"Prism data and the other NSA data collection schemes remain untouched until an investigation is triggered. Only then is the data examined under a warrant from the FISA court (a secret court, with secret members)."

If this is really the case, then why isn't this bulk collected data placed under the physical jurisdiction of the FISA court, which would be provided with control or at least auditing tools to ensure that the only data accessed by the agencies is that consistent with the warrants that have been issued?

I get about 20 pounds a week of political direct mail, almost all of it of very poor quality. Often there is something on the envelope like OFFICIAL DOCUMENT--HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL--SEQUENCE #55535353--THERE ARE HEAVY PENALTIES FOR INTERFERING WITH MAIL.

Republican/conservative marketeers seem for the most point not to grasp the point that people who have significant $$$ to contribute to political causes mostly have *some* degree of astuteness, and that it doesn't work to market to them as if they were stereotypical hicks from an imaginary version of the 1950s.

Sounds like great technology...but many (most?) politicians would rather have the potholes re-form so they can give contracts for "fixing" them to their favored supporters among local contractors.

Therefore, the technology will have to be suppressed. Environmental reasons are a handy way to do that....perhaps by drawing attention to all that microwave radiation. I bet some sinister attributes of taconite could be discovered, too, if someone wanted to look hard enough...

Way back in 1950, Arthur Koestler wrote a novel of ideas--The Age of Longing--focused on the West's loss of cultural self-confidence. It's an important and thought-provoking book, and deserves to be better read.

Koestler's protagonist, Hydie, is a young American woman living in Paris.  Although once a devout Catholic, Hydie has lost her faith. She is unable to be attracted to any of the European or American men she meets, but falls very hard for a committed Russian communist.

My review is here: Sleeping with the Enemy. I think many of the factors Koestler saw in Europe in 1950--and perhaps exaggerated a bit for literary purposes--are present in America today, in full reality.

Well, Obama is all about contempt...toward just about everybody. It has taken many people an amazingly long time to realize that he's just as contemptuous toward them as he is toward everyone else.

About the press/Obama breakup, though, I dunno...I'm afraid that whatever magnetic pull they feel in this man will pull them back again.

Back in September, I posted a batch of great breakup songs in anticipatory celebration of what I was hoping would be the breakup between Obama and the American people...

This thread needs to go on the MAIN FEED so I can link it.

Ancient water mills...link looks interesting; will read.

Note that the medievals exploited waterpower for a range of applications--fulling cloth, powering furnace bellows, etc--as well as milling.

When you say "rediscovered," do you mean rediscovered in the sense of reading about it from old Roman documents, or in the sense of being independently invented?

On medieval mining, see Agricola's handbook De Re Metallica. It was published in 1556, but it seems likely that most of the techniques employed were of at least somewhat older vintage. Discusses the laws affecting mining, which seemed to be quite well-developed, as well as the technology.

A good source on the medieval development of waterpower is Terry Reynolds' book Stronger Than a Hundred Men. While the Greeks and Romans did exploit waterpower to some extent, it was far more extensively developed during the Middle Ages.

I just posted on this: Durbin, Tocqueville, and Freedom of the Press.

A couple of months ago I posted some links about 3-D printing and related technologies, here.

Why is all that bandwidth needed, anyhow? A one-page text memo requires very little bandwidth. It would seem that lots of images, video, PowerPoint presentations, etc are being sent back and forth across the continents, indicating an excessive level of micromanagement.

Important to note that oil and gas have vastly different transportation characteristics. Oil is fairly economical to transport by sea; gas, not so much as it must first be liquified. Numbers being quoted for gas ocean transport vary but seem to mostly be around $3/million BTUs.

The transportation economics suggest that nat gas is better used domestically rather than exported. The CEO of Dow Chemical has been demanding a protectionist policy on gas exports to maintain his low-cost feedstock advantage; I think he'd do better to be worrying about the nat gas demand, and consequent price impact, of the power generation shifts from coal to nat gas.

Rose Wilder Lane, the writer and libertarian political thinker, visited Russia in the early 1920s when she was still a Communist. She was attempting to explain the benefits of central planning to one skeptical village leader:

He shook his head sadly.

It is too big – he said – too big. At the top, it is too small. It will not work. In Moscow there are only men, and man is not God. A man has only a man’s head, and one hundred heads together do not make one great big head. No. Only God can know Russia.

It seems almost impossible to explain this insight, which of course prefigures Hayek, to the average liberal or "progressive."

Stephen Bishop..."The Chinese state has created a motorway and railway infrastructure in much the same way as Eisenhower created the inter-state system.  This clearly helps those private initiatives to bear fruit."

Actually, it appears that, in the railroad arena, the Chinese state has over-emphasized prestigious passenger-transportation projects at the expense of vital freight-rail projects. (One Chinese railway expert, in making this point, actually used the phrase "playing with train sets" to reflect that attitude of certain government officials)

Matede...."Maybe the GOP should start a dating website, where conservative men and liberal women could meet."

I am reliably informed that many, many liberal women *explicitly specify* on their dating profiles that they will not date men who do not have a strong commitment to "social justice," etc.

I suspect that in many, if not most cases, if they met a man they were sufficiently attracted to this requirement, like many other checklist options, would be dropped...but they would have to meet in some way other than on-line, given the profile specifications.