Curbside recycling pickup suspended. I would like to know if our recyclables were going to the landfill anyway.

by Rod Williams, Dec. 22, 2021- I have often thought that if I had the capacity, either the extra energy myself or a paid reporter, I would like to find out the truth about Metro's curbside recycling.  Well, I don't have a reporter, and doing that piece of investigative reporting has never reached the top of my priority list, but still, I have questions I would like to have answers to about Metro's recycling. Once, I wrote an email to the director of our recycling program but got evasive non-answers to the questions I asked, and never followed up to get straight answers. 

I don't know, but I suspect Nashville's recycling is wishcycling.  If I could get answers, I would want to know how much it costs to dispose of a ton of garbage in a landfill.  I would want to know how much we have to pay to get someone to take a ton of our recyclables.  What is the real net difference?  Is landfilling cheaper than recycling?  I don't know.  Do our recyclables often end up in the landfill anyway? If so, how often?  I would like to know.  I know we do pay for companies to take our recyclables.  At one time, it is my understanding, a company paid us for our recyclables. 

The reason I suspect that our recycling program may be a scam and simply wishcycling is because it often is in other places.  A report out of Seattle Washington says over 2000 tops of paper collected as recyclables were landfilled.  This is not that uncommon.  One sees stories like this from all across the nation.  The problem is that China has, for the most part, stopped accepting plastics and paper for recycling and China was the world's number one customer for them. 

In an article appearing in The Huffington Post, The Dirty Truth Is Your Recycling May Actually Go To Landfills, this situation of recyclable actually not being recycled is reported. Similar stories have appeared in The New York Times and other major publications.

This week, The Tennessean reports, Nashville suspends recycling pickup services as trash collection woes sap Metro resources. The article says that Metro recycling trucks and staff are being reassigned to trash collection due to growing trash collection delays caused by staffing and fleet issues.  The article explains how we got in such a mess that the garbage is not being collected. The article says this is a temporary suspension of the curbside pickup but gives no clue as to how long it may be before curbside is resumed. 

The article list drop-off recycling locations where one may take their recyclables. I won't be doing so.  I need some assurances that when collected as recyclables, they will not be landfilled anyway.  And, I need assurances that if they are recycled that it is worth my gas money and time to do it.  I am civic-minded and don't mind doing something for the public good, but my time is valuable.  If it takes me three gallons of gas a week and three hours of my time to recycle and only saves the city $3 it is not a wise use of my time. 

I am not opposed to recycling I just wanted it to be a rational thing to do.  A long time ago before Metro had curbside recycling I volunteered many a Saturday morning at a recycling drop-off site, helping people dispose of their recyclables and making sure they were properly sorted and did not contaminate the whole batch.  I do recycle now. I also compost and a lot of my paper waste gets composted instead of placed in the recycle bin.  I like to garden and am now retired and have this year stepped up my gardening game.  With time to do it, I started composting my kitchen waste, and yard waste.  Recently, I added paper waste. The worms seem to really like cardboard. (If interested in composting see this video: How to compost.)

I support recycling if it makes sense. I will do it myself if it makes sense to me.  I will support the city's recycling program if convinced it makes economic sense for the city and is not all for show and nothing more than an exercise to make people simply feel virtuous. 

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Metro Budget 101 Series: How Does the City Spend Money? Schools

 Metro Budget 101 Series: How Does the City Spend Money? Schools

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Student loan forgiveness is the poor subsidizing the wealthy. How is that fair?

by Rod Williams, Dec. 22, 2021 - I am convinced that liberals only pretend to care about poor people.  The cynical side of me thinks they want to keep poor people poor so they will keep voting Democrat.  One has to look no further than the various welfare programs to see how their affect it to keep poor people poor. And inflation, which hits those with less disposable income the hardest helps keep poor people trapped in poverty.  And an overtaxed and overregulated economy is less dynamic and provides less opportunity for people to pull themselves out of poverty.

Maybe, however, Democrats really do love poor people and that is why they favor policies that keep people poor and create more poor people. 

When it comes to student loan forgiveness, there is nothing that could be more unfair to poor people. 

Median career earnings for a bachelor’s degree holder are $1.28 million in 2018 dollars. ... At the median, career earnings for a bachelor’s degree graduate are more than twice as high as for someone with only a high school diploma or GED, roughly 70 percent higher than for someone with some college but no degree, and more than 45 percent higher than for someone with an associate degree. (link)

With student debt forgiveness the person with only a high school education is taxed to help someone who has a college education. How is that fair? How can any fair-minded person support such a policy?

 

Biden Administration Extends Pause on Student-Loan Payments through May 1

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House redistricting to eliminate five Democratic incumbents in urban Tennessee. Dems freak out.

 by Yue Stella Yu, The Tennessean, Dec. 17,2021 -Tennessee House Redistricting Committee on Friday unveiled — and voted to advance — its own draft state House map that would eliminate five Democratic incumbents who face re-election in 2022.

The plan, if approved by the legislature, would further solidify the Republican supermajority in the General Assembly and diminish Democratic influence. 

The map, presented for the first time in public and immediately passed by the committee Friday, would lump nine Democratic incumbents in urban areas such as Nashville, Knoxville and Memphis in four districts.

Six Republicans are paired together under the new district lines, .... House Democratic Caucus Chairman Vincent Dixie, D-Nashville, said the redistricting process reflects Republicans' efforts to "rig" the elections. ... most partisan and racially motivated process that I've been involved in since I have been in the legislature," Dixie said. ... 

 It preserves 13 majority-minority districts statewide ... In Nashville, Rep. John Ray Clemmons, D-Nashville, and Rep. Jason Potts, D-Nashville, are drawn into House District 52, represented by Rep. Mike Stewart, D-Nashville. Clemmons represents House District 55, which covers west Davidson County. Potts is not up for re-election in 2022, leaving Clemmons and Stewart potential competitors. (read it all)

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Tennessee's newly drawn congressional district boundaries will be revealed next month

 Republican reps keep quiet on Nashville's redistricting future

... U.S. Rep. Mark Green has gone on the record expressing his opposition to dividing Nashville among multiple Republican House members.

.... State Rep. Bob Freeman, D-Nashville, who serves on the House redistricting committee, tells Axios the 5th district is likely to be divided among Republicans.

... Green was quoted in the Nashville Post in September calling the concept of an 8-1 map "greedy" and "a bad idea." He warned splitting Nashville and its liberal voters into suburban districts could backfire in future election cycles.

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Mayor’s Aide Courtney Pogue on Frustrations, Priorities for Nashville Neighborhoods

Courtney Pogue

by Rod Williams, Dec. 20, 2021-  In an article in the Nashville Scene today, Stephen Elliott interviews Courtney Pogue, Mayor John Cooper’s director of economic and community development for about the last nine months  Pogue expresses his frustration about a lack of direction in city government and a tendency to focus on newsmaking economic development deals — like those with Oracle or Amazon — rather than the kind of work that can bring grocery stores or other vital businesses to underserved neighborhoods. 

 He says the city does not really have a community development strategy for the city. The city follows the lead of the Chamber and focuses on big deals but there has been no focus on small business development. 

I am not so sure, the city should even be steering development.  We should avoid overtaxing businesses so they will want to open or expand in Nashville, we should provide good police protection so businesses can safely function and provide quality education so we have a good workforce and the city should do the other things that constitute good governance and then essentially let the market determine who gets the grocery stores.

This is an interesting article.  I think it is rare to find someone who serves at the pleasure of the mayor be so blunt in what amounts to criticism of his boss. To read the article follow this link. 

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Tennessee ranked 3rd for election integrity.

From Heritage. Org, Dec. 19, 2021- Every citizen's vote is sacred. The vote is how we guarantee that our government remains of the people, by the people, and for the people. Americans need and deserve elections that they can trust. Legitimate voters should be able to vote in privacy without being harassed, secure in the knowledge that their vote will not be lost, stolen, altered, or negated by a vote cast by an illegitimate voter. Americans need and deserve a transparent system in which fraud can be easily detected and false allegations of fraud can be easily dispelled. Americans need and deserve a system in which it is easy to vote and hard to cheat.

In order to help voters, state legislators, election officials, and all Americans who are interested in ensuring a fair and secure election process, The Heritage Foundation has published this Election Integrity Scorecard, which compares the election laws and regulations of each state and the District of Columbia that affect the security and integrity of the process to the Foundation's best-practices recommendations. 

....

In 2012, the Pew Foundation released a report on the voter registration systems maintained by the states. The report found that:

• Approximately 24 million—one in every eight—voter registrations were either no longer valid or significantly inaccurate.
• More than 1.8 million deceased individuals were listed as voters.
• Approximately 2.75 million individuals were registered in more than one state.

....

In 2020, the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) released a similar report, Critical Condition: American Voter Rolls Filled with Errors, Dead Voters, and Duplicate Registrations, using an even bigger database of voter registration and voter history information obtained from 42 states covering the 2016 and 2018 elections. Like GAI, PILF supplemented the state registration information by using other commercial and government databases such as credit agencies and the Social Security Administration’s Master Death Index to obtain unique identifiers and sift out as many “false positives” as possible when comparing the data.

PILF’s comparison of the state data, also using a conservative matching program, revealed that:

• 8,360 individuals registered and voted in two different states during the 2018 election.
• Votes were recorded for 7,890 deceased individuals in the 2016 election and 6,718 deceased individuals in the 2018 election.
• 43,760 individuals who registered more than once at the same address in the same state voted twice in the 2016 election, and 37,889 individuals registered more than once at the same address cast two votes in the 2018 election. Thousands of these duplicate votes were cast using mail-in or absentee ballots.
• 5,500 individuals registered at two different addresses in the same state and voted twice in the 2018 election.
• Votes were recorded in the 2018 election for 34,000 individuals who were registered at nonresidential, commercial addresses such as gas stations, casinos, and restaurants.

(For more, follow this link.)

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2021 Pork Report: 12 Recipes for Government Waste, Fraud, and Abuse

The Beacon Center, December 15, 2021 - The Beacon Center is proud to release its “recipe book”
themed Tennessee Pork Report, revealing hundreds of millions of dollars in government waste, fraud, and abuse.

This year’s infamous Pork of the Year “winner” was Metro Nashville Public Schools (MNPS). MNPS entered into an $18 million no-bid contract with Meharry Medical College Ventures which produced a $1.8 million website with all the visual appeal and functionality of AskJeeves.com. Experts say this website should have cost no more than $75,000. 

As if the no-bid contract and lighting tax dollars on fire weren’t bad enough, at the same time the city of Nashville decided to shut down schools because in-person learning was too dangerous due to COVID, MNPS partnered with the YMCA to have…in-person learning for children of Metro School employees and students from K-5th grade.

Other 2021 Pork Report entries included:

• $702 million government-owned broadband plan in Knoxville, despite 98% of Knoxville residents having multiple choices in broadband internet.
• A $20 million (and counting) taxpayer gift to build a waterpark in Jackson.
• Davidson’s County continued “emissions testing” tax grab that was deemed unnecessary by both the state legislature and the EPA.
• Hamilton County’s $16 million purchase of nearly 2,200 acres to turn into a manufacturing hub, yet only about one-third of the land is ready for development.

The 2021 Pork Report comes from state and local budgets, media reports, state audits, and independent research conducted by Beacon Center staff and scholars. You can read the full report here.

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Pork of the Year: Over-Stuffed Baked Apples. Metro Nashville Public School's COVID Favoritism and $18 Million No-Bid Contract with Meharry Medical Ventures

 

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Rick Perry Pitched Meadows On Plan To Steal Election Even Before Results Were In

by Rod Williams, Dec. 17, 2021 - Shame, shame, and embarrassment. The evidence is overwhelming and continues to mount that there was an attempt by and on behalf of Donald Trump to steal the Nov. 2020 election.  I don't know that there is enough evidence of treason to convict anyone of the crime, but the conspirators should go down in history as traitors who attempted a coup, and they should not be welcome in polite society. Their names should be removed from buildings and if they have highways or bridges named after them, those structures should be renamed.  They should be shunned and treated as shameful embarrassments. 

I was not surprised that there was a coup attempt following the 2020 election. I had a bad feeling that we would see violence and maybe a coup attempt following the election, but I badly missed how it would play out.  I thought President Trump would win the election and there would be a coup attempt from the left.  Liberals hated Trump with such a passion and many thought of him as the next Hitler.  If one is stopping the next Hitler then a coup is justified.

I always thought that if there ever was a coup, or attempted coup, in America it would come from the left.  Liberals, I reasoned, do not really love America the way conservatives do.  They scoff at patriotism and they see the Constitution as not much more than an impediment to the enactment of the general will.  Conservatives, on the other hand, are patriots and they revere our republican form of government, liberty and order, and the constitution. 

As it turned out, conservatives (Republicans or those who have co-opted the label "conservative,") are willing to defile the constitution and illegally seize power.  What is labeled as "conservatives" today consists of people who are no better than progressives.  Trumpinistas, including former Governor Rick Perry, assuming the allegation is true, are traitors who plotted to betray their country. 

Please see the following excerpted article. There is always the possibility that this article is untrue or that Perry was framed.  I hope that is the case, but I don't expect that to be the case.  Click on the title below to read the full article.

CNN: Rick Perry Pitched Meadows On Plan To Steal Election Even Before Results Were In

By Josh Kovensky, December 17, 2021-  Investigators on the Jan. 6 Committee believe that former Energy Secretary Rick Perry authored a Nov. 4 text to Mark Meadows suggesting that three state legislatures overrule their voters and cast electoral votes for Trump, CNN reports.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) presented the text on Tuesday night, which reads: “HERE’s an AGRESSIVE (sic) STRATEGY: Why can t (sic) the states of GA NC PENN and other R controlled state houses declare this is BS (where conflicts and election not called that night) and just send their own electors to vote and have it go to the SCOTUS.”

Perry sent the text on Nov. 4, one day after the election was held and as votes in key states were still being counted.

... the plan resembles what Trump would partly spend the following two months doing: trying to pressure state legislatures into sending Trump, and not Biden, electors to Congress, regardless of their vote counts. 

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2021 Pork Report: Beale Street Irish Car Bombs. Billion Dollar Handout for Ford to Move to West Tennessee Megasite

 

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2021 Pork Report: Exhaust Smoked Ham with Nashville-Hot Honey Glaze. A Tax Dollar Grab through Outdated Emissions Testing

 

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