Check out Google Earth. It is the coolest program I have seen in some time. My favorite feature of Google Earth is that you can tilt the map view so you can see the topographic features on the land. It is great.

According to beggintodiffer:

So according to recent Supreme Court decisions, the government has no business in your bedroom (unless you’re growing marijuana), but they can drive a bulldozer right through it?

I like Alex Tabarrok’s take in the increase in lobbyists and federal outlays. Tabarrok says:

No doubt this will create more calls for reform but the truth is we will never get the money out of politics until we get the politics out of money.

The Government won Kelo, which means that government can take your home and give it to someone else for private economic development. This is just one more reason that I hate utilitarianism. Read what Professor Baingridge has to say about it.

Here’s what Julian Sanchez has to say about it:

You do wonder: Now that the “liberal” justices on the court have sided with the drug warriors against cancer patients, and with a plan to rob people of their homes for the benefit of wealthy developers, will some court-watchers on the left begin to question the wisdom of having let economic freedom become the red-headed stepchild of modern jurisprudence?

According to Yury Izrael, Director, Global Climate and Ecology Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences and the UN’s Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change (IPCC):

One issue on the table at the G8 summit at Gleneagles in early July is global climate change.

As I see it, this problem is overshadowed by many fallacies and misconceptions that often form the basis for important political decisions. G8 leaders should pay attention to them.

There is no proven link between human activity and global warming.

According to 10,000 meteorological stations, average temperatures have increased by just 0.6 degrees in the last 100 years. But there is no scientifically sound evidence of the negative processes that allegedly begin to take place at such temperatures.

So what should we do? Izrael says:

The G8 can adopt some effective climate-related decisions. In my opinion, academics, politicians and governments should assess maximum permissible temperatures and carbon-dioxide levels. Quite possibly, the world would have to sacrifice something in the face of a common threat.

You know that a movie will suck when reviews all reviews of the movie are emgbargoed. I have no doubt War of the Worlds will suck. I saw a trailer recently and the only thing that was interesting is that Steven Spielberg directed it. Other than that I couldn’t find one reason to care about the movie.

Here’s what Ann Althouse has to say about Durbin’s “apology.”

Durbin apologizing. I saw this on TV and found it … icky. What are you really crying about, Dick? Your own miserable little career?

Keep in mind that Althouse is no right-winger.

American George Weller was the first foreign reporter to enter Nagasaki following the U.S. atomic attack on the city on Aug. 9, 1945. Weller wrote a series of stories about what he saw in the city, but censors at the Occupation’s General Headquarters refused to allow the material to be printed. Weller’s stories, written in September 1945, can be found here.

I thought that the when I saw the ads for Morgan Spurlock’s new show 30-Days–Minimum Wage that it was be political fluff and it looks like it is. Econopundit looks at the show here.

This is one of my favorite political stories I have seen in a while. Funds from gamblers were channeled to anti-gambling groups to restrict gambling. This kind of thing happens all fo the time, but it usually not out in the open.

Here’s the seminal article explaining this phenomenon–Bootleggers and Baptists–the Education of a Regulatory Economist by Bruce Yandle.