Transmillennial

Most people are familiar with Boko Haram , the Islamist terrorist organization that began in Nigeria. What they probably don't know is what the name means. Contrary to some media reports, Boko is the Hausa word for the Western system of secular education brought to Nigeria by the British, and means more generally sham, fraud, or deceit. When the British colonial government imposed secular schools in northern Nigeria at the beginning of the 20th century, Boko was applied in a pejorative sense to this new system. Haram of course just means forbidden . We shouldn't be smug. Our own local fundamentalists also think Western secular education is haram . Take for example, the locally-founded coven of screaming wingnut harpies quaintly named Moms for Liberty . These, ahem, ladies, who are mostly free of the education they so deplore, have gone after all mannner of social studies textbooks. And now they've also decided to clean up biology, which as we all know is...

I ran into Steven A Christie, MD, JD online. He wrote a pro-forced-birth book called Speaking for the Unborn, which purports to provide 30 second pro-life rebuttals to pro-choice arguments . I think 30 seconds actually refers to the amount of tiime he spent thinking about them. It's a truly bad book. But he sent me a copy. And to give it credit, I don't think any other book has made my job drop to the floor from the very first sentence. Whether or not something’s alive is a purely scientific question that science has fully settled As I wrote to him, there aren't enough LOLs in the entire universe to cover that one. Just google the phrase Are viruses alive? . Not a bad idea anyway... you can come up with some interesting, informative discussions. I like this one . Funny, the Microbiology Society hosting a discussion about a fully-settled question! Science in general is not a safe space for binary minds, and biology is t...

 The GOP candidate for Mayor, Wes Morrison, has carefully positioned himself as a 'kinder, gentler' Republican. But he still backed Governor DeSickness over the mask mandate . And he's still pushing the 'reduce taxes, by the way I go to church' buttons. Sorry, Wes. I don't care about your church attendance. Not overly keen on Mike I was cop Brown, but he'll have to do. For city council: I'm voting for Kim Davis and Ginny Dirschka. Not even considering voting Republican again until they purge their party of insanity . 

 Turning Point USA love lists. They have a long-standing list of faculty who have not hewn to the conservative way, either by writing stuff unfavorable to Donald Trump, or teaching things conservatives don't want to hear. So, in the spirit of listing and transparency, these are their current members at UNL.  This group funded some of the terrorists who stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.  Alexander Burkhard Andrew Shelburn Benjamin Terry (their faculty advisor, from the College of Engineering) Carson Scott Christian Simmons Christine Stulken Christine Discenza Dan Mathews Dawson Coudriet Dominic Naughtin Eleanor Kenkel Ethan Nelson Faith Santana Garrett Cantrell Grant Carstens Hayley Brakefield Izzy Rosegrant Jack O'Dell Jackson Towne Jacob Benton Jordan Minderman Josie Dostal Kaitlyn Nein Kevin Coffey Kiara Kearney Kirby Hughes Madison Talbert Matthew Berringer Nancy Nguyen Ryan Barragan Sam Gilbert Sarah Pagano Sierra Schroeder Sofia Heggem Taylor Tunnison Willia...

I have known of Dan Whitney, Larry the Cable Guy , longer than most people have. In the car on the way into work at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, we used to listen to one of the usual mostly-talk rock radio shows. Larry would quite regularly call in. His accent fascinated me. Probably because I’ve lived in so many places, I like to try to place accents. Larry the Cable Git's accent was vaguely southern, or was meant to be southern, but I couldn’t place it anywhere in particular in the South. In any case, he’d distorted it so much you could make out only half of what he was saying.  What he was saying was mumbled, consciously transgressive hate.  Later on, I discovered he was was born and grew up in Pawnee City Nebraska, until his preacher daddy hauled him down to Florida. It’s a long story… (1) Daddy issues Daniel Lawrence Whitney, better known by his stage name and character Larry the Cable Guy, was born on February 17, 1963 in Pawnee City, Nebraska, to the Reverend ...

Jacob Siegfried and his wife Eva, and a family of one boy, also named Jacob, and several girls, emigrated to the US through Texas, from Saratov, on the Volga River, in 1908. Though they came from Russia, they spoke German. They settled in Logan Township, just outside Enid, Oklahoma.  Volga Germans had been encouraged to immigrate to Russia by Catherine the Great, in the hopes of civilizing her still mostly barbarous country, and remained until Tsar Nicholas started to revoke their privileges. Then many of them came here. During WWI, they were driven out. Germans were not welcome in much of the United States. So they made the long trek up to Saskatchewan, where there was a community of Volga Germans. We have record of Jacob and family crossing the border legally in August 1918. Since there was wartime internment of German immigrants in Canada, it's a little unclear why Saskatoon was a safe haven for them. Possibly it was just remote from the nonsense happening in Ontario. Or possibl...

 Ryan Hamilton was named Executive Director of the Nebraska Republican Party on March 13, 2019 . Let me say right away that I do not think Ryan is a very nice human being. We used both to contribute to a Lincoln Nebraska politics forum which had strict rules about civility. This did not prevent Ryan from dragging up some obviously phony teaching evaluations of me from a student revenge site, because he lost an argument. His twitter handle is @ryanmfhamilton ( what does mf stand for, mom? ), although he doesn't want you reading his Twitter feed. So let's review Ryan's history. He's 35 years old, He comes from Nevada. He attended Chaparral High School in Las Vegas, and Catholic University of America in Washington DC from 2004-2009, and then took a Masters' in Journalism and Media Studies from 2011-2014. A nice Catholic boy, you might say. He's devoted a lot of time to Nevada Boys' State, from back when he was in high-school. Before he came here, he worked for ...