It is the ultimate irony, isn't it? The government is not supposed to profile because it might violate the civil and constitutional rights of a minority. So instead, the government violates everyone's civil rights.  This is the brilliant logic of our ruling class.  As a result we get this program, TSA, and all the rest of the rubbish the government does. It is expensive, violates rights, and does not achieve the goals it is supposed to achieve.

That there are those who would say that revealing that the government mining data on such a scale is in the realm of treason or a violation of national security would seem laughable if it were not so disgusting. Comparing the government to the gestapo is not that far fetched.

And it's not as though these gestapo tactics are keeping people safe. It is just providing employment for a bunch of people running around in circles sticking their nose into things they have no place sticking their noses into. In the mean time we get events like Boston. Violated and not safe -- that is what Homeland Security means.

Because our idiot political elites are so mired in austerity -- Republicans wanting to cut the welfare state and Democrats wanting to impoverish the country through regulations -- it will be interesting to see who gets thrown under the bus first: the environmentalists or the welfare state cutters. Energy will be the means of actually being able to afford the welfare state we have gotten so used to and most people do actually want to keep.

As for the Middle East: I never have cared. It is an enormous mistake to become mired in a part of the world that rests on sand.

What these empires did was facilitate communication and commerce under a common law. What is remembered of them is seen through an overlay of later propaganda -- whether Christian about the Roman Empire or Marxist about the British Empire -- to produce memory and historiography.  The empires lose their edge largely because of their success: they transfer to other peoples knowledge and those people couple that new knowledge with their own to first take down another empire and then supplant it. No one replaced the Roman empire, but the Greeks and the British were replaced with successor empires. I think the idea of the downfall of Rome due to decadence is nothing other than Christian propaganda. Disease wiping out huge portions of your population is not decadence. And the Romans did not have a legacy of innovation to overcome this.

Does it matter what critics say about rap? The question is whether there is a sufficient market to keep it going. Evidently there is.

It seems like conservatives would know that.

New Orleans is a 3rd world city. If you've spent time in 3rd world cities, you know there are power outages. If there had not been a power outage, it would have been a sign of a conspiracy.

I've never worn a watch for more than a day. I hate them. They get in the way. They chafe. So I don't get it.

What the author of the Atlantic article is saying is nonsense, both before the advent of ebay and after. The best place to buy 19th century covers has always been at auctions in large lots. It still is. You get the best bang for your buck that way and knowledge very much pays off.  Not all such finds are on ebay but in the dozens of auction houses around the world. My experience on ebay is that individual items often have ridiculously high starting prices and will never sell. There are also an enormous number of forgeries and fakes out there and you better have the knowledge to be able to know what is a forgery (a reprint of a stamp) or a fake (application of a false cancellation to a real stamp). I've seen forged stamps on ebay go for ridiculously high prices so the idea that "the market knows" just is not true. As for "finds", you always have been and still are more likely to find them from dealers who sell in large bulk and do not have the time to break things down. They make their money on volume and not one-at-a-time.

"President Obama". But it ain't gonna happen.

It isn't only Americans.

Matt Ridley described it all very well in The Rational Optimist.  He compared the life of a middle class person to Louis XIV and showed how much better life is for a middle class person today than kings of only a few centuries ago.

The person you marry is (hopefully) not a blood relative, so the idea only blood relatives are needed for family isn't true.

That's_why the Japanese are doing it the smart way -- Japanese only -- in the face of an aging society. None_of_this_multicultural_stuff. Take_care_of_your_own.

Some do. Some don't.

The thing Krugman doesn't seem to recognize is that computers at the moment have the mental capacity of cockroaches. That's not going to last for long and it is merely a matter of a few decades before computers have the mental capacity of humans.

I completely agree with the idea that expanding populations are not necessary for economic expansion. The other reason is increased longevity combined with better health. It's going to be a matter of people living for centuries.

When these two trends merge, people who work will be people who want to work. And there will be plenty of people who want to work.

As for the Mark Steyn stuff, it's simply ridiculous. There have been periods when over half the population of Europe were wiped out by combinations of bad harvests, the plague, and war over a period of a few years. Europe survived. There is no such sudden collapse of population or of civilization on the horizon.

There are an enormous number of ideas and at its heart are the ideas introduced in The Persuadable Voter, i.e., the voters most easily persuadable are not independents but partisans on the other side who disagree with the party about an issue of importance to them. It's often written especially on this site that those who go back and forth are low-information voters when it's far from the truth. It's a matter of being partisans moving away and tugged back precisely because of issues. Use of the various techniques to identify and persuade are at the heart of a campaign and Obama did that well. There is a second element not identified in the literature you've cited and that is how to dissuade voters who might vote against you from showing up on election day and voting against you. I think Obama also did that effectively with his economic warfare message against Romney.

Experimental_methods_can_be_used_both_to_identify messages and identify target audiences. But what about bias that might be introduced as a result. Alan Gerber is cited as being the author of article on New Haven's turnout but he's had bias problems in the past.