Lawyers I worked with persuaded courts that California had to issue to non-residents. Not as good as reciprocity, and the costs are substantial, but if you regularly travel there, it might make sense. Here is a pretty comprehensive training course in Riverside.
Less than two hours from LAX.
I have a string that I copy from newspapers.com headers of this format:
Fri, Apr 21, 1967 Page 13
I wanted to convert this into:
#If VBA7 Then
Private Declare PtrSafe Function OpenClipboard Lib "user32" (ByVal hwnd As LongPtr) As Long
Private Declare PtrSafe Function CloseClipboard Lib "user32" () As Long
Private Declare PtrSafe Function GetClipboardData Lib "user32" (ByVal wFormat As Long) As LongPtr
Private Declare PtrSafe Function IsClipboardFormatAvailable Lib "user32" (ByVal wFormat As Integer) As Long
Private Declare PtrSafe Function GlobalLock Lib "kernel32" (ByVal hMem As LongPtr) As LongPtr
Private Declare PtrSafe Function GlobalUnlock Lib "kernel32" (ByVal hMem As LongPtr) As Long
Private Declare PtrSafe Function GlobalSize Lib "kernel32" (ByVal hMem As LongPtr) As Long
Private Declare PtrSafe Sub CopyMemory Lib "kernel32" Alias "RtlMoveMemory" _
(ByVal Destination As LongPtr, ByVal Source As LongPtr, ByVal Length As Long)
#End If
Const CF_UNICODETEXT As Integer = 13
Function GetClipboardText() As String
Dim hClipMemory As LongPtr
Dim lpClipMemory As LongPtr
Dim size As Long
Dim clipText As String
If IsClipboardFormatAvailable(CF_UNICODETEXT) = 0 Then Exit Function
If OpenClipboard(0&) = 0 Then Exit Function
hClipMemory = GetClipboardData(CF_UNICODETEXT)
If hClipMemory <> 0 Then
lpClipMemory = GlobalLock(hClipMemory)
If lpClipMemory <> 0 Then
size = GlobalSize(hClipMemory)
clipText = Space$(size \ 2) ' each Unicode character is 2 bytes
CopyMemory ByVal StrPtr(clipText), ByVal lpClipMemory, size
GlobalUnlock hClipMemory
End If
End If
CloseClipboard
GetClipboardText = clipText
End Function
Sub FormatCitationFromClipboard_API()
Dim raw As String
Dim cleaned As String
Dim title As String, dateLine As String
Dim regex As Object, matches As Object
Dim month As String, dayNum As String, year As String, pageNum As String
Dim formattedText As String
Dim splitPos As Long
Dim rngPaste As Range, rngTitle As Range
Dim insertStart As Long
raw = GetClipboardText()
If Trim(raw) = "" Then
MsgBox "Clipboard is empty or not text.", vbExclamation
Exit Sub
End If
' Normalize separators: replace line breaks and bullets with a unified separator
cleaned = Replace(raw, vbCrLf, " • ")
cleaned = Replace(cleaned, vbLf, " • ")
cleaned = Replace(cleaned, vbCr, " • ")
cleaned = Replace(cleaned, Chr(11), " • ") ' Word's weird line break
cleaned = Replace(cleaned, "·", "•") ' Replace middle dot with bullet if needed
' Now try to split on bullet separator
splitPos = InStr(cleaned, "•")
If splitPos = 0 Then
MsgBox "Clipboard contents must contain a title and a date line separated by a bullet or line break." & vbCrLf & "Text: " & raw, vbExclamation
Exit Sub
End If
title = Trim(Left(cleaned, splitPos - 1))
dateLine = Trim(Mid(cleaned, splitPos + 1))
' Normalize odd characters in dateLine
dateLine = Replace(dateLine, ChrW(160), " ") ' non-breaking space
dateLine = Replace(dateLine, ChrW(183), " ") ' middle dot
dateLine = Replace(dateLine, "·", " ")
dateLine = Replace(dateLine, "•", " ")
dateLine = Trim(dateLine)
' Create regex object
Set regex = CreateObject("VBScript.RegExp")
With regex
.Pattern = "([A-Za-z]{3}),?\s+([A-Za-z]{3})\s+(\d{1,2}),?\s+(\d{4})\s+Page\s+(\d+)"
.IgnoreCase = True
.Global = False
End With
If Not regex.Test(dateLine) Then
MsgBox "Could not parse the date line: " & dateLine, vbExclamation
Exit Sub
End If
Set matches = regex.Execute(dateLine)(0)
month = matches.SubMatches(1)
dayNum = matches.SubMatches(2)
year = matches.SubMatches(3)
pageNum = matches.SubMatches(4)
' Insert and style the text
Set rngPaste = Selection.Range
insertStart = rngPaste.Start
rngPaste.Text = title & ", " & month & ", " & dayNum & ", " & year & ", " & pageNum & "."
' Recreate the title range within the same StoryRange
Set rngTitle = rngPaste.Duplicate
rngTitle.Start = insertStart
rngTitle.End = insertStart + Len(title)
rngTitle.Style = ActiveDocument.Styles("newspaperTitle2")
' Optional debug
' rngTitle.Select
' MsgBox "Styled: " & rngTitle.Text
End Sub
Awesome. It takes about six seconds off each incident. My curiosity got the better of me:
Q. Do you know how many kilowatt-hours this session has used?
A. GPT-4 Energy Estimates (as of 2024–2025)
Inference energy per token (i.e., words generated or processed): ~0.00002–0.0001 kilowatt-hours per 1000 tokens (estimates vary widely by hardware and implementation).
Your session looks fairly long — let's estimate 30,000–50,000 tokens total (input + output), roughly equivalent to ~20–30 pages of dense conversation.
🧮 Estimated Server-Side Energy Use (GPT)
Estimate RangeValueTokens processed ~40,000 tokens
Energy per 1000 tokens (kWh) ~0.00002 to 0.0001 kWh
Total energy (server-side) ~0.0008 to 0.004 kWh
"Immigration rights advocates said conditions at the Metropolitan Detention Center downtown had become overcrowded, with 200 people packed into a facility built to hold only 100."
Solution is obvious. Verify their immigration status, load them into vans, drive to Tijuana.
The usual leftists are commenting about how fascist and ignorant supporters of the laws are, while a vast sea of supporters of ICE are making it clear that, yes, we voted for this. If progressives wanted immigration law reform, they have a number of sessions of Congress where Democrats controlled both houses and the White House. They did nothing.
They really do not want a situation with lawful immigration after background checks ot they would have passed this into law.
When COVID-19 arrived, we were told we must wear masks. Then, after these requirements were eased, the progressives imagined that continuing to wear masks was a sign of concern for others. (Let me emphasize that people at high risk of death from COVID, the immune compromised and elderly might well have good reason to continue wearing masks. This is not a criticism of those people.)
The problem was that many states had laws prohibiting the wearing of masks as disguises:
The original version of the statute was enacted in 1923.[10] See 1923 Minn. Laws ch. 160, § 1. Like similar laws enacted during the same era, the law grew out of concerns over the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. See Wayne R. Allen, Note, Klan, Cloth & Constitution: Anti-Mask Laws & the First Amendment, 25 Ga. L. Rev. 819, 821-22 & n.17 (1991).
ICE agents, as well as other federal agents delegated to work with ICE, are increasingly wearing masks during operations, something many people find objectionable. But at a press conference on Monday, ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons said agents had good reasons to do so.
"People are out there taking photos of [agents'] names, their faces and posting them online with death threats to their family and themselves," Lyons says. "So I'm sorry if people are offended by them wearing masks, but I'm not going to let my officers and agents go out there and put their lives on the line and their family on the line because people don't like what immigration enforcement is."
This sort of intimidation of police is something I would expect of the Klan. If progressives object to our immigration laws, they should have changed them while they controlled Congress and the White House. 9/29/17 Mother Jones:
Over the past year of clashes between “alt-right” and left-wing protesters and an escalating debate over violence as the means to an end, the word “masked” has become an epithet of sorts to describe protesters on the left.
Last month in famously liberal Berkeley, California, where right-wingers have been planning rallies that seem intended to stir up raucous counterprotests—and which have drawn hundreds of masked opponents—city leaders passed an ordinance allowing the city manager to set ground rules as to what kinds of items cannot be worn or carried into protest areas. Masks and other face coverings have been banned at every local demonstration since.
These rules haven’t thwarted antifa, a loose-knit network of groups and individuals who aim to confront—sometimes violently—people they identify as fascists. On August 27 in Berkeley, more than 100 antifa protesters clad in various configurations of black hoodies, bandanas, hats, and sunglasses—and some carrying heavy poles or shields—ignored the city ordinance and marched en masse to Civic Center Park, where a handful of right-wingers had made sporadic appearances during the day.
So, it is okay for Antifa to wear masks as disguises but not law enforcement. How special.
A thoughtful article, worth reading in full, so I am quoting only a little:
A research proposal on cosmic inflation from an acclaimed German quantum physicist is rejected because she did not address the relevance of her findings to “sex, gender, and diversity.” Could it be because… there is none?
A respected peer-reviewed physics journal publishes a paper on introductory physics courses that identifies whiteboards as complicit “with white organizational cultures, where ideas and experiences gain value (become more central) when written down.” No mention of blackboards.
A collection of 67 papers published in the Journal of Chemical Education includes “Decolonizing the Undergraduate Chemistry Curriculum” and “Integrating Antiracism, Social Justice and Equity Themes in a Biochemistry Class.” What’s next—the Periodic Table of Intersectional Elements?
Rice University offers a course on “Afrochemistry: The Study of Black-Life Matter.” BLM, get it?...
We have made so much moral progress since the Enlightenment—particularly since the civil rights and women’s rights movements that launched the modern campus protest movement in the first place—that our standards of what is intolerable have been ratcheted ever upward to the point where many people are hypersensitive to things that, by comparison, didn’t even appear on the cultural radar half a century ago. Thus it is that modern moral crusaders have forgotten how far we’ve come since the abolition of slavery, the elimination of the death penalty in most countries, the franchise for all adult citizens, children’s rights, women’s rights, gay rights, animal rights, and even the rights of future generations to inhabit a livable planet. In other words, most of the big moral movements have been fought and won, leaving today’s moral crusaders with comparatively smaller causes to promote and evils to protest, resulting in demands for safe spaces and trigger warnings, and paroxysms thrown over microaggressions and misgendering trans people.
When I was young, there were certain assumptions made by lots of adults (not all by any means). Blacks were intellectually inferior. Women lacked the intelligence and ambition of men; that is why their place was home raising children.
Today, you would be hard pressed to find anyone who would publicly admit such beliefs outside a neo-Nazi rally. Not just publicly: I know only a few people even in private who even scurry up to the edge of such ideas. (Even supporters of traditional sex roles know better than to assert female inferiority. Raising children and being in charge of home schooling is not a job for the dumb and lazy.)
If you desperately need some way to distinguish yourself from your moral inferiors, you need to find some cause to which to attach yourself beyond equal opportunity, regardless of race or sex. Something that makes you stand out. It is way easier to imagine a society awash in racism than to ask harder questions as to why blacks in America remain poor in spite of enormous efforts to provide opportunities.
In our search for the ultimate causes of this tragic period in history we could consider a number of historical trends, starting with the lack of viewpoint diversity that took hold in the academy in the 1990s and accelerated into a massive shift in the professoriate and student body to the point of there being next to no conservative voices anywhere to be found by the 2010s and 2020s. And certainly the science wars of the 1990s, following on from the postmodernism movements in the humanities of the 1970s and 1980s, which challenged the view that there is a reality and that it can be known through reason and the methods of science. And those threads can be pulled back to the anti-Western, post-colonial, post-capitalist Marxist liberation movements of the 1950s and 1960s, themselves reflecting the anti-Enlightenment Romantic movements of the 18th and 19th centuries. But underlying these historical trends are deeper themes rooted in the interpretation of human nature.
This is also important. The left's insistence that there are no absolute truths (F=ma; x=1/2at^2; metals reflect light better than non-metals) and the abandonment of reason are part of the problem. Oh yes, I forgot: the wokerati have found one absolute truth: America is a nasty, hate-filled, racist society. If you disagree, you are a mouth-breathing savage. (And why is that intrinsically bad? :-)
