If you thought US global hegemony was bad wait until you find out about regional power struggle.

The answer was not the point. The answer was never the point. The process of searching is the process of learning.

An Associated Press reporter was was blocked from an Oval Office event today because the publication "did not align its editorial standards with President Donald Trump’s executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America."

Second edition of my current events roundup. Doing my best to consolidate everything into a more digestible form and help folks get activated sixth-blog.ghost.io/what-the-fuc...

⚠️ Effective Monday 2/10/25, NIH indirect rate capped at 15%. Applies to existing & future grants.

—> Deep budget cuts & program closures coming to a university near you.

Is this the break the glass moment for university administrators who have been silent so far about the attack on science?

They are seeking to criminalize integration efforts across public life. We must be clear eyed and direct about what’s happening here. We have not witnessed this blatant of a comprehensive governmental attack on integration since the Civil Rights Movement. slate.com/news-and-pol...

We've been told that one Ivy League president recently said

"yeah, it would be bad if NIH dies. But the real danger is them removing our tax exemption. So <shrug> [we're going to keep quiet]."
2/

new reporting that Elon is instructing GSA, the agency that manages government worksites, to terminate the leases for all (!) federal offices nationwide: apnews.com/article/trum...

🚨BREAKING. From a program officer at the National Science Foundation, a list of keywords that can cause a grant to be pulled. I will be sharing screenshots of these keywords along with a decision tree. Please share widely. This is a crisis for academic freedom & science.

This means the Trump administration is just ignoring the courts, flouting the rule of law, as Vance promised this summer that they were going to do.

“Regulations, basically, should be default gone,” Musk said. “Not default there, default gone. And if it turns out that we missed the mark on a regulation, we can always add it back in.”

www.huffpost.com/entry/elon-m...

Hundreds of New Yorkers are out tonight demanding NYU Langone’s CEO commits to continuing to provide lifesaving gender affirming care for trans kids. No complying with fascists! No anti-trans policies!

I wrote about Musk and this bureaucratic coup as plainly as I could. There's reporting in here & the particulars are overwhelming but what's happening is so clear: He's not trying to run the federal govt like a software company He's trying to turn it into a political weapon. (gift link)

After talking with a lot of folks who are struggling to keep up or make sense of what's going on, I tried to synthesize the worst events of the last 2 weeks. I hope it's useful sixth-blog.ghost.io/what-the-fuc...

Of all the tech and design thinkers we've had so far, Ursula Franklin is maybe the closest to my heart. Going back to the wellspring for this one.

www.wrecka.ge/ursulas-list/

Tore down all my old blogs and started up a new one. Aiming to keep this pretty informal and personal, relatively low effort stuff. This one's about names and etymological identity! sixth-blog.ghost.io/wearing-old-...