“People define themselves by their real-estate holdings much more than their ZIP codes.”

Well, that’s a relief. For a second I thought people were being shallow.

Agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement entered the Agriprocessors Inc. complex in northeast Iowa Monday morning to execute a criminal search warrant for evidence relating to aggravated identity theft, fraudulent use of Social Security numbers and other crimes, said Tim Counts, a Midwest ICE spokesman.

Agents are also executing a civil search warrant for people illegally in the United States, he said.

Anyone who’s been following the immigration issue in America during the last few years knows that one of the two paragraphs above is true, and the other is horseshit. The answer is below the fold. (more…)

Mr. Murdoch said Wednesday that the company was taking separate steps to stem losses at The Post. He said the paper would raise its cover price within the next two weeks to 50 cents, from a quarter.

Some of us haven’t forgotten that the Post dropped its price to a quarter several years ago in an attempt to… turn a profit. I guess that hasn’t worked out. No mention of Mr. Murdoch having any interest in, I don’t know, improving the paper’s dreadful content, which combines the lowest of low-brow trash journalism unworthy of the weekly gossip and alien-abduction rags with the hard-right pro-war conservative editorial content Mr. Murdoch is known for. My guess is Mr. Murdoch isn’t actually concerned about turning a profit at his vanity press - otherwise it would have folded years ago.

Around March each year, North Korea typically asks the South to provide it with about 300,000 tons of fertilizer for its spring planting and 500,000 tons of rice to help overcome its chronic “choongoong,” or spring hunger.

“Spring hunger” must be Commie-speak for “our thoroughly discredited ideology seems to be causing another famine, please feed us”. (more…)

China’s long-term strategy, which the violence may have only reinforced, has been to wait for the Dalai Lama to die on the theory that it can control his successor as Tibet’s spiritual leader. A new Dalai Lama would likely have little of the same prestige, inside China or abroad.

In 1995, China arrested the Panchen Lama, the No. 2 in Tibetan Buddhism, a 6-year-old at the time. He has not been seen since. China then anointed another Tibetan youth as a replacement, and it has tightly controlled his education and public duties since. Under Tibetan Buddhism, traditionally the Panchen Lama names a new Dalai Lama, theoretically giving the Chinese government control over the present Dalai Lama’s succession.

Countries around the world have been grabbing adjacent territory throughout history, eliminating or “assimilating” the existing populations in the process–my own included. However, in the early 21st century, no country that expects to be taken seriously on the world stage ought to believe that it can get away with such barbarity. A government that “disappears” a six-year-old child in hopes of controlling its conquered territory has no legitimacy whatsoever.