Thursday, July 28 from 6 to 8, enjoy networking, hors d’oeuvres and wine and beer and while seeing the latest home trends and getting renovation ideas at Stock Building Supply’s design showroom at 1621 Battleground Ave., formerly Guilford Builders Supply. The event is free to business professionals who sign in and wear a name tag.
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Most people around here had probably not heard of the North Carolina Railroad Company before it agreed to purchase $13 million worth of land in Randolph County for the Greensboro-Randolph Megasite.
But come January, people should recognize the name of one board member. Roy Carroll, the CEO, president and founder of the Carroll Companies and publisher of the Rhino Times, has been appointed by the North Carolina legislature to a seat on the North Carolina Railroad Company (NCRRC) board.
The NCRRC is an odd duck. It is a private corporation entirely owned by the State of North Carolina and it oversees the North Carolina Railroad, which consists of 317 miles of track that runs from Morehead City to Charlotte, going through Greensboro. The members of the NCRRC board are appointed for four-year terms by the North Carolina governor and the legislature.
The NCRRC has about $18 million a year in revenue from renting the railroad track to Norfolk Southern and renting other property the railroad owns. The major investments listed in its annual report are for railroad bridges. The move to economic development, in particular a megasite that is not adjacent to the track, was unusual. It’s the first such investment the NCCRC has made and an indication that the NCCRC is going to get more heavily involved in economic development, not just the business of managing a railroad track.
We should know more about the activities of the NCRR in the future, but it is fitting that someone from Greensboro be on the board, since the company was started by NC Gov. John Motley Morehead, who lived at Blandwood in what is now downtown Greensboro, and the groundbreaking for the railroad in 1851 was held in Greensboro. Morehead also made sure the railroad ran through Greensboro instead of taking a shorter, more southerly route, across the state.
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There is no excuse for the way national and international news organizations report gun violence. The Associated Press on Saturday reported that the shooter in Dallas used an “assault rifle.” He did not. Words have definitions and if AP can’t bother to look a word up, it shouldn’t use it. An assault rifle is a rifle that is capable of fully automatic fire. It is not a semi-automatic rifle that is manufactured to look like an assault rifle.
CBS News made an even dumber blunder, reporting that the shooter had an automatic rifle. This is simply not a term that is used. A rifle can be semi-automatic or fully automatic or bolt action, but there is no such thing as an automatic rifle. If they meant a rifle capable of fully automatic fire they are just wrong.
And as one would expect, the national news media reported that the shooter used an AR-15 rifle, which looks like a military assault rifle and is the kind of weapon that President Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and others want banned. The mainstream news media also reported the shooter in Orlando used an AR-15. In both cases they were wrong.
In Dallas, the shooter used an SKS semi-automatic rifle, which has a wooden stock, no detachable magazine and appears much more like what people think a hunting rifle looks like. Even the Clinton era assault weapons ban didn’t ban this gun, which is considered by many to be an antique.
One might assume that the mainstream media get it wrong because they don’t have anyone on their staffs that knows anything about guns, but it is easy enough to look it up.
The mistakes aren’t because of sloppiness. The AP and CBS News are large news organizations that have plenty of employees capable of looking up terms they don’t understand. In fact, they have people whose job it is to do exactly that, copy editors and fact checkers. The reason that national news organizations continually make these mistakes is to further their own anti-gun agenda.
People all over the country who don’t know a pistol from a shotgun believe that men are running around the countryside with military assault rifles and believe these should be banned. The fact that they are essentially banned makes no difference because they believe what they read in the news media and the news media is constantly reporting that it is true.
Letters to the editor frequently bemoan the fact that people are allowed to own military assault rifles, which isn’t true, but the news media say that it is and I have never once seen a newspaper that has a fact-checking column write about the fact that their reporting on weapons has to be rated “mostly false,” or earn four Pinocchios, or whatever rating system they have because the fact checkers are in on the anti-gun effort also.
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Greensboro City Councilmember Tony Wilkins has a lot of patience. When former Police Chief David Wray’s lawsuit against the city for $220,000 in legal fees, incurred from lawsuits against him for actions while he was chief, was upheld by the North Carolina Court of Appeals, which allows the case to continue, Wilkins asked why the city wasn’t paying Wray’s legal expenses.
Greensboro has a policy dating back to 1980 to pay the legal expenses for employees if those expenses were the result of the employees doing their job. Exceptions where the city won’t pay the legal fees is if the actions were done with “actual fraud, corruption or actual malice.” Wilkins was told the city refused to pay because Wray’s actions were malicious.
Wilkins asked if he could see Wray’s personnel file to find out what malicious activity took place. First, he was told by City Attorney Tom Carruthers he could.
Then Wilkins was told he could see the file if he had a consensus of city councilmembers, and when he asked if the City Council needed to vote, he was told a formal vote wasn’t necessary, that a consensus would be enough. Wilkins had a consensus.
The latest is that Wilkins was told the City Council would have to formally pass a resolution to view Wray’s personnel file. So that is where it stands now.
It seems worth noting that former City Manager Mitch Johnson was fired but the city paid his legal expenses. Wray resigned but his legal expenses have not been paid.
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I am not a medical professional and I don’t play one on TV, but that’s not going to stop me from writing about the Zika virus. It seems most of the emphasis has been on those attending the Olympics in Brazil getting the Zika virus. I’m more concerned about what happens when they go home.
It appears to me that there is a chance for a virus, which is currently confined to one corner of the world, to spread worldwide. There are few events on earth like the summer Olympics, where large numbers of people from all over the world gather in one place for a few weeks and then return home.
If the Zika virus could only be transmitted by one particular type of mosquito and that mosquito only lives in certain areas, it seems the danger wouldn’t be that broad. But we now know that it can also be transmitted through sex. If thousands of people contract the virus and then go to every corner of the world we may find that it there are other ways to get Zika than from sex and mosquitoes
There is now evidence that the Zika virus is transmitted far more often through sex than first thought.
