Yay!


Yaaaay! Not quite the Rapture, but good enough for today.

Finally solved a strange problem in HTML/JS/SVG. I'd been using an 'object' tag to contain a switchable piece of code, so the courseware could turn pages. This worked about 60% of the time, in a completely irregular way. I couldn't tell which pages were 'good' and 'bad' because the sequence was never the same. Start up once, and get pages 1,2,3. Start up again and get pages 1,5,11.

Most of the online forums seemed to recommend 'object' for this usage, so I left it in place way too long. It turns out that 'iframe' works perfectly here and 'object' sort of halfway works. Jelly on a tree.

Labels: Danbo, TMI

  ¶ 6:40 AM

  20 different words
The common notion that Eskimos have many different words for types of snow has been debunked... it's not different words, it's just phrasal descriptions mashed together as 'words' by arbitrary spelling techniques.

Still, the underlying concept is pretty good. If you're accustomed to one natural event or substance, you become a connoisseur of its subtypes. Pattern recognition requires adaptation and templates, and an occasional event doesn't let you build a template.



This winter Spokane has (so far!) been blessed with very little snow. Not quite the absolute minimum record, but could end up there if nothing changes. Instead of snow, we've had freezing fog. Almost every day. As it relentlessly continues, it shows subtle variations that wouldn't have been observable among the usual scattered handful of instances. Some days the FZFG is easy for walkers and hard for all cars. Some days it's only hard for small pickup trucks. Ford Rangers have to pull over and give up. Some days it's impossible to walk and easy enough to drive. Some days it's worst on sidewalks, other days it's worst on streets. Some days the FZFG is only bad on east-west streets and okay on north-south streets; sometimes vice-versa; sometimes equal in all directions.

Maybe not 20 words, but close to a dozen!

Labels: Heimatkunde

  ¶ 5:22 AM

  Might as well conform to Google's stereotype.
Might as well continue 1940-censusing disappeared places. Especially since Google has algorithmically figured out what I'm doing. Each time I visit Youtube now, it "recommends" a whole bunch of abandoned-places clips!

Following up on this little story about the rented house on South Lincoln in Ponca. Here's a floor plan. The main rectangle was about 24 by 18 feet. The kitchen was added on, possibly in the '50s, a few steps below the rest of the house. Sunny and spacious, it was the only pleasant room in the house. Before it was added, the little passage on the right must have been the kitchenette. When I lived there, it was just wasted space. Note also the wasted space in the hall. Dead ends both ways, not formed into closets.



This house does appear in the 1940 census. At that time it was owned and occupied by a husband and wife about 50 years old, plus the wife's 80-year-old mother. The husband is listed as "interior decorator", which seems to have meant "painter" in Census coding. Presumably the phrase hadn't yet acquired its fairy connotation.

Even if the back kitchen was already added then, I can't imagine three people in such a small space! But living alone was EXTREMELY rare in 1940. After skimming lots of pages, I'd estimate that only 5% of dwelling units had a single occupant. Most of those seem to be single-room apts, i.e. hotel rooms labeled as apts. Nearly absolute rule: A residence with more than one room housed more than one person.
  ¶ 2:36 AM

  JR of the Bakken 2
Police have more or less finished investigating the execution-style murder of a high-rolling businessman in Spokane. It's pretty much what it looked like at the start.... a paid hit. The common thug who pulled the trigger has been arrested. He was supplied and commanded by another high-rolling businessman in North Dakota, who hasn't been arrested yet. Complex but well-written story from KXLY.
  ¶ 6:09 AM

  Always valid
It's an old theme and an old tune, but always valid. Woody Guthrie put it in an oddly delicate way: "Some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen."

The standard intro of the 1952 TV series 'Racket Squad' puts it much more accurately: "The carefully worked-out frauds and schemes by which confidence men take more money each year from the American public than all the bank robbers and thugs with their violence."

Certainly fits my own experience. I've been robbed with digital fountain pens several times, totalling more than one year of income. A couple of debit-card identity thefts, $6000 in lost interest on savings, and right now JPMorgan is snatching part of my annual royalties to satisfy its hostile-takeover debts against the bankrupt publisher.

I've been physically robbed only once. It was tiny and nonviolent, and left me feeling more guilty than angry.

In 1974 I was making good money for an unskilled dickhead, somewhere around $9K per year, or $40K in today's Bernanke Bucks. (Old Economy Steve, spot on.) I lived simply, in a Ponca neighborhood well below what I could afford. Every week I'd cash my paycheck, put most in savings, and keep a rationed amount in green rectangles. Paid bills in person when possible, or with cash in envelopes in the night-drop boxes of utility companies. One night I came home from work, left the prepared envelopes in my unlocked VW Bug (of course) and went inside to eat. When I came out to run the cash-drop errand, I saw that the envelopes had disappeared. Called the cops and learned that the cops already knew about the theft. The kids across the street had seen and grabbed the cash-filled envelopes. Their mother had immediately reported the event to the police. The cop and I went across the street where I identified the envelopes and took them back. Cop wanted me to give the kids a lecture, but I couldn't muster up any anger. Clearly the mom had already administered sufficient punishment.

These neighbors needed the money much more than I did. They were truly struggling for survival, and the kids were probably happy to bring home a little windfall. Mom thought it was more important to raise law-abiding kids than to have 30 extra dollars. Heroic. Nothing less.

= = = = =

This is where my rented house was. Another emptied-out neighborhood!


Boom-bust ratchet again. Ponca is in a big bust now, and might not recover soon. Enid, with income from wheat and oil services and an Air Force base, always bounces back from oil losses. Ponca has nothing but Continental, and now Continental has moved all its offices to Houston.

  ¶ 5:36 PM

  Class had a different meaning
A brief follow-up on my 'digital reconstruction' of the mysterious Big Horn in Enid.

Tried to find the Big Horn in the 1940 Census. Unsurprisingly no luck; the census lists only residences. I thought the nearest house might show up, because the occupant of that house in 1972 was also the owner of Big Horn. Possibly my memory of seeing a ref to Big Horn in a 1938 city directory is misdated.

Here's a 1940 census page for those blocks:



Pretty much the same as '72 in class and density. White working class, mainly working at Champlin or the elevators. Note that 1329 has a live-in housekeeper!

1329 is gone now, subsumed by the same junkyard that covers part of the Big Horn property. 1434, the north end of the block and the northernmost house in Enid at this longitude, seems to have been a big place in 1940. It was absent in 1972 and present again now. I lived in a rental house at 1426, which was absent in 1940, present in 1972, and absent again now. The boom-bust ratchet in action! (Assisted by the 1966 tornado, which sliced through these blocks.)



= = = = =

Just for fun, I decided to compare with another currently emptied-out part of Enid, the former black part of town.

Here's a 1940 census page from East State Avenue.



This page is typical of the area.

First: You can't tell the race by the names. There are no black names or white names. Only correctly spelled English names, written in a heartbreakingly beautiful Palmer cursive. In a modern list you could tell the color instantly and certainly by the Brytneis and Taelyrs and Nevaehs in the white list and the Qunaishas and LaShrandas and TyQuandios in the black list.

Second: Everyone has a job. Women are maids, men are mostly porters (black laborers) or WPA workers. This was typical until Comrade LBJ ripped black neighborhoods apart to create his private welfare army, replacing work by guaranteed welfare.

Third: Notice three schoolteachers on this one page. This was also typical. Every block in the colored area had at least one teacher or preacher or doctor. Working-class white areas had no professionals at all. In other words, a porter had more daily contact with educated people than a laborer did.

Fourth: On these two pages, blacks owned 2/3 of their homes, while whites owned about 1/2. This isn't quite typical; a quick scan through other pages in both zones shows white working-class and blacks about equal at 60%. Hmmmmm. Haven't we always heard that blacks weren't allowed to own homes?

What the area looks like now... In this case the boom-bust ratchet was assisted by the 1973 flood.



Sidenote of total puzzlement: Every time I look at the 1930s Depression in a 'close-to-home' context, focusing on places and people and numbers that I know something about, I find a lot less trouble and poverty and drought than we've been led to believe. We have lots of photographic and numerical evidence that the decade was a terrible time for some people and places. Obviously there was a there there. But when I try to pin down the there, it always turns out to be a small and slippery there. My ancestors were right in the middle of the Dust Bowl, and they got through it by scrimping and saving and gov't work. These working-class Enid folks, black and white, kept their homes. Probably the same way my ancestors did.

= = = = =

Update 1/18/14: I just took a magnified look at the name on 1329 N. 12th. I hadn't focused on it before. Bingo! He still lived there in 1972. I remember the name from the mailbox. He was about 70, which fits... and I'm fairly sure he was the owner of the Big Horn. (I don't remember if I picked up the connection from direct conversation or from 2nd-hand hearsay.) So there's part of the mystery solved, but I still don't know whether the place ever operated as a business.
  ¶ 7:09 AM

  La Niñita
So far this winter is a sort of La Niñita. A miniature version of the 2008 Hellfest. Same events in the same order .... snow followed by harsh cold followed by windy and warm ..... but only about 25% of full strength.

In 2008 the result of this sequence at 100% concentration was lots of collapsed roofs and flooded houses and ruined lives. This year's HO-scale version is sort of scary to watch but not especially harmful.

Today was the windy and warm part. 50/50. 50 degrees, 50 mph. The 2008 version was 60/60, but it happened at a time when ice dams blocked outflow of a 30" snowpack. Result: floods inside and outside.

Result of this year's HO-scale: No problem on roofs, just swampy yards and perfectly dry streets.

The full-scale version nearly killed me. The HO-scale version just gives me nice walkable streets for the first time in a month. Nature doesn't do linear. Nature does sigmoids.

Labels: Heimatkunde

  ¶ 4:22 PM

  They should have stopped after the first sentence
It's been obvious for 60 years that the current arrangement of Big Science (publish or perish, tenure, grant requests, etc) is atrocious and destructive. It keeps getting worse, even though the correct solution has been offered for 60 years.

Here's a newly offered solution that gets close, but misses badly at the end:

The system involves giving all scientists an annual, unconditional fixed amount of funding to conduct their research. All funded scientists are, however, obliged to donate a fixed percentage of all of the funding that they previously received to other researchers. As a result, the funding circulates through the community, converging on researchers that are expected to make the best use of it. “Our alternative funding system is inspired by the mathematical models used to search the internet for relevant information,” said Bollen. “The decentralized funding model uses the wisdom of the entire scientific community to determine a fair distribution of funding.”

Fixed annual funding is the correct solution. It must be allowed to accumulate, which this proposal doesn't seem to mention. The need to spend all of a granted budget each year leads to tremendous waste. If a researcher can buy only what he needs, at the moment when he needs it, the waste will be eliminated.

The bit about crowd-funding decided by other scientists is a terrible idea. It will reinforce orthodoxy and fashion even more strongly than peer review does. EXACTLY what we don't need. PRECISELY wrong.

Encouraging open public crowd-funding would be a good idea. This already happens for some projects, but it seems to be difficult to arrange and is probably forbidden by some universities or states. If open crowd-funding is one of the options provided by each university's grant control office, with assistance in arranging publicity, a lot of unfashionable (i.e. good) projects could be done.
  ¶ 3:54 AM

  Refreshment
I'm feeling a bit EMBATTLED AND BELEAGUERED this week by deadline pressures and bad weather and short sleep.

Thus it's a refreshing treat to see a strong and sane response by scientifically literate people to a piece of standard wacked-out insanity. Some bizarre alien creature named Max Shapiro (alias Max Tegmark) writes a standard predictable piece of toxic schizophrenic word salad in Anti-Scientific Anti-American.

It's good old genocidal tyrannical Plato as always: "The universe consists of math." I was preparing a cogent response until I started reading the comments. Almost unanimously the commenters crush Shapiro/Tegmark's nonsense from every possible angle. The crush is so comprehensive and decisive that anything I could add would be a net subtraction, because it would dilute the force of superior writers.

Good, by god.
  ¶ 2:11 AM

  Big boy blew it.
Christie just lost his brand.

The correct response to this "scandal" is as follows, verbatim: "Politics is a violent game. Only bullies get things done. I'm a bully, therefore I get things done. You got a problem with what I did to this disloyal mayor? Watch out. You're next."

Regardless of ideology, ordinary Americans are DESPERATELY HUNGRY for politicians grounded in reality. Until this point, Christie appeared to be grounded in reality. Now he's just another mincing squealing fairyboy.
  ¶ 4:23 AM

  Vowels and splines
Dream this morning was trying to tell me something useful.... need to write it down before it disappears.

The setting was completely unoriginal. I was working as a technician in an engineering lab, helping a prof set up an experiment. This is what I did for work during the '80s. The experiment had something to do with acoustic properties of various shapes, which was unimportant. (The dream generator explicitly marked these pieces as unimportant.)

Here's the important bit: The prof was telling me that he had worked with grad students from different countries on this type of experiment. He said that the students who came from areas that pronounced certain vowels in certain ways tended to favor linear point-by-point solutions, while students who came from areas that pronounced the vowels in other ways tended to favor solutions by "thirds or fifths", which were closer to nature.

The dream generator was having word-access trouble, which isn't unusual; I can often tell that the story-maker is able to find concepts or pictures but not words. In this case the generator handled the unreachable words in two different ways. It offloaded the missing nationalities onto the prof, who was supposedly being euphemistic; and it used the nearest available terms and blackboard pictures for the missing solution styles.

After waking, I was immediately able to fill in the missing words from the vowels and pictures. Students from Northern European or Teutonic cultures used FIR or LPC solutions, while students from Muslim cultures favored cubic splines, which were more natural. Alternately, "thirds or fifths" could refer to musical intervals, chords, harmony.

I'm pretty sure the message relates to my futile attempts to think about economics in a more or less Islamic style. Not sure yet how a cubic spline (or a chord) will help, but it's clearly an offer of assistance from the dream generator.
  ¶ 2:19 AM

  MMT is a fraud.
I've been reading various explanations of 'Modern Monetary Theory' with an open mind and with considerable sympathy. I wanted to find a system that could improve things. The people who are pushing MMT seem to be reformers. They seem to be opposed to standard US/UK economics, genuinely opposed to Krugman and Bernanke and Yellen.

After reading several explanations, I've reluctantly concluded that MMT is just a scam, just another Useful Idiot trick. The difference between MMT and the usual economics is just a dose of crack.

Krugman/Bernanke/Yellen economics consists of the following set of ten elegant autistic axioms:

(1) STIMULATE! (2) STIMULATE! (3) STIMULATE! (4) STIMULATE! (5) STIMULATE! (6) STIMULATE! (7) STIMULATE! (8) STIMULATE! (9) STIMULATE! (10) STIMULATE!

MMT extends those axioms to this larger set of turbo-autistic axioms:

(1) STIMULATE! (2) STIMULATE! (3) STIMULATE! (4) STIMULATE! (5) STIMULATE! (6) STIMULATE! (7) STIMULATE! (8) STIMULATE! (9) STIMULATE! (10) STIMULATE! (11) STIMULATE! (12) STIMULATE! (13) STIMULATE! (14) STIMULATE! (15) STIMULATE! (16) STIMULATE! (17) STIMULATE! (18) STIMULATE! (19) STIMULATE! (20) STIMULATE! (21) STIMULATE! (22) STIMULATE! (23) STIMULATE! (24) STIMULATE! (25) STIMULATE! (26) STIMULATE! (27) STIMULATE! (28) STIMULATE! (29) STIMULATE! (30) STIMULATE!

Neither theory has any answers to the basic questions that a leftist or populist economic view should handle. Neither theory does anything for working men and ordinary families. Neither set would impose 1000% tariffs on all imported or outsourced materials and labor, neither theory would wipe out the EPA, neither would torture and execute feral bankers and feral lawyers. Both theories steal everything from the poor and give everything to the superrich. MMT does it twice as fast.

If you want to solve our problems, you have to start with Mohammed's concepts, if not all of his details. Start with labor as the sole source of value. Shape the system to encourage productive labor and discourage counterfeiting, borrowing and abstractions.

Labels: MMT, Natural law = Sharia law

  ¶ 9:09 AM

  Pluto drives!
As long as we're doing anthropomorphic dogs, here's a Spokane news item about a chihuahua who enjoys driving....

Ormaechea said she stood up as soon as she was bumped. “When I looked up, there was no one in the car, just a little dog up on the steering wheel peeking over looking at me. I was shocked, I didn't know if I was crazy, or if this little dog had taken a joy ride.”

That is exactly what happened.

Fortunately the whole thing happened at low speed and nobody was hurt.
  ¶ 5:41 AM

  No Nonomom
The AT&T anniversary show mentioned in previous entry covered a lot of territory with no obvious logic or connection, including the Dionne Quintuplets. They were big news in 1935, so I suppose they had to be mentioned.

Led me to think about the distorted version of multiple births in recent years. Sudden realization: The trend has stopped. Octomom was the killer app. After Octomom, there was not a Nonomom or a Decimom or an Undecimom or a Duodecimom. End. Fini. No more.

Thank God.

But why? I can't imagine that publicity-seeking females voluntarily gave up the game. The competition was firmly established, with hormone-juiced multiple births every week for many years.

Did medical and pharmaceutical types quietly decide to quit providing the tools for publicity-seekers?

  ¶ 2:34 AM

  Pluto talks!
The Pluto/Goofy divide is one of the eternal and unsolvable puzzles of all literature. But it wasn't always a firm divide. In 1935 Pluto briefly crossed the line into anthropomorphism. He didn't quite become a human, he simply became a dog who talks like a human.

It was in the middle of a monumentally corny Salute to the 50th anniversary of the Bell System. I'm accustomed to '30s hokeyness, but this program blows all the gaskets.

Starting at 18:00 in the clip, there's a musical medley/rhapsody based on songs about phones, starting with Hello My Baby. In the middle of this medley/rhapsody, for no particular reason, we hear the following conversation in Sprachgesang form:



Ring, ring, ring.

Mickey: Hello, hello, hello?

Operator: One one one niner, please hold the liner.

Pluto: Hello, is this Mickey Mouse?

Mickey: Yes, this is Mickey Mouse. Who's calling up MY house?

Pluto: This is Pluto. Your doggie Pluto. I won't be home tonight. Woof woof!

Mickey: Well, watch your step now. Don't get in a fight!



No, it doesn't make any more sense in context.

Pluto's voice here is just what you'd expect from a working class dog. Nothing like Goofy's retarded country-hick human.
  ¶ 2:00 AM

  Moore's Law? Bah. Less's Law.
Supposedly computing speed continues to increase. Nonsense. In terms of actual time from keyboard stroke to results, computing speed slows down by a factor of 2 for every new generation of computers.

I've got a reasonably up-to-date desktop. Dual core, 64-bit, 3GHz processor. This is NOMINALLY 1000 times faster than the original Radio Shack PC I used 30 years ago. In FACT the new computer is about 1000 times slower for most basic operations.

When I hit Ctrl-O to open a file, I can see the steps happening.

Computer says: "Hmm. User has depressed CTRL. Let me ring up Bill and see what this means. Hello, Mr Gates? User has depressed CTRL. Oh, okay. This means that the next key belongs to the CTRL series as opposed to the Shift or normal series. Thanks, Mr Gates. Bye-bye. Now User has depressed an O. Hello, Mr Gates? Now User has depressed an O simultaneous with the CTRL. What does ... Oh, you say this Allows User To Open A File? Okay. Bye-bye. Open a file... open a file... this implies that I need to find the currently active folder... Oops, the file drawer was a little tight. Need to oil that drawer. Where's the WD40? There. Spritz, spritz, spritz. Much better. File drawer is open. Now I need to build one of those tiresome Window things on User's screen. Here's a frame: top side ... left side ... right side ... bottom side. Now here's a blank area in the middle of the frame. Add a couple of buttons on the bottom. One button, two buttons. We need labels on the buttons. Open on the first one, then.... I guess Cancel on the second one. Does that look right? I suppose. Now I need to fill in some files. Whoopsie! We seem to have some folders here along with files. What do I do with folders? Hello, Mr Gates? Okay. Bye-bye. Find some folder icons for the folders. First one, second one. Now I have, let's see, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Did I count right? Try again. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Six files to list. First one. It seems to need an icon. What kind of icon? Hello, Mr..."

Well, you get the idea. On my old 1984 Tandy PC all of these activities happened in a few milliseconds. Instantly to my eyes. There was no possible way I could separate the steps. On my 2010 Dell, supposedly 1000 times faster, I can see each of these operations and I can count TEN FUCKING SECONDS while they all ever-so-slowly complete. After several file operations the computer seems to improve with practice, and the time slips down to one or two seconds. But if I do something else for a while, the training is lost and the computer has to ask Mr Gates how to respond to a keystroke all over again.



In terms of total keystroke to action time, THIS IS SLOWER THAN A MECHANICAL ADDING MACHINE.

Or an even closer analogy: FINDING A DIGITAL FILE ON THIS SO-CALLED COMPUTER IS SLOWER THAN FINDING AN ACTUAL FUCKING PAPER FILE IN AN ACTUAL FUCKING METAL FILING CABINET.

The problem is not at the OS level. My old courseware, which uses DOS-level directory functions to build its own directory listbox, runs just as fast in W7 as in earlier Win versions. Also, some Norton-Commander type directory systems run instantly. The problem is in Explorer, and in all progs that use the top-level file dialogs.... which is ALL major progs. Many forums have discussed this giant bug, but none have offered a solution that works. I've tried them all.

Labels: 20th century Dark Age, Danbo

  ¶ 4:13 AM

  Early winner 2
Yesterday we were able to give out the 2014 award for the most fantastically idiotic stupid moronic brainless dangerous fatal genocidal piece of so-called alleged accused quote """"science"""" unquote. Now we already have a winner for the most fantastically idiotic stupid moronic brainless dangerous fatal genocidal piece of Gaian doctrine.

Ready? Here goes.

Professor David MacKay, the energy department’s chief scientific adviser, said that electronic equipment and cars should be kept for as long as possible and then disassembled so that components can be recycled.

Householders “buying lots of stuff and then throwing it away” make it “difficult” for ministers to reduce the country’s energy consumption, Prof MacKay said.

This is especially aggravating because MacKay is about 50% right for 100% wrong reasons.

Before 1980, US and UK MADE OUR OWN STUFF and we made it REPAIRABLE. This was a better situation all around. MAKING THINGS is CREATING VALUE, and it was possible to pay a livable wage to the people who MADE THINGS and REPAIRED THINGS.

Now we have stopped MAKING THINGS. We enslave children in Bangladesh to do our making, and we design things for complete disposability. Prices are lower than before and wages here are MUCH lower than before and the badly designed shit has to be tossed quickly. This is good for the Chosen Ones, of course, because it forces non-Chosen people to live by borrowing from Chosen Ones.

We DESPERATELY NEED to return to the pre-1980 condition, but NOT because it would appease Gaia's wrath. We need to return to the pre-1980 condition because it was GOOD FOR OUR OWN FUCKING PEOPLE, especially good for the non-Chosen who have better hand skills than math skills. No amount of STEM training, no amount of "pre-K education", will make the slightest improvement in this basic pattern. PEOPLE ARE DIFFERENT, and the DUTY OF A FUCKING NATION is to provide USEFUL EMPLOYMENT for the GREATEST FUCKING NUMBER of those people.

Blessings to the Telegraph commenters, as always. They have exploded High Priest MacKay's genocidal poison from every possible angle, including one big point I hadn't thought of. A large part of outsourcing and disposability was forced by MacKay's own Gaian genocide. Superfund lawsuits, EPA emission laws, "Endangered" "Species" "Laws" and brownfield laws smashed US factories. Anti-Freon laws and sealed emission systems on cars made repair impossible.

Labels: the broken circle

  ¶ 2:24 AM

  Nice exception
A pretty good rule for digital stuff and digital services: You don't get what you pay for. In general there's very little correlation between cost and quality. Open source freeware and shareware is often better than high-cost "reputable" software and services.

Finally found a positive exception to the rule, in a rather specialized area.

SCORM is a semi-vacant jungle. Most of the activity has been locked inside "authoring systems", leaving the independent developer at loose ends. Lots of dead links, abandoned projects, websites untouched since 2003.

I've been trying all the free and open Scorm "testbeds" and "players". None of them work. The "player" from reload.ac.uk sort of halfway works, but doesn't seem to register results. I've been wrestling with this tree-jelly for many days, trying to determine if the problem was in my code or not. Felt like driving on ice with an opaque windshield and a crescent wrench turning a rounded-off steering shaft.

The positive exception is ScormCloud. Their minimal service, called "little", costs $75 and it's already worth every cent in my first day of usage. It's easy to upload your ZIPped package, the system understands everything, excellent live help is available, and it lets you know for damn sure what's happening. If there's a problem, it's on my end now. If I'm pretty sure that a function should work, it does work in ScormCloud. If I'm pretty sure that a function shouldn't work, it doesn't work in ScormCloud.

Ah. Blessed certainty! It's still icy driving, but now I can tell which of my turns leads into a skid!
  ¶ 7:40 AM

  Early winner
Only one week into 2014 and we can already give the prize for most fantastically idiotic stupid moronic brainless dangerous fatal genocidal piece of so-called alleged accused quote """"science"""" unquote.

Ready? Here goes:

Nearly half of black males and almost 40 percent of white males in the U.S. are arrested by age 23, which can hurt their ability to find work, go to school and participate fully in their communities.

The study is an analysis of national survey data from 1997 to 2008 of teenagers and young adults, ages 18–23, and their arrest histories, which run the gamut from truancy and underage drinking to more serious and violent offenses. The study excludes arrests for minor traffic violations.

Most striking are the race differences revealed in the study, Brame says. In particular, the research points to a higher prevalence of arrest among black males and little race variation in arrest rates among females.

“A problem is that many males – especially black males – are navigating the transition from youth to adulthood with the baggage and difficulties from contact with the criminal justice system.”

The study’s key findings include:

By age 18, 30 percent of black males, 26 percent of Hispanic males and 22 percent of white males have been arrested.

By age 23, 49 percent of black males, 44 percent of Hispanic males and 38 percent of white males have been arrested.

While the prevalence of arrest increased for females from age 18 to 23, the variation between races was slight. At age 18, arrest rates were 12 percent for white females and 11.8 percent and 11.9 percent for Hispanic and black females, respectively. By age 23, arrest rates were 20 percent for white females and 18 percent and 16 percent for Hispanic and black females, respectively.

And the coup de disgrace:

“As a society, we often worry a great deal about the effects of children watching television, eating junk food, playing sports and having access to good schools,” Brame says. “Experiencing formal contact with the criminal justice system could also have powerful effects on behavior and impose substantial constraints on opportunities for America’s youth.

Experiencing formal contact with the justice system. Apparently this is an event that just sort of happens, like getting bit by a mosquito or catching a virus.

Nowhere in the whole wacked mess does it mention that the "justice system" usually has a reason for biting you. Cops may stop you and talk to you for minor reasons, but if they actually arrest you, there's a very strong chance that you've done something specific and illegal.

The goal of this %$#^%&%^&*^%*%^ is obvious. Next step: CDC will declare "contact with the justice system" to be a disease of epidemic proportions, and will mobilize all social workers and shrinks to "cure" the "disease". How will it be "cured"? By training the virus (i.e. the cops) to completely ignore all black males.

Finally, all of this unspeakable poisonshit will safely divert our attention from the REAL FUCKING PROBLEM, which is the lack of factory jobs. Our satanic corporations can safely continue outsourcing all low-skilled work, and can safely focus their attention on proper American business, i.e. sucking trillions and trillions and trillions and trillions and trillions and trillions and trillions and trillions of counterfeit "dollars" from Janet's gray and wrinkled tits.
  ¶ 6:05 AM

  Reversed prices
Along with juiced measures, we have an epidemic of reversed prices.

I hadn't thought about this until I heard a brief news item about the new Colo pot markets. The 'recreational' markets are selling pot for twice as much as the previously formed 'medical' markets.

This is how it SHOULD be. What do we supposedly want? We want people to go through approved channels. We want them to get prescriptions for drugs, and we want them to have health insurance.

The Colo pot market is the ONLY market that enforces what we supposedly want.

Everywhere else we do the exact opposite. We make brand-name drugs vastly more expensive than generics. We make American-sold drugs vastly more expensive than foreign-bought drugs. We make all American products vastly more expensive (and generally lower quality) than foreign-made products. We make Romneycare premiums twice as high as pre-Romneycare premiums. We make Romneycare premiums 12 times as high as the penalty for not using Romneycare. We make legally bought cigarettes vastly more expensive than illegal (untaxed) cigarettes.

And then we pretend to wonder why so many people choose the illegal or non-approved way of doing things.

The only logical conclusion is that our laws are made by the gangs who benefit from illegal transactions. Good old Bootleggers and Baptists.
  ¶ 4:52 AM