William M. Cavert

William M. Cavert

@williamcavert.bsky.social

Historian of Britain, its animals, pollution, energy, climate, nature, and people. Author of The Smoke of London: Energy and Environment in the Early Modern City. Living in St Paul, MN.

2.1K followers1.7K following1.3K posts

he further added "and our schools are so infected with the woke mindvirus that they don't teach the homoousianism promulgated by Patriarch Anatolius at Chalcedon. This is monophysitism and nestorianism run amok."

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com

JD Vance says of the Middle East that it's "a region of the world made up of countries whose name I couldn't even pronounce"

William M. Cavert reposted

You're thinking of capital accumulation all wrong, as if I had the money back in a safe. The money's not in yachts or jewelry, why your money's in Joe's house, that's right next to yours, and in the Kennedy house, and Mrs Maitland's house, and a hundred others.

Most billionaire wealth isn't in yachts or jewelry — that's just a few percent of it. Most is productive business capital: companies that employ people, build things, and fund research. Tax that wealth and you're taxing the businesses that employ us all. Cato's Adam Michel explains.

William M. Cavert reposted

Unidos/Monarca, known for providing some of the backbone infrastructure of this winter's resistance to ICE in Minnesota, has shifted to election protection. The Trump administration has unsuccessfully pushed for access to state voter rolls and will send DOJ observers. www.mprnews.org/story/2026/1...

mprnews.orgWith lessons learned in ICE surge, Twin Cities advocates shift to 'election defense'People who actively opposed the surge of federal immigration agents into Minnesota over the winter are working now to prepare voters to respond if federal officials interfere with people’s ability to ...

In Minnesota a sitting senator, Amy Klobuchar, is running for governor by stressing that she prosecuted a corrupt judge 25 years ago. I wonder if criticizing our currently pro-dictatorship, pro-war crime foreign policy might offer her an even better opportunity.

Ron Filipkowski@ronfilipkowski.bsky.social

Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff to Vladimir Putin today: “You talk so much about Trump being a humanitarian, you are a humanitarian also, sir. And I salute that. I commend you.”

Looking forward to a trade being available on polymarket so that I can bet all of my money and house on this not happening.

CNN@cnn.com

Elon Musk has said he will give every child in America a stake in SpaceX, his $2 trillion aerospace and artificial intelligence company, as tech firms face intensifying scrutiny over their impact on society. https://cnn.it/4yWTjTJ

William M. Cavert reposted

The problem with transit spending in America isn't that we don't spend enough, it's that we completely squander the giant budget we have.

Interested Milwaukee Citizen@citizenmke.bsky.social

Look at how much infrastructure was required to allow passengers to cross a 2 track line to allow boarding on the other platform. For a service that runs 7 times a day. I think this took 3.5 years to build and cost nearly $20 million

Today I read, for the first time, Senator Charles Sumner's 1856 speech "The Crime Against Kansas," in which he quotes poets and Roman historians and calls slavery a harlot. It was a 5-hr masterpiece of rhetoric. This speech does not remind me of it.

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com

Trump claims he has already talked to Google about changing the name of the Atlantic Ocean to the "Trump Ocean"

Why does the Chronicle endlessly insist on quoting people like Lepore - a public intellectual, a high-volume writer - as if they can speak about American higher ed in general? If you want to talk about teaching ask the people who do the teaching.

Jill Lepore, staff writer at The New Yorker and Harvard professor, uses AI in her own research and sees real promise in it. But she argues higher ed is failing students if it treats machine-written work as education. https://chroni.cl/4e3WLU2

William M. Cavert reposted

An important bit of immigration law which is relevant here; there is already a waiver process — Section 212(k) of the INA — by which immigrants who obtain status through fraud that they didn't know about can avoid consequences like losing a green card. So this is *even weaker* than it already seems.

Bill Grueskin@bgrueskin.bsky.social

Via Fox News, natch: A criminal raid, right before the election, based on some paperwork Omar’s dad filled out decades ago www.foxnews.com/politics/ilh...

William M. Cavert reposted

I’m ok. Make no mistake: this is an attempt to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement. For ten years, Trump has targeted me with baseless lies and smear campaigns. This is just the latest escalation in his campaign of political intimidation. I will not be silenced.

"Reshaped."

NPR@npr.org

Harmeet Dhillon has pushed out hundreds of longtime attorneys, replaced many with inexperienced ideological allies, and used the division's enforcement powers to pursue the president's agenda. n.pr/4s4xZsW

William M. Cavert reposted

90% of how Rubio described “the West” while in Athens (e.g., "fierce individuality,” “relentless ambition”) is just a rehashing of ideas plucked from Ayn Rand. Encouraging people to “ethical egoism” is how we got this level of inequality—which now sits at a higher level than Ancient Athens ever had.

Presumably implementing such laws would entail US courts deciding what counts as sharia. So to keep islamic law out of American courts, American courts would have to pronounce on islamic law. It'll be interesting to see whether the Roberts court leans more Maliki or Hanafi.

The Washington Post@washingtonpost.com

Anti-sharia legislation have soared in number across the U.S. in the past two years, a Post analysis found. The trend comes as polls show anti-Muslim sentiment by some measures is nearly double what it was just after the 9/11 attacks.

On shared governance of universities. Which, it's worth remembering, is how European universities began: as self-governing organizations of scholars, who students could pay to learn from. Not as employees of anyone else, not as servants to a board of regents or CEO.

Michael Bérubé@michael-berube.bsky.social

I wrote about academic freedom and democracy for the Pittsburgh Review of Books, but I didn't say the usual things you would expect a person to say about academic freedom and democracy. I said other things instead. Hence the title of the essay! tinyurl.com/2skc3aum Thanks to Ed Simon for the gig.

In terms of scale and impact this is probably the biggest scandal in the global history of professional sports. And the perpetrators, who have always proclaimed their innocence, revealed that their "irrefutable" defense is the flimsiest thing imaginable.

One of the absurdities of this is how many mission statements there are, at the level of institution, college, and department. Such statements get painstakingly crafted and then routinely ignored by the people in who are most entrusted with following them.

Faculty lines are treated in the neoliberal university as rewards for departments that bring in revenue (whether that revenue is in the form of grants or majors-yes, to admin, students are just a budget line). This gets the relationship between majors and investment in departments exactly wrong.

Hiking in wild nature became popular after industrialization with people who found industry to be damaging, ugly, unhealthy, alienating, or scary. So the word "because" is up to some strange tricks here.

Jay Willis@jaywillis.net

The Washington Post opinion section is an elaborate experiment to find the least compelling angle on everything

William M. Cavert reposted

Liberal coastal elites, leave your ivory silos and get out there and understand these people. They are concerned about the decline of the white working class.

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com

"Please right your right hand. I pledge to the greatest president in history that loves us so much he can't even breathe" -- in extremely culty scene, Trump has his supporters pledge to him that they will vote, then tells them they will "go to hell" if they don't Here's the full sequence:

Please read my first book, "Yes, It Is!" Also, please read my second book, "But Sometimes, No It Isn't."

John Warner@biblioracle.bsky.social

I'm sure Angela Duckworth is a nice and well-meaning person, but I find this interview with her at the College Matters podcast infuriating because her new stance appears to strongly resemble critiques of grit from before that first book even came out. www.chronicle.com/podcast/coll...

William M. Cavert reposted

Our refugee program, created under law by our Congress, no longer exists. The Administration is illegally using it as a visa for exclusively white people from a single country (South Africa), which has zero relation to Congress's intent and design. Congress could end this perversion tomorrow.

Two Christian groups conclude in a new report that Trump and his team have turned their backs on persecuted Christians around the world. The Trump admin did not admit a single persecuted Christian refugee to the U.S. in FY 2026. @mclem.org @douglasrivlin.bsky.social www.forbes.com/sites/stuart...

I also went to the MN State Fair today and we also noticed the sparse attendance at the Republican booths, plus the ways that they had zero reference to the leader of their party. No Trump flags, no slogans, just local nonsense cultural politics like revising the (very racist) former MN state flag.

David Brauer@dbrauer.net

Two things struck me about this in my admittedly limited 4 hours at the Fair: how persona non-grata the new flag is — even the Fair doesn’t fly it — and how little GOP-coded stuff I saw folks wearing (it was Labor Day so maybe most had gone back home?). Flag is objectively unpopular; GOP too?

"revising" should be "reverting to", because the state formerly had a terrible flag that no one liked, so it was replaced with something better/fine, and of course Republicans now pretend that the old terrible flag was their beloved heritage and must be brought back

Spoiler alert! Lord of the Rings is about some hobbits who live peacefully because the hard men of Gondor successfully maintain law and order.

Toby Buckle@polphilpod.bsky.social

this is an overtly fascist narrative - even the misreading of myth & literature is on brand

William M. Cavert reposted

Every. day. Everyday one of these ICE charter planes has to abort takeoff, or do an emergency return, or has a decompression, or gets stuck somewhere for 20+ hours with shackled immigrant passengers trapped onboard. And we never find out why. There is no transparency.

JJ in DC@jjindc.bsky.social

🧊✈️ YOUR DAILY DIVERT 😬 ⚠️ A GlobalX jet (tail: N319NV) bound for San Diego makes circles in the sky after takeoff before aborting its mission & returning to the ICE hub in Harlingen 👀

Looking forward to Dem leadership examining what kinds of tax deductions to grant for end-times related expenses: "When the sun becomes black as sackcloth made of goat hair and the moon becomes as blood, hardworking family farmers deserve a little help."

FactPost@factpostnews.bsky.social

Vance: I'm trying to focus on doing as much of God's work as possible. And if that leads to the end times, okay

Sahil Kapur@sahilkapur.bsky.social

What @hakeem-jeffries.bsky.social told me the House agenda will be next year if Democrats win —Reverse Trump’s Medicaid cuts —Extend expired ACA tax credits —Restore Congress’s authority on tariffs —“Decisively” end the Iran war Beyond that: “We’ve established five working groups on affordability”