Must remember to go to the garden every day; this is what happens with one day skipped. Corn, cucumber, zucchini, watermelon, yellow squash, tomato, buttercup, butternut, and eggplant. 34 pounds.
The zucchini are playing out; most of these we wouldn’t have bothered picking a week ago. The tomato, corn, and watermelon are new this picking.
Agrirama had a vine cutting Saturday for a Smithsonian food exhibit that will be there a while, with numerous accompanying events.
Tuesday evening there’s Organic Gardening Basics, and Friday there’s a South Georgia Foodways Festival, among quite a few others.
Ten pounds of zucchini a day, plus yellow squash, butternut, buttercup, cucumber, radishes and beets.
Pick a pint a day! Eat them on cereal, make them into jam, bake them into muffins. 
The most common reaction to any proposal of rail transit near Valdosta or Lowndes County is “there’s not enough population”. Yet there’s this:
Another rail opponents’ argument has yet to be addressed: Atlanta is simply too spread-out to make passenger trains worthwhile. The Beltline runs in circles around the most important job center — downtown — and will have to rely instead on connections with MARTA for those commuters.If even sprawl-happy Atlanta can manage denser rail-based development, Lowndes County can, too. A start would be to have the bus system (Valdosta, Lowndes County, or combined) run all the way around Perimiter Road, which is the local equivalent of the Beltline.Yet, despite all that, city leaders still believe in what first Gravel imparted: take these old train tracks, make them useful and pleasant, and development will come.
It will be a different kind of development, pedestrian-friendly and a bit denser in place of the car-friendly sprawl. The new buildings that spring up around Beltline transit stops and parks will give Atlanta new places for people to live. And it will be an agreeable place, improving land values and enhancing property tax revenues.
People say the east side of Perimeter Road was intended for industry. Well, maybe, but there is already a school and at least one subdivision there, and it could also be used for affordable housing, especially if there was bus or train service.
Maybe we should try this kind of stakeholder involvement:
Tax Allocation District Advisory CommitteeInstead of holding a few meetings and hoping people show up (and that is already an improvement over previous days), maybe actively seek out stakeholders both pro and con and get them regularly involved.The TADAC is made up of stakeholders from across the broad spectrum of Atlanta and is composed of community members representing the Atlanta neighborhoods and technical experts with a commitment to making the BeltLine a success for the City. Including experience in the area of parks and trails planning and development; transit planning and development; finance and business; complex project management; affordable housing; urban planning; arts and culture; historic preservation; green building principles and other subjects relevant to the BeltLine.
-jsq
Someone named Alvin Smith has invented
a simple buoy-driven pump to push water uphill from the sea. From there it can flow downhill through turbines to generate power when needed. We don’t have any cliffs on the Georgia coast, but I suppose we could build water towers. More efficient, dependable, and shorter than wind turbines.
Medical bills are behind more than 60 percent of U.S. personal bankruptcies, U.S. researchers reported on Thursday in a report they said demonstrates that healthcare reform is on the wrong track.Most medical insurance only pays for a proportion of large medical bills, and has a cap on the total it will pay. You can get medical insurance that covers everything above a large deductible, but most people probably don’t know it exists, insurers don’t want to sell it, and many people probably couldn’t afford the deductible for small medical expenses.More than 75 percent of these bankrupt families had health insurance but still were overwhelmed by their medical debts, the team at Harvard Law School, Harvard Medical School and Ohio University reported in the American Journal of Medicine.
“Unless you’re Warren Buffett, your family is just one serious illness away from bankruptcy,” Harvard’s Dr. David Himmelstein, an advocate for a single-payer health insurance program for the United States, said in a statement.
“For middle-class Americans, health insurance offers little protection,” he added.
The United States is embarking on an overhaul of its healthcare system, now a patchwork of public programs such as Medicare for the elderly and disabled and employer-sponsored health insurance that leaves 15 percent of the population with no coverage.
The researchers and some consumer advocates said the study showed the proposals under the most serious consideration are unlikely to help many Americans. They are pressing for a so-called single payer plan, in which one agency, usually the government, coordinates health coverage.
WCTV reports on the opening of the new Staten Road bridge in Lowndes County yesterday (27 May):
“We live at the north end of the county and for us our choices to come to town are Bemiss Road, Val del or the highway…drive all the way over to 75, so this is just a direct route from where we live in the north end to top of town,” said Gretchen Quarterman, a local resident.The picture, by Gretchen, shows the opening party, with left to right: Larry Miler, environmental compliance director for Lowndes County, Jeffrey Chiu who designed the three spans of the bridge, Richard Lee, county commissioner for District 2, which contains the bridge, Brian Starling, GDOT project engineer; Joyce Evans, commissioner; Jerry Hughes, GDOT area engineer; Ashley Paulk, county commissioner, who lives in District 2; Craig Solomon, GDOT communications officer; and Mike Fletcher, county engineer.“Today is like opening a Christmas present,” said Lowndes County Commissioner Richard Lee. “We’re excited. I cut the ribbon. I opened my present and I just took a ride on it and it’s absolutely smooth as silk.”
Most of the money came from the state, to the tune of something like $6 million.
The county also paved Staten Road from the bridge south to McMillan Orr Road.
The VDT has some good pictures of he bridge itself and more detail.
Gary Fields writes in the Wall Street Journal:
The Obama administration’s new drug czar says he wants to banish the idea that the U.S. is fighting “a war on drugs,” a move that would underscore a shift favoring treatment over incarceration in trying to reduce illicit drug use.That’s a refreshing change, given that the 5% of the population that’s incarcerated and their families and friends might well wonder if the government is at war with its own people. There are indeed some nasty sociopaths out there who need to be locked up to protect everyone else. But there aren’t enough of those to account for the U.S. prison population. The “war on drugs” accounts for many of the rest.In his first interview since being confirmed to head the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, Gil Kerlikowske said Wednesday the bellicose analogy was a barrier to dealing with the nation’s drug issues.
“Regardless of how you try to explain to people it’s a ‘war on drugs’ or a ‘war on a product,’ people see a war as a war on them,” he said. “We’re not at war with people in this country.”
It’s interesting that this article was published in the WSJ, not generally known as a left-wing rag. Kerlikowske, for that matter, is a former police chief. As is customary with newspaper articles, it ends with a counter view:
James Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, the nation’s largest law-enforcement labor organization, said that while he holds Mr. Kerlikowske in high regard, police officers are wary.Indeed, even people at the highest levels of government need to learn that for themselves. But the solution to Pasco’s conundrum for the “war on drugs” is to change the laws. That alone won’t do it, however. Just throwing convicts back on the street after being in prison with real criminals wouldn’t be nearly as good as implementing programs to reintegrate them into the community and to prevent others from getting drug habits in the first place. Kerlikowske’s approach is needed at the same time, and even before, changing the laws.“While I don’t necessarily disagree with Gil’s focus on treatment and demand reduction, I don’t want to see it at the expense of law enforcement. People need to understand that when they violate the law there are consequences.”
For those who say it can’t work, try this article about Norway, which actually provides public assistance for drug addicts instead of locking them up, yet does not have any large population of addicts, and is actually growing its economy during the current economic depression.
Senator Jim Webb of Virginia met with people who work in prisons:
But once we were inside the presentation room, where about a dozen people who work in corrections and social services had assembled to talk about the criminal justice system, Webb’s evident passion and fluency with the issues created a palpable bond with the attendees. “We have 5 percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of the people in prison,” he said. “Either we’re the most evil people on earth, or we’re doing something wrong.” As for the imprisonment of nonviolent drug offenders: “I saw more drug use at Georgetown University Law Center when I was a student there than I’ve seen anywhere else in my life,” he said, to knowing laughs. “And some of those people are judges.”We need to change that.Webb then listened as attendees enumerated the various dysfunctions, injustices and perverse incentives created by the metastasizing prison-industrial complex: “I can get $600,000 from the state for a new jail,” said Fredericksburg Mayor Tom Tomzak, “but I can’t get $40 for Healthy Families.”