Lessons I probably shouldn’t use in my classes

I subscribe to the Oglaf patreon. I find the comic amusing, and via the patreon, I get extra content, sporadically. Recently, Trudy and Doug posted “A bunch of ideas we had that didn’t quite turn into strips but that we also couldn’t quite let go of,” and there was one that I also found irresistible. It’s mildly scatological and definitely profane, and also biological, so I have to post it here.

Matthew 6:28-29

And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these.

Flowers of the field are shitty with Matthew.

What? We aren’t working because we’re not running a bakery or some shit?

We’re processing carbon dioxide to oxygen and carbohydrates, storing that energy, growing roots and leaves, drawing water and nutrients from the soil, deploying defenses against climate and pests, constantly battling for reproduction and survival.

Fuck you.

Let’s see you attract appropriate pollinators with scent and colour and then tell us we don’t work, you anthrocentric shit.

I post it here because, tragically, I cannot use it in my classes, no matter how appropriate the point is.

Yay! The war is over!

The President says so!

Donald Trump used a prime time address to the nation on Wednesday evening to declare the month-long war in Iran a success “nearing completion”, despite a spiraling conflict that has caused economic turmoil across the globe, fractured transatlantic alliances and eroded the president’s approval ratings.

In remarks from the White House, Trump argued that the US’s “little journey” to Iran had nearly accomplished “all of America’s military objectives”, but offered little clarity on how he planned to wind down the conflict over the next “two to three weeks”.

“We are on the cusp of ending Iran’s sinister threat to America and the world,” Trump said in the 19-minute speech, delivered from Cross Hall of the White House. “We have all the cards. They have none.”

If you believe that, you are so gullible you probably voted for Trump.

A lot of people with a lot of money didn’t believe him, since the S&P 500 declined in real time over the course of the speech.

(I do wish to complain: not basing the Y-axis on zero tells me this segment of the chart was selected to emphasize the drop.)

So what’s next?

Ticking through a list of claimed achievements, Trump said Iran’s navy and air force had been decimated, leaving the country weak and “no longer a threat” to the US and the world. He, however, said the US would continue to hit Iran “extremely hard” for next several weeks.

“We’re going to bring them back to the stone ages, where they belong,” he said, even as he said “discussions were ongoing”.

The war is nearly over, so now is the time to throw even more bombs, and the goal is to send a nation of over 90 million people back to the stone age. That’s not a reasonable conclusion, and says we aren’t at all interested in the welfare of the citizens of Iran. More bombs also won’t rescue his terrible poll numbers with the citizens of the USA, which is his real goal.

We get prizes?

Answers in Genesis has some peculiar ideas about how science is done.

This fool says you get a prize if you say the Earth is 30 billion years old, and that you get another prize if you say the Earth is 60 billion years old, but that it’s not fair that he doesn’t get a prize for saying the Earth is a few thousand years old because…creationist math is closer to 30 billion than 60 billion is? What? That’s not how anything works. There aren’t prizes for reciting numbers, this is not Numberwang. You have to provide evidence for your measurement.

Also, the Earth is 4.5 billion years old.

By the way, I am 178 cm tall, or 5 feet 10 inches tall. You should get prizes for announcing that I am 6 feet tall, and more prizes as my height escalates by acclamation to NBA values and beyond. You get no prizes for declaring that I’m 178 microns tall. And don’t you dare bring out a tape measure.

“List of Jews” has an ominous ring

The courts are demanding them, though. I’ve heard of something like this before.

A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the University of Pennsylvania to hand over records about Jewish employees on campus to a federal agency as part of an investigation into antisemitic discrimination but said it did not have to reveal any employee’s affiliation with a specific group.

First, you get a list of all the Jews at the university. Then you fire them, imprison them, and kill them. This was the trend in the 1930s and 1940s, when there were sweeping purges of Jewish professors, led by prominent non-Jewish scientists. Here’s a useful word to remember: Rassenhygiene.

The emergence of eugenics as an ‘applied science’ culminated in the horrendous atrocities committed by the Nazis during the Third Reich. Society was to be cleaned of all alien contamination, hence the German phrase ‘Rassenhygiene’ meaning ‘racial hygiene’. Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and people with hereditary diseases were deprived of their human rights, herded into concentration camps, used for scientific experimentation and murdered. And the scientists who provided the scientific backing were respected university professors or researchers of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (KWS), the predecessor of the Max Planck Society. Many of them remained in renowned positions even after 1945, influential enough to delay an unbiased historical confrontation.

These things sneak up on you. You provide a list for the purposes of “an investigation into antisemitic discrimination,” and next thing you know, Stephen Miller is holding it.

I have another useful word to add to your vocabulary: Lebensborn.

The Lebensborn e.V. (e.V. stands for eingetragener Verein or registered association), meaning “fount of life”, was founded on 12 December 1935,[1] to counteract falling birth rates in Germany, and to promote Nazi eugenics.[2] Located in Munich, the organization was partly an office within the Schutzstaffel (SS) responsible for certain family welfare programs, and partly a society for Nazi leaders.

Sound familiar? This was an organization designed to promote racial purity by determining who was a good Aryan.

The USA doesn’t have an official Lebensborn policy yet, but I note that it is so important to Trump that we end birthright citizenship that he is actually attending Supreme Court hearings today on that subject, an unusual move to use his vast prestige and power to influence a court decision. Let’s hope it backfires on him and that the court decides that the 14th Amendment stands.