inkbluesky

Been away so long I hardly knew the place
Gee, it’s good to be back home
Leave it till tomorrow to unpack my case
Honey disconnect the phone
I’m back in the USSR
You don’t know how lucky you are, boy
Back in the US
Back in the US
Back in the USSR

Lyrics from Back in the USSR by the Beatles. As you phone, e-mail, and text today try and be interesting you might be entertaining someone at the FBI or CIA, NSA’s Domestic Spying Grows As Agency Sweeps Up Data

According to current and former intelligence officials, the spy agency now monitors huge volumes of records of domestic emails and Internet searches as well as bank transfers, credit-card transactions, travel and telephone records. The NSA receives this so-called “transactional” data from other agencies or private companies, and its sophisticated software programs analyze the various transactions for suspicious patterns. Then they spit out leads to be explored by counterterrorism programs across the U.S. government, such as the NSA’s own Terrorist Surveillance Program, formed to intercept phone calls and emails between the U.S. and overseas without a judge’s approval when a link to al Qaeda is suspected.

[  ]…The effort also ties into data from an ad-hoc collection of so-called “black programs” whose existence is undisclosed, the current and former officials say. Many of the programs in various agencies began years before the 9/11 attacks but have since been given greater reach.

The Fourth Amendment is pretty clear - unwarranted searches and seizures are forbidden. Even the modern legislative accommodation to the electronic communications age, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) requires probable cause. It does allow for intelligence agencies to actually spy on e-mail and so forth for 72 hours before getting a warrant.

spring wet grass wall

A Boy Named Sue, and a Theory of Names 

By scouring census records from 1790 to 1930, Mr. Sherrod and Mr. Rayback discovered Garage Empty, Hysteria Johnson, King Arthur, Infinity Hubbard, Please Cope, Major Slaughter, Helen Troy, several Satans and a host of colleagues to the famed Ima Hogg (including Ima Pigg, Ima Muskrat, Ima Nut and Ima Hooker).

The authors also interviewed adults today who had survived names like Candy Stohr, Cash Guy, Mary Christmas, River Jordan and Rasp Berry. All of them, even Happy Day, seemed untraumatized.

“They were very proud of their names, almost overly proud,” Mr. Sherrod said. “We asked if that was a reaction to getting pummeled when they were little, but they said they didn’t get that much ribbing. They did get a little tired of hearing the same jokes, but they liked having an unusual name because it made them stand out.”

There have been some studies ( they didn’t account for socio-economic factors) that indicated that children with odd names didn’t do well in school or their professional life as other children. Poverty and ethnicity aside this new research indicates that Iam Hooker or Lucifer can do just as well as everyone else. I’m still for a moratorium on the name Britney and any name that ends in -ez for the next five years.