ANGLICANS GETTING ANGRY: Bishop says collapse of Christianity is wrecking British society – and Islam is filling the void. Plus, thoughts from the Black Crowes.

VITAMIN D UPDATE: “High vitamin D concentration in the blood is not associated with a reduced risk of prostate cancer, researchers report in an article published online May 27 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.”

ANOTHER REASON TO FLOSS: Gum Disease Might Boost Cancer Risk.

IVY LEAGUE: Elitist? Us? “Requiring every student to swim three laps and understand Renaissance art is not elitist. It’s essential for any person.”

NEWS ON NUCLEAR FUSION: Hot and cold. Stay tuned and hope for good news.

RALPH PETERS: “To date, not one ‘mainstream media’ journalist has pressed the leading advocates of unconditional surrender to describe in detail what might happen after we ‘bring the troops home now.’ There’s plenty of unchallenged sloganeering, but no serious debate. This selective political softball and pep-rally journalism serves neither our country nor our political process well.”

PLEASE SEND Libby Spencer of Newshoggers your best wishes for recovery from her cancer surgery.

WEBB AS VP: Ross Douthat and James Joyner are skeptical. But regardless of whether having Webb on the ticket is good for the Dems, it seems pretty clear that it’s not good for Webb.

TRAINING IN VAIN: “A generation of athletes will retire after training a lifetime in vain if women’s ski jumping is kept out of the 2010 Games, say a group of elite female jumpers. . . . The sport has been in the Olympics since 1924, but has never had a women’s component, prompting nine female jumpers to sue the Vancouver Organizing Committee alleging it’s breaking equal rights laws.”

VOTED OUT OF KINDERGARTEN: “Five-year-old Alex Barton was voted out of kindergarten class by his fellow students in Port St. Lucie, Florida. Before the vote, his teacher told classmates to say what they didn’t like about Alex.”

EVAN COYNE MALONEY: on the media and bloggers. “Unfortunately, as this CJR piece shows, some in the media view bloggers as the enemy, a tormentor that must be defeated. By seeing bloggers as direct competitors, outlets put themselves in a position of competing on their greatest weakness while at the same time undermining their greatest strength.” Read the whole thing. Hard-news gathering is the killer app for Big Media. Why do they resist it, then? Because it costs money?

ACCEPT NO SUBSTITUTES: Authentic Viking DNA! “Stereotypically, these Norsemen are usually pictured wearing a horned helmet but in a new study published in the journal PLoS ONE this week, Jørgen Dissing and colleagues from the University of Copenhagen, investigated what went under the helmet; the scientists were able to extract authentic DNA from ancient Viking skeletons, avoiding many of the problems of contamination faced by past researchers.”

TOM SMITH ON AFFRONTS TO HUMAN DIGNITY.

JERRY POURNELLE ON THE Texas polygamy case: “If we are going to establish that precedent — that I can call the police and allege that you are abusing me and your children — and never come forward to confront you, or give any real specifications, but they will come and take your children for their own protection, I have the power to ruin your life.” Plus, reflections on education in 1957 versus education in 2007.

ANOTHER MASS SHOOTING stopped by a man with a gun carry permit.

DARTMOUTH AGAINST DEMOCRACY?

HOW TO SNACK LIKE Barack Obama.

RAND SIMBERG ON OBAMA: The uncle seems real.

SARAH PULLMAN has read Nina Planck’s Real Food and likes it. Our podcast interview with Planck is here.

NOW THERE’S A WINNER: “Senator Biden Wants to Give Your Ex-Wife a Free Attorney…”

A 220 MPG HYBRID SUPERCAR featuring “wild horsepower?” I’d like to see one. Er, and drive one . . .

EXTREME BALLOON TYING! But it’s only “pop art” if you do it wrong . . . .

I HAVEN’T SEEN SCOTT MCCLELLAN’S NEW BOOK, but McClellan himself is not exactly getting raves at The New Republic:

Writing a harsh tell-all memoir of the Bush years is just good business sense at this point. You only need to look back at the anemic sales of Ari Fleischer’s rosy, no-tell memoir of his White House years to realize that–and Fleischer’s low-seller came out at a time when Bush’s approval rating was higher than 28 percent.

So kudos to McClellan. His book displays a calculating mind that was never much in evidence in the White House press room.

Ouch. Anyway, the Wall Street Journal has an excerpt, and some are noting the contrast between the press’s reception of McClellan’s book and the heavily-documented work of Doug Feith. What could account for the difference?

UPDATE: Clayton Cramer: “Still, I find myself asking this rather serious question: if, as McClellan says, he could see that Bush was intentionally misleading the nation into war back then, why didn’t McClellan say anything? Why didn’t he quit his job and blow the whistle? . . . It makes me wonder how much of this is that McClellan is trying to sell a book.” Yes, it’s hard to decide whether he comes off worse if he’s lying, or if he’s telling the truth.

MORE: Indeed: “It’s not the disloyalty that bothers me. It’s the press suddenly finding wisdom in a guy they previously disregarded as stupid and unreliable. It’s inevitable that critical Bush-era memoirs will come out, but written by smarter people. I’ll read those.”

POLITICS, COLLECTIVISM, and hypocrisy.