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Was just noticing in the genre of scary ghost movies that also happen to be mysteries, when the time comes to sit down in front of Google or a microfiche reader at the library and figure out what’s going on, for some reason that’s the chick’s job.

An Informative Map

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Notice the lengths to which people will go to live free in spite of oppressive government regulation.

Sometimes it even works.

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The Quooker supplies instant boiling water through a tap, connected to a small tank hidden in a cupboard underneath the work surface or sink. The heavily insulated three-litre tank is linked to the water supply and heated electrically to keep it at 100C. There is a safety catch to stop children accidentally burning themselves.

I’d buy it.

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Not that the Nanny State laws against doing that will be repealed, oh no — God forbid any governmental entity would consult Actual Facts in formulating policy.

Many will interpret this as meaning that people are obeying the law and it doesn’t matter. I think it more likely that people are just ignoring the law and, again, it doesn’t matter. The key thing to take away from it in either case, however, is that IT DOESN’T MATTER.

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But they can’t shoot you or put you in jail, as the minions of government can, so ask yourself why NPR is wasting time on this crap when Obama is out there with his hand in your wallet.

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It doesn’t matter how ‘assimilated’ a Muslim seems, he can turn on you in an instant. Time to wake up and smell the cordite.

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Hey, you didn’t have anything else to do today, right?

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And who could blame him?

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Yeah, Latin and Greek would raise the tone of the country beyond measure.

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One wishes to speak carefully here, but without letting pass a compound of willful ignorance, crude ethics, and cruder social doctrine: a compound, indeed, of the sorts of small, soft hearted errors that transform charity into social work, love of the Body of Christ into “altruism,” and a sense of personal obligation to a scheme of bureaucratic methods for getting others to pay for my sense of moral obligation.  Let us note a few things.

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Guess who needs ’em? Us.

These 15 consecutive lanthanide elements have, uniquely among all the elements in the periodic table, chemical properties so similar that they are difficult and expensive to separate from one another. However, once these metals have been separated from one another, the individual physical properties of these materials put them in today’s top tier of the rarest and in many cases the most critical of metals for technological application. These metals are used to manufacture environmentally friendly products such as electric cars and in alternative power generating technologies such as wind turbines.

Guess who owns ’em? China.

The main accessible concentrations of the rare earths are found in China, where more than 95% of rare earths are now produced. Over the last seven years, China has reduced the amount of rare earths available for export by some 40%.

Chinese officials are openly concerned that the elements mined in the Bayanobo region are so valuable and important to China’s technological future that they must be conserved for future Chinese use. Rare earth production is or may soon be too low to keep up with growing demand.

For the rest of the world, the problem is that the rare earths which the Chinese deem so important to their technological and green future are already critical for maintaining the West’s technological and green present, let alone a future of green growth and sustainable production.

Does that bother you? It bothers me.

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I am not making this up.

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Me want.

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Fortunately, Obama doesn’t speak Italian, otherwise the resemblance would be truly frightening.

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Recently, we pointed out that what’s often called “identity theft” involving someone falsifying bank account info to take your money is really nothing of the sort, but is instead a bank robbery where the victim gets blamed.

And watch the video, which is as funny as a ‘Get a Mac’ ad.

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Until they run out, of course. Then what will they do?

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Obama lies, and health care dies.

Tyler Cowen thinks he’s figured it out.

My theory is that Apple wants to capture a chunk of the revenue in this nation’s enormous textbook market — high school, college, whatever.  Why lug all those books around?  The superior Apple graphics, colors, and fonts will support all of the textbook features which Kindle botches and destroys.  Apple takes a chunk of the market revenue, of course, plus they sell the iPads and some AT&T contracts.  There are lots of schoolkids in the world.

In the longer run the iPad will compete with your university, or in some ways enhance your university.  It will offer homework services and instructional videos and courses, none of which can work well on the current iPhone or Kindle.

Can you imagine one attached to every hospital bed or in the hands of every doctor and nurse?

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Doing well by doing good.

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1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Probably in D.C. (Oh, wait, they already did that….)

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Was more polite than mine would have been.

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Back on November 3, after Berkshire Hathaway’s deal to acquire the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railroad was announced, FutureOfCapitalism.com wrote, “Compare Burlington Northern Santa Fe’s route map with the map of proposed high speed rail projects competing for $8 billion in federal stimulus funding and you can get a sense of some of the opportunities for Berkshire Hathaway and Warren Buffett.” President Obama, in his State of the Union address last night, said, “There’s no reason Europe or China should have the fastest trains,” and said he’d appear at a high-speed-rail related event in Tampa today. The White House is releasing the details  now  of the high-speed rail projects getting funding, and, sure enough, a lot of the big ones mesh pretty well with the BNSF route map.

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Taxpayers may look at the unlimited federal credit line now enjoyed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and see disaster. But New York Senator Chuck Schumer sees opportunity.

Yesterday he demanded that the two failed mortgage giants guarantee low rent for tenants in a Manhattan property they now own after the owner defaulted. As they say in Democratic Washington, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

People like Chuck-You Schumer foster anti-Semitism by being high-profile Jews who are blatantly crookeder than a dog’s hind leg. Abraham Foxman needs to worry more about people like Schumer and less about people like Rush Limbaugh.

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Well, that’s what they do.

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“Progressive” is a buzz word for liberalism, and when liberalism is cloaked behind the P-word it is bait and switch. You act like you’re going to restore power, wealth or both to the “Middle Class” — middle class being an imprecise term that generally refers to the income and property bracket of the person who is listening to you.

As soon as you build up a self-delusional groundswell of populist support, you do this hairpin turn and start parceling out the power and wealth to your friends. Leaving the middle class to twist in the wind.

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Well, that’s not something that you’d want to rush into.

Say not that the struggle nought availeth.

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Oh, no! You mean a U.N. organization is run by corrupt morons? How did that happen?

The Other McCain is on the case.

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Radley Balko explains why ‘Police and prosecutors won’t give up their license to steal.’

Over the past three decades, it has become routine in the United States for state, local, and federal governments to seize the property of people who were never even charged with, much less convicted of, a crime. Nearly every year, according to Justice Department statistics, the federal government sets new records for asset forfeiture. And under many state laws, the situation is even worse: State officials can seize property without a warrant and need only show “probable cause” that the booty was connected to a drug crime in order to keep it, as opposed to the criminal standard of proof “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Instead of being innocent until proven guilty, owners of seized property all too often have a heavier burden of proof than the government officials who stole their stuff.

Hey, stealing is what governments do.

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A useful chart.

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Let that be a lesson to us all. Frederick Barbarossa must have rolled over in his sleep or something.

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The car hadn’t been operated and it wasn’t clear that it was even operable, but Minnesota, like so many states, has a strictly worded DUI law. “Intending to sleep off a night of drinking [is] treated as the same crime as attempting to drive home under [the state’s] legal theory which does not take motive into account.”

Minnesota is, of course, one of those northern tier blue states where idiotarianism seeps down from Canada. Perhaps we could persuade them to secede.

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Truly, you cannot make this stuff up.

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A perfectly rational response to the situation, I think.

In fact, I admire his restraint. Were I a multi-millionaire with so dorkish a neighbor, it wouldn’t have been the alarm that would have been blasted with a shotgun. One of the advantages of being a multi-millionaire is that you can afford Minions and Henchmen to do such things for you.

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German state constitutions require children to attend public or private schools, and parents can face fines or prison time if they do not comply.

Aren’t you glad you don’t live in Germany?

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This will wipe that smile off your face.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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Without getting crucified at the end, one hopes.

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Well, if they were blind drunk, how valid was the test?

Good to know that the Taiwanese can keep up with professionals.

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New federal data indicate that, “Last year, for the first time in American history, there were more union members who worked for the government than there were in the private sector, though the private sector workforce is more than five times larger.

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In prehistoric times, these beautiful cats inhabited significant areas of the western United States, but in the past 100 years, there have been few, if any, resident breeding populations here. The last time a female jaguar with a cub was sighted in this country was in the early 1900s. (Jaguars — the world’s third-largest wild cats, weighing up to 250 pounds, with distinctive black rosettes on their fur — are a separate species from the smaller, tawny mountain lions, which still roam large areas of the American West.)

Two well-intentioned conservation advocacy groups, the Center for Biological Diversity and Defenders of Wildlife, sued the Fish and Wildlife Service to change its ruling. Thus in 2006, the agency reassessed the situation and again determined that no areas in the United States met the definition of critical habitat for the jaguar. Despite occasional sightings, mostly within 40 miles of the Mexican border, there were still no data to indicate jaguars had taken up residence inside the United States.

Despite the continued evidence, the two conservation advocacy groups continued to sue the government. Apparently, they want jaguars to repopulate the United States even if jaguars don’t want to. Last March, a federal district judge in Arizona ordered the Fish and Wildlife Service to revisit its 2006 determination on critical habitat.