We all do what we can; the way forward seems fraught and full of those who would harm us for who we are, but forward we go. Two people doing their damndest to find that way forward today.

• First, Jaime Noguchi of Yellow Peril, who sums it all up beautifully in today’s panel one:
  What to do if you see a swastika. Because that’s where we fucking are now.

  Which follows with handy tips how a hateful symbol can be hidden, its intent to intimidate and oppress turned into a delightful kitty or turtle or corporate logo. I suspect that this is the sort of thing that fucking Nazis will hate more than anything else; they’re so convinced of their superiority and the purity of their philosophy, message, and iconography that to see it subverted is likely to make them sputter But, but … my mighty swastika¹.

  Fat Tardises. Super Triforces. Pixel hearts. Screw the cowards, screw their message, put ’em in the ash-heap of history where they belong.

• Secondly, when we have (eventually, and I have no illusion it will be quickly or easily) fully populated the ash-heap of history², the task will remain to ensure that this crap doesn’t happen again³. That’s going to require a population that’s far more rigorous about sifting actual information from propaganda, reality from falsity, facts from lies. Learn well we will have to tell future generations or repeat our folly. One of the people on the front lines of that learning is the semipseudonymous Dr Dante Shepherd.

  Today his photo-webcomic, Surviving The World, celebrates 3000 entries with an observation that an exercise meant to help deal with the stresses of graduate school has turned into a professing career, and also:

  I am very pleased to announce that I have been asked to make science comics for the quarterly scientific journal Chemical Engineering Education over the next year, and will have the first comic released in the spring issue next year.

  For those of you wondering how that teaches the next generations to not be fooled by charlatans, let me assure you that chemical engineering does not care if your pet theory comes from your preferred Weltanschauung⁴ or not; if the equation that keeps the chemical reactor from blowing up in your face came from a person that you consider beneath you and you disregard it, it’s gonna blow up in your damn face.

  Honestly, a stronger grounding in the scientific method (which pits ideas against the test of reality) over the past three decades could have saved us all a lot of problems. In the meantime, send your youngsters to Shepherd and others like him; the vaccine of knowledge is armor against the plague of ignorance or some other similarly mixed metaphor.

Spam of the day:

That Realty Chick — CA Real Estate Market News & Updates from your local real estate agent

California is not local, but thanks so much for thinking I’d be interested in buying a house — pardon me, an estate — in Beverly freakin’ Hills.

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¹ Any coincidence with Randy Newman’s pondering as to Why must everybody laugh at my mighty sword? entirely intentional.

² And, hopefully, found a way to re-burn things that have already been burned.

³ One of the most astute things I’ve read since the election is the observation that this rising tide of authoritarianism is occurring as living memory of World War II is lost. Dunno about you, but my grandfather would not have put up with this fascist posturing. As he was the biggest man in the world in all of my memories pretty sure he would have fixed it all by his lonesome.

⁴ Look it up.