While High Priest of Coven Oldenwilde Steve Rasmussen had been camping out uninvited under Stewart Coleman’s now historic magnolia tree, he happened to notice there was a “large and dramatic silver maple that is quite a performance of its own” situated so as to obstruct construction on land reserved for a performing arts center. Meanwhile, Shelley Galvin begged the city to save a “giant old sycamore” in the path of a project in the Montford neighborhood.

Here’s a story problem. Somebody miscalculated the SAT scores. You have only one set of results, but you don’t know if they are the correct or incorrect ones or by how much the two sets of scores vary. What does this have to do with the percent of students tested? Click here for more questions.

One hundred volunteers are needed for Project Connect, according to Asheville’s Homelessness Initiative Coordinator, Amy Sawyer. Persons who can take time off work from 8:00am to 2:00pm Friday, September 12, are welcome to volunteer at First Baptist Church downtown. Services to be provided for the homeless and near-homeless include “haircuts, pet care, mental health services, physical health services, housing referrals, [and connection to] mainstream resources including Medicaid, food stamps and child care subsidies, and more.” Contributions of “clean socks, new shoes, toiletries, back packs, sleeping bags, and financial donations to help with food and supplies” will also be accepted.

I’m not feeling charitable. I might get some toiletries together, but here we have again big government perpetuating the life of the organism, and doing nothing to feed the spirit, encourage self-sufficiency, or even liberate people from the habits that most often lead to chronic poverty. I half suppose the volunteer orientation will instruct people not to minister or reach out from their hearts to these people. What matters is that our bureaucracies capitalize on the weaknesses of the vulnerable. Why do homeless people need new shoes when my working-class friends buy apparel second-hand? We go around with DIY hatchet hairdos. And no, I am not going to start working a second job to feed somebody’s pet.

The Great Smoky Mountains Railroad has cancelled its Dillsboro stop, citing the “national ‘economic downturn.’” This has visioneers beside themselves, “thinking outside the box to develop dynamic multi-faceted and heterogeneous and universal consciousness.”

Meanwhile, the state’s draft Metropolitan Transportation Improvement Plan suggests allocating $594,434,000 specifically toward passenger rail projects. This excludes $2,034,373,000 allocated for passenger rail between Charlotte and the Virginia state line. Most of the line items pertain to making railroad crossings safer, but $11,967,000 will go toward planning and studies. $194,472,000 will go toward the “environmental study, preliminary engineering, right of way, design, construction and equipment” for passenger rail between Asheville and Salisbury. $300,000 is proposed for building a passenger rail station in Asheville. Additional funds are requested for line items combining freight and passenger rail.

The City of Asheville wishes to expend $50,000 unbudgeted for a contract to develop its Strategic Energy Management Plan. Camp Dresser and McKee will partner with the city, providing a $140,000 research and development grant. Since April of last year, the city has hired an energy coordinator to help reach its council mandate of reducing municipal carbon emissions BY 80% by 2050. Thus far, the coordinator has informed staff with a PowerPoint presentation that the city needs to build consensus and focus on “social marketing and education.” She has also decided upon seven categories in which the city can reduce its carbon footprint.

People may be stinking for lack of shower water, or even dying of thirst. Not to worry. What matters is that officials generate lots of bureaucratic paperwork, in a format approved by state-level bureaucrats, so local and state government can impose their newly-bestowed arbitrary powers (like unannounced property entry) over the people in the midst of this crisis du jour.

Sheriff Curtis Cochran is suing Swain County for terminating his prisoner food allowance. He feels he is owed more than $10,000. The amount is based on spending $10 per prisoner per day incarcerated during the sheriff’s tenure. The county claims there was no system for making sure the sheriff spent the allotment on meals for prisoners. Other sheriffs had been known to skimp on the meals and pocket the difference. Further, the county claims the State Treasurer’s Office directed them to bring their practice into compliance with the Local Government Fiscal Control Act.

Having added 40 police officers since 2002 and having answered calls to streamline the UDO with more regulations and code officers to enforce them; the City of Asheville now finds itself in need of a few thousand square feet of expansion. In the near future, staff hopes to rent a couple thousand square feet at a local mall for one-stop customer service and development permitting. The city is also considering combining its park maintenance and purchasing facilities and using the old park maintenance property for affordable housing.

The Sullivan acts were upheld by the state Court of Appeals today. The City of Asheville had been contending that the laws are unfair. The acts state that Asheville and no other water authority in the state is not allowed to charge higher rates for customers outside the city limits. They also require Asheville and only Asheville to use water revenues exclusively for water department functions and Asheville and only Asheville to refrain from using water as an incentive for voluntary annexation. Sullivan acts II and III help developers build just outside the city limits on the cheap. Representative Charles Thomas, who succeeded cosponsor Wilma Sherrill, maintains, essentially, that Asheville’s governing body is too juvenile to be trusted with running its own water system.

Once upon a time, mankind came to accept that he lived in a world of physical laws, cause and effect being one of them. Once man acceded to these laws as inevitable, and learned to live within their framework, we had a Renaissance. With greater understanding of the givens of this earthly existence, we had an Age of Enlightenment and an Industrial Revolution. Individuals realized they did not need despots to micromanage their lives; they only needed enough government to protect each’s rights to the fruits of his own labor.

Now what? In Asheville, we have people with strange names squatting on another’s private property, purchased with his own money. These people share the text of a goodly olde spell book and hope blessing the crystalline form of water with love will save THE magnolia tree. Owner Stewart Coleman is given no credit for attempting to create jobs and stimulate the economy by purchasing materials for his proposed development. He wants to disrupt the viewshed of the commons. He is disdained because he is not cute enough to have people feed him while he does nothing all summer but lounge about in the beauty of nature’s splendor and participate in staged antagonism that exceeds McCarthy’s worst fears.