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This is in honor of my Dad, Uncles, Brothers, and exHusband, for there military services.
Cable companies said Wednesday that they will offer Internet service for $9.95 per month to homes with children that are eligible for free school lunches.
The offer will start next summer and is part of an initiative the Federal Communications Commission cobbled together to get more U.S. homes connected to broadband.
One third, or about 35 million homes, don’t have broadband. That affects people’s ability to educate themselves and find and apply for jobs, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said.
“The broadband adoption gap in the U.S. is very large, and the costs of digital exclusion are high and getting higher,” Genachowski said.
The initiative, called Connect-to-Compete, also includes Microsoft Corp., which pledges to sell PCs with its Office software suite for $250 to low-income families. A firm called Redemtech is offering to sell refurbished computers for $150, including shipping.
For those who can’t afford those prices, Morgan Stanley is pledging to develop a microfinance lending program for community-based financial institutions.
People are still signing up for broadband, but growth has slowed in recent years. For those who still haven’t signed up, cost is a minor factor. Most say they’re simply not interested or don’t need it, according to a report by the Commerce Department based on Census Bureau data from last year.
To help address the lack of interest and computer skills, Best Buy Co., Microsoft and nonprofits such as America’s Promise Alliance and United Way are promising to support the initiative with training.
All major cable companies are standing behind the $9.95 offer, which will be valid for two years. The price doesn’t include taxes, but the companies are pledging to charge nothing for installation or modem rental.
The minimum download speed will be 1 megabit per second, less than one tenth of average cable speeds. Brian Dietz, a spokesman for the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, said it will be up to the individual cable companies to decide what speeds they provide.
The NCTA estimates that about 5.5 million homes that don’t have broadband will be eligible for the offer. According to the Commerce Department study, 78 percent of households with school-age children already have broadband, making them far more likely to be connected than the average household.
The big broadband gap is between younger and older households: Only 45 percent of people older than 64 have broadband. Black and Hispanic households were less likely to have broadband, even when adjusting for income, according to the study.
Comcast Corp., the largest cable company and the country’s largest Internet service provider, is already offering broadband to $9.95 to low-income families, with a 1.5 megabit per second download speed. It offered to do that to get regulators to approve its acquisition of NBC Universal approved.
We don’t have all the details, but he was rushed to an L.A. hospital around noon today and was pronounced dead at the hospital at 1 PM.
He was 44 years old.
Heavy recently performed at the BET Awards in October
real name: Dwight Meyers
Short Description
When debt-ridden Highland Park, Michigan could no longer afford its monthly electric bill, elected officials had 1,000 streetlights ripped out.
Description
HIGHLAND PARK, Mich. (AP) — As the sun dips below the rooftops each evening, parts of this Detroit enclave turn to pitch black, the only illumination coming from a few streetlights at the end of the block or from glowing yellow yard globes.
It wasn’t always this way. But when the debt-ridden community could no longer afford its monthly electric bill, elected officials not only turned off 1,000 streetlights. They had them ripped out — bulbs, poles and all. Now nightfall cloaks most neighborhoods in inky darkness.
“How can you darken any city?” asked Victoria Dowdell, standing in the halo of a light in her front yard. “I think that was a disgrace. She said the decision endangers everyone, especially people who have to walk around at night or catch the bus.
Highland Park’s decision is one of the nation’s most extreme austerity measures, even among the scores of communities that can no longer afford to provide basic services.
Other towns have postponed roadwork, cut back on trash collection and closed libraries, for example. But to people left in the dark night after night, removing streetlights seems more drastic. And unlike many other cutbacks that can easily be reversed, this one appears to be permanent.
The city is $58 million in debt and has many more people than jobs, plus dozens of burned-out or vacant houses and buildings. With fewer than 12,000 residents, its population has dwindled to half the level from 20 years ago.
Faced with a $4 million electric bill that required $60,000 monthly payments, Mayor Hubert Yopp asked the City Council to consider reducing lighting. Council members reluctantly approved it, even in an election year.
“We knew it was going to hurt,” Councilman Christopher Woodard said. “We’re all hurting.”
In late August, contractors from DTE Energy began rolling through the streets, taking out two-thirds of the light poles.
“It is a winning proposition, but that doesn’t make it a winner with the citizens who find themselves in the dark,” Woodard added. “We had to watch our backs when we got out of our cars before. Now we have to watch them even more closely.”
Unless the government gets an unexpected infusion of cash or sees an uptick in its dying tax base, many parts of Highland Park will remain beneath a shroud every night.
The city’s monthly electric bill has been cut by 80 percent. The amount owed DTE Energy goes back about a decade, but utility executives hesitated to turn off the juice.
“We are extremely concerned with public safety,” said Trevor Lauer, vice president of marketing and renewables for the Detroit-based utility. “We recognize that street lighting is something that contributes to public safety.”
Now, he said, the company has “a municipal lighting customer I’m confident can pay its monthly bill.”
Most of the 500 streetlights still shining in Highland Park are along major streets and on corners in residential areas. DTE Energy has listed the city’s overdue bill as an uncollectable expense.
The leader of a nonprofit group that works to reduce energy costs for low-income families said he’s not heard of any other communities becoming so desperate to save money that they turned off streetlights. It might be a sign of things to come.
“If it works in Highland Park, I could not imagine other cities not looking at that as one option,” said David Fox, executive director of the National Low Income Energy Consortium in Alexandria, Va.
In its heyday, Highland Park was one of Michigan’s urban jewels, with large yards, spacious homes and tree-lined streets.
Henry Ford put his first moving assembly line here, and his factory eventually churned out a car every minute. By 1930, the city had grown to 50,000 people.
Ford later moved his primary manufacturing operations to River Rouge, southwest of Detroit, in search of room to expand. Highland Park survived that loss. But it never recovered from Chrysler’s decision in the 1990s to move its world headquarters 50 miles north to Oakland County.
“That took away $6 million” in taxes, Woodard said. “That was a lot of money to not have anymore. It was a major industrial operation moving out of here. When Chrysler moved out, things started to happen.”
Small businesses catering to Chrysler workers began to fail, and the city struggled to pay its bills. And like Detroit, which lost 250,000 residents from 2000 to 2010, people moved out, leaving hundreds of abandoned houses.
In 1980, the census counted 27,000 people living in Highland Park. By 2010, that number had fallen to 11,776.
The median household income is $18,700, compared with $48,700 statewide. And 42 percent of the city’s residents live in poverty.
“It’s pretty ghetto,” Cassandra Cabil said from her front yard. Voices drift in the darkness from down the street, but the speakers can’t be seen.
The 31-year-old short-order cook works odd hours and sometimes makes it home late at night. She watched recently as crews removed the streetlight and pole from in front of her rented home.
“It’s really dark unless people have their lights on,” she said. “There’s a lot of vandalism going on, people breaking into these houses.”
Eugenics was a scientific theory that grew in popularity during the 1920s. Eugenicists believed that poverty, promiscuity and alcoholism were traits that were inherited. Some of America’s wealthiest citizens of the time were eugenicists including Dr. Clarence Gamble of the Procter and Gamble fortune and James Hanes of the hosiery fortune. Hanes helped found the Human Betterment League which promoted the cause of eugenicists.
Eugenics was practiced in the United States many years before eugenics programs in Nazi Germany[4] and actually, U.S. programs provided much of the inspiration for the latter.[5][6][7] Stefan Kühl has stated the Consensus between Nazi Race Politicians and Eugenicists in Other Countries, including the United States, and pointed that eugenecist understood Nazi policies and measures as the realization of their goals and demands.
Elaine Riddick was 13 years old when she got pregnant after being raped by a neighbor in Winfall, N.C., in 1967. The state ordered that immediately after giving birth, she should be sterilized. Doctors cut and tied off her fallopian tubes.
“I have to carry these scars with me. I have to live with this for the rest of my life,” she said.
Riddick was never told what was happening. “Got to the hospital and they put me in a room and that’s all I remember, that’s all I remember,” she said. “When I woke up, I woke up with bandages on my stomach.”
Riddick’s records reveal that a five-person state eugenics board in Raleigh had approved a recommendation that she be sterilized. The records label Riddick as “feebleminded” and “promiscuous.” They said her schoolwork was poor and that she “does not get along well with others.”
“I was raped by a perpetrator [who was never charged] and then I was raped by the state of North Carolina. They took something from me both times,” she said. “The state of North Carolina, they took something so dearly from me, something that was God given.”
It wouldn’t be until Riddick was 19, married and wanting more children, that she’d learn she was incapable of having any more babies. A doctor in New York where she was living at the time told her that she’d been sterilized.
“Butchered. The doctor used that word… I didn’t understand what she meant when she said I had been butchered,” Riddick said.
North Carolina was one of 31 states to have a government run eugenics program. By the 1960s, tens of thousands of Americans were sterilized as a result of these programs.
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Eugenics was a scientific theory that grew in popularity during the 1920s. Eugenicists believed that poverty, promiscuity and alcoholism were traits that were inherited. To eliminate those society ills and improve society’s gene pool, proponents of the theory argued that those that exhibited the traits should be sterilized. Some of America’s wealthiest citizens of the time were eugenicists including Dr. Clarence Gamble of the Procter and Gamble fortune and James Hanes of the hosiery fortune. Hanes helped found the Human Betterment League which promoted the cause of eugenicists.
It began as a way to control welfare spending on poor white women and men, but over time, North Carolina shifted focus, targeting more women and more blacks than whites. A third of the sterilizations performed in North Carolina were done on girls under the age of 18. Some were as young as nine years old.
For the past eight years, North Carolina lawmakers have been working to find a way to compensate those involuntarily sterilized in the state between 1929 and 1974. During that time period, 7,600 people were sterilized in North Carolina. Of those who were sterilized, 85 percent of the victims were female and 40 percent were non-white.
“You can’t rewind a watch or rewrite history. You just have to go forward and that’s what we’re trying to do in North Carolina,” said Governor Beverly Perdue in an exclusive interview with NBC News.
While North Carolina’s eugenics board was disbanded in 1977, the law allowing involuntary sterilization wasn’t officially repealed until 2003. In 2002, the state issued an apology to those who had been sterilized, but the victims have yet to receive any financial compensation, medical care or counseling from the state. Since 2003, three task forces have been created to determine a way to compensate the victims. Officials estimate that as many as 2,000 victims are still alive.
Riddick was one of several victims to speak at a public hearing this summer. It was the first time that many survivors had told their stories publicly and that others heard of North Carolina’s tarnished past.
“To think about folks who went in…and their doctor told them this was birth control and they were sterilized…the folks who didn’t have the capacity to make the decisions, the uninformed consent,” said Perdue. “Those types of stories aren’t good for America and I can’t allow for this period in history to be forgotten, that’s why this work is important.”
Only 48 victims have been matched with their records, something necessary for them to eventually be compensated. State Representative Larry Womble has been advocating for the survivors of the state’s sterilization program for nearly 10 years. He helped fight for the repeal of the state’s law.
Womble said that if the government is “powerful enough to perpetrate this on this society, they ought to be responsible, step up to the plate and compensate.”
In August, a task force created by Gov. Perdue recommended that the victims be compensated, but they were unsure how much to award the victims. Previous numbers pondered range between $20,000 and $50,000. The task force also recommended mental health services for living victims and a traveling museum exhibit about North Carolina’s eugenics program.
Perdue said it’s a challenge to determine how much money each victim should be given.
“From my perspective, and as a woman, and as the governor of this state, this is not about the money. There isn’t enough money in the world to pay these people for what has been done to them, but money is part of the equation,” she said.
Riddick once sued North Carolina for a million dollars. Her case made it all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States, but the court declined to hear the case. “I would like for the state of North Carolina to right what they wronged with me,” she said.
Some victims and their advocates have questioned whether North Carolina is procrastinating in compensating them, hoping they’ll die before a solution is reached. “It’s an ugly chapter in North Carolina’s book, we have a wonderful book, but there’s an ugly chapter,” Womble said. “We must step up to the plate and we must realize and take responsibility.”
Perdue, for her part, said that she is committed to helping the victims.
“I want this solved on my watch. I want there to be completion. I want the whole discussion to end and there be action for these folks. There is nobody in North Carolina who is waiting for anybody to die,” Gov. Perdue said.
Despite the state social workers who declared Riddick was “mentally retarded” and “promiscuous”, she went to college and raised the son born moments before she was sterilized. Her son is devoted to his mother and a successful entrepreneur.
Elaine is proud of her achievements.
“I don’t know where I would be if I listened to the state of North Carolina,” she said.
In a blog entry at News One, Dr. Boyce Watkins examines Ann Coulter’s recent sound bite of “our blacks are better than their blacks” and disparages the treatment of African Americans by liberals and conservatives alike. Ultimately, Watkins says, black politics must go beyond choosing the better pimp.
Ann Coulter, the woman who makes her money with silly soundbites, decided to offend half the world by stating that “our blacks are better than their blacks,” referring to conservatives vs. liberals. I wasn’t surprised to hear this kind of banter from Coulter, who is smart enough to know how to sell books by saying things that most decent human beings would not. Sadly for poor Ann, she is an embarrassment to serious conservatives, but all the while seems content engaging in the political promiscuity of a woman desperately seeking out her next gig.
“Nanny Annie” Coulter’s remarks (which make her sound like a character from “Gone with the Wind”) also spoke to the peculiar fight between liberals and conservatives, who are trying to toss around the Black community like two pimps arguing over a prostitute. Rather than adjusting their platforms to fit issues that matter to Black America, each party is only able to point out the fact that they believe the other group abuses Black people more than they do. In that regard, neither conservatives nor liberals are innocent when vying to put Black folks on their own plantation.
When Coulter makes reference to “her Blacks,” which include the always-entertaining Herman Cain, she is referring to Black folks who embody the values that Coulter and her friends believe to be true. When someone like Cain attempts to genuinely lead the party in a different direction, he is spit out like a sex offender at a debutante ball. An example is when he challenged Rick Perry over the “niggerhead” controversy and was quickly told to sit down and shut up. Political analyst Yvette Carnell described things beautifully when she said, “The rendering of Black people as the ornaments of diversity, rather than incarnations of it, is one of the essential reasons why Blacks clash with conservatism.”
SIDEBAR: Ann Coulter can kiss my grits sideways to the 2nd power!
Every year you probably ask yourself the same thing: Should I get a flu shot this year, or should I pass it by?
It’s understandable that you might feel uncertain. There’s a lot of confusing information floating around out there about flu vaccines, which are available either as a shot or as a nasal spray. For instance, a recent study indicated that flu vaccines offer you only “moderate protection” from catching this season’s flu. That’s hardly inspiring. On the other hand, “moderate protection” is better than no protection at all, right?
What should you do? The CDC recommends that everyone over the age of 6 months receive the flu vaccine each year, unless you are allergic to the vaccine. But even still, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer.
Here are a few flu shot pros and cons to consider as you weigh what’s right for you:
Pros:
Flu shots can be life-saving: In the United States alone, more than 200,000 people are hospitalized for the flu every year, and about 36,000 die from causes related to the flu. The prevention a flu vaccine provides could literally save your life.
Flu shots don’t cause the flu: Yes, it’s true that flu vaccines contain strains of the flu virus itself, but flu shots are made with a totally inactivated form of the virus. The nasal-spray flu vaccine is made with a severely weakened form of it. Neither type of flu vaccine puts you at risk of catching the flu.
Flu shots are safer than you might think: For a long time, many parents were concerned that a preservative that had been used in vaccines, thimerosal, was linked to autism in children. Studies have shown no link between vaccines that contain thimerosal and autism — and the study that originally sparked concern has been discredited and withdrawn. What’s more, nowadays, most flu vaccines given to children in the U.S. do not contain thimerosal, and adults can request thimerosal-free vaccines as well.
Flu shots are easy to get: These days, you don’t have to make a special trip to the doctor to get a flu shot. Many pharmacies will give you a shot — without an appointment, in a jiffy, and for a very reasonable fee.
Cons:
Flu shots may not be safe for some people: If you are allergic to eggs, flu shots, which are cultivated inside of chicken eggs, may put you at risk. Be sure to consult your doctor.
Flu shots can have minor side effects: Some people develop symptoms like soreness, redness, or swelling where the shot was given; low-grade fever; or aches. These are usually pretty mild and no cause for concern, and resolve within a day or two.
Flu shots aren’t a one-shot deal: Because flu viruses change each year, the vaccines are re-formulated annually to keep up. To make sure you’re protected, you have to get vaccinated again every year during flu season, which generally lasts from October to May. Health experts generally recommend getting it sooner (like before December) rather than later.
Flu shots aren’t 100 percent effective: A recent study found that flu shots were only about 59 percent effective in healthy adults. Your annual flu shot may protect you from this season’s most dominant strains of flu, but unfortunately, it won’t protect you from all the other bugs that might be floating around out there.
After weighing the pros and cons, do you plan to get a flu shot this year?