Recently discovered Umberto Eco’s 1995 Essay on Ur-Fascism. Definitely worth a read, it’s the voice of the generation of anti-fascists no longer with us… archive.org/details/umbe...

I stand with the penguins of Heard and McDonald Islands!

"Vienna, Austria is a good place to be dead." 3/30 returns @jonreinhardt.bsky.social and Falco's "Rock Me Amadeus" to you: marchxness.com/thegames#/2x...

🙌🏼 I’m not sure who had the amazing idea to invite this constitutional lawyer to a senate hearing that intended to prove Biden colluded with Meta to censor conservatives, but she took the opportunity to speak truth to power ✊🏼 on the hypocrite 👑 KING OF FREE SPEECH, Donald Trump, himself. 👏🏼 Brava!!

We can’t wait to see you at the 2025 CALICO conference this May! 🕊️Register by April 25 to get the early bird rate 🏨 Hotel rooms are filling fast—book ASAP! On-campus dorms are also available. 📅Check out the preliminary agenda & lodging details here: calico.org/calico-2025/. See you in San Diego!

The US military has removed photos of the B-29 bomber “Enola Gay” — which dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan — apparently because it contains the word “gay,” which violates their new anti-DEI rules.

Every single day these fuckers are treacherous. Today it's Fulbright, the 78 year old program that brings international students and scholars here and sends us there, a form of diplomacy and goodwill building that makes the USA a good guy in the minds of millions. #StandForFulbright #Notmypresident

Of course Trump is trying to declare English the Official Language of the USA. England should say no.

The mentality that leads US Americans to answer “where are you from?” with a US state or city instead of “the USA” is the same that leads to thinking Canada would simply want to join the US, or that the EU is similar in structure to the US. They do not understand the concept of sovereignty.

So much for a new world order, George. Sorry about your party. bush41library.tamu.edu/archives/pub...

the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of destruction

So a Boston judge has stopped the freeze of NIH funds for the states that joined in the lawsuit. A sigh of relief for AZ and NC (Dem AGs!), but sadness for researchers in deep red states. How far are we all from being marched through the streets in dunce caps..

Hey International Academics thinking about boycotting conferences in the US: the only people you’re hurting are the academic organizations you’re not giving your money to. You’re actually helping Trump and the right wingers who want to destroy universities, not hurting them.

The only way to fix this post-Trump will be to rewrite the Constitution to severely limit the powers of the Executive Branch. I doubt that will happen in my lifetime. How else?

According to Al-Jazeera just now, "Saudi Arabia said its support for the establishment of a Palestinian state is unwavering and it rejects any attempts to displace Palestinians from their land."

On any FB post I made where I named and criticized Trump, someone posted a laughing face, but their name doesn't come up. My posts are set to private/friends only. I've deleted them all, but yeah, this is where we are.

To recap, Trump: -Forced out the FAA chief at Musk's insistence -Imposed a hiring freeze that reportedly included air traffic controllers -Fired the TSA head and gutted a key aviation safety committee -Blamed the DCA crash on DEI This is disastrous leadership.

“First they came for the illegal immigrant and I did not speak out because I was not an illegal immigrant”….is this where we are?

if you are not actively supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion, you are passively allowing uniformity, injustice, and exclusionary practices to grow unchecked.

Like my grandfather who probably never stopped using the telegraph, or my father who never stopped subscribing to cable TV, I will never stop using PowerPoint. Laugh at me all you want, descendants, I'll be dead, and you will never know the pleasure of a checkerboard entrance.

You know who doesn’t really care if university and urban economies are threatened by the grant freeze because they don’t live in cities or go to universities? Trump voters. He’s doing it to punish cities and divide us further. 1/2

This year we have applicants for our graduate program from 15 different countries around the world on all continents--basically no economically wealthy countries--which shows that US grad programs are pathways for highly talented individuals towards lucrative and globally equitable futures. 1/2

A great interview on the humanity of “illegals” by amazing author and good friend Manuel Muñoz: www.msnbc.com/ali-velshi/w...

Mountain time is the Gen X of time zones

He doesn’t say it in Spanish or Danish though

This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. -MLK, 8/23/73

1933: “The People’s Radio Set”, from the Topography of Terror exhibit at the Gestapo Museum, Berlin. Yesterday, radio, today, social media…

it’s meyer lemon, blood orange, and blue sky season

Several years ago after visiting Colombia I decided I wanted to become fluent in Spanish, a fifth language for me, by the time I was 60, so that I could explore the Americas and Spain. Last year I started learning it seriously, and now it has become a refuge. 1/2 #learningspanish

YIKES! Duckworth asks Hegseth to name a country that's in ASEAN. He names three -- none of which are in ASEAN. "I suggest you do a little homework," she says.

A 1930s anti-Nazi poster at the Reina Sofia museum, the caption reads: “little man asks for big donations” and “motto: millions are behind me”. Seem familiar?

Remember when liberal media and Democrats said: “North Carolina you deserved the hurricane because you are (backwards, racist, gave the world lung cancer, god hates you, whatever)”. Me neither.

Just walking by the TVs in the gym, noticed the CNN newsfeed reads “Trump not ruling out military force to take Greenland and Panama”, instead of “Trump threatens major military alliances and world peace by not ruling out invasions of peaceful allies”. Fck the mainstream media, Trump ass kissers.

If we’re just going to ignore one Constitutional amendment, why not just ignore any of them? This is how corruption begins and destroys us in the end. Go ahead and the law, there will be no consequences, especially if you’re rich. USA, over and out.

blue skies over New Mexico

One day long ago a group of Latin speakers got together, got drunk, and invented Spanish. One was like, "hey, let's not use pronouns!", and the others laughed, "sure, why not?", but then one was like, "but how will we know what person is the subject?" The room got quiet until 1/

Merry Christmas Bluesky! Give a gift to Wikipedia to celebrate: donate.wikimedia.org

Welp, there's now a news item up, so I guess it's official. www.itl.arizona.edu/news/changin...

William Labov, father of sociolinguistics, has left us. The question is, will God put his heaven on the fourth floor and make him get in an elevator and say it a certain way if he wants to get in?

Just tested out SpeakAI, an app that will translate speech into any language and then approximate—pretty accurately—your own voice in the target language. So is foreign language learning dead? If you don’t want the human benefits of unmediated interaction and don’t mind being a cyborg I guess…

Seasonal repost of coming to love my 15 foot Inflatable Rudolph (thanks for the reminder, @stephjayb.bsky.social): creativenonfiction.org/writing/my-m...

If you’re confused about singular they, remember that for a time in the 1600s, people were like: “Verily, thou speakest to a single commoner as ‘you are’, and it confoundeth me”. 1/

72F and blue sky over #Tucson

Let’s call her Phoenix Rose and start calling Coprolite the same.

Optimist: glass half full Pessimist: glass half empty Corpus Linguist: Which word most frequently appears in the phrase "glass half *"?

Remember when, the Trump Administration caved to Big Pharma and broke their promise to enable Medicare drug negotiations? Do not forget it was President Biden and Democrats in Congress who actually got this done!

The amazing Cathedral-in-a-Mosque of #Córdoba, wow

#picasso #guernica at the #reinasofia #madrid, a favorite museum