Numbers

By now most people should have seen the Washington Post refutation of the widely circulated statistic reporting 18 school shootings so far this year. The number comes from Michael Bloomberg's "Every town for GunSafety," and it is false.

Carrying it a little further, the Post reports that since the 1999 Columbine massacre about 150,000 kids have been present in a K-12 school when a shooting took place. With about 50 million K-12 kids in the country, that means 49,850,000 were not exposed to school gun fire. The percentage is thus about three one-thousandths one per cent over some 19 years.

One more boring statistic, not nearly as flammable as marches on Washington or frantic street demonstrations: There are roughly 98,270 high schools and elementary schools in our country. About 170 of them, according the the solidly liberal and anti-gun Post, have experienced shootings while, therefore, 98,100 of them have not. That percentage is 18 ten-thousandths of one per cent. 

Feel free to fact-check.

Nothing here is meant to minimize the horror of any murder; it is meant to attenuate the mindless drama.

(Just blowing the dust from my blog wth this little item I first posted to Facebook.  How y'all doing out there?)

Idiots of the Corn

Here in the idyllic heartland, one of the common crimes is  burgling and vandalizing isolated old farmsteads. The optimistic thugs are usually looking for antiques and other fencible merchandise (copper is always popular), and they often get away with it, earning, I judge, an hourly income about half of what they could make flipping legal if disheartening burgers.

A couple of years ago drones became the new toy of choice for our local gendarmes. (If you smell some hefty federal grant money here, I forbear arguing with you.)  They would make crook-catching a snap.

Down around Emmetsburg (nee "The Irish Settlement") it didn't work yesterday.

The crime was eyeballed by a citizen who called the cops who descended with enough men and materiel to set up a perimeter around the corn field into which the miscreants had fled. This all happened at mid-morning. Aside from the manpower, the lawn order lads deployed a small manned airplane and two drones.

We can assume a good time was had by all in the air and  on the joysticks.  Hour piled upon hour as they buzzed back and forth over the fading green of high September maize. It isn't too hard to imagine that the suspects watched the aerial crime-buster craft for while, shrugged, then settled down for nice long naps. A little before supper time they snuck out and tried to make their getaway through an adjacent field of soy beans where they were spotted by a citizen innocent of possessing a drone, a thermal imager, or even one of those old-fashioned Cessnas. He phoned the cops and the lead panned out. The county jail population rose by two at sundown.

My personal belief is that the law officers are spending this equinox day preparing new grant proposals to increase their drone force.

The Luddite who lives in one of the sub-basements of my soul finds all this pretty damned funny.

Newspapers from Pig Food

The main trouble with the goddam mass media these days is that cruddy ink they use, made out of soybeans. When you use a page of sooty tofu to polish your windows, it leaves a bunch of goddam smudges.

In my day we knew how to make newspapers with real ink. Useful newspapers. Our readers may have been misinformed, had their intelligence insulted, and been subjected to the you-live-wrong diatribes of the lifestyle writers, but they at least had clean windows.

How to snag ...

an overweight washed-up congressman and simultaneously maintain a national reputation as a seriously advanced  teevee thinker.