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A Canadian asked and Will Wilkinson responded with the most obvious follow up question: Why not Mexico, too?

Such a merger makes perfect sense. No two countries on Earth are as socially and economically integrated as the U.S. and Canada. They share geography, values and a gigantic border. Their populations study, travel and do business together and intermarry in great numbers. If they were corporations (or European states), they would have merged a long time ago. And each has what the other needs: The U.S. has capital, manpower, technology and the world's strongest military; Canada has vast reserves of undeveloped resources.

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Canadians have traditionally bristled at the thought of falling under the sway of the U.S., but without a...

All those creepy Muslim organization names look the same to me, and in this case, a woman's foundation probably came within 2 letters of being a terror org - which is within 1 or 2 degrees of freedom, so Ban Her! She's a Witch!

Yes, the plot looks remarkably like Terry Gilliam's Brazil, except they haven't whisked her off to Gitmo (yet) to drill her teeth in an interrogation room.

But as a caveat to those who think metadata doesn't matter, yes, government fuckups have wings that fly far. History notes that government surveillance usually errs in ways beneficial to them, not in ways beneficial to the public or their targets. "Err on the side of caution" doesn't bode well for this lady's rights, and as is typical, the government doesn...