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I haven't spent my whole life responding to people being rude, or stupid, or dangerous with knee jerk compassion. It's a new habit. The first time I did that as the lead for my lab, it was because the guy genuinely was so good natured that I knew something had to be off. But the other two times were just me going, alright, lets see if it always goes this well, and so far, it has. I'm almost 30, and I just figured out that the #1 reason people are shitty are because they are going through shit.

I don't think you have, like, a moral obligation to respond to people being jerks with knee jerk compassion. But it has made my life so much easier the last four months that I would recommend trying. For your own sake. Please.

Equiping an armor tutorial

yeah our covid safe hour. for the first hour of our event we're asking everyone to wear masks. obviously everyone who needs protection from pathogens can arrive exactly on time and won't take longer than an hour to go through our whole event. not like they've got anything else to do, or any sort of time restrictions.

texas tech's quartback, brendan sorsby, was investigated for sports gambling. i know sports betting is all the rage right now, but athletes themselves are not allowed to do it. it is Rule Number 1 and it is the highest priority rule for the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), who governs all athletic programs at about 1,100 colleges in the US.

the invesitagetion of sorsby revealed that, not only did he place more than 9,000 sports bets when he himself was a collegiate athlete, but 40 of those bets were AGAINST HIS OWN TEAM when he was playing at indiana university. immediately, this threatens the integrity of the sport, and especially because indiana is the hottest team right now as the defending national champion.

the NCAA, which is largely a sham organization these days (they've truly lost their grasp and college athletics are the wild west now) actually enforced their Number 1 Rule and told sorsby his career is over, that he would never play college football again (and, subsequently, that he would never get drafted into the NFL because his college career was cut short).

well, because the NCAA is a husk of its former self, sorsby and texad tech immediately took this to court. MANY athletes have learned these past few seasons that if you can find a judge who's a fan of your team, you can get any NCAA ruling overturned. that's exactly what texas tech did. they filed a suit in Lubbock, where the university is located and where every judge is an alum of texas tech. so sorsby was granted an injunction and will now only be suspended for the first 2 games od the 2026 season (which are alwayd against no-name teams that will be destroyed regardless of who's suspended).

every other school in the country immediately went on the defensive because this is a very clear integretiy issue. so nebraska and georgia (sic em dawgs) released statements saying that all currently-scheduled competitions witb Texas Tech in ANY sport will be canceled and there will be no future schedulings. at least 3 of the major conferences (SEC, Big 10, Big 12) , who account for almost all division 1 sports teams in the country, are also in discussions about cancelling comtests. Texas Tech is part of the Big 12, and there is serious talk of all other teams in the conference shutting texas tech out.

now would probably be time where i say that texas tech is one of the wealthiest programs in college football becaise there is a single billionaire alumnus pouring money into the program with hopes of essentially buying a championship. so texas techs integrity has always been questionable. anyway, the university president put oit a statement that he doesnt care that sorseby violated regulation and that texas tech will sue any school that refuses to play them because it jeopardizes their championship prospects if they're umable to play any games.

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:

"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"