Fun with numbers

I was talking to a young man I know about a local incident where someone raised a swastika flag over downtown to protest some poorly-communicated bad conditions in town. My friend said that his mother was furious, but as for himself -- "Now, if he had raised the North Korean flag -- where they've killed more people in concentration camps than they did in Nazi Germany --"

My immediate response was this was impossible, because there really aren't enough people in North Korea to have pulled that off. I have a rough estimate in my head: 6 million Jews, 3 million Roma, Communists and homosexuals, and I don't know how many disabled people -- that's already close to half the entire current population of North Korea (about 21 million).

He said, "I was thinking about over the last 60 years." Nope.

However, North Korea does have the distinction of having a greater incarceration rate than the US -- possibly the only country that does. This is not the best-documented of statistics, of course, and the countries that rival the US in this regard are not generally famed for their eagerness to share their numbers.

But I bet if you asked a bunch of random people where the US lies on this issue, you'd get a lot of overly-optimistic estimates -- depending very much on what community the people belong to, of course: the results would not be random at all.

On another front, I made bread, but it came out badly, though the dough looked and smelled quite good. It's been so long, I have lost the skill, and must build it up again.