UNLESS, OF COURSE, IT’S A BRILLIANT PIECE OF MISDIRECTION: How Downed U.S. Drone Helps China.

AT AMAZON, bestselling digital cameras.

WHEN QUOTES ARE FAKE BUT ACCURATE, at The Nation.

UPDATE: Eugene Volokh writes: “Glenn: I wonder if the item that you quoted is really that telling an indictment of the article in The Nation. As I understand it, The Nation is acknowledging that the line wasn’t actually said by Zhou Enlai, but was made up by someone else, so it’s not trying to deceive anyone. And it’s not claiming extra wisdom from the line because it was said by Zhou Enlai. So really it’s just quoting an interesting and possibly insightful saying, albeit one which might have originated in a mistranslation or a misreport. I’m not sure there’s anything really wrong with that. Or am I missing something?”

Well, I think that Prof. Campbell — who is hell on fake quotes and misleading press tropes — thinks that using a misreported quote to illustrate a point perpetuates the misreported quote. But people can follow the link and see what they think.

THIS WEEK IN THE FUTURE.

HUMAN ECOLOGY: Cheating Spreads Like Infections In Online Mulitplayer Games. “If you have friends who cheat, you are more likely to become a cheater, according to computer scientists who say this can be used to label you as a potential cheater.”

SOLAR UPDATE: Solar Photovoltaic Price Declines Not Sustainable.

CHANGE: Annual fuel budget for U.S. families this year? Over $4,000. “Been wondering where a bunch of your money went this year? For the average American family, a higher percentage of the budget was spent on gas in 2011 than at any point since 1981. According to the AP, gas cost most Americans $4,155, or 8.4 percent of the median household income, in 2011. In 1981, the number was 8.8 percent. In the 2000s, a normal number was around 5.7 percent. The culprit, as should not be a surprise, was $3.50-a-gallon gas in a sluggish economy.”

PEJMAN YOUSEFZADEH: Apologists For Communist Totalitarianism: I Hate Those Guys. Me too.

THAT ZANY RAND SIMBERG has questions on space policy for Mitt Romney.

BILL WHITTLE: Afterburner: Three Years Under Obama.

HAVE A SNO-CONE AND ENJOY THE SHOW: Snow-Cone Machines For Homeland Security. “When you give out money based on politics, without any accounting, this is what you get.”

UPDATE: It took only 7 minutes for the first InstaPundit reader, Thomas Jones, to email noting the Webb Wilder reference.

HUMAN ECOLOGY: The Microbes In Your Body. “This sort of diversity is made possible thanks in part to the vast number of ecological niches in the human body. Microbes that live on the surface of the skin can get lots of oxygen, but they also bear the brunt of sun, wind, and cold. Microbes in the intestines have next to no oxygen, but they have a much more stable habitat. Microbes have carved up the human body into far finer niches. The bugs on your fingers are different from the ones on your elbow. The two sides of a single tooth have a different diversity of microbes. . . . Here’s one crude but effective example of what this kind of ecosystem engineering might look like. A couple years ago, Alexander Khoruts, a gastroenterologist at the University of Minnesota, found himself in a grim dilemma. He was treating a patient who had developed a runaway infection of Clostridium difficile in her gut. She was having diarrhea every 15 minutes and had lost sixty pounds, but Khoruts couldn’t stop the infection with antibiotics. So he performed a stool transplant, using a small sample from the woman’s husband. Just two days after the transplant, the woman had her first solid bowel movement in six months. She has been healthy ever since.”

GAY ROBOT CONFRONTS MICHELE BACHMANN: “You’re A Robo-Phobe.”

Watch out, Matt Yglesias. They’ll be coming for you next.

Just don’t tell Yglesias about this.

SIGN OF THE TIMES: A Frankincense Shortage.

THOMAS FRIEDMAN WAS UNAVAILABLE FOR COMMENT: The Xinjiang Procedure: Beijing’s ‘New Frontier’ is ground zero for the organ harvesting of political prisoners. Funny how people who were outraged beyond outrage by the Abu Ghraib pics don’t care much about this.

A CROWDSOURCED LIST OF SOPA SUPPORTERS.

CHANGE: Voters leaving Republican, Democratic parties in droves.

CHRIS PETERSON ON the current state and future potential of nanotechnology.

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN, we’d have a President who used “signing statements” to evade laws passed by Congress. And they were right! Obama says he’s not bound by Guantanamo, gun-control provisions. “After he signed the omnibus into law Friday, the White House released a concurrent signing statement saying Obama will object to portions of the legislation on constitutional grounds. Signing statements are highly controversial, and their legality is disputed.”

Well, mostly when there’s a Republican in the White House.

HOW’S THAT BAILOUT WORKIN’ FOR YOU? “The EPA and the Department of Transportation predict stagnation for General Motors, with only 3% sales growth by 2025. Fiat/Chrysler is expected to shrivel by more than half. As Truth About Cars says.”

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: “He Got Us Both Pregnant At The Same Time.”

PHYLLIS CHESLER: Naked Breasts vs. Fundamentialist Islam. “In the last year, three Muslim women have posed nude or nearly nude in the media.” Shockingly they’re all still alive.

Chesler, however, falls into the lame bikini-burka equivalence trap that has snared many Western feminists. When writing “I am wondering whether she has escaped one noose only to find herself about to be hung in another way,” it is important to remember that one noose is literal, and the other is only figurative.

In that regard, I refer back to these comments from Jim Henley: “1) This would be a shade closer to true if western women who ever tried to wear something other than bikinis – like, say, a business suit – GOT THE SHIT KICKED OUT OF THEM FOR DOING SO. But there’s more: 2) We may feel very ambivalent about it, but women’s sexual power is real. In a REAL patriarchy, as opposed to a half-assed one, it’s practically the only power women have available. Afghanistan is a real patriarchy for sure, and the burkha robs women of their sexual power by design. That is its function. But we’re still not done. 3) A bikini-clad woman has a face. Men can see when she is happy, when she is sad, when she is cogitating, when she is pissed off and, especially, when she suffers. There are some sick bastards who get off on visible evidence of female suffering. But even most squishy sexists are as squeamish as the rest of us about seeing torment play across the face of another human being. This too is what the burkha takes away by design. There is simply no comparison that is not invidious.”

More on that here. Note this from Megan McArdle: “What Aziz is arguing for is, in my opinion, a well meaning but futile attempt to take sex out of male-female relations.” This seems to be Chesler’s problem, too.

FROM STEPHEN GREEN, IT’S the Week In Blogs.

STILL CRAZED IN WISCONSIN: “What is extraordinary is not just that a business owner would put up a sign that is a) obscene and b) political, but one that would infuriate roughly half of the potential customers who see it. Such is the level of craziness to which Wisconsin’s liberals have descended.”