I grant there has been a lot in the news lately about Democrat men exploiting women and getting a pass on it; not that this is really anything new but …
When I think about news stories of Democrat men behaving badly, obviously there is Joe Biden sniffing women’s hair and making inappropriate comments to them, and New York Governor Mario Cuomo groping the women around him. Nine accusers and counting. (Funny how one false accusation is almost enough to keep you from the US Supreme Court if you are a Conservative but nine is not enough to make a Democrat Governor resign.)
Also, I thought of Kamala Harris getting together this week with Bill Clinton to talk about empowering women. Clearly the funniest story of the week. Clinton has preyed on women his whole adult life and gotten off with hardly any consequences (OK there is one guy in Arkansas who claims to be Bill’s Love Child) while Harris is Vice President today because she slept her way to the top—thanks to Willie Brown and Lord knows who else.
Vice President Kamala Harris has accepted an invitation from former President Bill Clinton to join him Friday to discuss “empowering women and girls in the U.S. and around the world.”
Kamala Harris dons mask to protect her from Bill Clinton prior to their joint appearance
When he was mayor of San Francisco, Gavin was messing around with his appointment secretary. As a result, his wife dumped him and went to work for Fox News. How bad of a notorious cheater do you have to be for your wife to dump you and change political affiliation?
Kimberly Guilfoyle and Gavin Newsom were married 2001 – 2006
Then this morning I read that Governor Newsom has been playing hide the salami with his Capitol staffers. Some people never learn.
Hews Media Group- Cerritos News has learned from high-level sources that Gov. Gavin Newsom is having a romantic relationship with one of his close staffers.
With his recall heating up, this could be the last straw between voters and Newsom.
The sources are telling HMG-CN that many of Newsom’s other high-ranking staffers are aware of the relationship, and are ready to jump ship. Another said, “I have heard rumors!”
Newsom is currently married to Jennifer Siebel Newsom and they have four children.
Will the “worst-kept secret in Sacramento” blow into public view?
It’s hard to say.
The secret? That Gov. Gavin Newsom was engaged in multiple alleged extra-marital affairs over the course of 2020, a time where many of his orders shuttered nearly all personal and economic activity across the nation’s largest state.
Sources on K Street and within the Capitol complex peppered The Sun with corroborating rumors of infidelity by Newsom during the pandemic year.
One such instance allegedly occurred with a high-ranking official within his own office, K Street sources told The Sun.
“This is spiraling into the worst-kept secret in town,” a K Streeter, speaking anonymously to The Sun on Wednesday afternoon, said.
Underlying the growing chatter? Word of an impending exposé from The Los Angeles Times, adding professional woes of the 40th Governor currently under threat of recall.
Wednesday night, hours after announcing Rob Bonta as his appointee for Attorney General to replace U.S. Health and Human Secretary Xavier Becerra, the top auto-fill search result for “Newsom” on Twitter was “Newsom affair.”
Late in the evening, Capitol sources noted that POLITICO had also joined the chase for the story.
While Newsom deserves to be recalled, the position of this blog is that whoever replaces Newsom will be worse than he is so why subject taxpayers to this Quixotic exercise? Will this be the straw that causes Dems to abandon Newsom and rally around another? The morality of this lot is so twisted that I won’t be surprised by whatever happens.
Folks, the likely recall outcome is that we will get a more efficient tyrant than Garvin that will harm us even more.
My family’s plans to escape California took several big steps forward this past week.
First, we are getting proper access to our property installed from the main road by a contractor that we hired. The driveway should be completed in a few weeks. The house plans are slated to be ready soon as well.
We also took steps to get utilities installed on the property. The final price is unknown but the local government overseeing everything has had their preliminary fees paid to do the necessary engineering. We also met with the person installing electrical service to the property. Unlike California, where we are moving, hydroelectric is considered a reliable renewable energy source.
As part of our plan, I have accepted a promotion with a new agency, the dreaded Employment Development Department (EDD). Per conversations with some folks working there, it’s supposed to be an improvement from where I was before. The only concerning part is that the interview process was very minimal which makes me think they are just throwing as many people as they can at their problems. It is a “limited term” assignment which means I could be there 12 to 24 months, unless they convert me to permanent. I’d settle for the 24-month option. It will be more pay which of course will allow me to get more when I retire in two years …such a bargain.
I find it funny that after all these months of working from home, two weeks before I leave my current agency, I finally was issued the official department laptop. This laptop from Dell is perfectly fine, or it was before the IT department got ahold of it. Folks, I’m a better IT guy than almost anyone they have on their payroll. After years of trying to get hired by them, I finally gave up. Anyway, the laptop that I was issued was missing the accounting program and the VPN (Virtual Private Network) software. I had to get our building’s IT guy to install the programs. When I got it home and tried to use it, I found even more problems. The IT department stripped out the default Windows Power Plans and set it to use one of their own design. The max CPU usage I can get out of the thing is about 15 percent. My Excel program tops out at 2 percent CPU usage when under load and running macros in Excel. My Windows XP box from ten years ago was faster. Due to all the Group Policies, poor patching, and other nonsense, this thing is 85 percent brick and 15 percent computer. Oh, i7 processor and 16 GB of RAM should be faster. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think it was a 32-bit OS. The IT guy tried to remote in and fix it, but he doesn’t even know that Windows has Power Plans or how to configure them. Oh, this thing is so slow that web pages won’t resolve because they time-out’ thus looking for help on the Internet is impossible with this machine.
Also, there is no antivirus program on the laptop. I should have McAfee End Point Enterprise AV but that too is missing.
When transferring to the laptop, I abandoned about 90 percent of the files on my desktop machine and only transferred a few working files, and my photos and podcasts that I had accumulated over the last ten years. It’s a good thing I didn’t try to transfer everything. I have about 250 GB of data on my desktop and the laptop SSD is about 250 GB so it wouldn’t all fit anyway.
In light of my impending move to EDD, my question was how to get my personal stuff off of the laptop. Over the years the IT guys have gradually blocked thumb drives, DVD burners, and cell phones. I tried file transfer via network and Bluetooth but that didn’t work. Since I can’t get webpages to resolve, I couldn’t even use email to move anything. I know BIT Locker has been hacked but I had decided not to brute force any solution. I had about 50 podcasts and about 25 GB in photos that I wanted to move plus a few other odds and ends. (In most cases, the photos were copies that I probably had elsewhere but I wanted to compare them to my master copy on my home computer before deleting them.) I did many web searches on my desktop computer before I found a solution that worked. Thankfully, the IT guys don’t run Windows 10 in the real world so what I did was use something already baked into the OS.
Here is the solution that I found:
On both your home computer and the laptop, go to Setting > Shared Experiences and turn on both sharing buttons.
Then in Windows Explorer you can select files and broadcast them from one machine to another. I found that this usually worked but I was limited to about 14 files at a time. To move 25 GBs of photos at this rate would take forever. As a workaround for this file limit, I found that I could zip a whole directory of photos and transfer them as one file. I was able to move 8.5 GB of photos in a single zip file. I then deleted the stuff on the laptop. I recommend that you add Shared Experiences to your toolbox of things to consider as a method for moving files. The speed is limited only by your Wi-Fi.
Arizona Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego announced a proposal Friday to strip benefits for active or retired military members who participated in the Capitol Riot on January 6, according to Stars and Stripes.
Gallego wrote a letter to the Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) Secretary Denis McDonough and other top military officials March 18, stating, “Unfortunately, many veterans led or participated in this insurrection. Reporting suggests that nearly 20% of the insurrectionists were either veterans or military retirees, including some of the most violent members of the mob.”
“Any veteran or service member who stormed the Capitol on January 6 forfeited their moral entitlement to privileged benefits at the expense of the people of the United States,” the letter read.
“I ask you to quickly identify, investigate, and prosecute any active service member or retiree that participated in the attack under the jurisdiction of the Uniform Code of Military Justice,” Gallego said.
Folks, I have strong feelings on this idea. As readers should know, I am a veteran. Here is a little background before I address the Congressman’s idea.
Buried in the bowels of my enlistment contract is a clause that I was subject to recall to active duty until I reached the age of 55 even though I never had to serve a day in the Reserves—Active or Inactive. So yes, the government, in special circumstances, does have a limited claim on military personnel even after they are discharged.
Also, I did take an oath to protect and defend the country of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic. Actually, I’ve taken that oath many times as both an elected official and a service member. Funny thing is, I was never released from that oath, either as a military member or an office holder.
So, when I read this article, it makes me mad for a number of reasons. First, the Democrat Party is the home of the domestic enemies of the United States. Look at what that Party stands for: they hate God, limited government, life, they welcome racists and racism, they are all about the color of people’s skins and not the content of their character, they oppose hard work and passing an inheritance to your grandchildren, they protect the guilty and punish the innocent, they oppose self-defense, demonize law enforcement, embrace tyranny, hate the Constitution, our Founders, and our history.
Given the oath that we veterans have taken, and the election fraud used to keep Democrats in power, I can fully understand that many veterans were in Washington D.C. on January 6th. Do I believe that what happened was an insurrection? NO. Remarkably, despite claims this was an armed event, no one in officer or law enforcement has yet to prove a single firearm was taken into the Capitol Building let alone used in an attempt to overthrow the government. It does appear that folks did not properly enter the building but for the most part, the worst they are guilt of is trespassing or something similar. Folks like buffalo boy and Jorge behaved stupidly by going into places that they shouldn’t like the House floor and Pelosi’s office. Had they stayed in public areas, much of the drama on that day would not have occurred.
Congressman Gallego is just pandering for some publicity. Invoking the UCMJ (Uniform Code of Military Justice) is laughable [for reasons that I will explain in a moment] and meant only to impress the uninformed masses. There is no legal precedent to do what he is suggesting. Oops, he is a Democrat so when has the law even been an impedance to what they do?
Many parts of the UCMJ are not followed by the military except as a tool for selective enforcement. Here’s a few examples. Ever seem a sailor with a tattoo? Per the letter of the UCMJ, a tattoo is forbidden, allegedly as the destruction of government property. Although this policy has softened over the years.
Adultery is forbidden. As is homosexuality, at least until Obama was in office. The UCMJ covers many moral areas which are routinely not enforced. My point being that the UCMJ is being softened by the civilian government and not the military. The trend is away from enforcing many provisions and making the military, …well less military.
Sorry Congressman but attempting to use the UCMJ is a nonstarter in my eyes. Secondly, I know of no possible way that the military can touch the life of a discharged veteran or retired person. Gallegos wants to waive a magic wand and take away veteran benefits? Sorry dude. Whatever happens in the civilian world, we earned the benefits. Even veterans in prison can get benefits from the Veteran’s Administration.
After a diligent Internet search, it looks like the Congressman has this in mind:
Can A Veteran Receive Retired Military Pay While In Prison?
Generally, yes. Being convicted of a crime almost never jeopardizes a federal pension – the rare exception to this rule are charges relating to criminal disloyalty to the United States: espionage, treason, sabotage, etc.
Sorry Congressman but what happened on January 6th falls way short of “espionage, treason, sabotage”. Jorge Riley and others have been charged with many things, but none come close to the threshold needed to go after veteran’s benefits.
The truth is that most veterans and other folks in Washington D.C. on January 6th were peaceful. If the veterans were wanting to overthrow the government do you really think they’d bring their wives and children to help?
If that doesn’t help then try this, the purpose of the military is to kill people and break things. Since the evil veterans on January 6th didn’t come properly prepared with vests, guns, and other military stuff, then how were they planning to overthrow the government? Harsh pronouns and colorful metaphors?
This is just another attempt to use the power of the Federal Government to attack Trump supporters that believe that the Democrats cheated yet again and get publicity at the same time. Such selective enforcement is tyranny and doing it retroactively is doubly so.
Unbeknownst to anyone who actually cares about the pathetic life of Jorge Riley, apparently, he is out of custody and back in Sacramento. Yes, he is out of custody. I found this out yesterday. Jorge, as you may recall, was arrested by the FBI (yeah, as in federal crime not state or local) during the “insurrection at the Capital” back in January. Riley was in custody with no bail, until about the end of February, then he was extradited to DC. Apparently, a judge in DC bought his line of crap of being a combat veteran with PTSD and having no money.
Blogger commentary: Jorge was in the military, I cannot speak to his service, but a couple of veterans that I know refute his take on combat service. Riley intentionally keeps himself under or unemployed to leach off taxpayers; unlike the editorial board of this blog. This is to avoid court ordered support of his “children,” as for how many the world may never know.
Last I heard from an officer friend of mine, he is facing 2 misdemeanors and a felony for striking a child of his recently. He also is a heavy drinker, as detailed in past blogs, as well as a narcotics user. My officer friend says likely cocaine or meth, due to his skin/looks seeming far older than he really is. With no money or job, how does he keep his habit of drinking at events and using narcotics going you ask. Easy Answer!
His enablers.
After being released and told not to leave the country, Jorge flew back to California. My sources say Bill Cardoza footed the bill, no shock. I would say iron sharpens iron but neither of these two possess an IQ in positive territory. He recently attended a recall Newsom event. Give his recent past, while I guess that’s not a crime since it’s an open rally/protest; however, it’s a rough look. Even rougher is his giving an interview to a former central committee member of Sac County who is a current member of the Proud Boys and was recently expelled from said GOP committee. Couldn’t he find, I don’t know, anyone else to video tape the interview?
Oh, this interview is pure Jorge Riley gold folks. On camera, he admits to “rubbing his butt on Nasty Pelosi’s desk.” Actually, he says “may or may not have”, but in today’s media and court system, you better believe they are adding another charge, to his pending charging documents. I am sure his lawyer is thrilled. Most people get out of jail and do not wish to go back, apparently Riley misses it so much he wants to book a longer stay by nixing any chance for a concurrent sentence and insuring a consecutive one. Hotels may be open with minimal occupancy, but as an attorney friend of mine will say “there is always a vacancy at the Blue Roof Inn aka Jail.”
Oh, remember those media reports that we said were bogus about Riley leaving the California Republican Assembly in shame following his arrest for storming the nation’s Capital? Well, we now have proof, as if we needed any more, courtesy of Riley and his enabler Cardoza.
Let’s have a gander at another event Riley “showed up” to. I use air quotes because there is no way he didn’t know in advance and if I were a betting man, I would lay heavy odds Bill “the Wookie” Cardoza moved the regular meeting of the Sacramento Republican Assembly to make sure they could have Riley as their keynote speaker.
Riley’s leadership has brought such attention to the organization that he was presented with an award for his longevity of service as chapter president. Lest you forgot, Riley was SRA President and a statewide CRA Board member on January 6th. Yeah, check this award out.
Thank you for your leadership as president of the Sacramento Republican Assembly Jorge Riley 2015 – 2021
If it’s really gold, I got a feeling it’ll soon be pawned off, melted down, or sold for scrap to fuel his addiction to drugs and alcohol. Shame it won’t be around to be admitted into evidence at his trial.
Below is a photo that was taken during the night’s festivities. I can picture his time at the podium prior to the presentation. Likely Riley told stories of violating Speaker Pelosi’s office, fighting his cellmates, disrespecting officers, and stories of his multiple court outbursts. Proudly standing shoulder-to-shoulder with him in the photo below are 2 lawyers licensed by the California State Bar Association. Said Bar is not to be confused with the watering hole Riley is used to patronizing. The lawyers in question are Sue Blake, a former Sac CRA President and past Chair of Sacramento Republican Party, and Tom Hudson former CRA Statewide President and Placer County Republican Party leader.
Local SRA and California Republican Assembly (CRA) leaders gathered to pay tribute to Jorge for both his service on the SRA as well as the CRA board of directors. From left, 8th SRA President Angela Azevedo, Immediate Past CRA President Tom Hudson, CRA National Committeeman Bill Cardoza (me), 4th SRA President Russell Gray, current and 15th SRA President Dr. Justin Hardcastle, 7th SRA President Sue Blake, and current SRA Vice President Todd Freeman who also served as SRA’s 2nd and 3rd vice president. — Bill Cardoza Facebook page 03/09/2021
This speaks to enablement. Folks, I am sorry, but Sue and Tom know better. They may claim to be tax lawyers not criminal lawyers, but they had no business in that photo or at that meeting. First Blake hasn’t been an attending member in about a decade, so she showed up only to pay homage to Riley. Hudson knows better and knew of all Riley’s acts, again enabling. Hudson is immediate past president of the statewide California Republican Assembly—as such a sitting Board member of CRA— [per recent media reports, CRA allegedly ejected Riley which clearly is a lie]. Angela Azevedo came out of the woodwork to support Riley. Again, someone who had a career in the corrections arm of the state government and should know better. In fact, all four enablers listed above (Blake, Cardoza, Hudson, Azevedo) are career state employees living off the taxpayer’s dime.
Bill Cardoza, well he put it all together and is again running for National Committeeman of the CRA. Facepalm!
The problem Jorge has is that the drugs and alcohol have destroyed his health, and this will destroy his life, if it hasn’t already. These folks are not your friends Jorge. They are using you like the parent who uses their child to “re-live their glory years.” You may not be able to help yourself Jorge, but you are looking at about 15-20 years in a federal lockup. Try remorsefulness for a change. Stay out of politics and try to right a few wrongs you have had in your life. Jorge the FBI wants you. The scariest arm of the federal government not named the IRS is looking to bury you. You are in real trouble.
In the past, you always got your way at CRA, CAGOP, or Sac GOP meetings because Sue, Tom, Bill, and others covered for you. You screamed, shouted, interrupted, pouted, and muttered things incoherently and you were never told, “No”. These folks are not your friends and will abandon you as you leave the courtroom in handcuffs. Rest assured this video you made and the photos you took will be coming to a courtroom near you very quickly. I hope you get another stimulus check because a return trip to DC will be cheaper and more enjoyable on your own dime rather than if you ditch court. I can’t say for sure, but I think a federal chartered airplane won’t have flight attendants serving booze.
Sue, Bill, Tom and others, you may be lawyers (sans Bill) and work for powerful people, but your unfettered allegiance to Jorge has me questioning why I ever got involved in politics with people of your caliber. You are all truly the lowest of the low. None of you are above the law and I wish you were required to testify as to why you support that sack of trash Jorge. Watching you squirm would be out and out fun, seeing you try to bob and weave, or plead negligence would be funny. Frankly, I would make sure the Academy Awards committee was on site as it could be Oscar worthy for best performance on camera!
Jorge word of advice, these folks (just like your lawyer) have very little say in front of a man/women/binary with a robe and a gavel. You have been warned.
Say it isn’t so but here we go again. A New Year, a new president, and yet same old, same old, out of our favorite out of touch person. He came into the office proclaiming 500,000 had died of Covid and asked me if I still thought it was a hoax. With all the editorial crew of this blog to back me, I have never once said that. I believe, just like we all do here, that it was a harsh overreaction by a loud minority of folks who believe everything they see on TV. I heard about how 1,000 people had died in Sacramento County, a county of almost 1.8 million mind you. He hid in fear during this entire time, and yet he insisted young folks and “essential” folks report for duty in case he needed to spin the reels at the Indian Casino. My favorite was his explaining to me the different variants of Covid; CA, NY, South Africa, European, etc.…things I frankly could not care less about. Folks this virus has very similar characterizes to the flu in the opinion of my doctor and many other medical experts; sans Fauci. The flu mutates annually and as a result the flu shot is either a “hit” or a “miss” depending on science and research.
Just to be clear, I do not see much on Covid anymore, it must be since we have a new president or a Governor who is about to be recalled. But I used to look at KCRA or CBS local affiliate news sites for info on Covid and I see nothing anymore except for the rare announcement that a drive thru vaccine clinic is in town. Apparently, this info is readily available to folks who have nothing better to do. As a blogger who is consumed with work, church, politics, and other extracurricular activities, I cannot let Covid break or destroy my mind. I know it is there, and the vaccine will not be available to me for a great while due to my young age. I also know I cannot control things outside my control, I wash my hands, wear a mask as required, and generally live my life.
While 90-Day Guy was on his diatribe about the variants I asked if he enjoyed watching so much television and what he specifically watched. Predictably he got upset and proclaimed he doesn’t watch TV. He took a phone call and began to recap last night’s episode of The Bachelor and parlayed that into a discussion about The Voice with a client. When I casually brought up The Bachelorette, I was told that ended weeks ago and to “get with the program.” I don’t have cable, nor do I care about those shows. But it makes my point, he watches quite a lot of TV. He also readily admits to watching Hannity, Tucker, and Laura Ingraham daily, adding 3 more hours to the docket. He also brought up how he watched a Giants baseball game the same night. Folks, baseball is not in season, it’s Spring Training, and the players worth a rip are out of the game by inning 5, yet he is “so busy” that he watches no TV.
For the heck of it, I decided to play a game with him. I said name all 50 states, I could care less the order named, I just wanted to hear them listed off. He asked to write them down, I okayed it. He correctly listed 44, and included Washington DC, which will likely soon be a state. He left out of usual ones located in New England, left out Pennsylvania, and Illinois, which while forgettable, they are large states. Then I mentioned list all capitals. This was not a great look. He listed 20, and some of the “capitals” had me puzzled; Seattle, New York City, Tulsa, Miami, and Portland were listed. He gave up shortly thereafter and claimed again he doesn’t watch much TV. Yikes.
The point of this blog is not to antagonize but to point out how brain drain is a real thing. Liberalism is a disease, but at the same time look at what TV does to your mind. This guy could name off all the variants, and stats Covid related, were he found them I do not know. He could also give a detailed run down of reality TV to a point of obsession, and watching an entire preseason baseball game, whilst simultaneously saying he is too busy all the time. However, he could not pass a basic test of something that has not changed in our lives. This is brain drain. Stop worrying about Covid, it’s a tertiary thing in our lives right now, additional info will come in time, but to make it an obsession is not good.
Why does the Left persist with the lie that there was no voter fraud in the 2020 election? Give me a break!
Oh, the following voter fraud was made possible a grant from Big Tech. Thanks Mark Zuckerberg.
In Georgia, a state Joe Biden won by fewer than 12,000 votes, county election officials still have not complied with a law requiring them to provide documents certifying the chain of custody of more than 400,000 mail-in ballots.
The request for the drop-box transfer forms was made by The Georgia Star News under the Georgia Open Records Law. Last July, the Georgia State Election Board passed an emergency rule requiring election officials to maintain the transfer forms
.But officials for the state’s largest county, Fulton, and another major county, DeKalb, said they didn’t know if they had the documents and promised to reply later, Georgia Star News reported.
But four months after the Nov. 3 election, those counties and 33 others have failed to comply with the law.
Overall, no chain of custody has been provided for an estimated 404,691 of the estimated 600,000 votes by mail-in ballot deposited in drop boxes, delivered to county registrars and counted in Georgia’s 2020 presidential election, Star News said.
Yep, if you thought the “Velvet Sweatshop,” as their employees call Microsoft, was in the clear after plugging holes in the mega security breach of SolarWinds, you would be wrong. Yesterday, I saw this article reporting another huge securing breach, this time by China. (FYI that I know of, no one has taken credit for SolarWinds.)
The quiet release of an out of band patch for a flaw in Microsoft’s Exchange server is rapidly turning into a major story, with credible reports ofat least 30,000 organizations in the USA, and possibly hundreds of thousands around the world, being hacked by a Chinese hacker group, who now has full control of the servers and the data on them.
For those that don’t know, Microsoft Exchange is their flagship email server software.
Krebs on Security reports that a significant number of small businesses, towns, cities and local governments have been infected, with the hackers leaving behind a web shell for further command and control.
Microsoft said the original attacks were targetted at a range of industry sectors, including infectious disease researchers, law firms, higher education institutions, defense contractors, policy think tanks, and NGOs, but Krebs notes that there has been a dramatic and aggressive escalation of the rate of infection, as the hackers try and stay ahead of the patch Microsoft released.
“We’ve worked on dozens of cases so far where web shells were put on the victim system back on Feb. 28 [before Microsoft announced its patches], all the way up to today,” said Volexity President Steven Adair, who discovered the attack . “Even if you patched the same day Microsoft published its patches, there’s still a high chance there is a web shell on your server. The truth is, if you’re running Exchange and you haven’t patched this yet, there’s a very high chance that your organization is already compromised.”
“It’s police departments, hospitals, tons of city and state governments and credit unions,” said one source who’s working closely with federal officials on the matter. “Just about everyone who’s running self-hosted Outlook Web Access and wasn’t patched as of a few days ago got hit with a zero-day attack.”
Folks, this is a really big deal but unless you read tech blogs, I doubt you’ve heard about this. Again, this breach includes schools, police departments, hospitals, financial institutions, and businesses. I encourage you to read the article which I linked above. I suspect we will hear more about this breach before long. Oh, and if you don’t that doesn’t mean everything is better.
Don’t forget that whatever the outcome of this most recent breach, your smart phones are sending all your text messages, address books, location, and other data to both China and Big Tech on a regular basis. Your privacy is an illusion in a digitally dependent world. How people use the information they are collecting is probably above my paygrade. If knowledge is power, then we’re likely in trouble…
With the backdrop of impending economic ruin and a recall, Governor Newsom has implemented what I consider a financial suicide pact for California’s government. Newsom and his “brain trust” have decided that working conditions under Covid-19 are such a wonderful thing that all State workers—to the fullest extent possible—will continue to work at home from now until Doom’s Day.Yep, state workers—as a group—will never again have to report to a brick-and-mortar office building. They will continue to work at home from now until they retire.
Apparently, this onetime accounting gimmick is projected to save the state lots of money. Instead of the government paying building rental (or long-term leases) and all utilities, supplies, and maintenance of the offices, now its employees will. As a benefit, California can fudge some numbers about how green the state’s government has become because nobody must drive to work anymore. Oh, and all those businesses that once served state workers breakfast and lunch around said office buildings are going out of business in droves.
In March I will have to spend one three-hour session in my office packing up my personal belongings and scanning any documents in the cubicle. Said documents will then be placed in the shredding bin for destruction. The goal is for me to be completely out of the office at the end of this visit. My coworkers have been commanded to do likewise. Sometime that month we will also be issued laptops to replace the desktops that we have been logging into from home each day since the pandemic panic was initiated. Then we can use VPN (Virtual Private Network) access instead of the VM Ware application that we now use.
Folks, in some cases working from home might work OK but to initiate a blanket policy doing this is nuts. If you think, there’s fragmentation in the Android ecosystem, just wait until the fragmentation of government functions becomes manifest.
How does someone monitor your workload when you work from home? Remember that government is not concerned with sales or productivity so what metric do you use? Hamsters are busy all day but do they actually go anywhere on their little wheels?
How do you balance workload when you’ve never done the work you are now supervising?
How do you promote people or train new employees with no properly written procedures and no face-to-face interaction? Office work is about relationships not just managing email traffic.
Folks, I know that in this post Enron business world, separation of duties is a thing but what California is perpetrating now is a gross perversion of the concept. I think it is a formula for financial ruin with even less accountability.
Oh, case in point is EDD. Did you know that the $31 billion in fraud was due in part to EDD’s employees working from home? There was no way to properly supervise the unemployment case workers because everyone was hiding in their respective homes just clicking approve on whatever came up on their computer screens. I really doubt that EDD employees—especially those hired after the two weeks to flatten the curve—ever had any relationship with their supervisors and I also guarantee that they had inadequate training to boot. In such a scenario, you only get supervision when you ask for help or deny too many claims.
Folks, Governor Newsom, and his fellow travelers are remaking California government right under your noses and the public—as usual—is none the wiser. Guess if it’s not on television then it’s not news. Both ideas and actions have consequences.
The only upside I see on this is that more people can be home during the day to watch their neighborhoods. Hopefully, this will somewhat mitigate the fact that both Gavin Newsom and Jerry Brown have emptied much of the state prison population into suburbia. Perhaps tens of thousands of state workers being home all day will make the criminal class think twice about home burglaries.
Meanwhile, because I work from home; my wife is happy that the trash is empty, the laundry is done, and the dishes are clean; and my dog is happy that he gets at least two walks a day and lots of love. Sadly, Rush Limbaugh is not the only guy showing up to work with half his brain tied behind his back just to make it fair.
Note: This blog is a place where I share how I feel or what I’m doing, often to let off some steam; however, occasionally, it’s just a place where I park notes to myself in case need them later. This article is one such note to myself; however, you still might learn a thing or two about how your tax dollars are spent. If you read on, remember that you’ve been warned.
Background—including Jargon and Vocabulary
In terms of technology, one of the most backwards places to work is the State of California. Yep, while the State may be home to Big Tech, your government is stuck in the past. In a sense, I can’t blame them. Government has zero incentive to become efficient, innovate, or do better. One reason is that everybody is represented by a union whether or not they are even a member of said union. As such, no jobs can be eliminated without their express permission—which never happens. Any media reports to the contrary are lies or smokescreens to trick the public—usually for sympathy to further the union’s grip on state government.
A legacy piece of technology which is the aging backbone of California’s finances is CalSTARS (California State Accounting and Reporting System). I have written about this software before. It is a Unix based mainframe system that was brought online when Ronald Reagan was President in the 1980’s. This is the same software that desperately needed patching as part of the Y2K scare. It is still in use today.
California has spent over a billion dollars of your money to try and get their new accounting system deployed to replace CalSTARS, but as usual, it is many years behind schedule and hundreds of millions over budget. This gem is called FI$Cal (Financial Information System for California). The acronym is pronounced fis-cal [with short “I”) Think of it as pausing between syllables of the word “fiscal”.
The next thing you need to know is that within the State of California, there is no formal way for one agency to talk with another. Lazy people might blame the right to privacy in the State Constitution. This privacy clause was sold to voters as a barrier to keep agencies from sharing information and to cripple “Big Brother” from spying on citizens. Voters we told that by passing it, government would be prevented from compiling comprehensive files to track citizens. Think Soviet Union Politburo and KGB surveillance.
I have two comments on that promise. First, who needs government to do that when we have credit agencies and Big Tech to do it for you. If you want the goods on a conservative, just ask Big Tech; if you want the same info on a Liberal you better get a court order. Such is life in Biden’s America.
Second, somehow liberals argue the this right to privacy—banning the government from keeping comprehensive records on citizens—must also include a right to abortion. Abortion was never mentioned by the campaign advocating passage of the right to privacy back when it was passed in the 1970’s.
Anyway, it is impossible for peers within agencies to speak directly with each other unless you are a lifer in state service and happen to have a personal relationship with someone in another agency; usually because you were once coworkers. If my agency has a question for the State Controller, Franchise Tax Board, Dept of Motor Vehicles or any other state agency, we get to call the very same 800 number that you do as a member of the public to try and get help. Needless to say, with no way to prove who I am, where I’m calling from, or why my question is related to my duties as a state employee, I can get no help. Managers have no secret backdoor or liaison to go thru to get answers either.
This communication barrier extends to email also. Even when I have the email address of someone, say at the State Controller’s Office, my experience has been that email outside that agency is refused by the mail server and/or firewall. In the wake of Covid and other state activities, perhaps this will eventually change.
My point in bringing up communication is this, no one at my agency can get the State Controller to find a better way to send us accounting documents other than snail mail. The accounting documents that we get arrive in drips and drabs (when they make it to us). Each envelope or box has two copies of each accounting document. These must then be sorted and scanned into Adobe PDF files. These PDF files are then run thru an OCR program and then manually attached into our accounting system. My question, for the entire time that I have been a state employee (12 years), is why can’t we get this information in an electronic form?
The answer is simply that no one in my agency knows who to ask at SCO to make this happen or even if it’s possible.
Anyway, we typically get 2,500 – 3,000 unique pages, plus their duplicates, per month from the State Controller. When SCO screws-up employee payroll, then we get extras. Lots of extras. In January, we were supposed to get over 19,500 extra accounting documents (plus their duplicate copies). Snail mail being what it is, the documents did not arrive in a timely manner and yours truly was tasked with finding a way to get them from the old Unix system so we could manually attach them into our accounting system (not FI$Cal).
sample of terminal software
What follows is my account of how I solved the problem of getting these missing documents for my agency and making them usable.
SCO Prod
Via the Unix/mainframe computer program mentioned above, we can log in to the State Controller system with Read Only access. In theory, users can go other places too, but you need user and firewall permissions which I don’t have. Oh, I don’t have access to the State Controller site either. I have to use some else’s account.
You see, the Information Technology people where I work never interact with actual users, just each other. They have no clue what we need, they just take their best guess, filtered thru the lowest bidder, and deploy it to us. We are expected to like it, even if it is outdated or underpowered equipment when its brand new. Ditto for software. IT doesn’t care what our job is, just that each budget is spent and not exceeded. Thus, about five or six years ago, they went from giving access to almost everyone to taking it away. Apparently, the per seat costs were too high so they cut to the bone and beyond.
Anyway, using the log in information that I possess, I went hunting for the missing documents. We use a terminal program to access the mainframe. This software is capable of being configured to do bulk screen captures. Screen captures are the only way to get the missing documents. The only option is whether to print to a file or a physical printer.
Using my three hour per day window to be in the office, I went in on consecutive days to capture our missing documents. The missing documents were on two different dates. With a practical limit of about 80 screen captures per batch, I did over 35,000 screen captures during my six hours in the office. Each batch was saved as a PDF file. The PDF batches were then merged so all those on the same date were in a single file.
Filter Results
My next step was to sort the pages by agency, a four-digit number on each page. By doing research, I found that Adobe Acrobat had no built-in way to do this. I tried converting the file into Microsoft Word, an RTF file and a few others only to have Adobe Acrobat crash completely after the better part of an hour. After crashing Acrobat about a half dozen times, I gave up on any type of file conversion.
After more diligent research on the Internet, I found a different solution, a Java batch file run in Adobe Acrobat.
Here were the steps that I followed:
First, I had to see if it was possible and if so, how? This thread said it could be done.
By clicking on the link found in the Correct Answer, I found some Java code to copy and paste. As is usual on the Internet, it was only part of a correct solution.
If you look at the above two pages, you can figure out where to go in Acrobat DC to paste the code into the Action tab. However, the code is not correct.
The line:
var stringToSearchFor = “Total”;
is not the correct syntax. (Whatever is written inside the quotation marks is what the script searches for.)
By looking at the below line of code, I found the missing thing needed above, parentheses.
var n = str.indexOf(“welcome”);
What the wonderful Java script mentioned above does is this; it looks for a string of text on the page and if it finds a match, it copies the page to a new file. Thus, I enter the agency number as the string to search for and then everything matching my agency is copied into a new file. As counter intuitive as it seems, I filter out what I want to keep and not the other way around.
The documents that were the result of the screen captures had only one problem, the font size was too small to be used in the macro process which I will describe below in a moment.
Increase Font in Acrobat Files
Once again, I found that Adobe Acrobat lacks a feature that I desperately need now. Acrobat has no ability to increase the font size of a PDF document. The reason for the need to increase font size is due to how the macro operates. The macro searches a location on the page for a document number. The margins on the page were too large and font too small. I felt that this would be a problem going forward.
Other than a few mentions about magnifying the size of a document on the page—which is not the same thing—I could find no solution. I came to the conclusion that improvisation was needed. I took the files created by the script above and then printed them to a new PDF file while increasing the magnification of the printed output to 115%.
The result was a page with a font size and page layout similar to the snail mail copies that we normally get. Once the font size was increased, I merged all files for the month into a single PDF.
Macro
Each month, I must take the existing PDF file for the month and run a series of macros on it. The end result of the macros is three parts:
First, is a list of comments that is bulk uploaded into the accounting program.
Second is that the merged file of all PDF documents is split into individual files that are labelled by document number.
Third is a list of accounting documents that need to be manually uploaded one page at a time into the accounting program.
As part of the Macro process, each page of the PDF file is imported into an Excel workbook as a separate worksheet. This was the largest Excel workbook I every created with over 20,000 worksheets. This baby took lots of CPU power but unlike Acrobat, Excel didn’t crash under the strain.
Sadly, the next two steps of the macro failed to find the needed document number to continue.
After a review of a few worksheets, I noticed that the part of the monthly PDF file created by the process described above were all the same, which was good, but the rows were not where I needed them to be. There were blank rows at the top of the worksheets. I thought, what if I can remove the top row of all these at the same time?
In the dark recesses of my mind, I remembered that this was possible, but I forgot how. After a quick Internet search and creative use of the Shift key, I deleted the top row of one selected page and after an interminable wait, the first row was deleted from all the other selected worksheets as well.
I reran the failed macro steps and found that everything worked just like clockwork.
Elapsed time for the above was a week of my life.
Conclusion
Now 18 of us are manually attaching all the documents created above. Each of us has 1,080 (or more) PDF files that we are attaching one at a time to line items in the accounting program. This takes about 12 hours per person of uninterrupted time or about 216 manhours just for this month.
I’m sure it is possible to do this entire process in a matter of minutes if the people controlling the budget layer cared about a fiduciary responsibility for taxpayer money, but we work for the union not you so such waste in baked into the system.
Stay tuned for more tales of how your tax dollars are spent.
