Read it.

What can $1,475 buy you in modern China? Not a Tiffany diamond or a mini-sedan, say Robert Zhou and Daisy Chao. But for that price, they guarantee you something more lasting, with unquestioned future benefits: an American passport and U.S. citizenship for your new baby.

Zhou and Chao, a husband and wife from Taiwan who now live in Shanghai, run one of China’s oldest and most successful consultancies helping well-heeled expectant Chinese mothers travel to the United States to give birth.

Read it.

There have been several occasions when the American people have voted for smaller government; most notably in 1972, 1980 and 1994. But it really doesn’t matter. You can vote for limited government, but you can’t get it; the political class won’t let you. This is not to assert the silly proposition that there is no major difference between Democrats and Republicans. The fiscal disaster that we have witnessed since the Democrats took control of Congress in 2007 proves the contrary. But still: experience shows that voting for Republicans hasn’t been enough to offset the power of the political class.

Bruce Nussbaum is one of the worst SWPL handwringers I’ve encountered in years.

Reading the article, it becomes plain that the not-invented-here objections raised (by native members of the Crust) reflect a dislike of having traditional power relationships disrupted than any actual, demonstrable flaws in the projects.

Our foreign aid programs have the same gauntlet to run — unless they’re funneled through the local wa-Benzi (who extract their customary percentage), they run the risk of being denounced as ‘imperialism’; the local wa-Benzi know this and know well how to game the system.

Read it.

Read it.

The children of the Crust are constantly indoctrinated with “America sucks!”, so it’s no surprise when some of them actually take action.

Read it.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

Read it.

If you’re reading this article in print, chances are you’ll only get through half of what I’ve written. And if you’re reading this online, you might not even finish a fifth. At least, those are the two verdicts from a pair of recent research projects – respectively, the Poynter Institute’s Eyetrack survey, and analysis by Jakob Nielsen – which both suggest that many of us no longer have the concentration to read articles through to their conclusion.

Of course, a lot of the problem is that what we’re presented with to read is mostly crap. The editorials in the Guardian will serve as a case in point.

Jesse Walker at Reason magazine reviews the new biography.

It was the beginning of a big year for Limbaugh, a radio host whose influence had seemed to be waning not long before. Allies and critics alike were soon describing him as the “head of the Republican Party,” not least when the actual head of the Republican National Committee criticized the famous broadcaster only to quickly cave to rank-and-file pressure and apologize for his remarks. Beloved by the true-believing party base, disdained by center-right compromisers, and detested by the left, Limbaugh has towered over every noisy Washington debate of 2009 and 2010.

Limbaugh interacts directly with his audience. He doesn’t just speak but listens, and the callers don’t just listen but argue. Limbaugh is always in charge of the show, and he manipulates his medium like a master. But the intimacy of radio gives him a relationship with his followers that’s considerably different from that enjoyed by ordinary politicians and pundits.

Read it.

Remember the left cheering when the New York Times did this stuff to the Bush Administration? Somehow I suspect they’ll still actually cheer for this, which won’t exactly do anything to reassure the American people that those in charge are good on national security issues.

Makes you wonder whose side they’re on. (Oops, I forgot, we already know that: Anybody But America.)

Read it.

And guess what? You can now bring that same frustration  enjoyment to Google Android. Available now via Market, the free, OS-wide keyboard alternative comes care of Access, who gained the rights to Graffiti following the Palm / Xerox settlement from way back in 2006. The future is the past as remembered by the present, or something like that — download away.

Read it.

Friday’s development: A Phoenix police officer has sued over the Arizona immigration law, arguing that he could be sued for racial profiling if he enforces the Arizona law.

Read it.

Recent reports from the L.A. Times show that since 2007, nearly $4.8 million in welfare funds have been withdrawn from ATMs in California casinos. And a new report shows that more than $12,000 from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program was withdrawn from ATMs in California strip clubs.

The bear necessities.

Read it.

‘Cave of Marsupial Fossils’ would make a great B-movie title or video game module name.

Marie Brennan, fantasy author, has some gender issues.

Still, the question is an interesting one, however her take on it might not be.

Eric Raymond is always worth reading.

I’ve been thinking for some time now that the smartphone has achieved a kind of singularity, becoming a black hole that sucks all portable electronics into itself. PDAs – absorbed. Music players – consumed. Handset GPSes – eaten. Travel-alarm clocks, not to mention ordinary watches – subsumed. E-readers under serious pressure, and surviving only because e-paper displays have lower battery drain and are a bit larger.

This raises an interesting question: what else is natural prey for the smartphones of the future?

Consider. My Nexus One includes a GPS, an accelerometer, a microphone, and a magnetometer. That is, sensors for location, magnetic field, gravitational fields, and acoustic energy. Hook a bit of visualization and spectral analysis to these sensors, and bugger me with a chainsaw if you don’t have a tricorder. A quad- or quintcorder, actually.

Be sure to read the comments as well.

Read it.

Read it.

Read it.

Why only half?

Read it.

They coulda let Bear Stearns’s creditors or AIG’s or LTCM’s or Mexico’s or Continental Illinois’s lose some, just some of their money. They shoulda. And they woulda if it had been safe. Or so they claimed. But it was too risky.They–the regulators and politicians didn’t give all that money to creditors because the creditors were politically powerful. No. The politicians and regulators did it for the country. At least that’s what they told us. They just couldn’t let lenders pay a price, even a very small one, for making imprudent loans if the lenders were large. I doubt the regulators will see their way to doing it differently the next time either. They could, of course. They just won’t.

Read it.

Nothing personal — it’s just business.

Financial reform might irk Wall Street, but the president’s real problem is with small businesses—the engine of any serious recovery.

And, as the BP executives have found out to their sorrow, Obama is not an Honest Politician; he doesn’t stay bought.

Read it.

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Probably in Ann Arbor.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, yanks back the curtain.

In the dismaying-but-not-surprising category of news stories recently, this one in the July 2 New York Times got my attention. It describes how the Obama administration is killing off the summer-internship programs, many of them unpaid, that are so popular with high-school seniors and college students.

What seems to be going on here is a war against the notion that any American citizen should do any kind of non-academic work before the age of 25 — before, that is, a college degree and a couple of years of law school have been completed.

A person acquainted with the real world would recognize this for what it is: the romantic piffle of fools living in money-padded cocoons. There, however, you see the circularity of the issue. The overclass types who extrude this gibberish are not much acquainted with the real world; and one reason for this is, they have never done low-paid, low-skill work. They may have done higher-status internships for little or no pay, but it seems the administration now wants to shut youngsters off from even that much acquaintance with the world of work.

I have noticed that if, among 30-something colleagues, I mention one of my own school or college summer jobs — factory or construction work, dishwashing, retail sales, bartending — my colleagues will look amused, and a bit baffled. How come a guy as well-educated as Derb was shoveling concrete? Boy, he’s a real eccentric! No, I’m not. Those experiences were perfectly normal for a person of my generation. They’re just not normal any more, not for children of the American middle and upper classes.

When I was in college, I spent my summers building mobile homes. My Yale T-shirt was unusual, but I worked alongside people from Notre Dame and Purdue and the local Bible college. It’s not a bad thing for a college graduate to know how to use a screw-gun or a band-saw.

Nor was physical labor always thought shameful. In the older American ideal, which is now as dead as the one-room schoolhouse, physical labor was held to have a dignity to it. Even elites believed their youngsters would benefit from a taste of it. Calvin Coolidge put his 15-year-old son to work in the tobacco fields of Hatfield, Mass., as a vacation job. (When the lad happened to mention who he was, one of his co-workers said: “Gee, if the president was my father, I wouldn’t be working here.” Cal Jr.: “You would, if your father were my father.” For a comparison with the “conservative” sensibility of our own time, recall Karl Rove’s remark: “I don’t want my 17-year-old son to have to pick tomatoes.” Good heavens, Karl, of course you don’t: The poor lad might break a fingernail.)

Read it.

Speed the day.

Read it.

Four ‘stone’ is 56 pounds. Why Brits can’t use pounds (or even, God help us, kilograms) when talking about people-weight is just beyond comprehension.

Read it.

Two things are clear regarding the post-flotilla twist in the internal Palestinian dispute: It is not just a media war, and neither side is about to give up.

Read it.

Indian defence chiefs have approved $11bn of funds to boost the country’s submarine fleet. The cash is intended to see India become the first non-Western nation to deploy long-touted, much feared “air independent propulsion” (AIP) submarine technology.

Back in World War II, nuclear propulsion wasn’t an option. Nazi engineers instead experimented with chemically powered AIP, in their case the system developed by Professor Hellmuth Walter. Oxygen from air was replaced by the use of hydrogen peroxide, an explosive oxidiser sometimes used in torpedoes or rockets, burned together with fuel oil in a special turbine.

Read it.

I really started losing my enthusiasm for this “Year of the Woman” poltical talk when The Susan B. Anthony List basically turned on me.  Well, not me exactly, since, as an anti-choice political fundraising machine they were never really going to be my sort of folk.  But something happened a few weeks ago that really started to make me lose my enthusiasm for this alleged women’s wave, be it liberal or conservative.

The Susan B. Anthony Group started endorsing male candidates.

The horror!

I guess the response of the Modern Feminist™ to sexism is … sexism?

Read it.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

Quelle domage. I ask you, what’s the world coming to, when genocidal thugs must fear for their lives? Surely the UN will step in and commission a study.

Read it.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

The automobile’s potential is its greatest secret—an open secret and yet, it often seems, a forgotten one. The big SUV in my garage may occasionally make a 10-mile trip to Walmart or 2-mile run to the volunteer fire station when the siren sounds. But it has the potential—the size, the power, the range—to take me, my friends, and our bicycles over the mountain to a distant bike trail, or 1,100 miles with a load of furniture and books to my son’s house in Florida.

This is why trains suck unless you haven’t got anything better, and underlies the Crustian fondness for mass transit: because it constrains the ability of the Lower Orders to move about freely.

Read it.

In 2009, a poll of nearly 12,000 people by online dating site Shaadi.com, revealed that skin tone was considered the most important criteria when choosing a partner in three northern Indian states.

“Indians believe that if you have fair skin you belong to the higher caste, the Brahmins,” he added, explaining that a succession of light-skinned colonisers in India reinforced the association of fairness with power.

Varna, the term conventionally used to describe the ‘caste’ system in India, literally means color.

Read it.

So he’s dumping the trophy wife he dumped his first one for.

The couple have been married for 16 years and have four children together.

I assume that his father is rotating rather briskly by now.

Read it.

The Nanny State proceeds apace in Britain.

Read it.

Can we order some of those for Arizona? Perhaps we can get them to do the jobs that Americans won’t do.

Read it.

A notable achievement. Message: The future is against the law.

Read it.

A rogue Afghan soldier shot dead a British colleague in his sleeping quarters before killing two more by firing a rocket-propelled grenade into a control room.

This is exactly the sort of situation that the British Army spent two centuries coping with prior to World War II. Unfortunately, the modern British soldier isn’t just some yob swept up off the street and drilled rigid, but a highly-trained specialist who is more talented to start with and represents a significant investment in time and money.

Read it.

A drunk Australian tourist has been hospitalised after he broke into a reptile park and climbed onto the back of a 16ft-long crocodile called Fatso.

Gotta love Australians.

Read it.

Next time, use MasterCard.

The 23-man squad, plus families and supporters, want to travel on traditional Haudenosaunee – or Iroquois – passports which represent six nations of indigenous North Americans.

However, the UK has said the passport is not an internationally recognised travel document.

It is understood the US authorities are also refusing to recognise the document.

Yeah, they might be Muslim terrorists (They’re everywhere! They’re everywhere!) or something. Government Rule #1: Never pass up an opportunity to inconvenience somebody for no good reason.

Read it.

Do not get on the wrong side of a New Zealand dog.

Read it.

There were some unusual moments during the first hearing of the presidential commission on the BP-Deepwater Horizon accident. And no, we’re not talking about the speakers who showed up claiming to represent the Communist Party. Or the witness who pulled out a guitar and crooned a song about the accident.

Sometimes Congress is the most entertaining thing around.

No, the really odd moment came when Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said in a statement that he was looking to the commission for information that could inform the administration’s position on halting deepwater drilling.

Salazar’s statement stunned the commission’s two co-chairmen, William K. Reilly and Bob Graham, who said they had been assured by Salazar’s office and the White House that giving advice on the moratorium wasn’t their job.

Oh, gee, the Obama administration lied to you? How could that happen? I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

Read it.

I’m curious as to why they’re considered to have some sort of a choice in this.

Read it.

‘Nuff said. I make it a general policy not to eat food from places where they’re moving from there to here (probably so they don’t have to eat the food any more).

Read it.

Not really news, but a useful reminder.

Read it.

The fragment includes a partial text including the words “you,” “them,” and “later.”

Probably the Akkadian analog of a tweet.

Read it.

On one stretch of the border, Chinese troops apprehended five North Korean soldiers in May alone. Prior to the sinking of the South Korean corvette Cheonan in March, allegedly by a torpedo fired from a North Korean submarine, it was rare for troops to be taken into custody on the Chinese side of the Yalu River.

“In the past there have been cases of North Korean troops crossing the border and plundering Chinese farms for their food, which they then took back to their posts in the North,” Kim Sang-hun, a human rights activist in Seoul, told The Daily Telegraph.

The defectors apprehended by the Chinese were reportedly returned to North Korea, where they face execution.

Those Communists, they’re just so warm and fuzzy.

Read it.

The Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the main opposition party in the Indian parliament, wants to ban beef from the menu at this year’s Commonwealth Games in New Dehli on Oct. 3-14 to showcase the country’s “cultural values and age-old traditions”.

Don’t tell me – let me guess: the ‘cultural value’ they’d be ‘showcasing’ is ‘Do It Our Way’ and the ‘age-old tradition’ is Suppression of Freedom. On historical grounds, I must admit that they have an excellent case.

Muslims have an equally good case to make that Killing Non-Muslims And Stealing Their Land is likewise one of their ‘cultural values’ and ‘age-old traditions’; indeed, the Moguls had been doing that in India for about 300 years before the British stepped in and ruined all the fun.

I wonder whether the BJP would be down with that?

Read it.

But I’m sure it will still cost you something.

Read it.

The new regulations, which kick in at the start of 2012, require any taxpayer with business income to issue 1099 forms to all vendors from whom they purchased more than $600 of goods and services that year. That promises to launch a fusillade of new paperwork: An estimated 40 million taxpayers will be subject to the requirement, including 26 million who run sole proprietorships, according to a report released this week by National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson….

“The new reporting burden, particularly as it falls on small businesses, may turn out to be disproportionate as compared with any resulting improvement in tax compliance,” the Taxpayer Advocate Service wrote in a report released this week.

Unintended Consequences, thy name is Obama.