p.a.lapid, phd ☃️❄️🧧

When DOGE Unleashed ChatGPT on the Humanities

Huge NYT article on the back story of those two weeks in March/April 2025 when DOGE illegally terminated hundreds of NEH grants. Gift link!!

www.nytimes.com/2026/03/07/a...

Picture of DOGE guy Nate Cavanaugh

Screenshot of my DOGE letter “Dr. Joseph Rezek Dear NEH Grantee, This letter provides notice that the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is terminating your federal grant (Grant Application No. FEL29509824) effective April 3, 2025, in accordance with the termination clause in your Grant Agreement. Your grant no longer effectuates the agency's needs and priorities and conditions of the Grant Agreement and is subject to termination due to several reasonable causes, as outlined in 2CFR§200.340. For instance, NEH has reasonable cause to terminate your grant in light of the fact that the NEH is repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the President's agenda. The President's February 19, 2025 executive order mandates that the NEH eliminate all non-statutorily required activities and functions. See Commencing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy, E.O. 14217 (Feb. 19, 2025). Your grant's immediate termination is necessary to safeguard the interests of the federal government, including its fiscal priorities. Any objections or appeals to this termination will be managed in strict accordance with the President's Executive Orders,

Last year, this guy (left) from DOGE used ChatGPT to find NEH grants that were too “DEI” for Trump, and canceled them, including mine, as shown by the letter I received last April (right). Huge new NYT article on the back story link below

Is that UBE flavor I see in the top scoop? 😋

safe to say that (most? all?) countries in general don’t want replacement heads of state or government appointed by Washington!

(my kababayans in the Filipino diaspora know all about this)

Don't forget: Daylight saving time starts TONIGHT! Spring forward means we lose an hour of sleep tonight. In DC, Sunday sunrise is at 7:30am, sunset at 7:08pm. CDC recommends:

✅ Go to bed normal time tonight
✅ Get outside Sunday morning
✅ Drive carefully Sunday
✅ Stick to regular bedtime Sun night

Gangsters of Capitalism A groundbreaking journey tracing America’s forgotten path to global power―and how its legacies shape our world today―told through the extraordinary life of a complicated Marine.“Far more extraordinary...

reading this from my local library because *waving hands at everything going on*

oo-rah

share.libbyapp.com/title/6211543

Makes sense, b/c Championship matches don’t use VAR, right?

and it survived VAR!

(there’s VAR at the Racecourse Ground?)

jeebus, “Nero fiddling while Rome burned” vibes

Fighting for America while fighting to be American.

photosynthesis: the ultimate tech tree goal

That Russian Revolution arc is LONG—the only one I lost track and dropped off. Will try again in a bit

The Jan 6 plaque has finally been hung at the U.S. Capitol

Happened at 4am

Happened three years late due to politicized foot dragging

Was just reading about Stalin’s Great Terror and how it impacted women in Soviet Russia in Julia Ioffe’s “Motherland”

Contagion is a MF

A painting of a bird beside the text "are you trying to give me a fucking aneurysm?"

I have seen this ad!

the price of oil surging means you can burn your shein clothes, extract the oil, and make more money than you paid

Alexandria’s forever war?

Fun thing to think about very briefly: who currently has better lawyers, the United States or Nintendo

nice! i therefore choose to be a beaver 🦫

A painting of a bird beside the text "i always wondered what would happen if we put a total fuckin' moron in charge"

With each day bringing news of another country joining the war I am really worried that we're doing August 1914 with nuclear weapons.

there's a thing I like to call "load-bearing assumptions", that you don't notice until they're suddenly gone (e.g the air you breath has oxygen in it).

the post-ww2 order is a load-bearing assumption for basically the entirety of american life. trump took a sledgehammer to it in the last 90 days.

So is where I feel the need to remind folks that the selective service system still exists.

But in practice, yeah. Super-lazy back-of-the-envelope, holding all of Iran might require c. 600,000 ground troops. (~3x our max Iraq deployment).

But you also need rotations, so 2x or 3x that.

is that an otter 🦦? Sure looks like one

This is Coast Guard Petty Officer 2nd Class Tyler Jaggers, an aviation survival technician based out of Astoria, Oregon.

He died Thursday after suffering critical injuries Feb. 27 during a rescue off the coast of Oregon, the Coast Guard says.

RIP.

Absolutely gorgeous dataviz from W.E.B. Du Bois. There's an amazing book detailing many of these.... papress.com/products/w-e...

Judging from the prose, the Pentagon appears to be using AI to announce the death of soldiers. If it’s not AI, it’s a person who simply does not care.