UR. A puzzling phenomenon.

Certainly, if there is a system of institutions in which anti-Americanism predominates, it’s the Western university system, certainly the West’s most prestigious universities are in America, and certainly anti-Americanism is no hardship to an American academic career. Where does Noam Chomsky teach? Not at the Sorbonne.

Techdirt. No surprises here. Perhaps fifty years ago the Segway might have made a splash, but in this regulate-and-litigate society, it had no chance.

Pogue. I think they do it just to piss people off. They’re the phone company — that’s what they do.

Read it. Another inconvenient truth gets some sunshine.

NYT. And, most importantly, doesn’t require you to deal with NIMBY homeowner associations and local governments. Second Life may be the best exemplar yet of a quasi-libertarian environment.

WSJ. Sometimes giving both sides gives the false impression that one side is as legitimate as the other. That’s not always the case.

NYT. “Terrorists! We’re just giving them away! While supplies last!”

NYT. Gratitude? In the dictionary, between “grab” and “greed”.

Scott Johnson at PowerLine experiences a true Blast from the Past.

Read it. Actually, India ought to have been divided up into about a dozen different countries. Attempting to keep it all together was about as foolish as, say, the French rolling all of their possessions in Africa into one country. I was amused to learn that a recent high Indian official, President or Prime Minister or something like that, had to give a major speech in Hindi, which he did not speak, by memorizing it phonetically. Say what you will about America, at least the Mexicans who are elected to office here can speak English. More or less.

But plans for brisk disengagement ignored messy realities on the ground.

Sounds like the Democrats’ plan for Iraq — which I’m sure the people at the New Yorker fully support. “Ironic” seems entirely inadequate a word.

LanguageLog. If you’re thinking that the government is screwed up, you ought to take a look at publishing.

WT. An interesting approach.

NYT. This is highly unusual.

NYT. You can almost hear them breathing hard.

Guys, this is science, not religion. This stuff gets re-arranged all the time, as new evidence comes to light and existing theories, most spun from a few scraps and threads, get revised. By its nature, it’s an iterative process. Hold the panic attacks.

Read it. Islam is not a religion; it is a totalitarian ideology with a religious component.

Engadget.

Read it. And weep.

I have in front of me a 2-pound bag of Peanut M&Ms. On the back of the bag is a panel labelled “Nutrition Facts”. Can you imagine a more useless thing to have on the back of a 2-pound bag of Peanut M&Ms than “Nutrition Facts”? I can’t.

NYT. Yeah, postmodernism doesn’t cope too well with premedievalism.

“Families, tribes these are the things that matter here,” said Oraz Jandosov, co-chairman of a Kazakhstan opposition political party. “Foreigners talk about these things, but it’s only talk. They don’t understand them.”

Well, some do. But their daddies didn’t go to Harvard — and they’re more likely to be found in the Marine Corps than the State Department.

NYT. What are they worried about? Not the Communists taking over, surely — they’d be in favor of that. Global Warming, perhaps.

NYT. How long before some bureacrat tries to steal it?

Read it. Apparently being a thug from a fashionable minority pays very well.

FuturePundit. Good news for Fred the Farmer — he can finally cash out by selling the Old Homestead to Archer-Daniels-Midland and buy that condo near the grandkids he’s always wanted. The rest of us take it in the shorts, of course, but that never stopped the damn-the-unintended-consequences, full-scheme-ahead crowd.

Read it. I don’t care who you are, that’s funny.

WSJ($). Another chapter in the continuing saga of why I don’t fly.

This summer, rampant flight cancellations and delays are forcing many travelers to languish, sometimes for hours, before they can board their flight. Unfortunately, that’s nothing compared with what may await them on the plane.

Tales of sweaty waits on un-air-conditioned planes, smelly bathrooms, dirty seats and tray-tables smeared with mysterious schmutz abound this season. Travelers complain that the environment on packed planes can degenerate quickly — and often long before the plane actually starts moving.

“When you get off a plane, it looks like the morning after a fraternity house party,” says Tim Winship, publisher of FrequentFlier.com, a Web site that offers frequent-flier program information and advice.

WT. I have an idea: Let’s send Mexico a bill for all the shit we have to go through because people are trying to get out of their kleptocracy.

WT. Oh, ya think?

I don’t know whichis worse: The thumb-suckers who did the research or the one who wrote the article.

Let’s see: Government-funded academics find evidence that the government ought to spend more money on education. What a surprise.

WT. Ah, those were the days. 300,000 arrested adolescents demonstrating once and for all that the sixties were all about never growing up. The Boomers ought to be renamed the “Peter Pan” generation.

Read it. The world is full of people who are delighted to run others’ lives.

EconLog. The trees used to print the New York Times — those have died in vain.

Read it. And I can understand that.

You’d think that Greenwich would be solid Bush-loving turf — what with all those tax cuts for the rich. It is not. The voters are roughly 40 percent Republican, 40 percent unaffiliated and only 20 percent Democratic, but Bush won the town by only a sliver in 2004, even though his father grew up here.

Well, duh; the filthy rich are all Democrats, popular political mythology to the contrary notwithstanding.

Engadget. This looks very interesting.

LGF. Religion of peace, sure.

Read it. Oh, a far from common criminal.

Engadget. How long before  these wind up in women’s purses?

Steve Sailer is not the first to note that the nutroots YearlyKos conventions was largely a herd of middle-aged white males, but he’s pretty funny about it.

A lot of the influential segments of American society are almost as white male-dominated as in 1960, especially those where affirmative action doesn’t apply, such as at liberal netroots conferences or as CEOs of Fortune 500 firms, which are about 99% white.

WSJ. Ted Stevens, in particular, seems to be in a competition with Senator Robber Byrd to see who can take the American taxpayer for the most.

NYT. Nor ought they to be.

NYT. Unfortunately, the article fails to point out that the Black Muslims are a looney cult with only a superficial resemblance to real Islam, which one can find out from asking any real Muslim.

PowerLine. The New Republic doesn’t seem to be having a good time of it these days.

PowerLine. One is evil, the other stupid; guess which is which.

NYT. There’s a lot there to revive. It will be particularly interesting to see what medieval versions of the Koran have to say about the modern text.

NYT. The key, of course, was the medieval universities, which formed a network to transmit scientific advances from where they were made to where they could be exploited.

Steve Sailer has his own take.

NYT. I’ve always been partial to fat.

NYT. Unfortunately, it’s more difficult to update a bridge than a software package.

NYT. No progress yet on Bush Derangement Syndrome.

NYT. I didn’t know they could do that.

NYT. More cool movies bite the dust.

NYT. No mention of potential uses, unfortunately.

LanguageLog. Well — apparently Teaching By Gesture may not be the panacea we might have been told it was.