THE IMPORTANCE OF “sexual simmering.”

MORE cheap external hard drives.

DECRYPTION: Coded American Civil War message in bottle deciphered. “A message in a bottle delivered to a Confederate general during the American Civil War has been deciphered, 147 years after it was written.”

JUAN WILLIAMS says that Sarah Palin can’t stand on the same intellectual stage as Barack Obama. He offers no evidence, however, for the proposition that Obama is particularly bright, and I can’t say I see a big difference.

Obama’s former colleague Richard Epstein says:

I like Obama but I reject the suggestion that he is an intellectual. He is an activist merely mimicking the mannerisms of an intellectual.

Personally, I think Richard Epstein’s a better judge of who’s intellectual than Juan Williams is. But I think most of the press — for whom the phrase “an activist merely mimicking the mannerisms of an intellectual” may also apply — is easier to fool.

CARS THAT WILL MAKE IT PAST 200,000 MILES. My nephew has a Jeep Cherokee that’s got over 220,000 and is still going strong.

ANTISEMITISM IN THE UNITED STATES: At an all-time low? Probably, notwithstanding Mel Gibson, Helen Thomas, and Rick Sanchez.

MORE LEGAL PROBLEMS FOR BLOOMBERG’S ANTI-GUN MAYORS’ GROUP: “The number of mayors in Bloomberg’s group that are facing felony and lesser charges is simply astounding.” Well, not so astounding when you consider that they’re politicians.

SEROTONIN GENE VARIANT that makes people violent when drunk.

RICHARD FERNANDEZ: “Just what is inappropriate in modern society is a matter of intense debate. Morals legislation appears to be as pervasive as ever. Nothing in the current environment suggests there exist opinions on which you may not be lectured. The extent of what is out of bounds is growing all the time. What has changed is the contents of that proscribed area.”

LOSING WEIGHT BY eating 20 potatoes a day. More here.

GEORGE WILL: WHAT TO DO ABOUT Beggar States. “Principal author of the Public Employee Pension Transparency Act is Rep. Devin Nunes, a Republican from California, where about 80 cents of every government dollar goes for government employees’ pay and benefits. His bill would define the scale of the problem of underfunded state and local government pensions and would notify states not to approach Congress like Oliver Twists, holding out porridge bowls and asking for more. . . . Oliver Twist did not choose his fate. California, New York and Illinois – three states whose conditions are especially parlous – did. And in November, each of these deep-blue states elected Democratic governors beholden to public employee unions.”

KAY HYMOWITZ: The End Of Middle America?

CLAIRE BERLINSKI IS PLANNING time-travel vacations. Do we get to go forward, or just back?

BYRON YORK: Frank Rich Rewrites History.

SCOTT JOHNSON: Gangster Government, FCC Edition.

LEONARD DAVID reviews Dave Baiocchi and William Weiser’s Confronting Space Debris: Strategies and Warnings from Comparable Examples Including Deepwater Horizon.

You can get it as a free eBook here.

CHANGE: Nanotechnology-enabled quantum computing may fuel a security race.

DRUG-WAR MISSION CREEP: “The Drug Enforcement Administration has been transformed into a global intelligence organization with a reach that extends far beyond narcotics, and an eavesdropping operation so expansive it has to fend off foreign politicians who want to use it against their political enemies, according to secret diplomatic cables.”

IN THE MAIL: From Oleg Atbashian, Shakedown Socialism: Unions, Pitchforks, Collective Greed, The Fallacy of Economic Equality, and other Optical Illusions of “Redistributive Justice.”

MICHAEL BARONE: Even After Shellacking, 2012 Looks OK For Obama. “Obama has obviously figured out that Americans prefer to see their president describe the glass as half full rather than half empty. That’s a good lesson for him, and for Republicans as well, especially those who believe that the Obama Democrats’ shellacking in the midterms means that Obama himself will definitely lose in 2012.”