SO IN MY EARLIER POST ON THE BALANCE-BALL CHAIR, I WAS SKEPTICAL: But one of my longtime readers emails: “I started using a balance ball as an office chair two years ago, and it literally changed by life. I no longer stoop like an old man when I leave my desk, but stand tall and strong. I have more energy in the evening, and my lower back ‘lock-ups’ are a thing of the past.”

UPDATE: Another reader emails: “I’ve sat on an exercise ball for five years now – at work and home. Used to have back problems – enough to lay me up in bed a couple of times a year, several days at a time. It hasn’t happened a single time since I started sitting on the ball.”

Okay, so I cracked and ordered one.

JERRY POURNELLE looks back at the end of the Evil Empire.

VIDEO: Rick Perry Returns To Texas.

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? Scars Left by ‘Great Recession’ Will Be Hard to Erase.

HAPPY HOUR with Bill Whittle.

WELL, I DON’T THINK THAT PICTURE WILL SELL MY ROLE: 6 Bloggers Who Should Be Republican Debate Moderators. I’m also available to moderate the Democratic debate, which at present looks like it should be between Candidate Obama and President Obama.

ISN’T THAT KIND OF OBVIOUS? Why “Friends With Benefits” Relationships Are On The Rise.

HOW TO CHOOSE a healthier beer.

MARK WHITTINGTON: Alien First Contact Paper Tainted By Media Misreporting. “The aliens commit genocide because we burn too much carbon comes right out of the odious remake of ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still.’ It is, however, unfortunate that this scenario, which is only one among many, is being played up. It plays into the meme, which has a certain grain of truth, that global warming hysterics are crazy. Now they are threatening us with alien invasion if we don’t change out evil, carbon burning ways.”

Meanwhile, Megan McArdle comments on the narrow-mindedness of those ETs. “It’s really remarkable, in fact, how often the aliens in science fiction just happen to be preoccupied with the exact same political issues that obsessed intellectuals of the era when the fiction was written. And yet it’s still somehow breathtaking. They don’t even notice that they’re not noticing all their embedded assumptions. For example, the scientists do not even consider the possibility that the recent decline in church attendance among the citizens of the world’s most powerful nations could be a signal to advanced, god-fearing aliens that we are a decadent and irreligious species who should be wiped out. . . . Of all the possibilities, the one that seems least likely to me is that advanced aliens capable of traveling between the stars will turn out to view global warming in very much the way that a handful of Western scientists do.”

ROGER KIMBALL: Why Hasn’t The Economic Recovery That Obama Promised Happened?

THE FOOTNOTE THAT JUDGES IGNORE: “The footnote in question — in a 2006 Supreme Court decision limiting the free speech rights of public employees — explicitly stated that the decision in Garcetti v. Ceballos did not apply to faculty members in public higher education.”

ELIE MYSTAL: The Student Loan Bubble: Only Stupid People Will Be Surprised When It Bursts.

ROBERT HEINLEIN: “Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.”

EIGHT WEIRD WAYS people are using facial-recognition technology.

AT AMAZON, bestsellers in science fiction.

LONGEVITY UPDATE: The Million Year Life Span. Just remember: You can’t live a million years if you don’t make it through the next twenty or thirty.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: More than ever before, cash-crunched state schools are looking for out-of-state applicants to balance their budgets.

DAN MITCHELL: When an American Company Redomiciles to the Cayman Islands, What Lesson Should We Learn? “The companies that choose to expatriate usually fit a certain profile (this applies to individuals as well). They earn a substantial share of their income in other countries and they are put at a competitive disadvantage because of America’s ‘worldwide’ tax system.”

NAOMI SCHAEFER RILEY: Will They Be Better At Sex Ed Than At Math Ed? “Last week, New York City announced that it would be bringing sex education back into public schools. I don’t have high hopes. That announcement came the day after the city released its standardized test scores. And here they are: 43.9 percent of New York City students met or exceeded the English proficiency standard. In math, 57.3 percent of city students were proficient.”

REX MURPHY: Global Warming Runs Out Of Gas. “In tight economic times people are naturally unwilling to engage in the comicbook fantasies of the wilder environmentalists. Perhaps Climategate gave a too-souring glimpse into the mixture of science and advocacy that has, to some extent, corrupted both. Perhaps, finally, the unctuousness, sanctimony and sputtering righteousness of the highprofile environmentalists signal to most observers that they aren’t really as certain of all this ‘science’ as they pretend to be. “

CONSEQUENCES: Alumni Resignations at Widener Law School In Wake of Connell Case. I wonder how long Dean Linda Ammons — who precipitated this debacle — will remain.

FEEDING THE MASSES ON UNICORN RIBS: Walter Russell Mead on the “Green Jobs” Fiasco. “What worries me isn’t that the President’s team advised him to make a few speeches on this subject; if a candidate can’t throw chum to the base now and then what’s the point of having elections? What worries me is that they didn’t understand that making something this bogus a central plank of his actual governing plan on an issue as vital as jobs would have serious costs down the road.”

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN WE’D SEE ENDLESS WAR. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! US troops may stay in Afghanistan until 2024.

DRUG SHORTAGE UPDATE: Scrambling For Cancer Drugs.