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  • 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.

    → 7:30 AM, Apr 18

  • 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.

    → 9:54 AM, Apr 5

  • 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.

    → 8:19 AM, Apr 3

  • This Rufo take on the Department of Ed clearly states the ideological project at play.

    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.

    → 12:39 PM, Mar 17

  • 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.”

    –

    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.

    Auto-generated description: A mosaic depicts a haloed figure with the words SCAPERPET VA inscribed above them.
    → 9:00 AM, Mar 12

  • 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.”

    –

    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.

    –

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

    Tower of Babel painting By Pieter Brueghel the Elder - Levels adjusted from File:Pieter_Bruegel_the_Elder_-_The_Tower_of_Babel_(Vienna)_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg, originally from Google Art Project., Public Domain, [commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.p...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22179117)
    → 10:11 PM, Mar 11

  • 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.

    → 10:43 PM, Mar 10

  • Here’s a reminder for why you should be excited for Season 2 of Andor:

    The Andor series dropped a season 2 trailer announcing an April 22 release date.

    Instead of posting the new trailer, I’m just gonna post one of the many moments of writing that made this show a revelation:

    I fear for you.

    We’ve been sleeping.

    We’ve had each other and Ferrix, our work, our days.

    We had each other, and they left us alone.

    We kept the trade lanes open, and they left us alone.

    We took their money and ignored them. We kept their engines turning and the moment they pulled away we forgot them.

    Because we had each other.

    We had Ferrix.

    But we were sleeping. I’ve been sleeping. I’ve been turning away from a truth I’ve wanted not to face.

    There is a wound that won’t heal at the center of the galaxy.

    There is a darkness like rust, reaching into everything around us.

    We let it grow and now it’s here. It’s here and it’s not visiting anymore.

    It want’s to stay.

    The Empire is a disease that thrives in darkness. It is never more alive than when we sleep…

    → 3:52 PM, Feb 24

  • I appreciated this taxonomy of Fascism.

    Fascism is a term thrown out so often as a pejorative in some of the online social circles I travel in that I can miss the forest because of whatever individual tree warrants a callout day to day.

    I found this essay from Jeremy Rios to be a helpful taxonomy of facism, particularly from someone who holds a Christian worldview. This isn’t to say other takes on facism from a different worldview are illegitimate, but he uses language and framings that I think will resonate with folks from my religious circles.

    The article gives a 4 part taxonomy and then gives 3 observations about how fascism may appeal to Christians. You should read the whole thing, but I’ll pull out 2 quotes here–this link also includes other highlights from the essay I found helpful:

    In simplest terms, Fascism is a concept of political governance that prioritizes the authority and power of the central government. To render this in what might be an effective political slogan, Fascism believes that “Power gets it done.” Give me power, and I’ll get it done. Give the leader power, and he’ll get it done. Give the government the power, and they’ll get it done. In fact, the only thing standing between these agencies and the solution to whatever problems we face at the time is that we haven’t yet given them the power.

    –

    So, what is Fascism? It is not really a model of governance. Instead, Fascism identifies a cultural state where high level figures bargain with society for a pact of power. Give us power, and we’ll get things done. The bargain plays upon a series of common emotions in the human heart: the feeling of a lost past, the grim realities of the present, the incompetence of current government. Fascism promises to solve these unsolvable problems through the application of special power which must be granted to it by a constituency. These generalized feelings of societal distress are, in turn, localized on a sub-group who can act as a focal point or scapegoat for the problems. Fascism thus comes to life when a Fascist leader sings his song to the Fascist Heart—a heart that is, to be explicit, present in all of us—and the Fascist Heart in turn gives power to that leader.

    → 12:19 PM, Feb 19

  • M.A.H.A. indeed 😩

    Trump withdraws Biden administration plan to set discharge limits on PFAS in water

    → 12:27 AM, Feb 1
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