SOME ADVICE ON WHAT THE HOBBIT MOVIE should be like.

KYLE SMITH DOESN’T LIKE the new Indiana Jones movie, calling it “the worst Steven Spielberg popcorn flick since the forgotten 1941. . . . Spielberg and producer George Lucas, who gets a story credit, seem to think they’re too good to revisit the original trilogy so they mock it instead.” Ouch. I had actually planned to go see it today, but family issues intervened.

REPORT IT TO THE HATE-CRIME POLICE: The one acceptable prejudice: Anti-Americanism.

PROFESSOR BAINBRIDGE: “Virginia Senator Jim Webb speaks a truth that’s supposed to remain unspoken and thus probably disqualifies himself as Barack Obama’s running mate. . . . This statement isn’t just going to get Webb in trouble with the non-black ethnic groups eligible for affirmative action, such as Asians, Native Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islanders, Hispanics, Native Americans and Alaska Natives, it’s going to exacerbate the sexism debate roiling Democratic waters these days.”

CAR LUST: Remembering the BMW 645 CSi. I remember seeing one of those and being very impressed that the dash was red-orange at night. That was a big deal, then.

DAVID BARON, CALL YOUR OFFICE: It’s not just cougars:

Ray Yager, 23, and a buddy were on their bicycles when they saw all the police activity and were told about the bear.

Moments later they saw the animal running but couldn’t believe it.

“We could have run right into it,” he said.

About 2:30 a.m. officers found blood on the pavement outside 134 Central St. eight blocks or so northwest of the original sighting and began following the drops.

Looking up they found the wounded bear in a pine tree on the east side of Fremont Elementary School and shot and killed it.

It is not true, as the story reports, that bears are “vegetarian.” The return of dangerous animal life is an interesting phenomenon of 21st Century America, as is the human reaction. More background here, here, and here.

MAKING THIN-FILM SOLAR CELLS MORE EFFICIENT, with nanotechnology.

TEXAS POLYGAMY CASE UPDATE: Appeals court says state had no right to seize polygamists’ children. I mentioned earlier that this was looking like an embarrassment to the authorities. I think it’s gone beyond “looking like” now.

UPDATE: Much more here.

DUDE, WHERE’S MY RECESSION? (CONT’D): U.S. Initial Jobless Claims Unexpectedly Decline.

A FAILED SUICIDE-BOMB ATTEMPT at a London Exeter restaurant.

GUN CONTROL IN THE NEXT CONGRESS? Not much enthusiasm, even among gun-control backers. But, of course, they could just be shamming until the election.

ARE PROGRESSIVES OUT OF IDEAS? Let’s just say that intellectual capital is in short supply everywhere in politics, by all appearances.

MORE PROBLEMS with Rules of Engagement?

IN CANADA, signs of sanity on censorship at last.

THERE’S AN ESPIONAGE CASE involving a retired professor here at the University of Tennessee. I don’t know much about it, but here’s an interesting angle from AvWeek.

IN THE MAIL: Steven Lubet’s The Importance of Being Honest: How Lying, Secrecy, and Hypocrisy Collide with Truth in Law.

AT WIRED, rethinking what it means to be green.

THE KARSENTY / AL-DURA CASE: covered, but also buried, by the Times.

WHAT BARACK OBAMA IS READING: “Meanwhile, let’s summarize: here we have the current frontrunner (barely) to be the 44th president of the United States (the son of a Kenyan man and an American woman, named Barack Obama), reading the top-selling current events book of the season (by an immigrant from Mumbai named Fareed Zakaria) called The Post-American World.” Kind of an odd picture, though — looks a little too GQ for a politician, more like a studio exec or something. I think it’s the sunglasses. Meanwhile, Obama ought to give this a read on his next flight.

UPDATE: Related item here: “In his campaign, Obama plays on his supposed resemblance to JFK, and his supporters respond to it. But it’s not so good to emulate the flaws of the man. See whether any of this sounds familiar.”

MICHAEL YON’S BOOK, MOMENT OF TRUTH IN IRAQ, is selling quite briskly, which leads him to wonder why you can’t buy it on most military bases.

Our podcast interview with Yon, by the way, is here.

COMPARE AND CONTRAST.

Plus, we’re all bozos on this bus!

GLOBAL WARMING: Cracks in the Consensus? Hey, science advances by changing its mind in response to new data. The worrisome thing would be if people didn’t.

UPDATE: Reader Walter Boxx emails: “If I was the really paranoid type I’d believe that all this fear-mongering on global warming was never intended to last past the inauguration of a Democrat.” Such cynicism.

WHY WE NEED TO SPEED UP PHARMACEUTICAL RESEARCH:

I’ve been in this business for almost 19 years now. That means that the drugs that were discovered during my first few years of work are now either on the market or expected to be there soon.

(Via Megan McArdle, who has some thoughts, too).