Something major happened today re: Enid Public Schools solicitations for bond votes

...and it deserves a blog post all by itself.  And anybody in Enid tuning in to Suddenlink channels 19 or 119 already know what I'm talking about, and I'm sure they've seen this horror long before I did...and...I'm sure that what's been seen can't be unseen.  Oh, woe is Mr. Darrell Floyd.  Suddenlink got on the case immediately after I started using Twitter to urge other locals to tune in, but the best fix they got was just a slide show with no audio.

I did capture what happened, and I spent the late afternoon turning into a vote no promo. Well, that's the size of the horror, and it's all of Darryll Floyd's own making.  Ya just can't make this shit up.  Enjoy:

January 26 UPDATE, school funding edition: Obama pledges $4 billion for computer science in school   Can't stand Obama? You'll have to hate Google too, then. Google is a partner.

Yes, computer coding is a science, you silly world-class-find-arts-center cheerleader twirling queens.  You're going to need math for coding, and it appears you didn't know that.  I say again: city engineers (civil engineers) don't come from arts programs.  Fire fighters don't come from arts programs either, so if you don't grow your own civil engineers and firefighters, you have to go afar to find them.  Computer coders don't come from fine arts programs either.  Fine arts programs don't train kids to qualify for jobs in Enid--they get trained for export to California or New York.  That's reality--deal with it or reality will deal with you.

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Saturday mini-UPDATE, Enid News & Eagle's article about the City Commission edition:
The article discusses a financial review, mentions in passing the sales tax revenue shortfalls over the past year, saying that automatic budget cuts kick in, and this comes in as Enid has to vote for higher taxes because of that pork-barrel school bond vote to give Floyd some more shiny new electronic toys to play with as if the new electronic toys the City of Enid gave him with his cable channels weren't good enough...

That jogged my memory about something I'd heard or read about how Enid and the state were hotbeds of non-profit organizations.  If you don't see where I'm going with this, I'll spell it out for you--under the guise of being anti-tax conservativism, is it the case that conservatives turn against the principles of making a profit?  The whole idea that conservative principles were based on was to not be ashamed of making a profit.  But profits get taxed, and so we have the posterboy for anti-profit occupation of commercial real estate property in downtown Enid in the form of CDSA, taking up the entire square footage of what used to be a for-profit furniture store, Burchardt's.  That's one helluva lot of multiple storey square footage of retail space not generating sales tax to replace the sales tax revenue of the company that used to be there.

And there's not one damn dollar spent on Main Street Enid that has made an impact on remedying that situation while it continues to burn good money best spent elsewhere.

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Sunday mini-UPDATE: Got word that a southern Illinois favorite, Minnesota Fats, passed away in Nashville...and while I was enjoying all the stories told about his legendary pool hustling days on this occasion, I also ran across something more pertinent to Enid's revenue situation in that it's failed to capitalize on the fact that it's a commercial road and rail crossroads.  Over in southern Illinois, in the town of West Frankfort, a mayor decided to buy a mall for development just because it's just off Interstate 57.  Anybody who knows the route as a significant north-south commercial transport corridor can easily see why.  Enid's a little dense in that regard, because while it meddles in mucking around aimlessly with buying up private property  for downtown development and some other residential developments, it's letting former retail tax generator Oakwood Mall backslide.

Oklahoma is peculiar in stacking all its revenue chips on retail sales tax, but the concept behind this scheme was based on good solid thinking when actual conservatives were running the place: you're in business to make money and when you make  money, you can chip in on showing the world how prosperous the state is.  But that was also before the roster of Oklahoma non-profit organizations hit the 8,000 mark.  With the anti-tax anti-government sentiment out there among the neo-cons and now with the Tea Party, now everybody's against making a profit these days, which makes the state's pro-business position look rather silly, especially in the accounting department.

Here's the article in the Southern Illinoisan newspaper.

Now here's an interesting graphic that might very well be applied to Enid's concept of TIF development:

Yup--TIFs don't always end well, and he's right about giving out special treatment that your local small biz owners don't get to benefit from.  And all the TIFs in the world don't make up for the fact that the schools in your city don't produce graduates that qualify for the jobs offered by the big biz you're trying to attract.  City civil engineers just don't come from fine arts departments, world class or otherwise, and neither does a skilled workforce.  You can't hire local firemen from that lot either because that requires at least a basic grasp of physics--and now that they're first responders in hazmat spills, they'll need basics in chemistry as well.

Arts and music are necessary for a well-rounded education, but you don't get a well-rounded education on arts alone.  You train kids for failure when you do that.

This just in, via a Facebook meme exchange:

Now for something completely different UPDATE: I've had stuff "go viral" before, but this one's a first on Facebook: