JAMES DELINGPOLE: Shale Gas Is Rearden Metal.

For my summer holidays I have been mostly reading Atlas Shrugged. Ayn Rand has her faults but, boy, was she prescient.

One of the things she foresaw was the current nonsensical, dishonest, canting campaign against shale gas. In Atlas Shrugged it takes the form of Rearden Metal, the miracle technology which is going to transform the US economy if only the progressives will let it. But of course, Rand’s fictional progressives don’t want Reardon Metal to succeed any more than their modern, real-life equivalents want shale gas to succeed.
Why not? For the same rag-bag of made-up, disingenuous reasons which progressives have used to justify their war on progress since time immemorial: it’s unfair, it uses up scarce resources, it might be dangerous. Rand doesn’t actually use the phrase “the precautionary principle.” But this is exactly what she is describing in the book when various vested interests – the corporatists in bed with big government, the politicised junk-scientists at the Institute of Science (aka, in our world, the National Academy of Sciences or the Royal Society), the unions – try to close down the nascent technology using the flimsiest of excuses.

Read the whole thing.

WHAT’S RAND PAUL DOING OVER SUMMER BREAK? Performing free eye surgery on the indigent. Stupid unfeeling libertarians! Why can’t he do something for the less fortunate — like Hillary Clinton is doing!

HOW ABOUT THAT: When Hillary Decided Anthony Weiner Was a Liability, All of His Democratic Friends in Politics and the Media Suddenly Found Out All Sorts of interesting Things. “That’s funny considering Shillary’s husband had an affair with a staffer.”

Plus: “Incidentally… It is now reported that this alleged affair was notorious and obvious, but apparently Bob Filner’s rampage of molestation was a tightly kept secret that No One Knew About.”

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Who Really Benefits From Public Schools? What if we look at public schools as profit-making ventures?

MARK STEYN: Idiot Big Brother: The prospect of NSA abuse is now a reality. “The Egypt/Washington industrial-scale wrong number is almost too perfectly poignant a vignette at the end of a week in which hundreds are dead on the streets of Cairo. On the global scene, America has imploded: Its leaders have no grasp of its national interests, never mind any sense of how to achieve them. The assumption that we are in the early stages of ‘the post-American world’ is now shared by everyone from General Sisi to Vladimir Putin. General Sisi, I should add, is Egypt’s new strongman, not Putin’s characterization of Obama. Meanwhile, in contrast to its accelerating irrelevance overseas, at home Washington’s big bloated blundering bureaucratic security state expands daily. It’s easier to crack down on 47 Elm Street than Benghazi.”

POLITICKING WITH TAXPAYER MONEY: The Hill: Health group’s ObamaCare enrollment drive targets states with GOP governors. “The window to begin enrolling in the law’s new coverage options opens in just 50 days. Enroll America, a prominent nonprofit with close ties to the White House, said it’s focusing on 10 states as it ramps up a massive education campaign that will ultimately cost tens of millions of dollars.”

Enroll America isn’t just a “nonprofit,” it’s the shady “nonprofit” on whose behalf Kathleen Sebelius was shaking down companies she regulates for donations. Now this non partisan nonprofit, on whose behalf a sitting Obama Administration official used her official position to raise money, is targeting Republican governors.

Remember when Democrats were complaining about a “culture of corruption?”

CHARLIE MARTIN: Dude, Where’s My Jetpack? Here?

JAMES TARANTO: Dog The Wag: A Professional Clown Is A Serious Clown.

WHAT’S REALLY GOING ON AT THE NSA? The NSA Won’t Say. “The proper response to the latest revelations is not panic but deep frustration and a demand for data that does more than get the NSA through a news cycle. It must be more forthcoming, or it will lose its mandate. And if the president wants to kill the program, he should say so; otherwise, he should get off the golf links and explain what is going on here.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Another law school laying off faculty and staff.

TERRY MCAULIFFE: Don’t Ask Me About GreenTech, I Was Just the Chairman.

WELL, ONE OF THEM BLOGS AT SLATE, and another of them is involved in some sort of affair-scandal involving Anthony Weiner.

ROLLING STONE: The federal government has made it easier than ever to borrow money for higher education – saddling a generation with crushing debts and inflating a bubble that could bring down the economy.

Really? Do tell.

Oh, wait, there’s more:

The thing is, none of it – not last month’s deal, not Obama’s 2010 reforms – mattered that much. No doubt, seeing rates double permanently would genuinely have sucked for many students, so it was nice to avoid that. And yes, it was theoretically beneficial when Obama took banks and middlemen out of the federal student-loan game. But the dirty secret of American higher education is that student-loan interest rates are almost irrelevant. It’s not the cost of the loan that’s the problem, it’s the principal – the appallingly high tuition costs that have been soaring at two to three times the rate of inflation, an irrational upward trajectory eerily reminiscent of skyrocketing housing prices in the years before 2008.

This is sounding kinda familiar. But it’s nice to see Rolling Stone take notice. From there, perhaps the message will filter out into publications read by young people thinking of college.

I WROTE THESE THOUGHTS ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF ELVIS’S DEATH 11 years ago, but they’re still relevant.

STACY MCCAIN ON theories about Michael Hastings’ death. “There is no reason to believe that the car accident was anything other than a car accident — insofar as a fatal crash is an ‘accident’ when you’re driving a Mercedes-Benz sports coupe 100 mph down a city street at 4 o’clock in the morning. The real story — and I’ve said this from the get-go — is why Michael Hastings was driving so fast at such an ungodly hour.”

The problem is that the real news is outrunning the conspiracy theorists these days.

WELL, THAT’S COMFORTING: Two Dems Warn NSA Violations Just ‘Tip of a Larger Iceberg.’

CHIPPING AWAY AT THE MACHINE: Appeals Court Rules Michigan Right-To-Work Law Applies To State Workers.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIP: The Pickup Lines Men Use On Women Are Nothing Compared To The Ones They Use On Each Other. Hey, that whole “gays are witty” thing is just a stereotype.

JONAH GOLDBERG: “To Hell with them.” “If real friends were threatened, the American people would support coming to their aid. It’s just that there’s a growing — or deepening — sense that we don’t have real friends in the Muslim world.”

THE PICTURE ROLLING STONE SHOULD HAVE HAD ON ITS COVER.

AT AMAZON, 50% or More Off On Multitools.

Also, 50% or More Off On Tools & Tool Sets.

LAW SCHOOLS RANKED BY return on investment.

THE PASSIVE HOUSE: Sealed For Freshness. “The basic idea is that these houses are so airtight that warm air won’t leak out in the winter, and cool air won’t leak out in the summer. Windows are three panes thick, and there is far more insulation than you would find in a standard American home. Stale indoor air is exchanged for fresh outdoor air without altering the internal temperature by mechanical systems you would not find in a conventional house: things like heat-recovery ventilators, which draw the heat from outgoing air and mix it with incoming air from outside in the winter, and do the opposite in the summer. (In high-humidity climates, an energy-recovery ventilator is used instead to strip moisture from incoming air.) Vents that look like small, round audio speakers are placed throughout the house to exchange fresh air. These devices have prevented the formation of mold, which plagued the passive-solar movement of the 1970s and 1980s.”

I THINK THAT MEN HAVE KNOWN THIS FOR YEARS: The Secret To Having More Sex? Make More Money!

SECURITY PROBLEMS WITH the “Internet of Things.”