“Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American, and the more panicked talk we hear from people like him, Feinstein, and King, the better off we all are.”

“The court order doesn’t allow the NSA to collect any information whatsoever on the contents of phone calls, or even to obtain any names or addresses of customers. What’s covered instead is known as “metadata”: the phone number of every caller and recipient; the unique serial number of the phones involved; the time and duration of each phone call; and potentially the location of each of the participants when the call happened. All of this information is being collected on millions of calls every day – every conversation taking place within the US, or between the US and a foreign country is collected.”

“Forget environmental concerns: When it comes to fracking, Germans are worried about how it might affect beer quality. In a letter to several ministries in Berlin, brewers expressed concern that the exploitation of shale gas could contaminate water supplies and thus violate the beer purity law of 1516.”