WELL, IT IS THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: Flying Cars, Jetpacks and Rocket Racers, Oh My!.

NOW THAT BARACK OBAMA AND I ARE THE SAME AGE, I’m feeling younger and more dynamic already!

EXTREME MORTMAN: Clinton Has Them All Tied Up in Nots.

OLD AGE: Single, Childless and ‘Downright Terrified’.

And a predictable NYT comment: “We have to take health care out of the hands of insurance companies, BigPharma and overpaid doctors. We need to set a goal of building a social welfare system similar to the more civilized countries in Europe, like France and Germany.”

More civilized? Well, possibly. But as The New York Times reported in 2003, In France, Nothing Gets in the Way of Vacation.

Apparently, nothing gets in the way of the holiday, not even grandma and grandpa. This summer’s withering heat wave claimed a staggering number of victims — the government talks of perhaps 5,000 deaths, the country’s largest undertaker twice that number — most of whom were elderly. The police, undertakers and social service agencies found them in apartments, homes and hotels. The rooms were often as hot as ovens.

Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, noted last week that roughly half the victims died in their homes, not in hospitals or nursing homes, implying that French families, in a rush to get to the beach, had simply left their loved ones to perish in the inferno. (And indeed, some families postponed funerals until after the Aug. 15 holiday weekend.)

The summer heat wave has exposed not only France’s slavish devotion to August vacation, but also the breakdown of family ties. French society, experts say, now increasingly turns its back on the elderly.

And, unsurprisingly, government employees don’t take the place of a caring family. Or, apparently, even an uncaring one.

MICHAEL HELLER: How patent gridlock is blocking the development of lifesaving drugs.

I mentioned his book, The Gridlock Economy, a while back.

OIL DROPS below $120 a barrel.

UPDATE: Brian J. Noggle: “Congress must act now! . . . . What is important is that our ruling political class realize that unless it acts, citizens might get the impression that market forces alone can cause declining gas prices, and that sometimes the rain falls without the dances of the rainmakers on the floors of the House and Senate.”

DUDE, HERE’S YOUR RECESSION: At least, if you believe this from Rich Karlgaard:

For example, take the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP). Last week the Commerce Department released a preliminary figure of 1.9% growth for the second quarter. Nominal growth was 3% minus a deflator of 1.1%. Say again, please? The government used a deflator of … 1.1%?

Who believes that? According to Reuters, the Commerce Department’s own figures showed a 4.3% inflation rate during the second quarter. Forgive my ignorance, but why is 1.1% the GDP deflator and not 4.3%? Were the latter figure used, it would show the second quarter retracted 1.2%. If I am missing something in my simple question, please set me straight.

More on that topic here.

UPDATE: Still more here. “You patiently try to explain that imports aren’t included in GDP, and that’s why the numbers came out the way they did. But they’re not going to believe you.”

AIR FORCE DEWEY.

ANDREW BREITBART: Enemy of the State.

REALITY TV and the return of the working-class hero.

“OBJECTIVELY MIRACULOUS?” That’s setting the bar kind of low.

GRILLING GUIDANCE: Interview with Weber Chef, Jamie Purviance. Including this devastating admission: “Once I attempted a grill a chocolate soufflé. It was a flop.”

JAMES LILEKS:

In the summer of ’78 I was back home in Fargo between college years – exiled from the civilized world, cast into barbarity. During the day I labored under the hot sun painting giant fuel tanks in the hot sun, next to an auto-body shop that exhaled poison and Eagles all day. A sensitive soul, cast into such grim circumstances. A noble soul, a poet, reduced to living on the gruel of hometown “culture,” almost unable to stir himself each day to face the hopeless allotment that stretched forth until the sun turned its face away.

Naturally, I was in the perfect mood to read the entire Gulag Archipelago. I got all three volumes from the drugstore – which should have told me something about the land in which I lived, that one could buy this work from a creaky wire rack at the drugstore – and it taught me much about the Soviet Union and the era of Stalin. After that I could never quite understand the people who viewed the US and the USSR as moral equals, or regarded our history as not only indelibly stained but uniquely so. Reading Solzhenitsyn makes it difficult to take seriously the people in this culture who insist that Dissent has been squelched. Brother, you have no idea.

Indeed.

MORE ON EDOUARD, at Weather Nerd.

RACIST! Talk of “the Paris Hilton tax break.”

And unfair, I believe, because Paris Hilton has actually earned far more money than she inherited.

Meanwhile, The New York Times fearlessly uses the word “mojo” with regard to Obama.

HAROLD FORD, JR.: Helping Humanity Starts at Home. “Only an economically vibrant America can help solve some of the vexing problems around the globe.”

MICKEY KAUS: “The LAT is more like Daily Kos than it wants to admit (and vice versa): The Daily Kos has banned longtime blogger Lee Stranahan for writing calm, clear-headed posts assessing the evidence in the John Edwards scandal.”

STEVE CHAPMAN on gas prices, home prices, and the economy:

Homes are not worth what they used to be, and for the Fed to attempt to disguise the fact would create even more uncertainty in a turbulent market. That, in turn, would merely postpone the day when prices hit the inevitable bottom.

When you have a loss of wealth, the best way to cope is to accept it and adapt to a lower standard of living, sooner rather than later. Sending out rebates, eliminating gas taxes, bailing out homeowners and accelerating monetary growth, among the proposed remedies, do exactly the opposite. They spare us the obligation of dealing with reality by making us feel richer so we can keep on as we were before.

But they don’t change the stark fact that we are poorer now and will remain that way for some time. And they ultimately backfire by wasting money, igniting inflation or both.

In the long run, we will adapt to the new realities, the economic impact will moderate, and the pain will fade. Till then, our least destructive option is to do something no politician would dare suggest: Suck it up.

Certainly not in an election year.

RICK MORAN ON bogus charges of “racism.”

And who was the first person to compare Barack Obama to Paris Hilton? It was Barack Obama! “I mean, I’m so overexposed, I’m making Paris Hilton look like a recluse.” (Via Newsbusters). It’s like the McCain campaign did its research in advance and lured the Obama folks into making bogus charges just so this would come out . . . .

Meanwhile, what do you make of this statement?

That ad was blatantly racist. Putting a black guy up alongside white women sends a strong racist message.

So in order to avoid being racist, we need to carefully separate the black guys from the white women . . . . Apparently, that’s what we’ve come to with the first “post-racial” candidate.

UPDATE: More racism — Obama juxtaposed with blonde white women! I guess somebody didn’t get the memo.

RUNNING ON EMPTY: The music is a nice touch.

HMM: “McCain, the fighter pilot, has gotten inside Obama’s OODA loop.”

GORDON CROVITZ: Free the Web — From the FCC! Well, but force the companies involve to disclose and compete.

A LIST: Essential movies of the 1990s. I can’t believe they left out Ed Wood.

AN ENERGY RIOT ON THE PLAINS:

Driving south out of the agricultural town of Ainsworth, you can’t miss its newest crop: wind turbines, three dozen of them, with steel stalks 230 feet high and petal-like blades 131 feet long, sprouting improbably from the sand hills of north-central Nebraska, beside ruminating cattle. Though painted gray, the turbines stand out against the evening backdrop of battleship-colored thunderclouds and bear an almost celestial whiteness when day’s light is right. Airplane pilots can spot them from far away, and rarely does a bird make their unfortunate acquaintance.

Nobody tell Ted Kennedy. And, yes, Riot on the Plains is my favorite Frontier Trust song. But I’ve been trying to work the phrase “Willa Cather Proud” into a post for ages without success . . . .

VIRGINIA POSTREL: “Thanks to everyone who’s sent emails asking about the state of my health. After quite a year, I’m happy to say that I’m doing fine. I completed radiation therapy on July 3 and, as the oncologists put it, I have ‘no evidence of disease.’ I still have a few more triweekly Herceptin treatments to go, but they have no side effects.”