Nearly complete. Everything is in its place and working.

The washer and dryer stick out about 3″ too far. That clips the drawer to the right.

I hooked up all the wiring and plumbing last night.

The countertop is black epoxy on 3/4″ plywood. It turned out better than I expected. I’ll see how well it holds up to scratches before doing the same in the kitchen.

Nothing to do now but finish painting the cabinet doors, install a decorative backsplash, and trim around the window.

There are lots of candidates out there raising money for their campaign but doing very little else to distinguish themselves.  I expect most of them know they don’t have a chance of winning, but they DO have a chance to will big prizes in the campaign fund raising.  Under election law, they can keep anything they don’t use.  So this is a little know path for Democrats to bribe their favorite office holders, and expect those office holders to be grateful later.   Democrats know all the bribery back door tricks:  Book deals, stock tips on stocks that are guaranteed to go up, and Charitable donations to your private “charity foundation”.

Finally, just remember that the Democratic Party Primary is a dog and pony show, with no pony.  The Democratic Party chooses their candidate by asking the party insiders (Super-Delegates) who they want.  Local primary elections are meaningless.  They have zero effect on the outcome.

It will also be interesting to see how many Democrats register as Republicans and use their votes to select a non-Trump.  Their votes in the Democratic party primary don’t matter anyway.  At least sabotaging the republican primary helps their cause.

The fact is, I support the Democratic party process of selecting their candidate.  It is insane to have open and fair elections to help a party select their candidate and thereby let your opponents dominate your selection process.  Total insanity.  Each party should have their own internal process to select their candidates.  Potential methods are to force anyone to casts a vote in the Republican primary to also automatically cast their vote in the general election for whoever that party candidate is.  I also support proportional voting, where each vote is weighted by how much that person donates to the candidate.  A single vote costs nothing.  A single vote and a check for $1 million is a commitment.

The various news stations have become so contentious that the TVs in the food court at the Pentagon are now permanently tuned to the weather channel.  They were on a rotating schedule between Fox news, MSNBC, CNN, and CBS.  But no matter who was on, management was getting too many complaints about “that F&*$ing offensive political propaganda.

Interestingly enough, MSNBC, CNN, and CBS were getting complaints about what they said, and Fox was found to be offensive, just because they were Fox.

So now we see the 24 hour storm tracking with the volume muted and no Chiron scroll.

The news has been hyping the resurgence of measles in some communities. In every case, the media blames “anti-vaxxers”.

In America, those diseases were completely eradicated. So, it should be totally safe for everyone to stop vaccinating and not worry about getting it. Remember, the idea of spontaneous disease generation was disproved over 200 years ago. For anyone to get sick, a carrier had to bring that disease into the community.

We all know who those “carriers” are. You used to have to be vaccinated to travel internationally. Long boat trips allowed incubation times to develop. But today, we have nothing like that. Our nation has been importing unvaccinated people from rat-infested parts of the world for decades.

Our school systems encourage illegal aliens to send their kids and would never dare demand they meet vaccination standards first. That would be racist.

It’s not the anti-vaxxers. It’s the immigrants. In every way measurable, allowing third world people to settle in American is bad for Americans.

A new TV series for those people who love medical shows.  This one is a fictional NYC hospital, called “New Amsterdam”, based on real life hospital Bellevue.  There are so many things wrong with this series that I will have to use numbers.

1.  Over the top PC.  The show has a mostly young cast even though they all play people who are at the height of their medical practice careers.  This includes the lead role of the medical director.  The chief of the Cardiac section is a black man.  The chief of the ER is a white woman.  The chief of Psychiatry is a gay man who is married and has an adopted daughter from Asia.  The chief oncologist is a 30-ish black woman. Male nurse with a skin art fetish.  And just when you thought it couldn’t get more over the top… they bring in a midget doctor working in the ER.  The real life hospital, you will be happy to know, is run by a bunch of middle-aged to older white guys.
2. The black heart surgeon gets caught up in a “scandal” that he doesn’t want to get out.  It turns out, it was just “driving while black” and nothing he did at all. So, not a scandal.  he gets a task to rebuild his department.  So he hires all black female heart surgeons.  He justifies it as “no one else will give them a chance”.  Seriously?  In America in 2019, skilled heart surgeons can’t find jobs?
3. The Black oncologist has a heart-wrenching moment with a woman patient who is losing her hair due to Chemo.  She says something condescending about the patient being more than just her hair and discusses how wigs are really not a good option.  This is from a woman who literally glues other people’s hair onto her own head all the time.

4.  In one episode, they discover that some patients are “frequent flyers” and hogging medical resources.  One homeless man comes in every few days and costs the hospital $1.4 million every year.  So, the hospital gives him an apartment, so he has someplace else to go.  It doesn’t work, and he comes to the emergency room anyway charging up more expenses that he will never pay.  So the hospital gives him a job, showing people around.  The guy is homeless, not because he can’t find a job.  He is homeless because he is permanently unemployable because he is NUTS.  He can’t function in the society the rest of us live in.  The show doesn’t mention that in real life, word would quickly get around that the way to get a free apartment in NYC is to overload the emergency room.

5.  The whole point of the show is that modern medicine is too “money focused” and if doctors just cared more about patients, everything would work out.  They even have a few sermons about how health care should be publicly funded (like they are, even though they are constantly on the brink of bankruptcy).

6.  The lead character doesn’t seem to have any idea what it takes to actually run a hospital.  He spends 110% of his time, fixing minor issues as if they are the most important things and ignoring the 2 thousand people who work for him.  He even went out on house calls to homeless people at a time when his own hospital was being inundated with patients because of a huge emergency situation.  The guy has zero time management skills and no ability to prioritize.  He even recommends multiple times that his doctors participate in various forms of insurance fraud in order to “help patients”.  He doesn’t discuss how many patients are helped by doctors who get put in jail.

7.  The leader of the ER department is addicted to uppers.  It just keeps her going and she learned how in Med school because she needed it there too.  And no one sees this as a problem.  She swears that she is straight now and everyone should trust her.  In a career field that deals with addicts every day, NO ONE SHOULD TRUST HER.  They all know that addicts cannot be trusted.

8.  In another episode, the hospital director ignores his duty to “run the hospital” and goes to do house calls with homeless people.  They are a family of three that became homeless in Ohio because they lost their farm.  How does a family that is homeless in Ohio wind up on the streets in NYC?  It’s not even good writing.  Then, once they are homeless and have nothing, they won’t go into the “free” hospital because they fear getting a huge bill that will put them in debt.  What on earth are these writers smoking?

I was listening to the Kim Komando radio show over the weekend.  She used a term that I am sure she heard from somewhere else and finally trickled down to her.

You are all likely familiar with the term “STEM” to describe those fields in education that are hard and therefore have merit.  The term originally meant Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine (sometimes Mathematics).

Kim slightly modified it to Science, Technology, EDUCATION and Medicine.

Then she expanded it to STEAM, Science Technology, Education, Arts, and Medicine.

It seems that educators (the gatekeepers to higher education) felt like they were being disrespected because they were being asked to encourage young people to get educated in stuff that really matters, not waste their education like their teachers did.  So, they changed the term to be more inclusive of their own choices instead of standing firm on what was good for their students.

Then adding Arts to the term just makes it totally meaningless.  In reality, STEAM, just means, “study anything you like because they are all equal”.  Of course that is exactly the sort of advice you would expect from a HS guidance counselor, Vice Principal or Teacher because that reflects the choices they made, which are exactly the opposite of original STEM choices.

You can always count on the system to protect the egos of the people running the system even at the expense of accomplishing the nominal purpose of that system.