Rory Kraft

Female athletes and sex verification: Ewa Kłobukowska failed the chromosomal test in 1967, later gave birth to a son. Extra X chromosome! Anyway I like how no one wants to learn biology or history just because they like stepping on the same motherfucking rake.

With free legal help from @rcfp.org attorneys, @marisakabas.bsky.social obtained almost six hours of bodycam footage that shed light on a DOGE takeover of the US Institute of Peace building.

Read Kabas's latest reporting on the raid after reviewing the newly disclosed videos:

I planned to share my report on the body cam footage early next week when I learned that a DC news station had obtained some of the footage as a result of my lawsuit and they were going to scoop me. After working on this for a year, I couldn't let that happen. Published 2 mins before they aired :)

Too ‘Tangled Up in Blues’: A Look Inside Bob Dylan’s 1974 Notebooks Too ‘Tangled Up in Blues’: A Look Inside Bob Dylan’s 1974 Notebooks By W. Jason Miller, North Carolina State University   Over twenty pages of Dylan’s handwritten lyrics to “Tangled Up in Blue…

"I wish we’d tied the knot just like I tied the laces of my shoes
The circle has come to an end
Guess I always been too tangled up in blues"

This sucks. Worldcat used to be amazing.

it's a beautiful ruling in the runup to an election that already considers vote-by-mail tantamount to fraud. 2026 here we come.

In my Philosophy of Law course this semester we have been using Villarreal as the current SCOTUS case to examine to understand qs about what is law, schools of interpretation, etc. The opinions were released today. Woo hoo!

Anthropic Accuses 3 Chinese Companies of Harvesting Its Data

Oh, it sucks when someone steals your shit, doesn't it

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/23/t...

Absolutely shameful. Four years of war and the United States sends nobody to mark it.

The New York Rangers expect me, a woman, to come back and watch the rest of the season after I watched the people who run the organization and two of its players laugh at female athletes. I think I’m good on hockey for the rest of the season. It’s been, like, really ruined.

1940 Irish language scif-fi book Manannán by Máiréad Ní Ghráda
It is the first Mecha Robot outside of Japan and mention of a Gravity assist in fiction. It was never republished or translated.

ChatGPT cuts in action

DOGE allegedly used ChatGPT to identify 1,400 NEH grants it said were DEI. Grants were terminated April 2025, according to a court filing. E.g.

Film: 1873 Colfax massacre
Film: first female pilots flying for U.S. military in WWII
Film: “Untold Story of Jewish Women Slave Labor in the Holocaust"

Texas A&M eliminates women’s and gender studies program University leaders also said six courses were canceled and 48 exceptions were granted under new rules on race and gender.

I don't buy the numbers argument. 25 majors/31 minors is small but sustainable. Plus, Chaitanya Lakkimsetti "said she taught a feminist theory grad seminar last spring that enrolled 15 students from multiple departments, an unusually high # for a grad course."
www.texastribune.org/2026/01/30/t...

Tower and historic buildings at the University of Florida. In white text the kicker Faculty Issues, the headline Florida Moves Toward Banning H-1B Visa Hires, and the sub-headline University system leaders say they need to pause hiring on the visas for a year to collect information about how universities utilize the program. Only the student and faculty board representatives objected. Photo source: Michael Warren/iStock/Getty Images

The quote, “Whether it is a pediatric cancer surgeon or a globally recognized researcher, these individuals directly contribute to Floridians’ health, safety and economic success. In many cases, the H-1B visa is the only viable pathway for bringing this level of expertise to our state.” from Kimberly Dunn, chair of the statewide Advisory Council of Faculty Senates and the faculty board representative

ICYMI | Florida took another step Thursday toward banning all its public universities from hiring foreign workers on H-1B visas.

If enacted, Florida would become the second state to ban the use of H-1B visas at public universities.

Read the full article: https://bit.ly/4t8R8K5

#EDUSky #HigherEd

Text reading: A truly inclusive democratic politics must be understandable, or cognitively tractable, for ordinary people busy with the rest of their lives. This extends not only to everyday politics and policy, but to constitutional politics as well—non-specialist democratic citizens should be able to grasp the fundamental law that governs them and imagine their own role in shaping it as political agents. Yet these requirements raise a difficulty: in many countries, including the United States, constitutions are treated as the exclusive domain of lawyers and judges. As a result, constitutional matters are typically discussed using legalistic jargon that is inscrutable even to non-specialist lawyers, let alone ordinary citizens. How then can constitutional politics be made legible to ordinary citizens? In this essay, I argue this challenge is partly one of political ideas—specifically, the ideas ordinary citizens use to think about their constitutions, or their folk constitutionalism. This may sound strange because insofar as constitutions are treated as lawyers’ exclusive turf, the problem may seem to be one of practice, not merely ideas. But popular practices of what scholars like John Finn and Elizabeth Beaumont call popular or civic constitutionalism involve citizens and social movements in transforming constitutions. These transformations often occur behind the backs of everyone involved, as new frames and understandings come to gradually transmute constitutional meaning, which in turn pervades the public political culture and reshapes the public’s constitutional imagination. I suggest we need ideas that more closely reflect what democratic citizens already do in democratic constitutional politics, so that they can do it more self-consciously and dispel the impression of an anti-democratic lack of control that recent constitutional innovations reveal to be illusory. I explore the utility of ideas of unwrittenness and functional multi-textuality to the end of a …

I gave the article a nice long 18th century-style title:

Folk Constitutionalism, or Why It Matters How Ordinary People Think about the Constitution

Here's the abstract, and a link to an ungated preprint: kevinjelliott.net/wp-content/u...

Physics experts, please answer a question for me: do gravitons exist?

History experts, please answer a question for me: did Charlemagne exist?

Linguistics experts, please answer a question for me: which of the above answers is objective?

I love that the subheadline avoids ending with a preposition.

AAUPjudgment012226.PDF

JUST IN: Judge William Young, who ruled Trump admin violated 1st Amendment by targeting pro-Palestinian activists for deportation, enters order allowing @AAUP & @MESA_1966 members to block any deport attempt until feds convince a judge it's legit. Doc: www.documentcloud.org/documents/26...

The City of Philadelphia is suing the Trump administration after the National Park Service removed a long-standing exhibit on slavery in the city's Independence National Historical Park. https://cnn.it/4jSDTZQ

The slavery exhibits at the President’s House have been removed following Trump administration push President Donald Trump and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum ordered content at national parks that “inappropriately disparage” the U.S. to be reviewed and potentially removed.

The full story from my colleagues:

www.inquirer.com/politics/nat...

So all colleges and universities will bring back the DEI stuff they cut when obeying in advance right...............................................................................................................................................right?

🚨HOLY CRAP. An ICE whistleblower just revealed a secret memo authorizing ICE officers to break into homes without a judicial warrant, which DHS's own legal training materials say is unconstitutional!

ICE then hid the memo from the public, passing it along by word of mouth and private conversation.

Donald Trump Accused of Leaking ‘Market-Sensitive Data’

President Trump posted jobs figures on Thursday ahead of their official publication by the Department of Labor.

Well now I'm thinking about that too...

Mainly due to student privacy/safety concerns I just added language to my syllabi banning smart glasses — curious about a) whether others are doing this or if their institution has a policy, and b) whether Ray Ban is already regretting its collaboration with Meta

While working on Is This America, I've read & transcribed a lot of Confederate letters and diaries. In one letter, Tom Rowland, a Virginian who was leaving West Point to become a traitor, stated the departing cadets’ position clearly. Secession was happening and he wondered what was taking so long.

But can they teach Plato to the engineers?

The fact that nothing is being done about this — and that people keep blithely hanging out on that site as though its owner and a key part of its official architecture aren’t actively enabling disgusting criminal abuse at scale — is making me lose my mind

If the estimates are right, it puts water consumption of chat gpt for one month at greater than the city of Atlanta's water consumption for a YEAR.