I'm still breathing, but some of my joints

feel like they're tired of their current accommodations and want to leave.  And I still need them.  Add a couple of long days and short nights to a cold front coming through.

While I'm convincing them they have to stay, check out this data dump.

Despite the travails- the busy, the wind,

the looming rain- the data must get through

'Higher' Education:

"If we say you're guilty, you're guilty!  Now stop bringing up inconvenient stuff that annoys us!"
This should be good for a serious big-numbers lawsuit.

There are some remarkably stupid and bigoted people out there

A fine example of such.

Seriously, lady?  THIS outrages you?  You must really have a cushy life.

Next step: lawsuits

on the police and prosecutor involved.
Last Thursday an Ohio jury acquitted Anthony Novak, a 27-year-old man whom Parma police arrested last spring for making fun of them. After hearing one day of testimony, the jurors unanimously concluded that Novak did not "disrupt public services," a felony punishable by up to 18 months in prison, when he created a parody of the Parma Police Department's Facebook page.
This was stupid; "He made fun of us and we don't like it" is not a case to bring to court.  And on top of all the current costs, it's going to cost them a lot more to settle this.

Busy few days,

bloggage probably light.  Maybe very.

And not a single communist actor with shotgun, body armor

and a leaky boat in sight.
They're out in force, patrolling in jon boats, motorboats and even canoes through south Louisiana's new, flood-made waterways, saving cats, dogs and people.

 

They're known as the "Cajun Navy," and in recent days they've become possibly the nation's most important neighborhood watch.

And I don't see mention of any federal idiots giving equal-opportunity and sexual harassment lectures, either.

I've got nothing

No rant, no interest.  I'm going to attempt to accomplish a couple of things, and after that I might be able to generate sufficient interest in the world to say something.

On the academic front, some people need to remember that Michael Bellesiles

was not a good example.  And what happened to him.
Fox News reported a few weeks ago that University of Alabama researcher Adam Lankford, author of a media-sensation study on the connection between mass shootings and gun ownership across countries, refuses to share his data and the details of his methodology with skeptics.
...
Worse yet, Lankford’s editor apparently does not agree that the lack of transparency is a problem. The editor instead fell back on the old standby that the study has been peer reviewed — as if that removes all doubt about its validity. (See Slate’s Daniel Engber on why peer review deserves much less esteem than it receives from the media. Short answer: Peer reviewers are rarely thorough, and they tend to build echo chambers for like-minded researchers.)

So why doesn’t Lankford just release the data? “I am open-minded about sharing data with other scholars for collaborative purposes, and consider those opportunities on a case-by-case basis,” he told Fox News. In other words, he’ll share data only with people unlikely to criticize him.
Which is a good indication that your data is crap, and you know it.

If you're not familiar with Bellesiles, you can start here.  Short version:
Scholar claimed 'there weren't very many guns in early America.'
Didn't want to share data and methodology.
When forced, turned out he'd been lying his ass off and faking data.
Did not end well for him.  Rightly so.

And the only ones actually surprised

are the idiots pushing for these laws.
Author Paul Coleman said anti-discrimination laws in the United States are designed to control an individual’s “conscience” and would ultimately threaten First Amendment rights.

“They do grow from the same tree so in terms of our protection of speech, of conscience, and of associational rights, all of these are part of the same package and the threats to these different freedoms are all of a similar nature as well. What they are about is really state control and state sanctioning, so in hate-speech laws the state is seeking to sanction what we can and cannot say,” said Coleman, author of Censored – How European Hate Speech Laws are Threatening Freedom of Speech, at the Heritage Foundation in Washington.
A noted investigator commented

Except I'd say it's not 'ultimately', they're threatening speech rights NOW.

This reminded me of something else, which I was able to find:
First of all, both are totalitarian ideologies. The totalitarian nature of Political Correctness is revealed nowhere more clearly than on college campuses, many of which at this point are small ivy covered North Koreas, where the student or faculty member who dares to cross any of the lines set up by the gender feminist or the homosexual-rights activists, or the local black or Hispanic group, or any of the other sainted “victims” groups that PC revolves around, quickly find themselves in judicial trouble. Within the small legal system of the college, they face formal charges – some star-chamber proceeding – and punishment. That is a little look into the future that Political Correctness intends for the nation as a whole.


And then we have this crap:
"We do not want justice or peace anymore. We done with that shit. We want blood. We want blood. We want the same shit ya'll want. Eye for an eye. No more peace. F--k all that. Ain't no more peace. Ain't no more peace. We done. We cannot co-habitate with white people, one of us have to go, black or white. All ya'll have to go!"
Somebody, in a thread on Fookbase, said they thought the Only Black Lives Matter movement was actually set up to start a black Intifada in the U.S.; looks like they're succeeding.  And if they really do get it going, it's going to get remarkably ugly.

And this:
“Burning down s**t ain’t gonna help nothin’!” she yelled, referring to the rioting that ended with six businesses being burned down and the summoning of the National Guard. “You’re burning down s**t we need in our community. Take that s**t to the suburbs! Burn that s**t down!”
Yeah, that'll help.  Tell everyone in the suburbs that you want to loot their business and burn their house, and that a lot of you want anyone white you catch dead.  THAT'S really going to work wonders.

Sums part of the trouble up nicely

I hate Donald Trump. But the media really is treating him unfairly.
Yes, they are.  While so many of them are so obviously bent over backwards for Clinton.  All this crap does is reinforce to people that the media isn't to be trusted, and that's going to be biting the media for a long time to come.  Or biting deeper, as the case may be.

The Stupid Party and the Evil Party have both picked(although in the case of the Evil Party there was damn little 'picking' involved) people who, if they knocked on your door, you'd either tell them to go away or not answer.  The Libertarians picked a couple of people who keep saying very un-libertarian things(and the occasional "I've climbed these mountains, what has he done!" crap from Johnson), the Greens... they seem to think having Comrade Stalin back wouldn't be bad, long as he wanted to end fracking. 

What I'd really like is a do-over, involving a whole new cast of characters.

This looks like a good read, and it's a free download

The orphan tsunami of 1700—Japanese clues to a parent earthquake in North America

Added: Daniel reminded of this link from a year ago, worth reading