Eaglemoss creates little figurines of pop culture characters as well as starships. One of their current product lines is a chess set featuring Marvel comic book characters. You know, rooks, Queens, knights, pawns, that sort of thing. The characters are apparently sold individually rather than as one set.
One of the characters… I don’t know. Something about this sets my SJW-Outrage Senses a-buzzin’.
Ummmmmmm……………
The Babylon Bee has a useful graphic:
It should prove interesting to see how this plays out given that there are multiple narratives at play here. In short, a Hasidic family was booted off of a Frontier Airlines flight due to Commie Cough Mask Requirements. According to the family, it was because their 18-month-old baby wouldn’t wear a mask (and those under two are not legally required to do so). According to Frontier, it’s because multiple adults refused to wear their masks (and they *are* legally required to do so). Were the people involved pretty much any other minority religious or ethnic group, the pile-on onto Frontier would be overpowering; the airline would most likely have used a firehose to spray out termination notices.
Narrative one:
Narrative two:
As we’ve seen over the past few years, people are seemingly incapable of waiting for the facts to come out before leaping on one side or the other. But in this case, I think we might not see the usual firestorm of the kind normally applied to situations such as this given that the “minorities” involved here are not politically advantageous minorities. Ilhan Omar, for example, seems unlikely to pop out of the woodwork to defend the family and demand that Frontier apologize.
Annnnnnd then there’s “overboard:”
The comments in that one are spectacularly toxic.
Ragical the Unhallowed Knight is a Dutch YouTuber who presents videos created by others, with a bit of his own commentary. In this case, what makes the videos worth watching isn’t so much his contribution, but the videos themselves… recently he has focused on interactions between “Sovereign Citizens” and the police. “Sovereign Citizens” are a particular brand of goofy who think that somehow they are outside the jurisdiction of the local law; that they can drive cars on public roads without having drivers licenses, insurance or even license plates; that they can invade and occupy someone else’s property and declare it their own; that, in short, the laws don’t apply to them Because Reasons. They think that bloviation will cause police to back away in shame and confusion and let them get away with their foolishness. Nearly inevitably, of course, they find out otherwise, typically after escalating a minor interaction into a full-blown crime.
On one hand, such videos are sad because they depict the marriage of arrogance and stupidity, some of the worst examples that mankind has to offer. on the other hand, such videos are a hoot for exactly the same reason.
This one is a dumbass American trying to claim that he is immune to Mexican laws while in Mexico. Guess how it turns out for him (note: sometimes these doofii get away with it):
Oy. Another school board Zoom meeting that catches a monumental case of stupidity for all the world to hear. In this case, the drive to open schools is “white supremacy” according to the school board vice president, La Mesa-Spring valley board of education in California. Because education is only for white supremacists, I guess? One would hope that this would be another one of those instances where those involved resign in shame, but this time it seems to be not the whole group but just one person, tragically afflicted with a case of stage 4 wokitis.
Oh, but it gets better: she points out that these meetings *are* *not* being recorded, then gets snippy when someone contradicts here. Guess who turned out to be correct. Go on, I dare ya.
Similar to the Oakley school situation, she's seems unaware that the meeting is being recorded. "If our meeting were actually recorded for the public, we would know that." pic.twitter.com/bFWjaYlLfp
— Jorge Ventura Media (@VenturaReport) February 25, 2021
All these people screeching about racism: does it ever occur to them that if there was some shadowy cabal of Klansmen out there pulling the strings to ruin the future of non-white children, they’d choose the same strategies the woke do? Go ahead, declare science and skepticism and objective facts and falsification and western civilization and a work ethic and 2+2=4 to be “white supremacist concepts.” How well do your think kids will do when raised *without* those ideals?
Plus: ever notice that as awful as the people who seek high public office are (I’m looking at you, Beto and Pelosi and Swalwell and AOC and Cuomo and Jackson-Lee and Hillary and Schumer and …), if you want true balls-to-the-wall power mad nuttery, ya gotta look to low-end politics like school boards and neighborhood councils and the like? The people there are just as power-mad, but haven’t had to restrain their public insanity any.
BONUS ROUND:
— Biden Voters Posting Their L's Online (@BidenLs) February 25, 2021
First the good news: I watched the pilot episode of “Superman & Lois” and… it was *actually* *good.* It is not the usual Superman storyline; Clark Kent and Lois Lane have been married for near on to two decades at this point and have to teenage sons. The sons are of course non-canonical, but it works and is a perfectly cromulent extrapolation of the characters. The plot, acting and dialog were pretty good; the VFX were top notch. One scene that I thought was particularly well done was when Clark Kent gets a devastating phone call that causes him to dash across the continent in seconds. It was simple, but it worked.
I will continue to watch the show with interest, which is far more than any of the other CW shows can boast.
BUT THEN…
Oh, goodie. A race hustler and the guy who almost single-handedly set both Star Wars and Star Trek on the roads to ruin joining forces to turn one of the oldest American sci-fi IP’s into hot garbage.
I have a plot idea. Feel free to run with it. Hollywood: feel free to steal this plot and spend $200 million making it.
So, it turns out that Lex Luthor is the bagrillionaire behind the scenes puppetmastering various nefarious schemes, a process decades old. One of his leading efforts: manipulation of the press. Specifically: whenever a cop is involved in any tenuous way with the death of a black suspect, the press – under Luthors hidden influence – runs inaccurate stories calculated to drive up rage and violence. The BLM/Antifa riots and insurrections are being driven by Luthors schemes; aiming to sow as much chaos as possible in order to destroy faith in the government, police, institutions and America as a whole. Part of this is seeing to it that major political parties nominate senile old kiddie-sniffers and incompetent diversity hires for major offices. Part of it is manipulation of the tax code to make sure that major corporations offshore their operations; this not only unemploys millions of Americans but empowers the Chinese Communist government, further driving down the American publics faith in the government. Part of this is funding crackpots to infiltrate colleges, universities, high schools, middle schools, pre-schools and HR departments, filling them with anti-science, anti-engineering rigor, anti-objectivity nonsense so that STAR Labs and WayneTech and the like are starved of competent talent.
Superman, aided by a dark detective from Gotham City, finds all this out. But what Luthor is doing isn’t strictly illegal. So Superman goes to the public with what he’s learned… and he is promptly cancelled by the woke mob. Twitter and Facebook deplatform Superman for spreading politically incorrect “disinformation.” He is declared a Nazi and a white supremacist after he puts out a fire at a science fiction bookstore at the latest arsonriot.
Movie ends as Superman sadly says “I don’t want to live on this planet anymore” and flies off into the sky to find somewhere less insane and stupid. Post-credit scene: Luthor is now President of the US. The woke mob celebrates… for about five minutes, and then Luthor turns on them.
First up: a writer for Gizmodo flips her lid over the terrifying prospect of the Defense Department generating ten whole watts of electrical power in space with a solar panel:
This solar panel is officially called the Photovoltaic Radiofrequency Antenna Module (PRAM), and it’s designed to capture the powerful blue light in space that doesn’t pass through the atmosphere. Navy scientists launched it last May using a mysterious drone called the X-37B, and it’s currently circling the Earth every 90 minutes. So right now, as I’m typing, there is a little solar panel looping the planet because the Department of Defense wanted to put it there. Somehow, this is not an episode of the X-Files, it is real life. …
The scientists want to send dozens of these panels to orbit the Earth, and they say if they scale up the project, it could produce enough electricity to fuel a whole city. But as far as I can tell, no one has been clamoring for space power. Myself and the other 99.9% of humanity would be perfectly happy with solar, wind, and other clean energy generated right here on Earth.
If these Defense Department scientists successfully get more of these panels into orbit, there’s no telling what horrors the nation will use them for.
Nobody wants space-based solar power according to this genetic defective.
Huh.
Bonus round, from the color-value reversed version of “Stormfront,” The Root:
“Be less white.”
If it were up to me, this would be America’s motto. Instead of the Pledge of Allegiance, children in school should stand up before class, put their hands over their hearts and shout “BE LESS WHITE” at the flag for five minutes before beginning the day’s lessons. (I’m old AF and I have no idea if students even have to say the pledge before school anymore, but still.) “Be less white” should be printed on t-shirts, bumper stickers, white people’s birth certificates, white people’s tombstones and it should replace “In God We Trust” on the back of U.S. currency.
Uh-huh. Read the comments for an extra dose of “my god humans are stupid.”
Unless you simply decide that objectivity and the finding of the correct answer are not needed. Then, math is easy! However, you can make objectivity-less math hard again by turning it from a quest for the objectively correct answer into a quest for the politically correct answer. Witness, for example, this 80+ page long workbook to brainwash teachers into turning math class into a semester-long struggle session:
White supremacy culture shows up in math classrooms when…“I do, we do, you do” is the format of class. This structure of direct instruction doesn’t always allow for the full range of ways of thinking—reinforcing objectivity and the idea that there is only one right way—because it potentially dismisses students’ own ways of processing, and it also stifles creativity. It also reinforces paternalism because the way that teachers model becomes the standard for student learning. Solicit student ways of thinking and processing
White supremacy culture shows up in math classrooms when… The focus is on getting the “right” answer. The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false, and teaching it is even much less so. Up-holding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuate objectivity as well as fear of open conflict.
Uh-huh. And what other ways are there to do trigonometry than, say, trigonometry?
Obviously I’ve bitched about this sort of thing before. But as time goes by I’m becoming more and more convinced that this isn’t simply some manifestation of mental illness, but in fact something more ominous. I would suggest that the people pushing this rubbish should be quietly investigated. Find out who’s funding them, who’s directing them, who’s whispering in their ears planting the seeds of the destruction of Americas ability to competently do not just complex leading-edge science but basic engineering. I would be *wholly* unsurprised if it turns out that this is just the latest in a long, long game set in motion by the KGB back in the day, or an earlier phase in an equally long game being run out of Beijing today.
There is no “white supremacy” in math. Math doesn’t care about your race, your religion, your sex. F=MA regardless of who you want to bang or who you voted for. E=MC^2 independently of who your ancestors were, whether they were sold off or sold out or ran away or were deported or stayed put. And 2+2=4 regardless of your ideology; all those who say otherwise are either stupid, massively deluded or are trying to sell you something… something that if you saw it in the cold hard light of day you’d recognize as being cheap flawed garbage.
Bill Gates’ fortune was built on science and engineering, married to salemanship. Without objectivity and seeking the right answer, he’d be living on the dole now. I imagine an interesting time could be had by a good journalist who could corner him and persuade him to answer some questions about this nonsense.
I’ve been saying that a lot since 2009.
The computer generated “cast” of “Star Trek: Prodigy:”
Buh?
Meh.
Fry’s hasn’t been relevant to me since I left California in 2004, but I recall their stores being pretty spiffy. But I’ve seen a number of YouTube videos in recent years that make them look like ghost towns, so this doesn’t shock me:
The day of such stores is likely about as over as that of the shopping mall.
