(NUNAL) (EYEBALL)

I am using t his book by Daniel Innerarity in my freshmen seminar and I liked this line: "we practice an imperialism that is no longer related to space but to time, an imperialism of the present that colonizes everything.. There is a colonization of the future that consists of living at its expense and an imperialism of the present that absorbs the future and feeds off of it parasitically." The other book I'm using for this class is Jaron Lanier's Who Owns the Future? I guess I am future minded this fall. Must be the effect of the looming apocalypse.

Oops, the NSA accidentally and illegally scooped up "56,000 “wholly domestic” communications each year."  But you don't need to worry yourself, John and Jane Q. Public, it was just an accident. “This was not in any respect an intentional or wholesale breach of privacy of American persons,” Robert S. Litt III, the general counsel for the Office of the Director of the National Intelligence, said Wednesday. No, that "wholesale breach of privacy" is what the NSA is doing legally by gathering every phone call and every internet search. This implies that freedom is rapidly becoming a boutique item, like those enjoyed not by our reassured Mr and Ms Q. Publics, but by that smaller number of one percenters, knowwhatI'msayin?

If you are still fooling yourself that MOOCs are revolutionary for the ways they are helping education to evolve, than this should help you understand that the change is really to be found in the ways that administrators no longer even pretend that higher education is anything but a business that requires the approaches and sensibility of a business. That is, profit is the sole legitimate motivation. In this NYTimes story on Georgia Tech adopting for-credit MOOCs , we read " The Florida Legislature has directed the University of Florida to start fully online bachelor’s degree programs and set the price for residents at three-quarters of the campus in-state tuition, or about $4,700. But Bernie Machen, the university’s president, said he had not yet decided whether to charge out-of-state online students the full $28,000 tuition they would pay on campus, in part because he wondered if online pricing models were changing. “ Most of us got into online graduate programs more from...

I don't know why this particular DEA aspect of the federal government Big Brother system in the NSA hasn't gotten more attention. The NSA data collection wasn't much of a surprise except in scale given the reality of the Patriot Act, but the domestic ramifications in other agencies and their use of the data  is actually shocking (though not exactly surprising). Take for example the   secret branch of the DEA called the "Special Operations Division". Nothing sinister about the name, nope, nothing at all.  The initials are S.O.D.  Perhaps a reference to  that other S.O.D.? Andrew O'Hehir writes: "T he feds really were after him. In the   latest post-Snowden bombshell   about the extent and consequences of government spying, we learned from Reuters reporters this week that a secret branch of the DEA called the Special Operations Division – so secret that nearly everything about it is classified, including the size of its budge...

Worth noting that the Encyclopaedia Metallum , cite above, has 90,000 bands listed.  Ninety Thousand. But they do not have an entry for Los Wetbacks del D.F., which I have written about. (now defunct, quickly disappearing from Myspace too )

This is a real shock... there is zero proof smartphone apps teach your kids to read .