City Hall, Jeff Speck and "The Death of Expertise."

On Wednesday, March 18 at 6:00 p.m., there will be a third "public information session" on Jeff Speck's downtown street network proposal, to be held at the Pepin Mansion at 1003 E. Main Street.

With the dysfunctional grandiosity of John "Pinocchio" Rosenbarger's pet Main Street project boondoggle festering just yards away, the Bored of Works will eschew the irony.

Not only that, it will boil, skewer, braise, sear, poach, roast, fry and stew the irony.

That's because the survival rate of irony in New Albany is even worse than the odds of Kevin Zurschmiede ever grasping the dimensions of human trafficking.

Once again, the public will be invited to air its views on a study few have read. As I noted recently, the meeting will accomplish almost nothing, because no effort will be made to answer questions or educate the public.

ON THE AVENUES: As Admiral Gahan steers his Speck study into the Bermuda Triangle, crewmen Padgett, Stumler and Caesar grimly toss all the rum overboard.

Gahan and his merry minions continue to hint privately that they're altogether for Speck's proposals, while doing everything possible to publicly distances themselves from them. With every passing day, the mayor works to sabotage what he insists he supports.

If that's not bipolarity, I await a better definition of the phenomenon

Meanwhile, at The Federalist, Tom Nichols describes "The Death of Expertise." I link to the essay with no small trepidation, given that it may be viewed as an endorsement of the current regime's operational philosophy.

... The death of expertise is a rejection not only of knowledge, but of the ways in which we gain knowledge and learn about things. Fundamentally, it’s a rejection of science and rationality, which are the foundations of Western civilization itself. Yes, I said “Western civilization”: that paternalistic, racist, ethnocentric approach to knowledge that created the nuclear bomb, the Edsel, and New Coke, but which also keeps diabetics alive, lands mammoth airliners in the dark, and writes documents like the Charter of the United Nations.

This isn’t just about politics, which would be bad enough. No, it’s worse than that: the perverse effect of the death of expertise is that without real experts, everyone is an expert on everything. To take but one horrifying example, we live today in an advanced post-industrial country that is now fighting a resurgence of whooping cough — a scourge nearly eliminated a century ago — merely because otherwise intelligent people have been second-guessing their doctors and refusing to vaccinate their kids after reading stuff written by people who know exactly zip about medicine. (Yes, I mean people like Jenny McCarthy.