Disc Golf Courses Dismantled in Austin

Disc golf clubs and businesses basically went along with the local government in threatening disc golfers that they'd pull the targets if people didn't follow the closure rules. When the ball golf courses got shut down the Attorney General of Texas made a ruling that cities couldn't do that. There wasn't even a court case. The AG made it happen - for ball golfers. Can you believe an attorney ensured ball golf courses stayed open? Before churches and other institutions, the AG had his priorities right. 

Disc Golf courses have not had the same providence as their rich baller counterparts. Disc golfers defied the closures at first, which provoked the authorities to pull the targets. That stops most people, but I still played without them. Once. Until now I've been able to escape the draconian destruction. They only altered the basket slightly until a few days ago - putting a bag on the target or holding the chains high with locks or plastic constraints. The pics show people cut the chain holders.

I'm waiting for the city of Austin to rip up the turf at all the parks to keep people from visiting them. That would be consistent with their fascism. Maybe ban cigarettes and smoking which kills a half million people every year. But please, instead, tear up the concrete and tar roads and streets so people don't drive on them. People are dying everyday from cars and the pollution from cars and car production and fuel production and processing and global climate change and ... please destroy it all. Yet I'm not holding my breath. What these liberal fascists decide to destroy and reconstruct in there fantasies of protecting and preserving life is unknowable and frightening. Many people scoff at the label of fascism saying it's not a police state or militaristic. We already had militarism. Now we got the police openly restricting first amendment activities with the threat or commission of arrest and civil penalties. And corporate control of the government and economy remains. Guess what all that means - FASCISM, yo!

Black Church In South Austin

Some of the most important historical events in states like Texas are the creation of Jim Crow segregation in cities and towns throughout the South. Yet the stories we hear in classrooms, in documentaries, and from experts often makes it seem a simple process. Before the Civil War, blacks were oppressed by slavery and put in a different status than whites in American culture. Though the war ended slavery, whites quickly replaced that institution with segregation which continued until the modern Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Actually the process of creating Jim Crow practices and policies was complicated, difficult to implement, and took many decades. It was a process that never really ended. Social conditions changed with economic development of the city and who was allowed to live in a place kept changing. Segregation didn't just happen. It kept happening, and still does. The pics here show an old African American church that disappeared after World War II. The building stayed but the community, the real church, left. When you see a black church, what you can know is that at one time black people lived there. None of those homes remain, and the people are gone. But for many years black people did live in that neighborhood and they were pushed out.