Received yesterday. -jsq
News never reported in the Quitman FREE PRESS or in SOUTH GEORGIA NEWS MEDIA:
From the YouTube description:
Senator Emanuel Jones is demanding “all charges are dropped”Continue reading
that those are bills in Congress to censor the Internet.
If you like blogs, YouTube, facebook, and other social media, you won’t like SOPA and PIPA if they become law, because they will enable big copyright holders such as movie studios to force websites to remove links to entire domains on suspicion of copyright violation.
What you can do: contact your members of Congress today. You can do that through one of the many online tools Or call, email, or send a paper letter directly. Free the Internet!
-jsq
Patrick Davis wrote yesterday for the Macon Political Buzz Examiner,
Jim Crow politics on display as Brooks County absentee case proceeds
Brad Shealy, who had been the long-time chairman of the Brooks Board of Education faced the prospect of being voted out as chairman and witnessing a majority-black Brooks County Board of Education for the first time ever.Excuse me? The former Brooks County school board chairman works for the D.A.’s office? And the D.A. is going on TV for pre-trial propaganda in the case?Shealy lost his position when new leadership was elected in January 2011.
Shealy’s day job is the assistant district attorney under J. David Miller who originally started the investigation back in the late summer of 2010.
Patrick Davis asks the obvious question: Continue reading
The Commission started early, and they were already into agenda item
7.a. REZ-2011-16 South Beach Commercial, US Hwy 41 South R-10 & TLA to C-G, ~1.7 acreswhen this video started. Then they moved right into
7.b. Lowndes County – Greater Lowndes 2030 Comprehensive Plan Updates — Resolution to TransmitAs you can see, County Planner Jason Davenport had little to say about that (mostly that this draft isn’t the final version; they’ll revise it some time next year after they hear back from the state), and the Commissioners even less (they said nothing), at Monday morning’s Work Session. Tonight at 5:30 PM they vote on sending these materials to the state. If you want to know what’s in these documents, see Gretchen’s writeups The actual documents are on the LAKE web site. LAKE obtained them from elsewhere after the county refused to honor an open records request. The Chairman told Gretchen yesterday that those versions were “close enough” to what they’re going to vote on tonight.
Here’s the video:
Comprehensive Plan @ LCC Work Session, 12 December 2011
Work Session, Lowndes County Commission (LCC),
Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 12 December 2011.
Videos by Gretchen Quarterman for LAKE, the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange.
-jsq
Elizabeth Shogren wrote for NPR today,
EPA To Unveil Stricter Rules For Power Plants.
She described new rules for coal plants EPA is going to release in the next
few weeks, including controls on mercury, “arsenic, acid gases and other pollutants.”
Southern Company doesn’t like that.
“It’s physically impossible to build the controls, the generation, theOther power companies see no problem: Continue readingtransmission and the pipelines needed in three years,” says Anthony Topazi, chief operating officer for Southern Company, which provides electricity to nearly 4 million homes and hundreds of thousands of businesses in the Southeast.
Topazi says electricity rates will go up, putting marginal companies out of business. He says unless his company gets six years, it will not be able to keep the lights on.
“We will experience rolling blackouts or rationing power if we don’t have simply the time to comply,” Topazi says.
Frequent attendees told me the audience was much larger
than in previous years, and one attributed that to the recent
school consolidation referendum.
Sitting side by side were Chamber Chair Tom Gooding and
FVCS President Sam Allen.
Jeff Hanson introduced the legislators.
He’s the Chair of the Chamber’s
Government Affairs Council (GAC).
He said they are seeking more participants.
Hm, they have an Energy and Environment Policy Committee that’s chaired
by someone from Georgia Power….
Tim Golden announced that the local delegation’s highest priority
was to get $32 million for a Health Science Center for VSU.
VSU Interim President Dr. Levy was there, as was former president
“Dr. Z” as Tim Golden called him.
I was just talking to someone from SGMC in the food line about how it would be nice if the Industrial Authority would promote healthcare industries more. It’s good that the legislators are doing that, although it’s not clear that there are not other things that should be even higher priority.
Tim Golden also wants to remove a sales tax Continue reading
Just a decade ago, private prisons were a dying industry awash in corruption and mired in lawsuits, particularly Corrections CorporationWe’d already heard from Bloomberg that Continue readingof America (CCA), the nation’s largest private prison operator. Today, these companies are booming once again, yet the lawsuits and scandals continue to pile up. Meanwhile, more and more evidence shows that compared to publicly run prisons, private jails are filthier, more violent, less accountable, and contrary to what privatization advocates peddle as truth, do not save money. In fact, more recent findings suggest that private prisons could be more costly.
So why are they still in business?
In a recently published report, “Banking on Bondage: Mass Incarceration and Private Prisons,” the American Civil Liberties Union examines the history of prison privatization and finds that private prison companies owe their continued and prosperous existence to skyrocketing immigration detention post September 11 as well as the firm hold they have gained over elected and appointed officials.
In line with comments made by Steven Chu:I added the blockquotes and the Moore’s Law link. Seems to me physicist Sec. Chu must be looking only at the sticker price, while economist Krugman is also looking at other costs and at externalities not currently included in the sticker price, yet still costing us in other ways. Add in the costs of wars for oil and I wonder how long ago solar already became cheaper than oil….
Solar cheaper than fossil fuels in a decade, says Steven Chu, by Christopher Mims, 3 November 2011.
Solar power will be cheaper than fossil fuels at some point between the end of this decade and 2026*, said U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chuas well as a recent Op-Ed piece by Paul Krugman:
Here Comes Solar by Paul Krugman, 6 November 2011.
…progress in solar panels has been so dramatic and sustained that, as a blog post at Scientific American put it, “there’s now frequent talk of a ‘Moore’s law’ in solar energy,” with prices adjusted for inflation falling around 7 percent a year.
This has already led to rapid growth in solar installations, but even more change may be just around the corner. If the downward trend continues — and if anything it seems to be accelerating — we’re just a few years from the point at which electricity from solar panels becomes cheaper than electricity generated by burning coal.
And if we priced coal-fired power right, taking into account the huge health and other costs it imposes, it’s likely that we would already have passed that tipping point.
-Michael Noll
-jsq
Continue readingGeorgians have until Dec. 23 to comment on new state and congressional district maps. The U.S. Department of Justice is in the midst of its 60 day-review of the maps. Voter advocate groups say this may be the last chance to comment before the maps go into effect for a decade.
…
Elizabeth Poythress, president of the League of Women Voters of Georgia, says the Justice Department is eager to receive citizen comment.
“We’re just encouraging people to take the advantage they have
Vanessa Barrington wrote for Grist 21 November 2011, Baltimore’s can-do approach to food justice
That’s the problem.…43 percent of the residents in the city’s predominantly black neighborhoods had little access to healthy foods, compared to 4 percent in predominantly white neighborhoods. Meanwhile, more than two-thirds of the city’s adults and almost 40 percent of high school students are overweight or obese.
There are solutions:
Speaking on a panel at the recent Community Food Security Coalition Conference in Oakland, Calif., Abby Cocke, of Baltimore’s Office of Sustainability, and Laura Fox, of the city health department’s Virtual Supermarket Program, outlined two approaches to address the city’s food deserts. Both were presenting programs that have launched since Grist last reported on Baltimore’s efforts to address food justice. And both programs come under the auspices of The Baltimore Food Policy Initiative, a rare intergovernmental collaboration between the city’s Department of Planning, Office of Sustainability, and Health Department. They also show how an active, involved city government and a willingness to try new ideas can change the urban food landscape for the better.The article outlines the specific solutions, such as: Continue readingAccording to Cocke, Baltimore’s Planning Department has a new mindset. She calls it a “place-based” model. “In the past,” she says, “growth was seen as the only way to improve the city, but we’re starting to look at ways to make our neighborhoods stronger, healthier, and more vibrant places at the low density that they’re at now.”