CHINESE TOURISM AND LUXURY SPENDING SOARS – I’ve been a Fulbright Scholar in lovely Ljubljana, Slovenia this year and I’ve been visiting Europe since the 1980s and this trend is super noticeable on the ground here.  My last long trip to Europe was summer of 2011, and I don’t remember seeing swarms of Chinese tourists carrying Prada bags, and using selfie-sticks with iPhones that year or earlier.  I grew up in New York City in the 1970s and 1980s and there were lots of Chinese immigrants and virtually no Chinese tourists, because if you got out of China in those years you stayed out of China.

I actually take the tourism as a pretty good sign.  Better that the Chinese spend their money in freer and more democratic markets.  It is also good that they get a view of how the rest of the wealthy world lives, with cleaner air, louder political debates, free access to Google and Facebook, etc.  When growth runs at 10% or higher and lots of folks are making money, people are willing to put up with a lot of BS from their government.  Once people have some money and growth slows it’s a lot harder to keep that balance, especially if the middle and upper middle class is traveling elsewhere and taking notes (and pictures, lots and lots of pictures).

HOW REPUBLICS DIE: “When we ignore and sidestep the Constitutional and legal process to achieve a desired end, the bedrock starts to turn to sand,” Rand Simberg writes.

ACLU: WHY WE CAN NO LONGER SUPPORT THE FEDERAL ‘RELIGIOUS FREEDOM’ LAW:

Shorter ACLU: we liked RFRA more when it was used to help people we naturally sympathize with, not icky Christians. http://t.co/mRwrltNfsm

— Sonny Bunch (@SonnyBunch) June 27, 2015

MEDIA BIAS? WHAT MEDIA BIAS, GAY-MARRIAGE DIVISION: Cheerleading erupts at the nation’s newspapers.

Elsewhere, an “Important update from PennLive: Sorry that we made ourselves victims, or something.”

Read the whole thing, which is yet another reminder of how much most DNC-MSM newspapers truly despise their readers – or to borrow from a headline by Erick Erickson of Red State at the start of the month, ‘Dear Reader, The Editor Hates Your F—ing Guts.’

YOU’RE GOING TO NEED A BIGGER DRONE: California Lifeguards Get Drone, Instantly Spot 10-12 Great Whites.

RELATED: Timeless Terror: Steven Spielberg’s Jaws turns 40.

GEEZ, EVEN THE MARX BROTHERS USED ‘SWORDFISH:’ IRS Employees Can Use ‘Password’ As A Password? No Wonder We Get Hacked.

THE GREAT CONFEDERATE PAYBACK: Is graffiti and other forms of vandalism to Confederate memorials really akin to the end of the Soviet Empire, as a college professor the Associated Press quotes suggests? “One might better say that there is a kind of anarchic madness loose in the land, that hasn’t been seen since the days of the Salem witch trials,” Michael Walsh writes in response at the PJ Tatler.

THE IRS SCANDAL, DAY 779: Republicans Consider Impeaching IRS Commissioner.

HOW TITLE IX IS CHILLING CAMPUS SPEECH: Check out FIRE intern and University of Delaware college student Rachael Russell’s article on how her education has been negatively impacted by her school’s concerns about Title IX compliance.

YES, IT’S POSSIBLE TO TALK SENSIBLY ABOUT THE CONFEDERATE FLAG: Here’s an example. (Trigger warning to Southern partisans: Talking sensibly doesn’t mean defending the white supremacists who waved it in the 19th and 20th centuries–or pretending they weren’t in fact white supremacists.)

YES, LET’S TALK ABOUT SEMICOLONS: Commenting on John Tierney’s tampons post, Charlie Martin writes:

I’d rather start a conversation about semicolons. People don’t give semicolons enough respect. Semicolons make lists clearer; they break complex thoughts into readable stages; they provide a stronger separation than the comma without implying a parenthetical — although the long dash was used in that way in earlier times. And they don’t even have their own names: “semicolon” as if they were a defective, smaller colon, when in fact they are actually bigger and have more interesting contours. I think we need a national conversation about semicolons.

Then we can start on the oxford comma.

This University of Bristol page endorses the semicolon as “a hugely powerful punctuation mark. Getting it right will not only impress your tutors and future employers, it will allow you to express your ideas and opinions with more subtlety and precision than ever before.” Ah, so maybe the semicolon is a British affectation and thus un-American? I suspect some copyeditors think so. I’m with Charlie. (And I’m always trying to sneak Oxford commas into Bloomberg View.)

PUTTING STUDENT EVALUATIONS IN THEIR PLACE? Seen at George Mason University School of Law

MUST WE TALK? A British campaign called JustATampon is urging men and women to post photos of  themselves with a tampon. The goal is “to start a conversation about periods,” which may seem too ambitious–perhaps beyond the ability of even Starbucks’ socially enlightened baristas. But there is one early success: a column in the Spectator by Rob Liddle, who explains why he has joined the campaign and posted his own photo.

For my part, I put a liberated tampon up each of my nostrils with the strings hanging down over my top lip: a touch of whimsy which I think will appeal to the feminists who run this campaign. Feminists are notoriously good-humoured and ‘game for a laugh’, perhaps especially in those few days leading up to their monthly cycles.

As I say, the point of all this is to demystify menstruation and to ‘break the stigma and taboo’, as one of the feminists put it, which surrounds this entirely natural function. For too long now menstruation and female sanitary wear has been the subject of male sniggering, disgust and — frankly — cruelty. I have not been immune to this in the past, I have to admit. Until relatively recently I locked my wife in the garden shed during her monthly cycle and if a third party ventured near the shed, I would scream ‘Unclean! Unclean!’ and drag them away. I regret this behaviour in retrospect. These days Mrs Liddle is allowed in the main body of the house at all times (although obviously not in the kitchen) and permitted to see visitors, provided she is not in the same room as them.

Perhaps that wasn’t the conversation they had in mind.

GAY MARRIAGE IS HERE – NOW WHAT? A diverse set of conservative and libertarian reactions to yesterday’s ruling on gay marriage in The Federalist, including contributions by Senator Mike Lee and Cato’s Ilya Shapiro. (The Federalist is becoming one of my favorite sites.)

“WHAT I’D LIKE TO KNOW IS: how did Roberts decide that this is the kind of issue ‘courts usually decide’? That itself is a decision. What’s the standard for saying the Supreme Court shouldn’t decide an issue? Is it just based on whether the Justices have a bad feeling about the whole thing? And aren’t issues of minority rights exactly the kinds of issues that are often very important for the Supreme Court to decide?”

And: “The comments appear to be uniformly negative in response to Scott Walker’s denunciation of the Supreme Court’s marriage decision on his Facebook page…”

ADDED: Scott Walker showed a far superior instinct back in January. What’s happened since then?

IN CASE YOU WONDER WHY I’VE BEEN SCARCE HERE:  I’m attending Liberty Con in Beautiful Chattanooga TN.  There is a high preponderance of members of the Evil Legion of Evil, and we’re having a great time.  I’ll return to my right (ah!) mind sometime in the afternoon on Sunday.

YE LIVELIEST AWFULNESS: A LOOK AT LOVECRAFT IN VIDEO GAME RPGs: “There is a specter haunting videogame RPGs,” Moe Lane writes at the PJ Lifestyle blog. “No, not Karl Marx: H.P. Lovecraft.”

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“A FUNDAMENTAL CHANGE:” Q&A with Senator Mark Warner about the sharing/gig economy, which he (correctly) believes challenges the employment model built into most public policies. Is it good for policy makers to start thinking about this? I’m ambivalent. But at least Warner isn’t taking the French view.

What is your concern about the sharing economy?

Warner: This is a fundamental change, and yet what I find is that policy makers may not have even heard about the “Gig economy” or sharing-economy. We have 25 people running for president, and no one is talking about the fastest-growing area of work in our country. What I don’t want to do is impose a Washington top-down solution, yet I don’t think this should be left to a patchwork of court decisions either.

Full interview here.

WILL DEMOCRATS APOLOGIZE FOR SLAVERY AND SEGREGATION? An open letter to DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

WELL, IT IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Toyota Channels ‘Back to the Future Part II’ With a Lexus-Branded Hoverboard.

TEXTILES AND TECHNOLOGY: I discuss my recent Aeon article with Australian radio here. From the article:

‘The important improvements and innovations in clothes for the World of Tomorrow will be in the fabrics themselves,’ declared Raymond Loewy, one of the [1939] Vogue contributors. His fellow visionaries agreed. Every single one talked about textile advances. Many of their designs specified yet-to-be-invented materials that could adjust to temperature, change colour or be crushed into suitcases without wrinkling. Without exception, everyone foretelling the ‘World of Tomorrow’ believed that an exciting future meant innovative new fabrics.

They all understood something we’ve largely forgotten: that textiles are technology, more ancient than bronze and as contemporary as nanowires. We hairless apes co-evolved with our apparel. But, to reverse Arthur C Clarke’s adage, any sufficiently familiar technology is indistinguishable from nature. It seems intuitive, obvious – so woven into the fabric of our lives that we take it for granted.

We drag out heirloom metaphors – ‘on tenterhooks’, ‘tow-headed’, ‘frazzled’ – with no idea that we’re talking about fabric and fibres. We repeat threadbare clichés: ‘whole cloth’, ‘hanging by a thread’, ‘dyed in the wool’. We catch airline shuttles, weave through traffic, follow comment threads. We talk of lifespans and spin‑offs and never wonder why drawing out fibres and twirling them into thread looms so large in our language.

The story of technology is in fact the story of textiles. From the most ancient times to the present, so too is the story of economic development and global trade. The origins of chemistry lie in the colouring and finishing of cloth. The textile business funded the Italian Renaissance and the Mughal Empire; it left us double-entry bookkeeping and letters of credit, Michelangelo’s David and the Taj Mahal. As much as spices or gold, the quest for fabrics and dyestuffs drew sailors across strange seas. In ways both subtle and obvious, textiles made our world.

Read the whole thing here. And here’s a related article on Google’s Project Jacquard.

SOCIALIST SANDERS VS. ZOMBIE HILLARY! Reading Jonathan Last’s new Weekly Standard article, the prospect of SMOD2016 as a sleeper candidate is definitely looking better all the time. (We’ll all be sleeping permanently after his campaign flyby has concluded.) Sure he’s older than both of them by a million years or so. But unlike Hillary, SMOD is quite capable of moving under his own power; no exoskeleton required. And unlike Bernie and Hillary, he’s definitely got a catchy bumper sticker slogan.