THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN WE’D SEE HEADLINES LIKE THIS. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! White House apologizes for Quran burning.

IS MARRIAGE ONLY FOR the rich and well-educated?

FAMILY TALK, southern style.

DAN MITCHELL: The Higher-Education Bubble and Third-Party Payer.

DEBATING civilian drones in the United States.

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: What Would Real Space Combat Look Like?

DEREK THOMPSON IN THE ATLANTIC: False Recovery 2.0: It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like 2011.

PUTTING A MACHINE GUN on a “green” military vehicle.

A PULITZER PRIZE for PJ Media?

RICHARD EPSTEIN: The Oil Market Panic.

U.S. SUPREME COURT takes college affirmative action case. “The U.S. Supreme Court today agreed to consider whether the University of Texas at Austin has the right to consider race and ethnicity in admissions decisions. Those bringing the case hope the Supreme Court will restrict or even eliminate the right of colleges to consider race in admissions – a prerogative last affirmed by the Supreme Court in 2003 in a case involving the University of Michigan’s law school.”

More here.

ANN ALTHOUSE ON PETER GLEICK’S HEARTLAND FAKERY: “Mmmm. Taste it: the Real-and-Fake cocktail. Much better than straight real, which is quite bland. No kick! And ‘climate change’ is so very, very important.”

UPDATE: In Apologizing for Global Warming Hoax, Peter Gleick Blames His Victims.

SOME GOOD NEWS from Nigeria’s North.

SOMEHOW, I THINK THIS ROBERT HEINLEIN QUOTE IS WORTH REPEATING ONE MORE TIME:

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as “bad luck.”

You know?

A.W.R. HAWKINS: Are We Armed Because We’re Free, Or Are We Free Because We’re Armed?

UPDATE: Reader Drew Kelley emails: “Yes.”

THERE’S MORE TO NOTHING than we knew.

It is, perhaps, the mystery of last resort. Scientists may be at least theoretically able to trace every last galaxy back to a bump in the Big Bang, to complete the entire quantum roll call of particles and forces. But the question of why there was a Big Bang or any quantum particles at all was presumed to lie safely out of scientific bounds, in the realms of philosophy or religion.

Now even that assumption is no longer safe, as exemplified by a new book by the cosmologist Lawrence M. Krauss. In it he joins a chorus of physicists and cosmologists who have been pushing into sacred ground, proclaiming more and more loudly in the last few years that science can explain how something — namely our star-spangled cosmos — could be born from, if not nothing, something very close to it.

Just don’t get too far beyond the data.

MOUTH GEAR: Improving the Tongue Drive for paralyzed people.

AT AMAZON, a new Kindle Book Deal every day.

Also, today only: The Godfather collection — the Coppola Restoration, for $25 on Blu-Ray. All 3 movies.

ANDREW KLAVAN: The Tyranny of Hip.