The Sviggum drama continues

The university board of regents member, Steve Sviggum (for some reason, I always think of him as a Ralph Sviggum), who suggest that maybe the University of Minnesota Morris is too diverse, is still squatting on the board, despite calls to resign. The latest comes from student leaders at all the branch campuses.

Dear Regent Sviggum:

We write to you today asking for your immediate resignation from the University of Minnesota Board of Regents.

Your question at the October 13th Mission Fulfillment committee meeting, in which you asked whether or not the Morris campus had become ‘too diverse’, demonstrated your inability to fulfill the University’s institutional commitment to equity and diversity as written in Board of Regents policy.

While we acknowledge your public apology, what students have shared about your visit to the Morris campus last month make it clear that your apology was meaningless. We do not believe that your reported behavior when interacting with Morris students from marginalized communities is consistent with someone who truly believes that diversity is a strength.

Finally, we acknowledge that many of our campuses are currently facing enrollment struggles. We firmly believe that encouraging students from diverse backgrounds to attend our colleges will be a part of the solution to those struggles. A recent study conducted by Niche found that diversity was one of the top aspects high school seniors want out of their college experience. With that in mind, we are concerned that your continued presence on the Board of Regents will signal a hostile attitude toward diversity and deter prospective students from choosing one of the five University of Minnesota campuses.

He’s lingering on like a foul odor, and it’s quite clear that he has no intention of leaving until he is forced out. The latest bit of petty bullying from him occurred at a board of regents meeting to which student leaders were invited.

Yeah, he’s not leaving. Right now he’s clinging to his position out of spite.

By the way, here are the stats on Morris enrollment.

The University of Minnesota’s strategic plan calls for the Morris campus to have 1,700 students by 2025, but it had just 1,068 at one recent count. About 41% of students describe themselves as a person of color, up from 21% a decade ago.

I was here a decade ago (two decades ago even), and I’m here now. We’ve had no decline in the ability, the enthusiasm, or the brilliance of our students over that time. So much for “too much diversity”!

The Gräderdämmerung

Schläfst du, Lehrer? I did not sleep well last night. I was up and down all night long, struggling to get the rest I need today. You see, I did a terrible thing: I set the deadline for submission of all finals, final essays, and term papers in all three of my classes for the same instant, at midnight last night. I think I may have accidentally wired a connection from the digital bit bucket to my brain, so all night long as papers were sent in I’d get a jolt of electrons directly into the attention centers of my hindbrain.

Or it might have just been general dread at what I was going to find waiting for me in the morning. Those damn Valkyries were galloping through my head all night long, and now I must rise! Reite zur Wal!

Hojotoho! hojotoho! heiaha! heiaha!

Aquarists fear

I’ve been an aquarist for a few decades, but the largest aquarium I’ve ever owned was 29 gallons. I was more about assembling many aquaria, and I think maybe the largest total capacity I’ve ever had was about 150 gallons. Every aquarist has the nightmare of something happening to the aquaria — I remember George Streisinger (the original zebrafish guy) recounting his terrible dream about the quonset hut where the entire initial zebrafish colony was housed having a catastrophic collapse and all his work getting wiped out.

This is a setup for the fabulous Berlin AquaDom, a giant million liter aquarium housing about 1500 exotic fish. Here it is, isn’t it beautiful?

Fantastic. I wonder what kind of nightmares the owners had? Because they all just came true.

There was speculation freezing temperatures that got down to minus 10 degrees Celsius (14 degrees Fahrenheit) overnight caused a crack in the acrylic glass tank, which then exploded under the weight of the water. Police said there was no evidence the incident resulted from a malicious act.

Yikes. Yikes. Yikes.

Worst time of the year for travel

I imagine Australia doesn’t have the same problems we do here in Minnesota — the major artery to Morris is a sheet of ice right now, with drifting snow blowing around — but still this is a bad time to travel, as FDotM illustrates.

Trains? We ain’t got no stinkin’ trains. They even discontinued the bus service, and we have to somehow get ourselves to a town 45 minutes away to get a shuttle. My choice is the first one: stay at home with the pigs and chickens…only in this case, it’s a cat and a lot of spiders. My wife and I will be spending Christmas home alone in a small snowy midwestern town.

So what are you doing for the holidays?

The purges have begun

First, I publicly deplore all stalkers, and apparently some people have been stalking and harassing Elon Musk, and someone was following his family around. This is despicable. There are people, irrespective of what political position they hold, who lose all perspective and turn their personal dislike for someone into a crusade, and that is a behavior that must be opposed.

However, it is interesting that rather than relying on the police, the law, and social opprobrium to deal with the problem, Musk is lashing out at journalism.

Twitter suspended the accounts of more than half a dozen journalists from CNN, the New York Times, The Washington Post and other outlets Thursday evening, as company owner Elon Musk accused the reporters of posting “basically assassination coordinates” for him and his family.

The Post has seen no evidence that any of the reporters did so.

The suspensions came without warning or initial explanation from Twitter. They took place a day after Twitter changed its policy on sharing “live location information” and suspended an account, @ElonJet, that had been using public flight data to share the location of Musk’s private plane.

@ElonJet wasn’t stalking him. The account was posting publicly available information that you can still get online (although less conveniently formatted), and it had been arbitrarily closed by Musk, after he’d said he wouldn’t.

On Wednesday, @ElonJet was permanently suspended despite a tweet from Musk weeks earlier, saying he would keep it up as part of “my commitment to free speech.”

So much for his commitment to free speech. His latest spasm is even more revealing, though — he’s killing accounts for even mentioning the @ElonJet account, or reporting on confrontations with his stalker.

Around 11:30 p.m. Thursday, Musk joined a Twitter Spaces chat — essentially a public conference call — with several journalists, including some who had been banned, in which he reiterated his claim that they had “doxed” him.

The journalists challenged him on this.

“You’re suggesting that we’re sharing your address, which is not true,” said Harwell.

Musk retorted, “You posted a link to the address.”

Harwell replied, “In the course of reporting on @ElonJet, we posted a link to @ElonJet, which is now not online.”

Musk left the call abruptly about four minutes into it.

He has since shut down Twitter Spaces. Or maybe it just broke because he’s been starving the maintenance teams?

We’re now entering the tyrant’s paranoia phase, where he is afraid of all the enemies he imagines are out to get him. He’s losing everywhere — Twitter was never a money-maker to begin with, but now Tesla’s value is plummeting, people are beginning to look at his other business ventures with a skeptical eye (The Boring Company and Hyperloop were clearly useless scams intended to kill mass transit), and his Mars fantasies are pretentious delusions — and he’s seeing well-deserved criticism as personal attacks and even threats to his life. This is a bad attitude to have if you’re trying to run a company whose whole purpose is to allow and encourage free discussion about anything and everything. If his incompetence doesn’t kill Twitter, his eagerness to ban journalists who tweet will do the job.

It’s also hypocritical. Many of us have experienced online stalking that has risen to disruptive levels, far worse than what Elon Musk gets. The old Twitter just shrugged and ignored it, allowing Nazis and misogynists to harass whoever they wanted, and Musk has made it worse. You want to cry and complain about people picking on you, but at the same time you’ve dismantled what little machinery Twitter had in place to police that kind of behavior? I’m not going to feel much sympathy for your chickenshit fee-fees.

Do you want $100,000? (Or is it $200,000?)

I have been contacted by a loon who is offering big money to anyone who can disprove his mathematical argument that god exists. I’m not interested — it’s incredibly stupid — but hey, if you want to waste your time playing a rigged game, help yourself.

One hundred thousand dollars, $200,000.00, cold hard cash for disproving this theory by these rules.

The Jews have been doing Gematria for thousands of years. There are 20 verses in the Holy Bible telling us that God put this Gematria in the Bible. Dr. Ivan Panin bagan in 1890 to create 43,000 pages of Gematria and went around the country challenging any atheist to disprove ANY of these 43,000 pages of proof that God wrote the Holy Bible. Not one Yot or Tittle of Dr. Ivan Panins 43,000 pages of proof has been disproven in the past 130 years.

‘The Theory of Biblical Patterns’ shows the significance of God’s prime digits, ‘3’ for trinity, ‘7’ for divine perfection and God’s prime pairs, 3 and 7 side by side, ’37’, and ’73’ and ’23’ the number of chromosomes in human DNA. All probabilities are shown. The first 28 are from Dr. Ivan Panin 130 years ago and have never been disproven. A half a dozen others are from various sources such as Dr. Chuck Missler. The remainder God gave me directly.

It’s numerology. It’s utterly absurd. Here’s one of his 100 proofs.

So the number of words in Genesis 1:1 is evenly divisible by 7. Big whoop. What am I supposed to disprove? That a multiple of 7 is not divisible by 7? Or that this mathematically trivial fact is not evidence of god? I suspect he has the former as his trump card, that no one will disprove a truism, so he’ll never have to cough up his cash.

Fox News is mad at a Minnesota teacher

And it’s not me! They’re upset because a St Paul science teacher is a socialist, and not shy about it.

A Minnesota science teacher in the Saint Paul Public Schools district lambasted cell biology lessons, particularly on mitochondrion, for containing “capitalist” propaganda, Fox News Digital found.

Mandi Jung, a teacher at Highland Park Middle School, said, “Lately, there’s been a lot of conversation about teachers indoctrinating students to their beliefs. And I always find this funny because our children are seeped in capitalist indoctrination from like the second they’re born, basically.”

She’s right, you know.

Jung proceeded to provide the “perfect example” of how “capitalist indoctrination” is expressed in her seventh grade science classes.

“Seventh grade science… [is] the year that you learn that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell and all this cell biology. So at the end of the unit, I have [students] take a test. And one of the questions is ‘A person says the nucleus is the most important organelle in the cell. Do you agree or disagree, and why?”

“And almost every child says, ‘Yes, I agree. Because without a boss, the cell would be in total chaos.’”

Jung added the students’ responses “cracks me up,” and went on to claim microscopic bacteria were the “original anarchists.”

“Bacteria don’t have a nucleus, and they are arguably one of the most successful classes of organisms on the planet. Bacteria out here being the original anarchists, right? No nucleus, no master. Seize the means of metabolism. I don’t know. It’s funny to me,” she said.

She’s right again! I’d also mention our erythrocytes, which lack a nucleus and seem to function just fine. It’s a good point she’s making, that all the organelles in a cell are functioning cooperatively, without any one running the show.

Fox News makes her point for her, and finds it outrageous that anyone would have an anti-capitalist opinion, and went running to the administration to tattle on her.

Fox News Digital asked the Saint Paul Public Schools district whether Jung’s commentary is part of its curriculum, and they sent over a science unit used in the district. The district did not directly answer the question.

Jung frequently posts anti-capitalist views on her social media platforms.

For example, she shared on Twitter, “You are not a capitalist, you are an exploited worker with Stockholm syndrome.”

The sentence in the middle is revealing: she says these things on “her social media platforms.” She is allowed to hold her own opinions, you know, and she was making a valid point with her test question, even if the anti-science twits at Fox don’t understand it.

She’s been in trouble with Fox before. She dared to hand out a survey in class asking their preferred pronouns.

The questions asked students about their preferred pronouns and names, and whether those can be used when speaking directly with a student’s parents.

Some of the questions included:

“What name should I use when speaking to your parents?”
“What pronouns should we use when we talk about you? (CHOOSE AS MANY AS YOU WANT)”
“Is it okay to use the pronouns you selected above when we talk to your parents?”
“Is it okay to use the pronouns you selected above when we talk to other students or the class?

Are you horrified yet? Of course, Fox News went screeching to the authorities. They got rebuffed.

Fox News Digital reached out to the district for comment, and a spokesperson referred to existing policy which said, “Respect all students’ gender identity and gender expression by honoring the right of students to be identified and addressed by their preferred name and pronoun.”

They go on to complain that she asked these questions of students without telling their parents. They’re keeping the parents “in the dark”! I guess students aren’t allowed to have autonomy, or question capitalist hegemony, or even consider the fact that there are forces that want to keep students in the dark.

I also wish to report Mandi Jung to the St Paul school district…for a commendation. We need more teachers like that.