Shades of Art Mafia Behind City Council Meeting, July 24

Good news and bad news. Good news is the Renaissance Faire, artisans, artisans are reborn from the ashes of a near-death experience. Bad news is, they seem to be uncritically accepting control of the new "Culture Commission" structure that is being imported from Massachusetts (with a strong Seattle contingent). But one has to hope there are enough independent artists and independent arts groups, as well as a strong enough local economy, that the kind of control the Massachusetts-based activists are trying to win is not going to be handed over without a fight.

What I am talking about was not up front on this week's agenda, but it came up during the Citizen Communications at the June 18 meeting, (see link in sidebar).

I haven't got the emotional energy to footnote the following history all at once. I'll add links by & by. If you can't google up the proof of what I am about to tell you, please post your comments or questions and I'll reply with details. To really describe what is happening in Austin, it is necessary to tell you what happened with the same crew ten years ago in Massachusetts. When you read it you might not want to be identified as agreeing, particularly if you have a public job, and so I won't require log-in to post and I will delete only unnecessary obscenity.

Control, Not support, of the Arts

This incoming Culture Commission is not a "new" direction, although it may be new to Austin. It is as old as tyranny. The truth is never told about what the NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) did in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, in the 1980's and 1990's, when it helped one of the first and most powerful culture commissions get set up: The Berkshire Artisans. It moved into a vibrant arts community and virtually destroyed it. It is hard to describe the setting of the Culture Commission's "death-art" project that had been set up in an abandoned department store in the center of that small city, and which the mayor finally bulldozed. The lies that covered this sequence of events are a testament to the incredible gullibility that cripples modern society.

That project was part of a massive activist effort that was responsible for a spike in teen suicides across the region, and it was also part of a genocidal hazardous waste spill, a deliberate dumping, that resulted in a 25% miscarriage (not abortion) rate because of PCB pollution of the soil and water-table all through the Housatonic valley. It was the GE Housatonic Superfund site.

It was unbeliveable. People like Steve Spielberg moved in to suck the blood from the corpse: he's just one big name among the imported Hollywood and New York artists who replaced the natural community that once thrived in those hills. (Governor Weld, by the way, had signed exactly the same agreement with the media gliterati on behalf of unaware Massachusetts that Governor Perry signed last year, on behalf of unaware Texas.)

Texans don't know the bloody history of the Culture Commission because it didn't happen down here, but now the "Artisan" project is down here, and it is about to bite Texas in its collective ass, which appears to be Austin.

Austin is to become America's Sarajevo, Texas's own death-ridden Pittsfield. I am not speaking figuratively. The same terrorists who referred to the genocide of the artists of Sarajevo as "Ethnic Cleansing" and who are moving into position around Austin have already shown up in City Hall, last month, whith their falsified "statistics" and their heavy-handed threats of dire consequences if the City Council does not hand them control of all the Arts funding in this city.

Brazen Abuse of Public Trust

Councilor Shade bragged during her campaign about her use of Americorps volunteers. She should be impeached for election funding fraud if indeed she did that, but that is a digression and, to me, not a battle worth fighting when the problem is so much bigger than that. Yet her willingness to brag so brazenly about her use of Americorps, and her part in setting it up in the first place, speaks volumes.

Americorps "volunteers" are an important part of the coming genocide that will involve the City Hall arts commission, because the first thing they are trained to do, is to lie. They are not "volunteers", they are students who are recruited to get college money for acting as temp labor in social service agencies all over the country. They are paid the same as any other unskilled laborers and they are taught not to respect either themselves or the working people in the communities they serve, because they are taught that a little money is not real money. So if their agencies steal a little, how is it different from what each and every Americorps volunteers does each time he or she uses that term? An honest person whose honesty has not been compromised has a much easier time resisting corruption than an honest person who has, through confusion and inexperience, been persuaded to lie.

The lies are an important part of Americorps training because nobody can lie to another human being without at least partially dehumanizing that other human being. It is basic training in corruption. It is also "stage one" genocidal training: dehumanizing the other people one serves. "Cleansing" the city of such people is stage two genocide. The churches are already leading the way in that regard, with their increasing efforts to build isolated "leper colonies" (to quote one protesting citizen who spoke at today's City Hall meeting) that will serve to involve the rest of the citizens in pogroms within another year or so. The pogroms may not be against Jews, and that only serves to underline a near-forgotten part of the history of modern genocide: The Jews were the last group to be systematically isolated and killed by Hitler's German followers. They began their genocide on the poor, the disabled, and the homeless, and as they ran out of victims, only then did they begin to openly home in on the middle-class Jews. The Jews were only 60% of the victims of that genocidal German nation. For some reason, the American nation does not want to remember that.

Randi Shade Exploits Homosexuals

Once the first part of that Americorps training has been accomplished, then it is easy for people like Councillor Shade to sic the hate-based gay-lesbian brigades on the rest of the community without facing much opposition. Just exactly like Nazi Germany did in their own famous exploitation and betrayal of the homosexual community in the 1930's. It is easy for Shade to pretend the lies she told about Jennifer Kim were not hate-based and racist because no one in her circle will resist or expose her. Liars are not famous for resisting other liars. The whole gay-lesbian poltical culture is a culture of lies. They have no redeeming qualities and the only redeeming quality of the Americorps volunteers is that their youth may empower at least some of them to outgrow the training and reclaim their integrity after their uncomfortable year of "service".

The Original Culture Commission: Lies, Greed, & Americorps/Vista

The original Culture Commission that is entangled with Mass MOCA ("Museum of Contemprary Art) in North Adams, Massachusetts was headed by a former Americorps/Vista volunteer Dan O'Connell. Dan O'Connell was the son of a former Pittsfield, Massachusetts mayor and also of a family that owned an oil heating company, O'Connell Oil. He took office as the Culture Commissar just as Jack Welch was pulling the plug on the GE workers. He managed all the money that was being sent to Pittsfield from Washington DC via the Kennedy conduit of the NEA money. Tiny Massachusetts, the size of a Texas county, took 20% of the national arts funding, and most of that did not stay in Boston but was shipped west to tiny Pittsfield and then given not to Massachusetts artists, but to New York artists who came in for the kill as soon as O'Connell sent word.

Picture it: a city smaller than Austin, certainly less important, and most of the working class works at one plant, GE. Highly paid, secure. Around them the old small-town industries of the papermills were turning out the finest art paper and wallpaper, even the US treasury currency paper was made there, and all scattered among idyllic dairy farms, boarding schools, and millionaires' summer camps.

The Truth About Jack Welch

Jack Welch arrived there in the late 1970's. Just about that time the PCB disposal was becoming a problem. The local hippies were doing ok, but the political Left was looking for new blood, since the Vietnam War was over and the Persian Gulf had yet to heat up. There was a commmittee in Boston called the "GE Project" that had focussed on weapons made in Pittsfield during the Vietnam War. Those of us who participated in the anitwar effort were busy embarking on our individual lives while the bored Leftists played around with way-out-firnge feminism (not the equal-rights feminism for which many of us fought so hard, but the weird man-hating stuff that no one really took seriously.)

Christina Hoff Sommers, a Clark University professor, wrote about the awakening of that radical fringe group in her book, "Who Stole Feminism?" She describes a lot of what happened, but while wearing academic blinders. She was too polite to point out that what she identified as unscientific and politicized false data that was used by the fringe-feminists to steal millions of dollars of art money was fraud: it was organized crime. And it was done during the years the FBI office in Massachusetts was being run by a man who later became one of the FBI's 10 most wanted: Whitey Bulger. Yet she described the scheme accurately, including some of the violence against professors and students, and that, too, was right out of a Nazi scene from 1939. She described it all clearly enough for anyone to see. They used art, and psychological terror on school-children, not just physical assault, to attack all of the families and artists in Massachusetts.

"Needs Enhancement"

While Jack Welch was sowing his seeds of destruction all through the new nonprofit arts commission groups in Pittsfield, all of it was headed by the same Dan O'Connell who has his fingers in Austin's pie right now. The new group of artists who moved into Berkshire county and helped run the native artists out of town were setting up "death art" as part of the gay-lesbian "needs enhancement" campaign. That was the campaign to increase teen suicides by challenging high school students to identify themselves as "gay" so that the funding Sommers describes would be approved. It was openly discussed in activist circles in Boston, particularly among Unitarians, some of whom spearheaded direct assaults on teenagers at Pittsfield's Taconic High School in the 1990's. Strategically, the Unitarians played into the game because it was a rule in Massachusetts that any special school funding had to serve at least 10% of the population, but the actual, scientific incidence of gay identity among teens is far lower than 10%.

Pink Floyd & Whitey & The Irish FBI Mafia

Bill Weld, aka "Pink Floyd", was governor. Whitey Bulger was not yet on the lamb. He's the notorious Irish mafia thug who got the Boston field officeof the FBI to participate in hits, even intermarry with the Southies. Whitey's brother, State Rep William Bulger, was head of the Massachusetts Supreme Court. Some sons of a few Kennedy associates got involved in drowning two men by shoving their car into a lake just south of Pittsfield in 1981 and got away with it. They served 30 days, for fighting. They were let out for Christmas holidays and there were demonstrations in the town against it. One of the two victims was the son of one of the most influential union stewards GE faced: Barry Griffin, who'd gone down to the GE plant in Houston to a leader in the only unionized machine shop in all of Texas. Griffin knew about the PCB's and he knew who worked for Jack Welch. Whitey Bulger's brother William stood against the Griffin and Retzel families in the Massachusetts Supreme Court and helped set an important legal precedent against due process.

That is when O'Connell threw the Culture Commission into high gear. Soon after, William Bulger had moved from Boston to Western Massachusetts where he became president of the University of Massachusetts, keeping the money conduit flowing.

By the mid 1990's, the lesbian fringe-feminists had moved into military-style marches, complete with butch-like sergeants commanding the women, most of whom were clients of a rape-crisis center who were told to join the demonstrations in order to keep their shelter services and get their welfare checks. By then Jack Welch had closed GE down, having presided over the deliberate disposal of the PCB's into the Housatonic Valley, including distributing some of the contaminated soil to the ethnic & Black neighborhoods as "clean fill", which contributed to the 25% miscarriage rate.

On the Lamb In Texas

When Whitey Bulger went on the lamb, he came to Texas. For years he was able to "hide" all along the Route 10 corridor between New Orleans and east of Austin. He murdered at least nine people in Massachusetts. His cohorts around Dan O'Connell and the bizarre fringe cult inside the feminist movement murdered close to that many more, but only a few of their crimes got prosecuted, and those of course were supposedly "random".

We may be as doomed as those Jewish passangers of a cruise ship that nearly failed to make it out of Hitler's nightmare, but we must cling to some hope, just as they did. There is an important difference between Texas today and Massachusetts ten years ago. The Culture Commission up there was able to set itself up in an economically devastated death zone with very little opposition. The Catholic Church played a prominent role is silencing critics and whistleblowers, but that is important only in-so-far-as the Catholic Church as an organization is corrupt and its role in politics is largely unexamined. That role has nothing to do with theology, sex, & faith, and it not unique to the Catholic Church. Austin is still vibrant and alive. Texans have their own way of doing things, and the incoming carpetbaggers from New York, Boston and Seattle (there is a real history to Seattle being part of that, too, going back to 1972) are not going to find it as easy a kill as they found in Pittsfield.

Summer's Almost Over, CARITAS is up, Hearings Scheduled For New Budget....

End of summer break. The City Council is back with 101 issues on the table. The one thing that jumps out on first glance over the agenda is that there are five issues concerning the airport: Assistant City Manager Robert Goode is being appointed to the Board of Directors, the other four items concern concession lease renewals & extentions.

2008-09 Budget

A bigger item is the fiscal 2008-09 budget. The schedule of Public Hearings on the budget is to be set up, so mark your calenders and start training for the arm-wrestling matches.

Bicycle Bridge

$600,000 is up for approval for a Mopac bicycle bridge. This is a start on some real change that can benefit some healthy athletic people as well as everyone who breathes air. But is that really enough? The entire road & street system needs to be opened up to more bicycle traffic, and while they are at it, how about a "motorscooter" consideration for the rest of us? Think of the savings on gas as well as space and pollution! We should have motorscooter concessions leasing them to people at the bus transit centers. And you can park three times as many motor scooters as cars in the same space, so think about the relief of congestion downtown. Congress Ave could be limited to parked scooters! Commuters could easily arrange a lease with something like the bus-pass system and the scooters could have strong enough location detectors in them to be theft-proof. (Yeah yeah yeah, "location detector"="big brother", but just how secret is the average commuter's route? Anyway, it would just assure that the rented scooter is not lost to the leasing system. An alternative could be that the leased scooter is plugged into a prearranged destination....)

(BTW: if anyone picks up on this idea and makes a million bucks, please cut me a check for the creative idea :D, or at least buy me a scooter! )

CARITAS

CARITAS is up for another re-house the homeless grant. That should not be as automatic an approval as some people would like. CARITAS ran a very underhanded campaign to de-fund the Salvation Army last year, mainly becauce the Salvation Army's tradition is not to include political re-education and benefits "entitlement" in their appraoch to helping the homeless. CARITAS does not actually house anyone, and until they began attacking the Salvation Army last year, the Salvation Army was the only agency actually giving women a pallet on the floor if they showed up in emergency after all the bunks were fulled with women enrolled in various help programs. CARITAS staff ran a campaign along with a couple of radical Americorps volunteers to shut down those night services that were the most important to women in crisis. the city's own shelter, the ARCH, did not house women at night, only men. CARITAS knew this, and the churches that run CARITAS also knew this. The Catholics, Lutherans, Episcopaleans, & such could not tolerate the simple life-saving help the Salvation Army was giving women from all walks of life in the middle of the night.

CARITAS exploits & endangers women

CARITAS staff lied about their women's groups, claiming they were for helping the chronically unemployed learn new skills and attitudes from blue-collar and better-trained women, but in fact the groups were for gay-lesbian re-education and for indoctrination against the traditional "patriachal" attitudes of the Salvation Army. Now, I will be as quick as the next independent American woman to criticize the Salvation Army's religious beliefs about women, but they never imposed those beliefs on people outside their church staff, and in the middle of the night a woman trying to escape Austin's street-slave trade needs someplace safer and more accessible than CARITAS.

Predators and CARITAS

While I am on the subject of organizations who exploit and misrepresent statistics in order to get money that does NOT reach the supposed beneficiaries of the grants, something needs to be done about these same corrupt nonprofits placing sexual predators into the connecting points between law enforcement, the courts, and children. Everyone knows about the court advocate who was recently arrested in Austin for sexually assaulting children and videotaping the assaults. Does anyone know CARITAS role in this type of situation? CARITAS is supported by the Catholic Church. I am Catholic, so I know whereof I speak of my own kind, I am not afraid to point out that Bishop Aymond has a negative listing from his previous work in Louisiana, and he is one of the overseers of these so-called faitbh-based "advocacy" agencies. (Here is his listing in the Catholic "Bishop Accountability" website: http://www.bishop-accountability.org/resources/resource-files/databases/DallasMorningNewsBishops.htm)

You can't avoid the way these nonprofits unprofessionally and dishonestly present themselves as "saviors" of children while they harbor and coddle active predators in their midst. I live in a working-class neighborhood and mingle freely with the kind of people these agencies are supposed to be serving (and to be fair, there is still enough good in human nature that some of their staff people do the best they can, in spite of the corruption of the political activists and executives of those agencies)

So-called "Advocates" Make Children Available

Just recently, I was standing a good 20 feet away from two people talking, in a public place, and I could hear the whole gossip fest. A judge took the children away from two parents, according to the loud and totally UNconfidential "advocate" who was talking. . It would take less than fifteen minutes for any predator within earshot to track down the family in question and find those kids. Based on her job as an interpretor and based on finding out the dockets of certain courts, he could find her name in the public record and discover which children are now in that highly dangerous zone of transition from family to foster care. And most likely, the predator would be a gentle-spoken person who could count on the confidence and protection of the so-called "advocacy" system, the one providing FAKE legal aid and FAKE assistance in order to ensure that the criminal underworld thrives while the honest middle and working class people become its victims.

A Zone of Vulnerability

That time & space that follows in the few days after a judge's decision is a zone of emotional confusion and fast-paced bureaucratic case-management. It is one of the primary zones in which the professional pedophile and slave predator rings strike, and that is why there has always been a traditiona of strict confidentiality around family court cases! Look it up in any state in the union and find out what the statistics are for children "lost in the system", when and how they get "lost". And to top it off, the advocate lives in an adults-only building that just happens to be a building of choice, if not last-resort, for sex offendors who either plead out or serve out their time and then face restrictions against living near children, just like the no-child condominiums favored by a certain sector of the upper classes. I saw that advocate openly bragging about a family's case, not even just to people she knows, but out in public places where people 20 feet away can hear, and where some of Troxell's professional drug-addicted panhandlers ply their trade! (Troxell's scam is a column for another day, but just do the math: he, along with CARITAS and the Loaves & Fishes crew, claims everyone who is low-income is "homeless" in order to inflate the actual statistics as a fraud fundraising ploy. Everyone knows it, but everyone plays along, because the churches that run CARITAS also run the hospitals and have their activist members embedded in the schools and social clubs where they can and do terrify potential critics with the threat of consequences to families members.)

Who You Gonna Call?

I was angry enough to try to make a child-endangerment report on that advocate. I did not have my cell phone ready and I only carry plastic, no coins. So I went to a pay phone to use 311 to report the advocate's violation of that family's privacy and the children's safety. Guess what? Those 311 and 211 calls cannot receive calls from pay-phones! This is the very type of call that they are supposed to be handling, in order to take the burden off the 911 system. When I went to the manager to tell him his pay-phone was broken, he said that the calls are simply not allowed by the city and advised me to call 911 and have the 911 operator switch over to the 311, which finally I did. Apparently this is now the routine, because the 911 operator did not seem to mind and shifted me over to a routine APD number. The individual I spoke to there advised me to report the incident through the child-protection system.

So, right there in a nutshell: a system designed to make "soft" reports gets shoved back into the more expensive "hard crisis" system while an advocate paid for by the city via these CARITAS-type grants is openly advertising available children to anyone within earshot of a loud conversation, never mind whether the person she was telling had any right to know.

That money that the city is considering giving CARITAS would be better spent on an investigation of the entire set-up of the so-called "advocacy" system and the presence of a ring of protection that exists around the professional predators inside that system.

Vets Warned Away From CARITAS

And I do have an unconfirmed report from a Gulf veteran who recently won his disability that the VA warned him specifically against allowing CARITAS to assign a payee to his case. In our own casual conversation, in which I was telling him my opinion that he'd be better off to talk to a bank about setting up automatic bill payments than getting a payee, he said "well, the VA told me they won't allow CARITAS, anyway."

City money is wasted on CARITAS. There is too much fraud involved in how they get the money and how they spend it.

Preferential Treatment For Ex-Offenders?

Recently we happened to have the tv tuned to Channel 6 outside of the regular City Council time and we caught another group in action: the Human Rights Commission. They were listening to presentations on the question of giving ex-offenders preferential treatment similar to the "affirmative action" model, particularly in the job interview/hiring process. Whatever the Human Rights Commission decides will be presented to the City Council as a recommendation, so if this issue concerns you, it might be a good idea to contact the City Clerk and find out when meetings, hearings, and decision-points are likely to be reached.

Here is a link to this commission's page in the City hall site: http://www.ci.austin.tx.us/agenda/2008/rights_062308.htm

You know, "Affirmative Action" started out as an idea that made sense. Our history and culture has allowed us to erect unconscious barriers in society to the advancement of people who have certain physical, inborn traits that we know have nothing to do with mental or intellectual competence: race and gender, and "Affrimative Action" seemed like a necessary step to take in breaking down those barriers. It has been somewhat expanded to include lifestyle choices such as homosexuality, culture and religion because there are strong arguments that these are at least partially inborn traits or are important private choices, and in any case are not normally violating another person's rights. But the notion of giving "ex-offenders", people who have been found guilty of crimes and done time, anything like an "Affirmative -Action" eligibility boggles the mind.

The main point seems to be "Ban the Box", a movement to prohibit employers from asking about criminal convictions on job applications. But affirmative action requirements that include bringing job offerings to ex-offender populations were also mentioned. These could be requirements for employers.

There are legitimate issues about job applications that ask such questions as "have you ever been arrested?" which probably should be prohibited because it is too easy for a corrupt society to subject people to arrest for no good reason. Such arrests usually are tossed out of court, if they get that far, and the person should never have to refer to it when filling out applications, but convictions? There are processes by which an unjust conviction can be overturned or expunged. We may need to expand and strengthen those processes, but we don't need to protect the people who were rightfully convicted of crimes. We may even be giving a message to young people that they can get extra points in careers if they get in trouble!

Job applications should certainly be simplified and sensitive questions should be held back to a more secure level, especially concerning the ease with with completely unauthorized an unqualified workers can read them in some companies where they are left sitting on a shift-manager's desk or a public counter, but affirmative action for ex-offenders????

Comments welcome, because this subject sure does need discussion!

Governor's Mansion Fire Cited As Warning

Today at City Hall a young child addressed the City Council on a consolidation proposal by first saying that what happened to the Governor's Mansion needs to be noticed. She then spoke about graffitti as art, referring to the famous "frog" icon on the drag and mentioning that this icon has shown up in other cities. She gave a most unchild-like speech about graffitti as art. She closed with an appeal to the Council to support article 59.

(An aside: here is a very interesting link to an article about the City Council voting last year to spend $50,000 on "graffiti education", dailytexanonline.com )

She was followed by an adult who spoke about meeting with the NEA in Colorado in preparation to bring this new division program to Austin.

Forgive this reporter for not noting all the names down for this article. This reporter was sitting in near-shock. This reporter is a survivor of the graffitti-driven and violent gang that set up a similar commission in Pittsfield, Massachusetts in the late 1980's that drove all independent artists out of that city while the political group that remained shoved death-oriented and extreme left-wing violent art projects into the high schools and into the public arena. Several people died suspiciously while fighting that group. The corruption in Massachusetts has always been notorious and need not be discussed here, except when it casts its shadow as far as Texas.

The proposed creation of this new Arts Division involves the merging of six city committees/commissions and looks like simply a move towards efficiency, but it covers a more sinister agenda. Someone coached that young child to open her remarks with reference to the burning of the Governor's Mansion and reference to the "need" to see graffitti as art, something no child of her apparent 9-12 years (at most) would have done on her own. Someone brought her around to see graffitti matching Austin marks in several cities, according to her own remarks as she described her surprise and she was told that the appearance of these marks in places like New York means Austin is very important.

The child who spoke in Austin is African-American, but the people responsible for exploiting children in New York and Massachusetts in this left-wing "art" tactic are mostly white racists. They are skilled at choosing unsuspecting or vulnerable people to deflect responsibility for their well-orchestrated violence and propaganda.

The Austin Egalitarian believes we have been given a warning, and that a very surreptitious and home-grown terrorist group is taking credit for the arson at the Governor's Mansion as their opening salvo.

Notice the new graffiti around town, the hanging bat? Look for more art-edgy projects involving school children and teachers who will be claiming this is art.

What it really is, is an opportunity for some "teachers" and other adults to bring children into contact with street violence, teaching them to see police authjority as the "enemy" and moving them into the role of violent confrontation with the "evil" authorities, because the children do not have the experience to understand that the innocent appearance of a bat or a frog is not the point: the vandalism of property is the point.

These home-grown terrorists who are snatching the minds of children right in front of us in City Hall are teaching the children the "property is theft" extremism of anarchist socialism, that is the kind that results in violence. And in order to succeed, they need not only the protection of City Hall which will fear embarrassment if they are investigated, but they also need to drive all the independent professional artists out of town, in order to silence the voices most likely to be influential in the early stages of resisting this incredible coup in Texas.

Nightmare On Second Street

It boggles the mind. One begins to wonder if one accidently signed up for some kind of Orwellian "Reality" show. One begins to wonder if some kind of Jim Jonesian kool-aid is being sipped up there on the dais.

I'm talking about Article 18:
"Approve an ordinance authorizing the acceptance of $30,000 in grant funds from the TEXAS DEPARTMENT OF STATE HEALTH SERVICES, GOVERNOR’S ADVISORY COUNCIL ON PHYSICAL FITNESS, Austin, TX; and amending the Fiscal Year 2007-2008 Health and Human Services Operating Budget Special Revenue Fund of Ordinance No. 20070910-003 to appropriate $30,000 to restructure the Mayor's Fitness Council and create a web-based Austin Fitness Index. Funding in the amount of $30,000 is available from the Texas Department of State Health Services, Governor’s Council on Physical Fitness, Austin, Texas. The grant period is May 1, 2008 through October 31, 2008. "

By itself, it looks innocuous. Maybe the City Hall is going to engage in a little promotional propaganda for getting people to use stairs instead of elevators, etc.

I was late for the meeting. As I sat down, a well-tanned middle-aged man was speaking. It was Lou Earle, publisher & CEO of Austin Fit Magazine. He was describing a plan to use the $30,000 grant in a program that will facilitate the placement of volunteers inside "faith-based organizations" and "affinity groups" as well as places of employment, in order to accomplish "real behavior change" regarding tobacco use, obesity, and other health issues.

Not one comment or question came from anyone on the dais. No one seemed to realize that if you have a government-paid set of "volunteers" embedding themselves inside existing organizations for the purpose of coercing "behavior change" in the members private lives, then you have.......

Well, you have....

Full-blown, unadulterated, pure FASCISM.

What else is it? A person joins a faith-based group for many reasons having nothing to do with "fitness" and certainly has the right to engage in faith-based activities without worrying about "fitness". What kind of misery is going to be visited upon such people when they discover they cannot engage in their chosen activities without facing invasive, intrusive questions about their diet, exercise, and health from these intrusive "fitness" experts? What about the other affinity groups? The art groups and book clubs, the garden groups and charity orgs? Are they all going to be forced to treat perceived "unfit" people as pariahs, are they all going to be trained in the art of mobbing and ostracizing the recalcitrant smoker or drinker?

And couple this with the other looming shadow of Fascism, the Parks Dept recent decision that groups of people exercising with an instructor need to pay $500 a year to assemble on public land, and you see why I call this a nightmare. It is a real one-two-punch.

Consider this hypothetical situation: an individual develops a personal network of friends with a common interest, maybe they sing in a choral group. The group gets noticed by the city-supported "fitness promoters" who will embed one of their trainers in it to start forcing the singers to gang up on any smokers or fat people. All of a sudden the rehearsals are places where snide, nasty remarks and syrupy-scary "invitations" to change are going to be repeated every week.

Now since smokers and fat people are approved hate-objects, many readers might say "so what?" Well, what about the thin person who may be using the easy camaraderie of a faith-based singing group to overcome anorexia or bulimia? And what about the fat person who is not a glutton but who is carrying weight that may have accumulated over a number of years after a heart ailment or other issue put the kabosh to exercise? Do these people now have to face being spoken to in that elitist, patronizing, dehumanizing tone that Fascists use for average citizens?

Ok, so we don't care about exascerbating normal human frailties with City-hall sponsored fascism. Let's look at the compliant, obedient members of our hypothetical "affinity" or "faith-based" group: the ones who try to overcome the psychological bullying by agreeing to meet together to exercise and support each other.

Now they are going to be approached by the Parks "thought police" who are going to publicly humiliate them with questions about what do they think they are doing, showing up to exercise together, because they are going to have to prove that none of them is an instructor.

End result: average people will stay home. Harmless little volunteer groups and hobby clubs will disband because of hurt feelings and well-founded fears of intrusion into family and private lives. The animosity that will be encouraged by City Hall's support of the fitness trainers will cause more illness, more unhealthy habits, than will be cured. People will be forced to answer personal questions asked by strangers and if they don't co-operate with those trainers, the trainers will step up to "interventions".

And what really is known about fitness? I am no expert but I do know this: at one time all alcohol was considered the demon's work, but then science showed that moderate wine and beer consumption has health benefits. I know that the explosion in obesity followed the drive to eliminate tobacco from common use, and I have wondered about the actual relative cost of lung cancer compared to type II diabetes and other complications of obesity. I also am aware that many prescription medications have weight gain as a side effect and some are known to cause type II diabetes in most people if they are used continuously for three or more years.

What people need is to be left alone. The City can best encourage fitness by telling the Parks department to forget the $500 fees and let people enjoy a safe and pleasant landscape in which to walk, jog, dance and play. The City should eliminate most car traffic from the core and also set up bike-only arteries into it so that people will just naturally become more active. Give that $30,000 to a fitness program that may include some kind of reward to businesses that install fitness equipment and showers or that give employees credit in nearby fitness centers like Gold's Gym, but don't burden us all with yet another layer of obnoxious attitude-police!

May 27: Next Meeting: June 5th. Present Concern: Open Those Mikes!

I try to keep a general list of agenda items in the bottom of this page for quick reference, but it has not been posted yet. When it is I will update that list. The link to "City Clerk: Council Meetings" in the sidebar leads to the latest agenda updates in the city's own site. The coming meeting schedule is June 5 and June 18. (The June 19th meeting has been moved to observe Juneteenth celebrations.) The next "work session" is June 4th.

A major concern is the manner in which several special interests have been blocking regular citizens from being able to speak at the open mike session that is supposed to provide contact with City Council. Normally, ten people are allowed to speak on any issue for three minutes each. But normally, Jennifer Gale and Carolannerose Kennedy show up EVERY WEEK in order to filibuster with hateful and ignorant remarks. Jennifer Gale, a transvestite, likes to make comments that vaguely resemble attempts to represent the police and the city bus drivers. Sometimes she brags of having "broken" a bus strike, which to this old union steward sounds really strange. Carolannerose Kennedy likes to recite inane poetry with an insulting, vaguely obscene tone while she throws things on the floor. It is an insult to the rest of the citizens of this fine city to see the way these two performers are allowed to embarrass us all, and it is an abuse of a system intended to support a democratic government process.

We'd like to see the City Council introduce a rotation into the system, perhaps by giving extra points to new speakers and shoving frequent flyers off the bottom of the list. We have issues like the 3.5-second crossing light on St. John's where there is a camera for catching jaywalkers and a building that includes more than a half-dozen residents who use wheelchairs, walkers and canes while trying to cross to the bus stop. People in that building have actually found it safer to jaywalk some distance from the corner in order to give turning motorists a chance to slow down instead of clipping them as they turn even when the pedestrian light is on. Motorists do not respect that white figure, they take their right-turn-on-red without looking. Now some retirees and veterans among others may have to face big fines on fixed incomes because of the short light and the watching camera.

We have issues like the growing problem of drunk cyclists on sidewalks who can do serious damage to pedestrians who can't react to their horns or bells. I, for one, have a hearing loss on one side so that I cannot tell how a cyclist is going to pass me when he speeds up behind me ringing his bell. I've been knocked aside twice, so far, this spring, just walking along the sidewalk on Congress. We need to find ways to support both cyclists and pedestrians, especially in the more active neighborhoods.

There are other issues, too. Zenobia Joseph brought up some interesting questions about children's writing programs at the last meeting, and we should hear more from parents about these issues. We should hear more from the Asian community, whose shops all over town must be seeing some effects from the shifting sands of business development.

One man I met while leafletting told me he has lots of questions about the flood-safety of the new riverside developments. He said his big complaint is that the City Council wants "to dance" while these questions, at least for him, go unanswered. "We didn't elect them so they could see a show", he said. City Council needs to hear from people like him. City Councillors need his vote as much as anyone else's.

It is always very dangerous for any government to lose connection with its own constituency. City Hall needs to keep those channels of communication open and not be fooled by the fact that one of the main obstacles to open communication, Jennifer Gale, spouts pablum about "open government" and the supposed need of an "ombudsman". City hall does not have to add another layer of bureaucracy in the form of an "ombudsman". It just needs to introduce a better rotation system into the speaking order at the open Citizen Communication sessions. There is so much valuable work that gets done at those sessions even now that it would be a shame to fail to open them up a little more.

22nd: Plastic Bottles & Green Water

Plastic Bottles: item #24 "Approve a resolution directing the City Manager to eliminate City purchase of plastic water bottles for use inside governmental facilities in City Hall and to present a plan to the City Council for reducing plastic bottle use in all City operations." (click here for full resolution)

The discussion of this resolution was a little confusing, since at first it sounded like the proposal would discourage carried water bottles. City purchase is the key here, and it means someone in City Hall is admitting that the emperor of bottled-water-land has no clothes: unless you're importing some exotic sparkling spring water, that stuff all came out of someone else's faucet!

So the big plastic water jugs that are not disposable will still be in use, but cases of individual bottles will not be draining taxpayers' money into that great plastic island in the Pacific Ocean... nice.

We just hope they don't get mad at people like us who carry plastic bottles in our packs. Even when we can afford to buy a plastic empty bottle for $5 at a sporting-goods store, we can never remember where we left it and so the old refill-the-pepsi-bottle trick works fine. No one wants to face a couple of blocks as a summer pedestrian without a full bottle of water!

Green Water: Item #40 in today's agenda brought a host of architectural firms to City Hall to put on some pretty fancy presentations showing off what they can build on the Green Water Treatment plant site. We won't try to discuss the individual companies here, except to say that it was gratifying to see a City government willing to carry this part of the process out in public. Those Austinites who have the expertise to ask the right questions can tune into Cable Channel 6 at 10:30 Saturday morning or 4:30 on Sunday and see all the dog & pony shows for themselves.

In general, though, we always wonder about high-rise residential buildings. Several of the proposals included this type of development. Part of the discussion concerned the problem that high-rise condominiums usually are not in the "affordable" range. But what never got mentioned is why anyone would want to live in such a tall building no matter what the cost. Not to rain on anyone's parade, but we do live in uncertain times. Give us walkable staircases and openable windows for those unforeseen catastrophes that may result in a power outage for a few days in August. We really do believe more wariness should be felt about this type of super-dense residential development because there are ramifications for times of natural disaster, civil unrest, or economic collapse.

Wouldn't Austin be better off to develop wide swaths of medium-density residential complexes (six stories or less) and consolidate all the other activities into the towers? Wouldn't such residential buildings be more hospitable to lower-impact energy use?