An Aggie Joke

Texans are fond of Aggie jokes.  The idea is that Texas A & M students are very very stupid.  A mother tells her Aggie son to put on a pair of clean socks every day.  After a week he couldn’t get his shoes on.  Or how about the one where the Aggie plans to build a spaceship to sample the sun’s surface and is told that the sun will burn up the spaceship.  He says not to worry.  They will launch at night.  You get the idea.  Just search for “Aggie Jokes” and they will come up.

Here’s another.  An Aggie student filmed her professor in a class called “Literature for Children” and sent the film to a Texas legislator.  She claimed the prof was not following Trump’s executive order, promulgated on his first day in office, that U.S. policy would only recognize two sexes, male and female, and would enforce that rule.  So the professor was fired.  So much for academic freedom.  So much for free speech.  And what kind of student, instead of engaging the prof in a discussion, sends a film to a legislator?

And what kind of legislator acts like that?  Maybe it isn’t the Aggies at Texas A & M.  Maybe it’s the whole damn state.

See Vimal Patel and J. David Goodman, “Texas Professor Fired After Accusations of Teaching ‘Gender Ideology,’ “ New York Times, (Sept. 11, 2025), p. A14.

The Charlie Kirk murder

At a meeting tonight somebody mentioned that Charlie Kirk was murdered.  My first reaction was, “Who?”  One of the advantages of not being connected to any type of social media is that I don’t see or hear a great number of “influencers,” as they are called.  I am told that Mr. Kirk was a major influencer for millions of people.

I also heard that he had two small children.  I’m not sure why anyone would want to kill him.  Why not just turn him off if you didn’t like him? 

Why do humans walk upright?

 Actually I don’t any more.  I’m walking rather bent over from arthritis and spine problems, but that’s not what I want to talk about.  Charles Darwin noticed in “The Descent of Man” that apes and gorillas and chimps did not walk upright.  To quote Darwin, “Man alone has become a biped.”  He said bipedalism was one of mankind’s “most conspicuous characters.”

The secret is in the largest bone in your pelvis.  It is called the ilium.  It evolved to its present shape as our brains got larger, and the birth passage had to accommodate those larger heads.  Dr. Terence Capellini, a developmental geneticist at Harvard and a colleague, Gayani Senevirathne, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard, have been studying chimp and ape skeletons and embryos preserved in a number of museums.

They hope to discover how the changes in the pelvis may have made us vulnerable to certain pelvic disorders.

In May the Trump administration terminated billions of dollars of funding to Harvard, including the grant that supported the pelvis research.  Dr. Capellini and his researchers were two years into a five year project.

Dr. Capallini said, “We are wondering what would have come next had we not lost this funding.”  

Information for this post, including the quotations, is from Carl Zimmer, “The Evolutionary Steps to Standing Upright,” New York Times, (Sept. 9, 2025), p.D4.

Protest in Lehighton

The group Indivisible is calling for a nationwide protest on Oct. 18.  In Carbon County the last three protests have been held in Jim Thorpe, but Jim Thorpe is a tourist town, and all the leaf peepers show up in force–literally thousands.  

As a result we are holding this demonstration in Lehighton along Stanley Hoffman boulevard, also known as Route 209.  Tonight my friend Midge told the Lehighton Borough Council where and when we were planning to demonstrate.  I went along for moral support.  Or in my case, maybe just support.  

I thought we might get some flack from the Council, but they thanked Midge for the heads up.  That went well.

Changing the names of government agencies

Trump is changing the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War.  He is not stopping. 

The EPA is now the EDA. 

The Justice Department is now the Retribution Department.

The Department of Energy is now the Department of Oil and Coal.

The CDC is now simply the CD.

ICE is still ICE, however.  Gestapo didn’t make the cut.

Northern California Fire Report

Our daughter works for a social service agency in Northern California.  Every few days at her work, the agency gets a list by county of the fires currently burning, the containment, and whether the agency’s clients are affected.  

Here’s an example for Siskiyou County, from Sept. 4.  Five fires were burning in Siskiyou.  This was one:

“Dillon Fire, 9,374 acres, 21% contained.  Protection on the eastern side of the fire improved over night.  This fire is still a risk as it has been growing into nearby drainages and growing in a western direction.”  

Siskiyou was not the only county with a fire.  Trinity had three, Butte had one, Tehama one, and Shasta one.  There were ten other fires but they were either under an acre or posed no threat.

In the meantime, Trump and Trump voters who put him in office are doing their best to stop alternative energy sources and even get rid of existing windmills and solar power generators.  The latest report from the administration says that global warming is not a real threat to our future.

 

"Driving while Black" in 1963

I just finished a book by black author John A. Williams entitled This is My Country Too.   It was written in 1963, the year President Kennedy was assassinated.  Williams, the author of the 1967 best seller The Man Who Cried I Am, was assigned by Holiday Magazine to travel around the U.S. and report back.  He put 15,000 miles on the car, traveling to the South, California, the Northwest and Southwest.  He was pulled over by cops for what we call today a DWB offense, was refused service, had to sleep in black-owned motels in the South, but also had some white friends he looked up along the way, and he visited some great jazz clubs.

He mentions getting sick a few times, and no wonder.  It was not easy being a lone black man driving across the U.S. in 1963.  It still is not easy, but you probably won’t get turned down when you stop at a hotel.

In an “Afterword” Williams wrote that the trip had been a real trial.  “I had had to reach the conclusion that man as I knew him best in America, was not basically good as is always suggested but evil in the primitive possessive, and destructive sense.  I knew good people existed; I had been fortunate in meeting many of them.  But stack American upon American, reach into the heap and pull one out and the chances of getting hold of one who measured up to the ideal American we all would like to be would be practically nil.”

Williams died in 2015.  I wonder if he had the same attitude when he died.  I think today he would.