May 10, 2016 -- A Quick Run Around the Web

• Ol' Remus has a new Woodpile Report.
• Last week, Lexington Green predicted: "We are going to see a preference cascade in which many Republican politicians and much of the conservative media come out and openly endorse and campaign for Hillary Clinton as the only way to stop Donald Trump. Once a few do it, the rest will feel protected and pile on. It will start with neocon foreign policy wonks, then spill over to journalists. This will be a major realignment." This week, over at The Last Refuge, I read: "As Predicted – Billionaire Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush Backers Now Financing Hillary Clinton…" Globalism versus nationalism. 
• "China Will Probably Implode"--The National Interest (h/t SNAFU!). From the article:

In July of 2001, Gordon Chang predicted an inevitable meltdown of the Chinese Communist Party in his best-selling book The Coming Collapse of China. Since then, China’s economy has increased by more than eightfold, to surpass even the United States on a purchasing parity power basis. Oops?

In Chang’s defense, he could not have anticipated the colossal blunder of President Bill Clinton and a Republican Congress in paving China’s ruthlessly mercantilist way into the World Trade Organization just five months after his book was published. That mother of all unfair trade deals—a well-deserved target of both the Sanders and Trump presidential campaigns—kept China’s Great Walls of Protectionism largely intact. However, it also opened U.S. markets to a flood of illegally subsidized Chinese imports, and catalyzed the offshoring of millions of American manufacturing jobs.

Since China’s entry into the WTO in 2001, the center of the world’s manufacturing base has seismically shifted as the People’s Republic of Unfair Trade Practices has used a dizzying array of illegal export subsidies, currency manipulation, intellectual-property theft, sweatshop labor and pollution havens to seize market share from both Europe and North America. To date, more than seventy thousand American factories have closed, over twenty million Americans have been put out of work and Chinese Communist Party leaders have laughed at Gordon Chang—all the way to their Swiss, Panamanian and Caymanian bank accounts.

China’s mercantilist WTO windfall notwithstanding, there are nonetheless growing signs that the collapse of China as Gordon Chang once predicted, andDavid Shambaugh is now intimating, may soon be at hand. As Exhibit A of the signs of China’s troubles I offer, in the remainder of this missive, an email correspondence directly from the Chinese mainland. It’s from an American citizen living and working with his Chinese wife and son in the PRC.

The author goes on to post the missive. A couple highlights:

The biggest problems in China right now are poisoned food, water, and air. Nobody trusts anybody, which is the reason why there is huge capital flight out of the country.

China has a national debt in excess of $28 trillion. But anybody knowing anything about Chinese accounting practices knows that number is probably just a very conservative number. Add some of the data and stuff Caixin [an online newspaper] is telling us about in terms of city and provincial accounting practices, and the numbers are horrible.

Read the whole thing.

• "Man who shot himself in the arm while cleaning his gun didn't realize until THREE DAYS later when he changed shirts"--The Daily Mail. The downside--or in this case, for this particular man, the upside--to using .22 Long Rifle. Also, a good reminder to not be handling firearms while under the influence of drugs or medications.
• "America Has Dependents, Not Allies"--Cato Institute. "... America’s involvement tends to turn friends and allies into dependents. The principle is the same as domestic welfare: Why should they do for themselves if they can get someone else to do so?"
• "Exclusive: Say goodbye to OPEC, powerful Putin pal predicts"--Reuters. Oh, what fracking has wrought.
• "Ubuntu 16.04 proves even an LTS release can live at Linux’s bleeding edge"--Ars Technica. A positive review of the latest incarnation of Ubuntu.
• "Kenya Closing Refugee Camp That's 'Breeding Ground For Terror'"--WND. From the article:

A United Nations refugee camp from which hundreds of Shariah-compliant Somali migrants are sent to the United States every month for permanent resettlement has been ordered shut down by its host country.

The government of Kenya has said “no more” to the burgeoning refugee movement that has been spilling across its borders since the 1990s.

It announced it will take action to close two camps, including the Daadab camp near its border with Somalia that is considered one of the world’s largest refugee centers, housing 328,000 Somalis. The other at Kakuma houses 190,000 refugees from South Sudan.

The Kenyan government also disbanded its Department of Refugee Affairs, which worked with humanitarian organizations for the welfare of the refugees.

• "Study shows immigrants use 40% more welfare than native-born"--American Thinker. "...we are admitting millions of nearly illiterate peasants from Central America and Mexico who will be dependent on the taxpayer until their children are grown." I don't think the dependence will end there.
• "Does Acuna have a serial killer?"--Borderland Beat. The author writes: "The fact of a dead body found on the street in Mexico is not usually occasion for a big news story.  But when you start looking at the number of women who have been murdered in Acuna in the near past, perhaps it should be a big story."
• "These rare Indian records survived over a century and are now online: Nearly 1,500 recordings from 1900-1940 are now free through the British Library."--Ars Technica.