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That's the best -- it's a complex process and that's about the simplest way to explain to it you. But the first thing is really getting off the drug and letting the biology settle down.
Craig Frank Adams, 38, was charged April 10 with operating a chop shop, receiving stolen property, a felony probation violation and 19 counts of possessing a firearm by a convicted felon. He remained in the Elbert County Jail on Tuesday.
Adams, who resided on Wesley Drive in an upscale subdivision off Morton Road in Athens, is the only suspect arrested in connection with the chop shop, where officers said they found trucks, buses, heavy equipment and thousands of diesel auto parts.
The chop shop was located on a 16-acre site off Plantation Road in a rural area north of Elberton, according to Insurance Safety Fire Commissioner spokesman Brandon Wright. An additional site was located nearby off 13 Forks Road, where deputies seized 19 guns.
The vehicles parts are valued at several million dollars, according to the insurance commission.
Insurance Commission Deputy Director Dennis Bell said his agency got involved in the investigation at the request of the Elbert County Sheriff’s Office.
“Capt. (Darren) Scarborough called me a while back," Bell said. "I visited with him and he showed me what he had. We went to the district attorney’s office and started the paperwork."
Several agencies assisted and a large force of officers arrived at the garage on April 10 and surprised Adams, according to Bell.
Adams ran for the nearby woods.
“He left a hot biscuit and cold drink on the tailgate of his truck,” Bell said.
Adams disappeared in the nearby forest and despite a search using K-9 units from the Oglethorpe County Sheriff’s Office and State Department of Corrections, the suspect eluded the manhunt, according to Bell.
“Special Agent Bill Weston actually talked to the guy" following his escape, Bell said. "He called him on the phone and (Adams) turned himself in."
Adams surrendered hours later to Athens-Clarke County police, who turned him over to Elbert County deputies.
The State Environmental Protection Division is also involved in an active investigation at the site, but Bell said he is unsure of the nature of that probe.
Vehicle parts were everywhere, he said, and officers are still trying determine where the parts and vehicles came from.
After hours of testimony and countless questions over the contentious issue of a borrow pit off State Road 207, the St. Johns County Commission brokered a compromise that left all parties shaking hands Tuesday afternoon.
At the regular Commission meeting, the board considered an appeal of the approval of Special Use Permit for the Hicks Elkton Borrow Pit project by the Planning and Zoning Agency in November.
The appeal came from Mark Atkins, on behalf of North Florida Bicycle Club, and adjacent property owners Dale and Molly Jackson.
The main issues were safety for the bicyclists using the newly completed trail from Elkton to Palatka, which dump trucks would cross to access the borrow pit; and noise, water and drainage issues in relation to the neighbors.
Owners of the borrow pit, James and Shawna Hicks, said they have worked to appease the affected parties well before the issue even went to the PZA. In the end, it took a protracted hearing to get them all to agree to a solution.
The Hicks family agreed to increase the height of a berm between their property and that of the Jacksons to 11.5 feet. They also agreed to erect signs along the bike path to warn of possible dump truck traffic coming across the path. There will be signs with flashing lights if allowed by the Florida Department of Transportation.
While all of the commissioners expressed some concern about safety of the bicyclists, they were less worried about the operation of the borrow pit affecting the farming/ranching activities of the Jacksons next door.
"The water resource issues are well addressed," Commissioner Henry Dean said. "My reservations deal exclusively with the safety factor on this application. Safety, to me, is the key issue here.
"The trail was here before the borrow pit, so I'm more concerned about the bicyclists than I am the borrow pit. I want to see some large flashing lights."
While there's never a guarantee of safety, the Commission generally agreed that with proper signage and simple awareness of the activity on the part of both truck drivers and cyclists, the borrow pit project shouldn't be especially dangerous.
It helped that the owners agreed not to have trucks entering or leaving the borrow pit property on Saturdays or Sundays when it is assumed the trail will see the most use.
Commissioner Jeb Smith stressed the importance of the Hicks' business interests as well. The family has been trucking fill dirt around the area for about 40 years, and Smith pointed out that the operation of borrow pits is important and didn't want to force them to build a higher berm.
As a fellow farmer, Smith said he understands the worries of the Jacksons but felt confident that the borrow pit will not harm them.
"I am not for building something that I would consider to be onerous," Smith said. "I am an expert in the cattle industry. I think some of the fret, some of the anxiety is not well-founded, personally."
The Commission voted 4-1 to move forward with a new financing plan to build the requested training facility and communications center for the St. Johns County Sheriff's Office.
The issue had been continued from January due to concerns over how the county was going to pay for the project, which will cost an estimated $15 million.
The original idea was to use bonds over a 30-year period and pay for the annual obligation with proceeds from the law enforcement portion of impact fees paid on new construction in the county.
However, several commissioners balked at the plan because it was going to cost more than $11 million in interest with no way to pay it off early.
In the strategy approved Tuesday, the county will borrow $5 million from each of: General Fund Reserves, Utility Services Reserves and Solid Waste Reserves. The money will still be paid back through impact fees, but this way the county will be paying itself back rather than borrowing from an external source and incurring interest charges.
Also, the county will end up with a net savings of $3.9 million in the total cost of the project.
"The real nice thing is we're paying the interest back to the taxpayers," Commissioner Paul Waldron said.
Traffic on Memorial Drive will look a little different, as bikers,skateboarders and roller-bladers get ready to take to the street forthe second annual Bow River Flow.
Traffic on Memorial Drive will look a little different, as bikers, skateboarders and roller-bladers get ready to take to the street for the second annual Bow River Flow.
The full-day event on Aug. 22, which promotes human-powered transportation, is going to be even better than last year’s, according to the festival’s coordinator.
“We have a three kilometre loop for the first time,” said Gerald Wheatley.
He said the highlight of the day will be TuneStations, where people can get their bike tuned up while listening to local musicians.
Activities will stretch from 9th Street NW to 4th Street NW, meaning Memorial Drive will be reduced to one lane of traffic in either direction.
Last year, the festival had a turnout of 4,000. This year, Wheatley said, they are anticipating about 8,000.
Some controversy erupted last year over the closure of Memorial Drive. Wheatley said the road closures will be the same.
Bow River Flow will run from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and is free to the public.
Shelter Island Country Club members packed Town Hall Saturday morning, December 22, to hear reasons for the club to become a nonprofit organization.
Club Board of Directors President Marc Scola led the meeting.
Other board members present were William Banks, Greg Toner and Mike Higgenson. Nonprofit consultant Bill Mastro, and Cathy Ann Kenny, who is a club member and attorney spearheading the project, were also at the meeting.
Mr. Scola explained that he knew of some 30 municipalities that have golf courses that are nonprofits. “The municipalities own the courses and the people run them,” he added.
It was explained through a question and answer session how the process would unfold.
The main advantage for taking action would be that, as a nonprofit, no sales would have to be paid on items necessary for running the club. It was, however, pointed out that dues would still be taxed. The club would also be free from income tax. Another significant reason for a nonprofit designation would be that the club could solicit tax-deductible donations.
When asked if the board was rushing into this, it was said that the process takes time. And right now the club needs $45,000 for an irrigation study that the directors agreed might generate donations if they were tax deductible. The club would also be able to apply for state and federal grants when it receives nonprofit status.
It was noted that the membership would have to vote on the change. Members would be mailed ballots along with a self-addressed, stamped envelope with boxes to be checked to vote for the move and dissolve the current corporation, or a vote to turn down a change.
Couples would receive two separate ballots. The ballots must have the member’s name.
But if a member doesn’t want to enter a name, the space can be left blank and the vote will count, provided it is a proper ballot with the self-addressed envelope. The board said it hoped to get the ballots out and returned by the end of January.
Ms. Kenny said if the club is successful in achieving the nonprofit designation, the bylaws of the club would have to be changed to include a conflict-of-interest section. She also said that a name change is necessary for the change in status.
Board members will accept suggestions.
The Town Board would have to approve the move, since the town owns the property at Goat Hill and leases it to the club.
“We must inform them of everything,” Mr. Scola said.
Town Councilman Albert Dickson, a club member, was present at the meeting.
The status of “The Flying Goat” restaurant would remain the same, board members said.
Mr. Scola noted that the net bottom line savings from a move could be as much as $8,000 annually. The cost for initiating the nonprofit status change is about $800, it was learned.
Former Town Supervisor Jim Dougherty emphasized that, in the application, it should be noted a list of community projects and other activities beneficial to the public.
The almost 40 members present voted unanimously to send out the ballots.
The world now knows: It is very possible to buy your way into the Ivy League. As The New York Times reports, prosecutors this week revealed that dozens of film stars, business executives, and other wealthy individuals had paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to gain college admission for their children — often without their knowledge — using fraudulent test scores and false claims to athletic ability. It's a perfect scandal for our era of helicopter parenting and ruthless competition for a coveted brass ring.
That the college admissions process is not strictly meritocratic should probably come as no shock. But there are important lessons in this scandal that we shouldn't ignore in the initial rush of schadenfreude.
The most obvious takeaway is that the parents of these college-bound children thought admission to these elite universities was very, very important for helping them get ahead in life. Why else would they spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes, and engage in astounding skullduggery, to get their kids into Harvard or USC? But this truth cannot explain the entire scandal. There is much more driving these parents to cheat.
For starters, there's very little evidence that the actual education you get at an elite university is better than the education you might get at a less-prestigious school. In fact, there are some persuasive arguments to the contrary. The real value of a Harvard degree arguably lies less in what happens in the classroom than in the elite connections you make outside of class. But these connections are already available to the children of the elite; they only make a substantial difference to those who come from more humble origins. Why spend vast amounts of money for access to something you already have?
One answer is, of course, is status. This mysterious quality, more often than not, is the reason people seek wealth in the first place. As Ross Douthat put it in a series of tweets on the scandal: "... legitimacy attaches to (a particular form of) intelligence and (a particular kind of) resume, with Ivy admittances as the social register of Talent. So the rich parent who buys their child admittance is buying a form of legitimation whose worth isn't calculable in $."
This feels closer to the truth of the matter than simply saying these parents wanted to help their kids get ahead. But if it's true, consider what that implies about what has happened to meritocracy as it has morphed from a means aimed to further a democratic ideal into an ideal in its own right.
When the United States started using standardized tests for college admissions, the point was explicitly to open up our elite institutions to talent that lacked pedigree. If those institutions failed to make room, it was feared, the gap between the status they conferred and the actual capabilities of their graduates in the modern scientific and bureaucratic age would grow too wide. Indeed, Harvard and Yale needed bright upstarts from Brooklyn and Biloxi to retain their status as makers of the elite.
Meritocracy as a process, then, expanded the elite in order to make it more capable, and therefore more durable. Incidentally, it also made that elite more representative of the nation it was groomed to serve. Once in place, however, the system morphed from a means to an end. The idealistic meritocrat claims that what justifies elite rule is precisely that they have been pre-selected as "the best." Implicitly, other means of choosing an elite — including those we traditionally understood to be more democratic — come to be seen as corruptions of this ideal. By now, we've internalized this notion to such a degree that even those who already have money and power are willing to steal a Harvard degree to prove that they deserve money and power.
As a means of selection, merit still has a lot to say for itself. Students really do learn better when they are surrounded and challenged by their intellectual peers; organizations really do perform better when their upper echelons are selected based on ability rather than personal connections or outright bribery.
But as an ideal, meritocracy needs to be tossed on the junk heap of historically awful ideas. No elite should be taught to be so arrogant as to believe it has been proven that they are superior to those they govern and manage. In a democracy in particular, it is vital that the elite see itself as of the people, not separate from it, and that the rewards of progress should be shared broadly, not concentrated in the hands of those who clawed their way to the top, whether by fair means or foul.
How can we rein in meritocracy? Well, to start, consider what would happen if ultra-selective schools had to reduce their selectivity. They could still set high minimum standards, academic and otherwise — there is real value in having institutions where instruction takes place at a uniformly high level, and many of the other criteria that admissions officers apply are also meaningful. But among the students who applied and met those criteria, Harvard and Yale, Duke and Rice, Stanford and MIT, would have to choose their next class by lottery.
The immediate consequence would be to eliminate the pretense that any of these schools had selected "the best" from all the applicants, as opposed to merely choosing students who were capable. If the eligibility criteria were sufficiently transparent, applicants could even know in advance whether they met them, and apply only to schools that were appropriate. Instead of a furious struggle to get into the "best" school, there would be a more reasonable struggle to achieve eligibility for top-tier schools in general. And cheating to move up one tier, with no certainty that one would actually get into a particular institution, would have far less value.
Instead of desperately trying to make oneself into the sort of person likely to be selected by a secretive committee, the focus would be self-selection by applicants for a school with a curriculum or instructional style that seems best suited to them. And those schools would have an incentive to distinguish themselves institutionally, to provide students with a diversity of options from which to choose. If Harvard wanted to maintain its reputation for training the national elite, it would have to demonstrate the ability to train such an elite, rather than simply selecting it.
The goal would be to build an elite that is broader, less insular, and less convinced that its gifts are extraordinary long before they are matched by anything resembling achievement.
The children of privilege will always have a leg up, and they'll always chase empty status symbols. For the health of democracy, it would be better for those symbols to be as empty as possible, and for our system of higher education to focus on nourishing minds rather than feeding egos.
Nike SB Vulc Rod "Khaki"
The Nike SB "V-Rod" has been around for a while now, but this denim-Swooshed, khaki suede pair is too good to pass up. The slimmed-down, lightened-up, Vulcanized Paul Rodriguez signature joints work on or off the board, and are available now from Nikestore.com for $65. Get on that.
President Trump will give a speech at the National Rifle Association’s annual gathering in Atlanta later today. The NRA has fought tirelessly to make sure that gun owners can take their guns anywhere. But ironically, conference attendees won’t be able to hold onto the rock-hard steel of their sensuous guns as they watch Donald Trump’s speech.
Yes, despite the fact that Georgia has an open carry law, and the fact that this is America’s biggest gun-friendly circle-jerk of the year, the Secret Service has banned guns from the event while President Trump is there.
The NRA is fond of saying that the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. But when it comes to important people, I guess the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a total ban on guns. Go figure.
Trump is the first sitting president to speak at the conference since Ronald Reagan did in 1983, and guns will still be allowed at the rest of the conference, as you might expect. But as long as the President of the United States is there, you won’t be allowed to enter with a firearm of any kind.
In the same letter LaPierre said that liberals were bent on destroying the Second Amendment and taking everyone’s guns away—something that President Obama apparently forgot to do during his eight years in office. In fact, there were no new federal restrictions put on guns during the Obama administration, even after the nation was horrified in the wake of the brutal mass shooting at a school in Newtown, Connecticut that killed 20 children and 6 adults.
Six and seven-year-olds were murdered en masse and the country still couldn’t find the political will to pass any kind of new gun control laws, which is a testament to the tremendous power of the NRA in America. And LaPierre probably has a point about helping push Trump over the top. The organization run ads attacking Hillary Clinton as hostile to gun owners.
LaPierre’s letter said that liberal groups are only attacking Trump to lay the groundwork for attacking gun rights. Because apparently every road leads to guns in LaPierre’s world.
LaPierre didn’t mention the gun ban that will be in place while President Trump was in the vicinity of the conference. But I’m sure he understands the necessary precautions. It’d be insane to let someone with a gun near the president. Especially with all those online threats made against him.
As for the rest of us? I guess we’re on our own.
Loaded with tools, wizards, inspectors, and editors, XML Spy 4.3 is a true IDE. When you launch the program, no fewer than six windows pop up, including the main editing window, a project manager, and a general information window, as well as element, attribute, and entity inspectors.
XML Spy earns high marks for a feature-rich yet easy-to-use environment, and we recommend it for XML application developers, schema designers, and XSL style sheet creators. Its well-designed user interface far surpasses those of the environments in the other products we reviewed.
To test the IDE, we loaded the Rocket XML framework files, which XML Spy imported easily. The project manager's capabilities were impressive, letting us move freely from document instances to their associated DTDs or schemas from within the project window. For documents without an associated DTD or schema, XML Spy can generate one automatically. It can even convert your older DTDs to the newer XML Schema format. This makes XML Spy a helpful tool for jump-starting your move to Schemas.
You can preview an XML document rendered using either XSLT or XSL-FO (formatting objects). One caveat is that you may need to update older style sheets to conform to the W3C XSL 1.0 Recommendation. XML Spy had difficulty loading older style sheets.
We found a minor annoyance at install time: XML Spy changes some file associations. It changed the TXT file association in Windows, making itself the default application for text files. And the installation program makes the change without requiring a confirmation.
XML Spy has a cool database import wizard that lets you import data from Microsoft Access through an ADO (ActiveX Data Object) or from any other database through an ODBC connection. The wizard constructs SQL statements to retrieve the data. You can retrieve the entire database or refine the SQL statement in the wizard to retrieve exactly the results you want. It stores the imported data in a temporary XML document, with the fields converted into elements or attributes.
Other key features of XML Spy are a SOAP editor and debugger, an XPath expression evaluator, a schema designer, a forms editor, a standalone XSLT editor, and access to a full scripting environment. In short, XML Spy is the perfect tool for XML application developers, schema designers, and XSL style sheet creators.
Archives|Irving Berlin, "From Rags to Riches"; THE STORY OF IRVING BERLIN. By Alexander Woollcott. 237 pp. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons. $2.50.
Irving Berlin, "From Rags to Riches"; THE STORY OF IRVING BERLIN. By Alexander Woollcott. 237 pp. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons. $2.50.
Elton John’s Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour will lead him to Winnipeg for a pair of dates next October.