Free speech experts say that when teachers speak in their personal capacity, even on school grounds but outside their official duties, they retain their right to comment on matters of public concern.
A former NASA astronaut turned US senator has joined with other lawmakers to insist that his two rides to space remain on display in the Smithsonian.
Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) has joined fellow Democratic senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, both of Virginia, and Dick Durbin of Illinois in an effort to halt the move of space shuttle Discovery to Houston, as enacted into law earlier this year. Kelly flew two of his four missions aboard Discovery.
"Why should hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars be spent just to jeopardize a piece of American history that's already protected and on display?" wrote Kelly in a social media post on Friday. "Space Shuttle Discovery belongs at the Smithsonian, where millions of people, including students and veterans, go to see it for free."
In brief: This is largely a persistence forecast. Houston will face temperatures in the low- to mid-90s this week before rising humidity levels bring highs down slightly this weekend. Bigger changes are possible next week, but we’re making no promises.
Tuesday
We are seeing mostly cloudy skies this morning due to a passing disturbance. If there were more moisture in the atmosphere this might spark some showers, but there’s just not much to work with. So we have overcast skies, and these should give way to sunshine later this morning or by early afternoon at the latest. Following this we are going to see temperatures rise into the lower 90s in Houston, with mid-90s possible for areas west and north of the city. Afternoon dewpoints will drop to about 60 degrees so this won’t be super sultry weather like summertime in Houston, but it will be hot for the end of September nevertheless.
Winds will be light, from the north at about 5 mph today, shifting to come from the east tonight. Lows will drop into the lower 70s. With the slightly lower humidity, nights and mornings will continue to feel pleasant for a couple of more days before dewpoints rise a bit by Friday or so.
High temperatures on Thursday should be the warmest of the week. (Weather Bell)
Wednesday and Thursday
These will be hot and sunny days, with highs in the lower 90s in Houston, and possibly mid-90s for inland areas. Dewpoints will remain marginally lower to keep a bit of a lid on humidity. Rain chances remain near zero. Nights drop into the lower 70s for most except the coast.
Friday, Saturday, and Sunday
By the weekend the flow turns more southerly, so dewpoints will ramp up slightly. This increased atmospheric moisture should limit highs to around 90 degrees, and push overnight lows to the mid-70s. Each day should bring a slight chance of rain, perhaps 20 or 30 percent for areas near the coast, with lesser chances inland. Any accumulations should be very slight.
Temperatures next week continue to look hot as a heat wave grips the northeastern US. (Pivotal Weather)
Next week
Most of next week will likely see a continuation of the pattern above, with highs in the vicinity of 90 degrees. Rain chances may start to look a little better by Monday or Tuesday, but we still probably are looking at overall low likelihoods and nothing serious in the way of accumulations. That may finally start to change toward the end of next week when a cool front could approach the area. But from this far out I would be a fool to make any promises. So I’m not.
My workplace has drinking heavily interwoven into the culture. You doubtless know the kind of place — never had a work social event without copious amounts of booze, boss bringing around beers on Friday afternoons, work parties with an open bar being relocated to another bar where the limitless company tab covers five shots for everyone at the table in five minutes, that kind of vibe.
I didn’t know that was the culture when I was applying, and I’ve had a lot of issues with alcohol and drugs in the past. Over the past year and a half, I’ve had some life stuff going on that meant I got to the point where I felt it would be good for me to cut out drinking, and oh my god I did not foresee “the receptionist is having a Pepsi with no rum in it” to be the apparently catastrophic event it seems to be.
Apparently I’m fun when I’m drinking (yeah, I am, until I’m stumbling home throwing up and sobbing at 3 am) and I have a unique ability to keep the party going (not a good thing in my case!) so whenever I’m at any work social event, the pressure is constant, especially from a few of my bosses. No thanks? Oh, come on! I’ve been trying to cut back? It’s just one, on a special occasion! I have to work tomorrow? Oh, it’ll be fine, we’ll be okay if you’re a few hours late tomorrow if you go too hard!
And so on and so forth, to the point where once my boss at a party, after being told I wasn’t drinking this time, handed me a glass of what I thought was ginger ale but turned out to be a dark and stormy, because “I know you like them!” Another has told me after a few drinks, probably joking but still, that they hired me for my personality, so I have to go to the bar after with everyone and if I don’t, it’ll come up at my performance review. Even if I drove, they don’t reliably accept when other people say they can’t drink because they’re driving — or, on one occasion I can remember, pregnant.
We don’t have HR — after they abruptly fired the HR guy, they decided to split up his duties between four of my bosses, most of whom are on the drink-pushing side of the equation. I would really like to have my “no thanks” respected, but I’m hesitant to go into my issues with my bosses because from what I’ve seen so far, it probably won’t help. Any suggestions, besides doubling down on the old job hunt?
In an ideal world, you’d talk to your bosses and point out that the drinking-heavy culture is really problematic for a whole range of people — people in recovery, people who are pregnant or on medications where they can’t drink, people who don’t drink for religious reasons, and people who just plain don’t drink or don’t feeling like drinking at the moment. And in that ideal world, your bosses would then address it on two fronts: (1) having a zero-tolerance policy for pressuring anyone to drink and (2) reconsidering how heavily alcohol features in their work events in the first place.
But it doesn’t sound like you’re in that ideal world. Any chance, though, that it’s worth a conversation anyway? Is there a manager who you’d be comfortable pointing out the above to, possibly (although not necessarily) paired with an explanation that you’ve stopped drinking and the pressure has become a problem? (You don’t need to disclose that about yourself, but if you’re comfortable doing it, it might help them take the conversation more seriously.) You could also point out the legal liability for the company when “I’m driving” isn’t immediately understood as a reason not to drink.
If not, or if that doesn’t work, then — short of finding a new job — all you can really do is limit your exposure to these events (hard to do when they’re in the office during work hours) and tell people to stop when they’re trying to get you to drink. Feel free to say, “No, and it’s weird to push people to drink; you don’t know what their reasons for not drinking might be.”
If you find that easy to do, then great; that might be all you need. But if you find that hard to do, and as a result you’re making decisions you don’t want to make (like drinking when you’re trying not to), that’s a sign that this is really not a culture you should stay in. It’s easier said than done to find a new job, especially if you’re otherwise happy with this one, but at that point that would be the right move.
Pop star Sabrina Carpenter is one of several artists set to headline this year’s Lollapalooza. The Onion sat down with the “Espresso” singer to discuss love, life, and her forthcoming album, Man’s Best Friend.
The Onion: Which one are you again?
Carpenter: Of the two very short pop stars under 35, I’m the one who acts like a horny 56-year-old stepmother rather than a transracial infant.
You got your start in Hollywood as a child actor for Disney, is that right?
Yes, I starred in the 1999 Disney Channel movie Zenon: Girl Of The 21st-Century when I was just three minutes old.
What is your first music-related memory?
My grandma used to sing me an old Scottish lullaby about girls getting on top.
Favorite ungulate?
Brazilian tapir. Wait—no! Siberian musk deer!
Are you a natural blond?
We’re all born bald, and we’ll all die bald.
What part of performing do you get most excited for?
The free bottled water. At the Grammys, I stuffed, like, nine Dasanis down my bodysuit. They almost fell out during “Espresso.”
What is your biggest turn-on?
Ants freaking out after you erase their pheromone trail.
Who is “Manchild” about?
Charlton Heston.
What are your biggest regrets?
If I could do it all over, I would have chosen different cover art for Man’s Best Friend. I now understand that it’s wrong because I was comparing myself to a dog, and dogs play poker, which is a vice.
Did one of your ancestors really work as a carpenter?
All of my ancestors also sang about fucking, but in period-accurate clothing.
Do you have any hidden talents?
I can crush a beer can inside my vagina with a single Kegel.
INDIANAPOLIS—With an official proclamation that declared the state “open to self-proclaimed messianic prophets,” Indiana began offering tax breaks Wednesday to attract religious doomsday cults. “Whether your fundamentalist commune believes it will usher in an apocalyptic race war or board a spaceship to a higher plane of existence, we hope your cult will choose to make Indiana its new home,” Gov. Mike Braun said during a signing ceremony for the new law, which will provide a 30% tax credit for all qualified expenditures, including stockpiled firearms, ceremonial cloaks, surveillance equipment, proselytizing pamphlets, and bulk purchases of matching Nikes. “This legislation will make us the next hotspot for fanatical cults of personality, bringing new opportunities to the neglected rural parts of our state, especially those that are isolated and free from any outside influences or scrutiny. You can move here and do whatever your beliefs command you to do: Drown your followers in Lake Michigan as part of a spiritual cleansing ritual, bury the bodies in the Indiana Dunes National Park—that part’s up to you,” Braun added. “It doesn’t matter if your cult is the kind where no one is allowed to have sex or the kind where everyone is allowed to have sex, but only with the group’s leader. Either way, you’ve got friends here in the Hoosier State.” Braun went on to observe that an end-times collective could get “a whole lot more bunker” for its money in Indiana than it could in California or Texas.
QUANTICO, VA—Racking his brain for answers as he gazed out at the high-ranking officers gathered before him, a visibly hungover Pete Hegseth reportedly struggled Tuesday to remember exactly how he ended up in a meeting room filled with U.S. generals and admirals. “Jesus fucking Christ, why are they all staring at me—am I supposed to say something?” the defense secretary muttered to himself as he looked from face to expectant face of the assembled military top brass, pinching the bridge of his nose and quietly cursing his nightcap of Beefeater from the previous evening. “Anyone out there have a Pedialyte? Advil? No? Nothing? All right, well, let’s start by dimming those lights. My head is killing me. That’s good. Much better.” At press time, Hegseth asked a nearby five-star general for a 20-minute recess, lowered his head into his arms, and vomited.
Welcome, neighbors, come on in. There’s plenty of room for everyone, aside from God. He has no place inside this well-ventilated, open-concept embodiment of runaway capitalism.
What you see before you is my 14,000-square-foot testament to taste, triumph, and unrepentant hubris. A five-bed, six-bath new-construction McMansion with a gaping spiritual wound that can never truly heal.
Let’s start in the foyer, which doubles as a waterpark and triples as a shrine to me. The marble floors are hand-cut from an Italian quarry that geologists begged us not to touch. The chandelier? They found it inside a meteor already shaped like that.
I spared no expense. Especially not on humility.
Over here is the living room. I’ve actually never been in here before. Vaulted ceilings that touch the second heaven, twelve Corinthian columns (structurally unnecessary, spiritually confrontational), and a roaring fireplace powered by a small but persistent coal fire deep within the earth. Is it environmentally sound? No. But is it efficient? Not really.
Now, please direct your gaze to the kitchen. Not for cooking, lord no! We have Postmates. But we do have a thirteen-burner Viking range, two walk-in fridges (both empty), and a spiral ham encased in resin. The island is so large that it has its own HOA. The countertops? Carved from pure astatine. Highly radioactive stuff. Could have fed an entire village for a year with how much I paid for that, FYI.
Follow me upstairs via the golden escalator. It’s just like the one Trump had, except five workers died making it. It’s haunted.
Also, the escalator only goes up, so you’ll have to slide down a bunch of silk scarves I had the help tie together. Very chic, very unsafe. OSHA has been here nine times.
Here is the primary bedroom, or as I like to call it, “The Throne of Flesh.” King bed? Please. That’s for plebeians. This is an emperor bed, thirteen feet wide, custom made from the bones of extinct forest creatures most have never even heard of. Mattress Firm will sell you this bad boy only if you have an Amex black card and a personal endorsement from the Illuminati. Above the bed is a mural of me riding a lion into battle against modesty. It glows at night. Not with electricity, but with spiritual discomfort. Unfortunately, it’s too bright for anyone to sleep in here. Still worth it.
Now, let’s step outside to the yard. The landscaping was designed to resemble Babylon, pre-fall, naturally, but with more water features and several nude models I hired as living statues. Please don’t feed them.
We installed a full-size Roman aqueduct even though we’re on city water. Just hoarding for the sake of hoarding! And yes, that’s a twenty-four-hour flamethrower fountain spelling out my name in cursive.
Over there’s the infinity pool, which literally mocks God by being both infinite and chlorinated.
And finally, the roof features a concrete and soapstone statue of me, standing an extremely petty six inches taller than that inferior Jesus the Redeemer statue in Brazil. It’s been struck by lightning twelve times!
Is it all a bit much? Well, perhaps. Am I technically violating forty-seven zoning laws? Who isn’t? Whatever, I can afford the fines. But if God wanted me to build modestly, He wouldn’t have given me generational wealth and a complete lack of internal regulation.
All I know for sure is that while this may not be the most structurally sound house around, it’s certainly the most lavish. And no act of God would ever befall it.
Anyway, thanks for the housewarming gift. You can just throw out the edible arrangement. I waste so much food.
Please feel free to worship the golden calf on the way out!
TikTok’s new owners will include Rupert Murdoch (responsible for creating Fox News, the most effective mass media right wing propaganda platform ever) and Trump bestie Larry Ellison, who is in the process of turning CBS News into basically the same thing via his nepo baby son and Bari Weiss.
Normally you’d want to be a little subtle about the plan to turn TikTok into a pro-Trump and pro-Netanyahu propaganda machine to avoid scaring off customers, but that’s not Trump’s style. So last week he basically just blurted out the whole plan, then insisted he was just “joking”:
“Trump signed an executive order to “save” TikTok, while supposedly joking that he’d like to censor influencers by tweaking the algorithm so that content is “100 percent MAGA.”
“Everyone is going to be treated fairly,” the president added—seemingly covering his tracks as critics warn that TikTok under US ownership could soon carry a right-wing bias, perhaps going the way of Twitter after Elon Musk took over and rebranded it as X.”
Yes, “perhaps.”
From Twitter and the Washington Post to CBS News, the right wing billionaire tendency to buy up major media properties and convert them into right wing propaganda and bullshit machines has not been subtle. Yet, as the framing of this Ars piece makes clear, the press still seems somewhat confused as to whether TikTok will be any sort of reliable source of information (spoiler: it won’t) under far right wing billionaire ownership.
TikTok under Bytedance ownership certainly raised privacy, propaganda, and national security concerns. But under Bytedance the platform at least tried to behave so it could continue operating in the U.S. With Trump having dismantled all our privacy, NatSec, and fraud regulators, the new U.S. ownership of TikTok will see arguably fewer regulatory constraints on their worst impulses than ever.
Murdoch clearly wants a modern media extension of his existing Fox News empire given his core audience is dying off. Ellison, a staunch supporter of Netanyahu and his industrialized mass murder of children, clearly wants to leverage TikTok as a new media extension for whatever fresh hell he and Bari Weiss are building over at CBS. I’d expect ample authoritarian apologia.
To be clear the deal hasn’t been fully finalized yet. It’s still not clear if the deal will meet the legal requirements of the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, especially given there seems to be some ongoing debate over who’ll exactly own the underlying algorithm. There will likely be some opportunities for activists and lawyers to throw sand in the gears.
But make no mistake: if this deal goes through TikTok will absolutely be headed the way of Twitter under Elon Musk. They’ll likely try to leave things much the same for a 6-12 months to pretend that’s not going to be the case, but I suspect that, ultimately, its use for right wing propaganda will be obvious.
Creating an internet full of wall-to-wall racist and corporatist right wing agitprop was always the end game of MAGA’s bogus “Conservative censorship” and “we support antitrust reform now” claims, it was never remotely subtle, and you can’t say you weren’t warned, repeatedly.
You’d like to think that the conversion of TikTok into a far right wing safe space will cause a mass exodus of ethical people off of the platform, but as we’ve seen with Twitter (especially when it comes to journalists’ continued use of a website owned by an overt white supremacist) that’s clearly not really something you can truly rely on.
You’d also like to think that the hijacking of TikTok will create the opportunity for innovators to create a better, more ethical short-form video platform not owned by assholes actively cheering on the destruction of foundational democracy. Here too, time will tell.
Their goal is obvious but as some are quick to point out: their success is far from guaranteed. Remember what happened with Rupert Murdoch and MySpace? AT&T’s attempted domination of video? These sorts of domination plays, especially in mass modern media, never quite go the way rich brunchlords planned, and it’s not like Oracle executives have any sort of serious experience with consumer-facing product success, much less any understanding of modern media.
That said, you’d need to define “success.” The billionaire right wing architects of this new modern era right wing propaganda bullhorn (that may soon be comprised of Fox, CNN, Sinclair, TikTok, Twitter, and countless other media properties) have no limit of money to burn on profit-losing propaganda ventures in a country that just took a hatchet to any remaining financial or consumer protection regulators.
They may never have the competency to actually execute, but given the already extremely shaky status of journalism, the media, and informed consensus, I think emphatic alarmism remains the right response to the grand, unsubtle mass media plans of our shittiest billionaires.
RIYADH, KSA – As Saudi Arabia’s new comedy festival welcomes talent from around the world, local executioner Imad Usman is excited for the opportunity to perform in front of larger audiences. “I’m going to open with some classic crowd-horrifiers, like beheading an apostate and beheading a burglar,” Usman told reporters. “Then, of course, I’ll finish […]
Large companies like IBM, Microsoft, or Novell typically had a well defined process for releasing software on floppies. More often than not, files were not directly copied onto a physical floppy; instead, a tool was used to create an image of a floppy disk from distribution files, and the image was then sent off for mass duplication.
Quite often, timestamps of files were set to a predefined value when creating the image. That practice is probably as old as timestamps in the FAT file system. PC DOS 1.0 kept track of the date when a file was modified, but not the time of day. PC DOS 1.0 has all non-system files set to a 08/04/1981 date, although it is theoretically possible that this was a result of normal file manipulation.
A somewhat strange IBM TCP/IP 2.0 for OS/2 Base Kit (1994)
With PC DOS 1.1, there is no ambiguity. The timestamps of all files are set to 12:00:00 on 05/07/1982. Floppy disks are not nearly fast enough to write all those files within two seconds (the FAT timestamp resolution), even in the extremely unlikely case that someone sat there waiting until exactly noon to start the operation. It is a given that IBM artificially set the timestamps of all files to match, and that was before the PC was even a year old.
It is notable that Novell followed a different strategy and strictly kept the original timestamps of shipping files. It was common that different releases had some files with matching timestamps and some files different. One could be reasonably confident that two files with the same name and timestamp were in fact identical. That was not always the case with IBM or Microsoft, where two files with different timestamps were often identical. And in rare cases, two different versions of a file were distributed with the same timestamp, arguably completely defeating the purpose of timestamps.
Especially when software was released with artificially created timestamps, this helps identify modifications to the release disks. If one has, say, an IBM DOS 4.0 install disk where files are dated 06/17/1988, but the timestamp of AUTOEXEC.BAT or CONFIG.SYS is different, it’s more or less certain that someone modified those files. Such modifications may otherwise be impossible to clearly identify if one only has a floppy image to work with, because editing an existing text file may not result in any changes to the FAT and a disk sector will simply be rewritten in place.
IBM TCP/IP 2.0 for OS/2
The other day I was looking at a disk set (that is, a set of floppy images) of IBM TCP/IP 2.0 for OS/2 Base Kit. I was almost sure that I had imaged original disks about twenty years ago, but there were several red flags that usually signal non-original disks.
Here’s a listing of the B1 floppy (the installation disk):
While the LANLK directory is presumably part of the installer, the TK and HDCONTL directories are definitely not. They are in fact fragments of the OS/2 2.1 Multimedia Toolkit. Completely unrelated to TCP/IP. So… that’s suspicious.
The README file is several months older than the rest, which is unusual; usually the README includes late-breaking information and ends up being one of the most recent files on an installation disk.
And there’s more. The OEM identifier in the boot sector of disk B1 from the kit is “IBM 20.0”, which is normal for OS/2 2.x disks. The OEM identifier on disk B2 is “DOS4.0” which is much less common for OS/2 software. Disk B3 has OEM identifier “IBM 3.3”. Disks B4 and B5 have “IBM 20.0” and disk B6 has “IBM 3.3” again. To top it off, the OEM identifier on the IBM Library Reader disk (also part of the Base Kit) is “IBM 10.2”, indicating OS/2 1.2.
In other words, the disks are a complete mess. They were clearly not created through any kind of a controlled process. It looks like someone just took whatever random disks they had lying around, deleted the existing files, and copied over the new ones.
That is also clearly visible in the root directories of the disks, which contain some (or many) deleted files.
There’s also the small matter that IBM released TCP/IP 2.0 for OS/2 in mid-1993, and these disks clearly contain updated files from early 1994, even though the packaging does not indicate an updated version.
All this made me quite unsure that I was looking at images of original disks. So I had to find the old box of floppies and then ran them through my Kryoflux. Lo and behold… the images were really made from true blue IBM disks. The Kryoflux tools can identify rewritten disk sectors but no, the disks were all clean mass-duplicated specimens.
Whoever mastered these disks was either in a real hurry or didn’t have the right tools, and really just took a box of random floppies, deleted existing files, and copied the (updated) TCP/IP 2.0 Base Kit files onto the disks. And so we ended up with distribution disks that look really fishy, but are in fact completely intact originals.
Thanks to the Kryoflux, I can also exclude the possibility that someone modified the original disks after the fact—which was always unlikely, but not completely impossible. No, there was no modification, the disk images really reflect exactly how IBM shipped the disks from the factory… primed to confuse digital archivists decades later.
In response to last spring’s student protests against Israel’s war on Gaza that roiled college campuses across the country, including in Texas, the state’s Republican Legislature passed a law this spring placing certain conditions on “expressive activities” on campus. University governing boards were given more power to restrict when and how protests could occur, including a ban on amplified speech during class hours and demonstrations overnight.
This was a notable about-face from the purported free-speech protections that Texas Republicans had enshrined into law just a few years earlier, in 2019, to curtail perceived campus crackdowns on conservative expression as colleges canceled events with controversial speakers like “alt-right” white nationalist Richard Spencer.
So swings the political pendulum of First Amendment rights in the Lone Star State—and nationwide—as this foundational protection is treated as a prop to be bear-hugged in one moment and conveniently tossed aside when an opportunistic moment demands.
After the September assassination of right-wing influencer and activist Charlie Kirk during a college campus event in Utah, the Trump administration and the MAGA movement have responded with a crackdown on free speech and expression, ranging from policing the masses for uncouth responses to Kirk’s killing to getting a critical late-night TV show host temporarily taken off the air.
Perhaps nowhere has this been on more clear display than in Texas, and, more specifically, in the governor’s mansion. In the wake of Kirk’s death, Governor Greg Abbott publicly called for the expulsion of at least two students on state university campuses who were filmed mocking or otherwise making light of the assassination. In one case, he invoked “FAFO,” a very-online acronym he’s belatedly become fond of (short for “Fuck around and find out”), while posting the image of a Texas Tech student, a young Black woman, getting taken away in handcuffs after taunting Kirk supporters with an improvised song. “This is what happened to the person who was mocking Charlie Kirk’s assassination at Texas Tech,” Abbott wrote. “FAFO.”
The governor expressed no concern as to whether the 18-year-old had committed any crime or had simply been arrested for her speech.
Abbott and his agency bureaucrats also set up a hotline to report instances of public school teachers in Texas posting anything deemed inappropriate about Kirk’s killing, pledging to revoke the state teaching certificates of anyone deemed guilty of such speech crimes.
While many conservatives in Texas have willingly joined this crackdown, some have shown some semblance of a spine. In response to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi pledging in the immediate aftermath of Kirk’s killing to prosecute “hate speech,” Senator Ted Cruz kindly reminded his podcast audience that this would be unconstitutional. The nation’s founding document “absolutely protects hate speech,” he said. “It protects vile speech. It protects horrible speech. What does that mean? It means you cannot be prosecuted for speech, even if it is evil and bigoted and wrong.”
He also said that the Trump-appointed FCC chief had acted like a “mafioso” by threatening ABC execs over late-night show host Jimmy Kimmel’s (conveniently misinterpreted) commentary on Kirk’s death. Some other Texas Republicans publicly supported Cruz’s sentiment, including departing state Representative and ex-Speaker Dade Phelan, who chimed in: “Slippery slope indeed.”
Meanwhile, the state’s top Republican leaders rushed to assemble what appears to be purely a show committee. Two days after Kirk’s murder, the Texas House speaker and lieutenant governor announced a select committee on Civil Discourse & Freedom of Speech in Higher Education, an Orwellian title for a body to ostensibly oversee the implementation of two recently enacted laws policing speech, governance, and curriculum on campus.
This has all come alongside a rash of faculty firings in Texas sparked by the right’s efforts to purge universities of suspected leftist radicalism. A history professor at Texas State University was summarily tossed out of his tenured position for critical comments he made at a socialism conference about the violent American empire, which were surreptitiously recorded by a right-wing blogger. That professor, Thomas Alter, has since filed a lawsuit against the university for violating his First Amendment rights.
A lecturer at Texas A&M was also fired for apparently discussing a book that touched on gender identity in her children’s literature class. Texas A&M President Mark Welsh, a former four-star Air Force general, was caught on video initially resisting calls to fire the professor, though he ultimately did axe her in the face of cacophonous political pressure. But his initial hesitancy had his critics—including right-wing state Representative Brian Harrison and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick—saying he was insufficiently committed to carrying out the anti-left purges.
“His ambivalence on the issue and his dismissal of the student’s concerns by immediately taking the side of the professor is unacceptable,” Patrick posted on social media. Welsh then resigned.
A&M, the more conservative sibling campus to UT-Austin, has been under growing scrutiny recently from right-wing attack dogs like Harrison, who’ve pounced on any sign of supposed DEI initiatives, gender and race coursework, and the like. Welsh himself was named university president to replace M. Katherine Banks, who resigned in the summer of 2023 amid a firestorm sparked by the university hiring longtime UT journalism professor Kathleen McElroy to head up A&M’s journalism program. That news whipped right-wingers into what McElroy, who is Black, described as a “DEI hysteria,” and the university board of regents rescinded her offer. (McElroy, who remains a UT professor, has since become a board member of the Texas Observer’s parent nonprofit.)
While Welsh left without putting up much of a fight, his ouster has some similarities to perhaps the most infamous political breach of academic freedom in Texas history. In 1944, UT President Homer Rainey was summarily fired by the regents for his full-throated opposition to their firing of four economics professors with pro-labor New Deal politics and an English professor who’d assigned a controversial novel (which they also then banned).
His ouster became a national story and prompted broad resistance on campus—including thousands of students who went on strike. The governor at the time, Coke Stevenson, did replace many of the sitting UT regents, but Rainey was never rehired.
Nowadays, the independence of university leadership—to say nothing of faculty—has been greatly deteriorated by political dictates and targeted pressure campaigns.
Abbott’s appointed regents are all big campaign donors who sit neatly in his back pocket. And the chancellorships of the big three university systems are now all about to be controlled by ex-Republican politicians: at UT, former state Representative John Zerwas; at A&M, recently departed Comptroller Glenn Hegar; and likely soon at Texas Tech, hardline conservative state Senator Brandon Creighton.
All this portends a straitjacketed Texas campus culture, one fit for a Soviet Union in which Gorbachev had been succeeded by Pat Buchanan. In recent weeks, cancel crusades have been launched against individuals who merely quoted some of the late Kirk’s more repugnant views on civil rights or, sharpening the point, gun violence. To risk quoting Kirk himself here—espousing the rare view of his that was fit for a decent society: “There’s ugly speech. There’s gross speech. There’s evil speech,” he once opined. “And ALL of it is protected by the First Amendment.”
“President Trump’s declaration on Saturday that he had authorized the use of federal forces to ‘protect war-ravaged’ Portland, Ore., prompted bewilderment and frustration—and more than a little sarcasm—in the city this weekend.” —New York Times
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Help reshelve the books with pics of naked women in them that middle school boys have left strewn around Powell’s.
Put a stop to the ungodly ice-cream flavor combinations at Salt and Straw.
Institute a ban on wimps who use umbrellas.
Censor the outrageous cost for one, single penis-shaped Voodoo Doughnut.
Aggressive DOGE-style 20 percent reduction in the number of mediocre craft breweries.
Stop the radical liberal reeducation campaign to erase Oregon’s colonial history by allowing employees statewide to play The Oregon Trail during office hours.
Resurrect Shari’s Café and Pies, a tragic victim of cancel culture (not paying taxes).
Return the city’s historical monuments to their former, pre-woke glory (slap a new coat of paint on the Hawthorne Bridge).
Make Portland music legends Modest Mouse and The Decemberists form a supergroup.
Tend to victims’ war wounds (genital chafing) sustained during the annual Naked Bike Ride.
Police coffee shops that up-charge two dollars for alternative milk and then make your latte too weak and ruin the Stumptown beans they claim to use.
Have the NSA dig up some dirt on Damian Lillard to blackmail him into never leaving the Blazers again.
Mandate a new season of Portlandia and give the show the same budget as the Department of War.
Empower citizens to take the law into their own hands when they see someone throw a compostable plate into a landfill bin.
Instruct all HMOs to completely cover the costs of treating infected tattoos.
Eradicate the parasites living in Tryon Creek Park (ticks).
Subdue the real domestic terrorists—i.e., drivers who don’t know how to merge onto I-5.
Remove the scourge of unwanted immigrants flooding into Portland (crypto bros from California).
U.S. President Donald Trump’s peace plan for Gaza stands out from previous ceasefire proposals: For the first time, it tries to outline the key question of how the territory will be ruled after the war.
SAN ANTONIO—Demonstrating his commitment to entering the season in peak physical form, Spurs center Victor Wembanyama reported to training camp Monday having packed on 25 pounds of dense, towering hair. “The coaching staff wanted me to bulk up over the offseason, and growing tons of hair was the best way to put on weight without affecting my agility,” said Wembanyama, flaunting the colossal, 3-foot-tall mass of hair, which functionally brings his height up to 10-foot-3 and greatly improves his vertical reach and defensive utility. “I have to use a lot of shampoo now, but I think this hair weight will really allow me to take my game to the next level. I can probably set a screen on an entire defense just by shaking my head around. I can block shots I’m not even looking at.” At press time, witnesses marveled as the all-star used his hair to tip a half-court lob directly into the basket.
I work in the donor relations team at a major university.. This past year has been really tough for the university budget-wise, for various political funding reasons. There was a round of layoffs earlier this year where almost 20% of people let go were in our unit.
Another layer to consider is that our fundraising unit has gone through a massive reorg with a lot of roles being compressed with bigger portfolios.
Our team is really flat, with the associate director having too many direct reports. I’ve been approached to take on a role where I would oversee four of those people as a manager. This is a first time manager role for me but I have already demonstrated a lot of leadership and mentorship.
I was quite disappointed to hear that this new role would not come with a salary or job grade change. It was presented as a learning opportunity, but I sort of feel taken advantage of. I think I deserve a salary increase and if I don’t get one now, I won’t have as much leverage to negotiate if I wait to ask six months into the new role.
Yes, they’re taking advantage of you. Managing four people is a significant increase in responsibility and you should be paid accordingly for it.
I’m curious to know whether they’d be hiring for this position and advertising it to external candidates if you didn’t accept it. If they would be, they should absolutely pay you accordingly. But if they otherwise wouldn’t hire for it for budget reasons, it could become slightly less unreasonable; in that case, they might be seeing it as mutually beneficial. The idea would be that you get a management role that you might not be as competitive for if more experienced candidates were in the mix, and you can then parlay that into advancement and more money down the road (even if it not with them) … and in exchange, they get someone in that role. It’s still not fair — you deserve to be paid for a significant increase in work and responsibility — but I’d be slightly less irked by it, particularly given the context about the budget issues and layoffs.
Ultimately it comes down to how much you want to get management experience. If it’s not something you really care about, that’s a lot of work to take on for no raise just because they offered it. If you do want management experience, which can be frustratingly hard to get for people who want to move in that direction, it might be worth it to you to do.
If you do want to do the job, it’s reasonable to point out that it’s a significant increase in work and responsibility and ask to be paid fairly for that increase. They might not give you as much as they’d give a more experienced candidate, but you should get more than you’re getting now. If they really won’t budge, though, see if you can negotiate for a salary review (or outright raise) in six months. That’s not ideal, but it’s better than nothing.
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