Nationalise? (Yes, with a s and not a z)

The nadir of geological ignorance evinced by phrases such as "the underground aquifer" puts, imo, the folks complaining about this into the "concerned but completely clueless" box. Most high-access potable water aquifers have a connection to rainfall to recharge them, and aren't therefore connected to natural gas reservoirs, otherwise the gas would have escaped long ago. Shale gas wells tap the gas from a tight shale that's completely separated vertically from the aquifer. Nobody who has just spent $$$ on drilling a well wants the very gas they were after to piss itself away into an aquifer. You may doubt companies stick to regulations, but I'm sure you don't suspect their desire for not literally letting their profit evaporate.
Equally, fracking fluids don't go anywhere near anyone's aquifer - they go in the shale and that's it. I could be convinced that a company that felt like being a corporate dick might try and lose spare fluid in a ditch somewhere on surface, but that would have to be a far more convincing case than you see in 'Gasland'. Believing that because stuff is put "in the ground" it must all get mixed in with everything else in the ground - water, gophers, pirate treasure etc. - is really dumb, and basing any other arguments on that, however worthwhile, also looks dumb.

Now if you want to get back on topic about the sort of bastard offspring of DHS and corporatism that this story seems to represent, then great, because that's a lot more worrying than gas development, even more worrying than the idea that some fool would shoot or vandalise a gas line.

I don't know where he is, but here in the lovely Sahara desert (two-thirds down Algeria towards Niger) it's more like 49 Celsius. On the plus side, there's no humidity, except my slow evaporation. Dry and hotter than hell is fine, I really hate warm and damp.

Part of the importance of keeping Enigma secret after WWII (up until the late seventies) was that the British circulated Type-X coding machines widely into colonial countries (and the US may have done similar things, I don't know). That enabled GCHQ to run decrypts against a very large number of governments, presumably including those in the post-colonial wars, Suez, etc, although this is (unsurprisingly) not publically well documented. That's a fair number of wars right there.

Even during the earlier stages of WWII, key areas such as North Africa were won with very significant help from decrypts, not to mention the Atlantic. Without that, and assuming that Purple had never been broken either, WWII would have probably ended in 1943. All the "men and materiel" is irrelevant if you're an ocean away from the enemy and can't engage them.

Actually we're finding out more about probable functions of Stonehenge over time, not by peering at the stones, but by its context in the landscape, connections to pathways, riverways, nearby linked burials, all suggesting other interesting places to dig. It can be easier to find stuff in urbanising areas because they're being dug up - the Eton rowing lake 'bridges' in the UK or the marvellously preserved Hypogeum in Malta, found when digging out foundations for new houses, being examples. Whereas places like Catal Hoyuk and Gobleki Tepe are windswept and unlikely to be dug up except by archaeologists. 'Guesses' about agriculture and social groupings can be greatly strengthened if artefacts can be found that show commonality with other areas, or, more recently, male/female line DNA of current inhabitants can show interesting things about who has passed through the area in the past, and where they came from. So it's not as agnostic as you might think.

"Then I tried to think of cases where world opinion differed significantly from the US media's, I can't think of a single one." Er... Iraq war, freedom fries, 'old Europe'? Are you kidding? ROTW (bar Blair and Howard) busy saying WTF? Did you miss out on that one?