Mark Rice

The customer model presupposes they have complete preferences across all options already & are fully informed.

But education is premised upon NOT KNOWING a bunch of stuff! Students are served when new horizons are opened for them. Will every attempt work? No. But the world's impoverished without it

We spent the entirety of the 2010s hearing about what kind of socialism would come after the inevitable downfall of capitalism and I think nobody really expected "neoliberal technofascism" to be the likeliest actual answer

every time i read about one of these college presidents promising to reinvent the liberal arts education i think of "marge v. the monorail"

You can mock people for thinking the leopards would dine elsewhere but it is unequivocally good that the demo that reeeeeally helped put trump back in the wh is seeing what is happening and apparently reacting accordingly

As of the 2020 United States census, Reading had a population of 95,112. Of which, 68.9% were Hispanic/Latino, 18.9% were non-Hispanic White, 8.5% were non-Hispanic Black, 0.7% Asian, 0.1% Native American or Pacific Islander, and 2.9% mixed or other. 32]

So many things to say but I just want to point to the example of “Latin American studies” being a useless major in the piece and make sure everyone knows Reading is 70% Latino? Denying Albright the chance to learn Lat Am studies is a kind of affront against the community

There aren’t enough violent criminals in the country, period, to justify the kind of highly militarized mass deportation operations that trump and his party have long craved. I don’t think there are even enough immigrants period at some point you’ll have to track down Poles

Trump Accidentally Sabotages Case for Bombings in New Interview Fiasco The president’s claims about the boat killings and his pardon of the Honduran ex-president in a new Politico interview should finally convince Republicans that they, and we, must get to the bottom of ...

Awful: Trump just admitted in a new interview that he knows "very little" about the Honduran ex-president he pardoned. This guy trafficked a gazillion times more drugs into the US than anyone Trump has executed. Wrecks his case for the boat bombings.

New from me:
newrepublic.com/article/2041...

Being a relative of a disfavored former employee: Maureen Comey, a respected DOJ prosecutor, was fired shortly before Trump demanded her father be prosecuted. Refusing to illegally fire people: Kash Patel is being sued for firing senior FBI agents who asked him for adequate reason to fire their fellow agents. Investigating corruption and abuses of power: For example, ethics officers at Fannie Mae were fired after they raised questions about how Bill Pulte obtained documents as part of his effort to prosecute Trump’s political enemies. Investigating an insurrection or allegations of corruption by the President. Providing an intelligence analysis that contradicts the President’s claims. Being a trans person. An online monitor of the “deep state” accuses you of being disloyal to Trumpism. Such accusations are often erroneous: a prosecutor falsely accused of not willing to be part of the Comey investigation was fired. An FBI agent was fired after being falsely accused of participating in Mar-A-Lago investigations. Sharing accurate information to a judge: A DOJ lawyer was fired when he acknowledged that the administration had erred when it deported an immigrant. Not recommending that a prominent celebrity supporter of the President have his gun rights restored. Signing a public statement that existing policies are undermining the ability of agencies to complete their tasks. No reason at all. The President merely asserts that he has an Article II power to fire you and decides he wants someone assumed to be more loyal in your place.

We don't have to guess how an at-will public employment system will be used under Trump, because we have a de facto at-will system already in place.
Under that system, here are some of the reasons you can be fired from the federal government:
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/at-will-wh...

China was the largest export market for American farmers in 2024. They bought 27 metric tons of soybeans last year. They stopped buying in 2025 when Trump started his trade war. These are simple, obvious, basic facts. bsky.app/profile/atru...

“Her library estimates that 15 percent of emailed reference questions it receives are now ChatGPT-generated, and some include hallucinated citations for both published works and unique primary source documents. ‘For our staff, it is much harder to prove that a unique record doesn’t exist.’”

Can I get a “hell yeah”?

bsky.app/profile/neil...

"ICE has often been arresting children ... where members of the public are not allowed in to witness them. Accounts of these types of arrests of children have been hard to corroborate, because the families are often speedily deported and relatives around them are too afraid to speak up."

Behind the Curtain: Trump bets his presidency and GOP's future on AI He won on the backs of working-class MAGA. But he surrounds himself with tech moguls.

Even now, 11 mos into a disastrous administration that has upended how we live, the media exec class doesn't get it.

Trump doesn't give two shits about AI. Contrary to this lede, he's not betting his presidency on lightly regulate AI. He just wants to make more money

www.axios.com/2025/12/08/t...

ICE basically broke into a home in Burnsville Minnesota without a warrant & detained 4 US citizens, leaving a 7 year old without any parents around.

The jackbooted thugs are here

Torture Techniques from CIA Black Sites Were Used at Alligator Alcatraz Amnesty International, interviewing migrant detainees, identifies use of the confinement box. There can be no denying it is a torture prison

They're using the confinement box, one of the most horrific methods of CIA torture in the post-9/11 black sites, against migrants now. This is the direct result of the lack of consequences for the architects of the torture program. Either there will be criminal penalties for this or it will expand.

Matt Gurney: 'We will never fucking trust you again' Some blunt talk for our American neighbours at the Halifax International Security Forum.

'We will never fucking trust you again' www.readtheline.ca/p/matt-gurne...

The article detailing the history is posted below. (He was actually one of fifteen votes against, but they were outnumbered 119 to 15.) In an amusing followup, the dissenter later became the head carpenter on the reconstruction, and the project saved his personal finances.

If during the Biden administration, masked feds had stormed the campus of a Christian college like Hillsdale to apprehend someone while pointing guns at students and administrators, Republicans would have filed impeachment articles immediately and taken to the streets.

Spending tariff revenues on a well-positioned class of agricultural landowners in return for their political support. Glad we're entering the "1830s Peru" stage of the admin's economic policy agenda.

Jim Caviezel to play Jair Bolsonaro in ‘heroic’ biopic Actor, who starred in The Passion of the Christ, will play the disgraced ex-Brazilian president in film written by his one-time secretary of culture

This movie is gonna be so bad I'm also looking forward to watching.

www.theguardian.com/film/2025/de...

The President of the United States unilaterally levied a tax on all of us and is redistributing our taxes to a core segment of his supporters.

Ah, remember when folks were telling us Mahmoud v. Taylor wasn't that bad, limited to a few curricular opt-outs, would be contained...

It is really, really hard to get your head around the raw hubris of the majority. They really will be destabilizing the operating structure of the entire U.S. government. Why? Because they believe they have a better idea about how the past century should've been done.

Sadism is the lifeblood of MAGA, and US government agencies are sanctioning this as an operating principle on a daily basis:

not sure you can talk coherently about maintaining the rule of law without promising serious court reform

We are going *from* an equilibrium where most of the rest of the world spent less on defense, because they were happy to rely on the US, and fund US deficits that they could not pull off
*to* an equilibrium where they will spend more on military, less on everything else, and lose faith in the US

Screenshot showing a snipped of a Trump post, that reads: "stupid statements. My real problem with the show, however, wasn’t the low IQ traitor, it was that the new ownership of 60 Minutes, Paramount, would allow a show like this to air. THEY ARE NO BETTER THAN THE OLD OWNERSHIP, who just paid me millions of Dollars for FAKE REPORTING about your favorite President, ME! Since they bought it, 60 Minutes has actually gotten WORSE! Oh well, far worse things can happen. P.S. I hereby demand a complete and total APOLOGY, though far too late to be meaningful, from Lesley Stahl and 60 Minutes for her incorrect and Libelous statements about Hunter’s Laptop!!! President DJT"

Trump attacks the new Ellison-owned Paramount, saying "THEY ARE NO BETTER THAN THE OLD OWNERSHIP" of CBS. Paramount is biding for Warner on the premise that it has a good relationship with Trump.

(The rest of Trump's post is a complaint about Marjorie-Taylor Greene.)

I would love to believe Leavitt will never have a media job again, but that's impossible. As long as there is a billionaire with a checkbook, Karoline Leavitt will be in our faces, smirking.

I don't think this film and Donald Moffat get enough credit for their unique portrayl of the US presidency. Usually the president is cinematically portrayed as either nobley heroic or consipiratorially evil. Moffat is one of the few actors to portray a president convincingly as indecisive and weak.

People who think "actual thinking" means “insipid contrarianism that substitutes banal edgelordery for any meaning or principle" almost only go right.
Never socialists or super-woke or whatever, always variations on "this bigot is making arguments and you're close-minded if you're not open to them."