THE BOFFO FINISH: And what to do about “pop culture amnesia.”

IN THE MAIL: From fellow Popular Mechanics Contributing Editor Jeff Wise, Extreme Fear: The Science of Your Mind in Danger. Looks very interesting.

MICHAEL S. MALONE ON INTERNET FREEDOM: Two cheers for Google and Secretary of State Clinton.

THEODORE DALRYMPLE: A modest proposal for curing back pain.

PHOTO: Supplies sitting idle at Port Au Prince airport.

OVER AT HILLBUZZ, not taking kindly to threats. As I’ve noted in the past, it’s almost always a mistake to threaten bloggers.

MORE THOUGHTS ON inflation fears. “Inflation is not something you should be afraid of for 2010. But what we need is a convincing commitment from the government to both near-term stimulus and longer-term fiscal responsibility in order to be assured that it’s not a concern over the next decade. And that’s not what I’m seeing from the U.S. Congress.”

OOPS: Wind Turbines Leave Clouds and Energy Inefficiency In Their Wake.

ANNOUNCING THE Tournament Of Books field.

TELEGRAPH: Pachauri: the real story behind the Glaciergate scandal. “Dr Pachauri has rapidly distanced himself from the IPCC’s baseless claim about vanishing glaciers. But the scientist who made the claim now works for Pachauri.”

FOUND? ELLIE LIGHT.

UPDATE: Heh.

JOE SCARBOROUGH: Will the Tea Party tear itself apart? Some people certainly hope so, but I’m not seeing it. That Tea Party folks could look at Scott Brown and see that while he might not be an example of Tea Party perfection, he was good enough, and well-positioned to kill ObamaCare, bespeaks a lot more political maturity than many were willing to credit Tea Party activists with.

CONAN OBAMA.

UH OH: Glacier scientist: I knew data hadn’t been verified. “The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders. Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.”

“MR. RIGHT” has left the building.

IF YOU MISSED IT ON SIRIUS-XM SATELLITE RADIO LAST NIGHT, the latest PJM Political is now online.

THE SYSTEM WORKED:

Barry Eynon of Coopersburg, Pa., said in a phone interview that he was in the third row when another passsenger “saw this person trying to open the airplane door and trying to get into the cockpit.” The other passenger “jumped up and grabbed him from behind and yelled for help.”

Eynon said, “I jumped up and grabbed him from the front.”

Three or four other passengers also helped to subdue the man, putting him in a seat and ensuring he remained there, Eynon said.

Somebody ought to come up with a name for this surprisingly effective approach to security . . . .

UPDATE: Reader Richard Macklin writes:

It would be worth updating with a comparison of the Pack response to 9/11 and the Herd response to Katrina. Particularly looking at how much of the federal response is based on the expectation of a pack mentality and how that factored into the “failures” of FEMA.

Hmm. Good point.

“IT CAN’T POSSIBLY FAIL.”

WASHINGTON POST: Did the Obama administration blow an opportunity in the Flight 253 case? “It is now clear that the administration did not give serious thought to anything but Door No. 1. This was myopic, irresponsible and potentially dangerous.”

A YEAR AGO IT WAS ALL “HOPE AND CHANGE,” but now it’s Leviathan stirs again.

Today big government is back with a vengeance: not just as a brute fact, but as a vigorous ideology. Britain’s public spending is set to exceed 50% of GDP (see chart 1). America’s financial capital has shifted from New York to Washington, DC, and the government has been trying to extend its control over the health-care industry. Huge state-run companies such as Gazprom and PetroChina are on the march. Nicolas Sarkozy, having run for office as a French Margaret Thatcher, now argues that the main feature of the credit crisis is “the return of the state, the end of the ideology of public powerlessness”.

“The return of the state” is stirring up fiery opposition as well as praise. In America the Republican Party’s anti-government base is more agitated than it has been at any time since the days of the Gingrich revolution in 1994. “Tea-party” protesters have been marching across the country with an amusing assortment of banners and buttons: “Born free, taxed to death” and “God only requires 10%”. On January 19th Scott Brown, a Republican, captured the Massachusetts Senate seat long held by the late Ted Kennedy, America’s most prominent supporter of big-government liberalism. . . .

“The question that we ask today”, said Barack Obama in his inaugural address, “is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works.” This is clearly naive: with deficits soaring, nobody can afford to ignore the size of government. Mr Obama’s appeal for pragmatism has some value: conservative attempts to roll back government regulations have led to disaster in the finance industry. But left-wing attempts to defend entitlements and public-sector privileges willy-nilly will condemn the state to collapse under its own weight.

Read the whole thing.

CAN YOU pass a polygraph? “You’ll have to take a polygraph exam and get multiple security clearances if you want to be Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s associate lab director for global security.”

TENS OF THOUSANDS PROTEST CHAVEZ IN CARACAS. I maybe be wrong, but it seems to me that the time for protesting is over there, and the time for more serious action has arrived.

TEA PARTY UPDATE: Quincy Tea Party Event Standing Room Only Success.

DAN RIEHL: “What is it, exactly, MSNBC is doing that no one else is – besides failing?”

FLIGHT DIVERTED after man tried to open door midflight.