The Forester Ultimate Customized Kit Special edition is entertaining named, to be sure. It’s exactly the sort of thing that I would have absolutely zero interest in, and nor would the press, except for that one little detail…

Anti-Robocall Bill That, in a Perfect World, Fines Spammers $10,000 Per Call Is Now Law

Bills that fine people on the other side of the planet? Feh.

As a side note: twice in the last two weeks or so I’ve gotten robocalls that start yapping at me in Chinese or some such. Anyone else?

And all of her followers? *PLEASE* follow her example…

Alyssa Milano Calls on Followers to ‘Impeach’ Trump With Yoga Chant

I need your help manifesting a change-of-guard in Washington.

For 7 minutes a day, I’ll be chanting the following mantra: “Believe in believing. The impossible is possible.” As I do this I’ll be thinking of the special world we want to create.

JOIN ME. We’re stronger together.

— Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_Milano) December 22, 2019

Yes, yes, liberals. if you want change… rely on magic and superstition. That’ll do ‘er.

At least she’s not whacking people with bike locks, burning cars in the streets, sending the National Guard to slaughter wrongthinking citizens…

Oh My God.

Today’s our last class for the “Justice in STEM Education” course at @umasseduc and I couldn’t be prouder of the students. They’re sharing their final papers and I’m blown away by the questions they’re addressing & their commitment to justice. I’ll be sharing some of their slides

— Enrique Suárez 🇻🇪 (@SciEdHenry) December 5, 2019

I dare you to make objective engineering sense out of this malodorous steaming pile of leftist ᛒᚢᛚᛚᚲᚱᚨᛈ :

“Another student is concerned with how ableism undergirds all kinds of Learning Management Systems, pointing out how the design logics behind these learning platforms are inequitable”

“OMG! One of the other students just asked: “how could these platforms also integrate translanguaging in order to, for example, integrate indigenous languages?” “

“Using dis/crit the third student asks: what teaching and learning would be like for students with dis/abilities if learning environments would provide and value different ways of knowing, and what how do we support teachers? “Nothing *about* us *without* us!””

“A fourth student builds on the work by @furtak @bpenuel @ScienceEdDPS and Lorrie Shepard to ask what more just and equitable systems of student-centered assessments look like that disrupt the teacher-student power hierarchy”

“The fifth student is concerned with decolonizing a K-5 outdoor curriculum, understanding their positionality as a settler and partnering with local Native communities”

“The final student (who’s also a secondary science PST) asks us to reconsider the “humanizing” v “dehumanizing” binary through multiple critical lenses, and is designing an ecology unit that prefigure new forms of culture-nature phenomena and relations”

One can only hope that at least a few of the students cranking out this useless gibberish are simply feeding a few appropriate buzzwords into a gibberish generator and are laughing themselves fuzzy out of the sight of the “educator” who is taking their money whole providing them no aid in becoming actual STEM majors.

This being twitter, there is at least some valid snark:

Seeing these malleable young minds come into their victimhood is so beautiful ✨

— ₿randt (@CornbasePro) December 6, 2019

When’s the next struggle session I mean course?

— Nemesis Online ☢️ (@nemesis_online) December 6, 2019

I had to get half-way into the thread and comments to realize this is ostensibly not a parody account.

— Mike Patterson (@patterson087) December 7, 2019

Today's students are amazing. They are so good at figuring out what their teacher wants to hear. When I was a kid I just thought hard work and study was sufficient. I was a returning adult student before I figured out the value of ego stroking the gatekeepers.

— FluffyMcDeath (@FluffyMcDeath) December 6, 2019

Thank you Enrique for preparing these students for their future: shining my shoes. Or cleaning the Slurpee machine…..

— Austere Religous Kameleon_o (@kameleon_o) December 7, 2019

You have done these vulnerable youngsters a lifelong disservice. They now know less science, but more about how to whine in a socially accepted way.

Be ashamed.

— Epstein hat sich nie umgebracht (@TrumpWasHere) December 6, 2019

“Clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness” -Carl Sagan

— Yautja Vishaun (@youwinski) December 6, 2019

Looks like you are bringing "justice" to STEM the same way Hugo Chavez brought prosperity to Venezuela.

— Flame Angel (@FlameAngel8) December 6, 2019

And for the win:

Decolonize this, asshole:

6CO2 + 6H20 + (energy) → C6H12O6 + 6O2 (photosynthesis)

-b±√(b²-4ac))/(2a) (quadratic equation)

The entropy of a system approaches a constant value as its temperature approaches absolute zero. (3d law of thermodynamics)

— Sandra (@SandraShreve6) December 6, 2019

And from this minor gravity well’s Twitter feed comes this graphic representation of madness:

This guy’s Twitter feed is astonishing in it’s banal evilness, using randomized word salad to bastardize science education into a stew of useless feel-good decay and filth. This guy is to STEM education what boils and sores are to healthy skin.

I love the way the student is able to navigate the desire to know and the desire to respect and value the life of the Taro plant. Often times we don’t stop to think about the consequences of knowing coming to know; we should also think about when to know and why

Also, Django paris’s framework of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies foreground the dynamic aspect of culture and warn precisely against pedagogies rooted in stereotypes and essentializing communities

We need to create translanguaging spaces for students to use linguistics resources that we don’t share (e.g., Arabic, Tagalog). Equitable science learning environments must invite, value, and leverage their languages, and we must figure out how to get there

That’s why I look up to @emilynmachado and her work on (what I’m calling) semiotic solidarity: I may not understand what you’re saying, but I will support you in using that language in order to make this a brave learning environment for yourself and your ideas

Translanguaging spaces. Translanguaging spaces.

TRANSLANGUAGING ᚠᚢᚲᛜ SPACES.

Stalin and Orwell nod sagely.

As will probably come as a surprise to nobody by this point, this ad for the very expensive Peloton stationary bike has garnered a whole lot of negative feedback:

I have to admit that while I, too, reacted with disdain the first time I saw the ad a few weeks ago, my reaction was different than the Standard Accepted Response. While the bulk of the Woke Internet seems to see this ad as depicting a wife who is under the thumb of a domineering husband, working her keister off with slatherings of fake enthusiasm in the hopes of meeting his high expectations… I saw it as a horribly vain Instagrammer-Influencer-type who goes to great lengths to constantly film herself pretending to work out, all in hopes of gaining likes from her audience, and who then makes her doubtless put-upon husband sit there and watch what is surely hours and hours of banal vanity. Because she looks no different at the end of the supposed year of workouts than she does at the beginning, so it sure looks to me like her actions are all about *appearing* to be working out rather than actually working out. It’s not like they show someone actually losing weight; she starts of just as fit as she ends up.

But as I said, it seems that the vast majority of folks see it rather differently, that she’s got Stockholm Syndrome and a bad relationship. I’ve always had a bit of difficulty in picking up on some cues like this, so I’ll just shrug and so “ok, sure, maybe.” So, building on the idea that the wife in the ad is in a bad relationship, “Aviation Gin” hired the same actress for an ad for their product. It does not directly address the Peloton ad (apart from the very obvious title), but… see if it looks like a possible sequel to you.

Aviation Gin is partially owner by “Deadpool” actor Ryan Reynolds, which may go some way towards explaining why the company has a sense of humor.

Whenever the subject of some white celebrity, politician or just some random schmoe getting in hot water for using the “N-word” comes up, someone always asks, “well, why do you want to say the word, anyway?” There is a simple reason why there is the urge to say this word, a word which will torpedo careers and ruin lives. It’s the same urge to push that red, candy-like button. That same urge to eat the apple you’ve been told not to eat. The urge every cat has to push everything off of every other thing. The urge to do what you know you’re not supposed to (or at least, what those who hold power over you tell you to not do) is a universal urge. Everyone, to one degree or another, just wants to watch the world burn, to sit back and laugh as chaos unfolds and entropy builds.

And thus, this:

Text Messages Show How Syracuse University Students Are Too Scared To Go To Classes After A Series Of Racist Incidents

Some people received a “white supremacist manifesto” (apparently a copy of the Christchurch Mosque shooter manifesto) on their phones. There was a swastika in the snow, some sort of racist graffiti. As a result, some people have lost their minds to panic, demanding that the university shut down. Numerous students – somehow I suspect not a lot of STEM students, but who knows – are quoted as being afraid for their lives, not sleeping, crying a lot.

Wow.

To people who like to sow chaos – and that’s just about everybody – these sort of reactions are *gold.* Those of you old enough to remember 9-11: remember how people who were afraid of anthrax attacks or terrorists popping up out of the bushes were mocked? Well, these people were panicking as a result of three thousand of their fellows being murdered in a single event. Here, these true snowflakes are exhibiting just as much panic over… snow swastis? Group texts?

I’m sorry (not sorry) but their fear is not worthy of respect. Their panic-mongering is worthy solely of mockery.

Meh.

Watching Millenials/Gen Zers ripping on Boomers? Meh. We were doing that before you brats were born. Didn’t get us nuthin’.

Foamy here is right: the things that the more militant Millenials are cheesed off at the Boomers for are the things that the Boomers actually shared with the Millenials, and actually got: the friggen’ hippies gained political power and began enacting their utopian policies, and now that the check is coming due for decades of Boomer socialism and nanny statism it’s falling on Millenial socialists to pay it.

Yay, back to posting with my phone. This time my internet computer give me a blue screen of death about a minute after startup due to “memory management.” Shuts down starts up crashes again rinse and repeat ad infinitum. Nothing seems to affect it, so tomorrow off I go on a time wasting expensive journey to try to get it repaired. Friggin huzzah.

I walked into a “Field & Stream” store today just to see what sort of stuff they had. I expected it to be akin to the “Cabellas” that populate Utah… outdoor supplies, sporting goods, guns, that sort of thing. It seemed to be mostly much the same but there was a difference that made me shake my head.

I quickly made my way to the firearms. There in the case was the Sig Sauer “Spartan” pistol shown below:

This is a 1911 with some cosmetic details, which I don’t care much about, and a rail for a laser, which would be a handy addition to a standard 1911. I’ve little use for expensive cosmetics on firearms; I’m perfectly happy with my pistols being utterly unadorned. But as with all things, “Because I Wanted It” is a necessary and sufficient explanation for why any American should buy*anything,* from a Furby to a Pound Puppy to a Rose Tico inaction figure to a dressed-up pistol to an M-60 machine gun to an over-sized smoke-belching six-wheel-drive pickup truck to a “Hillary For President” shirt.

But this one was humorously ironic in my view. On the side of the slide in raised (and I believe quite inaccurate) letters is King Leonidas’ famed line, “Molon Labe.” This is the ur-text of the anti-gun-grabber movement; the Spartan kings response to the Persian demand that he give up his weapons was “Come And Take Them.” This is an appropriate sentiment for the side of the gun, but where it was problematic was the store itself. The “Field & Stream” store is part of “Dick’s Sporting Goods,” a company that *used* to sell all manner of conventional normal firearms, but a few years ago knuckled under to the civilian disarmament thugs and removed all modern sporting rifles from their stores. Not a single AR-15 or M-1A or AK-47 or AK-74 to be found. Dick’s responce to “give up your guns” was “here ya go.”

It was easy to leave the store without having spent a dime.