BRIT: I Deeply Resent the Americans Sneering At Our Health Service: But Perhaps That’s Because the Truth Hurts.

ANOTHER DEM JUMPS SHIP: Conrad Won’t Vote for Public Plan. “Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D. presented his cooperative health care proposal here Thursday and told an audience of 100 that he would not vote for a government-run health care program.”

JONATHAN ADLER REPORTS FROM MONTANA:

As for the President’s visit, most of the national coverage I’ve seen stressed the generally favorable audience at the town hall. For what it’s worth, the local coverage I’ve seen and heard out here has stressed that anti-ObamaCare protestors substantially outnumbered supporters outside the meeting. This should not be surprising — this is Montana.

And the reporting shouldn’t be surprising — this is the media.

YES WE DID: Jim Treacher updates the t-shirts.

GUESS I’LL SKIP THE GYM AND GO HAVE A BEER INSTEAD: Potbellies Become Stylish. And we can thank President Obama! “Hipsters, by nature contrarian, according to Dan Peres, the editor of Details, may be reacting in opposition to a president who is not only, as the press relentlessly reminds us, So Darn Smart, but also hits the gym every morning, has a conspicuously flat belly and, when not rescuing the economy or sparring with Kim Jong-il, shoots hoops. ‘If we had a slob in the White House, all the hipsters would turn into some walking Chippendales calendar,’ Mr. Peres said. Instead, the streets of Williamsburg are crowded with men who are, as he noted, ‘proudly rocking a gut.'”

So does this mean that we could solve our national obesity problem by electing Jack Black?

A REPORT FROM THE HUGO AWARDS, with pictures. There are more attractive women than I would have expected.

P.J. O’ROURKE ON REASON TV: Where Was The Government With Studebaker? Plus this: “Politics is the attempt to achieve power and prestige without merit.”

I haven’t read his new book, Driving Like Crazy, but I expect it’s good.

IIHS ANNOUNCES crash test success for the Toyota Prius, Kia Soul, and Honda Insight.

TOSHIBA ANNOUNCES world’s largest SD card. “Toshiba has announced the world’s largest SD memory card, a 64-gigabyte card that employs the new SDXC (XC for extended capacity) memory standard.” It wasn’t so long ago that a 512 MB card was a big deal . . . .

ARE YOU THERE ALIENS? It’s me, Earth.

MORE ON THOSE ALLEGED “HATE GROUPS.”

Plus this: Black Man Pleads Guilty to Posing as Obama-Hating White Supremacist on Facebook. “An African-American man from Mississippi admits posing as a white supremacist to send a death threat across state lines by Facebook. The U.S. Attorney’s Office says 20-year-old Dyron L. Hart of Poplarville pleaded guilty Wednesday in federal court to making a threat in November 2008. Hart admitted creating a name and using a white supremacists’ photo to pose as a white man who planned to kill blacks because Barack Obama had been elected president.”

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Capping Two-faced ‘Janus’ Nanoparticle Gives Engineers Complete Control.

IT’S WABBIT SEASON.

GOVERNMENT SURVEILLANCE targets license plates.

REMEMBER, IF YOU OPPOSE OBAMA’S POLICIES, YOU’RE A RACIST, FASCIST HATER: Fear for Obama’s Safety Grows as Hate Groups Thrive on Racial Backlash. As others have noted, we didn’t see this kind of concern when people were saying the same kinds of things about Bush. This storyline seems like a pretty transparent effort to delegitimize the protesters particularly when you see who’s quoted. But perhaps — as some did during the Bush era on the few occasions when they deigned to notice the hate — we should ask what Obama has done to so divide the country?

Meanwhile, Matt Welch notes a lot of pundits who seem eager to turn Obama-opposition into race-war. And here I thought the Obama presidency was supposed to usher in a post-racial America. How’s that working out so far?

Plus, watch out for all those anti-Obamacare fascists!

And Jesse Walker called it: The Paranoids Are Out To Get Me!

BOYCOTTING WHOLE FOODS over an anti-Obamacare op-ed.

THE IRANIAN MULLAHS are watching PJTV.

2006 TOWN HALL FLASHBACK: PELOSI TELLS ANTI-WAR PROTESTERS ‘I’M A FAN OF DISRUPTORS’.

A PHYSICIST PROPOSES LAWS OF TIME TRAVEL.

He omits Niven’s Law of Time Travel, though: “If the universe of discourse permits the possibility of time travel and of changing the past, then no time machine will be invented in that universe.” The reason is that if it’s possible to change the past — and, thus the present — change will continue until it reaches the stable state in which no time machine is invented anywhere. Or as Hans Moravec glosses it:

There is a spookier possibility. Suppose it is easy to send messages to the past, but that forward causality also holds (i.e. past events determine the future). In one way of reasoning about it, a message sent to the past will “alter” the entire history following its receipt, including the event that sent it, and thus the message itself. Thus altered, the message will change the past in a different way, and so on, until some “equilibrium” is reached–the simplest being the situation where no message at all is sent. Time travel may thus act to erase itself

So maybe it already has.

WILL ELECTRIC CARS wreck the grid?

DON’T TELL ME HOW THIS ENDS: Michael Totten on Iraq. “The uptick in violence following America’s partial withdrawal shouldn’t shock anyone. If you scale back security on the streets, more violence and crime are inevitable. The same thing would happen in the United States if local police departments purged the better half of their officers. That does not mean, however, that Iraq is doomed to revert to war.” I certainly hope not. I still think we’re pulling back more quickly than is optimal.

MICHAEL MALONE: The Myth of Valley Wages.

REMEMBERING Super Friends, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and more.

KILLING cancer stem cells.

IN THE MAIL: From Stephen McClellan, Full of Bull (Updated Edition): Unscramble Wall Street Doubletalk to Protect and Build Your Portfolio.