Raul Pacheco-Vega

How cool is this?

From the inbox: local activists have taken it upon themselves to print and distro this story to the community. Absolutely love to see it.

I am in Amsterdam right now, absolutely jet lagged and definitely happy about my decision to come to Europe earlier, because I won’t be functional nor say smart things with this level of jet lag.

It’s 2:22 AM and I need to go back to bed.

Flow chart from TX Tech memo showing that most class materials must be reviewed by chair, dean, and provost, and that all curricular material must be disclosed

TX Tech has a flow chat for guidance on what can be taught in the university system. Two things:
1. Very little content seems to be permitted. This is partisan control of the curriculum.
2. I would not enjoy teaching under these conditions, but I really would not want to be a Chair or Dean.

There is very real water problems with AI and data centers. These centers can and do exacerbate water quality problems. They can contaminate water supplies just like fracking or anything else

thefern.org/2025/11/the-...

Statement from Kids Can Press publisher of Franklin the Turtle

🔥 BREAKING: A spokesperson for Kids Can Press, the publisher of the Franklin the Turtle books, messaged me today about Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth using the likeness and image from the books to make light of killings in the Caribbean in his post yesterday on X.

I’ve purchased one large blanket. Join me.

Holy shit

A methodology out of date since the FUCKING 1700S???

faculty governance is at the heart of academic freedom

"As one senior researcher told me, decades of painstaking work vanished overnight in an attack by an inexperienced and ideologically driven staff intent on dismantling the bureaucracy without understanding its purpose."

See also: university senior administrators.

A Tumblr post from user "nitewrighter," March 26. Me: I don't get it. I thought I was doing a lot better than I was a few years ago. I'm like 10 times more on top of things than I used to be. How does everything feel terrible now? The Tiny Me in OSHA-approved Hi-Vis Gear Who lives in my brain and pulls all the levers: Boss, it's the fascism. You're completely gunked up with cortisol due to the fact that your entire daily life is now underscored with a haunting awareness of the rapid erosion of your rights, dignity, and any and all social safety nets, and you're also bearing witness to the most vulnerable people immediately being persecuted. This creates a natural stress response that basically means you're going to continue having memory and organizational problems, as well as emotional imbalances. Me: BUT I HAVE A BULLET JOURNAL AND I MEDITATE NOW. Tiny OSHA Me: BOSS, THE FASCISM.

There's a pretty great Tumblr post about this:

It’s useful to think about things like this in numbers of tenure track professors.

$33M is 358 assistant professors. Or about fourteen percent of the total number of full-time faculty at Michigan State.

Zillow Removes Climate Risk Scores From Home Listings

Lol, Zillow tried to rate the climate risks facing individual properties. The real estate industry *hated* it, precisely because it worked -- it made selling risky properties more difficult. So they rebelled & Zillow caved.

Don't look up!

Thinking how many people underreacted to Prasad working in the administration because they assumed a UCSF professor must be good enough, but his intentions about the Covid vax have been clear.

There’s just nothing left of a university’s mission if instructors can be disciplined and fired for teaching the current state of knowledge in their fields, the degrees they issue are worth precisely the value of the paper they’re printed on and not a jot more

Can you spare a minute to help this campaign? Save the State Library of Victoria!

Help! Sign & share the petition to save the State Library of Victoria from rolling crises, gallery closures, harassment/jettisoning of staff & new cuts to destroy services for children & adults. c.org/Hj9G9WSg2f. (Or change.org, search Save The State Library of Victoria.) #StateLibrary #librarians

NO YOU DONT NEED AI

oh if you're deciding if you need to use AI for your project, heres a handy graph:

Typically people have been allowed to stay when they have a “change of status” pending in the system. In fact, it can screw things up if they leave.

I found a flowchart which helps you navigate the IT landscape

I have a work visit to Portsmouth forthcoming (in January 2026) to visit and work with @jacqpriego.bsky.social But I’ll spend a couple of days in London (first weekend) so perhaps Londoners might join me for a non-alcoholic pint (or Ethiopian dinner).

"Why is there grade inflation? Why do our courses lack rigor?'

"Also we will immediately throw any graduate student TA or instructor who upsets an influential constituency under the bus, no matter how obviously manufactured their outrage is." 🤷‍♂️

the primary thing that TPUSA provides to young conservatives is a blueprint for weaponizing the abject cowardice of university administrators against individual teachers and instructors, and university admins should take a long look in the mirror and think about what that says about them

"Miles Hewstone no longer holds the honorific title of Emeritus Fellow at New College, which is part of Oxford. He has resigned as a fellow of the British Academy, a respected body that promotes humanities and social sciences."

archive.is/2025.11.28-1...

Don't hate me for what I am about to say, but BlueSky engagement is <<< Twitter engagement (for better or worse).

Mapping Deportations: What 58 Million Removals Reveal about the History of the U.S. Immigration System Over two centuries of deportation data and restrictive laws show that immigration enforcement is not a neutral process but a racial boundary-making system built across decades of policy decisions.

Important, sobering writeup on the history of deportation policies and practices

Trump is a matter of degree, not kind

Notable to me is that many tactics he’s using were signed into law in 1996… for those who think it’s a “them” thing

Thanks @austinkocher.com

open.substack.com/pub/austinko...

‘Northern Exposure’ actor gave ICE agents in Redmond her tribal ID. They called it ‘fake,’ she says Indigenous actor Elaine Miles of "Northern Exposure" was detained by ICE at a Redmond bus stop. When she showed them her Tribal ID, they told her it was fake.

ICE DETAINED MARILYN. Fuck these people. www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news...

'Slop Evader' Lets You Surf the Web Like It’s 2022 Artist Tega Brain is fighting the internet’s enshittification by turning back the clock to before ChatGPT existed.

Slop Evader is a tool from artist and researcher Tega Brain that lets you search the web for results exclusively before November 30, 2022—the day that ChatGPT was released to the public.

Dems need to keep repeating it, and they need to say what mean. “You can refuse illegal orders,

examples of illegal orders are: intentionally harming or targeting civilians, engaging in unauthorized domestic LE actions, falsifying records, or anything else that clearly violates the US constitution”

I think it’s pretty clear at this point that one of the main impacts of LLMs is to disrupt thinking: to make it so that far too many people never properly learn how to do it, and then to control the output so there are thoughts that people never learn how to think.