Highlighter & Cigarettes

Floating Herbarium , Polychrome I - Julia Whitney Barnes , 2025.

American , b. 1970s

Let’s play the biggest game of kick the can on the internet.

What is the joke?

Back in the day, it was quite common for christians to "put the talmud on trial." they would set up a whole legal case, and make a jew defend what it says in the books.

this was a catch 22. If the Jewish person successfully defended themselves and the books, the christians would get super pissed off and expel all the Jews from the town. if the Jews one, the christians would get pissed off and expelled Jews from the town

as the joke goes, there used to be a town which did not have a very learned presence among them. when the christians challenged them to defend the talmud, a simpleton agreed to be the defense and having no other choice they agreed. however the Jew spoke Yiddish and could not communicate with the priest, so it was a silent debate

To start, the priest raised his hand and showed three fingers. The Jew looked back and raised one finger. Next, he waved his finger around his head. The Jew responded bt pointing to the ground where he sat. The priest brought out communion, and the Jew, an apple.

this was the last straw for the priest and he conceded defeat

Later they asked the priest what had happened. The priest said,

“First I held up three fingers to represent the Trinity. He responded by holding up a single finger to remind me there is still only one God common to both our beliefs. Then, I waved my finger around my head to show him that God was all around us. The rabbi responded by pointing to the ground to show that God was also right here with us. I pulled out the communion to show that God absolves us of all our sins, and the rabbi pulled out an apple to remind me of the original sin. He bested me at every move and I could not continue.”

Meanwhile, the Jewish community gathered to ask the man how he’d won. “I haven’t a clue,” said the Jew. “First, he told me that he was going to beat me in three rounds, so I gave him the finger. Then he tells me that I was beating around the bush and I told him to get straight to the point.”

“And then what?” asked a woman.

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

In addition to finding out where in Africa her ancestors were abducted into slavery, Mary Moran discovered the meaning of the Mende song: a processional hymn for the final farewell to the spirit, it was sung in Senehun Ngola by women as they prepared the body of a loved one for burial.