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[eBooks] If it was not for paper books, the Delete History tool in your browser could really do just that some time in the near future. Poof, gone! G. Orwell.

[Stokely Carmichael] February is Black History Month remembering those that helped civilization. 

Anybody lose a pet monkey?

[Newbie advice] I never bought a house.  I’m not sorry, never have been and will not. Too many things to pay for for the ‘privilege of owning a home in the Keys.  If a person defines themselves by the purchases they own, they are screwed.

Getting more out of life is not about hoarding. It’s about alignment and allowing. It’s about milking and savoring. It’s about living abundant good now. I know that when I was struggling to get by in any area, I was not helpful to anyone else because you cannot give what you don’t have. It’s only as I allow myself to thrive that I have more to share; more love, more time, more energy, more money, more wisdom, more kindness, more fun.

[Burning on Ramrod Key] Monroe County Commission should immediately abandon the ideal of burn­ing yard waste from residents on Ramrod Key.

The current practice of shipping yard waste to Broward County to bum and release as carbon pollution into atmo­sphere is an insult. At a cost of $840,000 per year, it is an insult to the taxpayers of Monroe County, as well.

Monroe County ground up yard waste and composted it at the transfer sites in the Keys and delivered it to residents as mulch for many years. This practice must be restored; it is the only sensible, cost-effective, and environmentally appropri­ate solution.

Ten inches of mulch will become one or two inches of soil in a short time in the Keys. It raises yard elevations and stores carbon in the soil, grows trees which remove more carbon from the atmo­sphere.

If the county government wants to take action against climate change, or be sus­tainable, it should do it instead of talking about it and pretending to do something. 

Grafitti.

[The Gift] I thought I had bought the right gift for my wife for Valentine’s Day but after a 20 minute crying jag and slapping me cross-eyed I moved into my car.  I gave it a lot of thought and bought her 1 year subscription for Jenny Craig.  

Flowers probably would have been better!

No one goes to Portugal.

[Restore the vote to paroled felons] I heard the other day on NPR and in the paper that there is a growing movement nationally to restore the right to vote to paroled convicted felons. Based on the premise that many such felons were convicted of non-violent crimes and don’t really deserve to lose their voting rights for life.

To me a felony is a felony, quit trying to clean it up. Another premise was that blacks are un-proportionately affected by this denial of voting rights, raising the specter of racism yet again.  If you look at the crime arrest rates and resulting convictions of felony crimes going back thirty years, the majority of those persons are in fact black.  That is not racism, that is not lies, that is not messing with the numbers, these are pure statistics. These people chose a life of crime more often than their peers of other races, they get arrested, tried, and convicted for those crimes when the system works properly.  What is the mystery in that?  If they had chosen to work for a living, work their way through school like many of their peers, and live their lives like an honorable person, I seriously doubt they would find themselves arrested for felonies, serving time in prison, and losing their right to vote. No cop is grabbing young black men and youth off the street, stuffing their pockets with drugs, putting a gun in their hand, and make them rob a convenience store, or shoot each other in their own neighborhood streets.

Long ago, we the citizens decided that we didn’t want those types of people voting for our leaders in this country.  I haven’t changed my mind about that.  They forfeited their right to vote by showing us they didn’t deserve it. A consequence of committing a felony.  This is a good law, I’m sorry it affects blacks to such a large degree, but the statistics are not racism.

Now that Checkers in Key West has been closed and will be replaced by a Starbucks I won’t be getting my Big Buford Burgers and fries any more.  Hopefully they will re-locate to Big Pine.  Oops, I forgot, they’re one of those nasty chain places.  Maybe they could open here as Buford’s Big Burgers.

[Crazy ants] They are here, they kill nearly everything and they like electronics for warmth. Victims wished they had their fire ants back. Link 

The Republican Party of Florida is trying to make a heartfelt love connection between Democrat Charlie Crist and his old amigo, convicted ponzi-schemer, Scott Rothstein. Rothstein has recently accused his pal Charlie of selling Broward County, Florida judges in exchange for political favors. Crist has denied these allegations, saying that they were all “completely false.” Of course they were Charlie (sarcasm). But there is a trend developing with who Charlie Crist associates himself with. Along with the convicted ponzi-schemer Rothstein, Crist is very close amigos with Florida’s resident liberal blogger, Peter ‘Big Boy’ Schorsch, who just so happens to have a criminal wrap sheet of his own. Big Boy’s criminal record includes fraud charges, which he plead guilty to, as well as another charge he plead no contest to.  Link

FTR made a big thing of Obama’s crooked associates, but defend’s Crist’s.

[History of the Sand Key lighthouse] I used to go here often,  for a days outing, in the late sixties. Nice piece of history. Link

I’ve read some interesting logic on here the last few days. Under Rick Scott’s supervision and leadership his underlings apparently made screw ups and that’s what led to his company paying record amounts of fines unseen before in American history. However,  every little thing that happens under Obama’s Presidency is all his  fault.

Bring in the church lady, “How convenient”. 

Lower Keys woman can’t get any help trying to get loud rooster to go. There should be someone with a gun on BPK to help. Link

With technology and automation eliminating the need for humans in so many job areas, and the population growing,  what is going to happen to all the people who are not smart enough to do the intellectually demanding high tech jobs of the future that can’t be done by machines? 

Exercise Solid Curtain-Citadel Shield 2014 will be conducted at Naval Air Station Key West and naval bases and installations throughout the continental U.S. Feb. 18 – 28.

Specifically to Key West, exercises will be conducted at all annexes, but will be most noticeable at Truman Annex Feb. 24-28, with security forces at the gates and the use of the loudspeaker system there. More details are in the attached press release.

Photo caption: Naval Air Station Key West Security personnel participate in an active shooter training exercise during last year’s Solid Curtain – Citadel Shield exercise. U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Michael McNabb/Released. Guns by Mattel.

How” Macs do graphics and layout work better than PC’s.  As I said in the post, Windows machines have caught up and can do the job, it’s just more difficult.  The difference is the process, not the product.

First, maybe a little history.  The Microsoft interface has always been a copy of the Mac operating system.  Use of a mouse, WYSIWYG, links, and lots of other features were commonplace on Macs before they appeared for PC’s.  Most of the Adobe programs on which we’re so dependent, Photoshop, Illustrator, PageMaker, and multiple fonts, etc. were originally designed for use on the Macintosh.

An example — in the mid-80’s, I worked for a trade association, editing their magazine.  We used the traditional typesetting methods of the time, cumbersome and expensive.  We had heard of “desktop publishing” and thought it was worth investigating.  We also had a self insurance fund for workers’ compensation which utilized a high powered HP mainframe, so computer power was not an issue.  We looked for six months trying to find something that we could make work with our Microsoft based operating system (keep  in mind there was no internet on which we could do our research).  There was simply nothing available.

The Mac had only recently been introduced, so I decided to check it out.  In less than two weeks we were producing the magazine with an off-the-shelf computer and software that took me only about a week to learn.  We had a drawing program, a painting program, a page layout program, multiple fonts, and a ton of stuff our mainframe could never do.

Now, in time all of this kind of stuff became available on Microsoft based machines, but like any knock off product, they just never seemed to be as good or work as well as the original.

Even now, there are some things that Macs do with graphics that a superior to PC’s:
Better font management
Closed architecture means more seamless integration between programs
More out-of-the-box graphic tools available for Mac’s
More accurate and better color calibration on Mac’s
Better and quicker art programs for Mac’s

In general terms, there are also some things in which I find Mac’s to be superior to PC’s:
Mac’s crash much less often than PC’s
Mac’s are much more intuitive to use.  Commands and actions between programs are much more consistent (How intuitive can a PC be when you go to the “Start” menu to shut it down?)
Fewer maintenance tasks
Faster start up and shut down
Windows programs will run on a Mac.  Special software needed to make it work in the other direction
Much simpler file management protocols
Viruses, viruses, viruses

I have worked in both environments and have consistently found the Macintosh to be the superior machine when it came to graphics and publishing tasks, not as much in a difference in final product as a difference in the ease of producing that product.

Rick Scott will never win a beauty contest, but he might do well at Halloween.

Last week Team Obama released their guess as to how many people have signed up for Obamacare. Team Obama presented the numbers as being very positive. The fact is that the numbers suck.  According to Obama’s HHS, the government’s month-over-month data showed that January’s enrollment shrank in comparison with December’s numbers. HHS claimed that 1,146,071 signed up people in health exchanges from Dec. 29 to Feb. 1, bringing the cumulative to 3.3 million. Trouble is, that’s down 641,929 from the 1,788,000 signed up during December, according to HHS’s report for that month, which was released in mid-January. Yep, the number signing up in January was down by 1/3rd from Decembers sign up guess.

I used the word “guess” to alert you that Team Obama has no idea as to how many people have really started paying their premiums, no premiums, or no insurance. Please keep in mind that if insufficient numbers of people actually pay for insurance, the program will stall crash and burn. That’s why the Democrats built a provision into the law Obama will bail the insurance companies out with your tax dollars.  Sound familiar? Please also keep in mind that 7 million enrollees by March 31st, is considered the tipping point and was the goal of Team Obama. Less than 7 million and the system collapses. As of today the sign up rate is far less that needed to make that goal..

There are some interesting and alarming sub statistics. The end date is March 31st. The target number is 7 million. The program came into being on October 1, 18 weeks ago. Now we have 6 weeks left. To date only 3.3 million have “signed up”, but we have no idea as to how many have actually received insurance.  82% of the signups will receive a government subsidy. Only 25 percent of signups are between 18 and 34, while 53 percent are 45 and older. Actuaries tell us that the mix must be 60% young persons to 40% older people or the system crashes or rates must be radically increased. The number of enrollees who are under 34 must be much higher than the number of older signees to avoid a fiscal death spiral. Most of the signups are female. Unfortunately women’s health care is more expensive than men’s. Democare is nearly certain to be a massive black hole that sucks in and shreds massive amount of tax money. Link

Part 2) Last Friday a critic took another shot at yours truly and at Governor Scott. Deer Friends the ignorance of some posters is stunning. The critic wrote: “Rick Scott paid the highest penalty at the time for Medicaid fraud in American history and he was innocent?” The well-known fact is that Rick Scott did not pay the government a penny in fines. The penalties were paid by the Board of Directors of Columbia/HCA long after Scott had resigned. Scott was determined to fight the federal charges, the Board of Directors refused, so Scott resigned. Scott was innocent, he committed no crime, he was not charged, and he was not even interviewed by the investigators. Scott resigned from HCA/Columbia in 1997. HCA/Columbia agreed to pay the fine in December of 2000. Criticism is welcome, but the critics make themselves look foolish if they misstate the facts.

Please send me your comments at 1776ftr@gmail.com