FAST AND FURIOUS UPDATE: Issa: Officials had information about ‘reckless tactics’ in ‘Fast and Furious.’

REPORT: Wisconsin Democrats Are Busing in Supporters From Minnesota for Recall Vote (Video) …Update: Michigan Too! I’m sure the Justice Department, which is “monitoring” the election, will investigate these claims with characteristic diligence.

NANO-ENHANCED FUTURE FOODS and more improvements.

BEACH READING: bestsellers in Mystery, Thriller, & Suspense.

BILL WHITTLE: Firewall: Up or Down?

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN WE’D SEE THINGS LIKE THIS IN THE NATION. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! Assassin-in-Chief in the Oval Office. “Assassination as a way of life has been institutionalized in the Oval Office, thoroughly normalized, and is now being offered to the rest of us as a reasonable solution to American global problems and an issue on which to run a presidential campaign.”

Hey, rube! Feel the change!

JAMES LILEKS GIVES MIKE BLOOMBERG a brutal dressing-down. “A culture that redefines food choices as moral issues will demonize the people who don’t share the tastes of the priest class. A culture that elevates eating to some holistic act of ethical self-definition – localvore, low-carbon-impact food, fair trade, artisanal cheese – will find the casual carefree choices of the less-enlightened as an affront to their belief system. Leave it to Americans to invent a Puritan strain of Epicurianism.”

He’s even harder on Bloomberg-sycophants like David Frum, Frank Bruni, and Michael Tomasky. “Send us a man on a horse, to keep us from eating like one. . . . They’re talking about a burger and a Coke. This must mean that the ‘American Graffiti’ movie is the equivalent of ‘Triumph of the Will.'”

Let me be clear. These people are not well-meaning do-gooders who have just gone a bit too far. They don’t actually “mean well” at all. They don’t mean well, they mean to be in control. They are power-fetishists, drunk on the joys of bossing the little people around. They are not good people. They are evil. They should be ashamed of themselves, but shame — like taxes — is for the little people.

HMM. I KNOW HOW I’D BET: Voter suppression by “Walker allies” or last-minute, uncheckable smear by Barrett people?

HOW MOSQUITOES FLY IN THE RAIN: They bounce off the raindrops. Well, sort of.

Even though a single raindrop can weigh 50 times more than a mosquito, the insect can still fly in the rain.

Now, Georgia Tech researchers have determined how this is possible with the help of high-speed videography.

They found the mosquito’s strong exoskeleton and low mass render it impervious to falling raindrops.

Interesting. My guess is that this has a lot of relevance for flying microrobots, too.

I WONDER IF THIS HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH WHY HATS WENT OUT OF STYLE? White Americans’ heads are getting bigger — literally, study shows.

Researchers at the University of Tennessee’s Forensic Anthropology Center (what Mary Roach calls “the body farm” in her book “Stiff”) routinely examine skulls to try to determine sex and race of the craniums so if police officers discover just a skull, there are guidelines for gleaning info about it. The database of skulls and bodies has steadily increased to include people who were born and died in the 20th century, whereas prior the skulls were from people born in the 19th century. . . .

“The basic thing that we observed over the course of looking at crania that belong to people born from 1820s to 1980s, is that the cranium has gotten higher and narrower,” says Richard Jantz, who is married to Lee.

“If you just look at a side view of the skull, what you would see is the distance from top to bottom increased, and if you look at a front view of the skull, you would see the distance from side to side decreased.”

Bigger heads typically mean bigger brains, and while Richard Jantz and his colleagues did not look at brain size, he suspects brain size also increased. There are several theories why brains might be brawnier.

Better nutrition is one.

UPDATE: A better theory from reader Mary Forman: “Maybe those hats were interfering with head growth!”

VITAMIN D may reduce falls in the elderly.

COMPLAIN ALL YOU WANT, BUT I THINK THIS IS PROGRESS: Obesity Is The New Malnutrition.

MEGAN MCARDLE: Considering Elizabeth Warren, The Scholar. “The deeper problem is that some of her evidence doesn’t really support her thesis, and can be made to appear to support her thesis only by making some very weird choices about what metrics to use. . . . But it also matters because a large part of Warren’s prominence comes from the fact that she’s an academic. If she came from . . . well, the sort of think tank that publishes this sort of advocacy science . . . she would have considerably less glamor, and power.”

WEIGHT LOSS: Physician-reader Mike Kauzlarich writes:

I know I’ve written to you once about this already, but I just had to write to again say thank you so much for turning me on to Gary Taubes and the entire lower-carb dieting approach. Now after four months of largely avoiding any foods containing wheat, corn, potatoes, rice or sugar products, I have almost effortlessly lost 32 pounds without ever feeling particularly hungry or feeling “deprived” of anything. I’ve gone from barely fitting into size 36 pants to size 32, which I haven’t fit into since around the inauguration of the first President Bush. I feel the best I’ve felt in years, I exercise more now because I actually feel like I have the energy to do so, and I couldn’t be more pleased. Not only have you, through Mr. Taubes, helped me, but you are also helping several patients whom I have started on this dietary approach and the results speak for themselves. I guess you lawyer types can teach us doctor types a thing or two after all! :-) Keep up the good work!

I keep getting these kinds of emails. I encourage people to combine the Taubes approach with some Mark Rippetoe-style strength training.

CAN YOU TRAIN YOURSELF to be an optimist?

SCIENCE: A different drummer: Stanford engineers discover neural rhythms drive physical movement.

ASTEROIDS GALAXY TOUR: Could Mining Asteroids Violate Space Law? I don’t think so. The Outer Space Treaty forbids “national appropriation,” but not private property rights. The Moon Treaty’s explicit ban on private property rights is an admission of this, but nobody who matters has ratified the Moon Treaty. Rob Merges and I wrote an article on this for the NYU Environmental Law Journal a while back. Or if you prefer, there’s more here.

I believe that asteroid mining will usher in a new Golden Age . . .

Yeah, it’s a cheap gag, but whaddya want?

MEN: THREAT, OR MENACE? “Men alone cannot be by themselves in the children’s area.”

Sounds like a sex-discrimination lawsuit to me.

I DON’T KNOW, WHAT EXACTLY ARE MEN ENTITLED TO EXPECT FROM WOMEN THESE DAYS? Do Women Have The Right To Expect Chivalry From Men?

Chivalry, after all, was a system that involved expected behavior from women, too.

NEWSWEEK HIRES Megan McArdle.

HMM: “Bill Clinton Does Not Want Barack Obama to Win.”

ED MORRISSEY: Obama’s awkward embrace of the devil… who wears Prada. “As Americans grapple with disastrous unemployment numbers, the Obama campaign releases a video starring blatantly elitist Vogue editor Anna Wintour. . . . Romney doesn’t need to plant Dr. Evil on Team Obama. Right now, it looks as if the president’s re-election campaign is being run by Inspector Clouseau.”

RICHARD EPSTEIN: Not buying Sandy Levinson’s critique of the Constitution.

TEACHERS’ UNIONS HAVE A POPULARITY PROBLEM: Only 22% of Americans think unions have a positive effect on schools.

However Wisconsin’s recall election turns out on Tuesday, teachers unions already appear to be losing a larger political fight—in public opinion. In our latest annual national survey, we found that the share of the public with a positive view of union impact on local schools has dropped by seven percentage points in the past year. Among teachers, the decline was an even more remarkable 16 points. . . .

The survey’s most striking finding comes from its nationally representative sample of teachers. Whereas 58% of teachers took a positive view of unions in 2011, only 43% do in 2012. The number of teachers holding negative views of unions nearly doubled to 32% from 17% last year. Perhaps this helps explain why, according to education journalist and union watchdog Mike Antonucci, top officials of the National Education Association are reporting a decline of 150,000 members over the past two years and project that they will lose 200,000 more members by 2014, as several states have recently passed laws ending the automatic deduction of union dues from teachers’ paychecks.

Well, after the behavior of teachers in Wisconsin, it’s easy to see why.