AT THE OUTDOOR CHANNEL, Gun Stories.

NEUROSCIENCE: Mind Reading from Brain Recordings? ‘Neural Fingerprints’ of Memory Associations Decoded. “Researchers have long been interested in discovering the ways that human brains represent thoughts through a complex interplay of electrical signals. Recent improvements in brain recording and statistical methods have given researchers unprecedented insight into the physical processes under-lying thoughts. For example, researchers have begun to show that it is possible to use brain recordings to reconstruct aspects of an image or movie clip someone is viewing, a sound someone is hearing or even the text someone is reading. A new study by University of Pennsylvania and Thomas Jefferson University scientists brings this work one step closer to actual mind reading by using brain recordings to infer the way people organize associations between words in their memories.”

For better or worse (probably both) we’re coming to the end of the time when the only way to get information out of someone’s brain was to have them tell you things.

Related: The future of mind control: People already worry about genetics. They should worry about brain science too.

CONGRESSIONAL REPUBLICANS: ObamaCare is in our court now.

Also, note this from Ann Althouse’s comments:

My wife who is about as political as my cat, just contacted the local Tea Party in Cincinnati after the tax increase to see what she can do to help. Way to piss off the sleeping dogs.

I do expect a lot of re-energization among Tea Party folks who had perhaps grown a bit complacent.

UPDATE: Reader Kevin Murphy writes: “As one of those, I wonder if you could gather up a list from your readers about July 4th rallies in major cities.” Well, folks?

HEY, IF THE MANDATE IS A TAX, can President Romney tell the IRS not to collect it?

SCIENCE: Speech Algorithm Could Detect Early Parkinson’s Disease. “Max Little, a research fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, made the announcement during the opening of the TEDGlobal conference in Edinburgh, 25 June. While studying at Oxford University, Little developed an algorithm that identifies the unique characteristics present in the voice of a Parkinson’s Disease sufferer.”

REASON TV: Is There a Silver Lining to the Supreme Court’s Obamacare Decision?

DAVID BERNSTEIN: Was Scalia’s Dissent Originally A Majority Opinion?

RESPIROCYTES: Injecting life-saving oxygen into a vein: Microparticles could deliver oxygen when breathing is impaired. “Patients unable to breathe because of acute lung failure or an obstructed airway need another way to get oxygen to their blood—and fast—to avoid cardiac arrest and brain injury. A team led by researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital has designed tiny, gas-filled microparticles that can be injected directly into the bloodstream to quickly oxygenate the blood. . . . The microparticles consist of a single layer of lipids (fatty molecules) that surround a tiny pocket of oxygen gas, and are delivered in a liquid solution. In a cover article in the June 27 issue of Science Translational Medicine, John Kheir, MD, of the Department of Cardiology at Boston Children’s Hospital, and colleagues report that an infusion of these microparticles into animals with low blood oxygen levels restored blood oxygen saturation to near-normal levels, within seconds.” Faster, please.

And this is kind of cool: “We drew each other’s blood, mixed it in a test tube with the microparticles, and watched blue blood turn immediately red, right before our eyes.”

The emergency-medicine applications are dramatic. Here, by the way, is Robert Freitas’ original envisioning. Not quite there yet, but amazingly close.

SCIENCE: CALTECH RESEARCHERS DEVELOP TECHNIQUE TO FOCUS LIGHT INSIDE BIOLOGICAL TISSUE. “While the previous limit for how deep light could be focused was only about one millimeter, the Caltech team is now able to reach two and a half millimeters. And, in principle, their technique could focus light as much as a few inches into tissue. The technique is used much like a flashlight shining on the body’s interior, and may eventually provide researchers and doctors with a host of possible biomedical applications, such as a less invasive way of diagnosing and treating diseases.”

LARRY SOLUM: The Decision to Uphold the Mandate as Tax Represents a Gestalt Shift in Constitutional Law. Those who wondered what I meant by my Lopez reference below should read this post.

Related: Chief Justice Roberts writes an opinion limiting the commerce power and the spending power.

UPDATE: Rand Simberg: If the mandate’s a tax, how can it be valid if it originated in the Senate? I thought it originated in the House, but I could be wrong.

Also, a tax repeal can’t be filibustered.

“Don’t call it a ‘mandate,’ it’s a tax!”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Justin Binik-Thomas writes: “The Senate replaced an old house bill in its entirety with what is now Obamacare. So technically it started in the house but another example of cheating.” Yes, that’s what I remembered.

SO MUCH FOR THAT “NEW CIVILITY” BULLSHIT: Justice Thomas dissents, Left hurls vile racial slurs ‘house nigga,’ ‘Uncle Tom’. So many racists in the Democratic Party. Who knew?

HEH: “Real Reporters” Have Dewey-Defeats-Truman Moment on ObamaCare.

BILL WHITTLE: Firewall: Why ObamaCare Can’t Work.

Related: The Hidden Cost of National Healthcare.

HEALTHCARE HEADLINE: Obama Imposes Huge Tax On American Middle Class.

Romney’s likely take: Obama said it wasn’t a tax. The Supreme Court says he lied.

UPDATE: McConnell: Supreme Court Ruling Shows Healthcare Law Was Sold On A Deception.

Obama “promised up and down that this bill was not a tax,” McConnell said. “Well, the Supreme Court has spoken.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said the Supreme Court’s ruling on the 2010 healthcare law reveals that the individual mandate is constitutionally acceptable when seen as a tax, even though Democrats tried to argue that it wasn’t a tax to help get it passed.

“The President of the United States himself promised up and down that this bill was not a tax,” McConnell said on the Senate floor. “This was one of the Democrats’ top selling points, because they knew it would never have passed if they said it was a tax.”

That’s true. More thoughts from J. Christian Adams.

Also Ira Stoll, who opens with this: “Though the decision will widely be portrayed as a victory for President Obama — his signature legislative accomplishment was ratified as constitutional by a Supreme Court majority that included George W. Bush-appointed chief justice John Roberts — it isn’t necessarily clear that it will be a victory. By calling the mandate a tax, the court made an official ruling that President Obama had violated his 2008 campaign promise not to raise taxes on anyone earning less than $250,000 a year. And the ruling also keeps ObamaCare alive as a political issue. A ruling that struck down the law might have energized Obama supporters. This ruling may make the law’s opponents even more determined to elect a Republican president and Congress so that they can repeal the law or, failing that, defund it.”

Yeah, expect to see this video a lot:

Related: Issa to Obama: What Happened To ObamaCare Not Being A Tax? “In selling Obamacare, Congressional Democrats and President Obama assured the American people that it was not a tax. Today, the Supreme Court ruled it was, in fact, a tax. This tax was imposed on the American people amidst an extended recession and is one of the many reasons our economy remains stagnant under President Obama’s leadership.”

IT’S MOSTLY WHITE, AND WOMEN ARE PAID MUCH LESS: The “Creative Class’s” Dirty Secret. Hmm. Mostly white. Women paid less. Sounds like the Obama White House!

INDIVIDUAL MANDATE HELD UNCONSTITUTIONAL UNDER COMMERCE POWER, but Scotusblog says it survives as a tax. “It’s very complicated, so we’re still figuring it out.”

I feel sorry for the folks on TV trying to read this opinion and talk at the same time.

UPDATE: From ScotusBlog: “The bottom line: the entire ACA is upheld, with the exception that the federal government’s power to terminate states’ Medicaid funds is narrowly read.” Plus: “The money quote from the section on the mandate: ‘Our precedent demonstrates that Congress had the power to impose the exaction in Section 5000A under the taxing power, and that Section 5000A need not be read to do more than impose a tax. This is sufficient to sustain it.'”

So it was upheld on a basis — the taxing power — that the Administration didn’t advance. In fact, Obama denied that it was a tax. This just supports what Mike Graetz told me in Tax class years ago: “The constitution stops where the Internal Revenue Code begins.”

On the upside, the Lopez revolution, which some believed dead, appears to be revived.

So, liberals, does this mean the Supreme Court is legitimate again?

And what’s next? Republicans will have to push for repeal, or look like losers. Now Romney needs to make an issue of repealing the “Obama Healthcare Tax,” I guess. And, of course, it’s important to note that just because the Supreme Court — barely — found the Act constitutional doesn’t mean that it’s actually a good idea.

Text of the opinion is still not online. But here’s ScotusBlog’s summary:

In Plain English: The Affordable Care Act, including its individual mandate that virtually all Americans buy health insurance, is constitutional. There were not five votes to uphold it on the ground that Congress could use its power to regulate commerce between the states to require everyone to buy health insurance. However, five Justices agreed that the penalty that someone must pay if he refuses to buy insurance is a kind of tax that Congress can impose using its taxing power. That is all that matters. Because the mandate survives, the Court did not need to decide what other parts of the statute were constitutional, except for a provision that required states to comply with new eligibility requirements for Medicaid or risk losing their funding. On that question, the Court held that the provision is constitutional as long as states would only lose new funds if they didn’t comply with the new requirements, rather than all of their funding. . . . Yes, to answer a common question, the whole ACA is constitutional, so the provision requiring insurers to cover young adults until they are 26 survives as well.

So there you are. The Supreme Court has refused to save us from ourselves. The remedy now will have to be political.

FINALLY: Here’s a link to the opinion. I should also note that for those who thought the Lopez case dead, this opinion indicates that it remains very much alive. It appears that there may also be support on the Court for limiting Congress’s spending power. Has Roberts pulled a Marbury, appearing to give ground while actually laying the foundation for change in the future? Call that an optimistic reading.

LIVEBLOGGING THE SUPREME COURT’S OBAMACARE DECISION — THIS TIME PRETTY MUCH FOR SURE! — at ScotusBlog.

ROGER KIMBALL: America’s Political Class: Signs of Hope.

IOWAHAWK ON THE OBAMACARE DECISION: As a longtime connoisseur of overwrought political hysterics, it’s CHRISTMAS MORNING.

Related thoughts from Ann Althouse.

ANDREW MCCARTHY: What If They Held A Contempt Party And Nobody Came?

AT AMAZON, it’s the Automotive Outlet Sale.

Also, today only: Klipsch Quintet 5.0 Home Theater Speaker System, $199.99.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Why Nothing Is Shovel-Ready Anymore.

The time between planning a project and actually carrying it out stretches into decades. To those who bemoan the lack of “shovel-ready” infrastructure projects in America: this is why.

Even if you are a Keynesian and believe that deficit spending helps the economy to grow, infrastructure projects won’t do the trick anymore. By the time you’re actually actually able to get the project off the ground, the recession has been over for years.

And the problem runs deeper than infrastructure. Our bureaucratic institutions are ponderously slow. We need new structured interactions between laws, courts, and agencies that can process information and make decisions in real time — rather than putting everything in bureaucratic limbo for decades.

Slow governmental process is a facet of the blue social model and the progressive era civil service bureaucracies and slow procedures that model has historically entailed. And the high costs associated with it are among the reasons that the model is dying.

Indeed. Plus, from the comments: “I propose that the problem is that Blue and Green don’t mix.”

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Obama Is A Job-Outsourcing Hypocrite. “The president accuses his likely opponent of outsourcing jobs as his re-election campaign hires telemarketers in Canada and the Philippines. And what about GM in China and those electric cars built in Finland?”

KEITH HENNESSEY ON THE NEW HIGHWAY BILL’S PENSION PROVISIONS: How to avoid shafting future retirees & creating another bailout.

Congress will soon vote on a final version of a two-year highway spending bill. Press reports suggest the just-concluded agreement includes a “pension funding stabilization” provision from the Senate version of the bill. This means that any Member of Congress who votes for the final bill will be (a) shafting some future retirees in defined benefit pension plans and (b) increasing the risk of a future taxpayer bailout of a government-run corporation that insures pension plans. Congress can avoid both these bad things simply by removing this provision from the final version of the bill.

I wonder if they will? “No one lobbies on behalf of future retirees who face increased risk of having their pension benefits cut when their employer goes bankrupt. No one lobbies on behalf of the taxpayer who faces increased risk of paying for a future PBGC bailout.”