CULTURAL INSENSITIVITY: Cringeworthy French McDonald’s Ads Try, Fail to Poke Fun at Americans.

AT AMAZON, 50% or more off on Women’s Earrings. Plus new “lightning deals” every hour.

Also, 25% or more off on Women’s Fragrances.

Plus, DVDs under $5, as well as Blu-Ray under $10.

BRYAN PRESTON: 4 Reasons Why the Duck Dynasty Brouhaha Matters. You want to hurt A&E, and the media generally? Get behind the cable-unbundling legislation in Congress. It’s a good idea anyway.

BAR REPORT: ‘New Lawyers Are in a Financial and Emotional Depression.’

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: Our Final Invention? I tend to be more a Kurzweilian optimist, but there is this:

At the end of our interview, I asked Barrat what I thought was a joke. I know you’ve got a grim view of what may lie ahead, I said, but does that mean you’re buying property for your family on a desert island just in case?

“I don’t want to really scare you,” he said, after half a chuckle. “But it was alarming how many people I talked to who are highly placed people in AI who have retreats that are sort of ‘bug out’ houses” to which they could flee if it all hits the fan.

That’s for a darker, James Miller view. Here’s my interview with Miller. Says Miller about strong AIs: “I think the default path is that they treat us horribly.”

IS REPUTATION the new digital currency? Not yet.

A TINY $11,000 HOUSE.

JOSH LEVIN IN SLATE: The Welfare Queen: Ronald Reagan made Linda Taylor a notorious American villain. Her other sins were far worse.

Four decades later, Reagan’s soliloquies on welfare fraud are often remembered as shameless demagoguery. Many accounts report that Reagan coined the term “welfare queen,” and that this woman in Chicago was a fictional character. In 2007, the New York Times’ Paul Krugman wrote that “the bogus story of the Cadillac-driving welfare queen [was] a gross exaggeration of a minor case of welfare fraud.” MSNBC’s Chris Matthews says the whole thing is racist malarkey—a coded reference to black indolence and criminality designed to appeal to working-class whites.

Though Reagan was known to stretch the truth, he did not invent that woman in Chicago. Her name was Linda Taylor, and it was the Chicago Tribune, not the GOP politician, who dubbed her the “welfare queen.” It was the Tribune, too, that lavished attention on Taylor’s jewelry, furs, and Cadillac—all of which were real. . . .

When I set out in search of Linda Taylor, I hoped to find the real story of the woman who played such an outsize role in American politics—who she was, where she came from, and what her life was like before and after she became the national symbol of unearned prosperity. What I found was a woman who destroyed lives, someone far more depraved than even Ronald Reagan could have imagined. In the 1970s alone, Taylor was investigated for homicide, kidnapping, and baby trafficking. The detective who tried desperately to put her away believes she’s responsible for one of Chicago’s most legendary crimes, one that remains unsolved to this day. Welfare fraud was likely the least of the welfare queen’s offenses.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Hyper-Regulated Lawlessness. “The political significance of the ‘welfare queen’ story rests on how many of them are out there. A single person scamming the welfare state does not, by herself, represent a devastating indictment of the welfare state. It matters how easy it was, and whether a large number of people participate in such activities, albeit on a less grandiose scale than ‘the haughty thief who drove her Cadillac to the public aid office’ and wore ‘expensive clothes and oversize hats’ to her trial. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of scamming going on, and the Left is not even slightly interested in cracking down on it, or even admitting it’s a problem.” For them, it’s not a problem. It’s a funding mechanism.

HEH: Meet Ethan Krupp: Pajamacare boy and Organizing for Action employee.

LIVING FAT IN CAPITAL CITY: U.S. taxpayers are shelling out $1.9 million this year to provide U.S. Senate staffers with lifestyle coaching courses.

RON BAILEY: Ugly Climate Models: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change can’t explain the last 15 years.

The IPCC report acknowledges that almost all of the “historical simulations do not reproduce the observed recent warming hiatus.” Not to worry, it assures us; 15-year pauses just happen, and you can’t really expect the models to simulate such random natural fluctuations in the climate. Once this little slow-down passes, the report maintains, “It is more likely than not that internal climate variability in the near-term will enhance and not counteract the surface warming expected to arise from the increasing anthropogenic forcing” (emphasis in original). In other words, when the warm-up resumes temperatures will soar.

John Christy, a climatologist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, has come to a different conclusion. Christy compared the outputs for the tropical troposphere of 73 models used by the IPCC in its latest report with satellite and weather balloon temperature trends since 1979. “The tropics is so important,” Christy explains in an email message, “because that is where models show the clearest and most distinct signal of greenhouse warming-so that is where the comparison should be made (rather than say for temperatures in North Dakota). Plus, the key cloud and water vapor feedback processes occur in the tropics.”

When it comes to simulating the atmospheric temperature trends of the last 35 years, Christy found, all of the IPCC models are running hotter than the actual climate.

Well, that’s encouraging. Though actually, I’d prefer global warming to global cooling.

READER MEAD RECOMMENDATION: Reader Melissa Lambert writes:

I’m a daily addict of Instapundit – you’ve used my silly quotes a few times. A few months back I saw on your blog that Amazon was selling wine, and our “Meadery” is now on Amazon as of this week! We are so happy to have this new way to sell mead — we got our first order for “The Venerable Mead” (paging Ann Althouse) a few hours after we listed. So far we can only ship to CA, FL, and DC, but we’re going to add more states asap. (Pictures of the bottles with the lovely mead will be up in a few weeks.)

Here’s the link.

Alas, Tennessee — which doesn’t even allow wine or mead to be sold in grocery stores — won’t allow Amazon to ship booze here. But I encourage others to check it out.

SARAH HOYT: Woe Is Obama: Is the president depressed as his “accomplishments” come home to roost? “Unexpectedly! Everything going wrong for the most brilliant man in the nation!”

UPDATE: The National Enquirer was already on this. Hey, as John Edwards can attest, they’re not always wrong.

SCIENCE: 1 in 200 Pregnant Women Claim They Didn’t Have Sex.

PEELING THE ONION OF FAIL (CONT’D): Think your state has Obamacare problems? They’re nothing compared to Guam.

USA TODAY: A&E fowls up ‘Duck’ flap: The ‘tolerance’ society demands from Christians really is silent compliance. My own view is that everyone gets to state an opinion, but nobody has to listen to the opinions stated. That is a view, however, that is inconsistent with gleichschaltung.

UPDATE: From the comments: “I suspect this is an attempt to get Obamacare off the front pages and I suspect that we are all falling for it.” I’m still covering ObamaCare, but I think that’s probably right.

POPULAR MECHANICS: Is an Obsession With Safety Stifling Space Exploration? An interview of Rand Simberg about his new book, Safe Is Not An Option.

SO KNOXVILLE’S CITYVIEW MAGAZINE did a profile on me in their latest issue (though I got second billing to Johnny Knoxville). I liked this photo:

Also this one:

The cool photos are by Bryan Starmer, of Cityview Magazine.

PROF. JACOBSON: My email to the President of Princeton regarding academic boycott of Israel: Dr. Michael Oren, a celebrated Princeton alumnus, is subject to the American Studies Association boycott. Will Princeton become complicit?

GLEICHSCHALTUNG NEWS: Ann Althouse Unpacks the Phil Robertson Kerfuffle.

He didn’t compare “being gay to bestiality.” He put homosexual conduct — not the status of being gay — into a category of sins that included “sleeping around with this woman and that woman” as well as bestiality. We don’t see the heterosexual men who enjoy multiple sex partners getting hotheaded over Phil Robertson. Why not? They’re not organized to make political demands at the moment, but they haven’t had to fight for the right to fornicate recently. So those who are organized and in the middle of a movement are taking Robertson’s bait (or answering his duck call or whatever). It’s “anti-gay.” The “bestiality” business is forefronted.

This is the political game of the moment.

You must have no unacceptable thoughts or criticisms, comrade.

HE WAS A BIG DEAL ONCE, BUT BECAME TECHNOLOGICALLY OBSOLETE: Al Goldstein, Pioneering Pornographer, Dies at 77.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 224.

JOHN FUND: Someone Remind Podesta: Jim Jones Was a Democratic Vote Fraudster.

I was living in San Francisco during the period when Jim Jones was a Democratic power broker, known for his ability to deliver thousands of votes. I recall that in 1976, Assemblyman Willie Brown, later the longtime speaker of that body, compared Jones to Martin Luther King, Angela Davis, Albert Einstein, and Chairman Mao in an introduction. That same year, Walter Mondale, Jimmy Carter’s vice-presidential candidate, met personally with Jones. So did Jimmy Carter’s wife, Rosalynn. Among dozens of accolades from leading Democrats that Jones collected was this one from Joseph Califano, who was secretary of Health, Education and Welfare under Jimmy Carter: “Knowing your commitment and compassion, your interest in protecting individual liberty and freedom have made an outstanding contribution to furthering the cause of human dignity.”

Jones basked in the glow of praise his People’s Temple garnered from gullible politicians, and San Francisco mayor George Moscone, later tragically assassinated in 1978, even appointed him to San Francisco’s housing commission. Jones had been responsible for an incredible vote-harvesting operation that may have made the difference in Moscone’s narrow 4,000-vote victory over conservative John Barbagelata in 1975.

After Jones’s death, the national media briefly reported on the massive vote-fraud operation that Jones conducted on behalf of Moscone.

Then memory-holed it.

OBAMACARE: “A cascade of declining expectations.”

UPDATE: Then there’s the ad campaign: Even MSNBC is laughing hysterically at Pajama Boy.