I BLAME IPODS: Rising Teen Hearing Loss. “The bummer here is that listening to, say, Dark Side Of The Moon or Exile On Main St. is best done with plenty of volume.”

AMBITIOUS, INCREDIBLE, Do-It-Yourself Telescopes.

A NISSAN LEAF PRICE WAR? “After reporting that at least one Nissan dealer has committed to selling the upcoming Leaf for $1,000 below MSRP, we assumed that others would slowly follow suit. Well, sure ’nuff, another dealership has announced it will match or beat any offer out there, including the claimed $1,000 off of MSRP.”

NUANCE: Pelosi Tries to “Walk Back” Her Call to Investigate the Mosque Protesters.

PRACTICING “CONVICTION POLITICS.” I look forward to seeing the convictions.

LEARNING ABOUT ARTHRITIS from the majestic moose. “The arthritic Bullwinkles got that way because of poor nutrition early in life, an extraordinary 50-year research project has discovered. That could mean, scientists say, that some people’s arthritis can be linked in part to nutritional deficits, in the womb and possibly throughout childhood.”

A moose once bit my sister. No, really. And moose bites can be pretty nasty. Maybe he was just trying to make up for a nutritional deficit.

ANN ALTHOUSE ON AVASTIN: “There are death panels. They don’t want to be seen as death panels, because to be seen as death panels will undermine their relentless, bureaucratic work. So see them.” And name names, which, as I’ve noted before, undercuts the diffusion of responsibility that bureaucrats prefer. In this case, some names are Wyndham Wilson, the chair of the committee, and Richard Pazdur, the FDA’s cancer chief. Also committee members Natalie Compagni Portis, and Jean Grem, both quoted here.

And, as Mickey Kaus reminds us, this is all part of the ObamaCare cost-containment plan. The man behind that is named Barack Obama.

STATE SPENDING RESTRAINT: An Analysis Of The Path Not Taken. “Since the close of World War II, aggregate state and local spending grew 34 percent faster than the private sector and 37 percent faster than federal government spending. In recent years, the difference in growth rates has widened.”

SUFFERING FROM A “quarter-life crisis.” I’d like to mock this, but in fact the oldest I ever felt was on my 25th birthday. It’s all been downhill from there.

VERONIQUE DE RUGY: Stimulus And Job Creation. “As you can see, we are far from the millions of jobs promised by Christina Romer and the White House.” Heck, even Barney Frank is admitting that.

IN THE MAIL: The Kitchen Shrink: A Psychiatrist’s Reflections on Healing in a Changing World.

BETTER SAFE THAN SORRY: Chocolate Cuts Heart Failure Risk?

SILICON GRAFFITI: The Quotable Harry Reid.

TOM BLUMER: The Ruling Class Takes Care Of Its Own. “It’s safe to say that the disconnect between the resourceful, wealth-producing private sector and the resource-draining, wealth-destroying public sector has never been greater. . . . To see that the ruling class currently has the upper hand, one need look no further than an August 10 USA Today report covering federal, state, and private sector compensation filed by Dennis Cauchon.”

KEVIN WILLIAMSON: News flash: This is not 1982, and Obama is not Reagan. “The important difference is this: There was a good reason for the Volcker-Reagan recession: defeating inflation. American voters may not be terribly economically sophisticated, but they sure as heck did notice when inflation went from 13.5 percent to 3.2 percent — in two years. . . . What, precisely, will we have to show for having come through the Obama recession(s)? A gigantic new federal entitlement program? Staggering amounts of debt? Persistently high levels of unemployment? That’s the best-case scenario.”

UPDATE: A hedge-fund reader emails with another difference between now and 1982:

There was no limit to how high Volcker could let interest rates rise, in his successful fight against inflation. And the aftermath would be a feel-good rate decline.

Bernanke now faces an absolute limit, zero, on how low he can set rates to prevent deflation…and the end game has to be an unpleasant rate increase.

Good point.

ASSOCIATED PRESS: Obama at new low for handling economy. “Eleven weeks before the Nov. 2 balloting, just 41 percent of those surveyed approve of the president’s performance on the economy, down from 44 percent in April, while 56 percent disapprove. And 61 percent say the economy has gotten worse or stayed the same on Obama’s watch.”

NINETY YEARS AGO TODAY, Tennessee became the necessary 36th state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment.

PLEASE DON’T FOLLOW THIS ADVICE: “All you need to read is . . . Instapundit, pretty much.”

It’s a nice thing to say, but I make no effort to be comprehensive. As I’ve said more than once, InstaPundit is not a news service. It’s just a collection of things that I find interesting, or under-covered, or otherwise worthy of attention. But even that’s often a reaction against the priorities of big-media gatekeepers, which means that I kinda assume you’re being flooded with their stuff in my process of deciding what to write (or not write) about.

BARNEY FRANK: Obama admin ‘dumb’ to predict no higher than 8% unemployment. Ya think?

UPDATE: Who Are You, And What Did You Do With Barney Frank? I think Frank may actually be worried about November. Anybody seen a recent poll from his district?

ANOTHER UPDATE: Bailing Out Luxury Condos?

GENERAL PETRAEUS: Here’s My Afghan Redeployment Strategy.

DAVE KOPEL: Obama bans over 100,000 rifles. The reasoning is laughable.

THE AMAZING SPREAD OF the Zombie Squad. They’re everywhere!

MATT WELCH is “permanently pissed off” at Obama. “Willfully dishonest — willfully malicious, actually.”

THOUGHTS ON LEGAL EDUCATION AND WHAT LAWYERS CONTRIBUTE. Related: The Law Market And U.S. Law Firms.

THE JOYS OF rotary cheese graters. I love mine.