DOES PUTIN KNOW ABOUT SHRINKAGE? At Martha’s Vineyard, Obama Complains About Cold Ocean.

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Nanotechnology-based next generation memory nears mass production.

GREAT: Car Security Is Likely to Worsen, Researchers Say.

BRUCE BRALEY: I don’t like Iowans, I just want to be their Senator.

BIZARRO WORLD: Why It’s Cheaper to Lease a New Electric Car Than to Buy One Used.

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GOVERNMENT IS JUST ANOTHER WORD FOR THE THINGS WE CHOOSE TO DO TOGETHER: USPTO Tried To Hide Abuse And Fraud By Patent Examiners From Inspector General.

MORE BANG FOR YOUR BUCK: How Technology Is Shaking Up The Oldest Profession. “Now specialist websites and apps are allowing information to flow between buyer and seller, making it easier to strike mutually satisfactory deals. The sex trade is becoming easier to enter and safer to work in: prostitutes can warn each other about violent clients, and do background and health checks before taking a booking. Personal web pages allow them to advertise and arrange meetings online; their clients’ feedback on review sites helps others to proceed with confidence. . . . Appearance matters a great deal. The customers who reported encounters to the website we analysed clearly value the stereotypical features of Western beauty: women they describe as slim but not scrawny, or as having long blonde hair or full breasts, can charge the highest hourly rates (see chart 3). Hair that is bleached too unconvincingly to be described as blonde attracts a lower premium, but is still more marketable than any other colour. For those not naturally well endowed, breast implants may make economic sense: going from flat-chested to a D-cup increases hourly rates by approximately $40, meaning that at a typical price of $3,700, surgery could pay for itself after around 90 hours. The 12% share of women featured on the site who are described both as athletic, slim or thin, and as being at least a D-cup, suggests that quite a few have already taken this route.”

But immigration drives down wages for providers, here as everywhere.

BRANNON DENNING: Anti-Evasion Doctrines And The Second Amendment.

I AGREE: Judge affirms probationer has a right to tape police officer in her home. When police search a home, recording their actions is even more important.

The opinion doesn’t cite me and John Steakley on A Due Process Right To Record The Police, but it should, as the analysis is similar.

HMM: Alberto Gonzales backing Obama on executive power to impose amnesty?

JOURNALISM at the New York Times: “Whether Carr discovered his mistake by himself or, more likely, someone at the Post called it to his attention, I do not know. What I do know is that the Times would never have published a Letter to the Editor pointing out Carr’s error. That’s because, as a matter of policy, the Times will not publish letters that challenge the facts in any piece written by its own columnists or reporters. I learned this the simple way: by writing such a letter myself.”

FROM THE BIG DIG TO THE BAY BRIDGE, WE INCREASINGLY HAVE TROUBLE BUILDING ANYTHING AT ALL: Could We Build a Disk Bigger Than a Star?

RICHARD EPSTEIN: The Pax Americana Is Dead. “A record as dismal as Obama’s does not happen by accident.”

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 460.

MEGAN MCARDLE: When Obama Beat Hillary, We All Lost.

I think that Hillary Clinton would have been more cautious when dealing with Republicans, and therefore ultimately more successful in some ways. At the very least, she would not be facing the same level of vehement opposition in Congress.

I think liberals really do not understand emotionally the extent to which the Tea Party was created by the Affordable Care Act and the feeling that its government was simply steamrolling it. From the Tea Party’s perspective, you had an unpopular program that should have died in the same way, and for the same reasons, that Social Security privatization did: because sensible politicians saw that, no matter how ardently they and their base might desire it, this was out of step with what the majority of the country wanted (and no, you cannot rescue the polls by claiming that the only problem with the law was that it wasn’t liberal enough; when you dig down into what people mean when they say that, the idea that there was ever a majority or a plurality that was secretly in favor of Obamacare collapses). . . .

I think that Hillary Clinton would have pulled back when Rahm Emanuel (or his counterfactual Clinton administration counterpart) told her that this was a political loser and she should drop it. I’ve written before about how my Twitter feed filled up with comparisons to 1932 the night that Obama took the presidency, and it’s quite clear to me that the Obama administration shared what you might call delusions of FDR. It thought that it was in a transformative, historical moment where the normal rules of political caution didn’t apply. The administration was wrong, and the country paid for that.

They’ve been wrong about a lot of things, and we’ve paid — and will pay — for that. But the sheer “I won” in-your-face immaturity of the Obamaites — remember the “Hey, Hey, Goodbye” chant to Bush at the inauguration — ensured that people would be angrier than normal. And they did that on purpose because a sharply divided nation suited them politically. Now Ron Fournier wonders if Americans would rally behind Obama after another 9/11 the way we rallied behind Bush, and I think the answer is no — because Obama has spent his entire time in office flicking boogers at half the country.

As I’ve said before, the reason why presidents traditionally act “presidential” isn’t because they’re stiffly formal, it’s because acting presidential, rather than purely political, lets you appeal to the whole country in ways that a pure partisan can’t. Obama doesn’t care, and we may very well pay for that, too. But elections have consequences, and when you elect a guy like Obama, the consequences are bad ones.

APP 1, TRADITIONAL MEDIA 0: DC news crew robbed while reporting on app that identifies ‘sketchy’ neighborhoods. “We were doing a story on an app that describes ‘sketchy’ neighborhoods. . . It led us to the Petworth neighborhood of Northwest, and I’m not going to call it a ‘sketchy’ neighborhood, but as folks were telling us that it was a good neighborhood, and that not much activity happens around there — as that was being told to us, our van was being robbed.”

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RICHARD COHEN: America’s Left Slides Down A Slippery Slope In Iraq. Actually, they’ve been in a smelly pile at the bottom of that slope for a long time.

PETER WOOD: Campus Activism: the Fight for Imaginary Victories. “The premise behind campus activism is always the same. The college campus is a microcosm of the larger world. What happens in Vegas may stay in Vegas, but what happens at Oberlin or Sweet Briar is imagined to rock the foundations of the old order. Patriarchy trembles. The Zionist Entity is called to account. The coal-breathing capitalist Earth warmers feel the chill of a generation walking on their graves. That premise, of course, is always mistaken. . . . “Patriarchy” stalks the American college campus the way the plesiosaur stalks Loch Ness: oft reported, never actually seen. A mistaken premise, however, is still a premise, and we anthropologists have written many books about the way people organize their lives around interesting misconceptions. If you believe that witchcraft causes unfortunate events, protecting yourself from witches becomes a significant preoccupation. This is especially so if everyone else in your village is worried about witches too. From such preoccupations arise communities that appear to outsiders to be dominated by irrational fears and sometimes destructive obsessions.”

Amusing, of course, that campuses purport to be islands of rationality amid the booboisie.

EVERYTHING FREE FOR THE WIMMENZ BECAUSE EQUALITY! “Should women be given free tampons? That’s what columnist Jessica Valenti argues for in her latest article for Britain’s Guardian newspaper. Valenti claims that because women make up half the world’s population and need feminine hygiene products (unlike her headline, the article is not specific to tampons) for a good chunk of their lives, they should be free.” Well, okay then.

Valenti first came to InstaPundit attention back in her Groper’s Support Group days. She doesn’t seem to have advanced much.

REMEMBER WHAT HAPPENED TO THE FIRST GUY WHO CROSSED THE RUBICON: Jonathan Chait: Obama’s Immigration Plan Should Scare Liberals, Too. “To think that the cycle will end here, and that a future president won’t claim more expansive and disturbing powers to selectively enforce the law, requires an optimism not borne out by history.”

UPDATE: Obama’s standing among voters is hurting Democrats, poll finds. “By 42-32 percent, voters say their opinions of Obama make them more likely to vote this fall for a Republican than for a Democrat. And for the first time this election cycle, more people said they’d vote for a Republican than a Democrat for Congress, by 43 percent to 38 percent.”

Weak horse.

BYRON YORK: North Carolina’s nondescript, virtually unnoticed, hugely important Senate race.

OBAMA: Don’t Blame Me For Missing The Rise Of ISIS: I Had Bad Intelligence. You certainly did. . . .