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UT professor of education Angela Valenzuela (website) rails about how UT-Austin (the flagship public university in Texas) is applying pressure on academic departments to eliminate diversity buzzwords from its websites and research:
All this should alarm Texas taxpayers whose hard-earned money helps fund higher education and whose children attend our universities. As one of Texas’s two flagship institutions, alongside Texas A&M, these actions mark a troubling decline and a predictable loss of reputation that will be challenging to reverse if this agenda continues to gain traction. We cannot allow the Monopoly Tycoons who are ideologically vested in this takeover to continue trampling over students’ free speech and faculty’s academic freedom.
Ironically, in allegedly wanting to minimize so-called bias in the university curriculum, anti-DEI censorship is itself a demonstration of bias, against Latinos and Latinas and others. In education, a subject that I teach, one can never stand outside of either bias or the politics of education as the entire enterprise is inherently subjective, comprised of value judgments, ethical and moral dilemmas, sociocultural factors, power dynamics, and so on.
Mark Joseph Stern does a brilliant dissection of Aileen Cannon’s overstepping of judicial authority when blocking the Special Counsel report. As outrageous as it is, I have a feelilng that Trump will nominate her to an appeals court. By the way I’m a big fan of Amicus podcast with Dahlia Lithwick.
Here’s a terrifying story (YT) by actor James Woods about the panic that ensued while he was trying to evacuate the LA fire.
A climate scientist & former LA resident laments the toll that climate change is taking:
Here’s a fun panel discussion of open source, GPL and how WordPress got started. (YT) I think I mentioned already that I was one of the earliest adopters of WordPress (back in its b2/cafelog days), and by sheer coincidence, ran into Matt at a local geek meeting in 2003 after I installed it. (My mind was blown that this UH student was the brains behind it). BTW, I recently have renewed my WP enthusiasm after deploying 2 WP sites with 2023 and 2025 themes using the block editor. Semi-related: Photomatt dissects a negative article written about him and his company.
Speaking of WordPress, I filed a bug about the 2025 theme. Even though the support thread I raised did not resolve it, eventually someone came along and proposed a workaround.
I am feeling really good working with the bundled WordPress themes. I totally redid my Personville Press home page and the book page template. At first glance, these web pages look pretty unremarkable, but they are mobile-friendly, and doing that with two columns is no easy feat. I had been putting off that home page upgrade forever — I even put together a single static page a year ago which I thought was a massive improvement. But I was spending way too much time making web pages and had to admit that despite my commitment to ebook quality, the website looked like crap. That said, just having a good web page for a book isn’t enough to drive up sales.
Part of the problem is that I wanted a more sophisticated content management system with content types. (I had been playing with Drupal, etc). But that seemed a lot of trouble, and eventually I just opted for the convenience of WordPress. Learning how to design web pages with the default themes was a major accomplishment. A lot of people pick a theme for their website and then find themselves locked into a set of plugins which limit your ability to upgrade and extend.
Recently I’ve been enjoying Big Girls Blouse, a wacky Australian comedy show from the 1990s starring the women who made the great Kath & Kim in the 2000s. Here’s Patty Stacker (a 60s feminist parody), The End, Gay Olympics, Medieval Girls,
Gosh, I miss blogging. This is not really blogging — just linkdumps which sometimes were already on social media, but occasionally I spit out something substantial. I’m busy with family affairs or for certain periods my publishing projects. Keeping up a weblog is something I do mostly out of obligation, but out of passion.
Candid camera about how students react to a gorgeous teacher.
POLITICAL LYING: This bald-faced lie — and Trump’s personal defense of it — reveal a lot about the contempt these guys have for the American people.
“A President cannot eliminate an appropriated federal agency by executive order. That’s what a despot – who wants to steal the taxpayers money to enrich his billionaire cabal – does.” (SENATOR CHRIS MURPHY, on Trump’s recent decision to put the USAID website offline and presumably to gut it).
QUOTE: “I lived in Hungary for a long time. I also lived in Russia for a long time. And this is the third time I’ve ridden this escalator from democracy into someplace very dark. And unfortunately, what we’re seeing here is so similar to what happened in Russia and particularly to what happened in Hungary. And part of the reason why it’s so alarming is that Americans have this idea that when democracy fails, it’s going to fail with tanks in the streets, it’s going to fail with some radical rupture, it’s going to fail with normal ceasing to be normal. And when you look at how autocracy works these days and the rest of the world, it almost always comes in on the backs of a free and fair election. So somebody who is called a populist …. charismatic leaders who promise to shake things up — they get elected often fair and square. The first time you go back and you look at the election monitor’s reports from when Hugo Chavez was elected in Venezuela or when Vladimir Putin was elected the first time in Russia, or when Viktor Orban was elected the first time in Hungary. The election monitors all said, free and fair election, no problem. And then as soon as these guys come to power, they start to just take over and disable all of the checks on executive power. And they do it while their cover story is a lot of inflammatory rhetoric that causes pain to people. So now we’re seeing immigration, we’re seeing attacks on people with gender fluidity, we’re seeing attacks on affirmative action, we’re seeing attacks across the board on vulnerable groups and people who have really never been treated equally. But behind the scenes, what’s that disguising? This was also true in Hungary, it was true in Venezuela, it was true in Turkey. It’s in all these places, inflammatory rhetoric disguises the real work of autocracy. And what’s the real work of autocracy? Removing all checks on executive power. And a lot of that is happening in a very unsexy way in laws that are buried deep beneath the surface that only a technical lawyer could love. And that’s where you start to see chipping away at every single constraint on what the president can do.” (PRINCETON SOCIOLOGY & LAW PROFESSOR KIM LANE SCHEPPELE, ON YESTERDAY’S AMICUS PODCAST)
STUPID NEGOTIATIONS: (Quote) “There’s a school of thought that, in tangling with adversaries, it’s sometimes wise to seem unpredictable—to tip them off balance. But zigzagging has no upside in dealing with allies, especially when it comes to the partnership’s leader. Alliances depend crucially on steadiness and trust. Yet when Trump threatened to impose tariffs on two of America’s closest allies for no real reason (the Wall Street Journal editorial page deemed it “The Dumbest Trade War in History”), he stepped on the brink of violating the trilateral trade agreement that he himself had initiated and signed during his first time around in the White House. In other words, he was telling not just Canada and Mexico but every other country in the world, “Don’t believe anything the United States says, not even in writing.” (Fred Kaplan, Paywalled link)
READ-WRITE ACCESS. Despite Musk’s claims to the contrary, a business reporter quotes people who say that Musk’s employees in fact have read & write access to important Treasury Dept payment systems. Among the implications, 1)Musk and others have access to confidential personal information and financial records and 2)it makes it theoretically possible to create backdoors for hackers. The reporter Nathan Tankus has been providing ongoing coverage of this scandal.
Legendary comedy writer Merrill Markoe writes a semi-serious essay about being invited to a fancy meeting in 2019 and running into (of all people) Elon Musk. That encounter did not go well.
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