Utopia, you are standing in it!

I guess I’ll have to post twice on a race-related topic today, though I’m trying to avoid too much of this kind of stuff. Yet people keep sending me links to overly Woke initiatives, and this one was too good to pass up. It’s just one example of how every academic subject is being racialized these days. It’s certainly happening to evolutionary biology, but you’d think that math would be immune to identity politics.

Think again. The Seattle Public School system is planning an initiative that will fuse math education with Critical Race Theory from kindergarten through high school, effectively turning math class into Ethnic Studies class. (This initiative apparently comes from a branch of scholarship called “ethnomathematics.”)  If you think I’m exaggerating, have a look at the official math standards framework (below) and the two articles below that.

The new curriculum;

The first piece is from Education Week…

I confess that I watched only 45 minutes of last night’s Presidential debate. At that point I couldn’t take the fracas any longer: Trump interrupting both the moderator, Chris Wallace, and Joe Biden; the simultaneous talking so that nothing could be made out;  the failure of both candidates to answer questions (typical in these debates); and, of course, Trump’s Mussolini-like posturing.  As I expected, there was no light and a lot of heat, but the heat wasn’t even entertaining. It was a slugfest, and a very ugly one. I missed some bits in the second half that are reported in today’s news, including Trump’s reported refusal to condemn white supremacists.

Although I think Biden came off better, he seemed a bit timorous and shaken and sometimes went off topic. And at times even he couldn’t contain himself, calling Trump a “clown” and telling him to “shut up”. Biden refused to…

What follows is one of the most ridiculous and embarrassing instantiations of wokeness I’ve seen anywhere, much less in colleges.

If you want to see the equivalent of a full, self-abasing confession in the religion of Wokeness, then read the second article below from Inside Higher Ed. When I initially read it, without reading the forerunner article, I thought it was a joke—so over the top and groveling was it.

But it wasn’t at all a joke. It was from a professor who had written a pretty innocuous article (with a grad student co-author) on the education website, an article that simply called for college football to resume (with proper pandemic precautions) as a way of bringing people together. Though I’m not a fan of college football, it didn’t ruffle my feathers a bit, as I know many people—especially Ohio State fans—are rabid addicts to college football.

It turns…

Today is International Blasphemy Day, and there’s a special new Jesus and Mo strip, called “lurid”, in honor of the occasion. (Blasphemy Day is the day in 2005 when the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published the infamous Muhammad cartoons.)

The strip also came with an email message, to wit:

Oops. Sorry I’m a bit late with the mailout this week. I forgot. I also forgot it was Blasphemy Day today, but that’s forgivable because every day is Blasphemy Day at Jesus and Mo dot net!

Help keep this hideous blasphemy going by becoming a patron here: https://www.patreon.com/jandm

You can also buy the latest J&M collection, with a foreword by Jerry Coyne, here. 

I remind you that I don’t get any dosh from either writing the intro or from sales of the books; my foreword was a labor of love. But do throw some love toward the creator of this…

Australia has its former PM, Malcolm Turnbull to thank for its largest and most expensive renewable energy boondoggle, the Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro project.

Touted by the patrician and aloof Turnbull and his hapless sidekick, Josh Frydenberg as the Nation’s mega-battery, the heavily-hyped pumped hydro scheme (shelved in the 1970s because it was uneconomic then) has been heralded as the saviour for the Australian wind and large-scale solar ‘industries’.

The line goes something like this: if we use 3 MWh of wind or solar power to pump water through 27 km of tunnels, over an elevation of 900m, later, when power consumers actually need it, Snowy Hydro could return 2 MWh to the grid.

Never mind squandering 1/3 of the electricity originally generated; never mind that with the inclusion of the $85 per MWh REC the cost of the wind or solar power involved exceeds $110 per MWh; never mind…