MEGAN MCARDLE: Give Me Liberty And Give Me Death? “Selection bias will produce good results for the selecting organization, but you cannot replicate its results on a nationwide scale; fat, smoky people have to work somewhere (or go on welfare). If this became common, you’d see legislative pushback in the form of discrimination lawsuits and legislation. I’m betting there are more obese workers/voters than there are people who hit the gym five days a week.”

FIVE MYTHS about healthy eating.

ADOBE’S NEW De-Blur Plugin. I’m still using Photoshop CS3, so maybe it’ll be time to upgrade soon . . .

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Top Business Schools See Application Decline.

IF “SMART DRUGS” IMPROVE DOCTORS’ PERFORMANCE, is it malpractice not to take them?

POLLSTER DOUG SCHOEN: In interviews, protesters show that they are leftists out of step with most American voters. Yet Democrats are embracing them anyway. “Our research shows clearly that the movement doesn’t represent unemployed America and is not ideologically diverse. Rather, it comprises an unrepresentative segment of the electorate that believes in radical redistribution of wealth, civil disobedience and, in some instances, violence. Half (52%) have participated in a political movement before, virtually all (98%) say they would support civil disobedience to achieve their goals, and nearly one-third (31%) would support violence to advance their agenda.”

A far cry from the Tea Party, but not really a surprise.

JAY LENO ON the rebirth of classic American auto parts brands.

STARSHIPS: Not Such a Stretch to Reach for the Stars. “Participants — an eclectic mix of engineers, scientists, science fiction fans, students and dreamers — explored a mix of ideas, including how to organize and finance a century-long project; whether civilization would survive, because an engine to propel a starship could also be used for a weapon to obliterate the planet; and whether people need to go along for the trip. (Alternatively, machines could build humans at the destination, perhaps tweaked to live in non-Earth-like environs.)”

HEH: Celebrated redistributionists discover healthy respect for private property. As one of my law professors said, “I used to think that all property was theft, but that was before I had anything worth stealing.”

FAT GENES: New research links common RNA modification to obesity.

MICHAEL TOTTEN: The New Egyptian Underground.

MORE THOUGHTS ON ETHANOL: “Corn has been used for more than human food for years now, as it has been used for animal feed and also used for a cooking oil and sweetener. This past year, American farmers used 5 billion bushels of corn for human and animal consumption and 5.05 billion bushels was used for fuel. This has had an effect on food prices. The price of corn reflects the prices of other foods, and food prices are already steadily on the rise. So this may put more strain on the poor as more corn is grown to fuel cars than to feed people.”

FASTER, PLEASE: Branson opens world’s first ‘spaceport’ in US. “British billionaire Richard Branson opened the world’s first-ever commercial spaceport in the New Mexico desert, the new home for his company, Virgin Galactic. . . . Branson last month said he hoped to launch a vessel into space within the next 12 months, which he said would kick off an era of commercial space travel.”

STUDY: Only 4% Of Consumers Likely To Be Satisfied With Today’s Electric Vehicles.

RICHARD EPSTEIN: Uneven Stevens: The former justice’s outbursts are doing a disservice to the Supreme Court.

GALLUP: Americans blame government for the economy. “When asked whom they blame more for the poor economy, 64% of Americans name the federal government and 30% say big financial institutions. 78% say Wall Street bears a great deal or a fair amount of blame for the economy; 87% say the same about Washington.”

This is an even bigger margin than the Hill poll I mentioned yesterday. Conn Carroll adds: “This is dead on. It is not that Wall Street is completely innocent, far from it. But what the Occupy movement, and their intellectual leaders, fail to grasp is that the federal government has been Wall Street’s partner in crime.” Fail to grasp, or, in some cases, are trying to cover up.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: ABA: Law Schools That Misreport Placement Data Face Fines, Loss of Accreditation.

DAVID SWINDLE: When Boomer Culture Finishes Its Suicide, What Will Rise Next? “Cool, as it has been willed into existence in the post-World War II era, is an artistic expression of the self-destructive, suicidal temperament of a bipolar mind. . . . Ginsberg, Burroughs, Kerouac, Cobain, Thompson, and Hendrix didn’t build anything. We writers and artists are an over-glorified, over-praised lot. We cast our little literary spells, throw up our paint, and dance across the stage. But in the scheme of the global village we’re only the tribe’s witch doctor.”

UPDATE: Rob “N.Z. Bear” Neppell comments:

My instant reaction: Steve Jobs was cool. Robert Heinlein and Issac Asimov were cool. Rush — a band of three guys who have families, kids, don’t (and never) got into drugs or being rock stars but just love their craft of making music — are cool. Mark Zuckerberg? Cool. My new friend +Mack Reed — cool. Not because he dresses way cooler than I, but because he builds cool stuff: http://www.xylovan.com.

Those that create are cool; those that pose are not. Creation may mean art, but today it can also mean technology; whether it is the raw science of discovery or the magic (in the most Clarke-ian sense of the word) of a Steve Jobs envisioning how to make silicon and software into tools that change the way we live in ways that we enjoy.

Happily, I see attitudes moving in that direction.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A musician-reader emails:

Normally I agree with most of the articles you link to, but I have to take exception with this one. Sorry, but this piece is a mess.

For one thing, the self-destructive artist archetype is as old as mankind. It is not an invention of the baby boomers. Before Kerouac there was Hemingway, before that Poe, before that Shelly, and so on. They were all drunks or drug addicts and all went to an early grave. They were also all lauded and idolized for their work and romanticized because of their faults. This has been a part of human cultures from the dawn of time. Don’t get me wrong: I blame the boomers for most of what I don’t like about our culture these days. But they aren’t more guilty of romanticizing self-destruction than any other generation is.

And I doubt that anybody actually thinks it’s all that cool that Jimi Hendrix died accidentally. Every single Hendrix fan I’ve ever met, including myself, wishes he were still around making music.

Entrepreneurs and inventors have always been with us and have never been “cool” culturally the way that artists have, and they never will be, because the arts are romantic while business is generally not. I would pull apart more things in the article which I found silly, but frankly the thing is so poorly written I don’t think I could get through it again.

And in response to NZ Bear: if our culture starts thinking Rush is cool, but Hendrix isn’t, then we really are in trouble. . . . To put it another way: either the art is good or it isn’t. Whether the artist is a drunk or not is irrelevant to the quality of the work. Hendrix is cool because he made great art. Rush is not cool because they did not make great art (this is subjective opinion, I know). To say that we should praise the work of non-self-destructive artists over self-destructive ones is a politicization of art – the same thing we always criticize the Left for.

One MORE thought (haha – I’m not fishing for re-posts, I swear – I’m just thinking out loud to you. This is a subject that naturally interests me). Lots of normal people are drug addicts and have self-destructive lifestyles. We don’t romanticize them and we don’t glorify them (rightfully so). But we do glorify artists with self-destructive lives in part because it is a miracle (and a mystery) that they were able to produce anything of worth at all, considering the personal shortcomings they had to overcome to do it. Anybody can be a drunk, but only one drunk could write A Farewell to Arms.

Ha. Love that last point.

NEWSWEEK: Obama’s Big Green Mess: How the White House lost its eco-mojo.

UPDATE: Mickey Kaus tweets: If Obama’s lost Eleanor Clift … what’s next? Valerie Jarrett says he’s not ready to be President?

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Corinna Cohn emails:

Eleanor Clift wrote, “Some of the biggest immediate beneficiaries of the green revolution, ironically, may have been politicians themselves.”

Only a dyed-in-the-wool liberal could express surprise that politicians would receive campaign contributions as kickbacks from industries to which they’ve funneled millions of taxpayers’ dollars.

Actually, lots of liberals used to be smart enough to see things like that coming. Now they’ve either gotten dumber, or complicit.

MORE: Reader Matthew Knecht writes:

You tag this post with the line “Actually, lots of liberals used to be smart enough to see things like that coming. Now they’ve either gotten dumber, or complicit.”

Speaking as a public school educator in Pennsylvania for most of the last 20 years, I say “both.” The savvy ones are complicit. Most are victims of the decaying public school system. We spent so much time for the last 30 years filling their heads with nonsense that there was no time to teach the important things, like how government and economics actually work. Real, time-tested knowledge about how human beings behave in real life (AKA history and philosophy), are rarely even referred to in public school curricula any longer except in the most superficial ways. We’re now into a second and even third generation of public school teachers raised on politically correct revisionism. They’re not engaging in deliberate social engineering any more; many if not most of the teachers actually believe that the fluff ideas they’ve been taught to promulgate are how the world really works… leading to whole generations of kids without a single clue as to how any human societies — especially messy, complicated democratic ones that require a lot of personal responsibility — actually function. It’s no wonder our political class has sunk to the current depths. Their map doesn’t match the territory.

Bottom line: not dumb, just brainwashed, most of them. They were never taught any better, because they were taught by people who were never taught any better, who were taught by people who were deliberating trying to alter the American culture through the public school system. We’re rapidly approaching, if not already in, the educational Dark Age that Jerry Pournelle talks about: not only have we forgotten certain knowledge we had in the past, but we’ve forgotten (institutionally speaking) that we ever even knew that stuff. Because it’s not nice, and it doesn’t make us feel good to learn about it.

Well, that’s depressing. Meanwhile, another reader emails:

The problem is that we no longer have a mainstream press that holds Democrats’ feet to the fire. So by not being under scrutiny by the major press, they can get away with things like this. Over time, they walk farther out on the limb of corruption because there is nobody calling attention to it.

Sure, you have some blogs that point it out, but that is “pull” media, you have to actively go and get it. The “push” media, the information that arrives on your car radio during your commute or on your TV set never mentions it.

You can’t lay all of America’s problems at the feet of the mainstream media. But it’s a good place to start . . . .

DOUG BANDOW: It’s Time To Declare Peace In The War On Drugs.

PRESIDENT MILLSTONE: WaPo: In tight Virginia races, Democrats cutting ties to Obama. “Three years ago, Democrats in Virginia couldn’t get enough of Barack Obama — a popular, transformational figure running for his first term as president. But as Obama arrives in Virginia Tuesday for a two-day swing to promote parts of his jobs plan, some Democrats are distancing themselves from him — even in supposedly blue Northern Virginia. Less than a month before critical legislative elections, several Democratic legislators say they have reservations about the president and will not commit to supporting him next year. At least one longtime state senator has announced he will not vote for Obama in 2012.”

Related: Can Obama Hold On To African-American Voters In 2012?

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Cyberspace And Virtual War.

Back in those carefree innocent 1990s when bombing Serbia was the road to world peace and spam was the ugliest thing on the net, the Anglo-American world was indulging one of its periodical bouts of end-of-history wishful thinking. As in 1918 and 1945, an American consensus of the great and the good was morally certain that a new era in international life had begun.

Tech optimism was a big part of that. The cyberworld was almost unspotted at that time, like a field of snow the day after a blizzard. How many digital Whigs prophesied the inevitable triumph of a radically free and democratic world based on the cyber utopia taking shape?

These days, the cyberworld looks more and more like the rest of the world – perhaps with more porn.

So it’s got that going for it, anyway. . . .

MICHAEL WALSH: “In case you haven’t figured it out by now, what’s going on in Washington and across the country is the Full Alinsky.”

UPDATE: Reader Gary Schamburg notes that Jeff Goldstein was there first.

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