Nom de plume: Rivrdog

The "NEW AND IMPROVED" Occupy Movement

You probably didn't hear about this, since it happened in the middle of the week and damn few MSM reporters have had the 'nads to even mention it. OK, another explanation is that they don't understand it, so they didn't write about it.

The change is all about the decision-making model the Movement uses, now as opposed to the one they were using just last week.

They are using the "Spokes Council" model now, as opposed to the totally participatory General Assembly model. I've written about the General Assembly model, here, and noted that it was cumbersome and VERY time-consuming. The Spokes Council model is just the opposite, it is fast, conclusive and uses little time.

Some history.

The Spokes Council model of decision making was used first in Spain, in 1936, by the Spanish Revolutionaries. Yep, THOSE Marxists. Actually, it had been refined since about 1888 in Germany, where two decades had passed since Karl Marx had written his seminal Das Kapital. Based on the works of Marx, Socialist Revolution was beginning to sweep the kingdoms of Europe in 1888. It didn't come to Spain until almost 50 years later, but it did come. It is just coming to the USA now, some 125 years later. The "Wobblies" tried to launch it 90 years ago, but failed due to internal communications difficulties, mostly.

In the past two weeks, first in NYC, then finally out here on the Left Coast, a traditional Socialist Revolution has come to the US of A.

When it first broke out, the OWS Movement favored marxism, but didn't follow many of it's examples. Real Marxists, for example, didn't tolerate the shiftlessness of vagrants or the whackiness of crazies. They were all business, all the time. The early OWS Movement tried to be all things to all people, but the real Marxists in the Movement knew that model would fail, and it did, as I predicted here.

I figured that the Movement would either go away (I figured WRONG there), or it would become a REAL militant group, with the classic cell structure, of which the Spokes Council leadership model is. I went "all in" on fall apart and go away. I'm not THAT visionary, am I?

The Spokes Council model works via something called "Affinity Groups", not the cell structure of the traditional Che Guevara-style revolution. Traditionally, Socialist revolutions were based on cells of threes (the Russians called that a "troika"). There was a master troika (the beginnings of the Politbureau?), then each master troika member ran up to three other troikas, and each of those sub-troika members ran three more, etc. If one member was compromised, no more than a third of the original group was lost, and could easily re-constitute and carry on. Think of the Affinity Groups as sub-cells. The Spokes Council is when all the "Spokes" are together to form the full wheel, which then fully functions to make decisions. However, each Affinity Group can operate independently, once given orders by the Spokes Council. This is the improvement over the General Assembly version of management, because nothing could be done until a 3-hour General Assembly had met and decided.

So, to use the new model, expect that the political problems will be assigned Affinity Groups. So, there will be a Bank Confrontation Affinity Group, a Police-action Affinity Group, a Recruiting Affinity Group, and so forth.

More history.

This leadership model still (somewhat) supports the "anonymous leadership" model the Occupy Movement holds so dear, because one the Affinity Groups are allowed to operate, it will ALL be anonymous. There won't be many TRUE Spokes Councils that the press gets invited to, or even most of the drones/proles get to sit in on, unlike the General Assemblies, which everyone was invited to/expected to attend.

Yep, boys and girls, we've seen this before (or, more accurately, your blogger has). Try the Anti-Nuke Movement on for size: 1970-80s. Or the Global Justice movement, 1990s-2000s (think anti-WTO riots). Think Earth First! (which was so good at it, the FeeBees never busted more than one Affinity Group at a time). 

This is the real deal. Welcome to the world of Socialist Revolution, a world I was trained to operate in militarily back in 1967. First questions to ask ourselves:

• Will it be an armed revolution? We have no way of knowing now just how it will evolve, but just in case you don't follow this closely, remember the pre-Spokes Council OWS chanting "non-violent protest" at the cops all the time? Have you heard that chant at movement/police confrontations in the past week? No you haven't.
• Did the Obama War Room bring this about? Well, put it this way, there are some serious socialist academic minds behind this change, and Obama has a few, Ayers, Jarrett and Jones come to mind, but my first hunch is no, he didn't order this up. I think that way because the man himself, aside of who he surrounds himself with, is an empty suit. He may be a Manchurian Candidate, but he's not the Manchurian Candidate's handler.
• Is this something that we need to fire the trip-flares for? No, not right now. No Socialist revolution in the history books ever sprang fully-operational from it's opening day, and this one won't, either. It WILL have to gather some steam, flesh out the empty places in the Spokes, and put more Councils in place. This is a Movement for the long haul, just as Marx himself envisioned.

Self-training: Search on Spokes Council Leadership Model. Tear into the list, and note that the freshest references are right out of  the Occupy Wall Street - original group.

Welcome to Cold War II, kiddies. This time, the Marxists are after our Constitution, but not just academically any more, they're in our streets. In two hours, the first public recruiting meeting of Occupy Gresham (Oregon) opens, not three miles from here. Their Spokes Council has already targeted Black Friday shopping in downtown-Old Town Gresham. I've charged up my cameras, and will launch on a recce mission in a while. I hope I remember all my Field Work surveillance lessons and practice from the Advanced Police Academy, lo those 25 years ago...

How the Flea Party will fail....

...and fail soon, if the situation in the Portland camp is any indication.

• Check out this story. Events as depicted here are happening all the time down there. That can't continue, and heavy pressure is mounting on Hizzoner to clear the camp, which recently announced that it will stay there for a full year!
• The Mayor just ordered the last operable bathroom in the park closed, because it wasn't being maintained. Curious thing about the bathroom situation: In both blocks of the park, there are a total of two bathrooms, both one-holers, one female and one male (this was on my footbeat, remember?) Now, if you are holding an outdoor event in the City, you have to hire porta-potties, and the number you have to hire is proportional to the size of the participating crowd. Now that there are ZERO operable bathrooms, and ZERO porta-potties on site, the City has very good cause to shut down the camp for health reasons alone. The Flea Party brASS-hats tried to rent some biffies, but they couldn't come up with the necessary cash, apparently, so their order was not filled. Where's Michael Moore with his big bucks when you need him? As much as that guy eats, he HAS to know the value of a working shitter...
• Not seen in the paper of hiding the seamy lefty record, the Oregonian, was a story that the local Fox TV affiliate broadcast two days ago. It seems that rape and other forms of sexual assault are occurring with greater frequency in the camp, so much so that some of the women there decided to put up a "women's shelter" tent. As tents there go, it was large, a sizable wall tent, not just one of the usual little pop-tents. Now, if I'm Hizzoner's City Attorney, I have the po-po attempt to find out how many sex assaults have occurred there and have been hushed up within the Flea Party. If it's more than one, I send in the troopers and close the place. Why? Because it IS the Property of the City, and citizens have a legal right to expect to be safe from attack there, but, in fact, this camp seems to promote the opposite. Consider: some gal gets raped, and some smart friend persuades her to sue the City for failing to protect her. The City is out at least seven figures, and there's no insurance for that, the city has to rob Peter to pay for that Paula. Since the City made a conscious decision to let the Flea Party stay, even after being told that conditions there were barbaric, the City has the bulk of the liability. Multiply this by several cases, and it begins to add up to real money for Portland. Extend this principle of liability down to lesser insults than rape, and probably half the original political protesters have a tort-claim again the City.

The Flea Party will not be shoved out of their degrading camp though, they will fold it up and leave voluntarily, and here's why: The homeless. In case you just got off the slow shuttle from the Planet Zargon, the homeless are NOT all victims of greedy corporate barons, in fact few of them are, in fact, the number that are might be as small as 5%, and is no more than 20%. Most homeless people are homeless of either their own choice (the lifestyle suits them) or they are mentally deranged/deficient, and don't really have any other choices because our society refuses to actually TREAT mentally deficient/deranged people in a controlled setting anymore. The OWS (Flea Party) camp probably contains at least a large minority, to now perhaps a majority, of these homeless people, people we used to call BUMS or VAGRANTS, before those words lost their meanings and the cities lost their ability to control that sort of riff-raff.

What is happening inside the camp is that the political activists there now have two major issues on their hands, the first which was always there, the anarchists, who are only there to have a cause that "justifies" (in their idiot minds, anyway) violence against the society. The second is that they are now all caretakers for those homeless persons who have infiltrated their "movement", and are only there because the camp offers them things that they can use: food, women to rape, a place to get away from the eyes of the police, etc.

The fact that is slowly dawning on the protesters is that they have lost control of their movement. Instead of maintaining a camp where protesters may rest and sally forth from to do battle with the the evils of capitalism, they are now hoteliers for two of the ugliest groups of sub-humans ever to grace our shores. They have less and less time to mount protest marches out of the camp, as it has become such a chore for them just to keep it from sinking into the primordial ooze.

Nope, the Portland OWS is about done, killed off by the mounting loss of civilization, as indicated by the rat infestation, the body-lice infestation, both recently reported in the camp, and the predation of the whacko homeless on the protesters. One by one, protesters of good intent are leaving, and with each one who leaves, less reason to keep the movement going remains behind.

The Occupy Wall Street Movement, Portland division, has killed itself. It's vision of "99%" utopia just didn't ever fit the real world. We tried to tell them that, but they wouldn't/couldn't believe us.

PDX-xtra: The Flea Party declares war

This ayem, whilst the Oregonian was delivering it's daily fishwrap with it's lead editorial warning the Flea Party that they'd made their point, now it was time to leave, the scruffians attacked.

Suprise attack, masked individual (more on the masks in a moment), flung a bucket of poo onto the Courthouse front door and fled. Cops there within seconds, couldn't find him, probably because all he had to do to escape was cross the street and disappear into the camp, from whence the poo came (obvious, it has a dyed deodorizer in it which is used in the too-few loos at the pigsty).

Okayyyy, so the Flea Party goes to war. When they went to war, they went right to NBC (Nuke-Bio-Chem) Warfare. They chose Biological warfare, and if we are going to have a measured response in kind, which is certainly called for, let's put a decent face on it and leave radiation out, going to Chemical Warfare to dislodge the filthy mob. CS or CN (Cry Sooner or Cry Now) are the choices in tear gas. There's also pepper spray, which doesn't count in the chemical arsenal, but it's available.

No need for a 0330 Charge of the Riot Brigade such as the Oakland, CA po-po used. Just surround the camp and prevent ingress of supplies and re-inforcements. Turn off the water at the street (you don't want them cleaning their faces when the gas goes in). Tell them all to leave, now, and no one leaving by a time certain will be detained (but photograph and identify EVERYONE leaving, no masks. That's allowable as part of a Field Interrogation, permitted in such circumstances. Most will probably leave, and only the hard core which wants to fight will remain.

Give that hard core their fight, show them the riot batons and demonstrate their use. Forget all the glitzy projectile weapons. On this one, let's use knuckles and sticks. Arrest everyone. Charge everyone with the maximum crimes which can be charged, Riot (C-Felony) and Criminal Mischief 1 (C-Felony). Extract cash bail, since all the scruffians are a Flight Risk.

The press MUST be invited to film the entire operation. It is IMPERATIVE that the cops use only that level of force which is sufficient to gain compliance to arrest. Show the faces of the arrested on Cable Access TeeVee, and show the video of the arrest procedures. Invite the press to accompany the clean-up crews in the twin parks, so as to give the taxpayers an idea of the damage which the Flea party "occupation" has caused.

Trials and sentencing. The trials shouldn't take long, the charges of Riot and Criminal Mischief are proven by video of the arrests in the damaged area, and there's little defense to be offered to those charges. A plea of Rioting while Stupid doesn't get you off, boneheads. Everyone sentenced must have monetary damages to pay, no letting anyone off on an excuse of "indigency". Community Service in the clean-up and re-planting of the parks might be in order, but for the obstructionists, and there will be a few, State Prison is appropriate upon conviction of those felonies. If they think that the Flea Party camp was ugly, wait until they get a glimpse of life inside the Walls.

Next, add up the total costs, then file a civil lawsuit against all the arrestees to recover the damages and the costs of everything. File that lawsuit immediately, since it can have a bearing on release agreements, etc.

Then start the recall petition against Hizzoner. He went on a ChiCom-paid boondoggle to China while his city center was under attack. Desertion in the face of the enemy is NEVER to be tolerated in the leadership.

OK, about those masks. A little history, Students. Where do you see terrorists mask up, strike the first blows when there is an accord to avoid conflict in place, and use a weapon of mass destruction in that first-strike attack?

Let's see, the PaleSwinian and other Islamist terrorists do that, various Marxists have done that ("Shining Path", or the Tamil Tigers come to mind). Yep, this group has, at it's hard core, trained terrorists. The eco-terrorists Earth First! and the Animal/Earth Liberation Fronts also mask up and strike first.

And YOU thought it was all about financial inequity?

Silly you.

News Flash: Oakland, CA cops hammer Flea Party camp

The scruffians had a defense plan, apparently, and since they aren't real good at innovation, this is the plan cops all over the country will face: the "aux barricades" defense: pile the street high with crap, make a play-fort, and wait for arrest.

Simple enough counter-plan: bring lots of bucket-loaders and dump trucks for the barricades, and lots of flex-cuffs for the scruffians. Destroy all debris by burning at a remote location, as it is a health risk to allow repatriation of the tents, tarps, etc. Handle arrestees per Department Mass Arrest Policy. Videotape everything for presentation to court. Charge everyone with unlawful overnight camping, offensive littering and class 2 Vandalism (might do Class One, but it's a felony, and there's no need of Felony Probation as a tool, this Movement is going to be undetectable after a year, the length that Misdemeanor Probation may be assigned). Having previously identified the leaders (those will be, de facto and de jure, those protesters who appeared as "press liaisons", don't let these scruffians get away with the old Earth First trick {we have no leaders, only press liaisons}), present them with bills for the damage and clean-up before they are released from jail.

No charge for the plan, Chief Reese, although you should have had yours ready two weeks ago.

Yes, I am, in fact, assuming all of the protesters guilty of the above offenses. So I'm prejudiced. Sue me.

"Flea party" - the filth spreads and turns ugly

When you've spent better than a third of your life wearing a badge and protecting public safety as a Patrol Deputy, you learn certain things.

One thing I learned is that "waiving" the rules for certain disadvantaged members of the society means that you will have a very hard time enforcing them against anyone else, and when officialdom "waives" the rules, they are as good as useless, and might as well have not been written in the first place.

So, Hizzoner the Lying Bonehead Mayor of Portland (ok, I'm being nice to him today!) decided to "waive" the No Camping in Parks rules for the "Occupy Portland" (aka, Flea Party) protesters for the first day they protested, week before last. Trouble is, he didn't say, "you may camp tonight, but be gone by tomorrow noon" or some-such. He put no time limit on his "waiver". Legally, his "waiver" is improper, since the law has no such waiver language in it, and it would have taken the entire City Council, with a three-stage Reading agenda, to get an amendment to the law posted granting Hizzoner such Waiver authority. Perhaps Hizzoner is relying on some "the Mayor is God" rule that the rest of us don't know about.

But I digressed, again.

The Waiver happened, and was NOT conditioned in time, so now the protesters have refused to move. It took police action to sweep them off of a busy street they were blocking (the street carried 8 city bus lines), but that's not the worst of it. Now there's a homeless persons' camp downtown in Old Chinatown, and the idiots down there are citing the Flea Party protest as the reason they don't have to leave and can't be made to leave.

The other biggie you learn as a cop about civil disorder is that it naturally escalates. Just ask the Mayor of Rome, Italy about that. Their Flea Party protest turned really ugly, just as I predicted.

Ok, Chief Reese. You and I were in the same Police Academy, back in the day. You know me to have planning skills, so please make use of this tactical plan I'm offering you.

Pick a dark and rainy night late next week (gives you plenty of time to work out the details), call in the Morning shift 4 hours early, and tell the Second Night (graveyard) shift they are Held Over. Call up all your Reserves, and see if the Sheriff will double-staff the Booking Section in the Jail. Maybe the Sheriff will be nice and declare a State of Emergency to back you up.

Issue riot gear, and at about 0330, sweep the camps. Arrest EVERYONE, and blockade the Courthouse Square so that it cannot be re-occupied. Protect City Environmental as they move in and clear out all the detritus from the camps. Have Flying Squads ready to intercept any escapees who try to occupy other Park Blocks further South. Use the Jail Bus Sally-ports in the basement of the Justice Center (across the street from the camps) as holding areas. Use the entire fleet of Sheriff's Transport buses to transport detainees to Inverness Jail, get them right out of downtown. If they are released on Re-cog, release them out there. Have extra patrols on the city transit buses and Max trains. Make your best effort to deter protesters from re-gathering. Easy enough to do, the releasing Magistrate can order "no lawbreaking" and "diminished 4th Amendment Rights" as conditions of release. "Faces" will record it all and make it easy to re-arrest any who get back downtown. Once re-arrested, they can be held without bail, or on high FULL bail, pending trial.

This is going to cost some big bucks, and someone ought to keep a tally of it, and use that figure to recall the sorry-ass Mayor. It really IS all his fault, and he is the Maroon of the Month for it.

The Occupation Party

....just doesn't fly as a party name. First of all, and most obviously, there aren't a lot of occupations represented in the mobs. My guess is that fewer than 20% of the mobs' make-up at any particular time is employed.

For older folks, "Occupation" beings back painful memories of depressed, beaten countries, although this crop in the streets would hardly have been a sparkle in their parents' eyes when the last great "occupation" (eastern Europe) ended.

So, I've continued my search for a better reference to the mobs.

I think I've found it, on a comment at NetRightDaily.com:

"The Flea Party"

Unwashed hordes, attracting vermin? Check.

All the morality of fleas? Check

Yep, it fits. In fact, as Sergeant Provo in "Green Berets" would have said, "it sings".

The Flea Party. Pass it on.

"Occupy Portland"

...means I and other financially-able shoppers or diners have NO reason to enter the downtown area. Maybe some time next week, when the merchants get a clue that their business has been off for a week, and start calling shitty City Hall, the Police Chief might be told to get the riff-raff out of downtown.

I'm not holding my breath, though. When the Occupy Portland "leaders" demanded and got permission to camp overnight in City parks on Thursday night, they promised to be out of the parks by 7:00 am, and promised again to not interfere with the set up of the finish-line area there for the Portland Marathon, which is today.

The anarchists have broken every promise they've made, but the shitty City Hall just keeps accepting their word for these things.

BTW, what's up with the calls for the similar demonstrations back East to be fleshed out with Union personnel? Hmmmm...could it be that the White House is behind "Occupy (your town here)"

More likely, although I wouldn't rule out Valerie Jarrett's hand in the whole movement, would be that the anarchists are trying to put on a "WTO" fuss, but since the WTO isn't meeting anywhere, had to do this "Occupy" thing instead.

Oh, well. When there is Occupation, there is usually Resistance. Read the History books, chumps, you have no guarantees to be free from harm as you disrupt cities. Harm can come in many forms, at many speeds, from any direction.

All hail the Holy Bicycle!

Here in Stumptown, USA (Portland OR), we get this Holy Bicycle crap until it chokes us. As an example, when a huge (1 billion-plus) local public-works project, the Big Pipe (a 120" storm drain interceptor, running 4 miles under the City) was finished, there was actually a surplus of $22 million. Flouting the City ordinance which said that such surplus, if any, must be returned to sewer ratepayers, Hizzoner pirated the funds and stuffed them into the Holy Bicycle kitty, to be used to further degrade the City streets for motor-driven traffic, and make the streets more "friendly" for bicycles. That work is in progress, and some boulevards that formerly had 3 or 4 lanes for traffic and two lanes for parking, now have just one or two lanes for auto traffic, a bus lane and a bike lane, no parking allowed. The rest of the seized pavement is turned into tree planters, curb-extensions, bio-swales and other impediments to traffic.

And the doofus Mayor wonders why commerce in the Central City is drying up...

But, I digress.

Today I open the Op-Ed section of my local wet-garbage wrapper (another glorious "green" story), and find an op-ed by a well-known liberal scrivener, Neil H. Simon. In the op-ed, he extols the city of Copenhagen, Denmark for having a 50% bicycle commute rate. I read through the piece, and nowhere do I find any data relevant to a valid comparison to Portland, OR.

Here are MY points of difference between Portland and Copenhagen:

1. Copenhagen has a much older tradition of bicycle commuting, one which goes back 125 years or so. Portland's streets have only been paved for the past 70 years or so, Copenhagen's have been paved pretty much forever.
2. Copenhagen is a densely populated city. Most European capitals are. Portland is a patchwork quilt of joined small cities with "urban in-fill", and as such, does not logically lend itself to bicycle commuting.
3. In Portland, we have an active underclass which supports itself primarily by theft, and bicycles are a primary target of these thieves. Bicycling in Portland, you have to carry $100 worth of heavy locking equipment, and sometimes your bike still gets stolen. It is so bad here that the transit district has put up bike-locking facilities that cost six figures to lock up about 100 bikes. Copenhagen doesn't have much of an underclass, and the underclass they have isn't into much bike theft.
4. Copenhagen is a flat city, laid out on a seacoast. Portland is a river town, and the streets climb steeply to the west to a Coast Range ridge at 800 feet elevation, and more gradually to the east to 440 feet where I live 15 miles from downtown.
5. There is far less tradition of owning cars in Europe generally, and in Scandinavia particularly. It's very expensive to own an automobile there, with huge taxes on the purchase, and fuel that costs over twice as much as ours. The old city of Copenhagen was NOT laid out to have either parking downtown or garaging in the environs for cars, but Portland has adequate, if expensive, downtown parking, and almost all homes have garages.
6. Finally, there is the matter of safety. It is well-known that in Europe, motor vehicle drivers generally pay attention to bicycle traffic, but that fact of driving culture is not as strong in the American driver, so bicycling safety suffers, and badly, as a result. Portland has had 4 or 5 bicycle-auto deaths this year, and none of the fatalities were drivers, either. The lack of safety just plain keeps people off their bikes around here, except for recreation. It is a sad, but inescapable fact, and it cannot be remedied by painting lines on streets. Lines don't cheat physics.

Finally, the second purpose of Simple Simon's story is to claim that further spending on the Holy Bicycle culture will cause us here in Stumptown to pull ourselves out of the recession (Oregon is two percent worse in unemployment than the national figure).

What a load of BeeEss!

First of all, all the public works projects related to Holy Bicycles are just that, public works projects, and other than the immediate positive effect of the construction jobs created, there is zero lasting effect from public works. In fact, when commerce is damaged in the process, as most public works projects seem to do, there is negative effect on the local economy. Second, even if these Holy Bicycle projects exceed their progenitors' fondest dreams and actually manage to increase numbers in central-City shopping, look at the shoppers: they are BICYCLISTS, for Christ's sake! When did you last know a dedicated bicyclist that spent money on anything other than their bike? These people are the original cheapskates! The "do more with less" crowd. Aside from maybe a penchant for paying too much for their beer or arugula sandwiches or bran muffins, they spend next to nothing. If you don't believe that, just listen to them howl when proposals are published to tax their bicycles, maybe $10 per year, to pay for bike lanes.

Nope, the Holy Bicyclists and their "green" ilk have chased the big spenders, mostly folks from the suburbs, out of downtown. Stores that catered to the affluent have mostly shuttered and either fled to the suburban malls or gone out of business. Yeah, there is night life, but Martini-sipping, thirty-something broads in rave dresses and metro-sexual men don't pay the bills, either.

When God pulls your number...

...it could be your day to die, and you'd better be ready to, because you won't get a court-ordered delay.

...it might also be your day to act in God's stead, and do unbelievable good for your fellow humans. Such is the story of Doctor Kevin Kikta, ER doc with St. John's Medical Center in Joplin, MO.

If you will recall, St. John's took a direct hit from the maximum EF-5 tornado on May 22d.

Dr. Kikta tells, in his own words, what it was like to survive that direct hit, form a team of doctors, nurses, & EMTs, perform medical miracles by flashlight in his flooded ER, then move to a MASH and continue his ministrations.

My heart swells with pride to think that men like this walk among us.

My youngest daughter is an ER Doc. I sent this to her, and simply asked her, "Are YOU ready to do this?"

Dept. of "It's about time"

Hoorah for the Amity, OR police.

About time someone pointed out to the Holy bicyclists that their shit DOES, in fact, stink.

BTW, it is alleged that Portland cops have been instructed by Hizzoner the Holy bicycling pedophile, that they MAY NOT cite Holy bicyclists during "organized rides".

To show you just how bad the Cult of Holy bicycling has become in Portland, consider these facts:

• The City just announced that there will be five Holy Bicycling Sundays, during which the Holy Bicyclists are allowed to close off MILES of public streets to autos. This is in addition to the Holy Bridge Pedal, during which most of Portland's eleven essential bridges over the Willamette River (which bisects the City), are partially closed to motor-driven traffic.
• Hizzoner diverted $20+ million bux in savings from a Portland Sewer Project (the "Big Pipe" or "Big Dig" 120" interceptor sewer construction) to bike paths, when previous City Ordinance had required any savings from the Project to be returned to Sewer/Water ratepayers.
• A further City bike-path initiative to spend millions more was just announced.

It's totally out of hand, with the Spring bloom of potholes all over City streets un-repaired, but vast amounts of City cash available to remove traffic lanes on boulevards from motor vehicle use and dedicate them to bicycles.

These idiots are out of control. I've toyed with the idea of forming a "Common Sense' group out here in the more conservative eastern 'burbs, and putting issues on the Initiative Ballot to put these Holy Bicyclists in their place.

The Petition would simply say, for each city charter, "Public Roadways must be maintained, over their entire curtelage (property allotment), equally, for all forms of wheeled vehicular traffic, regardless of vehicle type." That would put an end to special "bicycle lanes", "bike boxes" (a green-painted block at each intersection on an "bikeway" that allows Holy bicycles to split lanes and have priority at light changes and other forms of insanity such at "curb extensions", mid-road planter boxes, roundabouts, and other crap designed to restrict or "calm" traffic.

It's about time...to give roads back to MOTOR VEHICLES, which, incidentally, pay ALL the cost of supporting them. Holy bicycles pay nothing, zip, nada, rien, bupkis. That said, if the Holy Bicyclists want to propose to tax themselves to pay for those bike lanes, even build new ones (away from motor traffic), I wouldn't be opposed, but they, like their kayak-paddling bretheren on the rivers, don't wnat to pay a dime towards maintaining the venue for their activity.

"He who pays the piper, calls the tune". And so it should be with the Holy Bicyclists.