LAWRENCE SOLOMON: China’s Coming Fall. “This ethos of corruption is captured in a popular song in China, I want to marry a government official, whose lyrics explain why an official makes for a good matrimonial catch: ‘He has power, a car and house; He only needs to drink tea and read the newspaper during work; He never spends his own money on cigarettes and alcohol; He can get free food every day; He can get promoted by only kissing his boss’s ass.'” Thank goodness we have none of that here.

VIDEO: HOW TO MAKE A CAR OUT OF BRONZE.

WIRED: Did Moscow’s Airport Bombers Dodge Security Checks?

WAS CHINA’S STEALTH TECHNOLOGY made in America?

AT AMAZON, 50% or more off men’s denim.

NINE TEXAS DEMOCRATS flip to the GOP.

THOUGHTS ON SAVING FOR RETIREMENT.

QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT could stretch across time. “In the weird world of quantum physics, two linked particles can share a single fate, even when they’re miles apart. Now, two physicists have mathematically described how this spooky effect, called entanglement, could also bind particles across time. If their proposal can be tested, it could help process information in quantum computers and test physicists’ basic understanding of the universe.” This goes well beyond spooky-action-at-a-distance.

BUBBLE DEFLATING? States Make More Cuts In Higher Education. Probably not, if tuition just goes up to compensate, and students are willing to borrow to pay it. Are they?

Meanwhile, here’s what faculty are doing.

THE JOYS OF retro-robotics.

WHISKY IN A POP-TOP CAN.

NOBODY BOTHERS TO chase ambulances anymore.

THIS WEEK in the future.

COLD WEATHER: Markdowns on jump-starters and portable power.

STANLEY KURTZ: Tucson, Piven and the Left’s Strategic Blunder. “The hope of silencing Beck in the wake of Tucson has lured the left into a strategic blunder. They’ve decided to turn Piven into a martyr. Yet in doing so the left has tied itself to Piven’s wild writings and over-the-top radicalism. Dreier acts as though Piven’s scholarly work is somehow different from the calls for rioting, crisis, and polarization in her two notorious Nation articles. Actually, Piven’s scholarly writings are worse. . . . A quarter century later the Nation has embraced Piven’s call for Euro-style rioting in America, allowing her to speak with the magazine’s editorial voice. It’s not Beck who’s tarring the left with the brush of Piven’s radicalism. They’re doing it to themselves.”

Related, from Ann Althouse:

Do academics mean to have influence or not? Are we supposed to think of them as oversmart flakes who are tucked away in institutions where they won’t screw up real life for the rest of us? Because that’s the only way in which it makes sense to portray Glenn Beck as the villain. He took an academic seriously, as if she meant what she said and expected real people to hear and act.

Indeed. And one of Althouse’s comments suggests that the logic of blaming Beck is this: “Because if Americans learn the truth of what the Left really is, they’ll want to shoot them.” Thus, accurate quotes are an incitement to violence!

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Buying their way out of ObamaCare. “Three local chapters of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), whose political action committee spent $27 million supporting Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election, have received temporary waivers from a provision in the Obamacare law.”

DOES CHINA HAVE MILITARY AMBITIONS FOR THE MOON?

The idea was straightforward and simple from this magazine editor’s standpoint—parlay the buzz about China’s lunar ambitions into a conjectural story about the weapons and tactics of a lunar battle. But my “battle for the moon” scenario started to fall apart immediately­—mostly because the moon is of such little military utility.

Yeah, those “high ground” analogies don’t really take account of astrodynamics.

JAMES TARANTO: Frances Fox Piven: Advocate of Violence. Plus, “The New York Times’s dishonest campaign for ‘civility.’ . . . Why is a newspaper that has been posturing as the scourge of violent rhetoric now siding with a purveyor of such rhetoric, and blatantly slanting the news as it does so? Because her opponent is a prominent media figure from outside the old media establishment.”

CHANGE: Yellowstone Has Bulged As Magma Pocket Swells. This falls into the category of things I haven’t tried to prepare for, since the only “prep” I can imagine working is moving to Australia or New Zealand.

SIXTEEN slow-cooker desserts.

YOU DON’T NEED A WEATHERVANE TO SEE WHICH WAY THE WIND IS BLOWING. Well, you don’t when you’ve got Colin Powell around, anyway. “Retired Gen. Colin Powell is not prepared to back President Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential campaign. The former secretary of state under former President George W. Bush endorsed then-candidate Obama in the 2008 election, but said Sunday on CNN’s ‘State of the Union’ that he will wait to make a decision on whom to support in the next presidential election.”

More on Powell here.

ESTIMATING THE COST OF ending global warming by going all-nuclear.

RAHM EMANUEL booted from mayoral ballot.

WORRYING ABOUT exploding stars and volcanoes.

THE MORTGAGE-INTEREST DEDUCTION: A benefit for Blue States? “The benefits of the mortgage interest deduction are not evenly distributed among the states. … [T]he per capita tax benefit from the mortgage interest deduction for Californians is more than two and a half times that for Texans. Marylanders get nearly five times the benefit of citizens in neighboring West Virginia. We always knew the mortgage interest deduction was unfair — favoring those in high tax brackets with big houses over renters and low-income homeowners. But until we did the calculations — as far as we know, the first of their kind — we did not suspect the geographic dispersion of tax benefits would be so large.”