CHANGE: Bank failures at more than double last year’s pace.

UNDERFUNDED PUBLIC PENSION UPDATE: Pension ‘reform’ will cost Pa. $52 billion.

A LOOK AT “Egalitarian Superiority.”

RECOVERED: Thomas Edison’s words.

The unlikely resurrection story began when archivist Chris Hunter grew curious about 13 undocumented film canisters tucked away on a bottom shelf among 5 million items in the basement archives of the Schenectady Museum & Suits-Bueche Planetarium.

Hunter had no idea what they contained, aside from a few vague jottings that indicated they involved radio programs from the 1920s.

There was an even bigger obstacle to solving the mystery. He had no machine that could play them.

He might as well have been looking at ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. The canisters were not going to give up easily their mute secrets. . . . DeMuth accepted the challenge to try to unlock the film canister mystery. Using modern digital equipment and tinkering for hundreds of hours spread out across two years of nights and weekends, he created what is believed to be the only functional pallophotophone in the world.

With that, the trio magically loosed Edison’s voice, which had essentially been frozen in time for more than 80 years.

Cool.

DOCTOR ZERO: The Helpless Titan. “It’s not necessary to ignore the misdeeds of British Petroleum to criticize the appalling performance of our massive super-State. Big Government and Big Business have become so entwined that any disaster on the scale of the Gulf oil spill, or the subprime mortgage crisis before it, will have both public and private agencies to blame. Suggesting that government cannot be criticized until every one of its private-sector ‘partners’ has been bankrupted or nationalized is a recipe for tyranny. We should study the example of BP and understand that only one half of the government-business alliance can call press conferences at will, addressing a media prepared to extend them unlimited credit for their good intentions. One of the reasons Big Government is so helpless in the face of an actual crisis is that it never learns anything, because it evades blame and consequence for its failures. The politicians who brought you the subprime crisis are richer and more powerful than ever before. The Gulf oil crisis may well end the same way.”

TO YOUR HEALTH: Tea and coffee ‘protect against heart disease.’ “Drinking several cups of tea or coffee a day appears to protect against heart disease, a 13-year-long study from the Netherlands has found. It adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting health benefits from the most popular hot drinks.”

Next they’ll be telling us that sex is good for your health!

BILL QUICK OFFERS HIGH PRAISE for Will Warren’s new book, Unremitting Verse. Hey, they don’t call Warren the Poet Laureate Of The Blogosphere for nothing.

CORY DOCTOROW GETS PHISHED: “Here’s how I got fooled. . . . Phishing isn’t (just) about finding a person who is technically naive. It’s about attacking the seemingly impregnable defenses of the technically sophisticated until you find a single, incredibly unlikely, short-lived crack in the wall.” Nobody’s immune.

PAUL RAHE: Executive Temperament in Evidence: Bobby Jindal.

IN THE MAIL: The Squam Lake Report: Fixing the Financial System.

REASON TV: 3 Reasons The FCC Shouldn’t “Touch” The Internets!

TRANSPARENCY! Walpin defeat means president can fire IGs at will. “A federal judge in Washington has dismissed the wrongful-termination lawsuit filed by Gerald Walpin, the AmeriCorps inspector general who was fired last year by President Obama. And not just dismissed; if the decision by U.S. District Judge Richard Roberts stands, in the future the White House will be able fire other inspectors general as it fired Walpin without fear of legal consequences.”

TOUGH: “Lawmakers are increasingly frustrated with guerrilla-style reporters, bloggers and campaign operatives who ambush them on video to provoke an aggressive or outraged response.”

Try restraining yourself next time guys. Or go into another line of work. Meanwhile, here’s how to respond. You just have to know what you’re talking about . . . .

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD ON The Killings In Kyrgyzstan.

WELL, PEOPLE SEEM TO BE SHAVING EVERYTHING THESE DAYS: The Growing Popularity of Shaved Ice.

PEGGY NOONAN: A Snakebit President: Americans want leaders on whom the sun shines. “Mr. Obama is starting to look unlucky, and–file this under Mysteries of Leadership–that is dangerous for him because Americans get nervous when they have a snakebit president. They want presidents on whom the sun shines.”

Is it really luck? Or is it just lousy management?

UPDATE: Joy McCann is going with lousy management.

ACTUALLY, THAT’S A BEST-CASE SCENARIO: Der Spiegel: Will Obama Be The Jimmy Carter of the 21st Century?

MICHAEL BARONE: THEY DON’T LIKE THE DOG FOOD:

William Galston, than whom there is no better thinker among Democrats today, has been reading the same polls as his Brookings colleague E. J. Dionne, but takes a much harsher view of what Democrats can do. “In a blogpost on The New Republic website headlined “Prepare yourself for Speaker Boehner,” Galston tell House Democrats “it’s time to press the panic button,” and cites the analysis of political scientist Alan Abramowitz on Larry Sabato’s website and the analysis by Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg of the poll he and Republican pollster Glenn Bolger conducted for NPR. Here’s Galston’s advice for House Democrats: “

Democrats must face the fact that much of the legislation that seems both necessary and proper to them looks quite different to the portion of the electorate that holds the balance of political power. And they must face a choice as well—between (to be blunt) the politics of conviction and the politics of self-preservation. . . . It reminds me of the old story about the advertising agency and the dog food. The best ads in the world failed to increase sales of the dog food. So they sent a market researcher in and found the reason: The dogs didn’t like the dog food. The Democrats’ problem is similar. The American people don’t like the dog food (“legislation that seems both necessary and proper to them”) produced by the Obama Democrats

Read the whole thing.

ANOTHER FRIDAY, another bank shutdown.

NOT QUITE CHURCHILLIAN.

HE’S GOT A HISTORY: FORMER RESIDENT RECALLS RUN-IN WITH ETHERIDGE:

A video of Rep. Bob Etheridge physically confronting a college student in Washington brought back unpleasant memories for one former Moore County resident. . . .In the fall of 1996, when Leslie was a senior at Pinecrest High School, he said he met Etheridge at a Pinecrest football game. Etheridge – then the state superintendent of public instruction – was challenging incumbent Republican David Funderburk for his congressional seat. At the time, Moore County was part of the 2nd District, which Etheridge now represents.

Leslie said he introduced himself to Etheridge and asked him about his stance on a particular education program. He said Etheridge didn’t answer his question, so he pressed him two more times.

“And that’s when he grabbed me by the shoulders, he shook me, and I’ll never forget it, he said, ‘Son, you need to learn to respect your elders,'” he said by phone on Wednesday. “I was just so taken aback, I think my jaw just dropped, and he walked off.”

Leslie said he was angrier about Etheridge’s attitude and “patronizing” tone than the physical contact. . . . Leslie, a self-described Democrat who “supports the Obama agenda,” said watching the video was “almost like looking in a mirror.”

“He doesn’t like to be pressed,” he said. “He’s kind of a bully.”

It’s that arrogant sense of entitlement.

HOW REFLEXIVELY IGNORANT AND PERSONAL-ATTACKISH IS ANDREW SULLIVAN? This much.

Glenn Reynolds, Paranoid Gun Nut

Who else would fall for an hysterical conspiracy theory about the feds and the Internet?

Here’s Insta’s knee jerking:

If they shut down the Internet, I’m getting out my gun. And I think everyone should take it as a signal to do the same — because one way or the other, it means the country’s under attack.

He soon realizes he’s been had, although characteristically fails to take responsibility for the error. Stewart Baker:

There’s an Internet kill switch all right, but it ain’t in Washington. It’s in Beijing and Moscow. And soon in Pyongyang. The Lieberman-Collins-Carper bill, which might take the kill switch away from our foreign adversaries, will soon have bipartisan support in the House.

By “soon realizes,” Andrew means I linked to Baker in the same post — not even in an update. But Baker doesn’t actually say there’s no US kill switch. Baker thinks a US kill switch is a good idea, in response to threats from other countries. Meanwhile, let’s look at some other paranoids on this issue. There seem to be a lot of us:

While the bill’s sponsors say it is intended to create a shield to defend the United States and its largest companies from the growing threat of cyberattacks, civil-liberties activists tell The Daily Beast they fear the bill could give the White House the ability to effectively shut down portions of the Internet for reasons that could prove to be politically inspired.

“We have seen through recent history that in an emergency, the Executive Branch will interpret grants of power very broadly,” said Gregory Nojeim of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a group that promotes Internet freedom. He said the bill, which he described as moving “at lightning speed in congressional terms,” was too loosely worded in its definition of which companies would be regulated and what they would be required to do in an emergency.

Wayne Crews, vice president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-enterprise think tank, said he believed the bill was so broadly worded that it might even allow the White House to take aim at whistleblowing websites that were believed to pose a national-security threat, such as WikiLeaks, in the guise of a “cyber-emergency.” “That would be a concern of mine,” Crews tells The Daily Beast. “The way it seems to be worded, the bill could easily represent a threat to free speech.”

They’re also worried at The Huffington Post. And here’s a report from Declan McCullagh: “The idea of an Internet ‘kill switch’ that the president could flip is not new. A draft Senate proposal that CNET obtained in August allowed the White House to “declare a cybersecurity emergency,” and another from Sens. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.V.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) would have explicitly given the government the power to ‘order the disconnection’ of certain networks or Web sites.”

This would seem to be the same kind of bipartisan civil-liberties consensus that I thought Andrew favored, at least back before the election, but I guess he’s got reason now for unthinking loyalty where the Obama Administration is concerned. The rest of us, not so much . . .

And here’s something on the subject that I wrote for the Wall Street Journal last month. Readers can decide how paranoid it sounds.

As for the large numbers of readers who always email that I shouldn’t respond to Andrew’s trolling, well, I usually don’t. But every once in a while it’s worth noting just how sadly he’s declined. And, as is done with regard to a certain other attention-seeking blogger he’s coming to resemble, I’ll try to make it up to you with a picture of Joy Riddle.

UPDATE: A reader emails: “Andrew Sullivan, Paranoid Gyn Nut — Who else would fall for an hysterical conspiracy theory about the birth mother of Trig Palin?” Heh.

A MAN OF THE PEOPLE: Hundreds of Construction Workers Forced Into Unpaid Leave to Accommodate Obama Photo Op.

HEH: 6 Time Travel Realities Doc Brown Didn’t Warn Us About.

ALAN BOYLE: See The Solar Sail In Space.