by Henry, ©2025
(Sep. 22, 2025) — “Roll Call – Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” (0:22)
“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to ‘The Pulse of the Nation,’ the place to hear it here first. We’re at the university sitting in Professor’s Wert’s Cosmology class, so let’s pay attention.”
“Hello, students and interested adults. We are gathered to learn about the universe and our part in it. The universe is a lot bigger than any of us can imagine, but that doesn’t diminish our part in it. The first question always asked is where did the universe come from?
“I think the only way to understand the vastness of the universe is to take your brain, empty it, and fill it with zeroes, as in 10 to the power of 7 quintillion zeroes times another until you run out of room in your head. What I’m saying is that we view the world according to our own senses such as up-down, sideways and time moving forward at a constant rate. Maybe there are many different guidelines by which to view the cosmos, but that’s not doing us much good if we can’t understand what we don’t know. What we do know is that a few billion years one way or another is a drop in the bucket compared to the vastness of the universe that we think has a beginning, but we don’t know for sure, and that’s about the only thing we do know.
“We study ants, and when there’s a flood the colony will bind together to float to wherever they land. Maybe humans act the same, from someplace else to Mars to Earth and then somewhere else; who knows? That’s why if we find evidence of a previous colonization on the moon not to freak out and become discombobulated, to keep our cool: been there, done that sort of thing.
“The first telescopes found craters on the moon, and then we saw ice caps on Mars, and then a few distant galaxies and then with the Hubble space telescope even more galaxies. Now we have the James Webb Space Telescope – JWST – and we see even more galaxies the farther back in time we go, some say to the very edge of the universe, although I’ve a feeling that we’ll never see the edge of the universe, ever.
“It has been postulated that our galaxy, the Milky Way, is an average one, but we have discovered others that make ours look puny. Numbers such as 100 billion are mind-numbing, and that’s that’s how many stars in our galaxy, but then to learn that there are more, many more, than 100 billion galaxies, some millions of times our size.
“Suns A billion times larger than our own; black holes the same. With all different kinds and degrees of radiation zapping all around the universe, it’s a wonder any of us made it this far. But here we are, on spaceship Earth, by luck or design, maybe both; who knows?
“There’s that ‘Who knows?’ again. We have to take some articles on faith if we’re going to get anywhere. To start, there are but two sexes, male and female, just as there are a hot and cold, up and down. These are called ‘observations,’ and we trust observations until they are disproven. A man can never give birth and you can’t make ice out of boiling water.
“I wouldn’t worry about our sun dying in a few billions of years if I were you. We can think about it, but let’s not lose any sleep over it. In the meantime, it would be nice to explore more of our solar system.
“The child that was aborted ten years ago was a genius and would’ve cured cancer; the child murdered in Israel on Oct. 7 would have discovered warp drive. We just don’t know, but this we do know: if we continue our present course of action, we’re toast. The mindset of the Left only allows for stupidity to reign supreme. Support ignorance and stupidity is not the solution to any problem. I do know if you fly the Hamas flag and yell, ‘Free Palestine,’ I’ll fail you. Let’s take a break.”
“Twist and Shout” (2:33)
“We need to focus on the future. Admiring stupid people such as Ilhan Omar won’t get you any bonus points when you’re at the Pearly Gates. Thinking that everyone who was killed, tortured and kidnapped on October 7 deserved it will get you a ticket straight to the place none of us wants to end up. And telling lies about Charlie Kirk, well, if you haven’t figured it out by now, the Devil is alive and well.
“Okay, by this time you’re wondering what being an ignorant idiot has to do with Cosmology. I’ll tell you. A telescope is but a tool, a nice tool to be sure, but just a tool. The real question is not ‘Where did the universe come from,’ but where do we go from here?
“All the information we glean from studying outer space now will lead us to our next home, maybe not in a thousand years, but in a million. Think of your being in this class as one of the building blocks of a giant pyramid and we’re the foundation, maybe a row or two above the first. It’ll take time, but if we all work together, men and women, and put our nose to the grindstone, we’ll make it out.
“In the next class we’ll discuss gravity and why it’s the key that’s somehow either overlooked or relegated to the back of the class. Thank you for being such an attentive class.”
“And that, as they say, is that. I hope we learned something or, if nothing else, that it got us to thinking about our part in the pyramid to help reach our future. Killing for the sake of killing doesn’t cut it; it’s a waste of resources that we can’t afford to waste. Thank you for watching or reading the transcript of the show in The P&E. Goodnight.”
“So Long Saddle Pals” (1:05)