Nic Babarskis

Once again, techno utopians reveal their gnostic anthropology:

Tech companies have worked for years to insert themselves in the middle of normal human relationships. Between parents and kids, teachers and kids, friends and friends, governments and citizens – tech companies want to sit in the middle of these, acting as gatekeeper, monetizer, and manipulator.

The idea that indigenous knowledge somehow is going to be passed down not by elders but by an app (produced by cubicle-dwelling coders) is more than ridiculous. It’s actively dangerous.

Deep Links are great and more people should learn how to use them:

Text fragment links represent a small but notable step forward in the evolution of the Web, finally realizing a part of Ted Nelson’s vision for hypertext and enabling precise navigation to specific content. Deep linking makes sharing information more efficient, improves the usability of lengthy documents, and helps readers focus on the most relevant content.

John 11:25-26

Jesus told her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Anyone who believes in me will live, even after dying. Everyone who lives in me and believes in me will never ever die. Do you believe this Martha?”

I live in a neighborhood that uses rain gardens as a primary means of storm drainage. This is a delightful time of year for walks.

This is a sobering look at the challenges Michigan faces in providing adequate social services to a rapidly aging population:

A common refrain among seniors who spoke to Bridge is worry that a lack of services will force them to live out their lives in a nursing home — and a feeling they are powerless to avoid it.

I have confidence that this is something the state can figure out if it’s given the scrutiny and sustained discussion it deserves. I wonder if the issue isn’t just a lack of attention but a willful avoidance on the part of the wider public. I don’t think many folks are willing to take a sustained look at the realities of aging and have the difficult debate about what we owe each other as a society when we reach that stage in life.

Today’s Public Domain find comes from Airline Timetable Images, a delightful collection of digitized timetables and baggage labels:

<img src=“https://nic.babarskis.blog/uploads/2025/e6fdf3d27c.jpg" alt=“A vintage green and white logo features an airplane with the text “MISR AIRLINES EGYPT” and additional Arabic script above it.">

<img src=“https://nic.babarskis.blog/uploads/2025/7a42bc981e.jpg" alt=“A vintage-style logo features a silhouette of an airplane with people boarding, along with the text “Fly MisrAir Egyptian Airlines Viscount” against a green and cream background.">

Two recent articles have me thinking once again about Title IX, religious exemptions, and how culture warring leads to short term thinking and erodes durable coalition building. So I wrote about it on my long-from blog: thinking-about-colleges-and-universities.ghost.io/culture-w…

Today’s Public Domain find. An image from the Library of Congress by Udo Keppler. Seems appropriate given all the tariff fueled volatility we’re experiencing.

If you haven’t ever tried 5calls.org this is a good week to give it a try. I prefer to engage with my elected officials when there are actual bills or legislative action I anticipate them needing to take. This week there will be a number of bills before Congress.

Trump administration strips legal residency of international students at CMU | Bridge Michigan

Without notice or explanation, the Trump administration has stripped several current and former Central Michigan University international students of their right to be in the US, university officials announced Friday.

There is a sequence to these moves. During the campaign the emphasis was on “criminals,” early deportations have included lawful visitors and permanent residents. The administration calculates these folks have engaged in activity the public will see as egregious enough (whether that activity is constitutionaly protected or not) to shrug off the civil rights of “foreigners” (legal or undocumented). Now they are accelerating efforts to push out as many non-citizens as possible before the courts step in. This is cruel and capricious behavior.

The Gen X Career Meltdown - The New York Times

Every generation has its burdens. The particular plight of Gen X is to have grown up in one world only to hit middle age in a strange new land. It’s as if they were making candlesticks when electricity came in. The market value of their skills plummeted.

Karen McKinley, 55, an advertising executive in Minneapolis, has seen talented colleagues “thrown away,” she said, as agencies have merged, trimmed staff and focused on fast, cheap social media content over elaborate photo shoots.

Using today’s interesting Public Domain find to highlight open access resources related to Trans* history (yesterday was Transgender Day of Visibility). While you can access many resources online, you should check your local (or nearest college/university) library and inquire about special collections. Surfing the web is great, but engaging with tangible history in a vertical file can move the abstract to the embodied.

There’s very specific vibes video that features 80s and 90s anime that exudes what I’d call a #vhspunk aesthetic–before the iPhone with its black mirror imposed a glass sheen on tech products. The video style is typified by Hanahaki Blank’s youtube channel. Its the perfect delta of the beauty of hand drawn animation, late 20th century nostaligia, and technophilia.

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An interesting Public Domain find. This is a picture of Catharine (Cappy) Vail, member of the Women’s Airforce Services Pilots (WASP) corps. Pulled from the Library of Congress' special collection on Armed Services history.

Meritocracy is SO BACK baby!!!!

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“Top Trump officials accidentally texted U.S. war plans to journalist Jeffrey Goldberg:”

A wild turkey inflicted $1500-$3000 worth of damage on a newly installed garage door this morning, so we’re really downplaying the “March goes out like a lamb” discourse in this house.

Mini Trees describe themselves as “living room pop” and the vibe totally works.

Spring by Mini Trees:

Curled up in the back seat/ I can read you like scenery as if I know you still/ So we’ll just float with what the tide brings/ Can’t stop myself from wondering if you feel it as well/ You feel it as well/

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Pssst, you can buy BSKY CEO’s SXSW “A World Without Caesars” t-shirt here.

Hat tip to @manton for the link.

An interesting Public Domain find. (I’ve always had a soft spot for roadside photography). A picture of a roadside business sign taken by John Margolies.

A piece by @jwhawthorne.bsky.social this week pulls some quotes from recent work by @ruthgraham.bsky.social and Katelyn Beaty regarding whether or not U.S. Christians face the reality of rising ostracization from the levers of cultural and political power.

Here, a lengthy quote from Beaty in Hawthorne’s piece:

“When Christian authors claim that we’re living in an ‘anti-Christian’ or ‘godless’ age, they are speaking less to observable fact than to a perception of minority status and worldly hostility. That’s a visceral emotion, and boy does it sell books.


But when Taylor says ‘secular,’ he doesn’t mean that most people are atheists now or even that they harbor anti-religious bias. Instead, he says, modern people now face a spiritual “supernova” of choices for faith, and that this plethora ‘fragilizes’ the religious choices we make, knowing that we might have chosen otherwise, as do many of our neighbors.”

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The pieces conclusion resonate with some of my own thoughts on the subject:

While authors like Renn and Dreher (and scores of others) are writing about how society is downgrading religion, we’re watching an administration stop humanitarian aid by religious nonprofits and threaten religious groups who do refugee relief. The cabinet is full of conservative Christian influencers. The Supreme Court has taken up a case allowing a private religious school in Oklahoma to receive state funding.


Believing in a “negative world” may just be a marker of where you stand within the broader religious landscape.

18 year old Nic (a dutiful Republican voter) would be absolutely flabbergasted that an ostensibly “conservative” Federal administration would be cheering on the possibility of deep integration of bureaucratic processes and artificial intelligence. This seems like a bad idea of you are skeptical of centralized State power.

Nicholas Carr, this week pulling quotes from Norbert Weiner, has some great reflections on the phenomenon:

Building on that idea in The Human Use of Human Beings, he argues that, once set in motion, machine learning might advance to a point where — “whether for good or evil” — computers could be entrusted with the administration of the state. An artificially intelligent computer would become an all-purpose bureaucracy-in-a-box, rendering civil servants obsolete. Society would be controlled by a “colossal state machine” that would makes Hobbes’s Leviathan look like “a pleasant joke.”

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What for Wiener in 1950 was a speculative vision, and a “terrifying” one, is today a practical goal for AI-infatuated technocrats like Elon Musk. Musk and his cohort not only foresee an “AI-first” government run by artificial intelligence routines but, having managed to seize political power, are now actively working to establish it. In its current “chainsaw” phase, Musk’s DOGE initiative is attempting to rid the government of as many humans as possible while at the same time hoovering up all available government-controlled data and transferring it into large language models. The intent is to clear a space for the incubation of an actual governing machine. Musk is always on the lookout for vessels for his seeds, and here he sees an opportunity to incorporate his ambitions and intentions into the very foundations of a new kind of state.

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If the new machine can be said to have a soul, it’s the soul Turing feared: the small, callow soul of its creators.

I find the narrative details behind Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest, reportedly without a warrant, and with no specific criminal charges involved, to be extremely disconcerting.

First, they told Khalil, who’s of Palestinian descent, that his student visa had been canceled. But he’s not on a visa; he’s a legal permanent resident. His wife went to get his green card from their apartment, but officers said his lawful permanent residency had been revoked.

“I demanded to see a warrant or have a warrant shown to me or Mr. Khalil before they removed him, and the agent hung up the phone on me,” Greer [Khalil’s lawyer] said.

It’s giving “first they came for X” vibes.