study recommends a method called ‘nasal packing with strips of cured pork’ as an effective way to treat uncontrollable nosebleeds.”

I don’t know why I didn’t see this sooner.

AT AMAZON, Science-Fiction Bestsellers on Blu-Ray.

Also, today only, up to 65% off on cashmere. For women and men.

LAMAR SMITH’S PRIMARY OPPONENT: A reader writes:

You mentioned this guy before, and now he’s officially filed to take out Lamar Smith in TX-21.

He’s not only making an issue out of SOPA, but Smith’s Internet snooping bill.

Not working for the guy, and no need for a h/t.

Site: http://sheriffmackforcongress.com/

“A Buck to Crush SOPA”:

I met him once back in the 1990s at a Second Amendment event in Arizona. Seemed like a nice guy.

UPDATE: Here’s more on Mack’s candidacy.

SEE THE 5 most politically controversial Super Bowl ads of all time.

AND THE ROMNEY CAMPAIGN SAYS THANK YOU: Harvard Professor Attacks Mitt Romney As “Stealth Tea Party Candidate.”

WELL, AMERICA CAN HOPE: Stock Market Predicts Defeat For President Obama. The Insta-Wife was just saying that she thinks the stock market is rising because it’s pricing in an Obama defeat in November.

UPDATE: Link was wrong before. Fixed now. Sorry!

THE HORROR OF cheap energy from shale gas.

THE GREAT ASIAN GOLD THEFT CRISIS. This is in Britain. I wonder if anything similar is happening in the United States.

UPDATE: A reader emails: “I haven’t done any research myself, but there was a story on the radio late last year about burglars targeting Indian households in the Atlanta area because they were presumed to have more gold on hand. Metro Atlanta has a large Indian population.”

EQUAL JUSTICE: One Rule For TSA Managers, One Rule for You. “As we’ve mentioned here before, the almost daily parade of would-be flyers who are stupid (or forgetful) enough to unintentionally carry a gun or some other contraband through a TSA airport checkpoint has become tedious. As in hardly even newsworthy any more. The poor absent-minded schmucks are arrested, given the full prostate exam, their guns are confiscated and they’re charged with a felony. Their gun rights: gone baby, gone. It’s the same story over and over, right? Well not quite. Not if you’re a TSA manager. Once again, with monotonous regularity, we learn that there’s one set of rules for government employees and then there are the standards the rest of us are held to.”

GLOBAL WARMING UPDATE:

When I visited the House of Lords’ minister, Lord Marland, at the Climate Change Department a couple of years ago, I asked him and the Department’s chief number-cruncher, Professor David Mackay (neither a climate scientist nor an economist, of course) to show me the Department’s calculations detailing just how much “global warming” that might otherwise occur this century would be prevented by the $30 billion per year that the Department was committed to spend between 2011 and 2050 – $1.2 trillion in all.

There was a horrified silence. The birds stopped singing. The Minister adjusted his tie. The Permanent Secretary looked at his watch. Professor Mackay looked as though he wished the plush sofa into which he was disappearing would swallow him up entirely.

Eventually, in a very small voice, the Professor said, “Er, ah, mphm, that is, oof, arghh, we’ve never done any such calculation.” The biggest tax increase in human history had been based not upon a mature scientific assessment followed by a careful economic appraisal, but solely upon blind faith. I said as much. “Well,” said the Professor, “maybe we’ll get around to doing the calculations next October.”

They still haven’t done the calculations – or, rather, I suspect they have done them but have kept the results very quiet indeed. Here’s why. . . . The UK policy’s mitigation cost-effectiveness – the cost of abating just 1 Kelvin of warming if every nation pursued the UK’s policy with the same cost-ineffectiveness – works out at $108 trillion per Kelvin abated

Read the whole thing.

HOW’S THAT “SMART DIPLOMACY” WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? Obama condemns violence in Syria, can’t secure UN Security Council resolution.

SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE: ‘The Army asked that the letter not be read from the pulpit.’

TEN YEARS AGO ON INSTAPUNDIT: CHUCK SCHUMER GOT THE MOST ENRON MONEY OF ANY DEMOCRAT: This story from the New York Daily News talks about why he got it. “Two months after Kenneth Lay, then the boss of Enron, held a Texas fund-raiser for Chuck Schumer, the senator-elect asked for a review of federal power contracts that eat into utility company profits. A Schumer spokesman denied any quid pro quo, but Enron officials praised the senator’s action in 1998 and said his letter asking for the review was a signal he was keeping a campaign promise to push for energy deregulation.”

ROMNEY wins Nevada.

MARK LEVIN EMAILS that his book, Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America, will be #1 on the New York Times bestseller list for another week.

RICK SANTELLI: What’s wrong with the jobs number: The labor-force participation rate. Obama is suffering “shrinkage.” Explained by Leo Cullum.

I’VE BEEN GETTING ILLITERATE AND ANTISEMITIC EMAILS in response to this link. Without even looking, I knew that Glenn Greenwald had written something about it. And I was right!

UPDATE: I can just add that if George W. Bush had listened to me instead of being a weenie, we’d be a lot better off. Instead, we had to wait until Barack Obama was President to start killing Iranian nuclear-weapons scientists and mullahs. If only Obama had appointed a tough-talking Secretary of State Atrios!

ROSS DOUTHAT: The Media’s Abortion Blinders. “In many newsrooms and television studios across the country, Planned Parenthood is regarded as the equivalent of, well, the Komen foundation: an apolitical, high-minded and humanitarian institution whose work no rational person — and certainly no self-respecting woman — could possibly question or oppose. . . . Three truths, in particular, should be obvious to everyone reporting on the Komen-Planned Parenthood controversy. First, that the fight against breast cancer is unifying and completely uncontroversial, while the provision of abortion may be the most polarizing issue in the United States today. Second, that it’s no more ‘political’ to disassociate oneself from the nation’s largest abortion provider than it is to associate with it in the first place. Third, that for every American who greeted Komen’s shift with ‘anger and outrage’ (as Andrea Mitchell put it), there was probably an American who was relieved and gratified. Indeed, that sense of relief was quantifiable: the day after the controversy broke, Komen reported that its daily donations had risen dramatically. But of course, you wouldn’t know that from most of the media coverage. After all, the people making those donations don’t exist.”

UPDATE; Reader Tagore Smith writes:

I’m going to stay out of the argument about abortion, because I think other people are going to cover any point I might make. But I’d like to point out that advocacy for breast cancer research is not entirely (or should not be entirely) uncontroversial. It’s not that I want women to die of cancer- my mother died of a non-sex-specific cancer this year, and all I can say is that I wish she hadn’t. I’m still single, and I’m not ashamed to say that I loved my Mom more than I loved anyone else. Someone else very close to me had a breast cancer scare last year- a biopsy revealed that the growth was benign. So I am certainly not against saving women’s lives through research.

But I am male, and I seem to recall that men die of cancer quite a lot more than women do (I’m not an expert on this subject, so I could be wrong about this.) It seems to me that there is a limited pie available for cancer research, and that quite a lot of that pie is already going to breast cancer research. I think that advocating that more dollars ought to go to breast cancer research _should_ be controversial. The message sent, otherwise, is that men are expendable. I don’t see big blue-ribbon prostate cancer campaigns all that often. Maybe it’s just that the prostate is not as sexy as the boob….

Good point, and one that’s been made here before.

#GREENFAIL: 100 Tories revolt over wind farms. “Critics say wind farms are inefficient because the wind cannot be guaranteed to blow at times of greatest energy demand. They are also said to be unsightly, blighting the landscape. Wind farms are also accused of forcing up energy bills while swallowing disproportionate amounts of taxpayer-funded subsidies.”

A CLEAN-BURNING COOKSTOVE THAT’S specially designed for use in the developing world: “These stoves reduce smoke and harmful gases by up to 80 percent, reduce fuel use by up to 60 percent and reduce cooking time by up to 50 percent compared to traditional cooking fires and stoves.”

UPDATE: Reader Perry Beeson points out that you can get it on Amazon. Might be good for disaster-prep.

ANOTHER UPDATE: here’s the spec sheet. (PDF).

JASON PYE: Obama Goes Christianist on Tax Policy.

AT AMAZON, $100 off Rosetta Stone Level 1-5 language sets.

LEGAL EDUCATION UPDATE: Law Schools Shrink Part-Time Programs After U.S. News Closed Rankings Loophole.

ANONYMOUS SPIES ON, RECORDS FBI-Scotland Yard conference call.

The online vigilante group has released a 17-minute clip of a Jan. 17 conference call between investigators discussing evidence gathered against members of the group as well as upcoming plans for arrests. The group also released an e-mail sent out by an FBI agent to law enforcement agents around the world with a phone number and password for accessing the conference call.

The FBI has confirmed to the Associated Press that the recording is authentic.

AnonymousIRC, a Twitter account purporting to be connected to the group, sent out a tweet on Friday with a link to an audio recording of the call, followed later by a message that read, “The FBI might be curious how we’re able to continuously read their internal comms for some time now.”

My guess is, a mole.

UPDATE: When is a hack not a hack?

ZILLA OF THE RESISTANCE HAS MOVED.

CHANGE: Bill Maher Turns on Occupiers, Denounces Them as D-bags That Should ‘Get a Job.’ Wait, I thought they embodied hope-and-change?