You're entitled to my opinion and there's ample time, so here are a few random links.

I'm always making notes and collecting links with the idea that they might become blog posts.

Of course "stuff" happens; in January, I began "political distancing" from anti-social Gahanism, then came the disruptions of the planetary pandemic. In short, the notes and links have accumulated, and so here's a helter-skelter collection.

To kick off the chronology, you'll not be surprised that this particular publication is suspicious of Piketty.

A bestselling economist sets out the case for socialism at The Economist

Thomas Piketty’s new book may prove as famous—and controversial—as its predecessor.

In “Capital” Mr Piketty shared Karl Marx’s goal in the work of the same name that he published in 1867: to reveal the economic logic of the capitalist mode of production. “Capital and Ideology”, by contrast, is closer to the sociological writings of Marx and his followers, especially “The German Ideology” (1845-46), which sought to explain the social and political means by which capitalists maintained power over the working classes.

How many times have I heard a New Albanian return from vacation, praise a walking- and biking-friendly locale far, far away, then sigh: "too bad we couldn't ever do that here." But couldn't we -- I mean, if we weren't so stupid and cowardly about it?

Why Do We Think Walkable Towns Are Only for Tourists? by Daniel Herriges (Strong Towns)

I wrote a piece a few weeks ago about Irish villages. It was intended to make the point that it's not only possible, but utterly normal in much of the world, for some of the best walkable urbanism around to be located in smaller cities or even tiny rural towns.

In such places, the village is compact, with bustling streets and little wasted space. However, if you walk to the edge of town, you are immediately in farm fields. There is a stark line between town and country, not the suburban-style blurring of the edges we often find in car-centric North America, where the edge of town consists of a mile or two of chain restaurants and gas stations.

Earlier this year when the town of Clarksville released its ideas for much needed positive changes to the design of Brown's Station Way, the automobile supremacists came immediately out of hiding, among them Wynken (John Gilkey) and Nodd (Lindon Dodd). We know Blynken is out there somewhere, but don't worry, car fetishists -- it will be a while before the town gets around to doing the rational thing, freeing you to remain Luddites.

DODD COLUMN: Road plan full of potholes (by Nodd, in the local chain newspaper)

Brown’s Station Way — a very short, simple, unassuming stretch of mostly ignored if not forgotten road that has apparently suddenly been discovered by engineers, architects, local political types, safety experts, and developers.

Of course the local chain newspaper is unaware of safety by design, and proved it with an editorial from Terre Haute. The conclusion is correct, but it would be instructive to see Gilkey's former employer show an aptitude for modern thinking about complete streets. After all John lacks it.

EDITORIAL: For safety's sake, ban cellphones while driving

No law is going to prevent every crash or bring an end to distracted driving. But banning cellphone use while driving can help make vehicular travel safer for everyone. It’s time for Indiana to become part of that solution.

Another look at the utter futility of painted (and ignored) sharrows on roadways.

Separated Bike Lanes Means Safer Streets, Study Says, by Aaron Short (Streetsblog)

A 13-year study of a dozen cities found that protected bike lanes led to a drastic decline in fatalities for all users of the road.

Perhaps even more important: Researchers found that painted bike lanes provided no improvement on road safety. And their review earlier this year of shared roadways — where bike symbols are painted in the middle of a lane — revealed that it was actually safer to have no bike markings at all.

One can only imagine the phone sex between Gahan and Duggins as they plot to turn the coronavirus crisis into some way of demolishing public housing in New Albany. Why? Because that's what opportunistic slaves to money do when people aren't looking.

For Those Living in Public Housing, It’s a Long Way to Work, by Sarah Holder (CityLab)

A new Urban Institute study measures the spatial mismatch between where job seekers live and employment opportunities.

Depending upon which zip code they call home, researchers found that the average person using some form of government housing aid is likely to face tougher odds of getting a job near their neighborhood than the average job seeker who isn’t using assistance, even those who are extremely low-income. “In fact, the average assisted household is surrounded by 6,032 more nearby Snagajob seekers than Snagajob postings, compared with 3,056 more for unassisted, extremely low–income households — nearly double the amount,” the report reads.

Of all assisted households, those living in public housing had the biggest difference between the number of job seekers and the number of jobs nearby; next came housing choice voucher, or HCV, recipients.

And, to conclude with topicality.

A Tale of Two Plagues, by Katha Pollitt (The Nation)

Tips on self-isolation from Daniel Defoe and Giovanni Boccaccio

I’ve been catching up on the classics. For example, Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, an early example of the nonfiction novel, written in 1722 about London’s Great Plague of 1665. After a slow start—the novel begins with a lot of statistics to establish its factual reliability—it picks up, as Defoe’s narrator, H.F., a prosperous saddlemaker, misses his chances to leave London and finds himself trapped in town, where he alternates between prudent isolation indoors and restless wanderings through the streets ...

... They’re definitely not having as much fun as the wealthy young people in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, who escaped the 1348 plague by holing up in the Florentine countryside, flirting and telling sexy stories.

ON THE AVENUES: It's a tad premature to sing the healing game.

Fear is an incompetent teacher.
-- Jean-Luc Picard

I don't make it a habit to quote from science fiction, or for that matter television in general seeing as I watch it so very seldom. It so happened that as I began writing, occasionally glancing up from the laptop, I saw Admiral Picard say these words only because my wife was watching the current series with closed captioning; otherwise I'd have heard nothing owing to wearing headphones and listening to Van Morrison's wonderful 1997 album, The Healing Game.

Down those ancient streets
Down those ancient roads
Where nobody knows
Where nobody goes
I'm back on the corner again
Where I've always been
Never been away
From the healing game

The brass section begins playing a riff as the song rounds the final turn and heads for the finishing line, and the passage bears a striking resemblance to "I Can't Get Started," the old popular song popularized by the epochal swing era trumpeter Bunny Berigan. He died in 1942, felled by cirrhosis of the liver.

Three years after Berigan's premature departure, V-J Day at last arrived, and America set off on a series of postwar victory laps lasting until the "Greatest Generation's" box office acme in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The remorseless actuarial tables took their toll, and their kids, the baby boomers, have found it difficult to recall the lessons of WWII and the Great Depression preceding it.

Subsequent generations are too busy simultaneously working three or four gig economy jobs to notice much about history.

That's too bad.

Presently there is a pandemic afoot, which isn't close to being concluded by any stretch of the imagination, but already it will be remembered by future generations for this news item documenting public outreach that was found necessary by the police department in Newport, Oregon.

"It's hard to believe that we even have to post this. Do not call 9-1-1 just because you ran out of toilet paper." 

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We know there are numerous factors helping to explain why the centuries-old Romanov dynasty was successfully overthrown in 1917 by an otherwise motley crew of ragtag Marxists.

The Russian Empire was making baby steps toward economic viability, but was rotten to the core when it came to the abilities of its ruling class. Like a celiac loose in a bakery, Tsar Nicholas II rushed into the one situation guaranteed to irreparably weaken his grip: Total war, in the form of World War I, a mind-numbing conflagration that exposed every socio-economic fault line in Russia and created whole new opportunities for cultural collapse.

There were two revolutions in Russia in 1917. The first occurred in February (according to the Julian calendar), toppling the already tottering tsar. A provisional government was formed, and it announced a series of comparatively liberal reforms.

However, the briefly powerful Alexander Kerensky failed to properly read the room, and Russia remained "in" the war in the face of overwhelming public sentiment for peace. Society continued to crumble, and in November the numerically inferior Bolsheviks -- the Commies -- welded superior leadership with the broad support of workers and peasants (many of them attracted by V.I. Lenin's brilliant "campaign" slogan of Peace, Bread, Land) and overthrew the provisional government.

Now, where was I?

Ah, yes, the coronavirus, Covid-19, which seeks a vulnerable host for the purpose of self-perpetuation, and could not have found a better candidate than our disunited states of dystopia. 

Still, as Russia proved more than a century ago, opportunism need not be restricted to a virus. Mega-corporations, capital accumulators and the 1% show no visible compunction when it comes to seizing the moment to fleece the rest of us, again and again, and we can't rely on either major political party for usefulness when both suckle the very same teat.

The late Gore Vidal (1925-2012) was the subject of a documentary called The United States of Amnesia, released in 2014.

A curious condition of a republic based roughly on the original Roman model is that it cannot allow true political parties to share in government. What then is a true political party: one that is based firmly in the interest of a class be it workers or fox hunters. Officially we have two parties which are in fact wings of a common party of property with two right wings. Corporate wealth finances each. Since the property party controls every aspect of media they have had decades to create a false reality for a citizenry largely uneducated by public schools that teach conformity with an occasional advanced degree in consumerism.

Are these advanced degrees in consumerism serving us well in a time of flattened curves and social distancing, or are we revealed to be inhabiting a failed state, dragged into the abyss not only by four decades of Hayek's neoliberal claptrap -- a destructive form of social engineering as or more offensive than what Lenin foisted on the Russians -- but more ominously, our own inability (read: unwillingness) as individuals to have an semblance of a clue as to exactly who are oppressors are?

Fetch me my pitchfork, ma -- well, just as soon as we all make it out of quarantine.

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For the second week running I sat down and churned out a column on the fly. Good, bad or indifferent, I'd resolved to try going a whole year without column reruns, and this makes three months. Interestingly, as wordy as I can be, the preceding clocked in at almost exactly the number of words (900) that used to serve as my limit when BEER MONEY ran in the pre-merger New Albany Tribune. Strange days continue to find us, and will during the weeks ahead.

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Recent columns:

March 19: ON THE AVENUES: If it's a war, then the food service biz needs to be issued a few weapons. We need improvisation and flexibility to survive the shutdown.

March 12: ON THE AVENUES: Keep calm and carry on.

March 5: ON THE AVENUES: I've got the spirit, but lose the feeling.

February 27: ON THE AVENUES: There is a complete absence of diversity among regular News and Tribune columnists.

Cultural education: Buckley, Vidal, and the essential documentary film Best of Enemies.

It took far too long for me to get around to watching this essential film. I highly recommend it. After you've seen it, please join me in lamenting the fact that Buckley and Vidal aside, their cultural perspectives remain locked in mortal combat, almost 50 years later.

Bilge Ebiri, writing at Vulture:

You might see a film about William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal’s ten televised debates during the 1968 presidential conventions as an opportunity to bask in eloquent, pointed repartee. You might also enjoy the spectacle of two of the foremost intellectuals of their time coming very close to physically beating the crap out of each other. You might not expect, however, to find yourself weeping — for the state of the republic and the poisoned media landscape, for the decay of the American social contract. Yet here we are. Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville’s masterful Best of Enemies leaves you with an overwhelming sense of despair. It’s not just a great documentary, it’s a vital one ...

 ... Best of Enemies’ true aim is to lament a bygone political discourse. Vidal and Buckley may have started off as representatives of an old-fashioned school of debate, learned and articulate and polite, but by the end of the conventions they wound up unwittingly inventing a new media landscape: one of constant conflict, sustained anger, and barely contained violence. Gordon and Neville find in these two men’s infamous clash a turning point, the moment in time when the networks, the press, the pundits, and even average Americans first realized their taste for political bloodsport. A terrible beauty had been born, as they say. This might be the saddest film of the year.

At The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw:

It is fascinating, not for any supposed lost standard of excellence in argument – the drawling debates look like a squabble between two snippy and indistinguishable twins – but for showing us two examples of that exquisite, extinct breed: the literate “political classes” willing to exchange high-flown badinage on television. The contest was always about who would lose their cool first and it was Buckley, furious at being called a “crypto-Nazi” and threatening to sock the “queer” Vidal in the face, live on camera. Buckley had, therefore, humiliatingly lost, but Vidal endured the ignominy of irrelevance as Buckley became the height of political fashion in the Reaganite years. They both then entered the wilderness as incorrect patrician wordsmiths who no one cared about any more.

A.O. Scott's review in the New York Times:

In 1968, as the summer political-convention season approached, ABC News decided to take a gamble. The network seemed permanently stuck in third place, and its news division in particular suffered from the lack of a brand-name on-air authority figure to compete with Chet Huntley and David Brinkley at NBC or Walter Cronkite at CBS. Back in those days, the two leading networks covered the conventions live from beginning to end. (Can you imagine?) Instead of comprehensiveness, ABC went for provocation and at least the illusion of intellectual heft, hiring Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr. to conduct a series of debates during the Republican circus in Miami and the subsequent Democratic debacle in Chicago. “Best of Enemies,” Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville’s lively new documentary, an accessible assemblage of archival footage and talking-head analysis, mines the Buckley-Vidal skirmishes for nuggets of historical insight.

And also — not quite the same thing — for zingers and gotchas and other flashes of that mysterious, you-know-it-when-you-see-it phenomenon called “great television.” The most memorable such moment occurred late in the battle, as the Chicago Police Department rampaged in Grant Park. What looked like law and order to Mayor Richard J. Daley and like “Gestapo tactics” to Senator Abraham A. Ribicoff of Connecticut set off a series of especially nasty personal volleys between ABC’s designated intellectuals. Vidal needled Buckley, calling him a “crypto-Nazi” until Buckley lost his patrician cool and snapped back: “Now listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.” Ratings gold.

A few handy Gore Vidal quotes.

The Guardian provides a short list of quotes gleaned from the life of Gore Vidal. My favorite, and the one most relevant to the New Albanian experience:

"There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise."

Gore Vidal quotes: 26 of the best ... Gore Vidal, the celebrated writer, has died aged 86. He was famous for his acerbic wit. Here are some of his best quotes.