William – Page 73 – Really Right

Moving from Windows Mobile 10 to Android 6

Recently my Microsoft Band 2 died; and for the last time since it was out of warranty. I really enjoyed the MS Band. It integrated with both my Lumia 640 and later 950 XL and had many features that other fitness bands and smartwatches still don’t offer. The warranty service from Microsoft was amazing but sadly too frequently. The flaw with the device was the Android operating system and battery. Once the battery was totally depleted, the watch would often fail to boot-up anymore.

I tried two other watches as replacements for the Band.

First was the Vector Smartwatch. When first released, this watch was praised for compatibility with the Window OS and recommended as a possible replacement for the MS Band. The company was recently purchased by Fitbit and was supposedly compatible with my Windows phone. The watch display was monochrome not full color like my Band. It would not connect to my phone under any circumstances. My phone could never see the device via the Bluetooth connection. I tried firmware updates and many other things to no avail. After several days, I finally returned it to Amazon for a refund.

Garmin also has a watch that did some things that my Band would do so I decided to try it. It too, was supposedly compatible with the Windows Phone OS with a caveat that it might loose Bluetooth connection occasionally. This too was a mixed bag of results. The watch itself was great but it would not maintain a connection with the phone. However, Garmin has a Windows program that runs on my PC and it works great. It is possible to use the watch without any smartphone connection. Lastly, the Garmin watch can go about five or six days on a single charge and is waterproof too!

After trying two watches that both were supposedly compatible with Windows Phone and the trickle of media reports that per their financials, Microsoft was terminating support for their Widows Phones at the end of June 2017, I came to the conclusion that the smartwatch phone applications were “abandonware”.

Sensing both my frustration at the lack of support for the Windows mobile platform and knowing that her Band would be failing soon, my wife prompted me to buy an Android phone. Like many folks, I took a look at Samsung but the prices of their Galaxy phones are crazy. I will not pay over eight hundred dollars for a phone. After looking around, I decided to try the ASUS “ZenFone 3 Zoom 5.5 ”.

https://www.asus.com/Phone/ZenFone-3-Zoom-ZE553KL/

This phone has a mid-range CPU and a better than average camera. The phone comes with USB cable, wall charger, headphones, and case. It also, comes with a promise to be upgradeable—at some point in the future—to Android 7.

While I have constantly heard that Microsoft’s ecosystem suffered from an “app gap”, two of my favorite apps are not available on the Android platform. The Milton Bradley game Battleship has no app in the Android store. (It was in the Windows Phone Store but was pulled a few years ago; probably when Electronic Arts acquired the company.) I played Battleship almost daily since I bought the game. Whatever Aaron Park might say not withstanding, it was my “go to” app when camping in the boy’s room. The other app that was a constant friend was Quake Watch. While there is an app by the same name in the Google Play store, it is not the same in terms of information or versatility.

In the next few paragraphs, I plan to compare my experiences with both Operating Systems.

Windows Phone a.k.a. Windows Mobile 10
Advantages
Live Tiles
Live Tiles are the cornerstone of what makes the Microsoft mobile OS different from Android or IOS. Each icon can—if the developer allows it—scale to at least three different sizes on the phone screen. In addition, each tile can give you current information that is pushed to the phone. For example, the weather app can give you current temperature without opening the app. The money app can give you the Dow-Jones close for your favorite stock, and a news app can tell you the latest headlines without even opening the app. The newest iterations of the live tile could even take you directly to the story on the tile that you clicked on when you selected the app.

Glance Screen
Let you see time and selected alerts without logging into phone. This was a semi-sleep mode for the phone without going to log on screen. Screen was black with white text. The idea was provide the user information without using too much battery life.

Other features that I did not use were VPN and Continuum.

Disadvantages
Live Tiles, Glance Screen, and other features cause battery life to be about 1 to 1 ½ days.

Apps were not continually updated. I have already mentioned Battleship. This was removed from the Store a few years ago but I could still download it because I had purchased it. MyFitnessPal was another app that was dropped from the store. I could continue using it but if I ever logged off of the app then I would not be allowed to get back in. Then there were the apps for the fitness bands/smartwatches that are no longer supported. They are virtually worthless but still listed in the Store.

Some phone features were deprecated or removed by Microsoft.
• For example, all phones have an FM radio built into them but Microsoft dropped support for the FM radio feature from their operating system leaving this functionality to be supported by third parties.
• For many years, Microsoft has built NFC into the phone but never developed the software to support the feature. Only about five banks in the United States supported the wireless payment feature.
• Also, Microsoft used to allow me to go onto a website using my PC, purchase apps for my phone and they would magically appear on my phone a short time later. Google still allows this but MS stopped this a few years ago.
• Lastly, my phone quit supporting visual voicemail and attachments to text messages. (This last could be a carrier issue and not a phone one but I didn’t ever get to the bottom of it.)

Android 6

As I get into this, I am fully aware that the newest version of Android is 7. My ASUS phone was at a reasonable price point for a cash purchase at $330. It also will be able to upgrade to Android 7 in the future. And yes, I know that might not be a certainty in the Android world but I would trust a promise from ASUS before I would a cell provider.

Advantages
Speed
Battery life
Plays nice with Garmin Smartwatch

Disadvantages
Missing and deprecated apps. Battleship, Groove, Quake Watch
No app notification integration.
No NFC radio—specific complaint to my phone
Desktop is cluttered and clunky.
SD Card—can’t move apps to this card.
Despite assurances on the Internet that Android 6 supports it, my device is not capable of 5 GHz Wi-Fi and the OS doesn’t offer the option.

Android apps do not natively integrate into the operating system the way that Microsoft’s OS does. When I load an email app on a Windows device, the app will notify me and any devices that I sync with—including my PC—that I have a text or email. With a few clicks, I could fully integrate Google mail, calendar, and address book but the reverse is not the case. On Android, the app installs and that’s it. Even after enabling permissions the app does very little. You need to drill down into the app to allow notifications and any app that you want to provide a notification then must also be linked to the other app.

For example, I installed Outlook on my Android phone. I had to drill down into the app until I found the notification settings, then I had to enable the feature. This then allows the phone to be notified that I received an email. Once that was done, I had to go into the Garmin app and enable Outlook notifications as a third party app in order to get notifications to my smartwatch. The process is convoluted and poorly documented—if at all.

Microsoft Groove does not work on Android the way it does on a Windows phone. The app has no ability to find music stored on an SD card. It can do this on my old phone. I can stream music via Groove or Amazon but prefer to have it stored on the SD card so as not to waste my data. When streaming, most of my stuff is on Amazon not One Drive. The bottom line is that Groove is no longer on the Droid phone.

The SD card was not what I expected either. Even though it is physically located inside the phone, the Android OS will only treat it as a removable drive and not as internal storage. Thus no apps can be moved from the internal memory of the phone to the SD card. My old Android phone had this feature four years ago. My son has an Android phone that we bought new for $5 two years ago that can do this so why can’t my $300 phone? Stupid design!

Android seems to use fewer resources on the phone hardware and thus appears more nimble but many of the apps on the Windows phone could scale to both mobile and desktop environments. My opinion is that apps are more limited in their abilities and generally I will take a full-blown program over an app any day—be it on a phone or PC. Moving to Android is like going from Windows 10 to Windows 98. Windows 98 had better screensavers (After Dark, Johnny Castaway, etc.) but Windows 10 is more productive and secure.

Barbarism, Moloch, and Murder of Innocents

WARNING : Normal humans will find the following topic revolting and deeply disturbing. Once you read this you will have difficulty getting it out of your head, continue reading at your own risk.

Last week, I was reading my email as I usually do. One daily mailing list that I get is from Joe Miller.
Link: Joe Miller
Miller is a conservative guy from Alaska that has run for US Senate and may be eying a run at governor of Alaska in 2018. I like it because it has stuff that you may not see from Drudge and it is often openly Christian in its presentation of news.

One article that caught my attention was one about a couple in Australia that turned their children into jewelry. Yeah, that’s not a typo; they turned their unborn children into jewelry to wear around their necks.

Link: Turning Extra Embryos into Jewelry

Original story:
Link: Couples are turning extra IVF embryos into jewellery

We’re not talking about some tribe of cannibals on some remote Pacific island somewhere wearing the shrunken skulls of their enemies as trophies, or that guy from Apocalypse Now wearing the ears of his enemies around his neck, no, these folks are the proud parents of children that they deliberately killed and are parading around Australia with their tiny bodies dangling from their mom’s neck thinking this is an act of love.

My embryos were my babies – frozen in time.
When we completed our family, it wasn’t in my heart to destroy them.
Now they are forever with me in a beautiful keepsake.

My first thought was the Scripture, “the compassion of the wicked is cruelty.”

Their babies are dead at their hand, which part of destroy them do you not get? Can you say, “Cognitive disconnect?”

”…forever with you”? Yeah, like Norman Bates’ mother. Psycho is probably the right term.

Many years ago, Melody Green wrote a tract call “Children…things that we throw away” but now in the 21st Century, we can embed them in amber or plastic or something and make them into keepsakes. This is how we define compassion now?

Singing the praises of the business that embalms children as a fashion statement, the original article includes this gem

“I don’t believe there is any other business in the world that creates jewellery from human embryos, and I firmly believe that we are pioneering the way in this sacred art, and opening the possibilities to families around the world.”

Sacred art? Three thousand years after the abomination of the children of Israel offering their children to the god Moloch by burning them alive, have things changed that much?

Jesus’ words should be echoing in your head, “Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.” Matthew 25: 45 But don’t stop reading there because the next verse talks about these wicked folks a little more “And these shall go away into everlasting punishment”

I used to think Angelina Jolie wearing a vial of blood from Billy Bob Thornton was twisted but these folks take jewelry to the next level of absurdity.

Wanna bet these parents can read Dr. Seuss to their other children and have no problem telling them “A person is a person no matter how small.”

The article that Miller links analyses the issue from a Roman Catholic point of view. Whatever the shortcomings of Roman, their position on bioethics is worthy of consideration since they are the leading voice in the Christian world on the life issue. They argue for limits (self-government) because just because we can do something doesn’t make it right.

Most people do not understand why the Catholic Church refuses to approve the practice of in-vitro fertilization, or any form of artificial insemination, or any method of conception at all apart from sexual intercourse. The Church teaches that all such means of conception are morally wrong. The reasons are profound, thoughtful and humble. If you’d like to hear it from the horse’s mouth, read this, especially CCC 2375 – 2378.

But allow me to say it succinctly this way: What you manufacture, you own. It belongs to you, and you call the shots with authority. What you manufacture, you can control.

THAT is precisely why it is morally wrong to manufacture children. Many people will object to the word “manufacture” here, but it’s the only accurate term. Babies are ordered up and created in a lab, purchased and paid for by adults who have commissioned their creation. That’s manufacturing.

Babies are not ours to control. Human life is not ours to manipulate in that way. We have no right to create life, keep it in some suspended animation, and then decide to destroy it whenever it suits us. We are not God.

We do not own our children. We have no claim on their lives. It is not for us to decide whether they live or die and when. The Lord God is the giver and creator of life. We can only receive our children as gifts. No one can demand a gift, or claim any right to receive a gift.

Lest you think this is an isolated occurrence of evil, try this article:
Nothing says ‘I love you, Mom!’ like abortion: Planned Parenthood leader touts killing of unborn on Mother’s Day

When You Get the Call That You Child is Injured

It’s been a week since I got that phone call that every parent fears they will get one day. You know which one I mean

“This is the …
Your child was hurt and …
Please come now …”

About 12:30 last Friday, that was the call that I received from my son’s school. It went something like this: “This is the school. Your child was hurt and broke his arm. Please come pick him up.”

I asked what happened. The school was having a “jog-a-thon” that day. (When I was a kid, jog-a-thon meant that you get folks to pledge so much per mile and ran your little fanny off to raise money. Now a days, I guess they just want a check for a flat fee and forget the jogging part.) Anyway, he was in a “human hamster ball” and fell thru the opening when trying to exit. He said someone hit the ball from the other side and this effectively caused him to be ejected out of the ball and onto the ground. He tried to stop falling head first thru the opening and braced himself by using his arms to break the fall.

Human Hamster Ball—this is an example and not the actual ball

At the time, I had a coworker in the car that I had gone to lunch with. I hurried back to the office and then dropped off the coworker, told my boss I was out for the rest of the day, handed all my unfinished work to my boss for distribution, activated the out of office message, and made haste to pick up my son. I drove swiftly (up to 80 mph) to his school and met him in the office. After checking on his condition, I handed the keys to an adult at the school and told them to load my son in the car. I collected his school stuff—binder, backpack, and lunch box—and then we headed to the emergency room of the local hospital.

At his school office, he was given a small zip lock bag of ice and that was the only first aid that he received. As I drove to the hospital, every time we hit a bump, he would say “ouch”. I walked him in the front door of the hospital and checked him into emergency. I then parked the car and waited for his name to be called. Just after his mom walked into the hospital, his name was called. Our next challenge was to get him out of his sweatshirt so he could have his blood pressure taken. When his sweatshirt was finally removed, there was no doubt that the arm was broken. Up until that point, no adults, other than me, seemed to believe the word of a twelve year old—even when other children confirmed that they heard the bones crack when he fell.

Once my son’s blood pressure and temperature were taken, we were escorted to a treatment room. About two hours after the arm was broken, my son was finally given some pain killer to take the edge off of his discomfort. It was a low dose of morphine give thru an IV in the top of his hand. Getting the IV put in seemed to be more painful than breaking both bones in his forearm.

Broken Arm—Line shows where arm should be when resting.

After three sets of x-rays, setting both broken bones twice, and a temporary cast, we finally started heading to the exit after 7 pm. The first stop was the pharmacy for pain meds and then home for dinner.

The following Wednesday, the temporary cast was removed and a more permanent one was put on. This evolution was a primitive one and did not go as advertised. For some reason, the hospital did not have the equipment to hold my son’s arm stationary and made him use the fingers on his broken arm to grip a metal frame when the cast was assembled on his arm. Then when they got to the plaster part, the doctor squeezed his arm—right at the point of the fractures—for about two minutes so that the plaster could set. Then they took an x-ray (the fourth ones so far) and sent us on our way until next week’s visit.

As I watched this unfold over the last week, I was reminded of DeForest Kelly who played Doctor McCoy in the original Star Trek movies cursing the 20th Century doctors for being a bunch of barbarians for their primitive methods. So far the 21st Century docs aren’t much better.

Aaron Hernandez can Teach Millennial’s about the Real World & Baby Boomers about College Sports

John M Slamkowski—A Special Correspondent

First of all I would like to thank William for the opportunity to write in this space about a couple issues; entitlement, and the sissifying of America. Aaron Hernandez—specifically his actions in college and in the pros leading to his arrest—will lay out my argument that our entire education and athletics system is broken and in bad need of repair. We can all agree that in our current scholastic system, everyone gets a participation trophy, and there are no clear winners or losers. This goes for everything; science fairs, baseball, soccer, etc. This sets up our youth to fail badly as they approach, high school, college and then the real world. Failing badly has to do with being unprepared but only to an extent, mostly it has to do with being coddled, and sheltered from any consequences. Without further ado let’s look at the plight of one Aaron Hernandez as told by ESPN.

Aaron Hernandez lost his dad at age 16 from complications from hernia surgery. So right here the liberal elite set the stage for a “rough upbringing.” I can say I have no idea what it is like to lose a father at a young age, but his father was most definitely not a thug. The story goes on to say that Aaron began showing rebel behavior and ignoring authority. I again find this hard to believe since he was offered a scholarship and signed with the University Florida Gators. Let me be clear, signing a scholarship doesn’t imply an athlete is a saint, but the amount of due diligence done by the university and coaching staff tells me there could not be too much smoke with Mr. Hernandez. Rebellious behavior? I think that is a pre-requisite for all high school age students? Am I wrong? The real issues with Hernandez didn’t start until he entered college, then he was coddled and babied by world class football coach Urban Meyer. This is where society really did in Hernandez; he always had an adult figure and a very powerful one at that, cover up drug tests and make excuses for young Aaron.

In 2007 as a 17 year old freshman, Hernandez after drinking two adult beverages, attempted to leave a bar without paying. When confronted by the bouncer, Hernandez punched him so hard it ruptured his eardrum. Police recommended charging Hernandez, but Meyer convinced them to allow internal punishment to suffice. Let’s take a look at something here, a 17 YEAR OLD, at a BAR, having DRANK 2 DRINKS, then committing battery, yet Urban Meyer thought nothing was wrong here? Maybe because Tim Tebow was on the team all of this would go away, maybe reading the Bible daily as Urban Meyer claimed Hernandez did, would help him find guidance. This cover-up was also aided when the local District Attorney decided not to press any charges opting instead for “deferred prosecution.” Let me be clear, numerous people had an opportunity to nip this in the bud, however they all passed or enabled. Then almost 6 months later…..

September 2007, Aaron Hernandez was identified as the shooter in a shooting that injured 3 people. Even with witnesses identifying him as the shooter, Hernandez walked free with no charges filed. Notice a pattern here? Each time the athlete gets into trouble someone—either a coach or law official—gets in the way to avoid negative consequences. Nothing much was heard from Hernandez over the next two seasons, his draft stock rose and after his junior season, he declared for the NFL draft and was selected in round four, guaranteeing him around $700,000. Strange, as a big fan of college sports, I had Hernandez pegged as a first round talent. He fell pretty drastically for a player as lauded as he was in college. He won the award for best college tight-end, a very prestigious award given out once a year. Then details about his college and personal life began to trickle out. He admitted to smoking copious amounts of weed. Strangely enough, he never failed a drug test at Florida, or did he? University of Florida hides behind HIPPA laws regarding drug tests but even Hernandez admits he failed at least one. Hernandez was never punished for any of these crimes he committed, actually worse yet, authority figures hid him from reality.

Fast forward a couple years in the NFL. Hernandez—as one of the game’s best tight-ends—lands a five year, 40 million dollar extension! Not only making him one of the highest paid at his position, but making him an extremely wealthy man. This was in 2012; remember that year.

In June of 2013 he was named a person of interest and later arrested in connection with the murder of his friend and the husband of his fiancés sister, Odin Lloyd. Lloyd was a friend of Hernandez. Hernandez would be convicted of murder in April of 2015, sentenced to life with no chance of parole.

**Aaron Hernandez** 11-06-1989 to 04-19-2017

Then came more allegations; suddenly he was being questioned about that double shooting at the University of Florida again. Worse yet he was “arrested” on charges of double murder in Boston in July of 2012, after he signed the extension! It was alleged he killed the two victims because one of them spilled a drink on him, and the other shot him a dirty look. Don’t get me wrong he was acquitted by expert legal help, and prosecutorial missteps, in this case, but Hernandez was not innocent. He was never tried in the shooting that occurred in Florida. He was accused of shooting his friend Alexander Bradley while he was in the same car as Hernandez after a late night trip to a strip club, again, no charges filed. Hernandez committed suicide in prison on April 19th 2017; he may or may not have had synthetic marijuana in his system, and apparently—according to TMZ and other sources—had a boyfriend in jail and didn’t want the word to get out.

The Patriots football team sued to recover all the bonus money paid to Hernandez and it appears his fiancé will get very little or none of that money. Good, it doesn’t belong to her. His lawyers are trying to get his conviction thrown out by some loophole in the Massachusetts legal system; America is great if you can afford great lawyers.

The point of my writing is this, Hernandez and other athletes are getting coddled and babied by our new politically correct, “my son would never do that” culture that has poisoned our education system. Lost a parent early in life, congrats you had a rough upbringing, thereby justifying your actions. Fail a drug test? Well a little weed never hurt that much, we should legalize it anyways. Underage drinking, everyone does that right? Shoot someone? May have been an accident and hey we’ve got a big game this weekend, I will take care of this I’m the coach after all. The football game or basketball game on Friday night takes precedence over the classroom. Discipline that could have been instilled never happened and as a result a high school in Connecticut, a University in Florida, and an NFL team aided and abetted a murderer. Make no mistake about it, Hernandez is not a troubled youth or a product of a broken system, and definitely not a good kid. He is a murderer, who ran around killing people with his Glock. Three people were murdered and at least two others were shot by this thug, so enough with the politically correct BS.

Memo to the baby boomers and Gen X, the coddling and excuse making needs to stop, start holding people accountable. No more safe places or spaces and let’s allow the police to do their job.

Why Education Matters

To illustrate the difference between computers and common sense, I respectfully submit the following:

Just ‘cause it passes spell check don’t make it right.

Labor Security—when you can never be fired. This only applies to career politicians and Swedish workers.

Here’s another I found today when buying tickets for the Scottish Games. After completing the page above with number of tickets, credit card number and my address, I scroll to the bottom of the page and encounter this.
OK computer guys, why is there two buttons and which is correct?

Do I Submit my order or Buy Tickets?

I have this mental picture of David Letterman asking, “What the hell is the difference?”

Just remember that people charge big bucks to connect web pages to online payment portals.

Oh, in case you were wondering, I clicked on Submit.

Einstein Vindicated Again

If you thought you were having a bad year because you voted for Hillary or have other issues with the direction of the cosmos, try being a physicist or astronomer. You see, somehow 68 percent of the universe is missing.

No, joke; 68 percent of the universe—according to the currently held theory—doesn’t exist and never did.
Link: Simulation suggests 68 percent of the universe may not actually exist

According to the Lambda Cold Dark Matter (Lambda-CDM) model, which is the current accepted standard for how the universe began and evolved, the ordinary matter we encounter every day only makes up around five percent of the universe’s density, with dark matter comprising 27 percent, and the remaining 68 percent made up of dark energy, a so-far theoretical force driving the expansion of the universe. But a new study has questioned whether dark energy exists at all, citing computer simulations that found that by accounting for the changing structure of the cosmos, the gap in the theory, which dark energy was proposed to fill, vanishes.

Scientist now confirm that the guys that developed this theory and won a Nobel Prize for Physics in 2011 for its development were wrong.

“The theory of general relativity is fundamental in understanding the way the universe evolves,” says Dobos. “We do not question its validity; we question the validity of the approximate solutions. Our findings rely on a mathematical conjecture which permits the differential expansion of space, consistent with general relativity, and they show how the formation of complex structures of matter affects the expansion. These issues were previously swept under the rug but taking them into account can explain the acceleration without the need for dark energy.”

For those of you that don’t understand the quotation cited above, it means that Einstein’s general theory of relativity is correct as long as you don’t round your math answer. Yes, in this age of computers, the eggheads that should know better, took a shortcut that injected errors into Einstein’s theory. Instead of checking their math, they invented dark energy “making it a placeholder plug for holes in current models.” When you end-up with a 68 percent error in your solution you deserve a failing grade not a Nobel Prize.

Is it me or did the guys in the era of slide rules do a better job of engineering than those with computers?

Comments on Beauty and the Beast

My protestations notwithstanding, the wife demanded to see Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. (Anything that passes as a musical will usually get her to purchase a ticket. Thankfully, she went with someone else to see La La Land.) Anyway, I admit that I made treks to the little boy’s room and snack bar during the film but what I did see of the film seemed really overhyped as far as the “rainbow people” was concerned. I’ve seen worse on broadcast television. It was blink and you miss it sort of stuff. Based on the posts from Focus on the Family and their fellow travelers, I was braced for some in your face propaganda; thankfully this was not the case. Unless you’re waiting to be offended, most of this stuff will go past both you and your children with hardly a notice.

The wife might be entertaining a return visit to go to the Beauty and the Beast Sing Along but I will sit that one out. Visions of The Rocky Horror Picture Show somehow do harm to what I might expect to see upon attending such an event. Girls Gone Wild meets off keyed singing; single guys, this might be your best opportunity since Sacramento hosted the Xena: Warrior Princess Convention several years ago.

More Gas Taxes

Governor Brown signed the gas tax bill one week after it was introduced in the legislature. Apparently we had to pass it to learn what’s in it because I doubt anybody that voted YES actually read it.
Link: news story from KCRA-TV

Per media reports, the bill is supposed to raise 52 billion dollars over ten years. If you believe that this is a temporary tax, then I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn that you might want to buy.

The pretext for this bill is that we have horrible roads because we are woefully under taxed. Now, California has the highest taxes in the country but somehow it is never enough. We have a spending problem not a revenue problem. Anyway, I digress.

Just for fun, I put all the numbers in my trusty Excel program and learned some interesting stuff.

KCRA’s math doesn’t work. Right off the top, 7 billion dollars are missing. I guess this is the cut off the top being diverted to the General Fund or to backfill underfunded pensions.

Of the remaining 45 billion, 24.44 percent is going to public transportation and non-road repair purposes.

Thus, 34 billion is supposed to be going to road repair over ten years. This means the tax is generating 3.4 billion per year for road repair. Currently the state diverts about two billion from road repairs from just two taxes that it collects on commercial vehicles. Extrapolating the other funds diverted from road repair means that there is no reason to have this tax. If the legislature would just follow both the law and the promises made to the people, all our repair needs would be fully funded with no new taxes.

But it’s actually worse than this. Money currently going to transportation can now be diverted from transportation to the General Fund. The way government budgeting works, this is the reality of what happens. Plus, the legislature is lying when they say that this money will go to its intended purpose. Yes some will but look at their miserable track record on this issue. Every few years they find a way to weasel out of promises made in the previous election cycle.

Tax revenue creates a government dependency on the revenue source, much like the homeless guy with an addiction problem; however, what happens in 2030 (a mere 13 years from now) when the internal combustion engine is outlawed in California. On this subject, look for two things to happen simultaneously: cars with gasoline engines will no longer be sold and gas stations will be outlawed via regulatory power and people that own “legacy” automobiles simply won’t be able to purchase fuel.

Lastly, did you notice that one Republican sold his birthright to give the governor a YES vote? In the proud tradition of Maurice Johannsson and Roger Niello, Anthony Cannella voted YES in exchange for 500 million dollars. This is less than one percent of the total amount of revenue the new taxes are supposed to raise; plus the governor can now say there was bipartisan support for the bill. Any bets that this guy is out on term limits soon?

Oroville Fix Update

The headline today, Governor Brown waived some environmental reviews on emergency construction at Oroville Dam. But look at the last paragraph in the story.

Authorities say designs for the redone main spillway are about 60 percent complete. State water officials still aren’t releasing an estimated price tag for the rush repairs, but say they hope to award contracts for the work by April 17.

Fact 1
OK, it’s close of business on April 6th. The state Department of Water Resources says the plans for the fix (temporary one per previous media reports) are 60 percent completed.

Fact 2
They hope to awards contracts by April 17th.

They are finishing the plans, soliciting bids, and deciding who will be awarded the contract seven business days from now? What could possibly go wrong with that plan?

Conclusion
Either the fix is in on who will be awarded this contract or these guys are dumber than dirt to think they can get a bid price with unfinished plans. Oh, change order is spelled $$$$$$

Diversity in Media

“Any character that was diverse, any character that was new, our female characters, anything that was not a core Marvel character, people were turning their nose up.”
Link: David Gabriel, VP of sales for Marvel

So what has Marvel been up to lately?

Over recent years, Marvel has made efforts to include more diverse and more female characters, introducing new iterations of fan favourites including a female Thor; Riri Williams, a black teenager who took over the Iron Man storyline as Ironheart; Miles Morales, a biracial Spider-Man and Kamala Khan, a Muslim teenage girl who is the current Ms Marvel.

Writer of the Kamala Khan Ms Marvel series, G Willow Wilson responded to Gabriel’s comments … and criticising Marvel’s tendency to introduce the new iterations of fan favourites by “killing off or humiliating the original character … Who wants a legacy if the legacy is shitty?”

If this sounds familiar, it should. George Takei, said something similar about the last Star Trek movie, when producers decided to make his character—Hikaru Sulu—into a homosexual, complete with “husband” and baby. Takei said they should have made a new character, not changed the cannon of Star Trek.
“Unfortunately, it’s a twisting of Gene’s creation, to which he put in so much thought. I think it’s really unfortunate” – George Takei

Hollywood is hell bent on making this issue one that you can’t avoid. Look at it from their point of view, they get to simultaneously teardown some part of an American symbol or institution and replace it with something else.

Partly, this is laziness on their part described as creativity. Stan Lee or whoever pours decades of work into something and then some young punk comes along and highjacks it in the name of diversity. Why? It’s hard to make an original thing successful.

Revisionism, especially as it relates to homosexuality, is just the latest fad in Hollywood. Xena: Warrior Princess and Wonder Woman are slated to become “gender-benders”. Xena is being revived by NBC as a television series and Wonder Woman—in her second movie—is expected to “come out”.

This is just the latest iteration of Democrat group politics. No character stands on its own merits. Everybody is just assumed to identify with a group, and the group must advance or no one does. This plantation mentality is just dumb and shortsighted; not to mention insulting.

Dear Hollywood Liberals, the more you push these issues, the less of your products that I will buy. I want characters that are entertaining and have a moral code not ones that get their identity with who they sleep with.
• I dumped my DirecTV a year ago because of this.
• I’ve seen every Star Trek movie except the last one because of this issue. Oh, and I will take a pass on the new Star Trek TV show on CBS because you are pushing homosexual characters.
• I’m done with most everything Disney because of this and yes, Disney there are many children in this country that have never owned a Mickey Mouse piece of clothing or even know who you guys are because of your abandonment to “family values”. If Star Wars or Marvel movies go the direction of Star Trek then I’m done with them too.

I want something my children can see that has good role models not morally broken ones. If I want my kids to see morally broken people and what they are really like then I’ll let them watch the evening news not your programming.