SEXIST PATRIARCHAL OPPRESSION.

(Via the Insta-Wife).

FINALLY, AN IRAQ POLICY THAT MAKES SENSE: McCain Backs Timeline to Get Obama Out of Iraq.

A SOCIAL POLICY hindsight thought experiment. I regard the sexual revolution as a success, though like all revolutions it did some damage along the way. A sexual counterrevolution would, of course, do its own share of damage, something proponents should consider, but usually don’t.

ANOTHER MEMO TO BLOGGERS ABOUT THE EDWARDS/HUNTER AFFAIR at the L.A. Times.

I’ll just note that the L.A. Times didn’t have the same concern for propriety when it published what Larry Lessig described as “a baseless smear” against Judge Kozinski just last month. Conveniently flexible, those journalistic “standards.”

UPDATE: In the London Times: Sleaze Scuppers Democrat Golden Boy. “The New York Times has not deigned to touch the story, although it recently ran thousands of words on a relationship between McCain and a female lobbyist, which appeared to be based more on innuendo than fact.” As I say, flexible standards.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Richard Fernandez: “The irony is that the John Edwards legend and all of its props were created by artful manipulation of the media. Nobody objected to that. But when the National Enquirer threatened to introduce the legend to its opposite there was a hue and cry about their lack of professionalism, etc. It may be pertinent to point out the Enquirer’s offense wasn’t entirely against the privacy of three people. Their real crime was to threaten to expose the facade built up with the help of parts of the press itself; to destroy the accepted narrative with an inconvenient fact. The news wasn’t that two people were having an affair at the Beverly Hilton; the real headline was that a carefully contrived myth was in danger of being exploded.”

MORE: Reader James Ruhland emails: “You say they have ‘conveniently flexible’ standards. But that’s not true. They are very consistent in applying two standards: One for the Left, and one for everyone else. The standards aren’t flexible at all, but very rigidly consistent when recognized, and are employed not just by journalists but across the board by the elect in this brave new world in which we live in.” I stand corrected. And I appreciate the subtle James Bond/Paul McCartney reference, which is very appropriate.

MORE STILL: “Keep Rockin’!” And a reader suggests that we should be grateful to the British press for doing the jobs Americans won’t do.

THIS IS NOT THE BAGHDAD THAT BARACK OBAMA KNEW: A.P. Declares Victory in Iraq.

The United States is now winning the war that two years ago seemed lost.

Limited, sometimes sharp fighting and periodic terrorist bombings in Iraq are likely to continue, possibly for years. But the Iraqi government and the U.S. now are able to shift focus from mainly combat to mainly building the fragile beginnings of peace — a transition that many found almost unthinkable as recently as one year ago. . . .

Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, told The Associated Press this past week there are early indications that senior leaders of al-Qaida may be considering shifting their main focus from Iraq to the war in Afghanistan.

(Via Protein Wisdom).

UPDATE: Tom Maguire weighs in.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Michael Totten on defining victory in Iraq.

TIM CAVANAUGH on the Seventies and the sexual revolution. “I always suspect that what was driving the suburban swingers who (at least in popular imagination) hit the key party circuit a few years later was a sense of having missed the party, that great opening up of consciousness and legs that marked the blessed-out sixties. Everybody has been plagued by the sense that somebody somewhere is getting laid in ecstatic new ways while you’re slaving over a hot stove. But suburbanites in the early seventies had actual reason to believe it.”

EASY INDOOR ACTIVITIES FOR DOGS.

MOVIE: An Inconvenient Tax. “Should Congress try to repair the tax code’s inequities by moving towards a broader based income tax similar to that of 1986 or should it pursue a consumption-based system such as a flat tax, VAT or national retail sales tax? Also, can America’s schizophrenic desires for lower taxes and increased social programs be reconciled? An Inconvenient Tax explores the answers to these questions and more through interviews with world renowned economists, U.S. congressmen and average citizens across the nation.”

If somebody offered us our current income tax system for the first time, would we buy it? I don’t think so.

BUILDING FLEXIBLE ELECTRONIC CIRCUITS from networks of carbon nanotubes.

MAPPING THE HUMAN MIND.

MICHAEL S. MALONE: “At age 54, I’ve just started two companies. And what I’ve already learned from the experience is that not only am I more suited for the task now than I was at 27 or 38, but that the world of entrepreneurial start-ups is now much more suited for me. And for you.”

EGGS: They’re not just for breakfast! True.

MICHAEL BARONE: “Sometimes public opinion doesn’t flow smoothly; it shifts sharply when a tipping point is reached. Case in point: gas prices. $3 a gallon gas didn’t change anybody’s mind about energy issues. $4 a gallon gas did. . . . In a country with less in the way of checks and balances, which can be gamed by adroit lobbyists and litigators, we would be building more nuclear plants, and would be drilling offshore and in ANWR. We would be phasing out the corn ethanol subsidies that are enriching Iowa farmers and impoverishing Mexican tortilla eaters, and we would be repealing the 54-cent tariff on Brazilian sugar ethanol (the sugar for which would be produced not in defoliated Amazon rainforests but in the desolate and currently unused certao).”

THE DANGERS OF CrackBerry addiction. And that’s before you even get to the ruined thumb-joints.

BUSINESS WEEK: Why is The New York Times worth so little? Asset values don’t matter, if management is bad: A lousy cook can turn wholesome ingredients, valuable in themselves, into an inedible mess.

MICHAEL YON REPORTS FROM NEPAL.

WHY YOUR HDTV ISN’T HI-DEF ENOUGH: The Real Story of HDTV Standards—There Aren’t Any.

In order to qualify as hi-def, a signal must have either 720 horizontal lines of progressively scanned pixels (720p), 1080 lines of interlaced pixels (1080i) or 1080 lines of progressively scanned pixels (1080p, which nobody even broadcasts yet.) But there’s a whole lot more to the quality of digital television than the number of pixels present. After all, 1080 lines of poor-quality pixels may technically be “high-definition,” but that doesn’t mean it looks very good.

One of the most important factors in determining picture quality is bit rate, or how much video and audio data is being sent down the pipe for each program. The technology behind digital television relies heavily on digital compression, and the ATSC specifies that digital TV use the MPEG-2 compression standard, which is also utilized by DVDs, although some satellite broadcasters use the more efficient MPEG-4 advanced video coding (AVC) standard. These compression technologies are necessary in order to deliver a large number of channels to consumers. Without these codecs, an uncompressed HD video stream could require as much as 1 gigabit per second of data capacity—that’s 52 times the capacity of the average broadcast channel. With compression, the same stream can be shrunk almost infinitely. But compression is often used overzealously, and picture quality suffers as a result.

Many people are already familiar with this data-size/fidelity tradeoff from their experiences with digital music: MP3 files with high levels of compression may take up less hard drive space, but they sound muffled and unsatisfying. The same is true for video. When an HD signal is over-compressed, it may have the same number of total pixels, ensuring it’s still technically HD, but the picture is often tainted with blocky, pixelated noise and image artifacts.

Read the whole thing.

IT’S THE 100TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FBI, and the folks at Cato look at the Bureau’s actual record as opposed to the Eliot Ness Melvyn Purvis mythology.

IN THE MAIL: Matthew Randazzo’s Ring of Hell: The Story of Chris Benoit and the Fall of the Pro Wrestling Industry. With a dramatic cover photo.