RUBY TUESDAY IS “FOCUSED LIKE A LASER” on improving its financials. Of course, the real problem has been their menu. Note the comments.

CHEAPER DESALINATION using nanotechnology.

I keep linking to stuff like this, but for those who haven’t been coming here since the beginning, here’s some background you may have missed. Here’s a survey column on nanotechnology, and here’s a followup piece on Greenpeace’s surprisingly positive take on the technology. Here’s a column on international competition, and here’s a recent piece from Popular Mechanics. Finally, here’s a look at nanotechnology and regulation in the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology.

WE MAY BE NUMBER TWO NOW, but we try harder. Johnathan Pearce has some further thoughts. “I am glad Mr Bush gave his rival leaders the verbal equivalent of a kick in the nuts. More please.” What is it with nuts this week?

Related item here.

I’M INTERVIEWED ON SPACE LAW over at Res Communis.

HOW BIG MEDIA COVERS castration threats.

UPDATE: Why Jesse Jackson attacked Barack Obama. “Barack Obama represents an existential threat to Jesse Jackson. If he succeeds he badly undermines Jackson and his methods. Jackson needs Obama to fail, even if he must avoid having anything to do with the failure.” Ironically, however, nothing is more likely to help Obama succeed than a public attack from Jesse Jackson.

FORBES: Your state’s employee pension fund is probably (a) doing badly with recent real estate pools and (b) working very hard with the private equity operators of these pools to keep you in the dark.

Oh, goody.

YOU FORGOT POLAND HILLARY!

A COOL PHOTO from Freeman Hunt.

Plus, some Knoxville photos from George Fillmore.

POLITICO: Dems Searching Their Souls on Drilling: “In the stages of grief, denial gives way to anger and then to bargaining. It may be an apt metaphor this week, as Democrats’ long-held opposition to expanded offshore oil drilling succumbs to the political realities of $4-per-gallon gasoline.” Plus, Jim Webb is pushing “a large package including expanded offshore drilling, alternative energy, nuclear power and technology to make coal cleaner.” Sounds good to me.

UPDATE: Reader Bruce Goldston emails: “Heh. Sounds like he’s doing everything but switch parties.” Yeah, he’s good on guns, too. He’s to the left of Obama on Iraq now, though — I think. It’s hard to keep track.

“NO BEER, NO CIVILIZATION.” Well, duh. At least, none worthy of the name. (Via Volokh).

UPDATE: Professor Bainbridge begs to differ.

IS IT PROOF OF CHANGE WHEN THE BIGGEST NEWS OUT OF IRAQ is about a journalist’s sex life?

A LOOK AT Iran vs. Israel.

IN THE MAIL: Michael Heller’s The Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives. Looks interesting.

VIDEO: NOZZLE RAGE: ATTACK OF THE PUMP: The website is here.

ERIC S. RAYMOND: Patriotism And Its Pathologies: “An influential minority of Americans now behave as though loving their country as it might be in the imagined future, where everything they don’t like about it is fixed, excludes loving their country as it actually is!“

PRICING SIGNALS WORK: “As average gas prices hit a record high of $4.108 a gallon this week, the government released new data showing that drivers have cut back their use of the fuel to levels not seen in five years. . . . Even through the Fourth of July weekend — a time when Americans traditionally get on the road — gasoline consumption dropped 3.3% from last year to 9.347 million barrels a day, according to weekly data released by the federal Energy Information Administration. For the first week of July, that is the least drivers have used since 2003, when consumption was 9.05 million barrels a day. Meanwhile, supplies of gasoline are building even as refiners produce fewer gallons of the fuel.” Hmm.

LEGAL JIHAD UPDATE: “We’re being sued by Hamas.” My advice: Counterclaim and engage in deep discovery . . . .

OBAMA VOTED FOR THE FISA AMENDMENTS, including telecom immunity, while Hillary Clinton voted against.

UPDATE: Related item here.

SURPRISE! China silencing internal critics.

AND NOT JUST THE POLAR ICE: Water found on Moon. “More practically, the widespread presence of water beneath the moon’s surface could prove a boon to future lunar colonies, who could harvest it for breathable oxygen and hydrogen fuel. Whether that is possible depends on the water’s extent and concentration. This is not now known.”

LARRY LESSIG: The Fairness Doctrine is unconstitutional. Well, yeah.

MICKEY KAUS: “Didn’t Jesse Jackson Sr. have a point? There is something condescending, or arrogant, in Obama’s lecture to a town hall meeting in Georgia. . . . Obama’s lecture to parents about how ‘you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish’? Also condescending! Especially since, as Abe Greenwald points out, Obama doesn’t speak Spanish.”

UPDATE: Related item here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Madhu Dahiya emails:

Actually, the substance of his ‘it’s embarrassing when Europeans come over here blah blah’ doesn’t really bother me. I just wish he wouldn’t say OUT LOUD how embarrassed he is by the very people he seeks to represent! I would think it a privilege to serve the American people, you know?

Yeah, you’d think.

GABRIEL CHIN: Why Senator John McCain Cannot Be President: Eleven Months and a Hundred Yards Short of Citizenship. At least nobody’s photoshopping his birth certificate.

WHAT’S WRONG WITH AMERICA TODAY:

After three weeks of clearing brush and poison ivy, scrounging up plywood and green paint, digging holes and pouring concrete, Vincent, Justin and about a dozen friends did manage to build it — a tree-shaded Wiffle ball version of Fenway Park complete with a 12-foot-tall green monster in center field, American flag by the left-field foul pole and colorful signs for Taco Bell Frutista Freezes.

But, alas, they had no idea just who would come — youthful Wiffle ball players, yes, but also angry neighbors and their lawyer, the police, the town nuisance officer and tree warden and other officials in all shapes and sizes. It turns out that one kid’s field of dreams is an adult’s dangerous nuisance, liability nightmare, inappropriate usurpation of green space, unpermitted special use or drag on property values, and their Wiffle-ball Fenway has become the talk of Greenwich and a suburban Rorschach test about youthful summers past and present.

Jeez. But read the whole thing to find out why it’s rational to be crazy these days.