WAITING FOR AN APOLOGY FROM THE GROUP OF 88, at Duke.

MARS as art. Beautiful stuff.

ROSIE O’DONNELL: Abstract expressionist!

ZING: “By the way, Senator Obama, it’s a ‘flak’ jacket, not a ‘flack’ jacket.”

Though something that protected against “flacks” would be useful in campaign season. Which is, apparently, every season now . . . .

Plus, a question: “Redeploy” where?

MORE WORLD WAR II BOOKS FOR KIDS: Here, and here.

MORE PICS: Phil Eaton of Armadillo Aerospace, which has something like a half dozen people here, and “The Pixel,” a lunar-lander testbed. Follow the link for video of its flight. More here.

And here’s a piece on Armadillo from Popular Mechanics.

MORE ON DDT and malaria.

SO I’M AT THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE DEVELOPMENT CONFERENCE IN DALLAS, where there’s a lot of talk about space and space tourism. Here’s a picture from the presentation by Chuck Lauer of Rocketplane Kistler.

MORE UNREST IN IRAN: May the crackdown fail. Then there’s this.

HOLIDAY TRAVELERS IGNORING FUEL COSTS: That’s certainly been my observation. Ron Coleman connects the dots.

DOING THE RIGHT THING for a stricken climber on Mt. Everest.

NEW YORK TIMES REPORTER “SKEPTICAL” ABOUT the “Greenhouse Effect.”

WAR IN LEBANON: A big roundup from Michael Totten.

HOWARD MORTMAN TRIES A RON PAUL EXPERIMENT: Looks like it worked!

ANDREW FERGUSON: Don’t leave scholarship to the professionals.

THE EU IS probing Google over privacy.

ROBERT X. CRINGELY: “I have a pretty good idea where we’ll find the founders of that Google-beating start-up. I think they are working right now at Google. Google is an amazing entrepreneurial petri dish. Yet at the same time, it is doomed to disappoint nearly every entrepreneurial type who works there. This is key: Google is sowing the seeds of its own eventual destruction. It can’t help doing so. . . . Google has designed a working environment that provides almost everything their technical people need except a guaranteed sense of satisfaction.”

JAMES PETHOKOUKIS on the U.S. / China trade war no one expects.

It’s the last thing that we — or the Chinese — need right now. Which doesn’t necessarily rule it out, alas.

A PODCAST INTERVIEW WITH STEVEN LANDSBURG, about his new book, More
Sex is Safer Sex.

DOES GLOBAL WARMING MEAN MORE HURRICANES? Maybe, maybe not: “Over the last 5,000 years, the eastern Caribbean has experienced several periods, lasting centuries, in which strong hurricanes occurred frequently even though ocean temperatures were cooler than those measured today, according to a new study.” There seems to be a lot of complexity involved.

AUSTIN BAY REPORTS ON “Iraq narratives” and counterinsurgency.

MOQTADA UNVEILS A NEW PLAN TO HUMILIATE BUSH and secure a U.S. withdrawal. It just might work!

GERALD STEINBERG WANTS more scrutiny for Amnesty International.suppressing election results to cover up a Dick Cheney loss . . . .

ARE THE RICH GETTING RICHER? I don’t know, but they’re certainly getting more numerous:

To enter the nation’s top 1%, you need more than $5 million. And if you get there, you’ll have plenty of newly-arrived company: The number of U.S. “pentamillionaires” has quadrupled in the past 10 years, to more than 930,000. Indeed, 70% of the nation’s big family fortunes are less than 13 years old, according to research and marketing firm The Harrison Group. And the people who amassed them are, first and foremost, entrepreneurs — risk takers for whom wealth is a byproduct of pursuing their passion.

What got them to the highest level? It isn’t necessarily stock-market savvy: On average, folks who recently hit the $5 million mark report that only 10% of their money came through passive investments. And only 10% of pentamillionaires inherited their wealth.

“Pentamillionaire” is a new term to me. I guess plain old millionaires have become so commonplace that somebody had to up the ante.

GREG LUKIANOFF: “I have always found it fascinating that colleges and universities–which tend to believe themselves to be centers of perfect open-mindedness and progressive thought–so often end up echoing the censors of bygone eras. As we note in FIRE’s Guide to Free Speech on Campus, for example, administrators’ justifications for punishing politically incorrect, ideologically incompatible, or simply inconvenient speech at times echo the rationale of southern slave owners in the early 19th century who wished to ban abolitionist speech because it “inflicted emotional injury” on slave owners. As we often have to point out, while politeness is a virtue, it is of minuscule importance when compared with robust debate and discussion.”