Dream

One of those dreams of academic failure. There was definitely a vibe of UT and graduate school. It seemed to be the night before finals week. It felt like I had not done a single thing all semester. I am utterly blank. And I am deeply scared. I am particularly concerned that if I fail to put in a semi-decent performance, I will be hammered financially: they will want me to pay back their grants and stipends and such goodies.

I went to the library and started to work on math stuff, but then I realized that, since I have so little time, it might be better to focus on the writing paper that is due, to work with my strengths. Hopelessly, I then realized that I cannot do anything decent in one night.

As I am overridden by anxiety and fear, I notice that a very pretty blonde girl from UTSA days is there watching me. She looks away when I look at her. Maybe there is some compassion there, but mostly I think I just make a wondrous sight - an injun out of his depths in the upper-middle-class white world. The dream closes with me walking around the Drag, looking for a place to eat.

I woke up with some of that anxiety and actually felt relief that I was not in school and it was only a dream. It took a couple of moments for the chill of fear to abate. The dream probably was influenced by the trouble I was having in finding my place in the Old Journal when I was working on the Three Journal. In trying to reorganize some of my misplaced entries, I was unable to hold the dates and journal places in my head, feeling the very narrow limitations of my easily overheated intellect, feeling quite literally retarded. I spent a good part of the afternoon straining over this task and feeling very headachey.

It has been years since I had one of these dreams. I thought I was over them, with my student days so far behind me now as to belong to some mythic age.

Net Neutrality

A federal court has thrown out net neutrality. It is not the last word in the matter, but we do have a Republican Supreme Court. How long could we hope to hold out before having to behold the corporatization of the Internet? It's going to become Disneyfied and become another version of NBC. I suppose upcoming generations won't know what they will doubtlessly be missing, but we sorely will. It will be like the difference between freedom and totalitarianism.

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Large private corporations that have been allowed to build out the pipes through which internet traffic flows have long wanted to introduce a different system, of net metering. In essence, if a corporation paid the internet provider a million dollars a year, readers could get to that site immediately. But for a site like Informed Comment without those sorts of bucks, service would be deliberately slowed and readers would have to wait a minute or two for the site to load. Studies have showed that most people won’t wait that way. So the entire independent cybersphere would be made invisible and more or less swept away.

A similar thing happened to radio, which was a grassroots medium at the beginning and then was corporatized with government help.

-- Juan Cole

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The Natural World

Random Pictures

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