Boy saw this coming from a mile away. Make your own opinion as I won’t bother repeating the reporting from The Journal

http://www.journalnow.com/news/local/city-council-approves-new-financing-deal-for-ballpark/article_ff1f310a-bebb-11e3-82c6-0017a43b2370.html

Day of the dozen is what they call it. Today only with this coupon you can buy any dozen Krispy Kreme Doughnuts and get a FREE dozen of glazed.

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I cannot even believe this story but it appears the Planning Board is about to approve a new Walmart Grocery Store on Country Club near the intersection of Country Club and Meadowlark. Anyone with half a brain knows that Country Club cannot support any more traffic than it already has especially during peak travel times. With the numerous wreaks on 421 between Peace Haven and Lewisville-Clemmons Road Country Club becomes the backup for many of those living in the Lewisville area. On top of this you have a blind curve, a hill which has an abundance of accidents on it during bad weather and an Elementary School less than half a mile away.

What fool thinks it’s a good idea to increase traffic density by building another grocery store in an area that has three grocery stores within two miles and four more in under three miles?!

Apparently the Planning Board Staff does so if you want to voice your opinions I suggest you make sure they are heard quickly.

Journal article on rezoning .

Planning Board Staff and Numbers.

Gary Roberts, Project Planner, Winston-Salem Planning Board [email protected]

In what could only be presented as a “I told you so” Winston-Salem approved a 3.9 cent per $100 property value rate increase. The city also decided to provide for pay raises for city employees up to 3%, this for employees that make in the $35,000 range for answering phones. And don’t think you are going to get away from paying these tax increases as they also increased the tax on your cemetery plot!

In what could only be presented as a “I told you so” Winston-Salem approved a 3.9 cent per $100 property value rate increase. The city also decided to provide for pay raises for city employees up to 3%, this for employees that make in the $35,000 range for answering phones. And don’t think you are going to get away from paying these tax increases as they also increased the tax on your cemetery plot!

Due to the high level of attempted SPAM messages, bogus account creations as well as direct hacking against the site I have had to change the comment and new user access pages. If you have trouble adding a comment or are trying to create a new login and get redirected to the FBI then sorry but your actions looked suspicious to the server.

U.S. Counterterrorism Agency Can See All Your Files

mashable.com | Dec 14th 2012 1:15 AM

At a secret White House meeting last March, the Department of Homeland Security argued against a sweeping change in rules covering the way the government collects information on American citizens. The DHS lost.

That’s the gist of a cracker of a story from the Wall Street Journal‘s Julia Angwin today.

Angwin pieced together heavily redacted documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, plus information gleaned from unnamed sources, to establish that the National Counterterrorism Center now has clearance to examine any federal government file on any U.S. resident or citizen and to retain that information for up to five years.

The NCTC will also allow foreign governments to look at the information it collects on U.S. citizens.

Previously, the NCTC could retain information only about people it could prove were connected to a terrorism investigation.

It wasn’t an easy battle. The NCTC faced strong opposition to the rule change, partly from the Department of Justice, but mostly from DHS, which, according to Angwin’s story, has 100 people devoted to civil-rights and civil-liberties issues.

Despite the objections to the new rules, which one DHS officer called “a sea change in the way that the government interacts with the general public,” the DOJ overruled the DHS’ objections and approved the changes.

The DOJ and DHS staffers who opposed the rule change have since left government service.

Now, the NCTC can request information from any other federal agency — be it Veterans Affairs, Health and Human Services or the Internal Revenue Service — on any “U.S. person,” which in this context means a citizen, permanent resident, corporation or association.

That means, for example, that the National Counterterrorism Center right now could be looking over your mortgage information, health records, tax returns, grant applications or any other document produced when you interacted with the federal government in any way.

Because every federal agency has its own rules for handling sensitive personal data, each one will negotiate, or already has negotiated, a separate agreement with the NCTC about how its information will be handled and retained.

Information collected by state and local governments does not appear to be subject to the new rules.

This article originally published at TechNewsDaily here

Listening to a broken record? Just maybe as Winston-Salem has approved $2.25 million in incentives to Herbalife is they decide to move into the old Dell plant. The County and State are looking at adding at least another $10 million to that pot. I guess there is some logic to paying another company to come move into a building vacated by the last major business you paid to move here considering that last one, Dell, did not ever meet it’s hiring projections and closed within no time as the PC market was already dying long before the plant even opened up.

I will give Herbalife credit that as a business it has remained stable for a pretty long time but do we really need to pay businesses to open businesses? If we do isn’t there some major flaw in the environment you have have created to begin with and maybe that should be addressed?