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.”

THE COMPASSION OF GOVERNMENT-RUN HEALTH CARE:

A friend who visited him at the Rochester Psychiatric Center in February 1995 remembered that Mr. Langevin had pain in his jaw, eye and face that was not getting much attention from the staff. A week later, he was discovered unconscious, with a near-fatal infection spreading to his brain and other organs.

Mr. Langevin sued New York State, which operates the hospital, and probably would have won a sizable award. But the state countered by demanding that Mr. Langevin reimburse it $1.7 million for 10 years of inpatient care he had received. A judge sided with the state, and Mr. Langevin wound up with nothing.

Slip and fall in a New York prison, or suffer abuse by its guards, and inmates can keep whatever they win in court. But for patients in state-run mental hospitals — people too ill to live on their own and too poor to pay for their care — the state can drain court-awarded damages, effectively deducting the cost of their stays in the very hospitals that failed or abused them.

“It’s a Catch-22, isn’t it?” said Leo G. Finucane, the lawyer who represented Mr. Langevin. “I need to go to this facility because I’m sick. But if they hurt me worse, they’re immune.”

Read the whole thing.

PRAISE FOR THE SNAP CIRCUITS KIT: Reader Molly Heiss writes:

Thank you for the recommendation for Snap Circuits — we bought them for my son, age 8, for Christmas, and they are an excellent toy. Even the box is high quality. We got him Snap Circuits 500 — and he made his way through about 60 of the beginning projects before he started branching out on his own (the entire goal, in my opinion, is to get kids to branch out on their own).

HOURS of entertainment — thank you for finding it for us.

I gave a nephew the SC-750 after he devoured the SC-300 last year, and the experience was the same. I think those are great hands-on toys for kids.

UPDATE: Reader Alec Rawls emails:

I got my boy Snap-Circuits last Christmas. He liked it. This year he’s 11 and I got him Penny Norman’s “Inventions” kit (from ScienceWiz). It comes with semi-raw materials for a handful of key electrical inventions and wow, after a couple of hours in the corner he’s playing with motors and a telegraph that he made all by himself. Add’s a real excitement factor I think, and a good lesson: he doesn’t need pre-made stuff.

Good point. I like this from the description: “So much fun kids will think it’s dangerous even though it’s totally safe.” Under 20 bucks, too. Wish I’d known about this sooner.

HMM: The National Debt Relief Amendment Gains Momentum.

AT AMAZON, the After-Christmas Sale is in full swing.

NEAL MCCLUSKEY: Hurrah for ‘Draconian’ Education Cuts!

For far too long, almost anything related to education has seen pretty regular, sizeable funding increases due largely to the simplistic — and easily demagogued – notion that spending more money on education must be good. Anyone opposing such increases has generally been attacked as a fool or heartless idealogue. But here’s the thing: All this spending has produced little if any discernable good! In higher ed, it has mainly encouraged more and more people to pursue degrees that they either don’t need, can’t handle, or that don’t signify much learning, all while enabling colleges to raise their prices to capture the aid increases! In other words, all the magical thinking about education spending notwithstanding, the evidence strongly suggests that more spending ultimately does little educational good while bleeding taxpayers dry and expanding our utterly unsustainable debt.

So let’s get those “draconian” cuts going, and maybe even have an honest discussion of what really happens when government spends on “education.”

It is better to be educated than ignorant, but not all spending on educational institutions actually results in more or better education. Indeed, in some cases the return may be negative . . . .

UPDATE: Reader Bart Hall emails:

We are somewhat poorly served by applying the term “education” to what is now much more properly referenced as “schooling.” Those two used to overlap almost completely, and some the the greatest damage wrought by easy funding with other people’s money is that from pre-K to Ph.D. schools these days offer bloody little real education apart from the sciences and engineering. Things are likely to change.

Eight hundred years ago education was controlled by the church. Groups of independent scholars, using Latin as a common language, began to congregate apart from the church to pursue a true education. By mid-12th century this grew into the university movement — Hic et ubique terrarum (here and anyplace on earth) as they said in Paris in 1163. It took a century or so, but by AD 1400 the church no longer controlled education.

In our time education is controlled by the universities and their lower level minions. Once again groups of independent scholars, using English as a common language have begun to congregate apart from the universities — internet, home-schoolers, independent researchers, and many others — to pursue a true education. The pattern is repeating, for the very same reasons. Hic et ubique terrarum indeed.

It won’t take a century this time.