PEOPLE COMPLAIN that I usually blog about expensive cameras. Well, here’s a very cheap camera, dock, and printer bundle — 4MP, 5x optical zoom, total price just over 200 bucks. My daughter has the EasyShare camera, and it’s good, and simple to use. I don’t know about the printer.

I’ve been pretty lame about blogging on cameras, electronics, etc., because I usually do so only when I buy something, and I’ve been too busy to spend time with new gadgets lately. But here’s an earlier post, and here’s the Digital Camera Carnival that I hosted, as well as an earlier post on printers.

MORE AGGREGATION: Another Army of Davids review, this one at Townhall.com. Excerpt:

Some reviewers have called Reynolds’ writing style “conversational,” and it is. This 268-page book, excluding notes and index, is a quick and engaging read. Reynolds’ prose style is just as absorbing as the ideas themselves. For example, he analogizes his beer-brewing hobby with blogging. As mass-produced beer, which has to appeal to the broadest market possible, tends to be “thin and flavorless,” mass-produced news and opinion journalism has become thin and flavorless.

Read the whole thing! But then, you knew I’d say that . . . .

AVIAN FLU UPDATE: A worrisome report:

The spread of avian influenza to at least 29 new countries in the last seven weeks — one of the biggest outbreaks of the virus since it emerged nine years ago — is prompting a sobering reassessment of the strategy that has guided efforts to contain the disease. . . .

The speed of its migration, and the vast area it has infected, has forced scientists to concede there is little that can be done to stop its spread across the globe.

“We expected it to move, but not any of us thought it would move quite like this,” said Dr. David Nabarro, the United Nations’ coordinator on bird flu efforts.

Even if bird flu never mutates into a human-transmissible form, this should be a wakeup call about our preparedness for pandemics generally. The good news is that people seem to be noticing. One datum: Our podcast interview with Bill Frist on the subject is our most popular so far, with over 330,000 downloads. Interestingly, a much higher percentage of them are the lo-fi dialup variety than for our other episodes; I’m not sure what that means, but I’m guessing that there’s more international interest in the topic.

ARNOLD KLING:

Many people are eager to fight the Battle of the Borders. The idea is to prevent illegal immigration. In addition, what I might call the “new xenophobia” is eager to fight the Battle over Outsourcing and the Battle over Foreign Ownership. In my view, all of these battles represent misplaced priorities.

I believe that illegal immigrants bring relatively little economic benefit and cause relatively little economic harm. I believe that there are substitutes readily available for the work done by illegal immigrants. Legal residents could do some of the work. Other labor could be replaced by capital or by alternative production techniques. By the same token, because there are many substitutes available for unskilled labor, the salvation of American workers does not lie in immigration restrictions.

I’m not sure how much of the political resonance comes directly from economics, though. I think there’s a political aspect, too, having to do with the effort of people who aren’t citizens, and aren’t here legally, to wield political power within the United States. I think this has a particularly unfortunate resonance in light of recent events in Europe. It’s not The Camp of the Saints, but I think it has overtones of that sort.

Meanwhile, the obvious tendency of this weekend’s marches to provoke a backlash makes me wonder why they’re happening. One possibility is that the organizers are dumb, and don’t think there will be a backlash. The other possibility is that the organizers aren’t dumb, and figure that they’ll benefit from a backlash if it occurs. Either they win (which means they win) or they lose, and get a prop. 187 type response, leaving both illegal and legal Latino immigrants polarized and looking to them for leadership (which means they win). Given the GOP’s inroads into the Latino vote, this may be, in part, an effort to sabotage any Latino realignment toward the GOP.

Mickey Kaus thinks that this will wind up hurting the Democrats more than the Republicans. I’m not so sure — but I am pretty sure that the march organizers don’t think so.

UPDATE: Of course, the march organizers may not care as much about how this issue affects the Democrats vs. the Republicans as they care about how this impacts their own political positions. The creation of a visible Angry Latino bloc may hurt the Democrats, but still help those seen as the leaders of the bloc.

Meanwhile, Arnold Kling responds to my comments on his piece: “I can see his point. I would rather see immigrants assimilate first and become a political force later, rather than the other way around.” That seems to work better. As Jim Bennett likes to say: Democracy, Multiculturalism, Open Immigration — pick any two.

HENRY PORTER: “Blair will need to rush through his ID cards bill before people have time to wake up to how terrifying it is.”

JOHN HAWKINS interviews Claire Berlinski about her new book, Menace in Europe. “There is something going on in Europe, a flourishing of sects, all of which have something in common and that is an absolute, virtually pathological, refusal to profit from experience. . . . If young Germans are now seen muttering darkly about how they deplore American militarism-a sentiment, I am persuaded, that represents nothing more than their own stifled longing to switch on the tank’s ignition and thrill once again to the low deep rumble of its engine-it is certainly nothing new; Germans have complained for a very long time of these things.”

UPDATE: If you missed it, our podcast interview of Berlinski is here.

AIRBRUSHING at the Los Angeles Times.