HOW MUCH MORE TRAUMA can Japan take?

A LOT OF INSTAPUNDIT READERS seem to like Farnsworth’s Classical English Rhetoric, which warms my heart.

VATICAN PUBLICATION PRAISES CLASSIC HACKER CULTURE.

TECHNOLOGY: “My deep thought for the day: In the future, when some group wants to burn some politically or religiously objectionable book, will physical books be so rare that they’ll have to get the books specially printed just to burn them?”

VIDEO: A Koran-Burning In Iran. Well, so long as it’s not in Britain. They’re really strict about it there.

REDUCE EMISSIONS with longer trucks.

MICHAEL WALSH: The Fiscal Feint: Obama Not Serious On Budget Cutting. “Please. This is all about 1) the 2012 election and 2) blunting any GOP momentum toward serious budgetary reform — nothing more.” I just hope the Republicans remember my proposal.

IN THE MAIL: From Barbara Oakley, Cold-Blooded Kindness: Neuroquirks of a Codependent Killer, or Just Give Me a Shot at Loving You, Dear, and Other Reflections on Helping That Hurts. Helen has a blurb on the back of the book, along with Joyce Carol Oates and Steven Pinker.

PETER INGEMI REPORTS from a Scott Brown book signing. “To the people of Massachusetts just a few years ago the concept of a line stretching out the door of a City Republican Headquarters in the state would have been as impossible as the idea of the Boston Red Sox winning two world series in 5 years.”

CLAYTON CRAMER: Pay No Danegeld: Teaching Western Civilization.

CHANGE: Larry Kudlow declares late-night budget deal a big change in direction of U.S. economic policy. “We are moving now from the proliferation of a very big government model of spending and taxing and borrowing to a much more moderated limited government model with lower spending and lower taxing.”

Um, faster, please? But a change in direction is significant. Now let’s keep it up with much bigger cuts in the debt-limit discussion.

MEGAN MCARDLE: The Housing Market Still Isn’t Clearing. “In my neighborhood, almost nothing is coming on the market even though we’re well into spring, and half of what does appear is either utterly decrepit, or wildly overpriced, or both. People are not selling unless they absolutely have to. Nor are people buying. I think the value of our house has dropped, but I can’t be sure because nothing’s moving on the market.” Stuff that’s selling in my neighborhood is selling for about 15% less than it went for a couple of years ago.

ROGER SIMON: Who Killed The Kennedys.

YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK, OR SOMETHING: Jailed Rapist Gets $119k in Tax Refunds; Caught by Prison Guard, Not IRS.

THE HILL: Poll: Inflation, fueled by gas and food prices, adds to worry.

TODAY ONLY: MARKDOWNS ON select Asus laptops.

MEANWHILE, there is slaughter in Syria. “If it’s good enough for Qadaffi it’s good enough for Assad, don’t you think? Indeed, the Assad case is far more important, because he kills Americans. But that’s the issue nobody wants to talk about. Not even the ferocious Valkyries (Hillary, Susan Rice and Samantha Power.) To which we really should add Valerie Jarrett, the president’s closest confidante this side of Michelle.”

ENERGY POLICY: IT’S A GAS.

FREEDOM: Texas considers highest speed limit in nation. “Sammy Hagar once crooned, ‘I can’t drive 55.’ To show how far things have come, now some Texans aren’t happy about only driving 80 miles per hour. The Legislature is considering raising the maximum speed limit to 85 mph, highest in the country.” Yay, Texas!

PROGRESSIVES WONDER why the Tea Party is kicking their butts.

KEEP YOUR HAND ON YOUR WALLET: Fine Print Of Spending Deal Still “Under Negotiation.”

VIRGINIA POSTREL ON survivalism and trade.

But here’s the real disaster: “This is Ms. Postrel’s final Commerce & Culture column.” WTF? The WSJ should have spent whatever it cost to keep her.

MICKEY KAUS: “Arianna lets everybody plug their projects (as long as they don’t dis Van Jones).”

YOU DON’T SAY: Peter Thiel: We’re in a Bubble and It’s Not the Internet. It’s Higher Education.

“A true bubble is when something is over-valued and intensely believed,” he says. “Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It’s like telling the world there’s no Santa Claus.”

Like the housing bubble, the education bubble is about security and insurance against the future. Both whisper a seductive promise into the ears of worried Americans: Do this and you will be safe. The excesses of both were always excused by a core national belief that no matter what happens in the world, these were the best investments you could make. Housing prices would always go up, and you will always make more money if you are college educated.

Like any good bubble, this belief– while rooted in truth– gets pushed to unhealthy levels. Thiel talks about consumption masquerading as investment during the housing bubble, as people would take out speculative interest-only loans to get a bigger house with a pool and tell themselves they were being frugal and saving for retirement. Similarly, the idea that attending Harvard is all about learning? Yeah. No one pays a quarter of a million dollars just to read Chaucer. The implicit promise is that you work hard to get there, and then you are set for life. It can lead to an unhealthy sense of entitlement. “It’s what you’ve been told all your life, and it’s how schools rationalize a quarter of a million dollars in debt,” Thiel says.

I think that’s exactly right. Read the whole thing.

THE RAZOR’S EDGE: Victor Davis Hanson: California In The Balance.

We calibrate California’s decline by its myriad of paradoxes. The nation’s highest bundle of gas, sales, and income taxes cannot close the nation’s largest annual deficit at $25 billion. Test scores are at the country’s near bottom; teachers’ salaries at the very top. Scores of the affluent are leaving each week; scores of the indigent are arriving. The nation’s most richly endowed state is also the most regulated; the most liberal of our residents are also the most ready to practice apartheid in their Bel Air or Palo Alto enclaves.

We now see highway patrolmen and city police, in the manner of South American law enforcement, out in force. Everywhere they are monitoring, watching, ticketing—no warnings, no margins of error—desperate to earn traffic fines that might feed the state that feeds them. I could go on. But you get the picture that we are living on the fumes of a rich state that our forefathers brilliantly exploited, and now there is not much energy left in the fading exhaust to keep us going.

I see California in terms now of the razor’s edge with disaster not far in either direction. A postmodern affluent lifestyle hangs in the balance here without a margin of error. Let me give some examples.

Read the whole thing.