HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Moody’s Offers Pessimistic View For Student Borrowers.

FROM BOB ZUBRIN, a fuel-efficiency wager. “Talk is cheap, so — in the tradition of Julian Simon’s famous 1980 wager with Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren that five crucial natural resources would not become dangerously scarce by 1990 — I am willing to back up my assertion with hard cash. I am willing to wager up to ten people $10,000 each that I can make my 2007 Chevy Cobalt run with substantially superior fuel economy on methanol than it does on gasoline.”

FASTER, PLEASE: Nanofiber Regenerates Blood Vessels. “Regenerating blood vessels is important for combating the aftereffects of a heart attack or peripheral arterial disease, and for ensuring that transplanted organs receive a sufficient supply of blood. Now researchers at Northwestern University have created a nanomaterial that could help the body to grow new blood vessels. Samuel Stupp and his colleagues developed a liquid that, when injected into patients, forms a matrix of loosely tangled nanofibers. Each of these fibers is covered in microscopic protuberances that mimic vascular endothelial growth factor, or VEGF—a protein that occurs naturally in the body and causes chemical reactions that result in the growth of new blood vessels. By mimicking VEGF, the nanofiber has the same biological effect.”

GASTRIC BYPASS SURGERY CAUSES aversion to dietary fat. “Further experiments suggest that this fat avoidance is triggered through digestive consequences, rather than just altered taste, and may be the result of an excess of hormones previously linked to food avoidance.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: NALP May Sue ABA Over New Law School Placement Data Reporting Rules.

IN EGYPT, TURNING ON THE LIBERAL, SECULAR PRO-DEMOCRACY FOLKS. From the comments: “Hope and Change. But no plan. Sound familiar?”

Want a successful revolution? Have a plan for neutralizing or coopting your opposition on day one. Alas, liberal, secular revolutionaries don’t think this stuff through, as Iran demonstrated. Communists and Islamists, on the other hand, do. Example:

Elections have been pushed to November, but the liberals and the secularists appear not to have taken advantage of the delay. Instead of organizing themselves into a coherent bloc, they have set up minuscule rival parties and feuded among themselves, say analysts and diplomats.

“There is a power game going on—and the liberals and the entire secular movement are the weaker element, while the Islamists and the army are strong,” said Laila Soueif, a liberal activist and human-rights campaigner who teaches at Cairo University.

While the liberals and the leftists paint the military as a holdover of the old regime, the formerly outlawed Muslim Brotherhood and the more radical Salafi Islamist movement have taken pains not to criticize Egypt’s ruling generals.

Secular liberalism flourishes under bourgeois democracy, but doesn’t seem very good at cultivating the qualities needed to seize or maintain power.

INVESTING IN DEEP-SEA SUBMERSIBLES. “A new generation of daredevils is seeking to plunge through nearly seven miles of seawater to the bottom of a rocky chasm in the western Pacific that is veiled in perpetual darkness. It is the ocean’s deepest spot. The forbidding place, known as the Challenger Deep, is so far removed from the warming rays of the sun that its temperature hovers near freezing. . . . The rush is happening now in part because of advances in materials, batteries and electronics, which are lowering the cost and raising the capabilities of submersibles. Still, the challenges are formidable.”

STEVE HAYWARD: “I understand why Tea Partiers and even conservatives who drink decaf might think the debt ceiling deal isn’t very good, even allowing for the current strength of forces on the political chess board. But judging from the UK papers on offer this morning here at Heathrow airport, Obama has had his head handed to him. . . . And so we have the best of both worlds politically: a deal that leaves the Tea Party unsatisfied and therefore fired up for the next battles and election cycle, and a demoralized liberal base that can’t come to grips with the fact that socialism is over because we’ve run out of other people’s money—a point made in Toby Young’s blog on another British paper today, The Telegraph.”

HEY, WHAT’S THAT NEXT TO TURKEY? The Obama Administration Notices Syria.

THE TSA tries a new approach.

DEBT DEAL clears Senate.

RECOVERY BUMMER (CONT’D): “Consumer spending unexpectedly fell in June to post the first decline in nearly two years as incomes barely rose.” Yeah, who could have seen this coming?

FROM JONAH GOLDBERG, a magnificent rant on press/pundit hypocrisy over “violent rhetoric,” the Tea Party, and Gabby Giffords.

Some of us were willing to stand up to the blood libels at the time.

NOW WE CAN CALL HIM Award-winning Space Journalist Rand Simberg.

RICHARD EPSTEIN: The Tax Expenditures Muddle. “The current impasse over the debt ceiling has been resolved, at least in the short run, by a set of compromises that leaves no one satisfied. At the same time, the long-term imbalance of government expenditures outpacing its revenues remains largely unsolved. . . . Two ways to make government bigger involve borrowing money and imposing progressive taxes. A third notable technique is tax expenditures. Tax expenditures allow the scope of government activities to increase without going through the nasty process of an explicit government appropriation and transfer payment.”

ED DRISCOLL: Deutschland Deja Vu.

SO WE’RE LESS THAN A WEEK FROM INSTAPUNDIT’S TENTH BLOGGIVERSARY. I can’t believe it’s been that long since I was posting about cloning, music industry malfeasance, and . . . well, actually, a lot of the stuff I still post about today. (See InstaPundit’s first week here.) So I feel like I should do something special, but I have no idea what. Any suggestions?

SHIKHA DALMIA: Obama’s Top Four Power Grabs: The president stretches executive power to expand the warfare state and the regulatory state. They told me if I voted for John McCain. . . .

WHAT CANADA’S GUN CONTROL LAWS mean to Alaskans.

TODAY ONLY: A sale on wireless portable speakers.

MICKEY KAUS: Baseline Madness–’No Non-New Taxes!’

SEX TOY MAKER FUNDS Joycelyn Elders Professorship In Sexual Health. No, really.

WILSON GETCHELL’S YOU’RE GONNA PAY VIDEO now has over 30,000 views. Just in the past couple of days.

IS RAISING THE SOCIAL SECURITY RETIREMENT AGE “quite horrifying?”