CHANGE: Average Gasoline Price Jumps To Highest In 5 Months.

NOT ONE HOSTAGE CRISIS: Lots of them.

DAILY CALLER INVESTIGATION: Inside Media Matters: Sources, memos reveal erratic behavior, close coordination with White House and news organizations.

My favorite bit: “Greg Sargent [of the Washington Post] will write anything you give him. He was the go-to guy to leak stuff.” Lots of other names named, too.

Of course, to the extent that Media Matters affects coverage it’s because left-leaning journos regard it as legitimate, and want to help. In this regard, like JournoList, it’s a “self-herding device.”

TEN YEARS AGO ON INSTAPUNDIT: ECOTERRORIST SENTENCED to 18 years imprisonment and $2.8 million restitution. His justification is pretty lame: he thought that the land in question, which he didn’t own, somehow “belonged” to him, not to the people building houses on it. . . . Many muggers and car thieves have the same confusion about property rights.

IS PINTEREST A PINK-COLLAR GHETTO? “AppData and Facebook’s advertising tool show that over 97% of Pinterest’s Facebook fans are women.”

WHEN EVERYTHING BECOMES A COFFEESHOP: Stephen Gordon’s blog post became a piece in the Boston Globe. Some serious higher education bubble implications.

Now, imagine a personnel manager at a mid-sized corporation who’s looking for an employee with some particular knowledge. There are two candidates: one with an appropriate college degree from the local state school, a second with relevant MITx certificates. Let’s say all other things between the candidates are equal. Which should the manager choose?

Given the caliber of professor at MIT, the online student may have learned just as much. The candidate who went to college probably enjoyed his experience more, but the potential employer is unlikely to care about that. Finally, there’s the financial reality: To some extent, the student debt of the job candidate dictates his salary requirements. If the MITx candidate has the knowledge required and far less student debt, he probably can be hired more cheaply. Ultimately, the cheaper option will win.

Phil Bowermaster has some additional thoughts.

AT AMAZON, bestselling books on Home Repair.

Also, books on container vegetable gardening.

ABC NEWS: White House Chief of Staff Errs on Senate Budget Rules.

JUSTIN HIGGINS: Why I Choose to (Tea) Party, Not Occupy.

THE PROBLEM WITH RETIREMENT ACCOUNTS IS THAT THEY’RE HOSTAGE TO FUTURE CONGRESSES’ GREED: Congress Eyes New Rules For Inherited IRAs. “A Senate Finance Committee proposal floated this past week as part of a highway-funding bill would give heirs five years to empty inherited individual retirement accounts or 401(k)s, which would typically trigger income-tax payments. The rule change could raise some $4.6 billion in income taxes over the next decade, according to a statement by Sen. Max Baucus (D., Mont.), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.”

J.E. DYER on Russia and Syria.

LOOK AT THE BRIGHT SIDE — LOTS OF IT ISN’T BURNING: Athens tonight. Nice pic, though.

UPDATE: Reader James Ellison writes: “So, your main source of hard currency is tourism and you scare all the tourists away? Wizards of smart.” Greece and Egypt.

THE MOST AMAZING SCIENCE IMAGES OF THE WEEK.

SHOULD YOU convert your car to natural gas?

LIVING IN THE AGE OF BIG DATA:

The story is similar in fields as varied as science and sports, advertising and public health — a drift toward data-driven discovery and decision-making. “It’s a revolution,” says Gary King, director of Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science. “We’re really just getting under way. But the march of quantification, made possible by enormous new sources of data, will sweep through academia, business and government. There is no area that is going to be untouched.”

Welcome to the Age of Big Data. The new megarich of Silicon Valley, first at Google and now Facebook, are masters at harnessing the data of the Web — online searches, posts and messages — with Internet advertising. At the World Economic Forum last month in Davos, Switzerland, Big Data was a marquee topic. A report by the forum, “Big Data, Big Impact,” declared data a new class of economic asset, like currency or gold.

We’ve barely begun to tap the power of this sort of thing. On the other hand, there will always be a place for a more aesthetic, intuitive angle, too — especially where consumers are involved. And will Big Data methods go small in an Army-of-Davids fashion via intermediaries like Wolfram Alpha?

TOO CRAZY FOR MSNBC: Scarborough Calls ‘Preposterous’ Sullivan’s Claim Obama Intentionally Set Contraception Trap for Conservatives.

DANGER IN THE EAST: “The Times report would at any rate explain the unprecedented buildup of the Pakistani nuclear stockpile in recent years. It was building weapons not just for itself, but supply a whole region.”

MORE SAFETY NET MUSINGS: “The NYT never paints wealthy liberals who don’t volunteer extra money to the state as hypocritical and guilty, but that’s no surprise.”

Plus this: “The NYT is continuing the progressive bait-and-switch here: Social Security and Medicare were sold to America as earned benefit programs, not welfare. It’s the ‘secondary mission’ of middle-class vote-buying — and the Boomers heading into retirement — that accounts for most of this story. The NYT overlooks that the US welfare state contributes to the supposed income inequality problem progressives have been decrying for the past few years. Moreover, compared to other developed countries, the US system is unique only in terms of low upward mobility from the bottom among men (although cross-country comparisons of mobility can be tricky). The left would no doubt argue this means we must have ever-higher taxes and more redistribution, while the right would argue we need lower taxes and less redistribution. However, what seems clear is that the Democrats’ version of the welfare state has been a political boon to Democrats and less beneficial to the poor they claim to champion. Moreover, if the NYT is at least correct that the increase in the safety net is fueling anger at the government, it may be that the political value of the welfare state to Democrats is diminishing as well.”

EUROPE: Greek protestors greet bailout vote with fire-bombs.

Related: Athens Burning As Police Run Out Of Tear Gas. “FinMin Venizelos has been speaking for the last 15 minutes so. He says that the country produces nothing and that is its main problem.” But they feel entitled to consume.

FASTER, PLEASE: