Happy Mediocre Thanksgiving Grading Day, or whatever

I hope you’re all celebrating by staying in place and not seeing friends and family, and may your holiday be quiet and boring and just like every other day in this endless dreary pandemic. Get used to it. You can use today to practice for the upcoming Dreary Christmas holiday.

My plan is to stay home, plod through a lot of grading, and then this evening fix a nice dinner for my wife and me. That’s kind of it. Black Friday: more grading, although I will be going into the lab to feed the spiders. This weekend: grading. Next week: I’ve opened myself up to my class for Zoom Q&As about their grades while I’m waiting for the final exams to come pouring in next Friday, when the torture grading will resume.

After that, I’ll party! At home, alone.

Almost over…

I’m about to give my last lecture of Fall 2020, so it seems only fitting to share a picture of dinosaurs at their last supper.

I AM DONE. With lecturing, anyway. Still have lots of grading. Also, I told my students I’d continue to log onto Zoom next week at regular class time in case anyone had questions about the take-home final.

The only majority that you guys have is the numbers

Watch this MAGA loon try to argue that mathematically, he wins…without any math.

He also states that We [Republicans] have 40% of the population here, you’ve only got about 60%. I just wanted to slap him and tell him that acreage doesn’t vote, people do, and that 60 is bigger than 40. Math Time for Republicans, you ass.

Deadly sequels

I was horrified to learn that Ernest Cline had written a sequel to Ready Player One, creatively titled Ready Player Two. The original was one of those books I could not believe got published, it was so badly written and was such a weaponized pile of 80s nostalgia trash, but then Steven Spielberg went and turned into a big budget CGI-rich movie (I have not been able to read the whole novel, or watch more than a few minutes of the movie), and I was shocked yet again. But now Cline has spewed out another. He’s like the Dan Brown of our decade, an inexplicable popular phenomenon that provides a constant stream of bad quotations on the internet.

But there’s an even worse prospect ahead of us: Jordan Peterson is trying to publish Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life..

Jebus. Who knew there was such a large market for shit? And that publishing houses would be so eager to line up and shell out cash for it, in spite of the fact that their employees are up in arms about it?

Four Penguin Random House Canada employees, who did not want to be named due to concerns over their employment, said the company held a town hall about the book Monday, during which executives defended the decision to publish Peterson while employees cited their concerns about platforming someone who is popular in far-right circles.

“He is an icon of hate speech and transphobia and the fact that he’s an icon of white supremacy, regardless of the content of his book, I’m not proud to work for a company that publishes him,” a junior employee who is a member of the LGBTQ community and who attended the town hall told VICE World News.

Another employee said “people were crying in the meeting about how Jordan Peterson has affected their lives.” They said one co-worker discussed how Peterson had radicalized their father and another talked about how publishing the book will negatively affect their non-binary friend.

“The company since June has been doing all these anti-racist and allyship things and them publishing Peterson’s book completely goes against this. It just makes all of their previous efforts seem completely performative,” the employee added.

Of course executives defended the publication! It’s capitalism, it’s all about the money! And of course the employees, who won’t see a penny over their fixed salaries and hourly wages, have the luxury of principles and can protest the unscrupulous decision.

It’s a self-help book by a guy who published an earlier self-help book, and then went on a self-destructive binge of drugs and weird, destructive dieting and ended up in a coma in a Russian clinic trying to cure his own self-harm with radical, expensive treatments. The only question is, did he end up in such a state because he followed his own stupid “rules for life”, or because he’s such a bad guru that he didn’t follow them? Either way, he shouldn’t be paid to dispense advice, and only a fool would listen to him.

It’s too bad that we have tens of millions of fools in 2020 America eager to lap up the corrupt drippings of bad writers.

What color is your engine check light?

I’ve been ambling along, telling myself that I’m OK, I’ve got a plan to get through all this, I’m fine, go away, leave me alone, I’ve got work to do. Maybe I’ve been wrong, though. Maybe I’m just really good at burying my worries. Then I ran into this simple illustration that brought my situation into focus.

I’m looking at my dashboard, and seeing that my engine status is not a solid green at all. It’s more like a solid yellow that occasionally flutters orange as my engine stutters sporadically. If I were a car, I’d be saying we ought to get this thing into the shop to be checked out (and honestly, if I were a car, I’d more likely be saying that we can coax a few more miles out of it and put off the bother of maintenance a little longer.)

I’m also thinking that there are just two things preventing me from crashing into the red.

  • The election was not totally disastrous. If the orange disaster had been re-elected, I’d be panicking that the starboard engine was on fire and the hydraulics have been cut and there’s no way to lower the landing gear — we’re going in for a belly landing in rugged terrain (yes, I’m aware that my metaphor has become airborne, but that’s to make the catastrophe more clear). Putting Biden in office just means I can sputter along in the yellow, not that everything is fixed.
  • The nature of my job is such that I have semesters of overwork separated by longish breaks. Everything is coming to a head in my classes right now, but by next weekend I’ll have the grading all done and can unwind with a lab full of spiders for a month and a half. It’s not quite enough to push my status into the green, because another semester looms beyond that, but it will help stabilize me in the yellow. I don’t think the surges in stress are the best way to teach or the best way to learn, but it’s the system we’ve got.

It does not escape my notice that yellow is not a good condition to be in.

What about you? Is your engine purring, grinding, or bursting into flames?

Bad professor

It’s always sad to see someone bring disgrace to my profession. There’s a physical science professor, Thomas Brennan at Ferris State University in Michigan, who went on a surprising rant. He raged about an elite Jewish conspiracy, that the coronavirus is caused by nanotechnology in cell phones, Covid19 is another jewish revolution, that the moon landings were fake, that atom bombs are fake, that the pandemic lockdown is a conspiracy by the Leftist new world over to take over, etc., etc., etc. He has since been placed on leave, although one has to wonder how long this guy was in place on campus, with the other faculty in his discipline looking on. They had to have known!

He was a full-on racist, anti-Semitic, far-right kook with an account on gab and ludicrously awful views about science.

But, you say, what about his side of the story? Maybe he’s got really good, rational arguments to support his views, and would be able to martial an excellent defense in a debate. I got news for you: Brennan wrote a formal letter explaining his position. It really doesn’t help him at all.

This controversy started after I made a few statements in a College of Arts and Sciences
meeting of faculty and staff about the Covid-19 pandemic. My statements were to the
effect that I believe the Covid-19 pandemic is a stunt designed to enslave
humanity and strip us of all of our rights and freedoms.
I don’t believe that the pandemic is a hoax, people have died. But its severity is being
exaggerated by revolutionary leftists in the media and government who ‘never let a good
crisis go to waste.’ The end result of this hysteria, if unchecked, will be a mandatory
vaccine. No one will be allowed into public places or permitted to buy food in a
supermarket unless they present proof-of-vaccination. Initially, this electronic vaccination
certificate will be tied to a person’s smartphone, but will soon after be in the form of
injectable micro or nanotechnology in the vaccine itself. If this comes about it will truly
be a fulfillment of the prophecy of the mark of the beast, as described by St. John the
Apostle in the Book of Revelation, Chapter 13:16-17.

See? Perfectly rational. Bible prophecies are always solid evidence.

Let me address a few of these tweets, starting with the one where I used the ’n-word.’ I
believe the ’n-word’ is a mind-control spell designed to make us hate each
other. I am not racist against black people, I love and respect them. But I
reject the premise that there are certain magic words that should never be used in any
context or by certain people. I uttered the word to try to neutralize its power, and
its implied meaning in the context of the tweet was as a synonym for ‘human being,’ or
‘person,’ since I used it to describe people of different races. I deleted this tweet within a
few hours of typing it back in June 2019, way before I made the Covid-19 comment, so
someone must have screen-shotted it and been building a portfolio to use against me for
when the time came.

It’s all a conspiracy! They’re out to get me!

Ironically, my casual use of the ’n-word’ in that tweet isn’t the most controversial thing
about it. It’s that I’m calling out the huge scientific and historical frauds that I believe
have been perpetrated since the mid-twentieth century. There is real science, but there is
also fake science. Fake science is an instrument of oppression. I believe that Bill Nye,
Buzz Aldrin, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Anthony Fauci are human beings of worth, as we
all are, but I believe they are telling some lies and are a part of a system of lies.

They’re all liars! It’s all fake science!

Besides using the ’n-word,’ a linguistic atom-bomb that I only used to get people’s
attention, I also said ‘Atom Bombs are Fake.’ The atom bomb has got to be one of
the most fear-inducing, oppressive ideas of all time, and ‘fear is the mind-killer.’ After rewatching the footage of atomic bomb tests from the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, it appears to me
they are just films of explosions of large piles of TNT, made to look much bigger through
special effects. By filming an explosion at a high frame-rate and playing it back in slow motion, an impression of immensity can be achieved. Other special-effects techniques
such as ‘front projection,’ ‘forced perspective,’ and superimposed images also seem to
have been used in some of the footage. A combination of these techniques was used to
produce the surprisingly real-looking tornado scene in the 1939 film, the Wizard of Oz.
The best special effects were then, and are still, a military secret, and were only used
sparingly in fictional films of the time to define a false frame of what was real on film.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were fire-bombed and flattened overnight with conventional
bombs.
There is much more to the atom bomb deception, but let me move on. I also said: “the
Moon landings are fake.” The films of the Apollo moon landings were faked using
the same special effects bag of tricks that was used to fake the bomb. But the most
powerful argument for why I believe we did not land on the Moon is that the inner solar
system is a blast furnace, and the sun-lit surface of the Moon is over 700 F, not 250 F, as
NASA claims. That is why the Moon glows red during a lunar eclipse—not because of
refracted red light from the Earth’s atmosphere, as Bill Nye and Neil Tyson would have
you believe. The shadow of the Earth’s atmosphere is blue, not red.

He taught physics, let me remind you.

The entire world has fallen under the spell of a satanic, globalist elite. Their end-goal is a
technocratic, one-world government, where everyone, Jew and Gentile, will be
microchipped and tracked 24/7. They use the rhetoric of social-justice and cancel culture, not to bring about equality, but to smear and silence anyone who opposes them.
We will all be equally enslaved if they have their way. They use science, both fake and
real, as a weapon to control us and keep us in a constant state of fear. The fear-spell of
the atom bomb has worn off after all of these years, so they had to unleash a new one,
Covid-19. Lord have mercy on me and on us all.

His intentions are noble and pure, you see.

Don’t you worry about Professor Brennan. He may be about to be fired so hard he’s going to fly out of his socks, but he has a lucrative future ahead of him as a speaker at QAnon rallies and anti-vaxxer conferences, and he’ll probably be invited onto the Joe Rogan show any moment now.

We braved the wilderness to forage for food today

It’s a big production. We’re avoiding human contact as much as we can, so we only rarely venture forth for essentials, like groceries. Unfortunately, today was the day. We’re in the last half-week of the semester, so no labs, so we could use my morning lab time to make the long drive to Aldi in Alexandria to pick up a load. We go in the early hours, arriving just as it opens, again to minimize exposure to filthy humans, and we stock up on about 3 weeks worth of food, and then we flee back south to the safety of our home. We’re probably OK until mid-December now.

We’ve made a major shift in our habits, and it still feels strange. It used to be we’d take grocery shopping for granted — the store in town is close enough that I’d plan ahead only a day or two, and walk the few blocks to pick up a few things every few days. But then the local store got all pestilential and refused to enforce the mask mandate (they’ve gotten better now, but they’ve lost our trust), so now we prepare weeks ahead — I also have a store of really basic staples, like dried beans and peas and rice, that could keep us going for a few months, if necessary — and I feel like one of those stupid doomsday preppers, and I despise those people.

Now we’re back, and that means buckling down to grading. It will be great to finish up this semester, and even greater to finish up this pandemic, some day in the distant future.

An unfortunate synchronicity

OBIT Edward J. Conrad died Thursday, November 19, 2020

Here I go and post a video about Ed Conrad on the 22nd of November, and then I learn that he had died 3 days before. I had tried looking him up, but he’d dropped off the internet as near as I could tell in 2015; I guess he was living the quiet life all this time.

I hadn’t mentioned that one of his other obsessions was life after death, and he wrote a fair bit about the Sheppton Mine disaster, and was confident that the experiences survivors and families had in that traumatic evident were proof positive of an afterlife. I did not find his stories persuasive. And no, the ghost of Ed Conrad did not visit me and tell me that I had to memorialize him with a YouTube video.

OOOoooooOOOOwoooooooooo.