School District Saturday – 2025 03 15

We’ll start today with the biggest news, which is the change of heart from the half of the board of Keller ISD which makes the decisions, and move on from there. The themes are clear: districts have a lot of money problems, small districts are going to four days a week, and a lot of kids need to get vaccinated.

Pride goeth before a fall

One of the major stories in the Metroplex this week is that Robert Morris, the former pastor of Gateway Church in Southlake, has been indicted on five counts of lewd or indecent acts to a child in Oklahoma. Morris was a travelling preacher in Oklahoma in the 1980s when he met Cindy Clemishire, who was then 12 years old, and began to molest her. This story had come out inside Gateway Church over the years, but only became publicly known when Clemishire told her story about how Morris abused her for five years last June. Morris resigned and Gateway has been splintering ever since.

Part of the problem with Gateway was that it had a bad culture, as described in this DMN article. When the story of Morris’ disgrace came out, he initially responded that he’d had a moral failure with “a young lady” 35 years ago; at least some Gateway elders didn’t know that she was a pre-teen even though the so-called moral failure had come up as early as 2007.

One of the things the DMN article describesis the culture of megachurches like Gateway, which has about 19,000 in-person attendees every week now, after membership has dropped by at least a quarter from its heights. Morris, who had become a celebrity evangelist and a spiritual advisor to Donald Trump, was apparently a talented preacher, and his leadership had made the church one of America’s largest. But there was rot at the heart of Gateway Church, one that manifested in ways that the DMN describes, and now Gateway has fallen: financially, in attendance, and morally. And yet, as the DMN notes, some parishioners, even women who have been abused, still want Robert Morris back as pastor.

Sources:

Closing my tabs – 2025 03 13

I got sick, so enjoy some things I have been reading:

Resources: Calling your reps (federal and state)

If you’d like to do something about whatever your representatives in Austin are doing and/or not doing, one of the things you can do is call to tell them what you’re thinking. It’s not that hard, especially if you have a script to tell you what to say on the issue you care about. But first you have to find those scripts!

A few things about calling your reps (state or federal): only call your reps, because they only care about people who can vote them out of office. Sometimes you’ll see requests to call chairs of committees, but unless they work for you as a constituent, that’s not going to help. With a lot of scripts, you’ll see “I’m a constituent at [address/zip code]” which is to tell them you can vote against them.

If you haven’t done it before, you don’t have to worry about what to say to the staffers beyond the script. They just want to report to their boss what the constituents are calling about and how many are for or against their boss’ position. Very rarely will you get a staffer pushing back; I’ve been calling for years and only once has it ever happened to me. If they do that, remind them they work for you or just hang up and call back later.

Federal level scripts:

  • 5 Calls, which has a web page, an app, and an email newsletter, is a great resource for scripts by issue. They’ll find the numbers for your congressperson and senators with your address and walk you through the process. It’s very easy even if you’ve never done it before.
  • Indivisible, the activist group, has a good resource list that includes call scripts for a bunch of issues at the federal level. They have a newsletter and they’ll send you to-dos every week.
  • Resistbot is a chat bot you can use with your message app on your phone to generate faxes, postal mail, or emails to your representatives. They also have a function to check your voter registration. Resistbot used to be free (the voter registration still is) but now requires donations to keep going because it gets so much use. They also have an app, but I haven’t used it.
  • Home With the Armadillo, the blog of journalist and activist Andrea Grimes, has started a series of Red State scripts. Useful for those of us who live in places like Texas (she’s in Austin).

State level scripts in Texas:

  • Howdy Politics has both Texas and federal call scripts. I know Substack is problematic (to say the least) but this is where the information is in this case.
  • The League of Women Voters has letters/emails to send to your representative which you can also use for call scripts.
  • I also see state scripts in Reddit’s Texas Politics subreddit. Reddit, like Substack, has its problems but if you’re just skimming and not getting into fights in the comments, even the Texas politics subreddit can be usable.

A lot of these folks are going to want your money (Indivisible, LWV, and of course Substack is constantly pushing readers to upgrade their pledge). The only one that’s pay to play at the time of writing is Resistbot, which is understandable since they function on text messages.

There are plenty of other ways to get into activism at the federal and state levels. This is just a starting point and a post I hope to revisit and update as I find more resources.

Sources/Resources – The Texas Tribune

The Texas Tribune is an online nonprofit journalism outlet that covers news throughout the state. It was founded in 2009; everybody who’s anybody in nonprofits and foundations in Texas has given them some money. In addition to their journalism, they put together a lot of events, most importantly the Texas Tribune Festival.

Two of the three co-founders were well-known Texas journalists; Evan Smith left the editor’s job at Texas Monthly to start the Tribune and Ross Ramsey also had a long career in journalism in Dallas and Houston. (The other guy was the money man.) The Tribune doesn’t have an editorial section at all. They collaborate with other journalism non-profits like ProPublica on big stories, and have broken a few on their own.

I’ve been reading the Tribune since they started publishing and I find them informative and reliable. I haven’t been a regular donor, but I do read their newsletter every morning and find it a valuable resource, so I probably ought to kick in at some point. In addition to their own stories, the Tribune also points out a handful of pieces by other outlets every day. That’s the kind of thing that makes me like and trust their judgement.

Closing my tabs – 2025 03 02

Eruditorium Press: The Cuddled Little Vice (Sandman). Part of a much larger (book-length, I think) story the author is writing on English comics, this very long essay is focused on the career of Neil Gaiman. It does cover his abuse of women, especially toward the end, but it’s also damning intellectually and emotionally even before you get to that.
Jo Blo: Hundreds of your Warner Bros DVDs probably don’t work anymore. Today I learned about disk rot, which is hitting most of the DVDs manufactured between 2006 and 2008 by WB. Apparently a bunch of classic Hollywood films are effectively gone: not on streaming and the DVDs have rotted. I guess it’s gonna be a pirate’s life for a lot of people.
CNN: A Ramadan etiquette guide for non-Muslims. A lot of this is common sense, but maybe common sense isn’t that common.
Reactor: Severance Is the Future Tech Bros Want. I’m beginning to think I’m going to have to watch this show.
Fritinancy: The new New Colossus “With apologies to Emma Lazarus and Percy Bysshe Shelley”. Ouch.
The Guardian: ‘A chilling effect’: is Hollywood too scared to touch hot-button documentaries? I’d like to see a number of the films described in this article, but I’m a pinko commie.
CultureMap Houston: New study proposes converting Houston offices into dorm-style apartments. I’d’ve done this when I was a young single if it had been an option.
Weird Medieval Guys: My favourite etymologies: “to curry favour”. Today I learned the very medieval origin of this term.
NY Times: A Day of American Infamy. You know things have gone to shit when you’re agreeing with Bret Stephens.
Seattle Times: To understand right-wing media’s power, study improv and theater of influencers. Interesting approach to this topic.
NY Post: Hey, RFK: Go to Texas and prove you mean it on vaccines. New York newspapers hate the Trump administration.
Bleeping Computer: Apple pulls iCloud end-to-end encryption feature in the UK. It’s a warrant canary: the UK government demanded a back door and gagged them, so all Apple could do was pull the feature. Related: Washington Post: Biden Justice Department downplayed U.K. demand for Apple ‘back door’. If that’s actually true (according to the article, it looks like the report in question preceded the demand), bad cess to them. If it’s not, the Post should have written a better headline.
The Guardian: A cosmic Jackson Pollock: Kathleen Kennedy’s Star Wars tenure has been marked by chaos. It boggles me that this article doesn’t discuss the misogyny of a small but vocal set of Star Wars “fans”. I don’t disagree with what the author says, but he missed a bet there and also by failing to compare and contrast with the work of Kevin Feige on the MCU. There was a lot of that kind of discussion when the MCU was hot and Star Wars was not, but now that they’re both in the dumps, nobody wants to talk about how hard showrunning a vast, interconnected story universe is. Much of my thinking is informed by articles about Kennedy’s departure like this one at Lainey Gossip: Intro for February 27, 2025 which is mostly about Kennedy.
Fansplaining: Sam Wilson Deserved Better Than Brave New World. I hesitate to go to Marvel movies these days and this expresses a lot of my hesitation here despite the fact that one of my favorite actors is in a lead (antagonist) role. Also: See what I mean about Star Wars?
Food & Wine: What Is the Guinness Widget and How Does It Work? This was pretty interesting to me because back in the 1990s I drafted a statement in support of a work visa for a guy who’d been involved in developing the original can widget for Guinness. This is a different process.
The Verge: Cars will need fewer screens and more buttons to earn 5-star safety rating in Europe. I drive a touchscreen car and while I’ve adjusted to it in the months since I’ve owned it, I think this is a wise move.
BBC: A border split my family’s language. Now I’m bringing it back. It’s Sindh and I’d never heard of it.
Publisher’s Weekly: Readerlink Will Stop Distributing Mass Market Paperbacks at the End of 2025. This means your supermarkets and box stores, which are two-thirds or more of the market, are going to stop carrying mass market paperbacks completely. We’re going to hardback/trade paperback/digital as our book formats.
Eater: What Should You Do if ICE Comes to Your Restaurant? Probably good to know, and about what I expected.
Ukulele magazine: Great Ukes: Alvin Keech May or May Not Have Invented the Banjo Uke, but He Certainly Helped Popularize It. Today I learned.

School District Saturday – 2025 03 01

This week our news again centers on Tarrant County, specifically Fort Worth and Keller ISDs. Fort Worth has been holding community meetings on school closures. Keller ISD is continuing doing whatever it thinks it’s doing.

Judge Clifford Davis

This month I learned about Judge Clifford Davis, one of the heroes of the Civil Rights era who helped desegregate Fort Worth area schools. His death earlier this month at the ripe old age of 100 caps a well-lived life. He litigated the cases that desegregated Mansfield and Fort Worth ISDs; he was the first elected Black judge in Tarrant County (in 1983); he established the first drug diversion court in Tarrant County. Fort Worth ISD named a school in his honor. I wish I’d learned more about Black Texans like him when I was in high school in the early 1980s.

Across the stories I read about Judge Davis, Black figures in Fort Worth and Tarrant County spoke of his mentorship, his fairness, and his commitment to justice. The Texas Monthly obituary gave me a great sense of the man and the tribute by Tarrant County Commissioner Roderick Miles Jr. gave me a sense of the good his mentorship did for others who followed in his footsteps. May Judge Davis rest in power, especially in this time where we have to fight to hold the gains he made.

Sources:

The plague years

The spread of measles in Texas has been on everyone’s mind since the first case showed up in Gaines County. This week, we’ve had three developments, all of which are trouble.

First, measles may have spread from west Texas to central Texas, specifically San Antonio. Someone from Gaines County toured UT San Antonio and ate and hung out at locations in town. I found this out just after we got back from Austin; the number of times we took day trips down there when we lived in Austin has been much on our minds this week. Health authorities think the possible contact got measles after the San Antonio trip but they’re being proactive.

Second, tragically, one of the unvaccinated kids in the Gaines County outbreak has died. It’s the first measles death in a decade. Unfortunately it’s probably not going to be the last.

Third, and most relevant for Dallas area folks, we now have a confirmed measles case in Rockwall County, on the eastern end of the Metroplex. It’s not believed to be connected to the Gaines County cases, either.

Measles is highly contagious. If you’re not vaccinated, get to your doctor or health clinic. Older folks should also check with their doctors about being boosted; in the 1970s and 1980s doctors only gave one MMR (measles/mumps/rubella) vaccine and now the schedule calls for two doses. I already had a message in the system to my GP about possibly getting a booster. I’ll be elevating that to a phone call when the office opens.

Sources:

Book Review: The Anti-Ableist Manifesto by Tiffany Yu

The Anti-Ableist Manifesto: Smashing Stereotypes, Forging Change, and Building a Disability-Inclusive World by Tiffany Yu. This was a solid read, but I felt old and sad while reading. Old because I’d never have dreamt of showing Yu’s boldness around my disabilities; sad because considering disability activism and accommodations during Trump II is depressing.

The structure of the book is solid: short chapters with bullet points and questions for reflection. I’ll need to reread it slowly to answer the chapter questions. Yu communicated her values and goals and the steps to achieve them clearly. At the same time, the book has a millennial vibe about disability accommodation: proactive, identity-based, and assuming good faith in dealing with employers, businesses, and government, an assumption I don’t share. Some of this comes up explicitly in her chapters on working with disabilities. Yu’s optimism about improving workplaces doesn’t jibe with my experience. Her experience with government in California is also different to what I’d expect in Texas.

Part of our difference is generational, but also I’m reading the book in 2025. It was published before the election, which not only changed federal government but also confirmed a cultural change hostile to DEIA. President Trump is openly eugenicist and HHS Secretary Kennedy plans to solve chronic illness and other health problems by “reparenting” patients in organic work farms. Within the context of the manifesto, it makes sense that Yu barely mentioned the eugenic discrimination in triage of COVID patients. Yet the widespread acceptance of discrimination against the disabled during COVID both parallels and foreshadows the open bigotry of the current Republican administration.

A book that addressed those issues wouldn’t be Yu’s manifesto, though I’d read a book by Yu that addresses continued advocacy and community with other marginalized groups in a 2025 context. All of her advice is good and similar to that I’ve read for and by other marginalized groups. It’s just going to be harder to follow now than it would have been when Yu wrote it.

Part of the discomfort I felt while reading Yu’s book was internalized ableism and the feeling that I don’t do enough advocacy for myself or around disability in general. I’m glad Yu got over those feelings. Her book points the way to a world where disability doesn’t evoke shame and anger because the conditions that lead to them have changed for the better or been eliminated completely.