No School Bus

on my walks, no school buses this year. First time in a decade that I haven’t seen a bus somewhere in my 5 miler. Second day out, I saw one so I knew school was in session. All the kids in my area had graduated. They left for college. Or, something else.

creationism : “Where the appeal to evidence fails so completely, the appeal to tolerance cannot succeed,” writes Kitcher. The pattern, of course, has not ended with creationism.

— NOTES FROM TEXAS TEACHER FIRINGS.. include? executive order leaglism. deb: assignments… what refs in your religion? — show course description clearly states gender topic. The teacher was fired because the retired general is afraid of sock puppets of the X social. He was as afraid of them as they are of jet trails and puppy dog tails. Wrong general for this fight.

Her syllabus clearly states: special focus on diversity in gender… [see the clip] The page was quick to be deleted, just not quicker than my screen grab.

Build a career by trolling academics. post your righteous indignation .. The blues of the collar denounce the scholar . Smurfing your way to a payday — nodding to Chuck and Church

In Texas, this is the Curriculum.

Great way to sell college. Two girls for every ROTC. Texas, what a great state for knowledge.

more at other posts: Uniform of the Day

[mccool – Building the next generation of the Warrior Class along with the Dog Patch workers.

To the point: Texas isn’t about education. Not that they don’t love another tax break.

Along comes this worthwhile general read: https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-department-of-education-changing-public-schools

Earlier this year, the Trump administration enacted cuts to academic research, curtailed visas for foreign students — especially those from China — and increased taxes on elite schools

In May, Trump alleged top U.S. universities are cradles of anti-American movements and revoked Harvard University’s ability to enroll foreign students, a move later blocked by a federal judge.

— more: https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2025/11/25/professor-texas-used-to-have-universities/

ongoing — https://dailynous.com/2026/01/16/texas-am-administrators-will-cancel-your-course-if-you-dont-tell-them-exactly-where-and-what-its-race-and-gender-parts-are/

friday: figs and chords

[A cord is a long flexible string or rope, often made of thinner pieces woven together. A chord is “three or more musical tones played together.”

how multiple meanings can multiply intent . 

The fig tree is about choices of paths .. Sylvia Plath […I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig-tree, starving to death, just becaus I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one they plopped to the ground at my feet….]

and, taking a break from my fig tree thinking I returned to a question about musical chords ..arriving at :

nick drake… success after death.. finding the commercial in the commercial . The time for memory selling the past .. The acoustic over automobile speakers … mechanized memory .

https://youtu.be/fBdbRoSrWr4?si=-S9K02k4Qc3OPSir

Even successful artists carry doubts. Success is never fully sustaining. Success never reduces doubt among the most creative artists.

[ often grouped with existentialist thinkers, Camus consistently rejected the existentialist label, insisting that his philosophy of the absurd was distinct from both Kierkegaard’s leap of faith and Heidegger’s ontology of Being. Instead, Camus argued that the confrontation between humanity’s “appetite for meaning” and the universe’s “unreasonable silence” constituted the absurd, which must be lived with clarity rather than resolved by appeal to transcendence ]

https://www2.hawaii.edu/~freeman/courses/phil360/16.%20Myth%20of%20Sisyphus.pdf

Camus, Albert, The Myth of Sisyphus, Translated by Justin O’Brien, Penguin Books, London (1955) ISBN 978-0-14-102399-1