THOUGH NOT DIRECTLY RELATED, this article on campus violence by the Insta-Wife and a couple of colleagues is still pretty relevant, given the Aurora shooter’s roots in an academic environment.

Let me also give another plug to Clayton Cramer’s My Brother Ron: A Personal and Social History of the Deinstitutionalization of the Mentally Ill. (Also on Kindle.) Several papers have written me to ask for columns and I’ve just referred them to Clayton. I don’t really have anything to say that I haven’t said before.

Here’s my piece from 2007 in the New York Daily News. Maybe you should click through just to see if we can bump it up to their “Most Popular” link today . . . .

UPDATE: Well, we’re up to #9 already!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Make that #7!

MORE: NOW #6!

STILL MORE: #5! I wonder if it’ll pass their odious “Blood On Their Hands” editorial, now at #3? At least the point’s made, anyway . . . .

MORE STILL: Now up to #4, but the odious editorial has moved up to #2, probably from InstaPundit readers clicking through to see how odious it was. . . . Oh, well.

SOME CIVIL RIGHTS GOOD NEWS: Calls For Gun Control Stir Little Support.

A TRIUMPH FOR TRADITIONAL VALUES: Porn, stripping get Octomom Nadya Suleman off welfare.

AT POLITICO, more on the news media’s ongoing effort to demonize the Tea Party movement.

Related: Tea Party Supporters Getting Understandably Irritated at Being Falsely Linked to Every New Incidence of Ultra-Violence. “It might just be that the Brian Ross fallout will be loud enough to prompt journalistic outlets to avoid pinning immediate blame on the Tea Party next time around. Maybe one day they’ll even get around to admitting how wrong, unfair, and divisive they were back in 2009. I won’t hold my breath.”

GALLUP: By more than 2-1, Americans think Romney would be better at handling the economy and restoring prosperity.

Plus: “A record number of Americans express skepticism about the activist role of government Obama espouses; 61% say the government is trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses. That’s the highest number since Gallup began asking the question in 1992.”

ODD JOBS OF THE 21ST CENTURY: MONKEY WHISPERER. “Business has been good because monkey ownership is at an all-time high. There are no official statistics, but various estimates put the number of domestic monkeys at from 3,000 to 15,000 nationally. Whiteaker, however, suspects it’s more like 45,000.”

CHANGE: Syria Threatens To Use WMD That Were A Figment of Neocons’ Imaginations.

LAWYERING: The Jack Daniels folks demonstrate how to write a cease-and-desist letter.

CHOOSING POORLY: CLIMATEGATE FIGURE MICHAEL MANN THREATENS A LAWSUIT. I suspect that many people would eagerly donate to a defense fund, in the hopes of seeing what comes out in the discovery process.

DOES THINKING HARD BURN CALORIES? I’m going to ponder this, but first perhaps I’ll have some bacon, just in case.

WHY YOU SHOULD TALK TO STRANGERS.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Woman Stabs Husband Over Facebook Post. Is this a “love crime?” I thought the approved term was “domestic violence.” Or is it different when a woman is the perp? And is this the lesson to take from the story? “Guys, here’s one more reason to watch what you post on Facebook.”

No double standards here.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How Women Ruin Romance by Talking Too Much.

J.J. GOULD: Disrupting the Infamy Game: How to Change the Coverage of Mass Shootings. “Cable networks thrive on the kind of drama the “Batman shooter” represents. In the way they’ve evolved, it’s become a pure protein for them.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Online Courses Free For The Taking. “A dozen major research universities, including Georgia Tech, Princeton, Duke, Johns Hopkins and the University of Virginia, announced plans last week to offer 100 free online courses that will enable millions worldwide to take the same classes as students at elite U.S. campuses.”

This is happening even faster than I expected.

LEGAL EDUCATION UPDATE: New Lawyer Salaries and the Creation of the Bimodal Salary Distribution, 1991 to 2011.

KAY HYMOWITZ: Is the Obama administration targeting the most successful poverty-reduction program in decades?

Like the song says, they’ll turn us all into beggars ’cause they’re easier to please.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Obama Tells Tall Tales About The Bush Years.

Bush-era tax cuts and deregulation, he argues “resulted in the most sluggish job growth in decades” along with “rising inequality, surpluses turned into deficits, culminating in the worst economic crisis in our lifetimes.”

There’s just one problem. Obama’s got his history wrong.

Do tell.

PHOTO: Diversity In The Obama Administration.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: California’s Bankrupt Cities: Look East to Wisconsin.

AT AMAZON, bestsellers in Mysteries, Thrillers & Suspense.

Also, today only: The Mel Brooks Collection on Blu-Ray, for $28.99. “The Mel Brooks Collection includes such classics as Blazing Saddles, Spaceballs, Young Frankenstein, High Anxiety, History Of The World Part 1, Robin Hood: Men In Tights, Silent Movie, To Be Or Not To Be, and The Twelve Chairs.”

I THINK HE’S DOING EXACTLY THE RIGHT THING HERE: Obama Agrees Not To Use Colorado Shooter’s Name.

In this, he’s on the same page as Victor Davis Hanson, who writes: “I wish to know nothing about him other than the information necessary to try, convict, and punish him.”

MICKEY KAUS: “Note to those who want ABC’s Brian Ross fired (as I do): As long as there is the threat of a libel suit, ABC executives will want to keep Ross close. If they fire him, he might turn around and testify for a plaintiff about ABC’s journalistic practices, which could be embarrassing.” I suppose it could.

GORDON CROVITZ: Who Really Invented The Internet?

A telling moment in the presidential race came recently when Barack Obama said: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” He justified elevating bureaucrats over entrepreneurs by referring to bridges and roads, adding: “The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all companies could make money off the Internet.”

It’s an urban legend that the government launched the Internet. The myth is that the Pentagon created the Internet to keep its communications lines up even in a nuclear strike. The truth is a more interesting story about how innovation happens—and about how hard it is to build successful technology companies even once the government gets out of the way. . . .

If the government didn’t invent the Internet, who did? Vinton Cerf developed the TCP/IP protocol, the Internet’s backbone, and Tim Berners-Lee gets credit for hyperlinks. But full credit goes to the company where Mr. Taylor worked after leaving ARPA: Xerox. It was at the Xerox PARC labs in Silicon Valley in the 1970s that the Ethernet was developed to link different computer networks. Researchers there also developed the first personal computer (the Xerox Alto) and the graphical user interface that still drives computer usage today.

According to a book about Xerox PARC, “Dealers of Lightning” (by Michael Hiltzik), its top researchers realized they couldn’t wait for the government to connect different networks, so would have to do it themselves.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Criticism from Ars Technica.