Sunday Fact Fest, Episode 04: Robin's right. Some Louisville (and SoIN) restaurants are not taking the COVID-19 pandemic as seriously as they should."

The link:

Robin Garr’s Taj Palace review at LEO: Great food and pandemic precautions, by me at Food & Dining Magazine.

My Saturday morning post at Food & Dining Magazine came about because Robin Garr did something that writers should strive always to do. His words at LEO Weekly stood me up, slapped me down, and said to me what needed to be said.

Restaurant and bar owners who aren't tasking the pandemic seriously are helping to put others at risk.

The majority of media mavens covering the restaurant and bar industry aren't holding them accountable, including me. Maybe it's time for this to change; I'm not sure it even matters given the culture of abject denial hereabouts, but what I know is that denial can only make it worse. What I can do about it as just one person isn't yet clear to me. In the meantime, it makes me even more grateful to work for people who GET IT.

My words:

 ... Billy Joel was right; honesty is such a lonely word, inside or outside “the business.” Speaking as one who owned a restaurant and brewery for 25 years, your peers function as a professional family. We stay together, and we take care of our own. There are times when some of one’s brothers and sisters err, and the understandable instinct is to keep it in the family. I’ve done so in the past, and on some occasions, I’ve come to regret it. Telling the truth might have forestalled subsequent, larger problems for everyone.

Little white lies, fudging, averting the gaze, looking the other way? They’re incompatible with the duties of journalists, analysts and reviewers, for whom credibility is dependent on being truthful. It doesn’t mean click bait, cultivating confrontation or trolling, although there might be occasional heated discussions with the folks who sell advertising.

That’s where experience comes to the fore; been there, seen that, able to synthesize information, and capable of saying what needs to be said – factually, sans hyperbole. It’s neither calling out, nor cancel culture. It’s very much about rewarding the positive performers, not the negative deniers.

I’ll shut up now. Kudos to Taj Palace, a restaurant I’ve yet to patronize but intend to visit soon for carryout, now that Robin has explained to me exactly what I need to know: “Taj Palace takes tasty Indian fare and pandemic safety seriously.”

Robin's words:

There’s no way to put this but bluntly: I don’t think some Louisville restaurants are taking the COVID-19 pandemic as seriously as they should. Why the worry?

You probably saw the news item about 11 Louisville businesses that got inspection blasts from Metro Public Health & Wellness over the Fourth of July weekend for failing to follow COVID-19 safety guidelines.

This matters: When I’m deciding where to dine during this pandemic, I want to have confidence that the restaurant’s management doesn’t slack off on health and safety.

"Nothing has prepared us for the baby boomers’ return to infancy."

I'm leading with this photo of Luna because communing with our three cats is much more fun than contemplating my status as a baby boomer. It annoys me tremendously to belong to this cohort, but if the youngest of the boomers are 54 and I'm 59, nothing much can be done about it apart from my ongoing efforts to stay out of simplistic boxes.

Consequently for some boomers, this opinion piece might seem overly harsh. Unfortunately for them (for us), it's largely spot-on. Scrooge-like deathbed conversions, anyone?

What the Hell Are We Going to Do About the Boomers?, by Bernie Bleske (Medium)

Nothing has prepared us for the baby boomers’ return to infancy

... The boomer generation’s youngest member is now 54, and as a group, they are 65 million strong, the largest generation in U.S. history. They are the children of the late 1940s, the ’50s, and the early ’60s, who came of age in an era of unprecedented prosperity and hard-earned luxury. No wars, no famines, no economic disasters occurred their entire lives. (The hardships they endured pale to what had come before.) The one great threat, the fall of capitalism to communism, never happened. (Like almost everything else in their lives, they exported the violent part of that conflict to Asia and South America and other places where the people weren’t white, even in their own country.)

They grew up with massive infrastructure projects — the U.S. interstate highway system, the power grid, and the water supply — which were all completed while they were still young. Their parents were forged in a time that saw two world wars, the Great Depression, and pandemic disease; a generation who vowed that their children, the boomers, would never suffer as they had. Hardened like steel by their experiences, the Greatest Generation succeeded. Universities were state-funded. The government was greatly expanded to include Medicaid and Social Security. Peace was built through diplomacy and U.S. dollars. The environment was protected. Parks were built and waterways cleaned.

So, what have the boomers done as they have aged?

"9-11 occurred eighteen years ago. The state terrorism of the war on terror continues. Its justification, if it ever had one, is long past."

There’s so much to talk about. And we won’t.

To me, having an honest discussion about America is what honors the dead, not rote remembrances. We have this militarism disease bad.

Alas.

Is Killing Peasants Protecting America’s Interests? by Ron Jacobs (CounterPunch)

The war drags on. There is no end in sight. Peace negotiations are thwarted again. Republicans and Democrats alike appear in the press decrying the possibility of the enemy coming to talk peace and staying at Camp David. Personally, I was surprised by the Camp David aspect of the story only because I figured Trump might try and get the Taliban negotiators a floor or two in one of his hotels or resorts. Why go to Camp David if the family Trump can make a few bucks? If Trump properties are good enough for the Chinese and the US Air Force, why not the Taliban, too?

Perhaps the real reason for the most recent failure of the peace negotiations between the Taliban, the Afghan client regime and the US can be found in Secretary Pompeo’s remarks on CNN’s State of the Union show this past weekend.

“You should know in the last 10 days we’ve killed over a thousand Taliban.” Pompeo told the audience. “And while this is not a war of attrition, I want the American people to know that President Trump is taking it to the Taliban in an effort to make sure that we protect America’s interests.”

Sarcastically speaking, there’s nothing bloodthirsty in that statement. Sounds like a man seeking peace to me. As for the veracity of the quote, let’s take a look. To begin with, if the US and its client forces really did kill one thousand Afghans in the preceding ten days, how can they be certain the dead were Taliban? A more likely scenario is that the dead, whether it’s a few hundred or a thousand, included many Afghan civilians who happened to live in areas controlled by the Taliban who are, after all, Afghans too. Indeed, since the Trump administration took control of the White House and Washington’s wars in 2017, the number of civilians killed by so-called US-led forces has increased each year. This is largely due to the US change in strategy from counterinsurgency to a war primarily fought from the air. In other words, the US is bombing and otherwise attacking anti-occupation forces and the places that shelter them with less intimate targeting than previously. As any observer of modern warfare can tell you, this means that more civilians die—what warmakers call collateral damage ...

Jeff Speck: "NA hired a local engineer who un-protected our bike lanes."

Jeff Speck gave us hope, but Jeff Gahan gave us the same old boilerplate.

Recently when Speck returned to New Albany to give Gahan credit for what the latter failed to achieve with the two-way street reversion, do you think at any point Speck looked around at the actual paving project with bicycling infrastructure castration and said to himself, wow -- that clueless yokel left 75% of it on the cutting room floor.

It's actually political patronage politics which must be destroyed, not Carthage, but how would Gahan function in the the world without the money of special interests like HWC Engineering, which publicly laughed at Speck?

SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW WORDS: Deaf Gahan has become Sardonicus, but what is to be our verdict?

GREEN MOUSE SAYS: The curious case of the speeding ticket, the honest cop, his fuming chief and the city's abject failure to calm downtown traffic.

The Green Mouse leaned back and drank deeply from his gunmetal flask, the one with the engraved inscription by Gilby Clarke, former guitarist for Guns 'n' Roses.

"You know, Rog, maybe this one's so bizarre even by New Albanian standards that you tell the story straight, with the minimum of embellishment."

Well, I'll give it the good ol' college try.

As with so many modern morality tales, it begins on Facebook. The post, since deleted for reasons which are about to be discussed, became known to the NA Confidential newsroom when I was brought into the ensuing conversation by a mutual friend.

Good thing I had the presence of mind to make a screenshot.

Here's the text:

I never do this, but I can’t help myself.

As I was driving down Spring Street in New Albany, a cop pulls out behind me and turns on his lights. I pulled over to get out of his way. He pulls over behind me. I thought maybe I had a tail light out or something because I wasn’t speeding. He comes to the window and says “Ma’am, you were going 36.” After I said ok, he said he has to give me a ticket because the chief of police for Floyd County told him he had to write 5 tickets in that spot tonight. He said others were driving the same speed in front of me, but there was space for him to pull out and pull me over. The officer proceeds to tell me that the Mayor of New Albany is up for re-election and there are tons of political reasons why they do things like this. He said he never gives tickets, but had no choice tonight per the chief. AND for 36mph, my ticket was $165 !!!!

Folks, this is a joke!!!!! If these are the people running the county I live in, I don’t want them to have their positions any longer!!!

So frustrating ......

Shocking, although it makes perfect sense in a demented, distinctly New Gahanian way.

Having failed to implement a panoply of traffic calming measures over and beyond two-way traffic, as suggested by Jeff Speck and others, and with increasing numbers of neighborhood residents along Spring Street beginning to grasp the sheer extent of the engineering debacle, City Hall's improvised damage control is to do what not one street grid reform advocate ever wanted done, which is use police officers better deployed elsewhere to operate speed traps to facilitate the enforcement that might have been achieved with better results through design -- had city officials not been so woefully ignorant of the design principles involved, and determined not to learn anything from the many studies they'd commissioned.

It didn't take long for the post on social media to rouse the ire of Todd Bailey, chief of police.

DO NOT under any circumstances tell a violator I have directed you to write citations. It is YOUR job and to enforce statutes and I will not tolerate any officer giving violators excuses that it is my order that they are getting citations. It is simple to determine who is doing this and in the event you do so you WILL face severe disciplinary action. You enforce traffic laws because it’s your job, not because you have been directed to do so. I have no idea what insanity has led to telling people this but it stops today.

Wow. The pre-election panic by the Democrats may already have started.

The Green Mouse was told that Bailey called the aggrieved party, apologized, trashed the speeding ticket in return for the original post being deleted from Facebook, then had pointed words with the ticketing officer. The memo reprinted above soon followed. 

Let's hope the officer in question, whose inadvertent honesty is appreciated in dissident circles, isn't cashiered. We're already short on police man (and woman) staffing, aren't we? It's a shame available officers are used at speed traps when properly implemented street design might have turned the trick.

Here's another thought.

Gahan's City Hall famously placed Speck's street study in the hands of favored contractor (and huge mayoral campaign donor) HWC Engineering, which fed the report into a nearby sausage grinder and emerged with a plan that has failed to slow traffic, failed to make streets safer for non-automotive users, and failed to enhance walkability.

As such, when the necessary changes eventually must be made, whether during the current occupant's tenure or by whomever follows, will taxpayers foot the bill -- or HWC?