Homeless, be gone! It's the GREEN MOUSE with NAWBANY WEEK IN REVIEW.

The more things change, the more they stay precisely the same. It's not a coincidence, you know.

Delusion, meet narcissism: Jeff Gahan denies the reality of homelessness while proposing to demolish affordable housing options.

We'll get there in a moment. First, be aware that the Green Mouse is fond of the word kakistocracy.

kak·i·sto·cra·cy
/kakəˈstäkrəsē/
noun

Government by the least suitable or competent citizens of a state.

A state or society governed by its least suitable or competent citizens.

It's a recipe, or maybe a mathematical formula: Nawbany + kakistocracy = New Gahania.

It's a ruling clique of cronies, most prominently Jeff Gahan, Warren Nash, Adam Dickey, David Duggins and Shane Gibson. Josh Staten suffers a degree of cognitive dissonance because deep down he knows better, but being redevelopment chief implies a foot on the middle rung of the ladder. Todd Bailey, the chief of police? Yes, so long as he remains pliant and allows those streets to remain safe for automobiles.

Bob Caesar believes he's in the clique, although the good old boys just laugh at Bobby behind his back. Jason Applegate desperately wants to be part of the fun; for reasons that have little to do with his qualifications, the clique is willing to use him. That's why Applegate spearheaded Thursday's assault on the homeless (below).

The New Gahanian kakistocracy is all male, all white and all bound up with pay-to play monetization via the mayor's band of campaign donors -- but we already knew that.

A few weeks ago Allen Howie's Idealogy newsletter inadvertently addressed the fundamental problem with the kakistocratic clique's unpreparedness to deal with our new realities.

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World War Z, the Tenth Man and You

In the 2013 Brad Pitt film, World War Z, a deadly virus washes over the globe unchecked, turning millions into zombies. But one place remains a safe harbor: Jerusalem, which managed to erect high walls around its perimeter before the outbreak reached the city.

Pitt’s character asks one of the city’s top officials how they were able to respond in time. He replies that they overheard communication from a small country about “zombies.” Why would you even pay attention to something so ludicrous, Pitt wonders.

The official then tells him about the tenth man, an idea created in the tragic wake of the Holocaust, the Munich Olympics and the Yom Kippur war — all events his nation’s leaders believed were impossible until they happened.

“If nine of us with the same information arrive at the same conclusion, it’s the duty of the tenth man to disagree,” he said. “No matter how improbable it may seem, the tenth man has to start thinking with the assumption that the other nine are wrong.”

What does all this have to with your company?

When you consider threats or opportunities, it’s often as a group. And what emerges is consensus — you act on the challenges or possibilities everyone can agree on. Outliers get voted off the island.

But a group can be wrong. A lone voice can be right. And in business, the greatest successes go to the contrarians. The early adopters. Those who question the assumptions.

So whether you’re thinking about an updated business model for this new normal, rethinking your marketing and messaging, or revisiting your product and service options, consider designating a tenth man.

Of course, the tenth man may be a woman. They could be (and maybe should be) someone from outside daily operations. Maybe even someone from outside your industry. They need to be someone who can speak freely without repercussions. Someone you’ll listen to. And someone with experience in thinking differently.

You’re as unlikely to have to deal with zombies as you are to hang with Brad Pitt. But every business would be better prepared for a rapidly-changing future if it embraced the idea of the tenth man. Who’s yours?

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Who's Jeff Gahan's tenth man?

That's the whole point, because there isn't one, and there cannot be.

As we've observed for years, membership in the clique is based primarily on one abiding qualification, that Dear Leader's narcissistic genius is not questioned. It's intellectual inbreeding, and outside blood need not apply.

It's why the crisis of the pandemic is tantamount to Toto pulling back the Wizard's curtain; the coronavirus simply cannot be mollified with a $100,000 HWC Engineering study. COVID's ripple effect will expose municipal government's conceptual nudity, and it won't be a pretty sight.

Our kakistocrats don't know how to do their business if it's not business as usual. Grasping for straws, looking for something or someone to blame, they found an easy target.

Same as it ever was: the homeless.

New Albany turns down $50,000 request for homeless shelter, by Daniel Suddeath (Hanson's Christian Digest)

NEW ALBANY — Despite approving the appropriation unanimously on initial readings in February, the New Albany City Council rejected a $50,000 funding request for Catalyst Rescue Mission on Thursday night.

The vote was 6-3, with council members Al Knable, Scott Blair and Josh Turner supporting the request.

Those opposed to the measure cited their beliefs that not enough funding is going directly to programming for homeless residents after they enter the shelter, and that the New Albany Trustee's office is already providing many of the services that Catalyst offers.

Councilman Jason Applegate said that in reviewing the financial information provided by Catalyst Executive Director Jim Moon, only about $2,700 of the $50,000 would have gone to programming and food.

"I couldn't get over where it was such a small percent of this money that goes to the programs that help people," he said.

Can we be honest, just for a moment?

A garden-variety space alien beamed down to observe politics in Nawbany would require no more than ten minutes to grok this situation.

First, our DemoDisneyDixiecrats HAVE ALWAYS been hostile to funding requests pertaining to the homeless.

Second, Republicans were in favor of the Catalyst funding (well, except the perpetually befuddled David Aebersold), thus dooming it, given a pliant, boot-licking DemoDisneyDixiecratic majority.

I suppose we’ll see an editorial in Extol Magazine spinning the vote.

This, this -- and this again: "The coronavirus didn’t break America. It revealed what was already broken."

I've read it twice and can't find much to disagree with. It's what I've been saying for as long as I can remember, herein articulated more skillfully and comprehensively than I can imagine doing. There's nothing else left to be said. Just read it. I reprint the ending, with a lethal crescendo concerning one Jared Kushner ... self-anointed genius.

Whatever happened to Nicu Ceaușescu, anyway?

We Are Living in a Failed State, by George Packer (The Atlantic)

The coronavirus didn’t break America. It revealed what was already broken.

 ... To watch this pale, slim-suited dilettante breeze into the middle of a deadly crisis, dispensing business-school jargon to cloud the massive failure of his father-in-law’s administration, is to see the collapse of a whole approach to governing. It turns out that scientific experts and other civil servants are not traitorous members of a “deep state”—they’re essential workers, and marginalizing them in favor of ideologues and sycophants is a threat to the nation’s health. It turns out that “nimble” companies can’t prepare for a catastrophe or distribute lifesaving goods—only a competent federal government can do that. It turns out that everything has a cost, and years of attacking government, squeezing it dry and draining its morale, inflict a heavy cost that the public has to pay in lives. All the programs defunded, stockpiles depleted, and plans scrapped meant that we had become a second-rate nation. Then came the virus and this strange defeat.

The fight to overcome the pandemic must also be a fight to recover the health of our country, and build it anew, or the hardship and grief we’re now enduring will never be redeemed. Under our current leadership, nothing will change. If 9/11 and 2008 wore out trust in the old political establishment, 2020 should kill off the idea that anti-politics is our salvation. But putting an end to this regime, so necessary and deserved, is only the beginning.

We’re faced with a choice that the crisis makes inescapably clear. We can stay hunkered down in self-isolation, fearing and shunning one another, letting our common bond wear away to nothing. Or we can use this pause in our normal lives to pay attention to the hospital workers holding up cellphones so their patients can say goodbye to loved ones; the planeload of medical workers flying from Atlanta to help in New York; the aerospace workers in Massachusetts demanding that their factory be converted to ventilator production; the Floridians standing in long lines because they couldn’t get through by phone to the skeletal unemployment office; the residents of Milwaukee braving endless waits, hail, and contagion to vote in an election forced on them by partisan justices. We can learn from these dreadful days that stupidity and injustice are lethal; that, in a democracy, being a citizen is essential work; that the alternative to solidarity is death. After we’ve come out of hiding and taken off our masks, we should not forget what it was like to be alone.

If you identify as "Democrat" and are enamored with Bloomberg, you're just running scared -- and you're not a "democrat."

"Swapping kakistocracy for oligarchy will not undo the damage of the Trump presidency. It will merely calcify the rot."

Kakistocracy via Trump: "government by the least suitable or competent citizens of a state."

Oligarchy via Bloomberg: "a small group of people having control of a country, organization, or institution."

ABAT: "As bad as Trump."

It isn't only that moderates identifying as "liberal" really aren't liberal. Apparently they're also clueless and terrified, positing that "liberalism" is devoid of meaning, and something to be discarded because after all, it isn't as if there exists reasons to be "for" something instead of merely "against" something else.

Inequality borne of capital accumulation is the problem. There are far more withouts than withs. Pitchfork lube?

Now you're talking.

Michael Bloomberg Isn’t a Smug Technocratic Centrist. He’s Something Far Worse, by Ross Barkan (Jacobin)

An admirer of dictators, a lowbrow misogynist, an unfiltered bigot — Michael Bloomberg is the only Democratic contender who might actually be worse than Trump.

... Oligarchy Personified

The best way to understand Bloomberg is to study his twelve years leading America’s largest city. Let’s get the obvious out of the way: there were things to like about Bloomberg’s New York, particularly if you were white and carried a degree of wealth. He was, to his credit, an early supporter of same-sex marriage. He cared about protecting the environment. It was a good thing when smoking was banned from restaurants and bars. Bloomberg stuck up for pedestrians and cyclists. The 311 system simplified the process of lodging complaints.

All of this is easily negated by the pain and terror he wrought. If you were a Muslim in Bloomberg’s New York, the NYPD was deployed to spy, without cause, on your mosque. Bloomberg’s police infiltrated Muslim student groups and put informants in mosques. The blanket surveillance, the NYPD would later admit, didn’t produce any tangible leads. Three lawsuits were eventually settled after Bloomberg left office.

Around the time Bloomberg announced his presidential campaign, he cynically ventured to a church in a black Brooklyn neighborhood to apologize for his police department’s maniacal abuse of stop-and-frisk tactics. Under Bloomberg, police stops — which overwhelmingly targeted black and Latino men — increased from 97,296 in 2002 to a peak of 685,724 in 2011. The stops, for these young men, were traumatizing, as heavily armed police officers stalked and then aggressively searched their bodies for no justifiable cause. In 2013, a federal judge ruled the practice unconstitutional.

Rather than accept responsibility, Bloomberg fought back, appealing the ruling. “There is just no question that stop-and-frisk has saved countless lives,” Bloomberg thundered in 2013. “I worry for my kids and I worry for your kids.”

Bloomberg was unrepentant. Police power could do no wrong. In 2011, armed police stormed Zuccotti Park in the middle of the night to forcefully break up Occupy Wall Street, a movement that kicked off a public reckoning with America’s surging income inequality. The protest ultimately offended his sensibilities. “I don’t appreciate the bashing of all the hard-working people who live and work here and pay the taxes that support our city,” Bloomberg said at the time.

Bloomberg’s total lack of interest in staunching his own city’s spiraling inequality fueled homelessness and displacement. Rezonings in formerly working-class neighborhoods spurred luxury development and increasingly unsustainable rent hikes. His lavish donations to Republicans in the State Senate ensured New York’s laws protecting tenants would remain in a weakened state as long as he remained in office. Public housing further crumbled under his watch. And in 2011, Bloomberg killed a housing subsidy program for homeless families, directly triggering the homelessness crisis New York is still grappling with today ...

CASH SLUSH NEWS FLASH: Pay-to-play special interests from afar have endorsed Mayor Gahan.

Just follow the money.

But I'm voting for David White, because shouldn't people come first? Shouldn't our own people come before out-of-towners who suck money from New Albany and redeposit a portion of it in Jeff Gahan's political slush fund?

Is it any surprise that not a single Democrat has so much as tried to explain why Gahan needs this much money?

As the half-million dollar mark draws near, Jeff Gahan undoubtedly has too much money, power and control. It's time to decentralize and #FireGahan2019

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Democratic mayoral candidate David White understands that change begins with a whole lotta scrubbing, and NA Confidential advocates just such a deep civic cleansing. 

After eight years on the job, Mayor Jeff Gahan's list of stunning "achievements" is long, indeed: tax increases, budgetary hide 'n' seek, self-deification, daily hypocrisy, public housing takeover, non-transparency, pay-to-play for no-bid contracts, bullying city residents and bullying city employees. Eight years is enough. It's time to drain Gahan's swamp, flush his ruling clique and take this city back from Gahan's Indy-based special interest donors. 

NA Confidential supports David White for Mayor in the Democratic Party primary, with voting now through May 7. 

As the half-million dollar mark draws near, Jeff Gahan undoubtedly has too much money, power and control. It's time to decentralize and #FireGahan2019

Updated with Gahan's 2019 first quarter windfall: Gahan's first quarter CFA-4 has been filed, and it's another massive, quivering edifice of pay-to-play cash.

The first quarter CFA-4 receipts and expenditures reports are being filed, and soon we'll see how many dollars Jeff Gahan has added to the Crusade for Himself tote board.

My guess would be $20-30k for the period beginning January 1 to the present, lifting his total within HWC-tithing distance of the half-million mark in career love offerings.

Regular folks looking at all this money have simple questions.

• Why does a mayor of a city of 38,000 need all this money?
• Isn't Jeff Gahan already bringing in $100k annually in salaries?
• Why are all those companies doing business with the city giving Gahan all this money?
• What about the under-the-table money Gahan HASN'T reported?
• Doesn't absolute power (and control) still corrupt absolutely -- especially with so much money?

They're very good questions, and to date neither Gahan nor a single soul among his sycophantic minions has so much as attempted to answer them.

Conversely, David White has stated openly and clearly that he will not accept donations like these from companies seeking favorable consideration from City Hall. In addition, White has vowed to be open and transparent about all such matters (a marked contrast with Gahan), and has stated that he won't hire in-laws and family members (as Gahan did with son-in-law Chris Gardner).

Earlier this year NAC's 20-part series detailed Gahan's receipts these past nine years. The News and Tribune couldn't care less, as it profits from Gahan's advertising buys. But I believe that voters are perfectly capable of doing the math, and resolving to #FireGahan2019

The series link recap:

The Jeff Gahan Money Machine, Part 1: Mysterious CRS Marketing and the inevitable HWC Engineering tie-in.

The Jeff Gahan Money Machine, Part 2: Of fire stations, amphitheater studies and Axis Architecture and Interiors of Indianapolis.

The Jeff Gahan Money Machine, Part 3: Eight-year donor Terry Ginkins and a consistency of beak-wetting.

The Jeff Gahan Money Machine, Part 4: The Estopinol Group and Cripe Architects are just two facets of River Run Waterpark's fertilizing effect.

The Jeff Gahan Money Machine, Part 5: In 2019, Gahan will pass the half million dollar mark in campaign fundraising since 2011.

The Jeff Gahan Money Machine, Part 6: GM Development, yet another economic development consultancy from afar.

The Jeff Gahan Money Machine, Part 7: Jacobi, Toombs & Lanz, or the anatomy of $33,225 "Big Daddy Dollars" since 2011.

The Jeff Gahan Money Machine, Part 8: Our towing and recovery companies offer their tithes to Dear Leader.

The Jeff Gahan Money Machine, Part 9: These west end properties and their ultimate redevelopment surely comprise a rich, albeit tangled, source of campaign finance extractions for our Genius of the Flood Plain.

The Jeff Gahan Money Machine, Part 10: Oh Cripe! Or, the path from Al "Indy" Oak's company PAC leads to Silver Street Park and Breakwater, and probably others.

The Jeff Gahan Money Machine, Part 11: Lawyers from afar, expressing gratitude to Jeff Gahan for their billable hours -- and the curious case of Stan Robison.

The Jeff Gahan Money Machine, Part 12: Madam I'm Adam, or the way HMB's Dickey brokers power and channels his party's beak wetting.

The Jeff Gahan Money Machine, Part 13: United Consulting Engineers rocks Deaf Gahan like a hurricane.

The Jeff Gahan Money Machine, Part 14: Kentucky-based GRW Engineers and the subtle art of the $200 out-of-state handshake.

The Jeff Gahan Money Machine, Part 15: Beam, Longest and Neff -- they're why Jeff Gahan is HERE and awash in cash, 16,500 times over.

The Jeff Gahan Money Machine, Part 16: Last week's minutes from the Board of Public Works and Safety reveal big donors daintily lapping their gravy.

The Jeff Gahan Money Machine, Part 17: Denton-Floyd feels M(ighty) Fine -- and the resulting Reisz Krispies Treats never tasted better to Mayor Gahan.

The Jeff Gahan Money Machine, Part 18: Clark Dietz, CD PAC top Gahan's "Quality of Distant Corporate Donors" chart.

The Jeff Gahan Money Machine, Part 19: Department heads, insurance peddlers, duffers and a few other odds and ends from Gahan's long and winding money trail.

The Jeff Gahan Money Machine, Part 20: Buying and selling a city? Our master list of 59 Gahan wheel-greasers is a pornographic potpourri of pay-to-play.

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Democratic mayoral candidate David White understands that change begins with a whole lotta scrubbing, and NA Confidential advocates just such a deep civic cleansing. 

After eight years on the job, Mayor Jeff Gahan's list of stunning "achievements" is long, indeed: tax increases, budgetary hide 'n' seek, self-deification, daily hypocrisy, public housing takeover, non-transparency, pay-to-play for no-bid contracts, bullying city residents and bullying city employees. Eight years is enough. It's time to drain Gahan's swamp, flush his ruling clique and take this city back from Gahan's Indy-based special interest donors. 

NA Confidential supports David White for Mayor in the Democratic Party primary, with voting now through May 7. 

ON THE AVENUES: Taco Bell has as much to do with "local business" as Jeff Gahan does with "quality urban design principles."

ON THE AVENUES: Taco Bell has as much to do with "local" business as Jeff Gahan does with "quality urban design principles."

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

Serendipity is the chief motivating factor behind all of human existence, and this fact might explain how I happened upon a film clip from a television series I never once watched.

Last week on Facebook, the proud owner of the newly plasticized Taco Bell perched precariously in a bulldozed flat spot halfway up a hillside that used to be delightfully wooded – just below the barren strip mine tableau up on top, which might yet boast a Rio-sized statue of Dear Leader grinning vacantly and C-student-like, hovering over us all – praised loyal New Albanians for supporting his “local business.”

Jeeebus, here we go again. Does anyone around here read? If you’re baffled by the onslaught of “fake news,” then look no further than the bathroom mirror, which reveals a human being desperately seeking self-delusion.

When the Gordita-bearer was lightly questioned, predictably vapid bilge came spilling out: it’s not a chain at all, because it’s a franchise, and the franchise is locally owned because it’s not a chain, and therefore, this Taco Bell is no different from Aladdin or Lady Tron’s.

By the same token, the Ford Fusion that I inherited from my mother, manufactured in Sonora, Mexico, magically becomes a “local” New Albanian automobile because I drive and operate it locally.

Uh huh.

Right.

It’s all so very tiring. You substitute money for creativity, buying a fully developed restaurant built 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 advertising and sponsorship campaigns of the sort almost never available to 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 franchise financing than start-ups from scratch, and of course the entire point of franchising is to adjust the risk factor inherent to start-ups by applying the sheer weight of huge pervasiveness.

It's ever harder to discuss matters like this without unleashing f-bombs. Franchisees like the strip mine Taco Bell mogul are almost as objectionable 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.

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 from a multinational, making it doubly ironic that one redevelopment commission appointee loudly cheering this cookie cutter Taco Bell is the legitimate long-term owner of a local independent business.

Such is the busyness of sycophancy.

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There’s another big difference between franchise accumulators and indie entrepreneurs, in that neither Aladdin nor Lady Tron’s have been selected as winners in City Hall’s subsidized strip mine development lottery, unlike the operator of the sleek and utterly non-unique “local” Taco Bell.

Taco Bell’s winning ticket casually rides piggyback, wearing flip-flops, on the backs of the stubborn property development coagulators Pat and Pam Kelley, who have relentlessly pursued a lifelong goal of paving every last square inch of their holdings, whether knob or valley, with the closest distance between these two points invariably measured by enhanced storm water runoff, even when their kinky desire to build a shiny profit-making city shitty on a hill was contested by the Dear Leader – and it was, at least for a while.

Then Scott Wood got waterboarded and the city collapsed into a puddle of cowardly avarice when the unmistakable odor of opportunism became too alluring to ignore, with Jeff “Dollar Sign” Gahan dispatching David “Bag Man” Duggins to broker a deal, and overnight, as though New Albany were standing in for Orwell’s decrepit Oceania, City Hall no longer sought to enforce rationality in development, but instead grandiosely announced its “partnership” in purposeful irrationality.

From that moment, when taxpayers footed the bill for a spanking new mountain-engineered road to reach the very Summit of the Kelleys’ insatiable greed, the Kelley/Gahan Loot-A-Thon became an indirect subsidy for multi-national hotel and fast food chains.

In turn, this helping hand from the mayoral picker of winners has emboldened the Taco Bell owner to proclaim he’s a local independent businessman, which is propaganda so shameless in its deception that neither Paul Joseph Goebbels nor Sarah Huckabee Sanders have shown any interest in furthering it.

At least Goebbels has the good taste to be dead. Shall we discuss the many high-wage jobs being generated by the subsidies granted to Summit Springs?

No? I thought as mush – make that “much,” but not “munch,” at least at a Taco Bell … ever. Local, my ass.

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Near the end of the Irish ballad Carrickfergus, the singer comes to an epiphany: “But I'll sing no more now til I get a drink.”

That's what I'm saying, and I’ll write just a bit more before shuffling off to the liquor cabinet. At Governing, there’s a cautionary tale about the convergence of excessive economic development subsidies and worsening inequality.

Early this year, construction began on a $130 million luxury high-rise apartment building in St. Louis’ burgeoning Central West End neighborhood. The development will dramatically alter the area’s skyline, but the city won’t be reaping much tax revenue from it anytime soon. Local officials approved a 95 percent property tax abatement that will be in place for a decade, as well as an exemption from sales taxes on the construction costs of the project.

These tax breaks coincide with steep spending reductions St. Louis made last year to bridge a budget shortfall. They are contributing to concerns that many neighborhoods and lower-income residents in the city aren’t benefiting from the tax breaks enacted to encourage projects like the luxury apartment complex.

Many other localities aren’t all that different from St. Louis. Early evidence from newly released financial data suggests that local governments most heavily reliant on tax incentives tend to be those with greater levels of economic inequality.

In New Albany, greater levels of economic inequality have become a favored, risk-free platform for Democratic candidates, and accordingly, the city’s heavily sapped tax increment financing (TIF) areas are displaying an increasingly sickly pallor.

And, speaking of shambles, subsidies and the impending Reisz City Hall historic preservation project, Paul Cooper (at BBC) offers a fascinating explanation of how dictators exploit ruins: “(Saddam Hussein) followed Mussolini’s lead in appropriating ancient ruins to tell a flattering story about his own authoritarian regime.”

For Saddam, the ruined city of Babylon had always held a special fascination. He ordered an ambitious reconstruction of the city’s walls, costing millions of dollars at the height of the Iran-Iraq War. And he raised the walls to a historically-improbable 11.5m (38ft) high, drawing criticism from the international archaeological community, who accused him of turning Babylon into ‘Disney for a despot’. As a finishing touch, Saddam built an anachronistic Roman-style theatre in the ruins. When archaeologists told him that ancient kings like Nebuchadnezzar had stamped their names on Babylon’s bricks, Saddam insisted that his own name be stamped on the modern bricks used in the reconstruction. These efforts were later described by Provisional Coalition Leader Paul Bremer, who was the envoy to the new Iraqi government following Saddam’s fall in 2003, as “a travesty… ersatz monstrosities”.

Our own tin pot Disney despot duly follows in these narcissistic footsteps. From Taco Bell on the bald knob to a promiscuous proliferation of anchors, spiced by incessant attacks on the poor, not to exclude gentrified alleys, full contact karaoke and the only municipal water park in the world with an offshore safe deposit box to keep the financials from prying eyes … a million bucks to desecrate a Native American site with a dog park, and coming soon, quadruple the functionary space for city hall so as to facilitate seceding from Floyd County and actually becoming the Veneer Salesman’s Republic of New Gahania --- and, of course, the inevitable dogs playing poker.

Let’s celebrate government by the worst, least qualified and most unscrupulous citizens with a Burrito Kakistocratio (no, not castrato) from the plummeting depths of Taco Hell’s commanding vantage point around the corner from the butt ugly bison, below the strip mine, where the storm water roams and the campaign finance report is not cloudy all day.

I’ll have mine with a side of Incensed (Jim) Rice -- light on the MSG, the HWC and the complete BS, please.

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Recent columns:

There was no column on May 31.

May 24: ON THE AVENUES: Long live Keg Liquors Fest of Ale, an indisputable annual beer institution.

May 17: ON THE AVENUES: Ghosts within these stones, defiance in these bones.

May 10: ON THE AVENUES: Seeing is believing.

May 3: ON THE AVENUES: Sadly, the Kentucky Derby no longer is decadent and depraved. It’s just another vacuous capitalist bait ‘n’ switch.

SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW WORDS: Bring out your brooms -- we have nothing to lose except the toxic cliques and vacuous kakistocrats of imbecilic Gahanism.

Yesterday I suffered an allergic reaction to self-designated big fish and their tiresome small-pond antics, but first, let it be known that André Spicer, professor of organizational behavior at the Cass Business School in London, is the author of the book Business Bullshit.

Last November, the author contributed a "long read" to The Guardian: "From inboxing to thought showers: how business bullshit took over."

A certain amount of empty talk is unavoidable when humans gather together in large groups, but the kind of bullshit through which we all have to wade every day is a remarkably recent creation. To understand why, we have to look at how management fashions have changed over the past century or so.

He had me at "empty," but there's even more.

A century of management fads has created workplaces that are full of empty words and equally empty rituals. We have to live with the consequences of this history every day. Consider a meeting I recently attended. During the course of an hour, I recorded 64 different nuggets of corporate claptrap. They included familiar favourites such as “doing a deep dive”, “reaching out”, and “thought leadership”. There were also some new ones I hadn’t heard before: people with “protected characteristics” (anyone who wasn’t a white straight guy), “the aha effect” (realising something), “getting our friends in the tent” (getting support from others).

If Insider Louisville were to ban the use of "reaching out" by its staffers, one in particular, I'd subscribe today. It hasn't -- and I don't.

Let's see: claptrap, emptiness, inanity ... the word association inevitably leads us down a currently dormant garden path to the theory and practice of Gahanism in New Albany, hence the word I'd chosen to discuss today, kakistocracy.

kakistocracy

[kak-uh-stok-ruh-see]

noun, plural kakistocracies

1. government by the worst persons; a form of government in which the worst persons are in power.

Origin of kakistocracy

Greek 1820-1830 ... kákisto(s), superlative of kakós bad + -cracy

Imagine my surprise when it became apparent that Spicer had been thinking along precisely the same lines. It seems I'd totally missed John Brennan's recent internet-breaking use of the word kakistocracy with reference to Donald Trump.

Donald Trump’s ‘kakistocracy’ is not the first, but it’s revived an old word, by André Spicer (The Guardian)

... Brennan is the only the most recent in a long line of people to dust off the term to describe what he sees as a incompetent and unethical regime. During its 450-year history, kakistocracy has mainly been used by conservatives to convey their anxieties about what happens when tradition and order are upended. Today, it is being claimed by people from across the political spectrum to describe the wicked disorder that can result when expertise and ethical judgment are aggressively and systematically pushed aside.

That's breathtaking, considering there is no evidence to indicate that Spicer has ever been to New Albany, where City Hall enables toxic cliques and encourages them to bully the citizenry, as with Develop New Albany's treatment of grassroots activist Kelly Winslow and the way Gahan's servile minions laugh it off.

As for the malignant cliques, they were covered here just last year.

clique

[kleek, klik]

noun

1. a small, exclusive group of people; coterie; set

verb (used without object), cliqued, cliquing.

2. Informal. to form, or associate in, a clique

Origin of clique

Middle French
1705-15; < French, apparently metaphorical use of Middle French clique latch, or noun derivative of cliquer to make noise, resound, imitative word parallel to click

Related forms

cliqueless, adjective
cliquey, cliquy, adjective
cliquism, noun
subclique, noun

The British definitions for clique include further background.

Word Origin and History for clique

n.

1711, "a party of persons; a small set, especially one associating for exclusivity," from obsolete French clique, originally (14c.) "a sharp noise," also "latch, bolt of a door," from Old French cliquer "click, clatter, crackle, clink," 13c., echoic. Apparently this word was at one time treated in French as the equivalent of claque (q.v.) and partook of that word's theatrical sense.

Let's end with a quote about cliques.

No matter where you are in your life, whatever set of people you're with, it all still breaks down like high school does. You have your social cliques, you have the people you get along with, the people you don't and the people you're ambivalent about. All of the dynamics are still here.
-- Colin Hanks

Wait -- Hanks attended New Albany High School?

He didn't?

Ah, okay (slaps head) ... that's why he's not a city councilman.