American Idiot.

Taibbi's analysis is brilliant.

Pogo's Axiom has never died: "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

The Trump Era Sucks and Needs to Be Over, by Matt Taibbi (Medium)

The race is tightening. Is America sure it's ready to give up its addiction to crazy?

In this sense the Republican Party’s 2020 platform is genius: there isn’t one, just a commitment to “enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda,” meaning whatever Trump says at any given moment. If one can pull back enough from the fact that this impacts our actual lives, it’s hard not to admire the breathtaking amorality of this, as one might admire a simple malevolent organism like a virus or liver fluke.

Automobile supremacy: "The machine that is the established “American Way” can commit countless legal and moral errors and be excused as an individual mistake."

"We’ve gotta be perfect. If a negligent driver kills someone, people see it as a necessary evil. But if a cyclist runs a red light, or a scooter hops onto a sidewalk alongside a busy street, we are just jerks driving crazy little vehicles with no regard for the law."

But seriously, I won't bug you; go back to complaining about the traffic on State Street, all the while accepting the underlying premise that "mobility" requires each of us to drive a vehicle, generally all alone, for just about any trip.

We've Gotta Be Perfect, by Arian Horbovetz (Strong Towns)

... The truth is, there is almost no situation in American culture where 40,000 lives are lost each year without a serious debate about whether or not the context of these deaths should lead to drastic changes. Except when it comes to cars.

If electric scooter crashes caused by negligent piloting led to the death of the elderly pedestrian and the hospitalization of two young children in my community, the public would likely call for the end of these machines. But since negligent driving was the cause of both, we see these incidents as “tragic” but ultimately accept them as normalcy. In reality, if these pedestrians and children were hit by electric scooters, bikes, or skateboarders instead of cars and trucks, they would likely still all be alive and relatively healthy. The hypocrisy in the face of potential loss of life is staggering, and shows just how addicted to our cars, trucks and SUVs we truly are.

Some may believe that addiction is too harsh a term. But when we look at the terrors of addiction, we see the unquenchable need to repeatedly engage in an activity, even if the end result can easily be dangerous or deadly. We accept the risk based on an addiction to the high. We defend its potential to ruin our lives and the lives of others around us, especially our loved ones.

A friend and fellow bike commuter recently said something that stuck with me:

“We’ve gotta be perfect. If a negligent driver kills someone, people see it as a necessary evil. But if a cyclist runs a red light, or a scooter hops onto a sidewalk alongside a busy street, we are just jerks driving crazy little vehicles with no regard for the law.”

Indeed, it’s a double standard with maddening predictability. In general, If it’s a car crash, we blame the negligent driver. If it’s a bike, scooter or skateboard, we often blame the machine itself, or the “culture” associated with said machine. For example, if there is a rash of car accidents on the news, one might say “people drive like idiots here!” But if there are a rash of electric scooter crashes, the reaction is typically an urgent call for these machines to be banned or limited ...

Autocentrism: Isn't it time to free ourselves from the chokehold of the car?

The underlined passage might as well refer directly to the colossal missed opportunity of New Albany's Downtown Grid Modernization Project. What Jeff Gahan has chosen to do constitutes the barest of minimums to (a) achieve paving on someone else's dime, and (b) declare victory.

$3 million (or more) later, we'll have climbed painfully into the 1980s. Just imagine what might have been, because if you can imagine it, that's considerably more than the suburban auto-centric mayor can conjure.

The car has a chokehold on Britain. It’s time to free ourselves, by George Monbiot (The Guardian)

Our insanely inefficient transport system is in thrall to the metal god. Electric vehicles are not the answer

We tell ourselves that we cherish efficiency. Yet we have created a transport system whose design principle is profligacy. Metal carriages (that increase in size every year), each carrying one or two people, travel in parallel to the same places. Lorries shifting identical goods in opposite directions pass each other on 2,000-mile journeys. Competing parcel companies ply the same routes, in largely empty vans. We could, perhaps, reduce our current vehicle movements by 90% with no loss of utility, and a major gain in our quality of life.

But to contest this peculiar form of insanity is, as I know to my cost, to be widely declared insane. Look at how advertising is dominated by car companies, and you begin to understand the drive to ensure that this counter-ergonomic system persists. Look at the lobbying power of the motor industry and its support in the media, and you see why successive plans to address pollution seemed designed to fail.

Suggest a neater system, and you will be shouted down by people insisting that they don’t want to live in a planned economy. But in this respect (and others) we do live in a planned economy. These days transport planners make a few concessions to cyclists, pedestrians and buses, but their overriding aim is still to maximise the flow of private vehicles. Rather than encouraging the more efficient use of existing infrastructure, they keep increasing the space into which inefficiency can expand ...

Urgent note to Deaf Gahan: More evidence that street design = street safety = social justice, even more so than a doggie fun park.

At this late date, it can't be denied that street safety in New Albany relies on one factor, and one factor alone, to the exclusion of all others.

In short, someone in a position of municipal authority just might consider street safety for all users beyond the same old auto-centric boilerplate, naturally doing so piecemeal for one singular stretch of roadway, though never as an organic citywide whole, so long as the 80-20 federal matching funds come through.

Until then, we cross our fingers and wade into the interstate-rated traffic lanes, as pedestrians have been doing along Grant Line Road for the past 30 years.

Grant Line Pedway Project in New Albany moving forward (Beilman; N and T)

It has taken five years and a second Gahan administration for the ruling City Hall junta to even begin making faint, barely detectable gurgling sounds about public safety in this context.

Consequently, we must not ever forget that in New Albany, public safety has consistently come second or worse, forever submerged behind Gahan's bright, shiny baubles.

New parks and recreation facilities were prioritized, and came first. Doggie exercise was prioritized, and came first. The Farmers Market was prioritized, and came first. Subsidized luxury housing and initiatives to demolish public (read: affordable) housing units were prioritized, and came or is coming first.

In fact, the word "oblivious" has met its match in Gahan. Oblivious surrenders, and says go ahead, shoot me now. Never has a New Albany mayor remained so stubbornly aloof from the reality of everyday life in this city. Agoraphobia is a crippling affliction; too bad the rest of us must pay for it.

ON THE AVENUES: For New Albany’s Person of the Year, the timeless words of Mother Jones: “Pray for the dead, and fight like hell for the living.”

Gahan’s grandiosely termed Downtown Street Grid Improvement Project might yield a bare minimum return on investment by restoring two-way streets, but otherwise it’s just another of his mock Potemkin façades, dedicated to garnering as much campaign finance lubrication as possible from the usual suspects in engineering and construction without making truly transformative changes to the grid.

It’s why the forever uncomprehending Gahan stripped Jeff Speck’s plan of its most potentially useful recommendations, and it’s why we’ll have to add them back as we’re able, with or without City Hall’s permission.

Street safety?

Clearly it's a social justice issue, not a campaign finance issue. Unfortunately for New Albanians, if "bad street design is disproportionately impacting historically marginalized groups in America," then Gahan's instinctive response is to ship the marginalized elsewhere, not fix the problem.

But there's a funny part to all this.

Gahan thinks he's a Democrat. Cue the laugh track, at least until you try to cross the street outside.

The Hidden Inequality Of America's Street Design, by Diana Budds (Co.Design)

New data shows that pedestrians in the U.S. are more likely to die if they're poor, a person of color, uninsured, or old.

Urban design has a long history of perpetuating racial and economic inequality, and the burden of bad streets is still being disproportionately borne by underserved populations. According to a new report, pedestrians in the United States have a higher risk of being killed by cars if they're people of color, aged 65 or older, uninsured, or from a low-income household.

The report, called "Dangerous by Design 2016," is authored by the National Complete Streets Coalition, a working group within the nonprofit Smart Growth America, which supports socially equitable, environmentally responsible, and economically healthy urban design strategies. The report focuses on designing streets for multi-modal transportation, and ranks every state and more than 100 major metropolitan areas by what it calls the Pedestrian Danger Index, or PDI, which assesses the likelihood of a car hitting a pedestrian by comparing the rate of pedestrian deaths in an area to the rate of people who walk to work. (SGA calls this the best available measure of how many people are likely to be out walking every day.)

"The leading goal is equity in implementation for all avenues of transportation," says Emiko Atherton, director of the National Complete Streets Coalition. "It really is about not only treating everyone equitably, but also encouraging departments of transportation to focus on the most underserved."

Put simply: Bad street design is disproportionately impacting historically marginalized groups in America.

From Foxwoods to Horseshoe, and following the money.

Setting aside for a moment the ethical implications inherent in government taxing the addictions of its citizenry, which after all has been occurring since the dawn of human history, what happens when a government that is unwilling (or is not permitted) to tax its citizens directly becomes reliant on the revenue produced by indirect taxation such as that produced by legalized gambling – or gaming, as preferred by America’s casino industry?

Precedents in other areas of purported sinfulness are many. As Ken Burns’s “Prohibition” documentary series observes, prior to the introduction of the income tax, excise taxes on beverage alcohol constituted a huge portion of federal revenue.

Obviously, this is a form of addiction in itself, whether an indispensable fix for those state governments issuing the restricted permits, or local authorities seeking funding for governmental agencies as well as their outsourcing of educational and social services to extra-governmental agencies and non-profits, all of which queue accordingly for grants from entities like the Horseshoe Foundation here in Southern Indiana.

Thus, these functions are off-loaded, and subsequently rely only on the continued popularity of gaming (see the article linked below) and whatever mechanisms exist to divide the proceeds among applicants.

At the Horseshoe Foundation, a Board of Directors manages the foundation and allocates disbursements with the assistance of grant and investment committees, under the overall direction of an executive director. Elected officials occupy some seats on the board and committees, while others are occupied by people representing a cross-section of the community.

It’s interesting to contemplate the ever increasing extent to which the Horseshoe Foundation’s very existence helps governmental ends meet. It’s also fitting and proper to monitor the ulterior motives of whomsoever has his or her hand on the spigot, and to advocate maximum transparency, seeing as the lines separating political and non-political can get somewhat blurred at the local level.

As Ronald Reagan himself was fond of saying, “Trust, but verifiy”. He was a Republican, you know.

Foxwoods Is Fighting for Its Life, by Michael Sokolove (New York Times)

 ... It would be easy to look at what has occurred at Foxwoods and think, Here are people who fell into money and didn’t know how to handle it. Which happens to be true. But how the casino reached this point, and the challenges its owners and operators now confront, is part of a much larger story — one involving the gradual relaxation of moral prohibitions against gambling, a desperate search for new revenue by state governments and the proliferation of new casinos across America. Casino gambling has become a commodity, available within a day’s drive to the vast majority of U.S. residents. Some in the industry talk of there being an oversupply, as if their product were lumber or soybeans.