Friday, October 30, 2020

Hanson's Folly, updated: There's still no diversity among regular News and Tribune opinion columnists.

I took a gander in February, checked again in June, and updated again circa late August (and posted at Twitter).


Here's a fresh update. Obviously elections bring out the letters to the editor, and so the sample size is slightly smaller than usual for periods of the same length. 

  • Letters 20
  • White Male Columnists 18
  • White Female Columnists 3
  • Black Male Columnist 1
  • Editorial Board 1

Allow me to calculate (because readers would notice, anyway) that of the 22 opinion columns, whether authored by whites, blacks, males or females, all writers probably are over the age of 50 (with the exception of staffer Daniel Suddeath), and all but one of them are white (95% of column slots).

Back in June, publisher Bill Hanson lamented racial injustice in America and bemoaned his own white "privilege," asking in essence what's to be done? Since then, 80-odd percent or more of his newspapers have continued to be old white people. I'd sugar-coat it if possible, but it isn't possible.

Publisher, heal thyself.  

Here are the screen shots at the News and Tribune's website ("Opinion"), beginning October 8, ending October 30. 







Thursday, October 29, 2020

Eliminate jaywalking laws: "The core problem lies with street design, not human behavior."

Yes, we've been here before.
    

Walking is not a crime: Dunman and others on the scourges of jaywalking in auto-erotic America.


Like the jaywalker said: "People don’t obey the rules when they’re driving. Why should I?"


But any little chink to be taken from the imperialistic edifice of automobile supremacy is worth a well-aimed Molotov cocktail here and there. 

9 Reasons to Eliminate Jaywalking Laws Now, by Angie Schmitt and Charles T. Brown (CityLab)

They’ve rarely protected pedestrians, and their enforcement is racially biased. Two street safety experts say there are better ways to curb traffic violence.

On Sept. 23, Kurt Andreas Reinhold, a 42-year-old Black man, was trying to cross a street in San Clemente, California, when two officers from a special “homeless outreach unit” stopped him. An altercation ensued; minutes later, Reinhold, a father of two and down-on-his-luck former youth soccer coach, was shot and killed. In a cellphone video of the confrontation, Reinhold can be heard demanding, “Where did I jaywalk?”

This is a particularly troubling example of a pattern we see all too often. Black and Brown people, especially men, are routinely targeted by police for jaywalking or simply existing in public space. Often these stops result in an escalating series of fines and fees. In other cases — as in San Clemente, as well as in Sacramento, Seattle and New York City — they can end in violence.

Especially at a time when there is intense focus on police brutality and racism, Reinhold’s death should prompt us to pause and consider who is truly served by jaywalking laws. Their effectiveness as safety measures appears to be limited: Despite heavy handed and selective jaywalking enforcement, pedestrian deaths in the U.S. have increased rapidly in the last decade. As two of the top experts on pedestrian safety in the country, we think it is time for cities to consider decriminalizing jaywalking or eliminating the infraction altogether.


Here’s why.

  1. Jaywalking is a made-up thing by auto companies to deflect blame when drivers hit pedestrians.
  2. The concept of jaywalking encourages drivers to be aggressive toward pedestrians, and for third parties to ignore or excuse pedestrian deaths.
  3. Our streets are not designed to make walking safe or convenient.
  4. Pedestrians are almost as likely to be struck and killed at an intersection as mid-block.
  5. When pedestrians jaywalk, they are often behaving rationally.
  6. Jaywalking laws are not enforced fairly.
  7. Jaywalking stops are frequently explosive.
  8. The focus on jaywalking reflects the lower political status of those who walk — not the societal harm of the activity.
  9. The safest countries globally allow jaywalking.

snip

Eliminating jaywalking laws may sound radical, but it’s been discussed before in cities such as Seattle. Other places, like Berkeley, California, are experimenting with new models for traffic enforcement that deemphasize police in favor of crash investigators who are trained to help promote infrastructure changes that improve safety. New York Attorney General Letitia James has advocated for removing police from traffic stops, and a new survey shows a majority of New Yorkers support the idea.

Wider reforms and changes to traffic safety enforcement are needed, from increasing diversity within law enforcement to enhanced data tracking, police training, inclusivity and investment in new social and criminal justice programs. Such efforts must be implemented with a vigilant eye towards reversing existing inequities: Early results from so-called “unbiased” enforcement efforts, such as intelligence-led enforcement, used by cities like Oakland, California, show disparities in traffic stops remain. The time is now, not later, to revisit or eliminate laws like jaywalking that are primarily used as a pretext to stop Black and Brown people — and rarely protected any pedestrians in the first place. 

Monday, October 26, 2020

An absolute fascination with "The 15 Tallest Skyscrapers of Yugoslavia."

If Donald Niebyl created a calendar with these images I'd snatch one up. 

My only visit to Yugoslavia when constituted as such came in 1987, for only a couple of weeks, and these buildings fascinated me, as did the "Spomenik" monuments Niebyl has been chronicling the past few years. This link from March, 2020 also includes a summary of my chronology on the topic.

Farewell to the Hotel Zlatibor in Užice, Serbia ... and further tales of the spomeniks (memorials) in former Yugoslavia.

I've never had a sufficient grounding in architecture to know very much about any of this. But the interest remains just as strong.    


Among the most monumental and landmark structures ever built during the era of Yugoslavia were its many soaring high rise towers and skyscrapers, of which many pushed the envelope of engineering and inspired a nation to look towards the future. While the country of Yugoslavia has ceased to exist for nearly three decades now, the many iconic and charismatic skyscrapers built during that era continue to inspire and speak to not only the old Yugoslav generation, but also the new youth generation who never lived in that former nation, as well as people around the world who are drawn in by their unique and bold architecture. However, for all of the fame and fan-fare surrounding many of these structures, many have barely been written about and few meaningful words dedicated to their history. In fact, my entire impetus for writing this article was that when searching for a listing of the seemingly straightforward query of "what were the tallest buildings of the Yugoslav-era", I found no authoritative articles related to that question or any serious investigation into the topic.

Saturday, October 24, 2020

Revisiting Neil Postman's bet on Huxley over Orwell.

My old friend John Campbell posted on Facebook: "Aldous Huxley was right, not George Orwell."

Before repeating John's quoted passage from Neil Postman's 1985 book, here is Postman's son Andrew to explain it, courtesy of The Guardian in 2017.


...The central argument of Amusing Ourselves is simple: there were two landmark dystopian novels written by brilliant British cultural critics – Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – and we Americans had mistakenly feared and obsessed over the vision portrayed in the latter book (an information-censoring, movement-restricting, individuality-emaciating state) rather than the former (a technology-sedating, consumption-engorging, instant-gratifying bubble).

Neil Postman, from Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business:

We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.

Friday, October 23, 2020

"Hotels of Pyongyang," not Summit Springs.

 

The book is Hotels of Pyongyang, by James Scullin and Nicole Reed. I may need to get this one for Christmas.
   
The curious design features of North Korean hotels at The Economist
A book of photography offers an offbeat look at a little-seen city

...the book’s main interest is in the unique design features of the hotels. Even those few Westerners who have ventured to North Korea are unlikely to recognise most of them (the vast majority of visitors to the country are Chinese). Because of the pandemic, North Korea has been off-limits to overseas tourists since the end of January. So, for the moment, those tempted to go—and the many more who never will—can get no closer to a Pyongyang hotel than Ms Reed’s engrossing pictures.

Wednesday, October 21, 2020

BEER WITH A SOCIALIST: Welcome to 12 days of a beer world that utterly baffles me.

Last week a friend gave me a bottle of Vienna-style lager from KC Bier Co, a brewery in Kansas City. It's a classic European style, underappreciated and too seldom brewed, as well as delicious. Shortly thereafter I bought a six-pack of Bell's Kalamazoo Stout, the label of which clearly states that the recipe is the original, from 1988. It was absolutely beautiful in its unadorned simplicity. 
 
Yep; tasting is entirely subjective, and it isn't necessary for us to agree. Furthermore, I'm not interested in being the old man with clenched fist railing against creativity. It's your money. Nothing against Rochester Mills; haven't been there, and know no one involved. I hope they make a mint, as opposed to infusing a milkshake stout with it. 

This said, I can think of nothing about twelve variously flavored milkshake stouts that speaks to me. So be it, and we move on. 

By the way, how'd that Red Velvet get in there?  

  • Peanut Buttercup Milkshake Stout
  • Imperial Milkshake Stout
  • King Cake Milkshake Stout
  • English Toffee Milkshake Stout
  • Imperial Java (Coffee) Milkshake Stout
  • Michigan Maple Milkshake Stout
  • Gingerbread Cookie Milkshake Stout
  • Chocolate Chip Pancake Milkshake Stout
  • Imperial Triple Layer Decadence Milkshake Stout
  • Red Velvet Ale
  • Double Chocolate Milkshake Stout (Revised Recipe with More Chocolate)
  • Salted Caramel Milkshake Stout
The full press release is here:
 

AUBURN HILLS, Mich. – Craft beer lovers in Michigan, Ohio and Indiana can begin their Holiday shopping and celebrations early with the return of the Twelve Days of Milkshake Stout. Given the popularity and growing consumer demand for this variety pack of beers, Rochester Mills will release their limited holiday edition 12-pack on November 1 online for pick-up at the Production Brewery Taproom in Auburn Hills and at “Better Beer Stores” across their distribution territory. The sampler pack features one, 16 oz. can of each beer in this year’s Twelve-Days of Milkshake Stout draft promotion.

“What began as a crazy idea to take twelve different versions of our Milkshake Stout to twelve bars over twelve days a few years back has grown into a holiday tradition,” said Rochester Mills Marketing Director David Youngman. “It’s the perfect gift for stout lovers, already wrapped and ready to go. Containing one pint of each variant allows you to share and compare with friends or horde for personal enjoyment.”

The Rochester Mills Taproom in Auburn Hills will join more than twenty-five other select premium craft beer bars and restaurants throughout Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana as host locations for the progressive tap takeover event beginning the first week of November. Admission is free and open to the public, ages 21 and up. The progressive tap takeover event will feature the (12) twelve specialty and limited-edition varieties of Milkshake Stout, Rochester Mills’ flagship beer. Each week, beginning the first week of November, two new beers will be tapped and stay on draft until the kegs run dry.

Tuesday, October 20, 2020

A stop last Saturday at Wolfe Cemetery in Georgetown.

We took a low-intensity road trip last Saturday.

A Saturday morning outing to Hemlock Cliffs, with an unexpected side order of unsolved murder.

On the way back, I'd yet to become aware of the locally famous story of William Dessie Messamore. This didn't come until later in the evening, when there was time to research. I can't recall ever hearing this tale, but it's possible my dad and his friends might have regaled me with it when I was a kid. 

For the return trip, we decided to stop by Wolfe Cemetery on the western edge of Georgetown for a visit with my parents, who are buried there. They always were adamant about having a simple veteran's grave marker, nothing elaborate or ostentatious. 

Diana and I always agreed with this course, and found the graveside scene on Saturday to be peaceful and appropriate. 



I wasn't up for a scientific survey, but most of the grave markers at Wolfe Cemetery are on the conservative side. This is in keeping with my recollections of the townspeople. Some are more expressive, and there's nothing wrong with that. After all, you can't take it with you.

Cemeteries always make me think. Will our lives and work be remembered? I'm not sure it matters. Thirty-five years ago, I walked along the Appian Way while visiting Rome. 



Crumbling 2,000-year-old memorials bore the names of tremendously important people who've been forgotten for almost as long. Gazing at them, lost in reverie, I soon realized the significance of the here and now -- namely, autos zooming past my vantage point on the narrow one-lane road. I opted for life, and repaired to the nearest bar for sustenance.

I may have known what my parents' grave at Wolfe Cemetery would look like, given I'd seen it previously. But I didn't know my reaction would be one of peacefulness and equanimity. We can't live forever, and their resting place seems, well, right. Maybe it's time for my wife and I to have that chat, too. 

Monday, October 19, 2020

Trump and toxic masculinity: "The core struggle for men is not with one another, but between our own warring selves."

If the rot is as deep as it seems, many of the enablers will begin slipping away to preserve future self-aggrandizement opportunities. It's likely to end with a whimper, not a bang. Like so many suffering from toxic masculinity, particularly the hardcore narcissists, there is an element of cowardice. 

I Wrote Trump’s ‘The Art of the Deal.’ And I’m Terrified of What He’ll Do Next, by Tony Schwartz (Daily Beast)

... This is toxic masculinity in action—the sense of entitlement, the embrace of privilege, and the wanton exercise of authority over others. It’s also marked by the rejection of any qualities that might be considered feminine, including gentleness, vulnerability, and empathy—the very qualities that Biden is relying on to distinguish himself from Trump.

For Trump, and for so many men desperate to hold onto control they fear is slipping way, the tactics include disparaging rather than encouraging others, reacting harshly rather than reasoning calmly, seeking certainty rather than struggling with complexity, and blaming others in a conflict, instead of first reckoning with their own responsibility. As the psychologist Terry Real puts it, “We raise boys to live in a world in which they are either winners or losers, grandiose or shame-filled, perpetrator or victims.”

The power that most men feel is fleeting and fragile, easily shattered by criticism, and uncushioned by the capacity for intimacy. Without deep relationships, including with themselves, too many men find themselves perpetually looking for ways to fill their inner emptiness and prove their worthiness.

The core struggle for men is not with one another, but between our own warring selves.

Sunday, October 18, 2020

A Saturday morning outing to Hemlock Cliffs, with an unexpected side order of unsolved murder.


On Saturday morning we drove down to the Hemlock Cliffs in Crawford County, a charming sandstone box canyon that's part of the Hoosier National Forest. The photos don't do it justice; it's a hidden jewel, not a big ticket item. Coupled with the drive, I found the experience to be a lesson in regenerated second-growth forest. There'd have been a great deal of pasture land and denuded hillsides even when I was a kid.  

When I posted about it later on Fb, a friend mentioned the saga of William Dessie Messamore.

In the early 1950s, Messamore was questioned about a family who had disappeared from his Crawford County, Indiana, farm without a trace on January 7, 1949. Members of the missing family were Thomas Vandiver, his wife, Beatrice, and her daughter from another marriage, Wanda Johnson. The family had been living with Messamore on his farm in English when they disappeared. The Vandiver investigation led to a confession from Messamore that he had been part of a Kevil, Kentucky, bank robbery. Police worked for years to solve the Vandiver mystery while Messamore served a 28-year prison sentence, including time at Alcatraz, for the bank robbery and a Paducah jail break. He was eventually paroled. No one was ever charged in the Vandiver case, although authorities always suspected the case was murder and thought Messamore was involved.

Supposedly the house where the crime occurred was located a few miles north of our whereabouts Saturday near the hamlet of Mifflin, which no longer exists. It is said the house was up on Saltwell Hill, with an expanse of cliffs in the back yard, so local legend affirms the existence of bones in a sinkhole (or the bottomland over the edge of a cliff like those we walked past). 

It's a helluva story, and based on Messamore's attraction to crime, all too possible. The story is retold here (The Vandiver Mystery) and there (Hughes Interview).





Friday, October 16, 2020

Endorsement: Hands down, Greg Roution is the best candidate for Floyd County Coroner.

Disagree if you will, but to me there's little reason to dwell on political affiliation and the usual attendant ideologies when it comes to voting for coroner. 

I have not yet made Greg Roution's acquaintance, but he strikes me as qualified and professional, perfectly capable of performing the duties of coroner. 

Does it bother me, a socialist, that he's a Republican? 

Not really. So is his opponent, the one running as a (pretend) Democrat, and I know plenty about him. Folks in my significantly "blue" neighborhood know exactly what I mean, which is why you don't see many Oxendine signs here, even if he's planted dozens of them quite illegally in public rights-of-way.  

This matters little in the end, because comparing the two candidates, I find that Roution's presentation speaks to competence and integrity.  

That works for me. Greg Roution is the best candidate, so please join me in voting for him.


# I have lived in Floyd Knobs for the last 24 years.
# Married with three great kids.
# I’m retired from U.S. Army & Kentucky National Guard with 20+ years, as a First Sergeant, Combat Medic.
# I have been an registered nurse for 21 years working at Norton Healthcare.
# Now I’m the Forensic coordinator running the Sexual Assault Program for the last seven years at Norton Healthcare as an Forensic nurse.
# I have worked with The Louisville Metro Police Dept as a forensic nurse.
# I have attended multiple classes on sexual assault training, strangulation, gunshot and human trafficking.

I would appreciate your confidence as being elected as the next coroner and if you have any questions please reach out to me. Feel free to share this page with your friends.

Thursday, October 15, 2020

Documentary: "Germany and the Cold War" (two parts).

  

It's another exemplary two-part Deutsche Welle documentary, focusing on the Cold War as experienced in the two German states that arose from the post-WWII settlement. 

For more than four decades, divided Germany was the epicenter of the Cold War. The border severing East and West embodied the animosity between the US and USSR. The smoldering conflict threatened to escalate and destroy both German states. The Cold War was persistently present in the two Germanys - both on the political and military level, but also in everyday life. On the one hand, there was the race for technical progress, the fear of bombs and rockets, the struggle for moral superiority over the other side: and on the other, doubt about each state’s policies, and those of their allies. 

How did Germans experience this Cold War? How did it shape attitudes to life on both sides of the Iron Curtain? 

This two-part documentary asks political actors and decision-makers in East and West, but above all contemporary witnesses from divided Germany, what experiences they had in the period between 1945 and 1991. Who were the winners and losers in this brutal stand-off between communism and capitalism? The demonstrations on June 17, 1953, the construction of the Berlin Wall, the major demonstrations in Bonn against Pershing missiles, nuclear strike drills, employment bans in West Germany on members of the German Communist Party, the opening of the Wall, the collapse of the Eastern bloc - all were events that shaped people’s lives. This is their story and the story of Germany in the Cold War.

Wednesday, October 14, 2020

Albania's last trains.

 

For the past 40 years, maybe even earlier if childhood stamp collecting is taken into account, I've been fascinated by the country of Albania. The Albanian coastline was visible in 1985 as the ferry stopped at Corfu, and finally in 1994 came the chance to actually visit. It's been the only time, but I've been wanting to return ever since.

It's a shame but understandable that Albania opted for automobile-centrism after emerging from Europe's most North Korea-like existence, and it's a head-spinner to consider communist-era Eastern European rolling stock still in use. 

This is an elegiac and melancholy documentary. I watched it twice, something that's very rare.   

We travel through Albania in a diesel locomotive at a leisurely 40 kilometres per hour. The aged trains make their way through the countryside on single-track lines. Travelling by rail in Albania is not always for the faint-hearted. The trains that are still running were once in the service of the former Deutsche Reichsbahn, the East German state railway before the fall of communism. Albania's rail network was never successfully connected to that of its European neighbors. In fact, it is even threatened with closure in favor of expanding the roads. There are said to be just 50 train drivers left in the country, and as mechanics they also take care of their decrepit diesel locomotives. The documentary accompanies one of them, Vladimir Shyti, and conductor Florida Kucuku on a journey to the north, south and east of the country, on the last remaining sections of track through an intact natural landscape. 
 
The wind whistles through broken windowpanes and branches whip against the 112-ton locomotive. It sounds dangerous and it is. The numerous level crossings have no safety precautions and pose a great danger to pedestrians, cyclists and animals. This often leads to serious accidents. The last trains in Albania all start their journey in Durres, also known as the "gateway to the Mediterranean," and that is where every journey also ends. Anyone boarding a train needs plenty of time and patience. Although rail travel is very inexpensive, it cannot compete for time with travelling by car, which is reflected in the low number of passengers. Hardly anyone takes the train these days. So how long will this form of transport continue to exist in Albania at all?

Tuesday, October 13, 2020

David Brooks says we're having a moral convulsion.

As usually seems to be the case with David Brooks, there are enough germs of truth and even inspiration here to make you think that maybe this time, he'll make a strong case and reach a forceful conclusion. 

Then you reach the end, and you're still hungry. 

There'll be those on the right who insist the mistrust of which Brooks writes stems from matters like not enough prayer in schools, and of course abortion rights. Conversely, the left will point to racism and the patriarchy preferred by the right. 

And yet, while the first great "shock" may have been Watergate, how can we rationally discuss any of this without taking into the deep dive into capitalism's late-stage cancerous mutations? Brooks tap dances around it, but he doesn't get near this third rail. 

He should. We all should, in fact. 

This said, it's a piece worth your time to read. My advice is to keep expectations low, and sniff out those few nuggets of worth.

America Is Having a Moral Convulsion, by David Brooks (The Atlantic)

Levels of trust in this country—in our institutions, in our politics, and in one another—are in precipitous decline. And when social trust collapses, nations fail. Can we get it back before it’s too late? 

The events of 2020—the coronavirus pandemic; the killing of George Floyd; militias, social-media mobs, and urban unrest—were like hurricanes that hit in the middle of that earthquake. They did not cause the moral convulsion, but they accelerated every trend. They flooded the ravines that had opened up in American society and exposed every flaw. 

Now, as we enter the final month of the election, this period of convulsion careens toward its climax. Donald Trump is in the process of shredding every norm of decent behavior and wrecking every institution he touches. Unable to behave responsibly, unable to protect himself from COVID-19, unable to even tell the country the truth about his own medical condition, he undermines the basic credibility of the government and arouses the suspicion that every word and act that surrounds him is a lie and a fraud. Finally, he threatens to undermine the legitimacy of our democracy in November and incite a vicious national conflagration that would leave us a charred and shattered nation. Trump is the final instrument of this crisis, but the conditions that brought him to power and make him so dangerous at this moment were decades in the making, and those conditions will not disappear if he is defeated. 

This essay is an account of the convulsion that brought us to this fateful moment ...

Monday, October 12, 2020

Statistics confirm that American drivers continue to massacre walkers and cyclists.


Just the facts, folks. Sorry if it hurts your car to hear them.

Exactly How Far U.S. Street Safety Has Fallen Behind Europe, in Three Bombshell Charts, by Kea Wilson (Streets Blog)

We knew it was bad, but not THIS bad.

The United States has failed to reduce pedestrian and cyclist fatalities as fast as comparably affluent European nations, a new study finds — and the authors think we must employ the same simple, effective policies that they did to catch up in the fight the bloodshed.

Researchers from Virginia Tech and Rutgers University compared the last 28 years of available transportation fatality data from the United States with data from the four countries with the most closely comparable national travel surveys and levels of affluence: Denmark, Germany, Netherlands and the United Kingdom. All four peer nations had reduced per capita pedestrian fatalities by at least 61 percent over the course of the study period — and standout Denmark did so by a whopping 69 percent — but the U.S. reduced ours by just 36 percent.

In other words, our worst peer country’s Vision Zero progress was nearly twice as fast as ours in the last three decades. And of course, U.S. pedestrian fatalities actually increased dramatically between 2010 and 2018. Only the U.K. experienced even a moderate increase over the same period — and some U.K. safety experts blame the rise on American-made SUVs.

Sunday, October 11, 2020

Update: NAC is heading for the exits, but we're not there quite yet.

I'm still moving toward the ultimate goal of putting NA Confidential to rest. 

ON THE AVENUES: Welcome to the last will and testament of NA Confidential.

There still isn't a firm timetable for the conversion, although at this point it's reasonable to assume that postings won't come to a complete halt until later in October, or even early November. 

As of now, I'll be reducing activity to only one post each day. There is much transitioning to do, and I'm busy with other tasks.  

The new web site is built and functional. Now it must be decorated and some furniture moved inside. The NA Confidential archive, all 15,000+ posts since 2004, is secure; if tomorrow morning Blogger might sink beneath the waves, there'd be a backup.   

Your patronage is appreciated. Thanks. 

Saturday, October 10, 2020

“Forget Crossing Through The City By Car,” says the Mayor of Paris as automobile eroticists squeal and howl.


Anne Hidalgo is not backing down. Other articles on the topic have pointed out that in terms of Parisian voting districts, the mayor's most strident automobile supremacist critics live outside the central arrondissements, and her support is highest in the center where these changes are occurring.

Paris Mayor: “Forget Crossing Through The City By Car” by Carlton Reid (Forbes)

In the first major interview since her re-election as Mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo told Le Parisien that her manifesto promise to crack down on motoring in the French capital would be kept.

“We must forget the crossing of Paris from east to west by car,” she told the daily newspaper.

‘The city needs to evolve,” she added.

Comfortably re-elected in June for a second term, she said she intends to create permanent curb-protected cycleways and expand the number of lockdown cycleways, known in French as “coronapistes.” At an urban planning conference later this month she also plans to reveal plans on restricting petrol-powered motoring on the usually car-clogged highways on the upper quays of the Seine.

Paris created 45 kilometers of coronapistes during lockdown, and now a further 10 kilometres of wand-separated cycleways will be added.

Of course the auto supremacists lurk in Paris, too.  

Not everybody is happy with Hidalgo’s plans. In the run-up to the mayoral election, Pierre Chasseray, leader of 40 Millions d'Automobilistes, a group with a claimed 320,000 members and which lobbies against speed cameras and other “anti-motoring” initiatives, said:

“[The Mayor] is wrong to take advantage of the health crisis to accentuate its anti-car policy.”

On the contrary, the “epidemic requires giving space to the car,” he added, more in hope than expectation because space for motorists in Paris has been much reduced over recent years.

As for Reid's conclusion, we know of at least one (local) mayor who remains oblivious. 

The plan, it seems, is for motorists to become an endangered species in many parts of the Paris of the near future. Mayors in other major cities around the world are watching with great interest.

Friday, October 09, 2020

ON THE AVENUES: I'm voting for Biden. Otherwise it's Trump's burgeoning fascist GOP death cult.

photo credit


It’s bizarre the way that memories can stay with us for decades, and then we awaken to find it's hard to recall what we had for lunch yesterday.

For instance, I still remember watching a very scary B&W horror flick when I was a little kid, so terrifying that it still resonates decades later.

In one of the pivotal scenes, a scientist is attacked in a cave by his own mutant creation, a gigantic monstrous blood-sucking vampire spider, which drains the man of all his bodily fluids, leaving him shriveled and bleached out, pasty pale, suitable for nothing except empty calories for the carrion flies.

But let’s not dwell on Mike Pence’s deathly pallor in his debate with Kamala Harris on Wednesday.

I hear the fly wants his money back: "Where's the beef?"

---

And so finally the election draws near.

Don’t worry.

I’m not about to climb down from the dizzying heights of the hill upon which I am fully prepared to drink (to die? Seriously? I wouldn’t consider DYING for these amoral, greedy schmucks – and that’s just the NFL owners), this looming height being my deep, pervasive and abiding disgust with America’s fraudulent two-party political duopoly.

As a genuine social democrat trapped in an anti-intellectual milieu filled with progressive poseurs who can’t muster the chutzpah to contest the dimwits on the other side, my hostility to the Democratic Party peaked in early March, when the capitulating centrists pulled every last string, called in all the necessary markers, and vanquished the party’s left wing.

Had I chosen, I might have devoted this column’s weekly inches ever since April to the myriad failures of the Democrats, beginning with our vacuous local party elites here in the New Albanian swampland, then scaling the slimy pole of unprincipled aff/inf/luence until the Democratic National Committee itself came into view, at which point I would be compelled to excuse myself, step away from the laptop, and slip into a Hazmat suit.

Of course, as damning as the indictments capable of being made against the Democrats, the Republicans have devolved spectacularly from merely objectionable into a drain-circling death cult, of which I’ll have more to say in a moment.

In the sense of our hallowed two-party system of spoils, irrespective of which “side” one chooses to inhabit (to squat?), politics today is a dismal, depressing and depraved journey into the very dark heart of human dysfunction.

By extension, this same old song and dance in American idiocy would have remained roughly the same as always in 2020 if not for the emergence of the COVID-19 virus and the pandemic that followed. Literally for once in our lives, there was a new twist in the tale.

One “side” is failing this test far more spectacularly than the other, and they're the ones I'll be voting against.

---

We’ve observed previously that the COVID-19 virus opportunistically targets vulnerable human physiologies. But the extent to which it has done precisely the same in terms of weakened human psychologies and belief systems simply cannot be underestimated.

We’ve seen already thin remaining layers of civility and sensibility stripped away. The science deniers have “enchantingly” multiplied not unlike Pence’s spider-victim-fly diet of pure excrement, waxing orgasmic as they’ve urged old folks to take one for the greater glory of the stock market. The owners of capital meanwhile have used the occasion to double down, while for the rest of us the economy seized up.

Then the deeper ugliness came forward, the accumulated bile, conspiratorial gibberish and raw hatred, much of it borne of generations-long cognitive dissonance, exploding from the ranks of the right-wing’s white know-nothings as Black Lives Matter demonstrations explicated the systemic persistence of racism and absence of social justice.

Through it all, numerous previous unaddressed crises – climate change, health care, income inequality, basic human rights – didn’t exactly disappear.

To be sure, not every Democrat got the pandemic response memo, and even a few Republicans quietly sidestepped their own party’s institutionalized inadequacies, but the primary outcome of the virus’s own truth-revealing capabilities has been the surgical exposure of the GOP’s fundamental(ist) fascination with dying for the “cause.”

And the cause itself? Someone else’s, as it always has been. Mostly the “cause” of bigger money, with a jot or two of apocalyptic religion, wrapped in a flag, although it’s never clear with these retrograde fantasists whether they mean an American or a Confederate flag.

The Republican death cult is the inevitable outcome of five decades spent busily espousing and later gleefully implementing neoliberal, survival-of-the-fittest economic orthodoxy, as abetted by hypocritical end-times Christian theocrats, and washed down with enough white supremacist Kool-Aid to float a fleet of oil tankers.

We should hardly be surprised at this acceptance of death as inevitable. For years, conservatives have responded to gun violence with angry renunciations of any links to gun proliferation or lax gun control laws, offering instead “thoughts and prayers.” The one exception where Republicans express outrage is over the “death” of fetal cells inside women’s bodies—indicating that the fight is less about “murder,” as the anti-abortionists like to call it, than it is about controlling women’s bodies. By and large, the nation’s right-wing factions have for years wanted us to accept mass deaths and preventable mortality as a price for our “freedom.” They expect the same during a pandemic.

But the Republican death cult truly pole-vaulted over the tipping point, and left Democrats in the dust, when BLM became part of our daily discourse, illustrating that James Baldwin’s words ring more presciently than ever before:

When the Israelis pick up guns, or the Poles, or the Irish, or any white man in the world says “give me liberty, or give me death,” the entire white world applauds. When a black man says exactly the same thing, word for word, he is judged a criminal and treated like one and everything possible is done to make an example of this bad nigger so there won't be any more like him.

Structural racism, white fragility, white supremacy – all of it tied neatly together over a period of four centuries.

---

As malicious and looney-bin ludicrous as Donald Trump most surely remains on an everyday basis, allow me to remind you for perhaps the last time that he’s merely a symptom, and symbolic of the rotting disease within.

Trump’s a salesman with only one product, himself, and one true skill, which is enabling the truly dangerous fascists to worship him as an “answer” and purchase the snake oil.

Bullshit.

If it makes sense to you, as it does to me, that to be white is to be racist by nurture, and if whites as yet are the majority in America, if inexorably declining in terms of raw numbers compared to non-whites – and if whites overwhelmingly support Trump in 2020, as in 2016, then logically, Trump is the fruition of American history to the present time, not an aberration at all.

And, if American history since the Reagan era has been an exercise in unfettered capital accumulation by wealthy elites, enabled by neoliberal economic policies on BOTH sides of the duopoly’s aisles, but as always the very heart of the Republican Party’s preference for oligarchies and extractive, robber baron capitalism as its worst, then once again, Trump is a culmination of sorts.

Guns, money and Jesus; that a majority of white “Christians” find it expedient to indulge the worst demons of their nature with respect to racial and cultural distractions merely suggests that Abraham Lincoln’s conception of “better” angels was wishful thinking at best.

Trump’s siren call is for whites to reaffirm their superiority, the supremacist snowflakes having been shaken to the core by the Obama presidency. If lots and lots of us, up and down the spectrum, can make a blood sacrifice of death via COVID, that’s just icing on their cow pies.

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Yes, I dislike the DNC, the Democratic Party’s hawkish warmongers, its centrist "liberal" cowardice, the neoliberal economic gutting, and the sheer volume of hypocrisy existing on the left side of the aisle.

Why, then, am I voting for Biden and Harris?

Because of the GOP’s death cult.

Because there comes a time when triage is paramount, and the bleeding must be stopped.

Because while there is no guarantee matters will improve with Biden, there is no chance of improvement with Trump, only further degradation.

Electing Biden and the Democrats won't resolve the fundamental problem of why 60+ million Americans have alchemized a narcissistic con man into a deity, and come together to fluff his personality cult.

(The short answer involves racism/caste, a misplaced sense of powerlessness, and no more comprehensive an education than an ordinary house fly.)

It will, however, remove at least one blithering buffoon from the daily news cycle, so maybe...just maybe...we can convince 10% of the 60 million that the issues go far beyond the charlatan-in-chief, who is little more than a figurehead for self-deception.

Personally, up ticket, it will be all Democrats for me. Locally, in spite of the GOP’s ethical chasm, a precious few Republicans will nonetheless receive my vote. One is an incumbent who’s right for the job. Another is a protest vote against the prevailing NAHS student council nepotocracy.

The third is Greg Roution, a man I've never once met. He’s a Republican running for coroner against Anthony Oxendine, a funereal circus-master who once tried to sneak a crematorium through the back door into my neighborhood and became all doofus petulant when his bluff was called. 

That's all, folks. Go out and vote, vote against the death cult's vulgarians, and don't forget:


 ---



The NAPD is right, because pandemic safety measures should come first.

 


I'll begin by saying that in my own personal opinion, pandemic safety far outweighs the understandable urge on the part of some to "recreate" a festival canceled owing to ... that's right, pandemic safety

Consequently, the letter from NAPD, while uncharacteristically firm, is entirely fitting. I agree with these sentiments completely. 

I'm confused by only one passage, and will hazard an interpretation: "Ensure no patron exits your business with alcoholic beverages."

I believe the chief means to say alcoholic beverages must not exit businesses in open, non-original containers, which is to say a cocktail or draft beer in a plastic cup, seeing as the governor's statewide emergency writ currently allows carry-outs even from those establishments lacking the proper permit to do so. The city doesn't have any restrictions against open containers out in the open, although of course the police might choose to interpret public intoxication broadly. The Alcohol & Tobacco Commission generally is the final authority on such matters.

To reiterate, I'm personally uninterested in the various crowd-gathering events being staged during the time when Harvest Homecoming normally would be in progress, and I support the city's vigilance. 

One question, though: If these crowd-gathering events are judged not to be in the interest of public health amid the pandemic, couldn't the city and/or health department have pro-actively nixed them? In particular, as with the ATC and beverage licenses, the health department can intervene in a situation involving public health any time it wishes to do so.

Just curious. 

Thursday, October 08, 2020

The great 800-lb pumpkin is silent. The madness yields to peaceful serenity.


Our 2020 non-Harvest Homecoming is under way, and it's a peaceful, easy feeling compared with the usual frenetic amok time, albeit still a tad strange given that with weather like this, we'd be pinned to the tarmac.

Today has been so very normal -- although "normal" will always be a subjective concept in Nawbany, where "We're All Here Because We're Not All THERE."

As first recommended in 2019, here's a new, innovative way to kick off Harvest Homecoming, whether or not it actually takes place: Sardinian throat singing. 


Friday and Saturday should be interesting. Minus the vendors from elsewhere, with some local organizations setting up anyway, and a few businesses staging kinda-sorta HH events, you get an idea as to how a scaled-back festival molded to downtown's actual contours might look. Maybe a springtime bookend fest one of these years? 

However, this year's not-the-fest-as-usual has a new 800-lb gorilla. It's the fact of these little farm-near-me/">mini-celebrations -- how many unofficial beer walks ARE taking place tomorrow, anyway? -- occurring in a pandemic context. Yes, I understand that the governor gave the okay to congregate outdoors, albeit it only recently, but supposedly the mask "mandate" that never really was still applies.

From my vantage point, I've spent the past few months watching local VIPs from both political flush mobs violating the mask mandate frequently and with apparent impunity. It's no longer my self-assigned "job" to call them out, so I haven't. 

However, the unmistakable message I've gotten is that our local political duopoly hasn't been very interested from the outset in leading by example.   

Note that I'm taking great care to be bipartisan, that elusive quality of fairness we all insist should be more prevalent. Let me be clear about what I've witnessed. It's been a firmly bipartisan indifference to science. 

Does any of it matter? 

Beats me. It will always annoy me that from top to bottom in America, grassroots business persons have been expected to enforce "mandates" that neither political entity cares to oversee and be held responsible for implementing. 

In closing, a random HH link from 2018:

Try to imagine Harvest Homecoming if 95% of visitors DIDN'T drive to it -- or, "Why Public Transportation Works Better Outside the U.S."

From 2019: Here are all of Tony Beard's event posters for Fringe Fest at NABC Bank Street Brewhouse, 2008 – 2018.

This one's from last year, but it bears repeating. Monnik has soldiered through the pandemic period, gradually transforming my former workplace into the sort of joint where I'll be spending time at some point down the road. 

---

2019 marks the first Harvest Homecoming since 2007 without a concurrent Fringe Fest at NABC's Bank Street Brewhouse, which closed in May and awaits a new owner.

The first Fringe Fest in 2008 actually took place in the gutted former day-old bread store building and adjacent, vacant parking lot, a full five months before the first day of business.

Those were the days, my friends. Take it away, Tony.














My business divorce became final in February, 2018, and losing Bank Street Brewhouse this spring was rough, but it was the right thing for the sisters to do. NABC's original Pizzeria & Public House is a genuine regional icon, and now they'll be able to upgrade it for what I hope is decades to come.

Americans aren't stupid. Anti-intellectualism has little to do with intelligence.

The common strain that binds together the attitudes and ideas which I call anti-intellectual is a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition constantly to farm-near-me/">minimize the value of that life.
-- American historian Richard Hofstadter

The previous post sets the table.

From 2009: "Hot Hofstadter, cold Cappuccino," or a treatise on Nawbanian anti-intellectualism.

We're just America in a microcosm, after all. 

Are Americans Just Stupid? by David Niose Psychology Today

Anti-intellectualism has little to do with intelligence.

... To understand American anti-intellectualism, it’s important to realize that smart people can embrace dumb ideas. On an individual or social level, this happens when the right mix of factors come together. The first factor is our own makeup – all humans are to some degree biologically prone to intellectual laziness, emotional decision-making, confirmation bias, and other natural impulses that often obstruct critical thinking.

But beyond the biological elements, there are also numerous environmental factors that can reinforce or weaken anti-intellectual tendencies. The extent to which one's family embraces education and critical thinking, for example, will be a major factor for many. Also, and importantly, the existence of influential cultural institutions that promote anti-intellectualism may result in a population that, regardless of its raw intellectual abilities, will seem in many ways ignorant.

From 2009: "Hot Hofstadter, cold Cappuccino," or a treatise on Nawbanian anti-intellectualism.


This was one of my guest columns for the pre-merger Tribune, appearing there on December 12, 2009. 

Many of the columns didn't appear at the blog in their entirety until later, if at all, seeing as the Tribune's understandable directive at the time was that I could link to them and drive traffic to the newspaper's web site (which NAC did consistently for 16 years, and I'm still awaiting a thank you card, ingrates), but not publish the columns myself. 

When the merger rendered me redundant, I assumed all previous agreements went out the window. If not, I'm sure current management is as oblivious as ever.

Consequently, as an introduction to this column's blog link in 2009, I wrote this.

Code enforcement alert: Today's column knowingly and indiscriminately violates the city of New Albany's ban on words of four syllables or more. I'm at home this morning and available to be cited and/or arrested.

No one ever knocked. If there is any consistent pattern to governance in Nawbany, it's that our betters don't read. Especially since 2012.

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BEER MONEY: Hot Hofstadter, cold Cappuccino.

On Monday evening, I overheard a New Albany city councilman explaining to a bystander how much more he knows about drainage issues than any number of trained experts in the field, and that our problems with stormwater primarily result from virulent conspiracies between city planners and a veritable mafia of builders.

I reached for my steaming wand, and thought immediately of Bayard R. Hall.

"(We) always preferred an ignorant bad man to a talented one, and hence attempts were usually made to ruin the moral character of a smart candidate; since unhappily, smartness and wickedness were supposed to be generally coupled, and incompetence and goodness."

Even though Hall might have written it yesterday, speaking perhaps as a resident of New Albany’s 3rd council district, or as a bemused observer of contemporary America’s penchant for creationist museums, masturbatory tea-party circles and Palin for Dogcatcher campaigns, all competing for the attention of a benumbed populace forever mistaking spasm for thought, his words actually date all the way back to 1843.

Hall penned them in reference to the political scene in frontier Indiana, thereby illustrating that anti-intellectualism was a cankerous sore on the American body politic long before George W. Bush took office.

“Anti-intellectualism is a term that in one sense describes a hostility towards, or mistrust of, those who call themselves intellectuals, and intellectual pursuits. This may be expressed in various ways, such as an attack on the merits of science, education or literature.”
--Wikipedia

From Hall, my thoughts raced to Richard Hofstadter. Those voters who have somehow managed to progress beyond the literary realm of “Left Behind” and the attractions of “Dancing with the Stars” might eventually come into contact with the work of the historian Hofstadter, whose 1964 book, “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life,” charted the American cultural habit of loudly detesting the quality that separates humans from other mammals.

“The common strain that binds together the attitudes and ideas which I call anti-intellectual is a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition constantly to farm-near-me/">minimize the value of that life.”

Hofstadter devoted his all too brief career to advancing the primacy of ideas, and exploring the ways that behavior (primarily in the political sense, but also in related pursuits) is related to the way people use, or refuse, their minds.

Ariel Dorfman, a writer, paraphrases Hofstadter’s findings:

“Anti-intellectualism had its origins … in American traits that anteceded the nation's founding: the mistrust of secular modernization, the preference for practical and commercial solutions to problems and, above all, to the devastating influence of Protestant evangelism in everyday lives.”

Like the councilman spouting in the corridor, New Albany’s most renowned practitioners of the anti-intellectual craft tend somewhat bizarrely to be registered as Democrats, although it is difficult to imagine any of them voting for their party’s standard bearer, Barack Obama, in 2008. As such, they’re little more than political poseurs, and with each passing day, we find better ways to sidestep their obstructionist defaults.

Does their destructive anti-intellectualism really matter?

It does, because it emits a catastrophic message to the community, mimicking Pink Floyd: “We don’t need no education – only ward heeling.”

It cynically condemns our children to the very same poisoned atmosphere of unaccountability and low common denominators that shaped New Albany’s malignant past and brought us to a state of apathetic degradation.

It furthers an atmosphere of congenital political underachievement. How many elected community “leaders” can you identify with support for the proposition that life’s difficulties are best confronted “with an intelligence of which no human should ever be ashamed,” as Dorfman phrases it.

Not many.

Rather, they persistently demand that we be ashamed, frightened and uncooperative. They denounce a pantheon of imaginary enemies, of shifty, phantom withholders of vital information, of smarty-pants book-learning engineers, of those who read, of those who write … of anyone who can “do” as they haven’t ever done, and cannot ever do.

Hence the purely imaginary cabal of zoning officials and contractors, plotting by candlelight to pump sewage into area basements.

In the same year as Hofstadter’s treatise on anti-intellectualism, his essay entitled “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” was published in Harper’s Magazine. It is a compendium of American political paranoia, as directed against a cornucopia of enemies – free masonry, the international gold ring, the Illuminati, Catholics and Communists, among others.

Hofstadter offers that “American politics has often been an arena for angry minds,” behind which is a “paranoid style” of thought.

“I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.”

Hofstadter died many years ago, and yet his words chillingly describe the prevailing New Albanian political “culture.”

Consider the incessant talk of malicious City Hall plots directed against selfless public servants on the council. Survey the chronic knee-jerking when these same public servants are asked for corroborating evidence to support their nonsensical conspiratorial claims. Chuckle at the recurring expressions of anti-intellectual rage when they’re presented with alternative, contemporary visions of the world and asked if they’ve heard of life outside the Open Air Museum.

Looking for the best place to begin rejecting the politics of anti-intellectualism and paranoia on the council, and for isolating their practitioners? It’s the council president’s chair – and the time for change is mercifully close at hand.

Roger believes that there are no big or little words, just the right ones. For daily commentary, visit the NA Confidential blog: www.cityofnewalbany.blogspot.com