GOLF COURSES OF THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION: A Pinterest board.

AND YET STILL HIGHER THAN IT DESERVES, PROBABLY: Americans’ Confidence in Television News Drops to New Low.

UPDATE: Reader John McGinnis writes: “Funny that. I find myself reading the British tabloids more and more for AMERICAN news I can use.” Indeed.

MICKEY KAUS ON MERITOCRACY:

A meritocracy “actually based on merit”–actual skills and actual performance–would be preferable to the current one based on college credentials and SAT scores. The economy would be more open to people with usable talents. Status would be impermanent–nobody would know who would end up where in life, since they wouldn’t be sorted out at the start, some being rewarded with fancy go-anywhere degrees (often mostly in recognition of their skill in acquiring fancy go-anywhere degrees). Since the knowledge needed to advance in a dynamic economy would always be changing, it would be hard to confuse discrete, particular skill sets with some sort of general rank. A good surgeon would just be a good surgeon, a good SEO-optimizer would just be a good SEO-optimizer, a skilled machinist a skilled machinist. They’d all make good money, thanks to the market, but financial success would be harder to confuse with general, permanent superiority–a sense of perspective that would come in handy when advances in robotics put surgeons, SEO-optimizers and machinists out of business.

But if you worry about income equality–well, “real” meritocracy might or might not make the income curve any more equal. As Charles Murray points out, the man or woman who can add an extra one percent to the market share of a big corporation will still be worth a lot of money–more, in growing world economy.

If (like me) you worry about social equality–in this case, the tendency of those who are successful financially to think they’re better than everyone else–“real” meritocracy is as likely to make the problem worse as to make it better. That’s in part because those who fail will, in part, have failed on their real merits.

I guess we need a few bogeymen to temper things, if we can’t live with that. Perhaps we could scapegoat an unpopular minority. Or we could go the other way — an aristocracy, tempered with noblesse oblige. . . .

STACY MCCAIN: The Coming Implosion of Salon.com. I dunno, they’ve been imploding as long as I’ve been blogging and they’re still around somehow.

APPARENTLY, HE HASN’T GOTTEN THE MESSAGE: SOPA Provisions Being Introduced Piecemeal From Lamar Smith.

AT AMAZON, it’s the Security And Surveillance Store. Hey, everybody else is surveilling you, so you might as well get into the act.

JEFFREY SINGER: The ballot box is not the only way to stop ObamaCare.

#NARRATIVEFAIL: Journalists Required To Show IDs at Eric Holder’s Talk On The Evil of IDs.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Small business confidence hits 2012 low as President Obama offers more ‘help’ by hiking taxes.

NEWS FLASH: Paul Krugman: Thin-Skinned?

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: A sign of the times.

MIXED RESULTS FROM INDIVIDUALIZED CANCER TREATMENTS.

In the end, Mrs. McDaniel’s journey to the edge of genetics research turned out to be a decidedly mixed experience. It was hard — much harder than anyone in her family had imagined — to get the sequencing and analysis done. It was breathtaking to see the results, which indicated that her cancer was driven by a strange gene aberration that could be attacked with a new drug. But it was heartbreaking to see how quickly her cancer recovered from the assault, roaring back in a matter of weeks.

Mrs. McDaniel’s story offers a sobering look at the challenges for this kind of quest for a treatment, even for someone like her, who had both the means and the connections to get the intricate geography of her cancer charted. Her husband, Roger McDaniel, was a former chief executive of two companies involved in semiconductor manufacturing, and the family could afford the approximately $49,000 that the search would cost. They had expected to pay much more, but to their astonishment, Mrs. McDaniel’s insurance company covered almost all the drug costs. And the scientists who did the data analysis did not charge.

From the start, the family knew the odds were against Mrs. McDaniel, but she thought she had little to lose.

“You cannot feel bad if this doesn’t work or I die,” she told her son Timothy, a molecular biologist. “I would have died anyway.”

Longterm, I think this kind of approach has great promise. And maybe short-term, for some people.

WAR ON WOMEN: A Douglas County Democratic pol was charged this week by local police with first degree forgery after duping a pair of municipal employees in a bid to win reduced child support payments.

AEROSPACE: Boeing’s Air-Show Revival Leaves Airbus Nursing Neo Hangover.

ONLINE UNIVERSITIES: The Future of Higher Education?

OBAMA’S GREEN ENERGY POLICY, explained by Dilbert.

PRIVACY IN THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE: In First U.S. Accounting of Wireless Phone Surveillance, Carriers Reveal 1.3 Million Requests For User Data. “The carriers have access to everything. Phone calls, text messages, search histories, usage histories, locations, elevations, movements over time. As modern people we have mostly chosen to pretend like we aren’t aware of how vulnerable we are. But what information have these law enforcement agencies been after? . . . Then there were ‘tower dumps,’ in which a law enforcement agency makes one request to access all the information from one entire tower. This could allow them access to hundreds or thousands of users. A tower dump, by the way, counts as one of those 1.3 million, even though it affects many, many more.”

A 1964 VOLVO with nearly 3 million miles on it.

MATT WELCH: Democratic Swissophobia is hurting patriotic, middle-class Americans. “There is something very wrong about the principle that your after-tax earnings are subject to still more scrutiny by the most powerful government the world has ever known, and something insidious about the sight of politicians blaming Americans’ investment choices for their own shoddy governance.”

Durbin is just asking: Who are these rootless cosmopolitans who wish to send their money away from the Fatherland?

A SEAFLOOR GOLD RUSH. “Mr. Dettweiler has now turned from recovering lost treasures to prospecting for natural ones that litter the seabed: craggy deposits rich in gold and silver, copper and cobalt, lead and zinc. A new understanding of marine geology has led to the discovery of hundreds of these unexpected ore bodies, known as massive sulfides because of their sulfurous nature. These finds are fueling a gold rush as nations, companies and entrepreneurs race to stake claims to the sulfide-rich areas, which dot the volcanic springs of the frigid seabed. The prospectors — motivated by dwindling resources on land as well as record prices for gold and other metals — are busy hauling up samples and assessing deposits valued at trillions of dollars.”

WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Exclusive: Darpa Gets a New Boss, and Solyndra Is in Her Past. “Until last year, Arati Prabhakar worked for the venture capitalists who backed Solyndra, the green-tech firm that imploded in a scandal described by Mitt Romney as an example of the White House’s ‘crony capitalism.’ Now Prabhakar has a new job, this one in the Obama administration: running the Pentagon’s most important research agency. But being the geek-in-chief requires investing billions on risky, high-tech bets that aren’t so different from Solyndra. . . . Prabhakar’s appointment once again raises an issue the president’s reelection campaign would rather forget.”

AND YET THEY GET LITTLE PRAISE FROM OBAMA FOR DOING SO: James Pethokoukis: Who’s Really Betting On America? Big Oil and Wal-Mart.

THE SPREAD OF SINGLE-SEX CLASSROOMS. “The idea of putting boys and girls in separate classrooms certainly is not new—private schools have been dividing the genders for eons. But lately, more and more public schools are opting for single-sex education. The ACLU is fighting against the trend, and already some programs have been dropped. But there are still plenty of educators advocating that separate-but-equal is better for everyone.”

An elementary school I went to in Boston had entrances labeled “Boys’ Entrance” and “Girls’ Entrance,” though things were no longer sex-segregated when I was there. Everything old is new again!

ONE STEP CLOSER to Electronic Telepathy?

THE MUGSHOT LOOKS SURPRISINGLY CHEERFUL: Ted Nugent’s Drummer Flees Police In Golf Cart. This may explain why: “Brown, who was reportedly intoxicated, evaded several people who tried to stop him and somehow picked up two women along the way, the department says on its Facebook page.”