A COMMONER IN OUR MIDST: Highlights of bigoted barbarian bombast from the uncommon, undreary Glenn Greenwald! “Where does Greenwald get the word ‘Muslim’? His imagination? Is that why he has to put it in bold? . . . In his mind, if you condemn barbarianism you become a stupid bigot.” That’s pretty much Greenwald in a nutshell.

HOUSING: In Housing Market’s Suspenseful Story, the Tell-Tale Stat Is Inventory.

ENHANCE YOUR SELF-ESTEEM BY “Vajazzling” your genital warts. No, I didn’t make this up. It’s just the spirit of the current age, or something.

AT AMAZON, markdowns on vacuum cleaners.

OF COURSE THEY DO: Russia wants ‘red button’ rights for US missile defence system.

WHEN IS A WAR CRIME NOT A WAR CRIME? When it’s conducted by actual war criminals.

ELENA KAGAN’S RECUSAL MANEUVERS: “While serving as Solicitor General, Justice Elena Kagan allegedly began maneuvering to avoid having to recuse in any eventual challenges to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, months before her nomination was announced — indeed, even before she was told she was under consideration — according to a series of documents released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.”

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Blocking Gun-Control Bills In Maryland. But note how the Washington Post spins it. Here’s the real problem: “Although Democrats have controlled both houses of the General Assembly for decades, several in the majority represent relatively conservative areas with voters who strongly support Second Amendment rights.”

OBAMA LIED, PEOPLE DIED? Johann Hari: We’re Not Being Told The Truth On Libya.

FASTER, PLEASE: Silicon Valley Startup Looks To Mine Moon.

ROGER SIMON: Is Boehner Our Sun Tzu? “While I agree with Roger Kimball that what has been achieved here is but the tiniest tip of the tip of a particularly giant iceberg, I suspect Boehner may have changed the atmosphere. He has negotiated some pretty difficult shoals, using, in Kissingerian fashion, his right flank to gain more advantage from his adversaries.”

UPDATE: Mark Levin is skeptical.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Likewise, Dan Riehl.

FRANK J. FLEMING: My Plan On How To Fight The Next Middle East War.

SURE ENOUGH, IT HAPPENED: After studying ancient rocks, a Japanese geologist warned that a disaster was imminent—to no avail.

IN THE MAIL: The Ethics of Voting.

LET THEM BUY NEW CARS:

This week President Obama replied to a man who told the president that he is hard-pressed to buy gasoline for his van that he ought to trade it in for a new car with better mileage. Obama assured him he’d probably get a great deal these days—from GM, Ford, or Chrysler, he added. The Associated Press first reported this incident and then scrubbed it from its story; most of the media did not care about it at all, because Obama is awesome.

Some might be tempted to shrug this off as an anecdote about a clueless ruler and his palace-guard press, unsympathetic to people clinging to their vans and religion. But we all occasionally say silly things—we’re only human, not sort of a deity—and it would be unfair to equate the president’s response with Marie Antoinette’s “let them eat cake” remark, because Marie Antoinette did not actually say that.

Good point. Plus this: “So Marie Antoinette was the victim of the tea partiers of the day, who attributed to her a remark she never made. Monsieur Le Deficit, on the other hand, actually made the remark that historians will not be able to find in the Associated Press.”

YOU DON’T SAY: Rising Oil Prices Beginning To Hurt U.S. Economy.

WHY EAT CORN WHEN YOU CAN BURN IT? U.S. Corn Reserves Expected To Fall To 15-Year Low. “Rising demand for corn from ethanol producers is pushing U.S. reserves to the lowest point in 15 years, a trend that could lead to higher grain and food prices this year. The Agriculture Department on Friday left its estimate for corn reserves unchanged from the previous month. The reserves are projected to fall to 675 million bushels in late August, when the harvest begins, or roughly 5 percent of all corn consumed in the United States. That would be the lowest surplus level since 1996.” Maybe I’m just channeling John Ringo, but I feel like we’d be better off with bigger than usual food reserves, not smaller than usual ones.

CNBC: Toxic Dollar: Why Nobody Seems to Want US Currency. “Traders are warning of a dramatic change in dollar selling. They fear central banks from the Middle East may force their Asian rivals to more aggressively drive the dollar down.”

SHOCKER: U.S. To Stay In Iraq.

IOWAHAWK: WAR ETIQUETTE TIPS, FROM SENATOR LINDSEY GRAHAM.

AT AMAZON, markdowns on Blu-Ray.

POLIWOOD: The Culture War Is Alive and Well: How ’24’ Got Mugged by Liberals.

JAMES TARANTO: Landslide! It looks like Waterloo in Wisconsin for government unions. “It must be acknowledged that the pro-union left succeeded in making this campaign into a referendum on Walker. Had it not, it’s likely that turnout would have been much lower and Prosser’s margin of victory much wider, as in the primary. But they lost the referendum. With Prosser proffered as a proxy for Walker (we dare you to say that 10 times fast), the justice’s approximately 50.5% of the vote is a swing of less than 2% away from Walker, elected last November with 52.3%.”

THE NEW CIVILITY: “The only good Republican is a dead Republican.”

STEVE WOZNIAK ON EDUCATION:

Nothing, he said, has changed our lives over the past decade more than technology innovation. “It opens new business sectors, creates additional wealth that didn’t exist before,” he said. “That means we have greater efficiencies, which just means that we have more money left over for other things.”

Public education remains a passionate subject for Woz, who was unabashed in saying that schools today are far too structured and thus impede innovative thinking – which is key to “the artistic side” of technology.

At issue, he said, are rules that tell each student exactly what they should be studying and when.

The learning cycle between what is taught and when a student is tested on it is far too short, he proclaimed. Short learning-testing cycles, Wozniak said, are nothing like the projects that technology innovators are afforded in real life.

When pressed by an audience member about how schools should judge student performance, Woz said they should be given one long project that spurs innovative thinking at the beginning of a semester and graded on their results.

“A really innovative person is known for something that usually took an awful lot of thinking, maybe even over years, and a lot of development in a laboratory putting it together and getting it to work. And it’s new and it’s different. And it’s not something you read about in a book,” he said.

“In school, intelligence is a measurement,” he continued. “If you have the same answer as everyone else in math or science, you’re intelligent.”

Read the whole thing. Here are my somewhat-related thoughts on the lower education bubble.