DAILY CALLER: Reid’s Phony Budget Numbers Go Unchallenged On Face The Nation.

HOUSE OF CARDS? Foreclosure crisis: Fed-up judges crack down disorder in the courts. “A Palm Beach Post review of cases in state and appellate courts found judges are routinely dismissing cases for questionable paperwork. Although in most cases the bank is allowed to refile the case with the appropriate documents, in a growing number of cases judges are awarding homeowners their homes free and clear after finding fraud upon the court. . . . Ongoing scrutiny by the FBI, the Florida attorney general, the Florida Bar, the media and defense attorneys has uncovered countless examples of forged signatures, post-dated documents, robo-signing and lost paperwork.”

ON SALE: A Cuisinart ice-cream maker. Is this better than an Ice Cream Ball?

UPDATE: On the Cuisinart machine, reader Marica Bernstein writes:

We have this and it’s freaking awesome. We are people who like low-tech food making/processing stuff, but are willing to set aside this preference.

I had a spectacular crop of melons last summer– mostly rare & heirloom, some of which had gone out of production just because they didn’t ship well. What to do with all these flavorful melons? Melon sherbet.

At the same time, we suffered a number of ice cream maker disasters. Recall that we live out in the county. The best way to fix this sort of problem– the need to make sherbet and the lack of a functional ice cream maker– is the internet, although we are trying to prepare for the lack thereof.

As I said, this thing is awesome. Turns out, you can freeze melon. So we had homegrown melon sherbet a few times this past winter. It was good.

John made a nice batch of coffee toffee ice cream in it last weekend. It’s not really ice cream. It’s iced custard. There are a lot of yolks involved. But the machine handles it well. For custard you have to pre-do some stuff which takes a couple of hours, but once it’s in the machine, you’re having a taste in 20-30 minutes.

Highly recommend this little appliance.

Thanks!

GEORGE WILL: In St. Louis, A Protest Sign Meets Government Arrogance.

GUN RIGHTS: Brannon Denning and I have a piece on what the McDonald v. Chicago case means. Download early and often! (Bumped).

TOM FRIEDMAN WAS UNAVAILABLE FOR COMMENT: Chinese artist Ai Weiwei arrested in latest government crackdown. “Ai Weiwei, one of China’s most prominent artists and an outspoken critic of the communist regime, was taken from Beijing’s airport by security agents Sunday as he was about to board a flight to Hong Kong. Police later raided his studio.” Still envious of the Chinese leadership, Tom? Sadly, I think the answer is yes.

WELCOME BACK, CARTER: Scary-Ass Charts Of The Day. As I keep saying, a Carter re-run is looking more and more like a best-case scenario.

MANCESSION UPDATE: looking at the BLS numbers: “The unemployment rate among men 20 years and older dropped only because the male labor force dropped by 31,000. Those employed barely rose by 4,000. Contrast with stats for women 20 years and older below. The labor pool for women rose by 96,000. The number of employed women rose by 247,000 vs. 4,000 for men. Thus, improvement in Friday’s jobs numbers came entirely from women, at least according to the household survey.”

CHART: Silver Coin Sales Skyrocketing. It’s like people have lost faith in the dollar.

ESTABLISHMENT OF RELIGION: “Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says congressional lawmakers all are discussing taking some action in response to the Koran burnings of a Tennessee pastor that led to killings at the U.N. facility in Afghanistan and sparked protests across the Middle East, Politico reports. . . . Sen. Lindsey Graham said Congress might need to explore the need to limit some forms of freedom of speech, in light of Tennessee pastor Terry Jones’ Quran burning, and how such actions result in enabling U.S. enemies.”

They told me if I voted Republican we’d see an establishment of religion, complete with penalties for heretics and blasphemers. And they were right!

UPDATE: Ann Althouse: “Zero attention is paid to freedom of speech or religious freedom. Neither Schieffer nor Reid gives a damn (or dares to say he gives a damn). Pathetic.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Steven Corcoran notes a double standard: “If only Terry Jones had submerged a Koran in a jar of urine, the entire world (or at least the Left) would have proclaimed this a great work of art. As for those who protested: bigots all.”

I don’t think it’s the urine that’s different here. And reader Cindy McNew writes:

U.S. flag burning: OK
Koran burning: Restricted.

I really despise the choice of language in saying it “enables” America’s enemies. … which, by the way, does he even realize he just called angry Muslims America’s enemies?

But it doesn’t enable them–it just gives them an excuse (what should be a laughably transparent one, instead of being taken seriously as a grievance) for what they want to do anyway.

Yes. This is a moment of clarity, on several grounds. And Lindsey Graham is unfit to hold office, too. Why don’t you and Harry resign, Lindsey? It’s the least you can do.

And reader Rob Crawford emails: “I wonder if it’s occurred to any of them that holding such hearings will cause a rash of Koran burnings. All the effort — by Democrats! — to protect the right to burn the US flag seems to have slipped from their minds. Almost as if it weren’t an issue of principle…”

MORE: Reader J.M. Hanes writes: “You know, if Harry Reid weren’t defending the Koran and attacking hookers, I’d have completely forgotten he’s the Majority Leader. You’d almost think that Mitch McConnell was already running the show, wouldn’t you?”

STILL MORE: Did they beclown themselves over nothing? Karzai’s brother: Beheadings had nothing to do with Koran burning. We’re led by cowards and fools. But at least by opening their mouths, they removed all doubt.

And reader Houston Foppiano emails: “Please correct the shoddy reporting in that Newsmax article. Terry Jones is not from Tennessee, he’s from Gainesville, Florida. For all the ‘hillybilly’ crap we’ve gotten from them over the years, make those damn Gators own this crackpot.” Heh.

MORE STILL: A reader emails:

You link to an erroneus Don Surber post about the beheadings in Afghanistan, titled “Karzai’s brother: Beheadings had nothing to do with Koran burning” (update to your 6:42 pm Sunday post).

Surber conflates the Mazar-i-Sharif beheadings with the riots in Kandahar. If you look carefully at the CNN story to which Surber links, Karzai’s brother was talking about a separate set of riots in Kandahar, where there were no beheadings (so far as I am aware).

Thus Surber’s point about the Koran-burning being merely a scapegoat for Petraeus et al. is somewhat undermined.

It’s hard to keep track of all the barbaric behavior emanating from that part of the world.

OF COURSE: Music Industry Will Force Licenses on Amazon Cloud Player — or Else.

INFLATION UPDATE: Many Restaurants Expecting To Raise Prices.

Grocery prices rose by more than 1 1/2 times the overall rate of inflation in 2010, according to government statistics, and economists predict that it will be even worse this year. For months consumers have grappled with higher prices at the supermarket, while restaurateurs pulled out every kitchen trick they could to absorb food inflation costs.

Well, the party is over. Experts say restaurant-goers can expect to see as much as an 8 percent increase in their checks.

And that may not be enough to keep the big chains alive, let alone the small independent eating places. Already suffering from flagging sales and low profit margins, record-high food prices – brought on by low supplies of corn, soybeans and wheat – could be the coup de gras for many restaurateurs.

Well, the supply of dollars has exploded, so the dollar’s worth less, so it takes more dollars to buy food. And there’s also the ethanol factor: “Because corn is also used for ethanol, demand has grown so great that feed costs for farmers and ranchers are being passed on in both the wholesale and retail markets.”

PROF. JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Time for WaPo to disclose sources on bogus Lynch story. “It matters because, as months passed and American public opinion turned against the war in Iraq, the singular role of the Post in the mythical hero-warrior narrative about Lynch faded in favor of a false narrative that the Pentagon had made it all up. . . . The Post itself has been complicit in suggesting that machinations by the Pentagon were behind the bogus story. But it’s clear that the Post alone placed the ‘fighting to the death’ story into the public domain. And as I discuss in Getting It Wrong, the Pentagon wasn’t the source for the hero-warrior tale.”

AT AMAZON, markdowns in Sports and Outdoors.

MY SUNDAY WASHINGTON EXAMINER COLUMN: From “Just In Time” To “Just In Case” — Disaster Preparedness And Resilience. (Bumped).

TODAY’S ECONOMY: Why North Dakota May Be the Best State in the Country to Live In. Drill, baby, drill.

TECHNOLOGY: Authorities in Awe of Drug Runners’ Jungle-Built, Kevlar-Coated Supersubs.

And there was something else hastily abandoned in a narrow estuary: a 74-foot camouflaged submarine—nearly twice as long as a city bus—with twin propellers and a 5-foot conning tower, beached on its side at low tide. “It was incredible to find a submarine like that,” says rear admiral Carlos Albuja, who oversees Ecuadorean naval operations along the northwest coast. “I’m not sure who built it, but they knew what they were doing.”

So what are people building that we haven’t found? “The prospect of Colombian drug traffickers running their own private navy poses problems that won’t be solved with a few arrests.”

SIEGFRIED, THE TIGER, AND THE MURDERS IN AFGHANISTAN:

To those in the media who are suggesting, apparently in all seriousness, that Terry Jones caused the deaths of seven UN employees in Afghanistan by burning a copy of the Koran, I’ll just note that the only way that argument works is by means of a suppressed premise. The premise is that the killers had no moral agency–in other words, that they were, literally, animals.

Me, I’ll stick with “savages” and “barbarians.”

If there’s no moral agency, then I guess the folks who argued for a return to colonialism after 9/11 were right. If Muslims aren’t capable of self-control or moral responsibility, then they must be ruled with a firm hand by those who are. Is that “liberal?” No, but interestingly the consequences of taking the ideas of liberals seriously seldom are. Alternatively, some people are just using this as an excuse to blame people they like less than savages and barbarians.

WAS THERE A NATURAL NUCLEAR BLAST ON MARS?

According to Brandenburg, the natural explosion, the equivalent of 1 million one-megaton hydrogen bombs, occurred in the northern Mare Acidalium region of Mars where there is a heavy concentration of radioactivity.

This explosion filled the Martian atmosphere with radio-isotopes as well, which are seen in recent gamma ray spectrometry data taken by NASA, he said.

The radioactivity also explains why the planet looks red.

Brandenburg said gamma ray spectrometry taken over the past few years shows spiking radiation from Xenon 129 — an increase also seen on Earth after a nuclear reaction or a nuclear meltdown, including the one at Chernobyl in 1986 and the disaster in Japan earlier this month.

Natural criticality I can see — that’s happened on Earth in the distant past — but an explosion? Color me skeptical. And I don’t understand the radioactivity/redness connection, either.

HMM: Rasmussen poll shows no bump for Obama on national security.

IN THE MAIL: Return to Prosperity: How America Can Regain Its Economic Superpower Status.

SUSANNAH FLEETWOOD: Why Veena Malik’s smackdown of a mullah was a seminal moment for feminism.

HAWKWOMAN: Samantha Power To Be Next Secretary Of State?

A DEFENSE OF “ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM:”

Part of the problem is that the American distrust of intellectualism is itself not the irrational thing that those sympathetic to intellectuals would like to think. Intellectuals killed by the millions in the 20th century, and it actually takes the sophisticated training of “education” to work yourself up into a state where you refuse to count that in the books. Intellectuals routinely declared things that aren’t true; catastrophically wrong predictions about the economy, catastrophically wrong pronouncements about foreign policy, and just generally numerous times where they’ve been wrong. Again, it takes a lot of training to ignore this fact. “Scientists” collectively were witnessed by the public flipflopping at a relatively high frequency on numerous topics; how many times did eggs go back and forth between being deadly and beneficial? Sure the media gets some blame here but the scientists played into it, each time confidently pronouncing that this time they had it for sure and it is imperative that everyone live the way they are saying (until tomorrow). Scientists have failed to resist politicization across the board, and the standards of what constitutes science continues to shift from a living, vibrant, thoughtful understanding of the purposes and ways of science to a scelerotic hide-bound form-over-substance version of science where papers are too often written to either explicitly attract grants or to confirm someone’s political beliefs… and regardless of whether this is 2% or 80% of the papers written today it’s nearly 100% of the papers that people hear about.

I simplify for rhetorical effect; my point is not that this is a literal description of the current state of the world but that it is far more true than it should be. Any accounting of “anti-intellectualism” that fails to take this into account and lays all the blame on “Americans” is too incomplete to formulate an action plan that will have any chance of success. It’s not a one-sided problem.

If you want to fix anti-intellectualism, you first need to fix intellectualism and return it to its roots of dispassionate exploration, commitment to truth over all else and bending processes to find truth rather than bending truth to fit (politicized) processes.

(Thanks to reader Jonathan Stafford for the link.) This is much like what Neal Stephenson said in In The Beginning Was The Command Line:

The twentieth century was one in which limits on state power were removed in order to let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abattoir. . . . We Americans are the only ones who didn’t get creamed at some point during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and value systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals.

Indeed.

UPDATE: It seems I have the above Stephenson quote wrong. A reader emails:

You’ve several times quoted Stephenson as writing:

“The twentieth century was one in which limits on state power were removed in order to let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abattoir. . . . We Americans are the only ones who didn’t get creamed at some point during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and value systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals.”

But every copy of “In the Beginning was the Command Line” I’ve been able to find does not contain this quote anywhere. I fact, the phrase “state power” does not appear anywhere in the text, not even once.

Following the link you provide (to Amazon.com), and using their ‘look inside the book feature’ turns up the following, and it’s the same in every version I’ve examined:

“But more importantly, it comes out of the fact that, during this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abbatoir. Those wordy intellectuals used to be merely tedious; now they seem kind of dangerous as well.

We Americans are the only ones who didn’t get creamed at some point during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and values systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals, and with anything like intellectualism, even to the point of not reading books any more, though we are literate. We seem much more comfortable with propagating those values to future generations nonverbally, through a process of being steeped in media.”

I’m confident you’ll want to correct this error, as it seems somewhere along the line someone’s twisted Stephenson’s words somewhat, and accuracy in quotations and references are important.

My copy of Command Line is at the office, but looking inside the book on Amazon this seems to be right. Further research reveals that the opening bit about state power is an introductory phrase from a law review article that somehow got put inside the quote, which is probably my error, though since I originally posted this in 2002, I’m not positive where I got it from then. But I’ll go back and correct the earlier posts as well. I don’t think the sense of the quote is wrong, but nonetheless I apologize for the error, and thank the reader (whose name isn’t in his/her email address) for the correction. To err is human, but to be corrected by anonymous readers is blogging!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Santiago Valenzuela writes:

Thoughtful article, but I am always disturbed by conservative anti-intellectualism.

Particularly, what disturbs me, is that it equivocates intellectualism per se with a specific species of intellectualism (statism of various stripes.) Why have conservatives ceded the title of intellectual to their opponents, instead confidently putting their faith in their gut instincts, “common sense,” and other decidedly “non-intellectual” ways of deciding? While it may be superior to statism in this case, it doesn’t make it good.

So why not instead say “These intellectuals have failed. Our intellectuals have a better grasp of reality and how men must live in it”? Why a rejection of intellectualism per se? It troubles me, because I have a profound respect for rational thought and a systematic approach to the troubles humanity faces, and seeing people mock that because one crop of intellectuals chose their theoretical models over reality can’t bode well.

Well, anti-intellectualism can mean two things. One is opposition to intellectualism, but the other is opposition to self-described “intellectuals” — who, often as not, are more credentialed than educated, and frequently not particularly intellectual at all except in mannerisms and self-description. We should, I think, be more explicit about distinguishing between intellectuals, and activists who mimic the mannerisms of intellectuals.

MORE: Hanah Volokh emails:

I found your recent blog post on anti-intellectualism interesting, particularly the last comments from Santiago Valenzuela and your response to them. I also find conservative anti-intellectualism troubling, and I think it’s important to separate it into three separate points:

1. Left-wing intellectuals are wrong substantively.

2. Many people who claim to be intellectuals are actually not intellectuals at all, but activists.

3. Central planning is not the best way to run a government or economy, so intellectuals do not need to be running things.

Still, to understand why central planning is a bad idea, and what we should have instead, and to get at the answers to numerous substantive policy issues, intellectuals are crucially important.

You may also be interested in this recent Stanley Fish column that attempts to describe academic intellectualism to laymen. It is particularly helpful at identifying the difference between an intellectual and an activist (full disclosure: I was an attendee at the conference he describes).

Thanks!

FINAL UPDATE: The Stephenson quote comes from the original online version of the book, which is here.

A SHOCKING CONFESSION: The Cause of All Discrimination? Me. Well, at least we know who to blame.