I feel a rant coming on: No, national chain restaurant franchises are not local mom 'n' pop shops.

On more than one occasion the past week there have been reminders from the local owners of national chain restaurant franchises that they’re mom and pop shops, too.

Jeeebus, this gets tiring. For background see the charts above and below, and then allow me to pound the desktop for a moment.

Taco Bell, Burger King, Culver’s, McDonald's -- whichever, whatever -- are not chains, they yell, because they’re franchises, and because the franchises are locally owned they’re not chains at all, and therefore, this 1,298th location cut from the same template is no different from Aladdin or Lady Tron’s.

We're locals just like you indies! We're mom and pop!

By the same mangled logic, the 2009 Ford Fusion that I inherited from my mother, which I believe was manufactured in Sonora (Mexico), magically becomes a “local” New Albanian automobile because I drive and operate it locally ... and because of this, I can take credit for building it by hand.

Uh huh. Look, you substituted money for creativity and bought a fully developed restaurant designed and programmed by others. You cannot change the menu on whim by substituting Frito Bandito Hot Browns for Roadkill Chalupas, but you’re quite happy to reap the benefits from national saturation advertising and sponsorship campaigns of the sort almost never available to genuine indie innovators.

Yes, it’s true that you must have enough money to buy the franchise and sufficient moxie to run it, but I’m guessing that bankers are far more cooperative with proven franchise financing than start-ups from scratch, and of course the entire point of franchising is to adjust the risk factor downward compared with start-ups by applying the sheer weight of huge and bland pervasiveness.

Which the public adores, even those who ought to know better.

It's ever harder to discuss matters like this without unleashing f-bombs. Franchisees are almost as annoying as those wealthy kids born on third base, convinced they hit a triple. It’s more like paying the umpire for a base on balls, trotting to first, and claiming to have been hit in the face by a pitch.

And, as a side note, genuine independent local small business owners know exactly what being hit in the face by a pitch feels like; it's how we learn, daily, without a safety net extended lovingly by a multinational.

All in it together? In terms of the pandemic, yes. But as it pertains to this idiocy about franchises being local, no, not really. Think you might stop pretending?

Not a single tree in this city has a chance so long as David Barksdale and Jeff Gahan wield the chain saws, and Freud would have a field day with the phallic symbolism.

$10 million to alleviate "inhumane" working conditions in the City-County Building, but not a farthing to spend on real people or living trees.

These really are absolutely horrid functionaries. Just horrid.

Three red ribbons have been wrapped around three trees in front of St.Mary’s school on Elm Street. I’ll bet you a dollar against a dozen doughnuts that Councilman Barksdale and Mayor Gahan have them slated for imminent amputation. And our City Forester is ready to comply.

Sad sad sad. One looks at least 40 - 50 years old.

It doesn't stop with yet another clear cut.

Did you read the horrible paragraph on the back of the “Stormwater News”? The “Message from Mayor Jeff Gahan” is a piece of steaming dog shit.

You mean this?

Deforestation hinders the stormwater control effort, but let's not ignore how stupefyingly banal this message reads, although the mayor has a reasonable retort: "Do you really think I write the words my name is attached to"?

On the errant notion of downtown two-way gridlock: The "I'll huff and puff and boycott a place I rarely go anyway, except to pass through" approach.

Just imagine if City Hall and captive non-profits like Develop New Albany had devoted just a bit of time educating the populace. Well, parties are more fun, I guess.

On the topic of impending two-way streets, our neighbor Jessica hits the center of the target and drops the mic:

"I'm sorry that this is going to slow down your commute and not allow you to speed down my neighborhood street. I'm sorry that two-way streets are going to make it safer for pedestrians. I'm sorry that this is going to cause less accidents to occur. I'm sorry this is going to make our city a walkable city. I'm sorry that this transition is going to continue to help our local businesses thrive. I'm sorry that this is going to make it safer for my family and all of the families with children that have begun to move to this area. Imagine if your subdivision/neighborhood streets were a speedway and think about how you would feel? Now think about downtown New Albany." 

Her hashtag: #sorrynotsorry

Right on, neighbor. Right on. Yesterday the social media-sphere was filled with the threats of flat-earthers to boycott downtown New Albany because the exact same number of traffic lanes will exist after the two-way reversion, just as they did before, but because the configuration is different, OMIGOD HOW WILL WE EVER MANAGE IT.

Maybe by paying attention?

There is a word that can't be repeated often enough to those who threaten to boycott downtown because two-way streets will require them to drive a tad more slowly and (heaven forbid) pay attention to the community outside their car windows:

Promise?

Even before the mayor has mounted his first self-congratulatory plaque, indignant pass-through drivers are screaming about gridlock, and as usual, Jeff Gillenwater provides the most devastating refutation of these spasms:

If people have to wait for more than a traffic light or two in downtown New Albany after having already sped through the neighborhood, traffic is "backed up" and that's usually just because too many drivers aren't smart enough to take alternate routes all of two blocks in either direction from Spring. It often takes me longer to exit the interstate via the 9th Street ramp in Louisville than it does to navigate the "traffic" in downtown New Albany. It's a lot like parking perception: There are typically so few problems with automobile congestion in Downtown New Albany, any seems like a lot. Those frustrated drivers, though, like to take it out on everybody else once they hit the ramps, driving 70-75 mph and weaving in and out of lanes because everybody knows that it's well worth risking multiple lives to keep them from being five minutes late to wherever they're going. I mean, they might not have time for a second cup of coffee at their destination before they have to get started with their work. If everybody driving a car was 1/3 as important as a lot of them seem to think they are, I could roll down my windows and chat with Nobel Prize winners every morning.

Perhaps my favorite of all was the man who said he'd be taking his business to all the wonderful restaurants on Veterans Parkway.

Dude: don't make promises that you can't keep.

Not in Adam Dickey's "democratic" NA: "All over the world, people are rising up against austerity and massive levels of income and wealth inequality."

One cult of personality at a time, please.

As the flailing chieftain of the DemoDisneyDixiecrats contemplates his challenge to Ed Clere in 2018 ...

Okay, but Bowling Night's still on, right?

 ... there's a lesson underway.

The Blair era truly ended on June 8th.

It's time for the Clinton era to end, too. Meanwhile, Adam's happy to help Jeff cleanse the city of its most economically vulnerable residents ... 'cuz that's the way we monetize.

Bernie Sanders 'delighted' by Jeremy Corbyn's results in election vote, by Matthew Weaver (The Guardian)

Vermont senator said strong figures show that ‘people are rising up against austerity and inequality’ across the globe

Bernie Sanders has congratulated Jeremy Corbyn on Labour’s performance in the general election. The Vermont senator – who narrowly failed to win his bid for the Democratic nomination against Hillary Clinton in the 2016 race for the White House – said he had watched the UK results coming in on Thursday and was very pleased about the party’s showing.

“I am delighted to see Labour do so well,” the Vermont senator said in a Facebook post, linking to a Guardian news story. He went on:

“All over the world, people are rising up against austerity and massive levels of income and wealth inequality. People in the UK, the US and elsewhere want governments that represent all the people, not just the 1%. I congratulate Jeremy Corbyn for running a very effective campaign.”

"Andrew Sullivan extols a pre-Trump past that bears little resemblance to the grotesque reality of American society."

But these rose colored glasses
That I'm looking through
Show only the beauty
'Cause they hide all the truth

Andrew Sullivan’s Delusional Dreams, by by Emmett Rensin (Jacobin)

Andrew Sullivan extols a pre-Trump past that bears little resemblance to the grotesque reality of American society.

... I am not disputing Sullivan’s anxiety, nor the anxiety of those who read his passage and identified with it. But it is a curious idea, this notion that just one month ago, “many people” did not need to think about politics at all.

Who are these “many people”? Surely they are not the millions afflicted by homelessness and joblessness and pain, the Americans harassed or murdered by our criminal justice system, or those for whom daily hunger is an inheritance. If the achievement of free society and a stable democracy is its citizens’ capacity to devote themselves to “passions” and “pastimes” and “loves,” free from “those who rule over” them, then “many people,” many Americans, have never lived in a free society in a stable democracy.

Perhaps the extent of the present depravity is reflected in the fact that even the “many people” who make up the professional and upper classes find themselves suddenly subject to the instability and malevolence of our politics, but they are the exception. The “markedly less free” nation existed long before last January, and “many people” have been living there since they were born ...

SNIP

 ... I share Andrew Sullivan’s desire to live in a nation where people are free to lead their own lives, participating in politics where necessary but confident that their interests will not collapse without their constant involvement.

But in order to achieve that desire, our immediate ambition must be more political consciousness, not less. We must continue the work already carried out by countless left organizations, from the Moral Mondays movement to our socialist parties, the difficult and often tedious work of real politics that go beyond takes and tweets and #resistance in the form of endless faith in the Democratic Party. We must organize our poor and oppressed and incarcerated, our unemployed and our exploited workers into a political class, aware that their situation is not immutable, and committed to transforming the United States not just back into the depraved caste society of decades past, but into a vehicle for common prosperity, where no citizen goes without food or medicine or shelter and no one is subject to the capricious violence of the upper classes and their laws.

The alternative is defeat, both moral and political. The alternative is barbarism.

"We are revitalizing the core," said New Albany Mayor Jeff Gahan.

The core.

Think about that.

He actually believes his administration has been hard at work "revitalizing the core."

I'm not sure how to address that, apart from letting the mayor's own words do the talking.

Multiple multi-million dollar park projects under construction in S. IN, Katie Bauer (WAVE 3)

"This is really the center of New Albany and we are 200 years old, so part of our plan is to make sure we are revitalizing the core," said New Albany Mayor Jeff Gahan.

"You can play mini league football, you can play softball, you can play baseball," said Gahan.

Gahan says he's excited to see how this develop revitalizes the neighborhood. A few miles away on Daisy Lane, a brand new water park is in the construction phase.

"It will have a lazy river, it will have a general activities area and some really power body slides, as well as a splash pad," said Gahan.

"My old Republican worldview was flawed because it was based upon a small and particularly rosy sliver of reality."

It's all about the difference between illusion and delusion.

An illusion is a fanciful vision or a false impression or idea, a mental state in which one attributes reality to something unreal. Delusion is a mistaken impression or wrong idea, but the word also implies action - the action of fooling with a wrong impression or idea or the condition of being fooled or deceived.

Or, in the case of embracing the worldview of the GOP, both.

I dove into the research literature to try to figure out what was going on.  It turned out that everything I was “discovering” had been hiding in plain sight and had been named: aversive racism, institutional racism, disparate impact and disparate treatment, structural poverty, neighborhood redlining, the “trial tax,” the “poverty tax,” and on and on.  Having grown up obsessed with race (welfare and affirmative action were our bêtes noirs), I wondered why I had never heard of any of these concepts.

Was it to protect our Republican version of “individual responsibility”?  That notion is fundamental to the liberal Republican worldview. “Bootstrapping” and “equality of opportunity, not outcomes” make perfect sense if you assume, as I did, that people who hadn’t risen into my world simply hadn’t worked hard enough, or wanted it badly enough, or had simply failed.  But I had assumed that bootstrapping required about as much as it took to get yourself promoted from junior varsity to varsity.  It turns out that it’s more like pulling yourself up from tee-ball to the World Series.  Sure, some people do it, but they’re the exceptions, the outliers, the Olympians.

I'll skip directly to the conclusion, but the essay should be read in its entirety.

Why I left the GOP, by Jeremiah Goulka (tomdispatch.com, relayed by Salon)

I grew up in a rich, Republican household, but after Katrina and Iraq, I realized my priorities were out of order

 ... My old Republican worldview was flawed because it was based upon a small and particularly rosy sliver of reality.  To preserve that worldview, I had to believe that people had morally earned their “just” desserts, and I had to ignore those whining liberals who tried to point out that the world didn’t actually work that way.  I think this shows why Republicans put so much effort into “creat[ing] our own reality,” into fostering distrust of liberals, experts, scientists, and academics, and why they won’t let a campaign “be dictated by fact-checkers” (as a Romney pollster put it).  It explains why study after study shows — examples here, here, and here – that avid consumers of Republican-oriented media are more poorly informed than people who use other news sources or don’t bother to follow the news at all.

Waking up to a fuller spectrum of reality has proved long and painful.  I had to question all my assumptions, unlearn so much of what I had learned.  I came to understand why we Republicans thought people on the Left always seemed to be screeching angrily (because we refused to open our eyes to the damage we caused or blamed the victims) and why they never seemed to have any solutions to offer (because those weren’t mentioned in the media we read or watched).

My transition has significantly strained my relationships with family, friends, and former colleagues.  It is deeply upsetting to walk on thin ice where there used to be solid, common ground.  I wish they, too, would come to see a fuller spectrum of reality, but I know from experience how hard that can be when your worldview won’t let you.

No one wants to feel like a dupe.  It is embarrassing to come out in public and admit that I was so miseducated when so much reality is out there in plain sight in neighborhoods I avoided, in journals I hadn’t heard of, in books by authors I had refused to read. 

Democrats declare a convention as prevailing reality takes an ugly, profound beating.

Think about New Albany. Consider where we've come from, and where we are going. It needn't be at a deep, probing level; rather, just pause and look back on the past two or three decades, and ruminate about municipal government's relentlessly adversarial attitude towards modernity -- the absence of creativity, and the persuasive evidence that ideas generally are regarded with the same tender loving care as trees on Main Street.

Now, ask: Which of the two major political parties can claim consistent hegemony during this very same period?

Clue: It isn't the GOP, at least at the city level.

Finally, read the unexpurgated text of the local Democratic Party's call to conventioneering. Note that it remains the party that Ted Heavrin calls home. Weigh the past and the present. Reach your own conclusions.

If you can make it all the way through this exercise without resorting to hallucinogenic substances, congratulations.

---

Some say that party identity doesn’t matter on the local level. We disagree.

Over the past few years under Republican leadership, Floyd County has faced difficult challenges: financial scandals, ethical wrongdoing, and just poor decision-making. While other areas are moving forward, Floyd County is falling further behind. Take just two startling facts: Our poverty rate has increased by 30% since 2000, while our per capita income has dropped from 1% above the national average to 3% below it. That’s the wrong direction for our community!

Now more than ever, it's important that we work as citizens to improve our community. To kick our efforts into high gear, we're hosting our first "County Convention" to bring our party together and offer our shared vision for the future of Floyd County. At our convention, we will showcase our candidates, adopt our local platform, and begin to coordinate our outreach activities. The event will be held on:

Saturday, June 21, 2014 at 9:00 a.m. - Noon
40/8 Voiture #1250 Club
221 Albany Street
New Albany, Indiana

You can be part of the team! The strength of our local Democratic Party has always been local Democrats. Without your input, hard work and dedication, we wouldn't be able to field top-notch candidates for public office, build a grass-roots support network, or spread our positive vision throughout the community. If you want to make a positive difference in Floyd County and help our Democratic candidates, we are inviting you to attend.

Mark your calendar and join us on Saturday, June 21, 2014 at 9:00 a.m. The future starts now!

The 1%: "Their apparent success is a cognitive illusion."

Required reading for One Southern Indiana's wannabe small-pond oligarchs.

The 1% are the very best destroyers of wealth the world has ever seen; Our common treasury in the last 30 years has been captured by industrial psychopaths. That's why we're nearly bankrupt, by George Monbiot (guardian.co.uk)

If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire. The claims that the ultra-rich 1% make for themselves – that they are possessed of unique intelligence or creativity or drive – are examples of the self-attribution fallacy. This means crediting yourself with outcomes for which you weren't responsible. Many of those who are rich today got there because they were able to capture certain jobs. This capture owes less to talent and intelligence than to a combination of the ruthless exploitation of others and accidents of birth, as such jobs are taken disproportionately by people born in certain places and into certain classes.

Dante on acid? Or just too much of Ronnie Mac's coffee? You be the judge.

DICK STEWART has left a new comment on your post "How is it possible to vote three ways on one issue...":

ROGER,HAD A FUND RAISER THIS MORNING TO GET MAYOR OUT OF HIS TAX TROUBLE.GOT .10 CASH,A PLEDGE OF .25 IF HE RESIGNS AND A LOT OF F____HIM. WITH HIS NEED FOR CASH,THOUGHT YOU!!! AND FRIENDS COULD HAVE A FUND RAISER AND SELL SWILL FOR $50.00 PER PINT.WILL SEND MORE AFTER I SEE YOUR INSIGHTFULL RESPONSE. YOUR EJECTED BUDDY DICK STEWART

Posted by DICK STEWART to NA Confidential at 9:16 AM

----

Here’s the story to which our crazed horsefly refers.

For those just tuning in, it’s helpful to know that DICK STEWART, a candidate for city council in the 6th district, approaches these and many other pressing local issues from a squarely elemental, black & white (boy, DICK sure does have problems with colors), two-step perspective.

First, everything’s all about Mayor James Garner, and nothing else matters. Second, in those halcyon days of yore when I agreed with DICK STEWART as to the mayor’s performance, DICK STEWART thought I was the best thing since the lumpy mashed potatoes at South Side. DICK praised me. He fawned over me. My, how things have changed.

DICK’s been dogging me ever since I jilted him for a different perspective: It’s not just about the mayor, it’s about the mayor AND the council AND some hopelessly outdated ways of thinking on the part of a select group of the citizenry (DICK STEWART front and center among them) AND congenital failures that need correcting AND a number of other matters that taken as a whole comprise the New Albany Syndrome.

We at NAC have moved so far away from the Garnercentric view of reality, but as you can see from the above comment, Dick’s still in full-kindergarten, mayor-bashing mode, and he’s still resentful, stalking and prodding me because of the way that I rejected his simplistic world for the complex, nuance-driven land of factual adulthood.

So be it. Dick, I’m sorry, but I just had to move on. I’ll always remember those sweet nothings you warbled back in the beginning, when it was new and fresh for both of us. Nothing can take away the candlelit vigils outside the mayor’s home, egging his doorway and toilet-papering his ornamental bushes.

Please, Dick -- please -- just leave me with the memories. Good luck in your bid to thwart the future ... though I doubt you have much chance of winning.

Trognonymous local blogger called out for plagiarism responds by blaming the mayor.

Regular readers will recall that earlier last week, NAC took note of Ms. Denhart’s latest in a seemingly endless series of unattributed Internet plagiarisms, as regurgitated at her “Freedom to Screech” troglodyte rant blog: In which we check the facts, since she won't.

In case you were wondering, a substantial portion of the text used in the Freedom of Speech blog entry dated Wednesday, January 24 (but actually published on Tuesday, January 30) was purloined without proper attribution (or even scant acknowledgement) from a far more coherent political blog called Tennessee Ticket.

Now we’ve learned that the Volunteer State blogger from whom our laughably fictitious “Professor Erik” pilfered her material has taken public note of the theft, and references it here: Why Crib the Goofball Stuff?

Wow! A blogging member of higher education quoted this little site. Except, well, he didn't so much quote me, as use my words, without attribution, with every indication that he meant for a reader to think they were his own. In the quintessential sophomoric plagiarist's manner, he inserted two lines of his own, and "edited" text to a grammatically poorer result.

Alert! From one responsible blogger to another: Not only is our “Erik” not a professor, but “he’s” also not a “he,” and disingenuous gender confusion is only part of the recurring entertainment value proffered by this daily spectacle of an embittered, semi-literate, faux “academic” aspiring to trognonymous stardom. Please, don’t draw any conclusions about the state of Indiana’s educational system, which suffers from its own problems quite distinct from Erika's playground cluelessness.

Know that we fully comprehend the childish nature of her charade, and laugh at it – not with it.

Beer-induced, Flaming Cougarhawk mania.

I seldom cross-post with my Potable Curmudgeon blog, but this piece was so much fun that an exception is merited. For more information on Gravity Head 2007 ("Gravity Madness: March Isn't Just About Basketball Anymore"), see: Badness and Preliminary Orders.

----

Perceptive reader Edward has noticed the inscription on the Gravity Head 2007 mascot’s basketball jersey, and he asks, undoubtedly smirking:

Can you tell the story behind Flaming Cougarhawks?

Not without pain, but here goes.

It is a widely and deservedly forgotten fact that while serving acne time during high school, your faithful Curmudgeon was a two-year varsity basketball player at Floyd Central. My active hoops participation ceased after our ignominious defeat in the morning session of the Seymour regional in 1978, after which spent the afternoon drinking Little Kings with friends in their Daze Inn hotel room before proceeding to an equally lackluster career of grabbing innings of varsity baseball pine.

Upon graduation, a regimen-free summer was spent lounging with like-minded pals, especially those with skills at being served, which magically added 25 pounds of non-muscle mass (i.e., goo) to an otherwise spindly frame.

A steadily growing affection for beer in its cheapest available incarnation accompanied four years of intramural basketball competition at Indiana University Southeast, and it should come as no surprise that my best-ever senior IM squad was called the Inebriates. By the mid-1980’s, activities like softball, walking and riding trains between European beer shrines had replaced organized basketball as my generally preferred forms of exercise, but as so often is the case, and without warning, there was to be an entirely unexpected roundball comeback.

It happened in 1999.

A group of Rich O’s Public House regulars, all of whom love the game of basketball – some of them can still be glimpsed limping to the bar for their daily medicinal pints – somehow fell into a summertime routine of meeting on Sundays atop the asphalt parking lot of Our Lady of Perpetual Help and shooting hoops, which led to half-court games followed by restorative ale drinking at the Shelbyville Road location of Bluegrass Brewing Company … and, fueled by these post-game sessions, led eventually to a bizarre delusion that we were good enough to compete in the autumn YMCA recreational league in Clarksville.

Mark, our starting guard and coach, did the paperwork, and I purchased garish bluish purple team jerseys for the team, which had been dubbed the Flaming Cougarhawks in honor of … owing to … hmmm, the ironic thing is that I have no memory of the naming process other than to suggest that we must have been drinking BBC APA when it happened.

When the newly minted Flaming Cougarhawks stepped onto the hardwood for their first-ever game, the average age of the starting lineup was about 35, and it quickly doubled when we suddenly realized that a regulation full court is very, very big, and that the opposing team of recently graduated 19-year-olds was very, very fast.

We outweighed them, though, and this came in handy on those rare occasions when one of us could catch up with one of them. Calling on long-neglected reserves of thespian talent, I duped the referee into calling a shooting foul and scored the first point in team history on a free throw. Moments later I jammed my right ankle and was lost for the season. The Flaming Cougarhawks dropped each and every game on the schedule, although we came close enough once to justify another BBC drinking spree.

Those young pups couldn’t touch us there, on our true home court.

(Thanks to Jared and Tony for remembering!)