WHAT EVERYONE NEEDS: An Easy Screw.

JOHN HINDERAKER: A Father’s Day Story.

WELL, I FELT LIKE MY LIFE HAD LASTED TOO LONG just reading this column by Jon Weiner.

More seriously, I’ve had some thoughts on the subject of life-extension here and here. Also here.

DOUBTS ABOUT THE BENEFITS of biomass power. All this “green” stuff seems to be underperforming the hype lately. . . .

FORGET WATERBOARDING: Heavyset confessed rapist claims police used heavy-handed diet tactics. “Bruce Tuck, the confessed serial rapist identifiable by his oversized waistline, now says he was coerced into confessing by Weakley County authorities who had him on a lettuce-only diet while in jail last year.”

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR MCCAIN, AMERICANS WOULD BE SHUNNED ABROAD — And they were right!

American expatriates are fast becoming the world’s financial refugees. Onerous legislation from the U.S. government is making it too difficult – and too expensive – for banks to service U.S. citizens that live abroad. Expats are being left with a fast diminishing range of options. An increasing number are taking the most drastic step and renouncing their citizenship.

Ouch.

THE MISSING GATES: Reader John Koisch makes an interesting observation:

For as long as I can recall, the media dubbed everything scandalous a “gate” of some sort after the famous Watergate. So we had Watergate, Contragate, and of course the blogosphere had Rathergate, and so on.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scandals_with_%22-gate%22_suffix

I can’t recall a single “xxxgate” since Obama came to office, at least not in common parlance.

On the one hand, it is welcome relief from a tired meme. But on the other, I wonder if the lack of Londongate, Stupakgate, Oilgate, Golfgate, [the democrat who was anti-abortion and wouldn’t vote for the healthcare bill, but did anyway once he got a hug from Obama]gate, Tarpgate, and so on indicates some sort of complicity amongst the MSM?

It strikes me odd.

Hmm. It’s not as if there haven’t been scandals. . . .

UPDATE: Several readers suggest “Profli-Gate” as the catch-all description for this Administration . . .

OUCH: MORE PROFLIGATE THAN THE EUROPEANS. “It was bad enough when France’s President Sarkozy lectured Barack Obama on how to conduct a strong foreign policy. Then, it was: the Obama administration–weaker than the French! Now, it is: the Obama administration–more profligate than the Europeans! Germany’s Angela Merkel rejects Obama’s call for more government debt, world-wide.”

WHAT DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND about “No Asians?” Nice.

T.M. LUTAS: It’s easy to have a disciplined euro, but nobody would want to join. Wouldn’t a disciplined Euro be called the “Deutschmark?”

BIG GOVERNMENT: Has Anyone Noticed that the “Damn Hole” Is Still Not Plugged?

HAPPY JUNETEENTH.

MICKEY KAUS: Why “Triangulation” Beats “Transcendence.”

STEWART BAKER, guestblogging, says:

I feel a little like Marshall McLuhan in the last funny Woody Allen movie.  Glenn has invited me to step into the debate between him and Andrew Sullivan about the Lieberman-Collins cybersecurity bill and its alleged Internet kill switch.

Andrew Sullivan will probably regret this in the long run, but he and I agree. (To his credit, Glenn knew that when he invited me to post here).

The widespread claim that the bill contains a kill switch is, well, a bunch of bull switch.

The epithet “Internet kill switch” was first coined to describe (to attack, really) a much different bill proposed by a different committee.  Maybe that bill justified the term.

But Lieberman’s bill doesn’t.  It is a lot more limited and careful in responding to a serious threat — the possibility that another nation might use our increasingly networked infrastructure to disrupt phone, banking, and power service in large parts of the country.  Since those services are in private hands, the government needs some legislative authority to respond to such an attack.  (We don’t usually ask private companies to respond to military attacks on their own.)

So what authority does the bill propose to give the government? To cut to the chase, it doesn’t grant authority over “the Internet.”  It gives the President the power to order certain critical infrastructure owners to protect themselves in a coordinated way.

Here’s a more detailed breakdown of who’s covered (My apologies, but this is a little complicated.)

• First, to be covered, an asset must be part of the critical infrastructure, which is defined under existing law as systems and assets “so vital to the United States that the incapacity or destruction of such systems and assets would have a debilitating impact on security, national economic security, national public health or safety, or any combination of those matters.”  That is pretty carefully focused on things like nuclear power plants and the New York Stock Exchange, not the Internet at large .
• Second, under section 241, even assets that arguably fit this definition are not covered unless they are identified on a list prepared by DHS (as far as I know, the list has not made public, because we don’t want to give adversaries a handy list of the best targets).
• Third, the authority only applies to a portion of that list, specifically to IT systems that support (or are themselves) critical infrastructure.

So the authority doesn’t extend to the Internet writ large, only to certain identified IT systems whose loss would have a debilitating effect on national security, health and safety.  It can’t be used to shut down the blogosphere, not even if Secretary Napolitano finds it personally debilitating not to get a morning fix of Andrew Sullivan.

Okay; it doesn’t cover the whole Internet.  But at least it’s a “kill switch” for the networks it covers, right?

Nope, not that, either.  Under the bill, in an emergency, section 249 of the bill lets the government order owners of critical infrastructure to do two things:

• First, the government can tell them to implement their own emergency response plans, which are required by a different section (248) of the bill.
• Second, the government can “develop and coordinate emergency measures or actions necessary to preserve the reliable operation, and mitigate or remediate  the consequences” of an attack. And in developing these measures, the government must choose “the “least disruptive means feasible.”

No doubt there’s room for quibbling and improvement in the bill’s language, but a kill switch it ain’t.

In short, if you think that a cyberattack is possible, and I’ve devoted big chunks of a website to explaining why an attack is highly likely, then this bill simply gives the President the minimum authority he’ll need to assure protection for our most important assets — like phones, banks, power.

Then why is the blogosphere, right and left, full of fulmination about the kill switch?  This post is long enough already, so I’ll just say that I think it’s a combination of privacy ideologues who automatically condemn new government authorities, even necessary ones, and anti-regulatory business interests — what I call the privacy-industrial complex. If you want to know more, it’s a theme I develop at length in Skating on Stilts.

[Glenn adds: Me, a dupe of the privacy-industrial complex? Say it ain’t so! But I’m sure Andrew won’t be troubled by these powers when they’re employed by the Palin Administration!]

THE END OF THE DESKTOP PC? Soon there will be no reason to have a big, boxy computer on your desk. Really? I use laptops/netbooks a lot, but for serious writing I still prefer the desktop in my study. Am I old-fashioned?

IMPORTANT NEWS: The 4 Surprising Beauty Benefits of Sex for Your Skin. In case you were wondering about the source of my youthful glow. . . .

ROUNDUP: Television’s best dads. How could they leave out Gomez Addams? Sure, his parenting was unorthodox, but it was done with brio!

FROM STEPHEN GREEN, it’s The Week In Blogs!

FIRST NORTH KOREA EMBRACES FREE MARKETS, NOW THIS: Russia Getting Rid of Capital Gains Tax. I have seen the future, and it works! Onward to capitalism, comrades!

MORT ZUCKERMAN: World Sees Obama as Incompetent and Amateur. “The reviews of Obama’s performance have been disappointing. He has seemed uncomfortable in the role of leading other nations, and often seems to suggest there is nothing special about America’s role in the world. The global community was puzzled over the pictures of Obama bowing to some of the world’s leaders and surprised by his gratuitous criticisms of and apologies for America’s foreign policy under the previous administration of George W. Bush. One Middle East authority, Fouad Ajami, pointed out that Obama seems unaware that it is bad form and even a great moral lapse to speak ill of one’s own tribe while in the lands of others. Even in Britain, for decades our closest ally, the talk in the press—supported by polls—is about the end of the ‘special relationship’ with America. French President Nicolas Sarkozy openly criticized Obama for months, including a direct attack on his policies at the United Nations. Sarkozy cited the need to recognize the real world, not the virtual world, a clear reference to Obama’s speech on nuclear weapons. When the French president is seen as tougher than the American president, you have to know that something is awry.”

Hard to argue, but Bill Quick is unimpressed to see former Obama-boosters like Zuckerman and Peggy Noonan realizing their mistakes now:

Listen up, you punked, chumped boobs: We looked at Obama not through your rose colored hallucinations, but through the cold, clear spectacles of reality. None of what he’s done since has surprised us one bit. In fact, many of us, myself included, predicted it even before his coronation by people like you. Yes, it’s nice that after a year and a half of horrible examples, the truth about him is finally beginning to penetrate your skulls. But why, for the love of god, couldn’t you see it at the beginning, when it was no less obvious, but your understanding of it might have done some good?

Because he went to Harvard. Duh.

STARTUP WILL OFFER PATIENTS a genetic profile of their cancer. “Many cancer researchers believe that therapies could be more effective if they target genetic aberrations in a patient’s cancer. In recent years, there have been a handful of successes in targeting cancer treatments in this way: for example, the drug Herceptin can be effective in breast cancer patients with a specific mutation in the HER2 gene. But so far, this kind of targeted cancer treatment has been limited to a select few genetic mutations in specific cancers, even though most cancers derive from several genetic mutations in combination. Foundation Medicine wants to create a test that gives a comprehensive view of the genetic aberrations in a cancer sample.”

BUMMER: The euro’s inevitable failure will be horrendous for all of us. Perhaps some of those “precautionary principle” fans should have spent more time thinking about possible consequences of a Euro collapse before adopting the single currency. But have you noticed that the precautionary principle only gets applied to technology, not politics or vast government schemes?

FATHER’S DAY: It’s not too late to send an Amazon Gift Card.

DUELING OUT-OF-TOUCHERS? White House chief: Yacht trip another gaffe by BP.

The Hill: Obama hits golf course with Biden on another hot, humid weekend.

UPDATE: I’m not the only one to note the contradiction. Love the pic.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Obama Says He “Won’t Rest Until Leak Is Stopped”… Then Attends Nationals Baseball Game (Video). It’s just an endless stream of PR gaffes with these people.

MORE: Drudge is having fun.

A HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE? More thoughts.