CLEARING OUT SPACE JUNK with giant balloons?

THE SCIENCE OF SLEEPOVERS: “The booty call relationship gives the guy easy access to sex, and gives the woman a steady partner.”

UPDATE: A reader emails: “My wife and I just read the abstract on booty calls and had a good chuckle. We were each others booty call for 7 years. We got married in Costa Rica on February 26 and are celebrating with a party tomorrow, not as extravagant as a Clinton wedding but a nice party none the less. In our humble opinion, our booty call made for a solid foundation for a great relationship.”

FASTER, PLEASE: Platinum-nanoparticle-based catalyst could lead to low-cost, stable fuel cells.

GET YOUR REST: One Night Of Sleep Not Enough To Make Up Deficit.

DAN RIEHL: Video: How Desperate Is Letterman In Breitbart Attack? This Desperate. “Watch him go on about getting the facts right, while getting them completely wrong.”

FASTER, PLEASE: Researchers find metabolic pathway in malaria parasites; possible drug targets.

ELENA KAGAN CONFIRMED.

HIDDEN HISTORY UNVEILED: Howard Zinn’s FBI File: What It Reveals.

UPS AND DOWNS OF THE raw food diet.

MEGAN MCARDLE: The Limits Of Policy Analysis.

A QUICKER TEST for hybrid batteries.

THE SEARCH FOR a stress vaccine.

JENNIFER BOGO: Skydiving From 120,000 Feet.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How to win Rock-paper-scissors every time.

OUT TODAY: My friend Amy Bourret’s new novel, Mothers And Other Liars.

IN THE MAIL: In Brown’s Wake: Legacies of America’s Educational Landmark.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The Kerry Yacht As A Teachable Moment. “Once again, a liberal proponent of higher and more redistributive taxes (e.g., Daschle, Geithner, Rangel) has acted antithetically to what he professes. In his 2004 campaign, Kerry alleged near-treasonous behavior (‘Benedict Arnold’) on the part of companies that relocated out of the country to seek lower taxes. The psychology of this hypocrisy is hard to figure: Does the technocratic guardian class believe that, as an overseeing nomenklatura, the laws should not apply to them? Does loud support for taxes in the abstract serve as some sort of surrogate ethical compensation for avoiding them in the concrete? Or is there an assumption that such elites won’t get caught (remember, Geithner and Kerry only paid up when public attention turned to their avoidance)?” Follow the link for more lessons.

UPDATE: The Obama Elite vs The American People.

DAVID RITTGERS:

I finally found the time to go through the WikiLeaks’ Afghan War Diary entries containing accounts of my 2004 tour in Afghanistan (my third tour; appropriate bio and disclaimer can be found here).

I am underwhelmed. I am not sure what Julian Assange thought the release of these documents would tell people about the war in Afghanistan, beyond the fact that people are shooting at each other and that, generally speaking, war is Hell. If I identified the entries associated with my service in Afghanistan, you would read summaries of the firefights and rocket attacks that my unit faced, with metrics of rounds fired and received and associated casualties.

Parallel to Noah Schachtman’s excellent write-up contrasting his experiences while embedded with Marines in Helmand Province versus what WikiLeaks provides, you would have little visibility on the actual maneuver of troops, the relationship that they have with the populace, and the effectiveness of Afghan forces. Reading WikiLeaks alone would give you a picture of the Afghan War that falls short of what you can get from normal press outlets.

This skewed portrait of our policy comes at no small price. The identification of our intelligence contacts and sources is sure to put their lives in danger, as Steve Coll and (more importantly) Taliban spokesmen point out.

But Assange is a hero to the press. Now that Breitbart fellow, on the other hand. . . .

INSIDER TRADING inside the Beltway. “A 2004 study of the results of stock trading by United States Senators during the 1990s found that that Senators on average beat the market by 12% a year. In sharp contrast, U.S. households on average underperformed the market by 1.4% a year and even corporate insiders on average beat the market by only about 6% a year during that period. A reasonable inference is that some Senators had access to – and were using – material nonpublic information about the companies in whose stock they trade.”

MARK TAPSCOTT: Gulf widening between ‘Political Class’ and most Americans. “That the gulf between these two Americas is growing wider is seen most disturbingly in Rasmussen’s finding that less than a quarter of Mainstream America now believe the government has the consent of the governed. Washington has a profound credibility crisis.”

JAMES PETHOKOUKIS: An August Surprise from Obama? “Rumors are running wild from Washington to Wall Street that the Obama administration is about to order government-controlled lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to forgive a portion of the mortgage debt of millions of Americans who owe more than what their homes are worth. . . . The political calculation is that the number of grateful Americans would be greater than those offended that they — and their children and their grandchildren — would be paying for someone else’s mortgage woes.” Idiots. Well, I’ve still got my Honk If You’re Paying My Mortgage bumper sticker!

UPDATE: Reader Fred Butzen writes:

You have your “HONK IF YOU’RE PAYING MY MORTGAGE” bumper sticker. Do you also have one for me: “I PAID OFF MY MORTGAGE: I AM A FOOL”?

Nope, but if this happens they’ll be for sale on CafePress within 20 minutes . . . .

ANOTHER UPDATE: A hedge fund reader emails:

I am now seeing institutional brokers urging their customers to pull money out of the mortgage market to avoid taking losses if and when Obama arbitrarily changes the rules yet again.

At what point does political social engineering become willful destruction?

Oh, about this point, I’d say.

ROGER KIMBALL: Annals of Swinishness, New York Times edition.

THERE’S THAT WORD AGAIN! Jobless Claims in U.S. Unexpectedly Climb to Three-Month High. Plus, last week’s number was revised upward. This whole “Recovery Summer” thing is proving to be unexpectedly lame.

UPDATE: Related: Food stamp use hit record 40.8m in May. “The number of Americans who are receiving food stamps rose to a record 40.8 million in May as the jobless rate hovered near a 27-year high, the government reported yesterday.”

Hope and change!

A LIST OF COOK’S ILLUSTRATED-APPROVED kitchen tools.

FROM PJTV: “Minority Report,” A New Show On Conservative Minorities.