Blair Hawkins | Charlottesville, Virginia | healingcharlottesville@yahoo.com
Blair's Magazine of Lost History
Table of Contents — Normal — Frames
104 Photos of Cemetery at University of Virginia.
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Blair Hawkins | Charlottesville, Virginia | healingcharlottesville@yahoo.com |
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Blair's Magazine of Lost History
Table of Contents — Normal — Frames
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Repeat Of Last Meeting Disrupted By Mob. Tuesday September 5, 2017.
9-5-2017 City Council Agenda PDF 260 pages from City Hall. The regular public meeting starts at 7:00 p.m first and third Mondays unless holiday. It's usually preceded by a closed meeting. Review of city council procedures. Call to Order. Pledge of Allegiance. Roll Call. Announcements. PUBLIC COMENT. CONSENT AGENDA. Agenda Items { Appropriation (2 readings). Resolution (1 reading). Ordinance (2 readings). Eminent Domain (1 reading). Sale of Seized Property (2 readings). } PUBLIC COMMENT. Adjourn the Meeting. Why don't you trust City Council? The Consent Agenda is their biggest lie. They claim they're not sneaking through legislative items. Yes they are. The items are good enough to pass at the start of the meeting BUT not good enough to be discussed and passed. Moving the item to the end of the meeting proves they are being sneaky. Yet a councilor or city manager will look at you with a straight face and say....Why don't you trust me? What can the citizen do when a politician says something obviously false and dishonest? Speak the truth early and often. The purpose of the speech restrictions since Jan. 2016 was to allow Council to go unchallenged when they speak absurdities. Item K should be dropped. It's a $12,000 matching grant from Va. Department of Historic Resources. Charlottesville is not interested in historic preservation as proven by Lee and Jackson monuments, which is shared history of whites and blacks. City Council has offered not one African-American historical marker. The Vinegar Hill monument is an abstraction, intentionally devoid of actual names and history. Council think they can mandate historic preservation in Rose Hill, Woolen Mills, and Fifeville while destroying history in other parts of town. This double standard proves the bigotry of City Council. Say that and Council will call you a racist for proving they are racists. Furthermore Council will expect respectful treatment in the face of obvious disrespect for the flag to which they pledged allegiance at the start of the meeting.
More about the City Council meetings.
Jesse James (1939). Saturday September 2, 2017. (Post) The most famous Hollywood film about Eminent Domain. First 15 minutes set up the injustice. Claiming government authority, a gang of well-dressed railroad execs move out to acquire land. The 1st family farm gives in to intimidation. If you don't accept what we offer, we will condemn your land and take it and you'll get nothing. The farm just wants a fair offer. Same language as today. The 2nd farm requires violence to seal the deal. To stop the beating of a family member, the owner signs the deed on the dotted line. The 3rd farm is owned by the mother of Frank and Jesse James. She says we'll handle it in court. Railroad won't take "No" for an answer and introduces violence. Frank and Jesse defend the homestead, shoot the railroad boss in the hand when he tries to use a scythe as a weapon. Railroad gang flees, complains to the court and returns with reinforcements. Frank and Jesse flee. Railroad boss throws dynamite into the house and kills the owner, the mother of Jesse James, who returns to kill the boss in front of many witnesses. So Frank and Jesse begin a life of crime, robbing banks and trains. Newspapers champion the righteous cause. Jesse interrupts a church service to marry his sweetheart. The preacher talks about how the railroad stole his own family farm. Plea bargain for a light sentence if Jesse turns himself in. When he does, the government/railroad collusion betray their word and call for the death penalty. Townspeople turn on the authorities and free Jesse James. Soon the original cause is forgotten as the crime spree continues on.
The 1939 movie is a cautionary tale against the modern cycle of land stealing rooted in the Great Depression. Today we remember the Blue Ridge Parkway and Shenandoah National Park as unnecessary and unjustified projects.
What about the public schools? Local system under scrutiny after recent unrest and revelations. Dede Smith speaks out, former City Councilor and School Board Chair. (A) Been there before. School board hired first black woman superintendent Scottie Griffin as a "Change Agent". The debate became "racially charged". Additional security was brought in. Was race used to dismiss substantive opposition to the changes? Was school board unable to justify the reforms? The replacement superintendent was also a black woman, who implemented the same reforms without controversy. (B) University towns have the greater achievement gaps AND spend more money per student. Well-intended liberalism is not reflected in the studies. The Change Agent was hired to address mandated reforms based on poor performance. Things improved for a while. Now back in a rut. (The controversy created political energy. In 2005 a dozen people applied to be appointed to the school board before it became elected. At-Large was adopted, which shuts out all voting minorities who push for the research studies and best practices. At-Large majority-only status quo creates a gap of us-versus-them, which fuels the achievement gap, contacts gap, inequality of all sorts.)
Schilling Show 2nd Hour Sep. 1, 2017.
Includes Confederate. African-American. Faculty. The lives of those buried there are not so easy to isolate into these labels. Intellectual vandals have struck. So please SAVE – SHARE – PRESERVE any photo on this website. 17 Unknown Soldiers are buried here.
Bullet voting is not a magic bullet to slay the At-Large dragon. It doesn't fix the broken system. But it can make the difference in a close race.
Plurality Voting = most votes win. Usually more than 2 candidates are running for one office. Runoff Voting = Absolute Majority of votes needed to win. The 2 highest vote-getters have a second "runoff" vote. Voter-Diluted Systems. The majority elects all the representatives. The minority has no voice. At-Large is only one way to reduce the voting power of the electorate. Single-Shot Voting is a tactic where voting minorities unify against the majority, who always choose all the reps. "Candidates may seek to encourage bullet voting in certain situations. One example is where there is a Bloc voting election for two seats of the same office, and there are several candidates (say A, B, and C). Voters in such a situation typically have two votes. "Candidate A encourages his voters to vote only for him and not use their second vote. If the second vote is cast for B or C, it helps A's opponents. The situation is most pronounced where A is of one party and B and C are of another party. If voters from B and C's party vote for them, while A's partisans cast one vote for A and split their second vote between B and C, A is significantly disadvantaged." Single-Shot Vote = Bullet Vote = Under-voting = Vote for only one of several redundant offices (or concentrate on less than the full slate to offset the dilution). Single-shot requires a diluted system where one man/one vote/one office is violated. In Charlottesville you have 1 man/5 votes/1 office. You have 5 people who have the same job. In U.S. Senate you have 1 man/2 votes/1 office. You have 2 people with the same job. Why is it good to have 2 senators but bad to have 5 city councilors? Your state is a small part of the whole, like a precinct. You increase your influence in Congress when you add reps from your state. If you increase national reps, say you elect 5 presidents, that would dilute the Congress, and every state and district would lose influence. One way to view Charlottesville is we have 5 presidents and no senators. 5 people represent the whole city. Nobody represents any part of the city, precinct or neighborhood. So city councilors address outside issues like city-county, state, national and international issues with resolutions and funding requests. Meanwhile internal issues are ignored. The councilors ask the public to attend every meeting so councilors can learn their concerns. There are town hall meetings because City Council is out of touch.
More on the diluted city council.
(A) Would you rather have 2 council members represent your neighborhood, your precinct? A diversity of small groups (precincts) to balance against the citywide majority?
More about the broken city council.
City Council will fund the Vinegar Hill monument because the community did not want an urban renewal marker exclusive to only one neighborhood. Liberation Day March 3, 1865 is elevated to a City holiday.
Everybody knows City Council is broken but they don't know how it's broken. Often efforts to reform fail until a big moment gives you new energy. In 2002 Kevin Cox failed to get Elected School Board THEN superintendent Scottie Griffin affair THEN the 2005 effort was successful. We can't fix our broken City Council from within. A minority cannot out-vote the majority AND the minority has no vote. Since the Jim Crow system was adopted 1924, several reform efforts have failed. NAACP 1981-82. An entire commission tried in 2004. In 2006 elected school board was an opportunity for inclusion. We need outside help from the President Donald J. Trump's Department of Justice to enforce 1965 Civil Rights Act which prohibits Voter Dilution of political minorities, usually same as ethnic minorities. Why does Charlottesville get a free pass? Because of this weird system, instead of a university professor sharing this knowledge to the community, you have nobodies like me, the voting minorities trying to make a difference. Carol Thorpe feels like she's wasting her time because she's outside of the majority. That's the core feature of the system. But she cares and is motivated. That's nihilism (you care but nothing you do matters). Very destructive emotion sweeping the nation. More on Voter Dilution and the At-Large system. The meme campaign is underway on Facebook. Favorite online meme generator is imgflip.com because you can use other online pictures, including any on this website. From there you can share your meme to social media.
Flat Tax To Reduce Civil Unrest. Sunday Editorial August 20, 2017.
What advice would Thomas Paine give today? Some people argue whether Paine should be considered a founding father. He moved to America in 1774. The 48-page pamphlet "Common Sense" was published anonymously January 10, 1776. In proportion to population, it's the best-selling book in American history. His profound insight is "Fear reveals itself in Anger." John Adams said, "Without the pen of the author of Common Sense, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain." The political argument has two parts: the reason and the motivation. Righteous means you're right and justified. Simply calling King George a Brute has no constructive content. It's unfocused anger, which is negative and self-destructive, leads to the French Revolution. If your creed or code of conduct is morally superior, you will be guided by providence. America's credo is All Men Are Created Equal. Liberty and Justice For All. E Pluribus Unum. Out of many we are one. Despite our many differences we all have something in common. The God-given right of Due Process, the social contract that permits taxation. The verdict varies but the goal is for a standard procedure. If a right is trespassed, you have anger although you may have never learned about that right. So you don't know why you're angry. Anger also comes from frustration. Apathy means you don't care. Nihilism means you do care, but nothing you do matters. I am a nihilist. Over time you become so mad that you can't see straight, want to tear down everything. Your emotions blind you to all sorts of differences. You see every member of the group the same as a bad member. So I myself have smeared all Democrats as bad. I'm guilty of emotional reasoning at times like everybody. Try to direct that energy to something positive that may exist only in the future (hope) or the past (enlightenment) if your contributions don't make a difference (nihilism). We need something to unify the competing groups created by the Progressive Tax Code installed by Woodrow Wilson. It makes sense that different groups should be treated differently because they are different. That is NOT the American Way. A Flat Tax or Fair Tax is proportional taxation. Everybody pays the same Rate but a different Amount. If you earn or spend a million times more money, you pay a million times more tax. That's not what we have now. The majority has voted to shift the tax burden to the voting minorites. Remove the bigotry from our tax code. Let the righteous anger Make America Great Again.
Thomas Paine – Wikipedia.
The latest spin-off of Blair Hawkins' one-man 17-year anti-urban renewal campaign kicks off. It's the latest of several campaigns since the 1920s in the community to fix the broken city council. Not only was the Robert E. Lee statue installed near the end of the Golden Age of Race Relations. This well-known majority-only system was meant to silence the 40% black population at the time. The system silences any political minorities. Most commonly today it's Latinos who are shut out from participation. Why is Voter Dilution allowed? Selective prosecution maybe. Political patronage. Charlottesville is not just any town. We're the Capital of the Resistance. We knew this was a bad system. Civics 101. Also mayors and lawsuits opposed it but it was adopted anyway in mid-1920s. The Klan were bad people. We've been trying to fix it ever since. 1981-1982 NAACP tried. 2004 Commission on Representation tried. 2006 was opportunity for elected school board to have Non-Diluted Representation, or Proportional Representation. (Source) You will be overwhelmed by the information on Wikipedia about systems of representation. But the Department of Justice already knows all about it. DOJ has been prosecuting other cities who have the same relic from Klan days. Department of Justice Search Results for Voting Dilution. The Voting Rights Act addresses the scheme of direct democracy to exclude voting minorities, often the same as ethnic minorites. The system has many names. The promise was to run things efficiently like a business. It's a magic system where your legislative opposition disappears. If Congress had the same system, bills would sail through without effort. Republicans would not have to deal with political minorities such as the Democrats. Voter Dilution Tactic — Broken City Councils.
1965 Voting Rights Act applies to entire nation....except Section 5 is like a probation order, certain really bad localities must be pre-approved for any change. Charlottesville is in that list.
Department of Justice knows all about it. We ask President Donald J. Trump why Charlottesville is given a pass. 15th Amendment of 1870 expanded federal government's power to ensure the right to vote of American citizens (freed slaves) was not infringed by the states. 1965 Voting Rights Act applies to localities as well. Section 2 addresses Vote Dilution, where At-Large is only one type.
"The first townhall was Thursday Aug. 12, 2010 at Tonsler Park, a year after its sponsor Councilor Kristin Szakos called for removal of confederate monuments as a way to end division and bring the minorities back to the ever-shrinking majority. "So the townhall is at least the 9th effort since 2002 to address the unresponsiveness of local government." Includes timeline of the 9 efforts and previous efforts. History of Charlottesville Chamber of Commerce. "In 1922 the elected Mayor B.E. Wheeler "obtained a court order and tried to prevent the new commissioners from taking over, but eventually gave in. [...] E.G. Haden, mayor 1908 to 1912 and 1916 to 1920, also opposed the direct democracy government. The change was slow because of substantial opposition. "Ironically some said real estate was the ulterior motive for the business-like government. Today we know this change enabled the widespread urban renewal stealing of real estate from the voting minorities stripped of representation on Council." Please donate whatever you can to support this campaign of ideas. My Facebook page shows these memes and ideas in action. Follow me on Twitter @Blair1776.
Here's two minutes to show I'm a real person.
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