STRIKING A BALANCE at The Purple Center.

MICHAEL YON IS ON HIS WAY TO AFGHANISTAN NOW; meanwhile he calls attention to this report from Tim Lynch.

MOVING TOWARD MOLECULAR-LEVEL DATA STORAGE, using nanotechnology.

DOING THE JOB THAT NEWSPAPERS SHOULD BE DOING:  Web Sites That Dig for News Rise As Watchdogs. “As America’s newspapers shrink and shed staff, and broadcast news outlets sink in the ratings, a new kind of Web-based news operation has arisen in several cities, forcing the papers to follow the stories they uncover.”  I keep saying that hard news reporting is the Killer App for old media, but they don’t seem to want to do it.

IT’S HOPELESS. GIVE UP. Trying to cope with an iPhone addiction.

UM, THAT WOULD BE “NO.”  Do you trust Congress to run the auto industry?

THINKING OF BUYING A FORECLOSED HOUSE AT A BARGAIN PRICE? Five things to look at first.

Meanwhile, I have to say that house prices seem to me to be falling too slowly. In my area, the houses that have sold are the ones where owners have cut prices significantly — but I still see houses being put on the market at prices that presuppose 7-8% appreciation over the last two or three years, which is ridiculous.

PUTTING THE “CON” IN “CONJUGAL!”  Inmates crawled through ceilings for sexual trysts.

PLUG-IN HYBRIDS with 25,000 mile batteries? I’m skeptical.

IN THE MAIL: Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed. Sure to be controversial, especially as the debate is heating up.

DOES YOUR BOSS HAVE TO PAY YOU while you wait for Vista to boot up?

THE MUDVILLE GAZETTE: Why no one knows the war was won.

More on that topic in this post.

MICHAEL YON: A Happy Ending (And Beginning) For A Brave Iraqi Friend.

GUN SALES AND THE ELECTION: It’s like when your dog senses an earthquake coming. I hope not. Reading this makes me wonder if all the people who are stocking up on spam and other food staples are motivated more by fear of disorder than by economics.

OBAMA FANS ARE unhappy with the Clintons’ high-profile role. Meet the new boss, yada yada . . . . Best bit:

“These are people who believe in this stuff more than Barack himself does,” said a Democrat close to Obama’s campaign. “These guys didn’t put together a campaign in order to turn the government over to the Clintons.”

I think over the next four years they’ll discover that there’s a lot of stuff they believe in more than Barack does.

GIVE STATINS TO EVERYBODY? Not so fast: “Relative risk has the effect of exaggerating a drug’s benefits. What does a 50 percent reduction in heart risk mean? It means that just one out of 120 statin users was helped by the drug.”

FROM A NEUROLOGIST, an online self-test for Alzheimer’s disease. Background on the test here.  Kind of cool.

WORDPRESS SWITCHOVER:  Except for an annoying tendency to default to “Aaron Hanscom” as post author (some sort of carryover thing from the main PJM installation, I think) the switchover seems to be working fine.  If you’ve been using the PDA feed, note that the main page is now supposed to automatically display in a PDA format if you’re accessing it via PDA, so you don’t need a separate feed any more.

PROFESSOR BAINBRIDGE ON the insider trading charges against Mark Cuban.

IS SENTIMENT LEANING against an auto bailout? Sure seems that way to me.

UPDATE:  Grover Norquist asks Feds for $700 Billion. “I have a plan for this $700 billion which should be just what’s needed to get the American economy going. Since the money came from the taxpayers in the first place, I propose giving it back to them.”

AT MSNBC, A POLL on whether to allow licensed gun-carry on campus. So far, the “yes” vote is winning.

PREDICTING a prolonged recession.

ABOUT FREAKING TIME: Tennessee Grocery Stores May Stock Wine in Near Future.

REVIEWING THE REVIEWERS: A roundup of book reviews from all over.

EIGHT YEARS without email. “This drives home, as nothing else could (at least for me), just how lonely and isolated the president must be most of the time.”

UPDATE:  Related thoughts from Ron Coleman.