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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.
Here’s a good expose of the Trump Crypto Currency and how many people are getting fleeced (while Trump earns $100 million)
Apparently Elon Musk’s canard that some 150 year old Americans were receiving Social Security checks resulted from his programmers’ failure to understand the legacy COBOL code.
A roundup of the crazy stuff Republicans are doing that is crowded out by bigger crazy stuff. Interesting how the egomaniac who claims to want to enforce immigration law better does it by firing immigration judges — the very people who actually can do so. (more) Then, again, TCF wasn’t very adept at listening to judges.
PATHOLOGICAL LIES. I never ceased to be surprised at how often Trump lies about basic facts. Starting from the crazy lie that Obama wasn’t born in the US, the recent lies about Zelinsky and Ukraine fill me with horror. Call me naive, but is it unrealistic to expect that politicians should be held accountable for the lies that they tell and repeat. It is one thing to occasionally mistake or exaggerate a fact (as long as it is walked back later). It is quite another thing to buckle down and keep repeating the same lie in the hopes that voters can’t tell the difference.
NYT did a deep dive about Elon Musk’s claim that millions of people over 100 were collecting Social Security. SUMMARY: After SSA’s Inspector General unearthed that in 2023, they concluded that “almost none” of them were receiving Social Security payments, which is why the Agency argued that it wasn’t worth the expense to try to clean up information about people who largely died before the advent of electronic records. (NYT Gift Link)
ARTICLE ABOUT MY CELEBRITY CRUSH. I’ve been a rabid fan of the actress Parker Posey. Imagine my delight to find this very long profile about her. (NYT Gift Link). It is always a delight to discover that Parker Posey has a role in a TV show or movie. She was outstanding in The Clockwatchers and Daytrippers and Fay Grim. Parker Posey is known for her meltdowns; my fave is in the underrated Price Check. It’s nice seeing that she can play straight roles (like Thelma, Irrational Man, Columbus) and dramatic roles (Louie). Don’t forget her online sketch comedy (“Genie on Hard Times,” “Emmy Speech Master Class,” “Mary Phelps Jacob Invents the Modern Bra.”) I would love some way to watch her ill-fated sitcom “Return of Jezebel James.” Yes, I’m a rabid PP fan!
AP and UPI reporters were excluded from today’s White House press pool, but … a Russian state agency was included?! Is anyone really surprised that Trump is afraid of being around honest domestic reporters and yet perfectly comfortable around propaganda makers from a foreign adversary?
Jeez! What an asshole! (about Trump and Vance’s yelling at Zelinsky). If there’s any silver lining in this, it’s that Trump has completely discredited his ability to broker any kind of solution. Even honest conservatives in the USA will find this assholery hard to rationalize…
“THE HARDEST THING IN THIS WORLD IS TO LIVE IN IT.” If you are a BUFFY fan, you already know that actress Michelle Trachtenberg (1985-2025) had a role which was ontologically terrifying, but she played it with panache (and hilarity). Here’s her lovely dance number in the amazing “Once More with Feeling” musical episode. (YT)
That quote comes from what the Dawn character says after Buffy’s “show-stopping number” in the same episode (probably Joss Whedon wrote these words, but to have the Dawn character utter it really resonated at the time — and even more so today). I must admit being totally shocked when it became clear who the Dawn character turned out to be. Hope to have an opportunity to see Trachtenberg’s other appearances in her other grown-up roles before she passed.
Update: Turns out that Dawn’s line was repeating Buffy’s farewell line Buffy said to Dawn before Buffy’s “death.” The full quote is here: “Dawn, listen to me. Listen. I love you. I will always love you. But this is the work that I have to do. Tell Giles … tell Giles I figured it out. And, and I’m okay. And give my love to my friends. You have to take care of them now. You have to take care of each other. You have to be strong. Dawn, the hardest thing in this world … is to live in it. Be brave. Live. For me.” I admit I have been listening and rewatching some of the songs from Once More with Feeling… All are brilliant, and it turns out that the wonderful actor who played the demon Sweet (Hinton Battle) passed away this year. I just love the song’s reprise later on.
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