UNEMPLOYMENT, and small business “going Galt.”

DIAMONDS under a hundred bucks.

MCDONALD’S RESTAURANTS open at the Louvre. Well, it’s had a food court for years. I don’t think Mickey D’s can compete with Hector Le Poulet, though.

MORE GOOD NEWS on Polywell Fusion. Faster, please.

AT POPULAR SCIENCE: More reporting from the Singularity Summit.

THE UPSIDES AND DOWNSIDES OF outdoor wood-burning furnaces.

POLL: Fear of Losing Private Health Insurance Trumps ‘Public Option’. “Sixty-three percent (63%) of voters nationwide say guaranteeing that no one is forced to change their health insurance coverage is a higher priority than giving consumers the choice of a ‘public option’ health insurance company. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 29% take the opposite view.”

FROM ED MORRISSEY, A STRONG REVIEW for the Flip Ultra HD camcorder. Those are good. I just got my Kodak Zi8 in the mail and I’ve played with it a little — it seems very good so far, with surprisingly good video quality from something so small.. Advantages: Removable SD card, and jack for external microphone (importance of good audio is often underappreciated, but it’s huge), plus 5MP stills. These days, the more people out there who have some sort of camera, the better.

UPDATE: And not just for Tea Party coverage. J.D. Johannes emails:

On my last trip to Afghanistan I shot what was essentially a TV news package on a Flip Ultra HD.

I had hit Afghanistan expecting to spend the month with Soldiers and not turn any products until I got back to the US so I only had a net book instead of my large editing lap top. I shoot my video with a Canon XL-H which requires a fire-wire and/or a 1394 card bus and lots of processing power to handle the full quality HD video.

A friend of mine asked if I could turn a report for them in Afghanistan. By chance I bought a Flip to take snap shots and record other little clips with right before I flew to Afghanistan.

I double filmed everything on the Canon and the Flip. When it became obvious I would not be able to find a proper lap top, firewire and card bus in Afghanistan I had to use the Flip. I downloaded some inexpensive editing software from Pinnacle, transferred the video from the Flip to a lap top with slightly more horse power than a netbook and edited the package.

We even recorded all the narration tracks on the Flip.

The video held together very well when we played it through a projector onto a 60 inch screen. I knew the audio quality would not be great, so made sure I got right on my subjects during interviews.

The end product turned out better than I had anticipated. It also helped that I used the Flip like I would a real camera so I had all my shots and enough material to turn a package with.

The Flip was perfect for the ultra-low-profile work I did out on the streets. It fit in my pocket so I remained fairly anonymous while doing man-on-the-street style interviews. It also looks enough like a cell phone that you can record things without drawing any attention.

Everything in this blog post was done with a Flip Ultra HD.

The only thing it lacks is a plug for an external mic. If it had a plug for a lav or small shot gun mic, the Flip would be the perfect on-the-fly news gathering tool.

Well, the Kodak has an external mic jack. But this is pretty impressive stuff for a small consumer-grade gadget.

JOHN FUND on Grassroots activism.

IN THE MAIL: Upstarts!: How GenY Entrepreneurs are Rocking the World of Business and 8 Ways You Can Profit from Their Success.

MY WASHINGTON EXAMINER COLUMN: Nobody is applauding as Hollywood premieres Polanski defense. “Technologically and market-wise, Hollywood is in the weakest position it’s ever been, and yet it is also more arrogant than it was in its Golden Age.”

WHEN WILL CONGRESS investigate ACORN?

Evidence continues to accumulate from far and wide that the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now is lousy with corruption. The latest revelations come from Louisiana and Oklahoma. In the former, the local ACORN Housing Corp. office received contracts worth a combined $625,000 from the City of New Orleans for repairing existing low-income housing and developing new units in poor neighborhoods. The contracts were paid for with funds from federal Community Development Block Grants from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. An investigation by the Pelican Institute think tank of New Orleans, however, found that no work was actually performed to fulfill the contracts. Worse, Pelican couldn’t talk to the ACORN official managing the contracts because he had left the organization months ago. One more thing: The office address listed on the contracts for ACORN turned out to be a vacant lot, although new plumbing connections indicated a trailer had recently been located on the site.

Meanwhile, in Oklahoma City, documents found in a recently vacated ACORN office included a detailed memo titled “Power Plan” for a five-year effort to elect supportive legislators and transform Oklahoma to a progressive state “in the way it was 100 years ago.” The man in charge of the office left town without paying back rent or utility bills, according to OklahmaWatchdog.org. Also found in the documents was a script for a Houston ACORN-directed recruiting campaign for “hiring Outreach Workers to remind people to get out and vote for Barack Obama in the upcoming election.” As a tax-exempt nonprofit, ACORN is barred from participating in partisan election activities, and its national spokesmen have insisted throughout the 2008 presidential race that their organization was not working to elect Obama.

I’m not expecting much here from Congress.

WHY JANEANE GAROFALO’S COMMENTS ARE DANGEROUS.

CHRIS DODD UPDATE: President Obama to Appear at Fundraiser for Sen. Dodd on October 23. Wonder if any Tea Partiers will show up?

MIKE LUPICA: President Obama is no loser just because Chicago didn’t get 2016 Summer Olympics. “The biggest winners of all are the people of Chicago, because their city doesn’t have to plunge itself into debt to host the Olympics. This is the kind of winner New York was despite Michael Bloomberg’s insane quest to get the 2012 Games, which eventually – and blessedly – went to London. . . . The President doesn’t lose here because Rio de Janeiro wins. He never should have been in the game in the first place.”

UPDATE: “The layers of emotion pile up unattractively.”

CHANGE: World Bank could run out of money ‘within 12 months’.

THEY MADE A MULTILATERALISM AND CALLED IT PEACE. I’d have preferred a desert.

Plus this: “If you make enough social democratic promises, and combine that with the singularity of an aging population with many needs, sure, you can make decline come true.”

JACKSON DIEHL: The coming failure on Iran. Failure? How can we fail? If things get dicey, the President will just make a moving personal appeal. That always works.

Related: Israel names Russians helping Iran build nuclear bomb.

UPDATE: Epic Fail.

NYT SCRUBS EMBARRASSING OLYMPIC QUOTES? Lame.

MORE BLOGGING FROM THE SINGULARITY SUMMIT.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON IS WORRIED: “I am not a fan of the Obama agenda. But I don’t want an impotent Commander in Chief abroad for three very dangerous years to come. So I am worried that the U.S. will be crippled with a weak, unpopular executive, as happened to Bush (35% approvals) in 2007-8. Our currency is tanking. Our debts are climbing. Our energy needs are breaking us. Our borrowing is out of control. The country is divided in a 1859/1968 mode. And the world is smiling as Obama, now hesitant and without the old messianic confidence, presides over our accepted inevitable decline. The country needs to buck up and meet these challenges head on, since the world smells blood, whether in Iran, Russia, the Mideast, North Korea, or South America.” Plus, who to vote for next.

ROGER KIMBALL: Barbarians At The Gate, Cushing Academy Edition.

STIFLING 4G BROADBAND? I suspect there’s more to this story, but it’s troubling.

FLASHBACK: The Toys of Toy Story and Toy Story 2.

UNEMPLOYMENT: “If laid-off workers who have settled for part-time work or have given up looking for new jobs are included, the unemployment rate rose to 17 percent, the highest on records dating from 1994.”

UPDATE: Related item here: Early retirements mean it is worse than 9.8% unemployment. Plus this: “The stimulus backfired. It undermined confidence in the economy. And people are reacting. Not only are companies cutting back on employees, but workers are throwing in the towel. Rather than look for another job, they are retiring or filing for a disability.”