Must read: "There is an antidote to demagoguery – it’s called political rewilding."

Monbiot is onto something important here, although his notion of "rewilding" -- devolution from top-down government -- begs a question: How do local and regional groupings wrest this power away from bigger government, or by extension, biggest capital?

Moreover, as we've seen in New Albany, it still doesn't mean we'll get devolution to the neighborhood level. You really don't think Jeff and Adam are in favor of THAT, do you?

Click through and read the entire essay. There's no paywall at The Guardian.

There is an antidote to demagoguery – it’s called political rewilding, by George Monbiot (The Guardian)

This form of radical trust devolves power away from top-down government, often with some very unexpected results

You can blame Jeremy Corbyn for Boris Johnson, and Hillary Clinton for Donald Trump. You can blame the Indian challengers for Narendra Modi, the Brazilian opposition for Jair Bolsonaro, and left and centre parties in Australia, the Philippines, Hungary, Poland and Turkey for similar electoral disasters. Or you could recognise that what we are witnessing is a global phenomenon.

Yes, there were individual failings in all these cases, though the failings were very different: polar opposites in the cases of Corbyn and Clinton. But when the same thing happens in many nations, it’s time to recognise the pattern, and see that heaping blame on particular people and parties fixes nothing.

In these nations, people you wouldn’t trust to post a letter for you have been elected to the highest office. There, as widely predicted, they behave like a gang of vandals given the keys to an art gallery, “improving” the great works in their care with spray cans, box cutters and lump hammers. In the midst of global emergencies, they rip down environmental protections and climate agreements, and trash the regulations that constrain capital and defend the poor. They wage war on the institutions that are supposed to restrain their powers while, in some cases, committing extravagant and deliberate outrages against the rule of law. They use impunity as a political weapon, revelling in their ability to survive daily scandals, any one of which would destroy a normal politician.

Something has changed: not just in the UK and the US, but in many parts of the world. A new politics, funded by oligarchs, built on sophisticated cheating and provocative lies, using dark ads and conspiracy theories on social media, has perfected the art of persuading the poor to vote for the interests of the very rich. We must understand what we are facing, and the new strategies required to resist it.

If there is a formula for the new demagoguery, there must also be a formula for confronting and overturning it. I don’t yet have a complete answer, but I believe there are some strands we can draw together.

In Finland, on the day of our general election, Boris Johnson’s antithesis became prime minister: the 34-year-old Sanna Marin, who is strong, humble and collaborative. Finland’s politics, emerging from its peculiar history, cannot be replicated here. But there is one crucial lesson. In 2014, the country started a programme to counter fake news, teaching people how to recognise and confront it. The result is that Finns have been ranked, in a recent study of 35 nations, the people most resistant to post-truth politics.

Don’t expect Johnson’s government, or Trump’s, to inoculate people against their own lies. But this need not be a government initiative ...

Croissants d'BBQ Bologna: Dan Coffey says that restaurants are taking up the sidewalk and his compatriots damn well better do something about it.

There will be a city council meeting tonight. If I can remain sober today, I might attend it.

But first, at the July 20 city council meeting, the king of barbecued bologna -- the Wizard of Westendia, and the Shunner of Tulip Tiptoeing -- indulged his penchant for diversionary innuendo.

Coffey's germ of truth is irrefutable, because disabled users really do face myriad daily challenges attempting to navigate the city of New Albany's sidewalks and streets.

But making this point by attacking the city's food and dining community, which has done more than any other economic sector to make downtown habitable again, misses the larger truth by a Birdseye mile.

As we've pointed out numerous times before, city government itself has no mission statement or internal policy pertaining to prioritization of mobility, and City Hall needs to begin by policing itself in this regard.

The vast majority of abuses occur at the hands of the city's chosen contractors, indifferent utility monopoly slackers, and unfortunately the city's own Street Department. Neither Jeff Gahan nor the Board of Public Works and Safety has made an effort to embrace modernity.

To repeat: it's merely procedural.

The city must develop good habits, and to develop them, the city must acknowledge it has a problem. A good start would be reading the bimonthly council agenda. At the bottom, there is a promise of assistance from the city clerk to disabled council meeting attendees who are in need of it.

Shouldn't the city's own workers, contractors and utility monopolies adhere to the same promise?

It starts with BoW's rote interrogations. Instead of this:

"How will (a proposal) affect parking/traffic/cars?"

The board first should ask this:

"How will (a proposal) affect handicapped users without cars?"

Infrastructure decisions routinely are rendered in the absence of forethought as to their effect on persons with disabilities. These tiny bits of effort will have little if any ultimate effect on the Holy Writ of Autocentrism, as worshipped by City Hall. However, these instances will immeasurably assist the disabled in getting back and forth.

Consequently, it is laughable for Coffey to continue pointing his dull reaper's finger at downtown business violators when there are far larger fish to fry. Furthermore, it's a safe bet that these scattered and inconsequential instances of eatery transgression are occurring not in Coffey's 1st district, but Greg Phipps' 3rd, which embraces the epicenter of downtown east of State Street.

And so we've learned to ask the question: What's Coffey after this time? I guess we'll find out after Adam Dickey hands the envelope du jour to Coffey on a gilded Democratic Party platter.

Tonight's agenda follows. After writing the preceding spiel, that half-full bottle of gin over in the corner is starting to look very much like lunch.