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?”
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.
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.
The Pitt is the first TV show where the reaction videos are more intriguing to me than the drama of the show itself. Maybe its just the anti-science cultural moment we seem to be living through right now, but there is something mesmerizing about watching what I presume to be subject matter experts break down the difference between drama and reality featured in the show.
I’m sure some of the reaction videos are just algorithm chasing, but for now I’ll lean into them and hope we haven’t become socially isolated by our media echo chambers that we can no longer accept expertise as a valuable resource for policymaking.
Side-note: television programming rarely makes me cry, but a particular scene from the show where the main protagonist starts having PTSD related flashbacks to COVID era ER memories momentarily broke me. Our understanding of what happened that first year of COVID has become so obscured by our partisan bickering over public health policy that I feel like we completely forgot the absolute hell our medical providers were subjected to not only by the wave of deaths, but the politicized backlash they received for their efforts to flatten the curve.
Reflecting on some of the recent posts I’ve seen about my state (Michigan) senators. Due to my chosen profession (Higher Ed) and the news interests (Ed Policy) that come along with it my social feeds generally skew left leaning or flat out leftist. The general vibe is that my feeds are mad at Peters and Slotkin. Lots of “good riddance” takes on Peter’s retirement announcement.
Mallory McMorrow is jumping into the race. She’s most known on the political scene beyond Lansing for a viral floor speech she gave after being accused of being a “groomer” for advocating for LGBTQ+ civil rights. Given that there has been lot of chatter about the (IMHO gross) “She’s for they/them not you” ad from the most recent presidential election cycle she’s a natural foil for that wedge social issue.
I see parallels to Whitmer’s early defining viral speech on a different wedge social issue…
…That’s all a side-track from the crank theory I wanted to share for a “heterodox” take on Peters compared to the general vibe of my feeds: that for all the derision I see heaped at Peters I think one could spin a yarn that he shrewdly saw it’s better to leave his seat during a cycle when Democrats are primed for a legislative wave. Maybe it was better to leave the seat now when it Ts up a McMorrow (as opposed to a centrist) to gain momentum instead of an opening in 2032 when the off-presidential-cycle-election could be correction against a Dem administration.
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.
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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.
![WASP member standing in front of a P-38. Dreier, D., Bridge, C., U.S. House Of Representatives/David Dreier & Chiera, A. M. (1942) Catherine Bridge Collection. [Personal Narrative] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, [www.loc.gov/item/afc2...](https://www.loc.gov/item/afc2001001.34158/.)](https://nic.babarskis.blog/uploads/2025/iiif-service-vhp-0341-034158-ph0001001-full-pct-100-0-default.jpg)
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.
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.
](https://nic.babarskis.blog/uploads/2025/48636161181-a678a03c71-o.jpg)
Pulling this series of quotes from an interview between Ross Douthat and Christopher Rufo. I was listening as a means of trying to understand the justification for all the pain being wrought upon the educational bureaucracy. This is such an ideologically driven take on what a government bureaucracy is and how it functions that I don’t know where to start with common ground or compromise.
It’s the worst sort of cavalier slash and burn policymaking:
Rufo: Here’s the problem, though: It’s very easy to cut external contracts. It’s very difficult to change the culture of an institution and the permanent bureaucracy of that institution. I know for a fact that at the Department of Education, replacing the management within the building does not really replace the broader culture… I just think that there has to be a kind of binary choice, agency by agency. Can this agency be reformed or can this agency only be abolished or dismantled to the maximum extent permissible by law? I think the Department of Education is then in the latter camp. I think the F.B.I. could maybe be reformed. Other agencies can be perhaps reformed. But the Department of Education in my view is beyond reform. You have to spin off, liquidate, terminate and abolish to the furthest extent you can by law. All while maintaining your political viability and your statutory compliance for those things that are essential, required by law, and that are politically popular. You always want to maintain the popularity, but can you take those things away ——… Conservatives cannot fully compete for education grants, or university-level research programs. No, conservatives can’t do any of those things.So we have to figure out what we can do. Where can we have leverage? Where can we take over or recapture an institution? And if we can’t do those things, then what do we have to shut down? Shutting things down is actually a very effective strategy.
I don’t know what sort of objective standard you use to ascertain the level of “wokeness” for any bureaucratic agency. The general gist under the current administration seems to be how quick they are to implement structural change that favors the incumbent president–jurisprudence or constitutionality be damned…
Good policy-making is NEVER a binary choice. It is always a sequence of calculated, often provisional, frequently complicated series of balancing acts that requires an informed perspective on national history, the law, the current cultural moment, and domain expertise of the subject matter (e.g. education, law enforcement, national defense, energy, land management). You can’t summarize the bureaucracy’s value and operation in a pithy Tiktok video, podcast interview, or scintillating video essay–it takes decades of usually quite and monotonous work to see a positive social transformation. That is partially what is so gut-wrenching about what I am seeing happen to the Department of Education–and the federal bureaucracy more generally–I may not always agree with our bureaucratic leaders, but to see the centuries of institutional knowledge and domain expertise demolished with glee or a shrug fills me with dread.
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.
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.
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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.
An interesting Public Domain find. A picture of a voter registration drive taken by John H White, as a part of his series of photos documenting Black life in Chicago.
An interesting Public Domain find this week. A 1940 image of a square dance in Mcintosh County, OK by Russell Lee.
