Sam Ulmschneider

My local small, high-quality private liberal arts uni, which uses its private resources to fund enormous broad financial aid, is being sued by the admin for having two scholarships with minority-priority and one with women-priority. That's how we're spending our natn'l civil rights law resources.

I haven't been an optimist abt SCOTUS for a long time, but I was at least an institutionalist of a cautious 'imperfect mutually workable institutions are better than shredded ones' variety. The most recent spate of concurrences, especially for this one, is rapid-firing nails into the coffin of that.

I’ve been thinking about this and it’s like four degrees of difference from us just pulling a Lusitania. 1) Germany never claimed US was a terrorist regime 2) scale/numbers 3) drugs aren’t arms to an opponent in a declared war 4) no published warnings of changes in use of force policy in Venezuela.

one of those films that I'd love to get a genuine and uncalibrated, unmediated reaction from a Gen Z audience about is Pulp Fiction. I genuinely have no idea how its pacing, references, aesthetic sensibilities, or pacing hold up to contemporary preferences and modalities.

jesus christ I can log off for....five hours?...and the President has, while I wasn't looking, decided nuclear arms testing escalation races are back on the table despite the fact that ending nuclear arms testing escalation was one of the Great Bipartisan and Multilateral Achievements of decades.

Who are 5 artists you have in heavy rotation right now? grandson Dessa They Might Be Giants Malinky The Black Keys Amon Amarth

You know, even in a scenario where Dems win midterms & the next Presidency, no sane person will want to be the next President because the entire term will be spent trying to untangle the gnarl of impossibilities into which the exec branch has been tangled they'll have no time for their initiatives.

I think one of the reasons I like David Blight so much is that his intellectual attitude and preoccupations are somehow a preservation of most of the good things about the Baby Boom generational idealism and literary or lecture style, and very few of their bad traits.

Increasingly think that getting older just means that some version of the blues will become more my favorite genre of music each year imperceptibly and ineluctably until, decades from now, I just sit on the porch and menacingly tell everyone else they don't even know the half of it if they dare ask.

things are really going just fine here in the civics, polisci, history educational space space, I promise (gift link)

The fact that districts have to pay significant money for a basically de rigeur secure channel, through a specialized web based application, to help their students apply to college effectively, is really a nice keyhole into just how weird overgrown our educational system has gotten w rent seekers.

serious procedural question: in previous long shutdowns, why didn't SNAP face serious likelihood of cuts, including the longer shutdown in 2018-19? Was there some separate appropriate or mechanism which applied to SNAP in those confrontations which does not in this one?

National polarization makes basic gov/polisci/civics so hard to teach. Federalism: the system whereby states in which the opposition party to the party in power at the national level obtains powerful procedural and policy tools to impede the policy priorities of the national government?