Future.

A physician friend is featured in two videos embedded below. For those readers who know me, further foreshadowing is unnecessary. If you don't me, I don't feel like explaining, at least yet. At this precise moment, I'm not sure what to say, so I won't say anything. If it's possible to be shocked, unsurprised and saddened all at the same time, then those are my coordinates. I'll need to work my way through cognitive dissonance, all the while trying to retain the example of Shimon Peres in the recent article at The Atlantic.

Understanding how dissonance operates reveals a few practical lessons for overcoming it, starting by exafarm-near-me/">mining the two dissonant cognitions and keeping them separate. We call this the “Shimon Peres solution.” Peres, Israel’s former prime farm-near-me/">minister, was angered by his friend Ronald Reagan’s disastrous official visit to a cemetery in Bitburg, Germany, where members of the Waffen SS were buried. When asked how he felt about Reagan’s decision to go there, Peres could have reduced dissonance in one of the two most common ways: thrown out the friendship or farm-near-me/">minimized the seriousness of the friend’s action. He did neither. “When a friend makes a mistake,” he said, “the friend remains a friend, and the mistake remains a mistake.” Peres’s message conveys the importance of staying with the dissonance, avoiding easy knee-jerk responses.

I'm not sure I can.

From April 29:

From July 13:

As for how this intersection of Christianity and medical science makes me feel, that's easy. It makes me feel profoundly uncomfortable.

Sunday Fact Fest, Episode 02: COVID death surge? It's real, and "the virus has done exactly what public-health experts expected."

Welcome to the ICU, Libertarians.

Narcissists don't care about others. When you don't care about others, it's easier to rationalize when they die. Let the rationalizations renew; after all, it's an election year.

A Second Coronavirus Death Surge Is Coming, by Alexis C. Madrigal (The Atlantic, via Medium)

There was always a logical, simple explanation for why cases rose through the end of June while deaths did not

... There is no mystery in the number of Americans dying from COVID-19.

Despite political leaders trivializing the pandemic, deaths are rising again: The seven-day average for deaths per day has now jumped by more than 200 since July 6, according to data compiled by the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic. By our count, states reported 855 deaths today, in line with the recent elevated numbers in mid-July.

The deaths are not happening in unpredictable places. Rather, people are dying at higher rates where there are lots of COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations: in Florida, Arizona, Texas, and California, as well as a host of smaller southern states that all rushed to open up.

The deaths are also not happening in an unpredictable amount of time after the new outbreaks emerged. Simply look at the curves yourself. Cases began to rise on June 16; a week later, hospitalizations began to rise. Two weeks after that — 21 days after cases rose — states began to report more deaths. That’s the exact number of days that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated from the onset of symptoms to the reporting of a death.

Many people who don’t want COVID-19 to be the terrible crisis that it is have clung to the idea that more cases won’t mean more deaths. Some Americans have been perplexed by a downward trend of national deaths, even as cases exploded in the Sun Belt region. But given the policy choices that state and federal officials have made, the virus has done exactly what public-health experts expected.

When states reopened in late April and May with plenty of infected people within their borders, cases began to grow. COVID-19 is highly transmissible, makes a large subset of people who catch it seriously ill, and kills many more people than the flu or any other infectious disease circulating in the country.

Cognitive dissonance during COVID: "Although it’s difficult, changing our minds is not impossible."

The article linked here about cognitive dissonance is short, concise and includes an interesting anecdote about the Israeli reaction to Ronald Reagan visiting Bitburg.

The pretzel logic has gotten so bizarre that earlier this afternoon, I was admonished by Democrats for being "political" when I suggested the obvious: New Albany is controlled by Democrats, and therefore we could have a mask ordinance tomorrow if the five-member Democratic majority simply voted in favor.

Cognitive dissonance?

You bet. It also just might be true that losing your mind is easier when you didn't have one to begin with.


The Role of Cognitive Dissonance in the Pandemic, by Elliot Aronson and Carol Tavris (The Atlantic)

The minute we make any decision—I think COVID-19 is serious; no, I’m sure it is a hoax—we begin to justify the wisdom of our choice and find reasons to dismiss the alternative.

Members of Heaven’s Gate, a religious cult, believed that as the Hale-Bopp comet passed by Earth in 1997, a spaceship would be traveling in its wake—ready to take true believers aboard. Several members of the group bought an expensive, high-powered telescope so that they might get a clearer view of the comet. They quickly brought it back and asked for a refund. When the manager asked why, they complained that the telescope was defective, that it didn’t show the spaceship following the comet. A short time later, believing that they would be rescued once they had shed their “earthly containers” (their bodies), all 39 members killed themselves.

Heaven’s Gate followers had a tragically misguided conviction, but it is an example, albeit extreme, of cognitive dissonance, the motivational mechanism that underlies the reluctance to admit mistakes or accept scientific findings—even when those findings can save our lives. This dynamic is playing out during the pandemic among the many people who refuse to wear masks or practice social distancing. Human beings are deeply unwilling to change their minds. And when the facts clash with their preexisting convictions, some people would sooner jeopardize their health and everyone else’s than accept new information or admit to being wrong.

Cognitive dissonance, coined by Leon Festinger in the 1950s, describes the discomfort people feel when two cognitions, or a cognition and a behavior, contradict each other. I smoke is dissonant with the knowledge that Smoking can kill me. To reduce that dissonance, the smoker must either quit—or justify smoking (“It keeps me thin, and being overweight is a health risk too, you know”). At its core, Festinger’s theory is about how people strive to make sense out of contradictory ideas and lead lives that are, at least in their own minds, consistent and meaningful.

One of us (Aronson), who was a protégé of Festinger in the mid-’50s, advanced cognitive-dissonance theory by demonstrating the powerful, yet nonobvious, role it plays when the concept of self is involved. Dissonance is most painful when evidence strikes at the heart of how we see ourselves—when it threatens our belief that we are kind, ethical, competent, or smart. The minute we make any decision—I’ll buy this car; I will vote for this candidate; I think COVID-19 is serious; no, I’m sure it is a hoax—we will begin to justify the wisdom of our choice and find reasons to dismiss the alternative. Before long, any ambivalence we might have felt at the time of the original decision will have morphed into certainty. As people justify each step taken after the original decision, they will find it harder to admit they were wrong at the outset. Especially when the end result proves self-defeating, wrongheaded, or harmful.

The theory inspired more than 3,000 experiments that have transformed psychologists’ understanding of how the human mind works. One of Aronson’s most famous experiments showed that people who had to go through an unpleasant, embarrassing process in order to be admitted to a discussion group (designed to consist of boring, pompous participants) later reported liking that group far better than those who were allowed to join after putting in little or no effort. Going through hell and high water to attain something that turns out to be boring, vexatious, or a waste of time creates dissonance: I’m smart, so how did I end up in this stupid group? To reduce that dissonance, participants unconsciously focused on whatever might be good or interesting about the group and blinded themselves to its prominent negatives. The people who did not work hard to get into the group could more easily see the truth—how boring it was. Because they had very little investment in joining, they had very little dissonance to reduce.

The term cognitive dissonance has since escaped the laboratory and is found everywhere—from op-eds and movie reviews to humor columns (as in The New Yorker’s “Cognitive Dissonances I’m Comfortable With”). But few people fully appreciate the mechanism’s enormous motivational power—and the lengths people go to in order to reduce its discomfort.

For example, when people feel a strong connection to a political party, leader, ideology, or belief, they are more likely to let that allegiance do their thinking for them and distort or ignore the evidence that challenges those loyalties. The social psychologist Lee Ross, in laboratory experiments designed to find ways to reduce the bitter conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, took peace proposals created by Israeli negotiators, labeled them as Palestinian proposals, and asked Israeli citizens to judge them. “The Israelis liked the Palestinian proposal attributed to Israel more than they liked the Israeli proposal attributed to the Palestinians,” he told us. “If your own proposal isn’t going to be attractive to you when it comes from the other side, what chance is there that the other side’s proposal is going to be attractive when it actually comes from the other side?”

Because of the intense polarization in our country, a great many Americans now see the life-and-death decisions of the coronavirus as political choices rather than medical ones. In the absence of a unifying narrative and competent national leadership, Americans have to choose who to believe as they make decisions about how to live: the scientists and the public-health experts, whose advice will necessarily change as they learn more about the virus, treatment, and risks? Or President Donald Trump and his acolytes, who suggest that masks and social distancing are unnecessary or “optional”?

The cognition I want to go back to work or I want to go to my favorite bar to hang out with my friends is dissonant with any information that suggests these actions might be dangerous—if not to individuals themselves, then to others with whom they interact.

How to resolve this dissonance? People could avoid the crowds, parties, and bars and wear a mask. Or they could jump back into their former ways. But to preserve their belief that they are smart and competent and would never do anything foolish to risk their lives, they will need some self-justifications: Claim that masks impair their breathing, deny that the pandemic is serious, or protest that their “freedom” to do what they want is paramount. “You’re removing our freedoms and stomping on our constitutional rights by these Communist-dictatorship orders,” a woman at a Palm Beach County commissioners’ hearing said. “Masks are literally killing people,” said another. South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, referring to masks and any other government interventions, said, “More freedom, not more government, is the answer.” Vice President Mike Pence added his own justification for encouraging people to gather in unsafe crowds for a Trump rally: “The right to peacefully assemble is enshrined in the First Amendment of the Constitution.”

Today, as we confront the many unknowns of the coronavirus pandemic, all of us are facing desperately difficult decisions. When is it safe to get back to work? When can I reopen my business? When can I see friends and co-workers, start a new love affair, travel? What level of risk am I prepared to tolerate? The way we answer these questions has momentous implications for our health as individuals and for the health of our communities. Even more important, and far less obvious, is that because of the unconscious motivation to reduce dissonance, the way we answer these questions has repercussions for how we behave after making our initial decision. Will we be flexible, or will we keep reducing dissonance by insisting that our earliest decisions were right?

Although it’s difficult, changing our minds is not impossible. The challenge is to find a way to live with uncertainty, make the most informed decisions we can, and modify them when the scientific evidence dictates—as our leading researchers are already doing. Admitting we were wrong requires some self-reflection—which involves living with the dissonance for a while rather than jumping immediately to a self-justification.

Understanding how dissonance operates reveals a few practical lessons for overcoming it, starting by examining the two dissonant cognitions and keeping them separate. We call this the “Shimon Peres solution.” Peres, Israel’s former prime minister, was angered by his friend Ronald Reagan’s disastrous official visit to a cemetery in Bitburg, Germany, where members of the Waffen SS were buried. When asked how he felt about Reagan’s decision to go there, Peres could have reduced dissonance in one of the two most common ways: thrown out the friendship or minimized the seriousness of the friend’s action. He did neither. “When a friend makes a mistake,” he said, “the friend remains a friend, and the mistake remains a mistake.” Peres’s message conveys the importance of staying with the dissonance, avoiding easy knee-jerk responses, and asking ourselves, Why am I believing this? Why am I behaving this way? Have I thought it through or am I simply taking a short cut, following the party line, or justifying the effort I put in to join the group?

Dissonance theory also teaches us why changing your brother-in-law’s political opinions is so hard, if not impossible—especially if he has thrown time, money, effort, and his vote at them. (He can’t change yours either, can he?) But if you want to try, don’t say the equivalent of “What are you thinking by not wearing a mask?” That message implies “How could you be so stupid?” and will immediately create dissonance (I’m smart versus You say I’m doing something stupid), making him almost certainly respond with defensiveness and a hardening of the belief (I was thinking how smart I am, that’s what, and masks are useless anyway). However, your brother-in-law may be more amenable to messages from others who share his party loyalty but who have changed their mind, such as the growing number of prominent Republicans now wearing masks. Senator Lamar Alexander from Tennessee said, “Unfortunately, this simple, lifesaving practice has become part of a political debate that says: If you’re for Trump, you don’t wear a mask; if you’re against Trump, you do... The stakes are much too high for that.”

This nasty, mysterious virus will require us all to change our minds as scientists learn more, and we may have to give up some practices and beliefs about it that we now feel sure of. The alternative will be to double down, ignore the error, and wait, as Trump is waiting, for the “miracle” of the virus disappearing.

Sunday must-read: "After Save A Lot’s Closing, Potential For Food Desert Grows In New Albany' by John Boyle at WFPL.

Where to begin?

It's wonderful to see John Boyle hit the ground running at his new public radio gig. We're advised never to underestimate the value of liberation from Hanson Acres.

No one can be sure, but apparently the rule of thumb at the Jeffersonville News and Tribune is to ALWAYS solicit the view of a public official, elected or appointed, when writing a story like this.

Refreshingly to the point of screaming aloud with joy and dancing in the streets, Boyle does not do this, preferring instead to speak with those humans affected by Save A Lot's closure, and to locate educated, principled local experts whose opinions are not wedded to the same old political considerations.

The result is fine writing without a cover photo of a mayor, councilman or NAHA administrator.

Three ... six ... nine ... hell, 18 cheers for that.

Thank you, John Boyle.

But here's the part I'm waiting to hear explained by local officials: Assuming the downtown food and drink sector recovers from COVID, which as yet cannot be asserted as a foregone conclusion, what does it say about New Albany as a city that we constantly flog our trendy eateries and watering holes while ignoring the fact that they exist smack in the middle of a food desert, a fact that is most damaging to residents who frankly cannot afford to dine and drink downtown?

Perhaps the LEE Initiative can annex us. Shall we pray?

After Save A Lot’s Closing, Potential For Food Desert Grows In New Albany, by John Boyle (WFPL)

Since the 1950s, residents of downtown New Albany have bought their food at 624 State St., which was originally a Kroger before becoming a Save A Lot. But on June 20, Save A Lot permanently closed its doors. And while there are large grocery chains like Kroger near the outskirts of town, the city’s core is now lacking a full-service grocery option.

“There’s so many of us over here that are very upset, because sometimes we don’t like the big stores,” said Kimberly Williams, who shopped at Save A Lot frequently over the last 12 years. “[Save A Lot] feels homey. Other stores are big, crowded. I don’t like a crowd like that. I like to keep it simple. I know where everything is. That’s going to hurt.”

Williams lives in the nearby New Albany Housing Authority (NAHA) complex. Every two weeks or so, she would pull a wagon just over half a mile to shop, which would take roughly 30 minutes roundtrip.

One of New Albany’s Kroger stores is a little more than a mile away from the former Save A Lot. Though the increase in distance may seem minuscule, every extra step matters to elderly citizens like Williams. The difficulty is amplified by nearby hilly terrain and the fact that Kroger is located in a large shopping center surrounded by an expansive and busy parking lot, which makes the trip less pedestrian-friendly.

“That’s real rough,” Williams said. “You know what I mean? Because sometimes my wagon gets a little heavy. But you know, that’s how I do it… I’ll pull it home. I’m going to miss that. I am.”

snip

The USDA identifies food deserts as neighborhoods that are more than one mile away from the nearest supermarket or grocery store in urban areas – or 10 miles in rural areas – and have poverty rates greater than or equal to 20 percent. One tract of New Albany east of downtown that has a population of 1,897 was already listed on the USDA’s interactive atlas of food deserts, which uses data from 2015.

With the closure of Save A Lot, four more tracts that meet the poverty thresholds could also qualify. Up to 13,500 residents of New Albany may now be living in food deserts.

Marohn: "The core cognitive dissonance in our affordable housing conversation."

A short and insightful piece follows, in which Charles Marohn doesn't pretend to have all the answers.

As with many housing issues, I don’t have a clear three-step plan to make everything work for everyone. Similar to the latest college admissions scandal, it seems that at least part of the conversation needs to acknowledge that even if we truly believe in some vision for an ideal society—whether that includes ample affordable housing or fair college admissions standards or something else entirely—when it comes down to it, our vision for our personal happiness is often at odds with our theoretical utopia. Put another way, individually, we have a vested interest in one approach (rising prices and growth), but collectively, we express an interest in the opposite (broader affordability and housing stability).

In conclusion ...

If we first make that acknowledgement, we can start to discuss a transition between a housing market dominated by our current distorted craziness and one that is more responsive to human needs.

Making this or any other acknowledgement as a preface to a genuine discussion?

Whether it's about affordable housing, streets and roads or virtually any other civic topic in New Albany, City Hall typically doesn't do public acknowedgements, and accordingly, real public discussions seldom occur. We're not having these discussions because they are at odds with the secretive goals of the city's administration.

Perhaps this explains the 800-lb gorilla perched on the dresser during recent chats about the future redevelopment of Colonial Manor.

Noting that I'm very much in favor of the grassroots effort to define a future for the property, and also that the organizers of this effort have done incredible work in standing against the usual Jeff Gahan "fix is in" approach to public "input," there has been some dissonance involved quite beyond City Hall's childish petulance at not having its way.

Specifically, neighborhood activists have openly dismissed any notion of the Colonial Manor acreage being used for housing. I believe this owes to a number of assumptions, some valid (the New Albany Housing Authority's recent spending spree) and others not so much (density fears).

However, Gahan himself surely triggered the backlash when he lofted a short-lived trial balloon about housing in a comment to the Jeffersonville newspaper on March 12.

"We will encourage residential and mixed use. We know the city of New Albany needs all types of housing," Gahan said.

The grassroots reaction to this statement was to read the word "affordable" as an adjective preceding "residential"; to assume "affordable" was code for "public housing," and to object not only to affordable/public housing, but also any housing at all on the site -- how many speakers at last week's listening event referred to there being "too much" density already?

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day -- and, for once, Gahan wasn't full of flatulence when he mentioned the desirability of mixed use, including residential. Of course, the devil in those details center on the level of municipal subsidy to campaign donors, but still, it was not an outrageous statement to make.

Obviously Gahan said nothing about this potential residential use being "affordable," which would contradict his longstanding preference for "luxury" in all forms, but the spectre of NAHA scattered site housing was enough to produce pushback, and correspondingly, redevelopment director Josh Staten made sure everyone knew that NAHA wouldn't be a part of the Colonial Manor picture.

For the moment it's moot, with Gahan publicly pouting and his Democratic Party stooges whining on social media about their inability to cope in a world where city council takes its fiduciary responsibilities seriously and doesn't settle for the Phipps Rubber Stamp.

But I believe Marohn's piece adds depth to the Colonial Manor discussion -- and happily at least we're having a discussion, contrary to Gahan's pathological need to micro-manage any such process behind closed doors.

Who Benefits From Lower Housing Prices?, by Charles Marohn (Strong Towns)

 ... I’m being brutally honest (and a little vulnerable) here in order to make a difficult point about another public issue that can quickly become personal: affordable housing. Because here’s another brutal truth: in our cities today, nobody in a position to seriously impact the affordability of housing ever benefits from housing prices becoming affordable. In fact, the opposite holds true: most every individual or organization in a position to lower housing prices would be harmed by such a result.

And:

A policy approach that lowers home prices is going to run into a lot of structural resistance. And that’s the core cognitive dissonance in our affordable housing conversation: we want housing to somehow become more affordable without prices actually going down. Stated another way, we want people to somehow be able to afford housing while housing itself remains largely unaffordable.

These seven important things about the government shutdown -- and look, not one of them has to do with Covington Catholic High School.

The federal government shutdown has brought the dysfunction of American civilization right to our doorsteps, and yet we've spent the past few days screaming at one another about Catholic school students in DC.

Maybe our Pavlovian reactions to social media prompts are the problem, not the solution. Localism is my mantra, and while defining it hasn't always been easy, to me it comes down to paying attention locally.

How does our local habitat work, and can it work in a more human way?

What's happening outside our front doors and in our own communities?

What can we do at the grassroots level to make life here fairer, better and more equitable?

Social media has been both a blessing and a curse as it pertains to localism. The medium is capable of ready use in reaching numerous households with matters of local importance, but just as often serves as an impediment by monopolizing attention spans over a plethora of national and international issues both fake and real, none of which tend to be capable of addressing by direct grassroots action.

In the sense of ancient Rome, bread and circuses: "A diet of entertainment or political policies on which the masses are fed to keep them happy and docile."

Or in our times, increasingly unhappy, angry and feeling pinned down.

I haven't watched any of the videos documenting the MAGA/Native American molehill. I've read none of the commentaries, screechings and tub-thumpings. Rather, I've been viewing the local scene these past few weeks, and noticing the shutdown becoming increasingly divisive -- and why wouldn't it be?

Since time began, the powerful seek to maintain their privilege by dividing the populace; we're already losing our grip on reality, so why not a few more coffin nails? The article below adroitly surveys the situation, most aspects of which are being ignored as we prepare for the arduous demands of the 10-year challenge on Facebook, or the next student field trip outrage.

As for the government workers being held hostage by the two-party system, it's a siege. If you're feeling bad because you've played no role and done nothing to help them, here's an idea: Do something to help them.

Occam's razor and all; the simplest explanation usually is the best.

---

Time for the U.S. Yellow Vests, by Paul Street (CounterPunch)

Here are seven things you won’t hear much if anything about in the reigning corporate media regarding the ongoing record-setting partial shutdown of the United States federal government:

1: The Longstanding Neoliberal War on “Big Government”: a proper understanding of the shutdown in relation to the longstanding capitalist project of what the leading corporate-neoliberal champion Grover Norquist called “starving the beast,” with “beast” taken to mean “big government.” Norquist wanted, he said, “to cut government down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

Now might be a good time to recall how Trump’s former top political adviser the faux-populist Steve Bannon (with whom Trump certainly still regularly speaks) described his main policy goal when speaking to the Conservative Political Action Conference in February of 2017: “the deconstruction of the administrative state.”

Bannon once proudly told an academic: “I am a Leninist.” Bannon said that “Lenin wanted to destroy the state and that’s my goal too.”

Is the current shut-down not an exercise in “administrate state deconstruction” – something right out of the faux-libertarian (more on why I use that term in my next comment) fever dreams of a Norquist, a Bannon, a Charles Koch, a James McGill Buchanan, a Milton Friedman and others of their right wing and so-called free-market ilk? The orange monstrosity says the shut-down could “go on for years.” You can be sure that capitalist politico and ideologues in the Norquist and Bannon mode are hoping the shut-down can last as long as possible with no clear reported disasters resulting. This will help them advance their “drowning” project. “See?” they can proclaim, as former federal employees work for reduced wages at grocery stores and shopping malls, “we don’t really need this big monstrous and totalitarian government after all. All hail the free market!”

2: On the “Left Hand of the State,” That is: any serious discussion of which parts of government are really targeted by right-wing neoliberal “Leninists” like Norquist and Bannon. Beneath their anti-statist discourse about the great conflict between “government bureaucracy” (bad) and the “free market” (good), they wish to aggressively wield state policy of a specifically regressive, plutocratic, and authoritarian — state capitalist — sort. They don’t really want to destroy the state. They want to de-fund and de-legitimize what the late French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called “the left hand of the state”— the programs and services won by past popular struggles and social movements for social justice, equality, environmental protection, and the common good. They do not wish to axe the “right hand of the state” – the parts that provide service and welfare to concentrated wealth and dole out punishment (including rampant mass incarceration and felony-marking) for the poor (and right-handed social-control functions tend to rise when left-handed ones fall). They do not go after America’s Pentagon system, a great cost-plus subsidy for high-tech corporations like Raytheon, Lockheed-Martin, and Boeing.

It’s not about whether the state should work or exist. It’s about who government should work for: the public and the working-class majority or leading centers of concentrated wealth and power.

3: The Bipartisan Terror of Neoliberalism: how richly complicit the contemporary Democratic Party is in the ugly and regressive neoliberal project. The 2018-19 lockout may be primarily owned by Trump and the Republicans (as MSNBC will tell you again and again) but (as “MSDNC” will not report) the Democrats have participated in the assault on positive government functions across the whole long neoliberal era.

The deregulation of corporations rose dramatically under the Jimmy Carter presidency. It was the arch-neoliberal president Bill Clinton who proudly proclaimed that “the era of big government is over” and then signed off on ending poor families’ entitlement to federal cash assistance while advancing racist mass-incarceration (a government program) with his “three strikes” bill. Clinton passed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a new continental bill of regulation-free rights for global investment capital. He also worked on to work with Republicans to de-regulate derivatives and the financial sector more broadly. Giant Cold War-level “defense” (empire) budgets – a massive taxpayer windful for corporate war masters – remained the rule under Clinton despite the collapse of the only other planetary “super power” (the Soviet Union) right before the beginning of Clinton’s presidency.

Bill Clinton was a masterful, silver-tongued fake-progressive champion of the U.S. bourgeois state’s movement from left- to right-handed state power when it comes to enforcing social control on the victims of the nation’s intertwined regimes of class rule and racial oppression. So, of course, was Obama, whose richly right-handed neoliberal and imperial policy record I have detailed on numerous prior occasions here and in other venues.

4: Wall Street Dems for the Wall: how key Democrats like Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Senator Minority Leader Charles Schumer have in the past supported border fencing. All three voted for the Secure Fence Act of 2006, and all three supported the 2013 Senate immigration overhaul that passed the Senate, which called for tougher border security including additional physical barrier construction. As Oliver Ortega noted on Counterpunch two years ago, the border wall was a bipartisan project before it became a partisan football under Trump:

“When President Trump signed an executive order last week to complete a wall along the 2,000-mile border with Mexico, he was building on decades of bipartisan consensus among lawmakers…In fact, Congress had already approved a border wall not too long ago. In 2006, legislators—including many Democrats—passed the Secure Fence Act, which called for 700 miles of double-fence construction along certain stretches of the border. Trump cited the Bush-era law in the first paragraph of the executive order he signed Wednesday as rationale for his executive authority to order a wall be built.

“Many of the same Democratic leaders now bemoaning Trump’s wall voted for one at the time— Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, Dianne Feinstein….Then-Senator Barack Obama, who as President would later deport a record-high 3 million people during his two terms, lauded the bill on the Senate floor, saying it would ‘help stem some of the tide of illegal immigration in this country.’”

And let’s not forget Bill Clinton’s critical wall-building activities in anticipation of heightened Mexican in-migration expected to result from NAFTA’s decimation of Mexican farmers. As Ortega noted:

“The most pivotal moments in the militarization of the border arguably took place during the time of Obama’s Democratic predecessor, Bill Clinton. ‘Operation Gatekeeper,’ passed in 1994, poured billions of dollars into border security. High-intensity stadium lights, motion detectors, and remote video surveillance were installed along key points of the U.S-Mexico divide, and the amount of border patrol agents was increased by roughly a third. With resources deployed to patrol densely populated sectors, undocumented immigrants were often forced to trek barren desert and mountains. Thousands died in their quest for a better life. ‘We will not surrender our borders to those who wish to exploit our history of compassion and justice,’ President Clinton said at the time.”

“It’s no coincidence that Operation Gatekeeper followed another landmark in US-Mexico relations that same year: the North American Free Trade Agreement. Under NAFTA, Big Ag flooded the Mexican market with heavily-subsidized corn and other staples, displacing small farmers in Mexico in one of the greatest neoliberal coups in history. The result was a flood of immigrants heading northbound in search of opportunities, accelerating one of the largest mass movements of people in history.”

“In short, the U.S. government, acting in the service of corporate profits, caused the very mass migration it has spent the last 25 years trying to keep out and criminalize.”

5: The Authoritarian Idiocy of Our Holy Constitution, crafted to prevent popular sovereignty in the time of the French Bourbon monarchy: how the manifestly un- and even anti-democratic U.S. Constitution empowers the right-wing-led assault on positive federal government functions by absurdly over-representing the nation’s disproportionately white rural “red” (Republican) states in the presidential selection process and in the composition of the U.S.Senate. We hear nothing about how the Constitution helps feed the partisan polarization that lay behind the current government shutdown by enabling states to create House of Representatives districts so badly gerrymandered on partisan lines that right-wing extremists in Republican districts can exercise political influence far beyond their numbers. And we hear little if anything about how the Constitutional system of “checks and balances” is prone to crippling gridlock when its separate components are controlled by different and conflicting, mutually hostile parties (the Constitution’s framers thought they had avoided this flaw because they foolishly believed or claimed to believe that they had created a scheme that would prevent the emergence of political parties).

6: The Need for a Popular Intervention Beneath and Beyond the Masters’ Election Cycle. The Gilets Jaunes (“yellow vests”) in France have given us a taste of what’s required. Among their list of demands is a real and functioning democracy—popular self-rule. Further to that, they have called for a referendum whereby 700,000 citizen signatories would force the French Parliament to debate and vote on a given law within one year. Evoking the French Revolution of 1789, there have even been calls for a Constituent Assembly to draft a new constitution meant to create a new French government—a Sixth Republic based on popular sovereignty and majority rule rather than the demands of a de facto corporate-financial dictatorship. Imagine!

The yellow vests have no illusions that their nation’s reigning elite-controlled political parties and time-staggered election cycle offer anything remotely like substantive popular and democratic input on the making of policy. They have already forced the repeal of a regressive fuel tax and are fighting effectively every day and in the streets for things supported by the majority of the French populace.

We, like the French, get to vote every few years? So what? Mammon reigns nonetheless in the United States, where, as the latest and best political science definitely shows, “government policy…reflects the wishes of those with money, not the wishes of the millions of ordinary citizens who turn out every two years to choose among the preapproved, money-vetted candidates for federal office” The notion that “we the people” are supposed to sit around with glazed eyes captivated by the endless RussiaGate drama and the already-underway two-year build-up to the next quadrennial electoral extravaganza (U.S. cable news is already obsessing over the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate field when it isn’t panting over crumb of Mueller-Trump-Russia news) while hundreds of thousands of “our” government’s workers go unpaid and key positive government functions are disabled in the present is preposterous from any kind of remotely democratic perspective.

7: The Potency of Direct Action. As the venerable left writer Barbara Ehrenreich recently Tweeted: “The shutdown would come to a sudden end if airport workers stop working and shut down air travel. Business, aka capitalism, cannot function if its minions are all floating in the stratosphere or fattening themselves at Cinnabon. The whole thing should take no more than 3 hours.”

That’s a bit too simple, perhaps. TSA workers lack the legal right to strike and are likely afraid of losing their jobs and the back pay that is due them if they walk off their jobs. Still, the basic direct-action point is sound. Hiring replacement airport screeners for no pay would be no small problem for the federal government. The TSA workers would get strong public support for refusing to work without pay – support that might be modeled on the remarkable airport mobilizations that protested Trump’s Muslim travel ban in early 2017. And what if the airline pilots walked off their jobs, reasonably refusing to fly planes under the unsafe conditions created by the non-payment of air-traffic controllers?

It’s not for nothing that the remarkable Gilet Jaunes struggle and story has been essentially blacked out in U.S. corporate media.

The time has come for direct worker and citizen action against the insane federal shut-down. Since I’m referencing Twitter, let me give the last word to an excellent and dead-on Tweet from the left economist Richard Wolff: “Where are the US ‘yellow vests’ to protest gov’t shutdown and the wall? Millions would sympathize, mobilize. The movement could grow, win demands, and expand just as in France.”

"American conservatives aren’t necessarily racists, but they are invariably anti-anti-racist."

Ironically, only moments before viewing this article, I was making a point to a friend as to why the city of New Albany typically refuses to do very much about the physical infrastructure of "domestic" disturbances, particularly as they occur (a) in rental properties, and (b) outside the geographical and socio-economic vicinity where such matters typically (and cynically) are "expected" to occur, and are planned for accordingly.

Now, there exist various mechanisms which might be deployed by functionaries to turn up the heat on the property owner, but in my experience, these are only sporadically referenced. Political will is virtually non-existent, as you already know. Your issues cannot possibly exist in this shining city on the hill (or, in the flood plain).

In short, any elected official capable of convincing himself that an incessantly chanted mantra of "fundamentally better" describes a city where one's own two eyes persist in returning a different verdict probably is inclined to exist in a perpetual state of denial.

If this place is wonderful, then by definition, there can be no unresolved problems. It follows that those who continue to point to the unresolved problems must be doing so from malice and spite. In short, in the current climate of make-believe, my friend's complaints are likely to be construed as direct attacks on the mayor of the city, whose campaign platform is restricted entirely to this:

"These nice things I bought for you using your credit card are proof that we are fundamentally better and simply must go swimming while consuming more ice cream and cookies."

Meanwhile, there is the tendency of conservatives to be "anti-anti-racist." The preceding example has almost nothing to do with racism, as does the article referenced here. However, I'd argue that there is a linkage in the sense of cognitive dissonance, and methods of rationalizing it. Feel free to disagree, as we're still supposedly allowed to do so, at least until the guns come out.

National Review Magazine's Racism Denial, Then and Now, by Jeet Heer (New Republic)

... This unwillingness to admit a racist motive for the Charleston killings has a deeply political motive, for doing so would mean admitting that racism is a real, ongoing problem in American society—one that requires policies to counteract it.

American conservatives aren’t necessarily racists, but they are invariably anti-anti-racist. The creed of anti-anti-racism goes something like this: racism was a problem in the past, but no longer is a serious issue; the chief barrier for non-whites to advance in American society is their own behavior; attempts to remedy racism, such as affirmative action, are themselves a form of racism. For the anti-anti-racist, the very word “racism” has a strange, talismanic power. To utter the word “racism” is to create racism, which otherwise does not exist in the wonderful meritocracy that is America.

Baylor on Beer at LouisvilleBeer.com: "Domestic? Yes and no."

In honor of the imperative of formerly American, domesticated lagers at event like this evening's Live @ Five, here's my latest column at LouisvilleBeer.com

As for "domestic," it all depends on how you look (or most of the time) don't look at it.

Domestic? Yes and no.

Posted by Roger Baylor in Baylor on Beer | 0 comments

Ever since Anheuser-Busch was folded into the international monolith currently known as AB-Inbev, there has been no single polemical activity quite as entertaining as reminding flag-waving, chest-thumping, God-fearing patriots that their carbonated urine of choice no longer emanates from an American-owned brewery.

Rather, it has become the possession of a dastardly multinational conglomerate. That’s right: Controlled by the same overseas shareholders who likely speak vernacular European (where the phrase for unfathomable dishwater is pronounced “Stella Artois”), routinely torture poor geese for use of their fattened livers, and not only know what a bidet is, but also how to use it.

On the size of my (employee benefits) package.

It strikes me that throughout history, multinational corporate monoliths have touted themselves as the most preferable choice for consumers precisely because they can lay claim to being big, predictable and omnipresent.

This has changed somewhat in recent years, which is to say the multinationals tell blatant lies even more often than before – for example, the Anheuser-Busch/Inbev beermaking colossus’ insistence that its American breweries are “local” by geographical virtue of being located in a dozen different places, and selected beers they mass-produce are to be regarded as “craft” even though the process is large-scale, and the proceeds migrate far, far away.

On the other side of all this are independent small business owners like me, who do not have the logistical economies of scale as do chains, big boxes and far-flung multinationals. What we do in response to the argument that merit lies in being biggest and baddest is to offer the principled converse: Not only is there quality in being distinctive and local, but more of the money stays at home, right here in the community, the very act of which verifiably helps the community actually function as a community.

If one, then the other, and you’d think that an argument in favor of micro-locality and distinctiveness has as much right to be heard as the opposite, and yet for quite some time, I’ve sensed a push-back coming.

An example was a recent discussion on Robin Garr’s Louisville Restaurants Forum, during which it was argued that locally-based, sustainable agriculture is not a good idea because it intentionally discriminates against the millions worldwide whose only chance of sustenance is factory farming.

Somehow I’m reminded of Andy Borowitz’s succinct summary of the current situation in Libya: “With Gaddafi gone, Libya's right to determine its future is now safely in the hands of multinational oil companies.” Similarly, the world’s undernourished masses look to Archer Daniels Midland, not themselves, for succor, which uncoincidentally enriches the multinational, robber baron class and keeps money and power where both already repose.

All of which is to say that for the investors to put their faith in Colonel Sanders is one thing, but for the chickens to blindly venerate him is something else entirely, and as I try to dissect the viewpoint of the push-back, there are instances when the source is quite surprising.

Not so long ago, during an e-mail discussion, I was verbally threatened by an employee of a humongous Internet-based retailing firm recording billions in sales worldwide, to the effect that if I didn’t stop unfairly criticizing her incredibly generous employer, she’d begin telling people how markedly inferior my small company’s employee benefits package is, compared to the one she receives.

In short, I’d be savagely exposed, utterly humiliated, and forced to cower pitifully in a corner when people finally learned that smaller-scale, locally-based profits do not enable the same remunerative largesse as internationally generated profits, such is the simplicity of capitalism’s core profit motive, and yet this fails to explain why we continue to have employees – long term employees at that – who know we cannot insure them all or provide stock options or enrich them beyond their wildest dreams.

As business owners, we try to be fair, and to do what we can for our employees. As employees, they agree to work accordingly. Are they exploited? It’s entirely possible, for there is a certain element of exploitation in every facet of human existence, including capitalism. It’s also possible that our employees are sufficiently self-aware to have drawn their own conclusions, based on their own needs and interests, and have found value in their own lives existing apart from money.

There is no intended moral to these ruminations, although reflecting on them, perhaps I’ve been mistaken all along. It always seemed to me that serendipity powered the planet, with instincts and allegiances usually finding their way to the struggle of the underdog.

Of late, the prevalence of cognitive dissonance suggests another explanation for behavioral quirks. It is sad when thoughtful, educated people come down on the side of the monoliths. Alas, it is not surprising. After all, the Yankees still have fans.