James Taranto:

“To the extent that the suspect, Jared Loughner, had political views, they were disjointed and impossible to categorize–think John Hinckley meets No Labels.”

Three blogs of note this morning from Galley Friends:

1) Michael Warren has started a serious-minded blog about movies, MichaelRWarren.com. First up for him is an essay about The Fighter.

2) Prolific proto-blogger (and Star Wars nerd) Pejman Yousefzadeh has moved his site over to ChequerBoard.org. Adjust your bookmarks accordingly. He has a series of excellent posts about the post-AZ shooting libel of the right.

3) K.K. has returned to blogging at A Mind That Suits. He, too, takes up the media’s reaction to the shooting over the weekend.

Robert Samuelson has a column up about American test scores and the PISA study (Steve Sailer has written on this too). The uncomfortable takeaway: American student test scores actually look quite elite if you filter out black and Hispanic student results.

That’s an indictment of something–be it culture, inner-city schooling, etc–but I doubt you’ll ever hear any real discussion of the subject because, well, you know.

If I ran a Hollywood studio, I’d buy the rights to this story, dangle it in front of Michael Mann, and see what happens. It’s the 21st century All the President’s Men.

Galley Friend Chris Caldwell has an incisive review of David Remnick’s Obama book over at the always excellent Claremont Review of Books. It’s really not to be missed. The thrust of Caldwell’s essay is examining how (and why) Obama self-consciously built a black identity for himself. You will not often see this subject discussed. Samples:

As an American boy growing up in Indonesia and Hawaii in the aftermath of the civil rights movement, Obama was in a confusing position. He looked black, but he didn’t know any blacks. He was descended from slave owners but not from slaves. Most disorientingly, Hawaii—where he was brought up by his white grandparents—lacked even those lingering remnants of racism, the exposure and expunging of which was, by the 1970s, the main preoccupation of the burgeoning establishment that had grown out of the civil rights movement.

In a way that strikes Remnick as both “touching” and “awkward,” Obama began “giving himself instruction on how to be black.” . . .

Obama is, racially speaking, a self-made man. If there were a citizenship examination for blackness, he’d have passed it. Remnick hints that Ann Dunham’s idealization of black people may have rubbed off on Obama, and that it may be responsible for the immodesty that is his besetting flaw. Remnick sees that blackness can, in some circumstances, be deployed to great effect on the political stage—and that the 2008 presidential election was one of those circumstances. . . .

At root, though, Remnick is without a drop of cynicism as to why Obama, as both a youth and a middle-aged man, might consider a confident blackness of a politicized kind to be something worthy of aspiring to. The struggle for racial equality appears in these pages as a moral lodestar, the only real litmus test of contemporary political morality. Mastering the history and rhetoric of civil rights, reading the rest of American history through it, rendering one’s personality acceptable to those who speak in its name—to Remnick, all of this is so self-evidently admirable as to need no explanation.

I won’t tease you with more. Go read the whole thing.

From IDLYITW, in re Jake Gyllenhal’s explanation of his split from Taylor Swift:

He could feel the age difference, huh? Isn’t that the point of banging 21-year old chicks? To feel the age difference? I’m a man. If I wanted to fuck somebody my own age it would be in a land development deal, not on my couch with her knees pinned to her ears.

Instant classic.

Martin Wolf isn’t Tom Friedman, but he, too, is getting ready to welcome our new Chinese overlords.

I don’t want to be the crazy guy ringing the fertility bell every time someone brings up China, ranting and pointing out that they’re heading toward a dramatic population collapse which will force the country to make a very hard choice. In a few years they will have some 300 million retirees with no children to care for them and no state-sponsored pension or welfare system. The Chinese government will have to do one of three things:

1) Significantly raise taxes on workers to pay for the care of the geriatric bulge.

2) Significantly cut spending in other areas (such as infrastructure or defense) to stand up a massive welfare system.

3) Send their old people out into the countryside to die.

But like I said, I’m not going to blabber on about that this time. Instead, I’ll just ask this: How can China hope to compete in a globalized world with their appalling lack of diversity? The Chinese are 91.5 percent Han Chinese with a handful of other Asian groups making up a an 8.5 percent minority. And because their immigration laws are pretty tight, China isn’t going to get less Chinese any time soon.

Seems to me that we hear an awful lot about how crucial diversity is for national success, how it fosters all sorts of synergy, creativity, energy, blah-blah-blah.

Either diversity really isn’t particularly important, or the Chinese economic dynamo is going to have to find some way to overcome their tragic ethnic monotony.

I don’t know about you, but over the past 18 months I’ve really been impressed by how Facebook has become 500 percent more valuable. I mean, you can see the increasing value proposition everywhere on the site, right:

in May 2009, the company was valued at $10 billion. Last August, Facebook was valued at $27 billion and now it’s $50 billion — for a company with a reported $2 billion in revenue and negligible profits. IfGeneral Electric, with 2010 revenue of around $150 billion, traded at a similar multiple of revenue, it would be worth $3.75 trillion instead of $200 billion. Facebook is now considered to be worth more thanTime Warner, DuPont and Goldman’s rival Morgan Stanley.

Just last week, Facebook’s shares were said to be trading on a private-market exchange at a valuation of $42.4 billion. Thanks to Goldman’s imprimatur, Facebook’s value increased 20 percent virtually overnight.

After this, William Cohan makes a depressingly convincing case that for Goldman Sachs, valuing Facebook at $50B probably makes sense, even if it will only lead to tears for everyone else.