“DID YOU JUST LOOK AT MY CHEST?”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The Economist: Slim down, focus and embrace technology: American universities need to be more businesslike.

Barack Obama invited a puzzling group of people into the White House on December 5th: university presidents. What should one make of these strange creatures? Are they chief executives or labour leaders? Heads of pre-industrial guilds or champions of one of America’s most successful industries? Defenders of civilisation or merciless rack-renters?

Whatever they might be, they are at the heart of a political firestorm. Anger about the cost of college extends from the preppiest of parents to the grungiest of Occupiers. Mr Obama is trying to channel the anger, to avoid being sideswiped by it. The White House invitation complained that costs have trebled in the past three decades. Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, has urged universities to address costs with “much greater urgency”. . . . Popular anger about universities’ costs is rising just as technology is shaking colleges to their foundations. The internet is changing the rules. Star academics can lecture to millions online rather than the chosen few in person. Testing and marking can be automated. And for-profit companies such as the University of Phoenix are stripping out costs by concentrating on a handful of popular courses as well as making full use of the internet. The Sloan Foundation reports that online enrolments grew by 10% in 2010, against 2% for the sector as a whole.

Many universities’ first instinct will be to batten down the hatches and wait for this storm to pass. But the storm is not going to pass. The higher-education industry faces a stark choice: either adapt to a rapidly changing world or face a future of cheeseparing.

Indeed.

WELCOME TO THE BIG LEAGUES, BUB: The way Americans talk about China can often seem hostile, frustrating, or altogether irreconcilable with the world as a newcomer from China knows it.

Americans have been having this experience while traveling abroad pretty much forever.

JAMES TARANTO: “There’s an irony for you. The one group to which the president’s brainless bashing of businessmen and conservatives appeals consists of . . . intellectuals.”

SHOCKING NEWS: “What? Occupy Wall Street is not fact-based?!”

USA TODAY: Household Electric Bills Skyrocket.

All is proceeding according to plan.

THE DANGERS OF SLEEPING WITH YOUR PET. “It turns out that, when it comes to pets on the bed, plague is not the only health risk. It’s one of many, along with hookworm, roundworm, MRSA, rabies, Chagas disease, Pasteurella, cat scratch fever, Capnocytophaga, Cryptosporidium and Cheyletiella. Oh, and bites.”

OUTDOING DOC EDGERTON with picosecond cameras. “It is so much slow motion you can see the light itself move. This is the speed of light: there’s nothing in the universe that moves faster.”

BIG MARKDOWNS ON big-screen 3D HDTVs.

PAUL RAHE: Is Means-Testing Social Security Just? “As things stand, we live in a world in which something close to half of Americans pay no income tax at all. The top ten percent of earners bear the bulk of the burden. Means-testing – which already exists for Food Stamps, Medicaid, and the like – would serve only to reinforce a set of arrangements that is not only an outrage but counter-productive to boot. Why should anyone in today’s America work really hard, scrimp, and save? After all, in the end, you will only be punished for your efforts. . . . If the Republicans win and win big in 2012, they are likely to take the same malicious principle and extend it to Social Security and Medicare. They ought to know better. But even the best of them – and I say this about men whom I admire – do not. Someone should pull John Boehner, Paul Ryan, Tom Coburn, Rick Perry, Mitt Romney, and the Governor of Indiana aside and whisper in their ears, ‘When the Tea-Party sprang up in 2009, its initial adherents carried signs reading, “Honk if you are paying someone else’s mortgage?” You would do well to take notice!’”

CALL HIS BLUFF: President Obama on Tuesday threatened to veto the payroll-tax-cut package put forward by House Republicans.

MOE LANE: “I think that you should watch this Rick Perry video.”

LIST: The 100 Hottest Cars Of All Time.

UPDATE: Had the wrong link before. Fixed now. Sorry!

USA TODAY: Resurgent Republicans close gap in key states. “Since the heady days of 2008, a new USA TODAY/Gallup Swing States Poll finds the number of voters who identify themselves as Democratic or Democratic-leaning in these key states has eroded, down by 4 percentage points, while the ranks of Republicans have climbed by 5 points. Republican voters also are more attentive to the campaign, more enthusiastic about the election and more convinced that the outcome matters.”

Funny, that hasn’t been the tenor of the news coverage and punditry.

SEXISM IS EVERYWHERE: How the philosophers discriminate against women with dim lights, drinks, and an informal atmosphere. “Why don’t we see would-be philosophers who are male expounding on their difficulties negotiating a cocktail party? Is it because they are not troubled, or is it because they are even more discriminated against? Do they dare write about their feelings of awkwardness and intimidation? The males suck it up and venture forward, I suspect. The women, in choosing to make an issue of female sensitivity, imagine they are advancing the cause of women. But are they?”

JOHN TIERNEY: In Pursuit of the Perfect Gift? It’s a Lot Closer Than You Think. “Traditionalists and etiquette mavens are complaining, but the rest of us can thank social scientists this season. They have come up with experimental evidence to support three revolutionary rules for people who hate shopping for holiday gifts.”

Personally, I recommend starting here. But that’s just my interest talking. Though from reading the article, maybe it’s still good advice . . .

OXYTOCIN can make you more extroverted.

FARHAD MANJOO’S favorite gadgets of 2011. I love my MacBook Air. It’s the best computer I’ve had.

SCIENTISTS KICK OFF DEBATE over barefoot running. “It’s a really polarized debate – there are what you might call the barefoot evangelicals on one side and the aggressive anti-barefoots on the other.” We’re here, we’re bare, get used to it.

MICKEY KAUS: How Is New Poverty Like New Coke? “Richard Bavier, a respected policy analyst with the OMB for many years, reams the Obama administration’s new bait-and-switch poverty line. … Bavier argues the new line is ‘carefully designed so that the public will think it is one thing when it is really something else.’” Kinda like when they were talking about stimulus, I guess. . . .

IN BELGIUM, a grenade attack on a bus station.

But don’t worry: “A Belgian Interior Ministry official, Peter Mertens, says there was only one attacker, who was killed in the incident, adding that it was not related to terrorism.”

IN THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR, A REVIEW of Iain Murray’s Stealing You Blind: How Government Fat Cats Are Getting Rich Off of You.

THIS CLAIM THAT IRAN WILL CLOSE THE STRAIT OF HORMUZ seems unimpressive to me. Should they do so, of course, it would give Obama the chance to open up a poll-pleasing can of whoopass. Iranian harbors, powerplants, refineries, etc. would all be easy targets. Too bad we don’t have some sort of pipeline to the Canadian oilfields, though. . . .

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: German Greens Dream Big: Too Big? “Vague, cloudy and romantic dreams of Eurasian Weltmacht were the great curse of Germany during the 20th century. Now that the Fifth, Berlin-based Reich has replaced the old postwar Fourth Reich headquartered in Bonn, those dreams seem to be stirring once more.” My advice: Dream of being able to pay your bills.