The most Popular Posts of the past seven days.
May 1, 2024
Will someone at Regions Bank please stop sending notices with this wording on them!!!!!!!!
FINAL NOTICE
Your mailing is trying to SELL me a service from your bank, but it appears to be some kind of LATE payment notice (as if you didn't know that!) That misleading envelope goes through MANY hands before it gets to me....and at least SOME of them will go away thinking I am late in payments. I AM NOT!
STOP IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Number of Posts
I have now published 10,000 posts on this blog!
I sincerely hope at least a few of them have been enjoyed by you, my friends!!!!😎
The Most and Least depressed states. Where is your state ranked?
Hawaii is the state with the lowest prevalence of depression in the U.S., while Tennessee is the highest, according to the United Health Foundation's America's Health Rankings.
The rankings, published Dec. 5, rate all 50 states on a variety of health measures. Data on depression prevalence was sourced from the CDC's Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System in 2022.
The national average of adults reporting ever being diagnosed with depression, major depression, minor depression or dysthymia by a health professional is 21.7%.
Here's how states stack up on depression rates:
1. Hawaii: Percentage of adults reporting depression: 12.5%
2. New Jersey: 14.6%
3. Nebraska: 17%
4. Illinois: 17.7%
5. Florida: 17.8%
5. New York: 17.8%
7. South Dakota: 17.9%
8. Nevada: 18%
9. California: 18.1%
9. Maryland: 18.1%
11. Iowa: 18.5%
12. Georgia: 19.2%
13. Connecticut: 19.3%
14. Texas: 19.4%
15. Kansas: 19.5%
16. Delaware: 19.9%
17. South Carolina: 20%
18. Arizona: 20.2%
19. Alaska: 20.3%
20. Mississippi: 20.5%
21. New Mexico: 21%
22. Colorado: 21.3%
23. Massachusetts: 21.6%
23. North Dakota: 21.6%
United States: 21.7%
25. North Carolina: 21.7%
25. Pennsylvania: 21.7%
27. Missouri: 21.8%
27. Virginia: 21.8%
29. Wyoming: 22.1%
30. Rhode Island: 22.3%
31. Idaho: 22.7%
32. Indiana: 22.8%
33. Michigan: 23%
33. Wisconsin: 23%
35. Minnesota: 23.5%
36. Alabama: 24%
37. Oregon: 24%
38. Montana: 24.5%
39. Vermont: 24.8%
40. Ohio: 25%
40. Washington: 25%
42. New Hampshire: 25.2%
43. Kentucky: 25.8%
44. Maine: 26.3%
45. Louisiana: 26.4%
46. Utah: 26.5%
47. Arkansas: 26.6%
48. Oklahoma: 26.9%
48. West Virginia: 26.9%
50. Tennessee: 29.2%
Isn't it ABOUT TIME?????
For decades the official pages detailing the history of the Montgomery Zoo have cited "racial violence" as the reason the zoo closed in 1960 and stayed closed for eleven years. You can find it in the Zoo "timeline".
That's not true, and the zoo knows it. It closed because if it stayed open, the zoo would have been required to open the zoo to everyone, including black residents.
The current Director of Parks and Recreation for the city:
Card, David
- Departments:Parks and Recreation, Zoo-Mann Museum, Riverfront Facilities
- Divisions:Cabinet Member
- Title:Director of Parks and Recreation
- Phone:(334) 625-4742
Most Endangered Historic Places in 2024
I'll cut to the chase: none of this year's eleven locations chosen by The National Trust for Historic Preservation are in Alabama...but if you are interested in history, and in preservation, you'll likely find the list of interest!
One example is this...
The New Salem Baptist Church in West Virginia.
It is all that remains of the African-American community in the town of Tams.
HERE is the full list of the eleven properties crying out to be preserved.
Home Prices/Affordability in Montgomery
AL.COM story reports:
Construction Coverage -- a resource guide for construction professionals -- examined cities across the U.S. based on their median home price-to-median income ratio and found that two Alabama cities were among the best for finding housing which fits into the average family budget.
Among midsize cities, Montgomery ranked second only to Toledo, Ohio, with a 2.5 ratio -- derived by taking Montgomery’s median home price of $139,969 and dividing it by the median household income of $56,707.
Toledo edged out Montgomery with a 2.3 ratio ($105,239 median home price/$45,405 median income).
Apr 30, 2024
Medicaid Expansion?
NPR has posted a story exploring the refusal of some GOP led states (INCLUDING ALABAMA!) to accept the offered federal payments to expand Medicaid.
We don't need no stinking Medicaid!
On this date in 1993---31 years ago--- the confederate flag was removed from atop the Alabama Capitol Building in Montgomery by the order of Governor Jim Folsom Junior.
George Wallace, raised the flag over the dome on April 25, 1963, as a symbol of defiance to the federal government.
Apr 29, 2024
Washington Post: Alabama Flooding
(Washington Post)
THEODORE, Ala.
"John Corideo drove the solitary two-lane highways of southern Alabama, eyeing the roadside ditches. It had been raining off and on for days and Corideo, chief of the Fowl River Fire District, knew that if it continued, his department could be outmatched by floodwaters.
It kept raining. Water filled the ditches and climbed over roads, swallowing parts of a main highway. About 10 residents who needed to be rescued were brought back to the station in firetrucks. More remained stranded in floodwaters, out of the department’s reach. “That week … we just caught hell,” Corideo said.
What the residents and rescuers of the Fowl River region faced on that day was part of a dangerous phenomenon reshaping the southern United States: Rapidly rising seas are combining with storms to generate epic floods, threatening lives, property and livelihoods."
<snip>
Master Boat Builders is one of the area’s largest employers and just manufactured the first electric tugboat in the United States, powered by at least 1,100 batteries. The ship, the eWolf, was delivered to the Port of San Diego earlier this year and has just begun operations.
Rice said part of the shipyard now floods during major high tides, something that never used to happen. When it does, the company moves workers out of that location and onto a different project until the seas relent. From his home on Dauphin Island, Rice said he’s seen the arrival of much higher tides.
“I really don’t think people think about it,” Rice said. “They see it on TV and I think it’s some kind of liberal hoax. But it’s not. If you live on the water, you’re on the water, you can see that it’s actually justified.”
FULL Story is HERE.
Apr 28, 2024
Honoring The Civil War Dead? Or using their bodies for fertilizer?
Apparently the remains of some of those killed during the civil war were turned into fertilizer!
Source: HERE.
"The practice also seems to have been adopted in the United States. During the Civil War, many of the estimated 700,000 soldiers who died were buried in mass graves. An 1867 article in the Delaware State Journal includes an eyewitness account:
The first sight that greeted my eyes at Manassas Junction was a forcible reminder of the war. Two huge piles of bones — horse bones, cattle bones, and, sad to say human bones intermingling — lay whitening right in front of the hotel. They are picked up off the battlefield by the owner of the soil, and carried here for shipment by the cars, to be ground into fertilizers at some mill at Baltimore."
NY Times story on Antebellum Homes etc, with little slavery context
FULL NY Times story is HERE.
"Women in hoop dresses ushered visitors one April morning into the grand old house known as Riverview, showing off the hand-carved wooden chairs, oil paintings, tapestries and gilded mirrors brought from around the world to the estate in Mississippi.
The house stood as a testament to the prosperity that had flowed before the Civil War in Southern cities like Columbus, just over the border from Alabama, as fertile soil and the labor of enslaved workers built fortunes.
It was also a highlight of the longstanding tradition known as Pilgrimage. Every spring, the city’s finest antebellum homes are opened to the public for a few weeks, inviting people in to marvel at the craftsmanship and the opulence.
The event took its name from the belief among its organizers that Pilgrimage was just that — a journey to houses whose grandeur, scale and history represent something sacred for Mississippi and all of the South. Homeowners and docents often dress in period clothing to facilitate the time travel.
“We have a culture here that is something to be admired and respected,” said Dick Leike, the owner of Riverview. “This is a prime example of it.”
But these days, some in Columbus are finding it difficult to justify a
trip to a gauzy version of the city’s past without accounting for the
suffering, injustice and violence associated with the slave labor that
built and ran these homes. That has led to competing ideas about the
scope of Pilgrimage and the story it is supposed to tell."
There is no shortage of similar stories on this side of the Mississippi/Alabama border either.
Apr 27, 2024
CBS: Non-Compete clauses
Federal regulators on Tuesday enacted a nationwide ban on new noncompete agreements, which keep millions of Americans — from minimum-wage earners to CEOs — from switching jobs within their industries.
The Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday afternoon voted 3-to-2 to approve the new rule, which will ban noncompetes for all workers when the regulations take effect in 120 days. For senior executives, existing noncompetes can remain in force. For all other employees, existing noncompetes are not enforceable.
The antitrust and consumer protection agency heard from thousands of people who said they had been harmed by noncompetes, illustrating how the agreements are "robbing people of their economic liberty," FTC Chair Lina Khan said.
The FTC commissioners voted along party lines, with its two Republicans arguing the agency lacked the jurisdiction to enact the rule and that such moves should be made in Congress.
Within hours of the vote, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said it would sue to block "this unnecessary and unlawful rule and put other agencies on notice that such overreach will not go unchecked." The new rule would "undermine American businesses' ability to remain competitive," the trade group, which advocates for U.S. corporations and businesses, said in a statement.
Why it matters
The new rule could impact tens of millions of workers, said Heidi Shierholz, a labor economist and president of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.
"For nonunion workers, the only leverage they have is their ability to quit their job," Shierholz told CBS MoneyWatch. "Noncompetes don't just stop you from taking a job — they stop you from starting your own business."
Since proposing the new rule, the FTC has received more than 26,000 public comments on the regulations. The final rule adopted "would generally prevent most employers from using noncompete clauses," the FTC said in a statement.
The agency's action comes more than two years after President Biden directed the agency to "curtail the unfair use" of noncompetes, under which employees effectively sign away future work opportunities in their industry as a condition of keeping their current job. The president's executive order urged the FTC to target such labor restrictions and others that improperly constrain employees from seeking work.
"The freedom to change jobs is core to economic liberty and to a competitive, thriving economy," Khan said in a statement making the case for axing noncompetes. "Noncompetes block workers from freely switching jobs, depriving them of higher wages and better working conditions, and depriving businesses of a talent pool that they need to build and expand."
A threat to trade secrets?
An estimated 30 million people — or one in five U.S. workers — are bound by noncompete restrictions, according to the FTC. The new rule could boost worker wages by a total of nearly $300 billion a year, according to the agency.
Employers who use noncompetes argue that they are needed to protect trade secrets or other confidential information employees might learn in the course of their jobs.
"It'll represent a sea change," said Amanda Sonneborn, a partner at King & Spalding in Chicago who represents employers that use noncompetes. "They don't want somebody to go to a competitor and take their customer list or take their information about their business strategy to that competitor."
Yet corporations concerned about protecting their intellectual assets can use restraints such as confidentiality agreements and trade secret laws, and don't need to resort to noncompete agreements, the FTC staff determined.
The commission's final rule does not nullify existing noncompetes with senior executives, who are defined as those earning more than $151,164 a year and who hold a policy-making position. Those execs are much more likely to negotiate the terms of their compensation, according to regulators.
Still, the FTC is banning new noncompetes for senior executives on the grounds that the agreements stifle competition and discourage employees from creating new businesses, potentially harming consumers.
The idea of using noncompetes to keep business information out of the hands of rivals has proliferated, noted Shierholz, citing a notorious case involving Jimmy John's eateries.
Low-paid workers are now the hardest hit by restrictive work agreements, which can forbid employees including janitors, security guards and phlebotomists from leaving their job for better pay even though these entry-level workers are least likely to have access to trade secrets.
Real-life consequences
In laying out its rationale for banishing noncompetes from the labor landscape, the FTC offered real-life examples of how the agreements can hurt workers.
In one case, a single father earned about $11 an hour as a security guard for a Florida firm, but resigned a few weeks after taking the job when his child care fell through. Months later, he took a job as a security guard at a bank, making nearly $15 an hour. But the bank terminated his employment after receiving a letter from the man's prior employer stating he had signed a two-year noncompete.
In another example, a factory manager at a textile company saw his paycheck dry up after the 2008 financial crisis. A rival textile company offered him a better job and a big raise, but his noncompete blocked him from taking it, according to the FTC. A subsequent legal battle took three years, wiping out his savings.
—The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Two Alabama Treasurers and I.
I enjoyed talking with the current Alabama State Treasurer---Young Boozer---and the perhaps better known former Treasurer---George Wallace, Jr., son of two former Governors, George Wallace, and Lurleen Wallace, whose statue we are standing in front of.
Apr 26, 2024
Next Generation of Moon Trees
April 26, 2024 — The first woman slated to launch to the moon has delivered one of the first trees grown from seeds recently flown there.
NASA astronaut Christina Koch presented a Loblolly Pine "Moon Tree"
sapling to her home state of North Carolina on Wednesday (April 24). The
tree began as one of more than 1,000 seeds that were flown around the
moon on NASA's uncrewed Artemis I mission in 2022.
"With the planting of an Artemis Moon Tree today at the governor's
mansion, North Carolina is firmly planting the roots of exploration for
generations to come," said Koch, who is targeted to launch in late 2025
as a member of the Artemis II crew.
As I have reported, one of the first Generation of "Moon Trees" is healthy and growing on the Alabama Capitol grounds!
NOW.... I HOPE Alabama will be able to obtain one of the new generation of Moon Trees to joint the existing one on the Alabama Capitol Grounds!!!
NASA is notifying the selected institutions in waves, with the first now
underway, followed by groups in the fall of this year, spring 2025 and
fall 2025. The agency plans to keep a record of the recipients on its website, noting the species of tree they received and their planting cycle.
Moon Tree hosts will also be invited to engage with the public at quarterly virtual gatherings beginning this summer.
A full list of the first, almost 50 recipients has yet to be made public, but according to a social media post, Mary Chapa Academy in Greenfield, California received a sapling on Thursday (April 25).
Advertiser Headline
Valiant Cross fundraises for new HVAC system at Prevail Union downtownI THINK they intended it to read...
"Valient Cross fundraises at Prevail Union downtown for new school HVAC system"
Washington Post Column
Some U.S, Senators and House members voted against the most recent Ukraine Aid package, even though it actually helps their states.
The article cites Alabama Republican Senator Tuberville as an example:
"Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) did not vote but tweeted his opposition to the aid package, declaring: “Globalist Democrats want to use this opportunity to send EVEN MORE MONEY to Ukraine. … I haven’t voted for a dime of Ukraine funding — and I’m not going to start now.” Actually, the money is going to workers in Anniston, Ala., to help produce Bradley infantry fighting vehicles and Hercules recovery vehicles; workers in Huntsville, Ala., producing Hydra 70 rockets; and workers in Troy, Ala., producing HIMARS and Javelin missiles for Ukraine. Tuberville’s opposition to not only hurts Ukraine but also defense manufacturing communities across his state.
Full Column HERE.
Unions
The Guv doesn't hold back:
"The UAW is NOT the good guy here. Thank you, Mr. Speaker, for calling out the UAW for what it is — corrupt, shifty and a dangerous leech."
Alabama Governor Kay Ivey
Dad's Death Date
30 years after my Dad's death.
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Apr 25, 2024
Consumer Reports: Most Expensive Cars to Maintain
Glad to see Alabama-Manufactured Hyundai vehicles are off the list!
Land Rover had the highest ten-year maintenance costs, at an average of $19,250. Porsche was second worst with $14,090 in costs.
10 car brands most expensive to maintain over 10 years:
- Land Rover: $19,250
- Porsche: $14,090
- Mercedes-Benz: $10,525
- Audi: $9,890
- BMW: $9,500
- Volvo: $9,285
- Infiniti: $8,500
- Acura: $7,800
- Mini: $7,625
- Subaru: $7,200
SOURCE: HERE
61 Years Ago Today
George Wallace, raised the Confederate Battle Flag over the Alabama Capitol dome on April 25, 1963, as a symbol of defiance to the federal government; that was the date of his meeting with U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to discuss desegregation of the University of Alabama.
The flag was eventually taken down three decades later--- on April 30, 1993.
Both the raising and the removal happened during confederate history month.
Coming to The Capri
SPECIAL EVENTS
May 23, 2024: A Fistful Of Dollars June 5, 2024: Adam Ezra Group June 6, 2024: Hedwig And The Angry Inch June 9 & 11, 2024: EOS: My National Gallery, London June 13, 2024: But I'm A Cheerleader June 19, 2024: Purple Rain June 20, 2024: Some Like It Hot June 27, 2024: The Adventures Of Priscilla Queen Of The Desert July 2, 2024: Jaws July 9, 2024: Invasion Of The Body Snatchers July 16, 2024: Tremors July 23, 2024: The Birds July 30, 2024: PredaIn case you've been wondering....
Here is a list of wild animals residents of Alabama may not own!
Alabama prohibits the personal possession of numerous exotic animals, including:
- Mongooses (yep, that's them up top)
- Giant African snails
- Tegus
- Walking catfish
- Coyotes
- Foxes
- Raccoons
- Skunks
- Wild rodents
- Wild turkeys
- Venomous snakes
- Black bears
- Mountain lions
- Bobcats
- Antelope
- Pigs
- Any species of bird, mammal, reptile, or amphibian listed as injurious wildlife under the U.S. Fish and Wildlife's Lacey Act (18 U.S.C. 42)
SOURCE: HERE.
Apr 23, 2024
My Camera Wrote this poem?
There's a camera that not only takes photos, but writes poetry about the scenes it records!
Here is the story.
Hey! I can do that too!
Here is a recent photo I made.
VOTERS
They snake
a
r
o
u
n
d
the place to vote,
wanting to say their say,
to pick their personal winners,
even those
who lose.
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