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n2doc's JournalSchool is now in session in Georgia- and the gunfire begins...
Report: Gunshots fired at Georgia school
By CNN Staff
August 20, 2013 -- Updated 1733 GMT (0133 HKT)
(CNN) -- Gunshots were reported fired at a charter elementary school Tuesday in Decatur, Georgia, a school board chairman told CNN affiliate WSB.
No reports of injuries have been made from the Ronald E. McNair Discovery Learning Academy, board Chairman Melvin Johnson told WSB.
Aerial video from WSB Tuesday afternoon showed children leaving the building and being guided to a corner of a field.
http://edition.cnn.com/2013/08/20/us/georgia-school-gunshots/index.html
"Pink Slip Rubio" Campaign Underway
By Deirdra Funcheon Mon., Aug. 19 2013 at 7:45 AM
Once upon a time, Marco "Golden Boy" Rubio was seen as the great Hispanic hope for the Republican party -- he fell perfectly in line with all the GOP's wonderful ideas like denying climate change and talking about how bad illegal immigrants were.
But this January, he proposed a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants --- and this flip-flop totally pissed off all the right-wing types who'd supported him.
Now, a group called Floridians for Immigration Enforcement (FLIMEN) is kicking off a "Pink Slip Rubio" campaign against the senator -- a.k.a. "Traitor Marco Rubio," a.k.a. "Marco Rubio Amnesty Man" -- in hopes of pressuring him to resign.
more
http://blogs.browardpalmbeach.com/pulp/2013/08/pink_slip_rubio_immigration_flimen.php
I just love a family feud! 
How low can you get: the minimum wage scam
Heidi Moore
You'd think the exceptionally low minimum-wage – $7.25 an hour – would be the shame of a country like the United States that prides itself on its economic leadership. Half of minimum-wage jobs are held by adults over 25 years old, and asking adults to live on $7.25, or $14,500 a year, doesn't leave them with enough to rent an apartment, commute to work, raise a child and participate in society in any meaningful way.
Many US states have higher minimum-wage requirements than the government, with Washington State leading the pack at $9.19 an hour. That's a start, but many large, international companies will only pay the minimum the federal government requires. As a result, the federal minimum wage keeps an entire class of people trapped in economic servitude, focusing their attention on survival rather than growth, barring their ability to save enough or pay for education that would allow them to rise to the middle class.
Income inequality is as bad as it has ever been – and the reason is simple.
Low-wage workers can't even care for their own health without giving up some other necessity. According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, it took a minimum-wage worker 130 hours to earn a year's worth of health benefits in 1979. That is only three-and-a-half weeks of full-time, minimum -age work. By 2011, the same health coverage cost 749 hours, or 19 weeks of full-time, minimum-wage work. Working nearly half the year to afford only healthcare, and nothing else, is a ridiculous demand to make of low-wage workers.
The low minimum wage is also as costly for the government as it is cheap for companies. While McDonald's or other fast food companies save pennies and boost their profitability by paying a low wage, their workers cannot survive on that amount and often end up taking welfare benefits. In 2012, 4.3 million people received welfare benefits and 47 million received food stamps. The number of Americans getting food stamps – a national hunger crisis – has risen in tandem with the number of people unemployed or out of the workforce.
more
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/20/minimum-wage-scam
Plan to Convert Texas Roads to Gravel Begins Despite Pushback
by Ian Floyd
As he witnesses the roads around his South Texas farm crumble and deteriorate, Dane Elliot is aware that he is both a victim of the problem and part of it. The farmer and rancher in Live Oak County also owns a small trucking company that hauls oil field equipment.
"My wife works in a local hospital and she has to take our son to daycare," Eliott said. "It worries me every day with the traffic and road conditions. It weighs on my mind, not only from a maintenance standpoint for my trucks but a safety standpoint for my family.”
The sharp increase in heavy traffic from a historic oil boom has damaged many farm-to-market roads in South and East Texas. The damage related to energy development has become so extensive that state and local authorities lack the funding to make all the repairs. Last month, the Texas Department of Transportation announced plans to convert more than 80 miles of paved roads to gravel. The conversions are expected to start Monday, TxDOT officials said. But the plan has been met with criticism from lawmakers and some of the farmers and ranchers who live near those roads.
"Since paving roads is too expensive and there is not enough funding to repave them all, our only other option to make them safer is to turn them into gravel roads," TxDOT spokesman David Glessner said.
Dimmit County, near the Texas-Mexico border, will be hit hardest by TxDOT’s decision. More than 30 miles of the county’s farm-to-market roads are slated to be turned to gravel.
more
http://www.texastribune.org/2013/08/19/conversion-of-roads-to-gravel-met-with-concern/
“I’m not a terrorist: I’m eight years old, and that’s my science project”
BY JESSE WALKER
Excerpted from The United States of Paranoia
I think he was trying to tell me something, like it had some sort of a meaning.
— George Costanza
October 7, 2001: less than a month after 9/11. Police in Maryland decide that two trucks on Interstate 270 might be carrying explosives. The alert cops block traffic for an hour, searching the vehicles for tools of terror. The cargo turns out to be stage equipment headed to a memorial service for the firefighters killed in the attack.
A forgivable mistake, given the circumstances? Perhaps.
In Tyler, Texas, a few days earlier, federal agents, city police, and bomb experts from far-flung cities had descended on a family’s mailbox to grapple with a gadget jerryrigged from wires, batteries, and green duct tape. The streets were blocked; the neighbors were evacuated. The device turned out to be an eight-year-old’s homemade flashlight, built as a school project and left in the mailbox for safekeeping.
Still forgivable? Maybe — though on reflection, it doesn’t seem likely that the killers who organized the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon would select a neighborhood in east Texas as their next target. But why, after learning that the bomb was actually a flashlight, did the authorities still feel the need to confiscate it?
more
http://www.salon.com/2013/08/20/im_not_a_terrorist_im_eight_years_old_and_thats_my_science_project/
Black Hole Analogue Discovered in South Atlantic Ocean
Vortices in the South Atlantic are mathematically equivalent to black holes, say physicists, an idea that could lead to new ways of understanding how currents transport oil and garbage across oceans
Black holes are regions of spacetime in which gravity is strong enough to prevent anything escaping, even light. These strange objects were first discovered in the early 20th century as mathematical solutions to the equations of general relativity. (It was not until much later that astronomers began to gather observational evidence of their existence.)
One of the curious features of general relativity is that the same mathematics crops up in various other situations. In recent years, for example, physicists have worked out how to create invisibility cloaks by steering light around objects using metamaterials.
Black holes steer light in the same way by bending space-time. In fact, the mathematics that describe both systems are formally equivalent. Because of that, it should come as no surprise that engineers have used metamaterials to create analogues of black holes that prevent light escaping.
Today, George Haller at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich and Francisco Beron-Vera at the University of Miami in Florida have found another analogue of a black hole, this time in the world of turbulence.
more
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/518416/black-hole-analogue-discovered-in-south-atlantic-ocean/
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