William – Page 65 – Really Right

School Shootings: What Will It Take?

Following the recent school shooting in Florida, many folks are asking, “what it will take to end such senseless violence?” I wish to address this question but not in the way that the George Soros types are expecting.

• First, the shooter was not a current student.
• Second, all of the non-violent, touchy-feely stuff like “See something, say something” was followed.
Months Before Massacre, Cops Told of Cruz Threats With Weapon
• Third, did you know there was an officer on the campus when the shooting started and he did nothing but hide until it was over?

Sheriff Scott Israel during a press conference Thursday said video showed Peterson arriving at the west side of the building where the shooting took place. Peterson, Israel said, took up a position but “never went in.”

Peterson was armed and in uniform during the shooting, but never entered the building despite “clearly” knowing a shooting was happening, Israel said.

The sheriff said he believes Peterson remained outside of the building for four minutes, while the shooting in total lasted six minutes. Israel said the officer never fired his weapon.

Deputy assigned to Florida school ‘never went in’ during shooting, sheriff says

Unless Tom Cruz really wants to setup the Pre-crime Unit from his movie Minority Report, nothing of substance could have been to the gunman prior to walking on the campus with his guns. (And no, you can’t lock people up because you think they’re crazy, the U.S. Supreme Court killed that idea in the 1980’s. What do you think caused the epidemic of homeless people?)

Sorry but Pre-Crime Unit is Science Fiction

What should have happened is that the cop on campus or some teacher “packin’ heat” should have ended this thing before it ever got started. If the coach that died shielding students had been able to use deadly force, then the tragedy could have been avoided entirely. But Liberals would rather that we all were defenseless sheep rather than potential deterrents to crime.

Calling 911 Won’t Save You
If you think that calling 911 during an active shooter event will save you then you are a fool. Never has a call to 911 prevented an active shooter situation. The police take too long to arrive to be of any good and will wait outside until they know they have superior numbers before entering the building. This time is measured in hours not minutes. Here are a few random examples

Orlando Florida School Shooting: June 2016
Delay in Orlando police response to massacre examined

Las Vegas Shooting: October 2017
Don’t believe me, look at the Las Vegas shooting. Cops waited an hour after the last shot was fired before entering the suspect’s hotel room.
Here’s a timeline of the Las Vegas shooting — with the crucial detail police left out last time

Parkland Florida: February 2018
In this instance, the shooter left the school with a group of students and before law enforcement was ready to enter the building.

Authorities said the alleged gunman, Nikolas Cruz, stopped at a WalMart, a Subway restaurant and a McDonald’s immediately after carrying out the second-deadliest mass shooting at a public school in US history.

“The suspect crossed fields and ran west along with others who were fleeing and tried to mix in with the group that were running away, fearing for their lives,” Broward Country Sheriff Scott Israel told reporters.
Florida Shooting Suspect Visited McDonald’s, Subway After Killing: Police

No news story directly addresses when police entered the school but they were setting up a command post for an active shooter situation about an hour after said shooter arrived on campus via Uber and a half hour after he had fled the campus.
Florida school shooting timeline

Schools aren’t the Only Soft Targets
I happen to work for the State of California. Where I work is supposed to be a “gun free zone”. Even if I had a conceal carry permit, I still wouldn’t be allowed to bring a firearm to work. If I did, I could be prosecuted by the State. While he’s really busy filing lawsuits against President Trump and the United States government, Xavier Becerra would gladly take time out of his schedule to bury me in a deep hole for daring to defend myself and coworkers against bad guys.

Nevertheless, we have mandatory training for active shooter situations. We are supposed to run, hide, or fight back; in that order. Let’s examine these instructions.

Option 1 Run
We are supposed to outrun a bullet or at least the guy with the gun; after all we are trained to do that. Yeah, right! If this is such a great idea then answer me this, “So how many state workers have you seen in the Olympics?” None. Most State workers feel fortunate if they can run to the breakroom fast enough to catch a donut because someone is celebrating their promotion.

Option 2 Hide
I work on the second floor of a building with two stairwells as access points. If two guys each took a set of stairs or disabled the back door before acting then everyone here would be trapped in the building. We have a few conference rooms built of metal studs and sheetrock in an otherwise open floor plan. A bullet would easily travel the whole distance across the room until it strikes a solid object which would likely be a person. Only if the gunman was interested in a quick hit and run would you have hope of surviving.

Option 3 Fight Back
Picture this, a bad guy brandishing his semi-automatic loaded with a clip of hollow point bullets versus me throwing my tape dispenser and stapler while yelling loudly to intimidate a guy with murder in his heart. That outcome seems rather stacked against me seeing another sunrise.

The State wants me to be happy that I’m a target. After all they are giving me a paycheck in exchange for workplace free of violence.

But if this is such a great policy why do they get metal detectors, armed California Highway Patrol guards, and armed drivers who are sworn officers?

Elected Officials have guns nearby for protection but not us

Beslan
Beslan has been called Russia’s 9/11. Over 330 people died in a school siege that you’ve probably never heard of. Here’s the short version. On the first day of school, over two dozen terrorists descended on an elementary school in a town of 35 thousand people. They took over 1,100 people hostage. They herded them all into the school gymnasium. They placed explosives on all the doors, confiscated all cell phones, and then executed the men and boys that they felt might have the physical ability to fight back. Three days later the Russian Army raided the school.

A documentary called Beslan: Three days in September is well worth viewing. I saw this years ago on Netflix but it is no longer available from them. In fact, I can’t find it for sale anywhere; however, it is available via streaming from CBS News. It is on their page for the news program, 48 Hours.

Streaming Beslan: Three days in September
Click here to Stream Video

Further reading
Wikipedia Article Beslan school Shooting

IMDB: Beslan: Three days in September

I think it will take a similar incident in our country to make meaningful changes in our public debate. As always the debate is do we begin to defend ourselves or cede freedom to the central government in exchange for the illusion of safety?

I wish to begin this discussion today with two propositions:

Rush Limbaugh says that for most people, history begins when you are born. In a sense that is true because you remember best what you experienced.

We have also been admonished that those that don’t learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.

My subject today touches on both propositions.

In recent times, the Internet has revolutionized the availability of information; however, I don’t mean this in the way you think I do. We have made everything transient and disposable. One such casualty is “Truth”. Our culture often speaks of “what is true for you” as opposed to “Truth” as an objective, absolute standard. Liberals have their “truth” and conservatives have theirs, too. Most of the time the intersection of the facts in any discussion is tangential to the discussion and not central to it. We talk past each other not to each other. Look at the news of the day and how CCN or the old gray lady covers it as opposed to Fox or World Net Daily or Breitbart. How do folks witness the same events and come-up with this stuff?

I love the ease of finding things on the Internet but try finding the same event or article six months or a year later. There is a good chance the link (URL) is gone or broken. It could be moved, purged, or the website is just gone. If you are lucky, the article might be behind a pay firewall—and thus out of reach anyway.

Example: Rita Crundwell “The Crooked Comptroller: Poster Child for Segregating Duties”
I took a college level class a few years ago and we had to read an article about a particular person that was written by a particular author. The subject was business ethics. The required article was owned by a company that wanted $595 for a membership just to access its contents. I wrote the company and they made an exception and allowed me to get a copy to write my report. Ironically the instructor had no copy of the article and didn’t seem to know that it costs money just to get it.

I dislike the current practice of allowing school children to compose reports solely from “research” conducted on the Internet. We all know that search engines put their thumbs on the scales when it comes to getting results. This can be to promote a particular political viewpoint or to promote one advertiser over another. Furthermore, research on the Internet only goes back for a few years. The farther back you go, the less you will find. Much prior to the “digital age” is unavailable.

Another factor that affects search results is that companies and people are employed to “scrub” the internet of unfavorable reports. This is particularly true of politicians and large companies and institutions. Here are two examples.

The University of California at Davis tried to scrub any references to an on campus protest in which students were maced by campus police. They were “busted” doing this and mercilessly raked over the coals by local media. The story eventually went national and lives on in infamy on Wikipedia.

Local Coverage: Sacramento Bee newspaper
UC Davis spent thousands to scrub pepper-spray references from Internet

National: CNET News
UC Davis spent $175K to hide pepper spray cop on Google, says report

Living in Infamy on Wikipedia
UC Davis pepper spray incident

While on Elk Grove’s City Council, Jim Cooper, ran for Sacramento County Sheriff. At the time, the department was facing budget cuts and layoffs. Candidate Cooper said that his solution would be to make the department more financially stable by the wide scale use of traffic cameras to fund the department. (Cooper by his statements admits that cameras are not about safety but revenue.) I heard Cooper say this while I was attending a candidate forum but I dare you to find a written report of his comments via an Internet search.

The Internet has other limitations as well. Ever buy music on Apple or Amazon or some other service? Here’s what you are missing.

• Who wrote the song?
• Who produced it?
• Who are the musicians?
• What inspired the artist to record it?
• Where was the track recorded?
• When was it recorded?

All this and more was once common on the jacket of a vinyl record and less so on a compact disk. Now you get no context to the song.

Electronic documents such as Adobe PDF files and EBooks are another area of concern when limitations of the digital age are concerned. With the click of a mouse or push of a remote button, these documents can be disabled in their entirety or edited without any user input. Paper books are better for sharing anyway. The thought that Amazon can edit, disable, or delete any book that you’ve purchased from them should give you some cause for concern. If someone modified or disabled, the PDF file extension then anything in that format would become unreadable. If you drill down into the licensing agreement, you will find that you really don’t own the software, music, or book that you think that you purchased. No, in reality you have only bought a use license and ownership is actually retained by some faceless corporation not you. The digital age has its benefits but don’t overlook the limitations as well.

It doesn’t take an EMP weapon from North Korea to end the “information age” as we know it. Buyer beware. Clearly I like the digital age but I like parts of the “old school” ways as well. In my mind physical media is always better.

Lastly, for your reading and amusement I present a technology called B.O.O.K. Bio-Optic Organized Knowledge.

BOOK is a revolutionary technological breakthrough: no wires, no electric currents, no batteries. Nothing to be connected or switched on. So easy to use, even a child can operate it! Compact, portable, it can be used anywhere—even on a beach, yards from a power point. Yet it is powerful enough to hold as much information as a CD-ROM disc! Here’s how it works:

BOOK is constructed of literally hundreds of sequentially numbered sheets of paper (recyclable), each capable of holding thousands of bits of information. The pages are locked together with a custom fit device (a “binder”) which maintains each sheet in its correct sequence.

Opaque Paper Technology (OPT) allows the manufacturer to utilize BOTH sides of each sheet, thus doubling information density while cutting costs. Sheets are scanned optically, registering information directly to the brain—the most efficient interface yet developed!

Read the full description of B.O.O.K.

Thoughts on California’s Housing Shortage

Happy Friday!

I’m just wondering what things are like in your corner of the world? Here in the shadow of California’s capitol, I keep hearing how great the economy is but I think its wishful thinking. Prices of food and energy keep going up due exclusively to government policies. In my town, Elk Grove, the city council is spending money faster than a drunken Congressman with a new girlfriend.

The only fault here that any politician will admit is a housing shortage. What shortage? The only thing in short supply is affordable housing. Ten years ago, at the peak of the housing boom, it cost about $100,000 per lot just to get a building permit. Wages, taxes, and utilities cost much more than ten years ago, but real estate prices in my area have never recovered their peak values of the last decade.

Nevertheless, single people that I know at work are paying apartment rental that is double what my monthly mortgage is costing me. What is worse is that there is plenty of housing available. I have three empty homes in my neighborhood that are within a two minute walk of my driveway. Two of the three are not even listed as being for sale. Yep, they are just sitting there. One has been empty for about two years and another for six months, and the third for about four months. Another family on my street is closing up shop and heading out of state later this year. If this is a common occurrence then things are worse than I imagine.

I fear that by the time Gavin Newsom and the gang in the “bill mill” are done with this state, we will be comparing ourselves to Haiti or Puerto Rico. That’s when you know that California has achieved its goal of being the worker’s paradise that we have been promised. Oh, and then government will have created affordable housing to boot. Until then, buckle-up.

Comments On Learning How To Think Straight

Bob Dylan released a track on his Grammy winning Slow Train Coming album called Gonna Change My Way Of Thinking but I’m not sure the article below is what he had in mind.

At first glance you might think this is the prison version of My Fair Lady but we are not talking about which fork to use at the fancy dinner or “The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain”. Neither is this a redux of All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten where rules such as “don’t hit others” and “share” were the life lessons that folks used to learn.

No, the article below is a target rich environment for an alien way of thinking. We are in fact looking at a religion of self-improvement and behavior modification which yields no improvement in the human heart; thus there is no real moral or ethical basis why the prisoner should change.

Inmates at Corcoran learn how to think straight

By Lt. Edward Sanchez, AA/PIO
California State Prison, Corcoran

Thinking for Change recently congratulated its second graduating class on Facility 3B at California State Prison, Corcoran. The inmates in the class learned social skills such as active listening, apologizing and responding to anger.

The next subject the class learned last fall was, Cognitive Self-Change: paying attention to how their thinking affects their responses, recognizing risky thoughts and behaviors that are likely to get them into trouble and how to identify new and different ways of thinking and acting that will help them avoid conflict.

After practicing these skills, the next subject was Problem Solving: learning to take problems they experience every day, such as conflicts with cell mates, family members and staff and develop a more constructive way of dealing with those difficulties.

Members of the class learned by observing the group leader and one of their own members who had already completed the class demonstrate the specific skills they were learning.

They then identified their own problem situations, worked through the process of identifying potential solutions, chose one and acted it out in front of the class with another inmate.

For Inmate Harris, this was the second time through the class, this time as a teacher’s assistant who helped demonstrate the various skills and worked with some of the other inmates to help them complete assignments in between classes.

“This wasn’t just book learning,” said another inmate. “We actually did what we were learning about.”

“The experience I got out of this class was the most helpful thing I have received in all my years in CDCR,” said another inmate.

Folks let’s face it, the guys in prison are those that are more logically consistent than the rest of us. If Darwin is true—which is what we teach from elementary school on up—then taking what you want and exploiting the weak is proper behavior. Rape, murder, theft, and other “crimes” are just survival of the fittest in action. What these inmates learn the hard way is that society for the most part doesn’t really believe Darwin.

You see, we want the morality of Christianity—the fruits if you will-without the consequences of the reality of God. We latch onto Darwin to explain our existence apart from God and justify abortion on demand but otherwise we don’t really have much use for him.

Inmates acted like animals (per Darwin and evolutionary theory) and subsequently got caged. Thus the society that caged them is now trying to train them to behave better. Acting according to nature got them in trouble so now somebody decided that the problem was their lack of nurture. Sorry but even with Siegfried and Roy, the animals were still wild, they just acted tame in a controlled setting for short periods of time; their fundamental nature is not changed.

Likewise, this prison program cannot effect the type of change that these men really need, only the Gospel of Christ can have lasting change. Why? Because when God saves us, he gives us a new heart, a new nature, His nature.

From a biblical point of view, the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation can’t really do either correct or rehabilitate. God is in the business or redeeming people from their sins. (Imprisonment is not a biblical punishment anyway.)

When the government gets into the business of trying to redeem people, they have left their God given sphere of responsibility and strayed beyond their mandate. These eight guys were able to get out of their cells and interact with others but sadly they were not given the antidote to their real problem just a placebo.

Sacramento Gets Another Area Code

Back when I was a kid, most of northern California was in the 916 area code. In 1997, the area code was split so that the metro Sacramento area remained 916 and the outlying areas became 530. Starting in the next few days (February 10th), a new area code will be overlaid on top of the area currently served by 916. Thus folks in Sacramento will be required to dial both area code and seven digit number—even for local calls. The new area code is 279.

Washington Post Warns about California

For those that haven’t believed me or aren’t paying attention (Rush’s low information voters), even the east coast Liberals see the trend.

Think California politics is on the far-left fringe? Just wait for the next elections

SACRAMENTO — For those who think California politics is on the far-left fringe of the national spectrum, stand by. The next election season, already well underway here, will showcase a younger generation of Democrats that is more liberal and personally invested in standing up to President Trump’s Washington than those leaving office.

Here in the self-labeled “state of resistance,” the political debate is being pushed further left without any sign of a Republican renaissance to serve as a check on spending and social policy ambitions. Even some Republicans are concerned about the departure of Gov. Jerry Brown (D), who proved to be fiscally cautious after inheriting a state seven years ago in deep recession.

Normally I don’t recommend the Post as reading material, but this is worth a look.

Trump After One Year

Donald Trump is working wonders in Washington DC. People in Congress are “self-deporting” as Trump has forced them into the spotlight and begun to expect results from them. Trump gets Liberals (and some Conservatives) all upset about what he says on Twitter—as if it mattered—when it’s really a distraction to let him accomplish things behind the scenes. Trump is rightly being compared to Ronald Reagan. Please understand that I love Reagan but Trump may far exceed his accomplishments.

Following the State of the Union speech, I heard some “watercooler talk” at work about what Liberal people thought. They don’t understand that Trump is a negotiator. Much of what he asked for was his opening position to negotiate. Democrats give some ground. Trump gives ground, and they meet in the middle with each side getting some of what they want. This makes senses to a guy who once authored a book called “The Art of the Deal” however, in Washington, the definition of bipartisan is when Republicans capitulate and agree with the Democrats without getting anything in return.

The best thing about Trump as President is that nobody under age 50 has ever seem what a vibrant economy is capable of doing when government gets out of the way. This epiphany for the American people is the weapon the will transform the American electorate. When Trump succeeds, America succeeds.

When I was young, the difference between a politician and a statesman was that a politician was only interested in the next election, a statesman in the next generation. Today, the difference could be defined as a statesman will pay for something with existing dollars while a politician will pay for it with your grandchildren’s economic freedom.

If you want further reading on Trump, start with these articles:

Here’s How Many Times Trump Said ‘I’ in His First SOTU Address… Compare That with Obama’s

Lone Democratic Senator Who Applauded Trump’s Speech: ‘Just to Sit There and Frown Is Not Going to Fix Anything’

Rep. Trey Gowdy announced Wednesday that he will retire at the end of the year, becoming the ninth Republican chairman of a congressional committee to decide to leave Congress at the end of this session.

Trey Gowdy Is Leaving Politics

Tray, please take Paul Ryan with you.

Folding Tablets Are New Cell Phones

Later this year two design concepts will converge to create a new category of devices.

Always Connected
Windows 10 devices will be entering the market which run on ARM chips. ARM chips are the same ones that power smart phones. This is not Windows RT or Mobile but the same Windows 10 that runs on your desktop and laptop. These always connected devices will hold a charge measured in days not hours and can run most programs that you use at work or home.

Foldable Tablets
In addition to laptops and tablets, a new set of foldable devices will also be marketed beginning later this year. This new technology category is the folding tablet that just happens to be a smart phone. Several Android and PC manufacturers are entering this market space.

Combining Both: Andromeda
I’m particularly interested in Microsoft’s Andromeda devices. These foldable tablets are always connected, run Windows 10, and support touch and pen. Andromeda is believed to be the mythical “Surface Phone”. Now that the top brands of cell phones routinely cost more than one thousand dollars, Microsoft can market this tablet without the sticker shock that would have occurred a few years ago. Also the technology has become both powerful enough and efficient enough to be practical.

Here is are sketches of the Microsoft Andromeda concept.

Microsoft ‘Andromeda:’ Everything we know about the rumored foldable device

I’m looking forward to seeing these gizmos at my local electronics retailer later in the year. (and hopefully under the Christmas tree too)

When Hyper-V Attacks

A coworker has an old program that he couldn’t get to run on his computer, so he asked me to help. From the description of the program it sounded like it was probably written with 16-bit code, so I told him about DOSBox. He had never heard of the program; nevertheless, I convinced him to try it. (I like D-Fend Reloaded mod) Once he got it installed he tried to run his program. It gave him an error because he didn’t have Windows installed. After several text messages, we agreed that he would bring the program CD to work, give it to me, and I could try it at home the next day.

In the meantime, I pulled out my old Windows for Workgroups 3.11 CD and tried to figure out how to install it on DOSBox. Yes, I know there is no such thing as a Windows 3.11 install CD, I made it myself almost 20 years ago. The CD is also bootable, I tweaked an image of a Windows 98 (or ME) rescue floppy and added some improvements. It can install WFW and Norton Desktop—a product that looks suspiciously like Windows 95 but is much older. It makes 3.11 have a different desktop experience and features portions of Norton Utilities as part of a graphical interface. It’s really cool software. After fiddling with DOSBox for a while I was able to get Windows installed. Oh, nice thing about having it on CD is no prompts for inserting the next floppy disk.

I then had to configure the sound card and video. Sound was easy, just select SoundBlaster and set Interrupt and IRQ—typical old school stuff. Video was a big problem. I picked Living Books “Arthur’s Teacher Trouble”. Believe me it was trouble too. The video in DOSBox just wouldn’t go. I changed the settings within Windows to every size and shape monitor but they all failed. Finally, I found a complete answer which I’m happy to link to HERE.
Having conquered Broderbund, I decided to revisit Microsoft virtualization in Hypervisor. I clicked on Hyper-V Manager in my Windows 10 machine and found a treasure—or so I thought; a relic of Windows 7, I found Windows XP. I tried running it and it errored out. One error was that the network settings were invalid. I was forced by Windows into a reboot after each failure. Unable to get it running, I decided to use the same virtual hard drive but use it in a newly created session of Hyper-V. I accepted the defaults and tried to create a new virtual PC. After letting Hyper-V run for about ten minutes I aborted to program. I knew something was wrong, it should only have taken a few seconds.

While messing with the virtualization software, I noticed that the virtual network card was running but my regular network card was dead. It said no network cable was attached to my computer. I tried many things, but none worked:
• At elevated Command Prompt: netcfg -d
• Help in Hyper-V had no content when I tried to use it
• Restore Point from a week before
• Delete all network cards in Device Manager
• Delete Hyper-V
• Reinstall NIC drivers
• USB network card (which said no ethernet cable attached to PC)

All these ideas and a few more failed. But things got worse.

In the midst of this, the Wi-Fi for our whole house went down and despite several reboots, nothing happened. I checked with a friend in the area and his connectivity was normal. On my phone, the ISP website assured me that there were no outages in my area. I ended up having to do a factory reset of the cable modem to get anything running. More than three hours after I tried to run my virtual hard drive, I finally admitted defeat and went to bed.

This morning, I was contemplating running a cable from another part of the house to my computer until I could get a wireless dual band NIC. Just for fun, before I left for work, I unplugged my computer from the hub in my wiring closet and plugged the cable into an unused port and immediately the green light came on and my computer was connected. I was glad to have my computer connectivity back but…

Folks think about it, a malformed piece of software on my desktop computer had the power to kill a port on my gigabit hub and my cable modem/router at the same time. Port 8 on my hub is dead and buried and a factory reset was needed to recover connectivity to the Internet. It sounds like I may have stumbled onto a bug or potential exploit. Whatever happened, I hope the boys in Redmond get this fixed. A simple message that this is not a supported operating system would have saved me a few hours of inconvenience.

State of the CRA

The CRA has graciously invited me to their annual convention in March; an honor that I must respectfully decline.

They will be gathering in once Republican Orange County to considering such weighty topics as:
• Battle for Congress—Which seats are at risk
• State of our State
• Why be activists?
• How to engage Non-Republicans?

Also they will vote to endorse candidates for Governor and U.S. Senate.

However, I must respectfully rip this confab as a relic of a long dead age. The CRA, and Republicans in general, living in California are much like zombies. They move around, make noise, occasionally mumble about brains, and can occasionally be herded about totally unaware that they died long ago.

Conservatives blame Pete Wilson and Charles Munger Jr. while Liberals blame pro-lifers and religious Conservatives for the Party’s demise; however, both are wrong. Two factors deserve the lion’s share of the blame for the decline of the Republican Party in the once Golden State, George Herbert Walker Bush and demographics.

• In 1973, Los Angeles County alone had 270,000 aerospace jobs, mostly due to the military. The aerospace industry was one of the biggest employers in California. While the number of jobs in this industry was declining due to the decrease in spending for the space program and end of Vietnam as well as improvements in materials and manufacturing, it was still an important industrial sector in the state.
• In the late 1980’s, then San Francisco Mayor Diane Feinstein refused to allow the USS Missouri to be stationed at Hunter’s Point as a permanent museum.
• A year after Ronald Reagan left office the Berlin Wall fell.

George H.W. Bush created the military base closure commission to celebrate the mythical “Peace Dividend.” This “Blue Ribbon” commission decided which bases would be closed and Congress agreed that no amendments would be allowed, it would be a straight up or down vote, that way if a base in someone’s district closed it was the commission’s fault not theirs. Furthermore, Bush agreed to sign the commission recommendations into law before it ever saw the light of day. This commission stripped most military installations from California. Ironically, the money from the base closures ultimately went to bailing out the Saving and Loan Crisis that was solely created by the same Congress.

Demographics in California changed for a number of reasons but the mass exodus of conservative and Republican voters from the state due to the base closings sealed the fate of the state. This change in the electorate coupled with the influx of people arriving from other countries changed the face of California forever.

It was during this era that CRA saw two things, a precipitous decline in membership and the rise of Barbara Alby and the Christian Right. CRA went from north of 100,000 members to about 20,000. Today CRA numbers less than 2,000 members in a state of 38 million.

For CRA to hold a convention about Republican victories is like the survivors of Pearl Harbor or Civil War reenactors gathering to honor the good old days of a bygone era. They can pound their chests and drink a beer in honor of their fallen comrades but other than being armchair quarterbacks to current events they are as irrelevant as Pete Wilson to contemporary politics.