Texas Rangers? "The team’s name is not so far off from being called the Texas Klansmen."

Something else I've learned today. The argument is convincing. Just call the team the Texas Horny Toads from now on, and be done with it.

The Texas Rangers’ team name must go, by Karen Attiah (The Washington Post)

As the Washington football team finally gives up its racist slur of a name, there is one major sports team that has avoided the spotlight and resisted meaningful engagement with the violent and racist implications of its name. To know the full history of the Texas Rangers is to understand that the team’s name is not so far off from being called the Texas Klansmen.

I grew up in Dallas, raised on myths about Texas Rangers as brave and wholesome guardians of the Texas frontier, helping protect innocent settlers from violent Indians. At church, boys could sign up to be Royal Rangers, the Christian equivalent of the Boy Scouts. I still remember the excitement when Chuck Norris himself, star of the television show “Walker, Texas Ranger,” came to visit my elementary school class.

My dad sometimes took my younger siblings and me to Arlington Stadium to watch the Rangers play. No state mythologizes itself quite like Texas, so of course, it made sense to have a team name that embodied that gauzy, self-regarding history. At the same time, being from a Ghanaian immigrant family, we weren’t that invested in baseball, or the team name. I just liked going because my dad would sometimes let me take sips of his Coca-Cola mixed with beer.

What we didn’t realize at the time was that the Rangers were a cruel, racist force when it came to the nonwhites who inhabited the beautiful and untamed Texas territory. The first job of the Rangers, formed in 1835 after Texas declared independence from Mexico, was to clear the land of Indian for white settlers.

That was just the start. The Rangers oppressed black people, helping capture runaway slaves trying to escape to Mexico; in the aftermath of the Civil War, they killed free blacks with impunity. “The negroes here need killing,” a Ranger wrote in a local newspaper in 1877, after Rangers fired on a party of black former Buffalo soldiers, killing four of them and a 4-year old girl. A jury would later find that the black soldiers “came to their death while resisting officers in the discharge of their duty,” an unsettling echo of the justification for modern-day police killings ...

GREEN MOUSE follows up: "How Dollar Stores Became Magnets for Crime and Killing."

Picking up where we left off on February 13, when I asked, "What sort of upper crust prohibitionist’s rationale is being advanced here?"

GREEN MOUSE SAYS: Neo-prohibitionism, foppery and hypocrisy at Indiana Landmarks as Family Dollar on Vincennes gets a perfectly legal alcohol sales permit.

This led to a traumatic Facebook kerfuffle, deletions and recriminations, and subsequently I was made aware of other back-channel goings-on, but by then the dark pandemic clouds were gathering and nothing much happened with any of it. Honestly, I've no idea whether the Family Dollar in question ever received the alcohol permit.

At the time, I was perfectly well aware of the controversies engendered by the contemporary growth of Family Dollar, Dollar General and other such carpetbagging stores in the context of impoverished areas, employment practices, food deserts, inept local governments and a host of other ills that capitalism gleefully exploits for the benefit of the accumulators of capital, at the expense of ordinary people who exist to be steamrolled.

What particularly bothered me back in February was the involvement of Indiana Landmarks, whether active and real or merely tactically suggested by opponents of the Family Dollar alcoholic beverages permit, as well as the paternalistic attitude of more than one self-identified (and Reisz-stuffed) historic preservationist concerning their responsibility to help the poor folks lest too many paychecks get squandered on booze -- an argument that was tired and regrettable a century ago in the run-up to Prohibition.

To be precise, I take none of it back -- not a word -- and note only that with the intervention of more important matters, the discussion came to an end. So it goes.

Now, about Family Dollar, Dollar General and others of the species. ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power, and in this gripping long read, Alec MacGillis explains "How Dollar Stores Became Magnets for Crime and Killing."

 ... The Gun Violence Archive, a website that uses local news reports and law enforcement sources to tally crimes involving firearms, lists more than 200 violent incidents involving guns at Family Dollar or Dollar General stores since the start of 2017, nearly 50 of which resulted in deaths. The incidents include carjackings in the parking lot, drug deals gone bad and altercations inside stores. But a large number involve armed robberies in which workers or customers have been shot. Since the beginning of 2017, employees have been wounded in shootings or pistol-whippings in at least 31 robberies; in at least seven other incidents, employees have been killed. The violence has not let up in recent months, when requirements for customers to wear masks have made it harder for clerks to detect shoppers who are bent on robbery. In early May, a worker at a Family Dollar in Flint, Michigan, was fatally shot after refusing entry to a customer without a mask.

The number of incidents can be explained in part by the stores’ ubiquity: There are now more than 16,000 Dollar Generals and nearly 8,000 Family Dollars in the United States, a 50% increase in the past decade. (By comparison, Walmart has about 4,700 stores in the U.S.) The stores are often in high-crime neighborhoods, where there simply aren’t many other businesses for criminals to target. Routine gun violence has fallen sharply in prosperous cities around the country, but it has remained stubbornly high in many of the cities and towns where these stores predominate. The glowing signs of the discount chains have become indicators of neglect, markers of a geography of the places that the country has written off.

But these factors are not sufficient to explain the trend. The chains’ owners have done little to maintain order in the stores, which tend to be thinly staffed and exist in a state of physical disarray. In the 1970s, criminologists such as Lawrence Cohen and Marcus Felson argued that rising crime could be partly explained by changes in the social environment that lowered the risk of getting caught. That theory gained increasing acceptance in the decades that followed. “The likelihood of a crime occurring depends on three elements: a motivated offender, a vulnerable victim, and the absence of a capable guardian,” the sociologist Patrick Sharkey wrote, in “Uneasy Peace,” from 2018.

Another way of putting this is that crime is not inevitable. Robberies and killings that have taken place at dollar store chains would not have necessarily happened elsewhere. “The idea that crime is sort of a whack-a-mole game, that if you just press here it’ll move over here,” is wrong, Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, told me. Making it harder to commit a crime doesn’t just push crime elsewhere; it reduces it. “Crime is opportunistic,” he said. “If there’s no opportunity, there’s no crime” ...

Simply stated, "Cars Are Death Machines."

To repeat: Car-centrism, or if you will "automobile supremacy," not only is a form of imperialism. It is perhaps the last remaining form of imperialism almost entirely absent social stigma.

When we get behind a steering wheel -- all of us, including me -- our assumptions of acceptable behavior change every bit as radically as when we savage people on social media.

Imperialism? Very much so.

Space must be seized to accommodate cars to the expense of non-car users. We expect to warehouse cars on public ground at no cost to ourselves. We demand cheap fuel and will support limitless violence (foreign wars, domestic economic coercion) in order to get it. We'll go to any length to characterize this addiction as freedom. The list of destructive behavior is seemingly endless, and yet we've made automobile supremacy the basis of civilization at the present time.

And then there's that other factor, because cars are death machines, and we seem to like it that way. How "freedom" fits into this dichotomy remains a complete mystery to me.

Cars Are Death Machines. Self-Driving Tech Won’t Change That.

By Allison Arieff (New York Times)

Cars are death machines. Pedestrian fatalities in the United States have increased 41 percent since 2008; more than 6,000 pedestrians were killed in 2018 alone. More than 4,000 American kids are killed in car crashes every year – I am thankful every day my niece wasn’t one of them.

Straight to the conclusion.

I’m not so naïve to think we can get rid of cars altogether, but we have so many tools to eliminate traffic-related injuries and fatalities right now. Banning all passenger auto-driving vehicles above a certain weight and front grill height would be a great start. Other solutions run the gamut from the quick and easy fixes — like reducing speed limits, eliminating right turns on red, building protected bike lanes and instituting congestion pricing — to major and necessary commitments like funding new transit projects (upgrading, maintaining and expanding existing transit systems) and rethinking land use to encourage walkable development rather than sprawl.

We can all commit to driving less, which reduces both CO2 emissions and the potential for crashes. We need to be as defensive about crosswalks and bike lanes as drivers are about their cars (and where we believe we are entitled to park them).

Until then, the streets will belong to the death machines.

Not dumbing down: "Wendell Berry’s lifelong dissent."

2011, Louisville Loves Mountains.

On Sunday I launched these words into the social media abyss.

It dawns on me that what I detest most of all on a consistent lifelong basis is the process of “dumbing down,” whether it’s society, business, politics, beer, whatever. Note that I’m not speaking of ignorance; it’s willful stupidity, which is like kryptonite to me. Jeeebus, I hate it so. Rant over. I’m going to hide somewhere in the house, read a book and LEARN SOMETHING just for spite.

I'm already reading a novel (Stalingrad, by Vassily Grossman). Then I saw this book review, which is an extended essay about Wendell Berry.

A Shared Place, by Jedediah Britton-Purdy (The Nation)

Wendell Berry’s lifelong dissent.

ESSAYS, 1969–1990, by Wendell Berry; Jack Shoemaker, ed.
ESSAYS, 1993–2017, by Wendell Berry; Jack Shoemaker, ed.

At a time when political conflict runs deep and erects high walls, the Kentucky essayist, novelist, and poet Wendell Berry maintains an arresting mix of admirers. Barack Obama awarded him the National Humanities Medal in 2011. The following year, the socialist-feminist writer and editor Sarah Leonard published a friendly interview with him in Dissent. Yet he also gets respectful attention in the pages of The American Conservative and First Things, a right-leaning, traditionalist Christian journal.

More recently, The New Yorker ran an introduction to Berry’s thought distilled from a series of conversations, stretching over several years, with the critic Amanda Petrusich. In these conversations, Berry patiently explains why he doesn’t call himself a socialist or a conservative and recounts the mostly unchanged creed underlying his nearly six decades of writing and activism. Over the years, he has called himself an agrarian, a pacifist, and a Christian—albeit of an eccentric kind. He has written against all forms of violence and destruction—of land, communities, and human beings—and argued that the modern American way of life is a skein of violence. He is an anti-capitalist moralist and a writer of praise for what he admires: the quiet, mostly uncelebrated labor and affection that keep the world whole and might still redeem it. He is also an acerbic critic of what he dislikes, particularly modern individualism, and his emphasis on family and marriage and his ambivalence toward abortion mark him as an outsider to the left ...

Gahan's violence against the homeless dominates NA Confidential's Top Ten list of posts for July, 2019.

The Democratic Party's raging
self-delusion was a hot topic in July.

Thanks for reading NA Confidential, where we enjoy reconnoitering the neglected periphery for uniquely local perspectives on life in New Albany. Otherwise your only choice would be the Jeffersonville News and Evangelbune.

For July there are five honorable mention followed by the top ten posts, in ascending order.

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JULY HONORABLE MENTION (5)

789

It's the morning after the Sherman Minton Bridge meeting, and Alka-Seltzer isn't helping Dear Leader's mood.

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825

DemoDisneyDixiecratic Party chairman releases stunning statement about Gahan's violent homeless encampment takedown today -- and more on our Dear Leader's drumpf envy.

For the real poop, read the Courier-Journal: After 3-day delay, New Albany tears down secluded homeless camp.

For the self-serving bullshit, read Jeff Gahan's re-election page: But the beautiful people all love me dearly.

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847

There won't be any new restaurants in New Albany this week.

Thanks for indulging this test of NA Confidential's theory that any post explicitly mentioning restaurants or food in the title can be relied upon to quintuple the views of the ones that don't.

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872

Jimmy's Music Center has a new owner and will become Kentuckiana Music Center in a new location.

We were out of town when Anna Blanton announced the purchase of Jimmy's Music Center and a forthcoming move to the corner of Pearl and Elm opposite Harvest Homecoming's headquarters, which many of us remember as the space that never housed the cider bar.

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904

One fine anniversary evening at Brooklyn and The Butcher.

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JULY TOP 10

917

This just in: "Insider Louisville to cease publishing on August 7."

"It is a sad day for the Insider Louisville team as well as its dedicated board to report that the nonprofit’s last day of publication is Aug. 7, 2019."

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963

Gahan's boom that crashed: "Quite the tab (for taxpayers) for making vulnerable people's lives harder."

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1,023

Sherman Minton Bridge leadership litmus test as Mark Seabrook stays for the entire meeting, while Jeff Gahan lasts seven whole minutes.

As more than one onlooker confirmed, evidently one glance of 125 persons milling around the third floor ballroom caused Gahan's agoraphobia to kick in with a vengeance, and he turned tail and skedaddled, terrified of an unscripted setting in an enclosed space amid uncontrollable people. Probably there exists medication for this condition, maybe even marijuana-laced Rice Krispies Treats with a Kool-Aid chaser, although first the patient must concede to being ill.

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1,034

Sherman Minton Bridge refurbishment: "Construction is scheduled to start in early 2021 and take two to three years."

All we can do at this point is humbly beseech Horseshoe/Caesar/Whatever the multi-national gaming entity is calling itself this decade to help save us from a total shutdown.

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1,044

The Harvest Homecoming Parade has a new starting time of 3:00 p.m. on Saturday, October 5.

I'm told the reasoning for the later starting time is to encourage parade participation (iffy) and to provide a natural segue into evening dining hours for participants and spectators alike in the hope they'll roam downtown (entirely possible). It seems like a good idea to me. Should we still begin porchside drinking at 10:00 a.m. or wait until 1:00 p.m.?

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1,049

Three eyewitness viewpoints as Governor Holcomb stumps for Mark Seabrook.

Following are three perspectives of last night's Mark Seabrook for Mayor fundraiser at the Calumet Club, written by Josh Turner, Dale Bagshaw and Nick Vaughn.

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1,088

Fresh eatery in New Albany: El Rico Taco is now open in Destinations Booksellers.

El Rico Taco is open for business at 604 East Spring Street, taking over the cafe space in the rear where Taco Steve formerly operated. But pay heed: El Rico Taco is a different cut of cloth.

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1,140

Bartender sez: "I don’t always enjoy telling people they can’t have the drink they’ve asked me for, but when I do, it’s because someone ordered an Irish car bomb."

Or maybe it should be renamed: "Hey, sweetheart, can I have one of those I'm a Culturally Illiterate American Cocktails?" No, it isn't St. Patrick's Day, although it's never too late to learn something.

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1,524

Exit 0's Paul Stensrud pulls zero punches v.v. Gahan's violence against the homeless: "In order for things to change there needs to be a change of hands within local government."

Watch the video, and ponder the true nature of Gahan's "compassion." Has a single ranking Democrat spoken publicly about the housing camp demolition?

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4,283 (posted at Facebook only)
New Albany Democrats heartily applaud as Jeff Gahan sends in the bulldozers to demolish a homeless camp. 

Hmm, where are the voices of the progressive social justice advocates who idolize the mayor? Seems all we're hearing is cowardly static. Thanks to Marty Miller of The Aggregate for this photo.

Gahan commits violence against our most vulnerable because our most beautiful can't get enough of "sanitary conditions."

It was another morning among many, walking back home from work, entertaining myself by watching as drivers of automobiles routinely violated the traffic rules, all the while ready to turn into road-raging beasts if a solitary bicyclist were to do the same by rolling through a stop sign, when from the shadows emerged a gargantuan 300-pound male pedaling frantically atop a terribly creaky ten-year-old’s bike.

This is the sort of contemporary phenomenon that eludes comprehension, these full-grown adults on kiddie bikes, and yes, I’ve certainly heard the litany of their vagrancy, drug abuse and petty thievery. Some of it may even be true, and deprivation in one of its numerous sanctioned forms surely plays a part, although I insist on thinking it goes deeper.

I believe they're the dispossessed protesting against the current reign of the fashionistas, or as I've termed them previously, the "beautiful" people.

SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW WORDS: Is there a -cracy word for government by the beautiful people?

... To me the term "beautiful people" is decidedly pejorative.

It's inevitably the people who fancy themselves as beautiful, not necessarily in some accepted sense of outwardly physical beauty, but those possessing the right ideas, the right look, the right connections and the right way of viewing their privileged place in the world.

Obviously I reserve the right to heatedly differ with "right" in these contexts, extolling a alternative definition in the process.

As an awkward and ungainly ugly duckling of a book reader, I've learned the hard way that trying to fit in with the beautiful people is a fool's errand. Whenever I've tried it, the story has ended badly.

I'm not sure whether these experiences made me into a defiant jaded contrarian or the other way around, but there we are. I've become fairly contemptuous of the self-centered milieu of the beautiful people, who know far less about the world than they profess, and who tend to dismiss the "little people" -- and this may be one reason why Donald Trump is president, among other things.

There are beautiful people and homeless people, and almost axiomatically, never the twain shall meet. In fact the beautiful people tend to view the homeless people as blotches to be removed, lest property values plunge and visitors come to believe we weren't taught about deodorant.

To close this post, give it up for this blog's co-editor, who has a knack for finding the center of the target.

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We were out of town when Mayor Gahan lied to and then destroyed a community of homeless people here in New Albany. His personal actions and the usual lack of substantive response from other Democratic officials are deplorable but not at all surprising given their consistent track records of subsidizing the wealthy while seeking to limit or penalize nearly everyone else. 

What’s mostly gone unremarked, though, owing to them being wholly unremarkable in this country, are the other lessons again made clear: 

1. It’s not just possible but highly probable for working people to be unable to afford a decent place to live. 

2. Medical situations to which we are all susceptible make and help keep people homeless every day.

I’m sure, via occasional donations, thoughts and prayers, etc., some of you think you’re offering support for the homeless. The fact is, though, there isn’t a single good and justifiable reason why the factors above need to be true. When we continue to respect and re-elect a leadership class that doesn’t support a living wage and universal health care, we are choosing to make people’s lives look and function like the photos and videos we’ve all seen too much of lately. We are choosing, in the wealthiest empire to ever exist, to set the humanitarian baseline so low that “unsafe, unsanitary” housing camps are accepted as a “natural” consequence of our systemic beliefs and actions. 

Year after year, a bulk of the American voting public, regardless of party and desperately clung-to delusional self-images, actively chooses and reinforces numerous forms of poverty and violence. It’s what we electorally say we want and it’s precisely what we get.

Cognitive dissonance: An abundance of gratitude for violent city "leadership" -- and other ways we lie to ourselves.

Who among our community's most vulnerable will Jeff Gahan attack next -- and to what phantasmagorical lengths will local Democrats go to rationalize it?

So very, very sad.

DemoDisneyDixiecratic Party chairman releases stunning statement about Gahan's violent homeless encampment takedown today -- and more on our Dear Leader's drumpf envy.

What, you expected actual words?

For the real poop, read the Courier-Journal: After 3-day delay, New Albany tears down secluded homeless camp.

For the self-serving bullshit, read Jeff Gahan's re-election page: But the beautiful people all love me dearly.

The Aggregate is working on a story. As of mid-afternoon today, the News and Tribune didn't even know there was a story.

And this is my take:

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“What you permit, you promote. What you allow, you encourage. What you condone, you own.”

I've been trying my best to begin the process of disengagement from local politics. 15 years is enough, and I need a break; besides, it's become very tedious constantly doing the GOP's job of articulating the resistance to idiocy when I'm a damnable socialist, not a Republican.

That said, my conscience precludes silence in the instance of Jeff Gahan's horrid "information" about "industry and compassion" with regard to the community's less fortunate. The statement, albeit composed by a bootlicking minion, was anything but helpful.

Petulant, flatulent and disingenuous comprise the tip of the iceberg; Gahan's reference to the public housing "compound" might be recent history's most revealing Freudian slip. When Donald Trump emits like-minded tweets, our city's Democrats are gravely offended, screaming and howling, but when their (Democratic?) mayor follows suit the only sounds we hear are pins dropping, crickets chirping and the mournful wail of an underfed mutt off in the distance.

As a friend astutely observed, Team Gahan's absence of "protocol" simply means they can do as they please about a homeless encampment, either look the other way or dial up the dozers, all without a trace of a political, philosophical or humanitarian rationale. Just the sheer whimsy of C-minus students on a power trip with plenty of Jorge Lanz's money.

Don't look at me. He's YOUR mayor, not mine, Democrats.

It's far past time for a reality check amongst those of you fancying yourselves progressive or liberal or whatever, because Gahan's stance with respect to your fellow citizens most in need of a boost -- exemplified by but not restricted to his cynical public housing takeover and of course today's demolition fetish -- has been absolutely abysmal, savagely contradicting any semblance of the "social justice" you claim to be pursuing.

Democrats, I suppose it's your business supporting a morally bankrupt fraud, even if it's based on sheer delusion -- but maybe you can be less blatantly hypocritical about it?

Chris Morris on distracted driving: "Pedestrians have the right-of-way, and don’t block crosswalks with your vehicles."

True story.

Those of us not cocooned in our cars understand quite well what it is.

Bullying, or the routine aggression that characterizes bad driving behavior.

We’ve all been there. You’re crossing the street, thinking you have a clear path, when the driver waiting at the light starts lurching into the crosswalk, itching for the green signal. Before you know it, you and everyone else crossing has to squeeze around this bully.

Inspired by a recent Jonathan McLeod post (headline: “Stop fucking driving your car at people”), I set out to catalogue a few of the most obnoxious behaviors people routinely engage in behind the wheel of a car.

Intersection bullying — when motorists occupy a chunk of crosswalk real estate that belongs to pedestrians with the right of way — is just one example of the many nasty, antisocial, and downright dangerous things drivers do when they’re interacting with people outside their car.

There’s a ton of bad driving behavior that should be socially unacceptable, but for some reason, granted the anonymity of a car, people engage in it anyway. This routine aggression needs to be called out for what it is — bullying.

Chris Morris nails this one.

MORRIS: Dealing with distracted drivers (Raycom Meets Tom May)

One of the reasons given for New Albany’s street conversion last year was to slow traffic, making it safer to not only drive in the city, but to walk, jog and ride a bike without the fear of being hit by a speeding car.

But city government can’t legislate distracted driving or those motorists who ignore traffic signals and crosswalks. Unless the police see it, not much can be done. So, a year later, are the streets safer?

Let’s say things have improved.

As a regular walker and jogger I see people every day ignore basic principles of driving on a downtown street. The main ones being pedestrians have the right-of-way, and don’t block crosswalks with your vehicles.

Here is what I see regularly at crosswalks: A motorist will pull up to the stop, ignore both me and the crosswalk, and wait for an opening before pulling out into traffic. Even though I was there first, and already had a step in the crosswalk, they just go on as if I were invisible. This one drives me crazy. Crosswalks are there for a reason, to allow walkers a safe path to cross a street.

This happens regularly in the morning as I cross Eighth Street. I usually have to jog behind or between cars because the crosswalk is covered up by a vehicle. It’s like I am invisible as they prepare to pull out onto Spring Street ...

Bullying, or the routine aggression that characterizes bad driving behavior.

We begin with the basics.

This means you: "STOP FUCKING DRIVING YOUR CAR AT PEOPLE."

My favorite paragraph from the following is this:

See someone crossing the road ahead? Slow down and be prepared to stop. If braking at the sight of human beings in the path of your car feels like an unbearable imposition, you might be a garbage person.

Yep.

How to Not Be a Bully Behind the Wheel, by Angie Schmitt (Streetsblog)

We’ve all been there. You’re crossing the street, thinking you have a clear path, when the driver waiting at the light starts lurching into the crosswalk, itching for the green signal. Before you know it, you and everyone else crossing has to squeeze around this bully.

Inspired by a recent Jonathan McLeod post (headline: “Stop fucking driving your car at people”), I set out to catalogue a few of the most obnoxious behaviors people routinely engage in behind the wheel of a car.

Intersection bullying — when motorists occupy a chunk of crosswalk real estate that belongs to pedestrians with the right of way — is just one example of the many nasty, antisocial, and downright dangerous things drivers do when they’re interacting with people outside their car.

There’s a ton of bad driving behavior that should be socially unacceptable, but for some reason, granted the anonymity of a car, people engage in it anyway. This routine aggression needs to be called out for what it is — bullying. To start things off, I’ve compiled this short list of things that people should never do behind the wheel ...

Indianapolis strip club owner attacks councilman for being "pompous." Heck, he could have TASED him -- right, Dugout?

For video, follow the Indy Star link.

In New Albany, it would have been the Common Council, not an Alcoholic Beverage Board snoozer, and here the councilman would be attacking the strip club owner, as Dan Coffey once vowed to do to a private citizen while disguised as a copperhead snake.

It's Halloween every day in the city's 1st council district, but I digress.

Coincidentally, this helps to explain why there has been so little support through the years for filming our city's city council meetings. True, it's gotten less fractious recently, but let the constituents see what really goes on, and strip club attendance might go down.

Or up.

Man accused of attacking Indy Councilman Jeff Miller shares his side of story, by Ryan Martin (Indy Star)

The owner of a south-side strip club is accused of attacking Indianapolis councilman Jeff Miller during a public meeting Monday in an act of retaliation over Miller's yearslong opposition to the bar's liquor license.

Police say Jeffery Moe, 51, grabbed Miller by the throat with both hands, picked him up and slammed his head against a wall. Moe later told police he "cleaned (Miller's) clock and I'll do it again," according to court documents filed Tuesday.

But Moe, who faces two felony and two misdemeanor charges, disputes how the attack was characterized by police. Moe told IndyStar he grabbed Miller's collar and shook him.

“I did not grab his neck. I shook him,” Moe, who owns Lenny's Gentlemen's Club, told IndyStar. “I was not intending to injure Mr. Miller. I was meaning to tell him to stop being a pompous politician.”

Last night at city council, the News and Tribune looked the other way as McLaughlin condoned Duggins' TASER hilarity.

My frustrations with local media's coddling, in a nutshell.

New Albany City Council adjusts some parking fines, by Chris Morris (Sweet Home Alabama)

Haven House receives $50,000 appropriation

NEW ALBANY — The New Albany City Council made some amendments to parking violations Monday night. Motorists can expect higher fines and to be towed for parking in an intersection, blocking a fire hydrant or crosswalk, parking on a sidewalk and parking illegally in a handicap space.

It's the usual by-the-numbers council coverage, and that's just lovely -- until someone who was present volunteers to fill in the missing bits.

By the way, Mark Cassidy attended last evening.

"At city council mtg. Pat making excuses for David Duggins. Al and David A. both had strong statements condemning such comments by an official."

Making excuses for Duggins' TASER misbehavior?

Cluelessly normalizing ugliness of this magnitude might be the default reaction of almost any ranking Democrat in town, but in this instance, it's 4th district's Pat "Methodical" McLaughlin, formerly the council president, now as ever joined to Mayor Jeff Gahan's swiveling hip in a surely forlorn hope that (a) Dear Leader might opt for the monastery some sweet day, and (b) McLaughlin then could become the biggest fish in this painfully small pond.

(Interestingly, Gahan didn't fight at all for Bob Caesar's bid to become council president in 2018; Caesar lost, and now his sinecure on the Redevelopment Commission has ended, too. Perhaps this is Gahan's pleasant way of saying "sorry, Bob, but your own mayoral ambitions just ain't happening.") 

I asked Mark to elaborate on the public vetting of Duggins on Monday night.

Al (Knable) brought it up at the beginning of the meeting. He said he'd talked to the Mayor about it, and also talked to Duggins. Knable thought it was totally inappropriate, but the person harmed is the only one who can accept Duggins' apology or not. He didn't think anyone should lose their job over it. David Aebersold wanted to know if Duggins now was on a short leash (paraphrased), suggesting that Duggins can't screw up again and still represent New Albany. Knable said yes. Next Aebersold stated that he's received far more e-mails and calls about this (TASER hilarity) episode than anything else since he's been on the council, and he didn't want to go through any of it again. I believe that if it had been up to Aebersold, he would've fired Duggins. After that is when Pat made his milquetoast defense.

And exactly how spineless was it, Mark?

Pat said "familiarity" probably was the reason Duggins said what he did, and that we all make comments that we shouldn't. 

Mark concludes with a concise thought, one that every DemoDisneyDixiecrat should read, reread and read again.

True, but that doesn't excuse it, especially not coming from an official with control over peoples' lives.

On second thought, it might interest a newspaper's editorial board, too. That is, if the newspaper ever gets around to taking its Fourth Estate obligations seriously.

Cue the inevitable Valentine's Day poll and chocolate pairing.

Here's where a newspaper reporter might start -- because see, there was a discussion at a council meeting about a tawdry lapse by a public official, at which it was divulged that the council's current president has discussed the issue with the mayor, who as yet has had nothing to say about it.

Here's an idea, Chris.

Shouldn't you go talk to the mayor, too?

"The embedded violence of the automobile is something we take for granted."

It comes down to this: Speed and inattention kill, and our society routinely encourages both, whether by design, selfishness or neglect.

If you don't walk or bike in these settings, you simply can't ever understand it. Any city official or engineer who believes otherwise is delusional.

By extension, designing purported "solutions" in the absence of understanding constitutes a fool's errand.

The Everday Surrealism of Automobile Violence, by Bill Lindeke (Twin City Sidewalks)

... The only real conclusion here is that the embedded violence of the automobile is something we take for granted. Cars are deadly, and we’ve surrounded ourselves with them. At the flick of a foot, any drugged-up maniac can kill just anyone at any time, even someone minding his own business riding the city bus down Dale Street at seven miles per hour. Designing a society around the automobile is not only wasteful of our energy and collective resources, not only alienates us from each other and feeds our most misanthropic feelings, but it must result in senseless death. This is the only outcome when our cities practically require everyone to wield a weapon every day.

Critical thinking, necessary action: "Do's and Don'ts for Bystander Intervention."

Yesterday was Inclusive Day for my Leadership SI class, during which we discussed topics like inclusion, diversity, unconscious bias, stereotypes and much, much more.

It was a mind-expanding opportunity to adjust one's perceptions of reality, particularly those of us falling into the white/old/straight/male grouping.

My classmate Missy forwarded this follow-up, and I consider it essential reading at the current juncture.

Do's and Don'ts for Bystander Intervention

If you witness public instances of racist, anti-Black, anti-Muslim, anti-Trans, or any other form of oppressive interpersonal violence and harassment, use these tips on how to intervene while considering the safety of everyone involved.

The importance of "AND" in confronting the American culture of violence.

Black Lives Still Must Matter, Even After Dallas, by Kai Wright (The Nation)

... Here’s the thing: The world is often more complicated than our political discourse accommodates. We are rarely allowed to use the word and in our politics, but it is surely useful this morning. We can and must condemn and organize against violence in all its forms — both violence against public servants and violence that public servants direct at us; acts of terrorism and state-sanctioned acts of war; hate crimes directed at a community of people and personal disputes that turn deadly due to the omnipresence of guns. What unifies all of this death is the grim reality that America is a horribly violent place. And if Dallas changes anything about the movement for black lives, it is only to remind us that in order to truly ensure black lives are valued, we will have to confront the broader culture of violence that has long gripped this nation.

Capitalism is predicated on violence -- but why do we have so much violence?

Photo credit: Philosophers for Change.

Gun violence is proof that trickle down theory works. It's the only part of it that works, but it works.
-- Jeff Gillenwater

Keep peeling away the layers, go past irrelevant debates about weaponry and Muslims, and get down to the heart of the matter.

The Structural Genocide That Is Capitalism, by Javier Sethness (Truthout)

Garry Leech, an author who had previously penned a book on the FARC insurgency in Colombia (2011), has assembled a forceful denunciation of the status quo with Capitalism: A Structural Genocide. In essence, he argues cogently in this work that the devastating structural violence experienced by societies subjected to the rule of capital since its historical emergence - and that particularly felt by the world's presently impoverished social majorities - is, instead of being an aberration or distortion of market imperatives, central and inherent to the division of society along class lines and the enthronement of private property. Even a cursory examination of the depth of human suffering perpetuated historically and contemporarily by the hegemony of capital should lead disinterested observers to agree with Leech that the catastrophic scale of violence for which this system is responsible can be considered nothing less than genocidal, however shocking such a conclusion might prove to be.

The pervasiveness of violence in America can be easily grasped via 10 minutes of Googling. Not that I'd want Bob Caesar thinking of me as anti-establishment, or anything quite so damaging to my social status.

It's like this: Garbage in, garbage out. A system founded on violence, violence as a chief by-product.


Violence Against LGBT People in America Is Astoundingly Common, by Emma Green (City Lab)

The attack on a gay club in Orlando on Sunday, the worst mass shooting in U.S. history, is not an isolated crime.

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Violence Against Women in the United States: Statistics (NOW)

Despite the fact that advocacy groups like NOW have worked for over three decades to halt the epidemic of gender-based violence and sexual assault, the numbers are still shocking.

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Violence against blacks recalls civil-rights era, by Nichelle Smith (USA TODAY)

Black History Month in 2016 comes at a time of escalated violence against African Americans — much of it involving police — that recalls the troubled times of the late 1960s.

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Violence Against American Indians Is a Pervasive Problem, by Susy Buchanan (Southern Poverty Law Center)

Racial violence against Native Americans has drawn attention from the federal government twice in recent years, but many hate crimes still seem to get a pass.

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Child Abuse Statistics and Facts (Child Help)

Children are suffering from a hidden epidemic of child abuse and neglect. It’s a widespread war against our children that we have the power to stop, and understanding the issue is the first step. Just how bad is the issue of child abuse in the United States?

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Atheists Face Discrimination On A Shocking Level (INFOGRAPHIC),by Yasmine Hafiz (American Humanist Association via HuffPost)

The American Humanist Association created this infographic which shows some of the ways in which atheists are socially and legally discriminated against.

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That's enough for starters, isn't it?

"What We Lose with Every Mass Shooting."

“You can't talk about fucking in America, people say you're dirty. But if you talk about killing somebody, that's cool.”
― Richard Pryor

Back in the day, Thomas Jefferson observed that so long as evil is tolerable, people will not seek redress by abolishing the forms to which they're accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpation reaches a tipping point, there comes a time to throw off the evil.

Are we there yet?

What We Lose with Every Mass Shooting, by Charles Pierce (Esquire)

​Orlando is not merely the destruction of innocence. It's worse.​

... This being the 15th one of these he's had to give over the eight years of his presidency, he probably feels somewhat burdened by how little has changed in the wake of the previous 14 statements he'd given on the subject. I would not blame the man if, at this point, he simply threw up his hands at the possibility of weaning this country off its suicidal affection for its firearms.

So I was struck by the thought that Barack Obama has had to preside over more mass shootings of Americans than any president since Abraham Lincoln. That was a bit sobering, I must admit, and it must be moreso for him.

(The only possible flaw in my calculation would be those presidents after Lincoln who presided over the mass killings of Native Americans. This will require further research as this country's suicidal affection for its firearms has a long and bloody history.)

“See, people with power understand exactly one thing: violence.”
― Noam Chomsky

To me, the key point is this.

The events in Orlando do nothing more than demolish our most treasured illusions about ourselves and our country and—most trivially—our politics. How many of the congresscritters now sending "thoughts and prayers" to the victims in Orlando, and to their families, spent a lot of time in their day jobs making the everyday lives of those victims more miserable than they had to be? There's still an audience for clean-shaven, well-tailored bigotry of all faiths.

Hate crimes, terrorism ... violence.

The original American birthright.

Statistically, the perpetrators are few in number, but the accessories and accomplices are many. To spend every waking hour demonizing is to find and create willing disciples, and when public "safety" has been outsourced to the gun rack at Wal-Mart (Jamey Noel will give you directions to the nearest store), there simply isn't much cause for optimism.

Or, as a friend phrased it on Twitter:

If you've said that people aren't good enough for heaven, nobody wants to hear you say you're sorry they're dead.

"Anti-abortion extremists are domestic terrorists."

If we spend our days fearing Muslims halfway across the planet, we won't think to look in our own backyards. Opposed to violence? Then the opposition needs to be uniform.

Anti-abortion extremists are domestic terrorists: They have created fear among providers that something violent can happen to any of them at any time, by David Cohen and Krysten Connon (Al Jazeera)

Part of Kristina Romero’s job as the regional director for several reproductive health clinics in the South, some of which offer abortion services, is to drive one of the clinic doctors to and from work. That way anti-abortion extremists can’t identify the doctor’s car.

One day, as Romero left her home, she saw a big poster with the doctor’s picture in a bullseye. There were more: The posters started in front of her house and continued along the entire route she took to get to the clinic.

To Romero, the posters were not only threatening to the doctor, but also to her. That they lined her route to work was a clear sign that anti-abortion extremists had followed her. The message, she explained, “was for me to be scared. It was for me. There’s nothing in my experience with the protesters that stands out more than that morning when I got up to go get the doctor and saw the doctor’s picture all over town.”

This is just one example of what abortion providers face in America today.

Baltimore in a nutshell: "The machine can work without the operator."

Thanks to Jeff G for the link. Badger's essay is clear, sad and not at all restricted in scope to Baltimore. That's because this isn't about the tip of the iceberg, as displayed in Baltimore and glimpsed on social media feeds. Rather, it's about those long decades of contributing factors preceding it, there and elsewhere.

The long, painful and repetitive history of how Baltimore became Baltimore, by Emily Badger (Washington Post)

... These cycles are not unique to Baltimore, which is also why the unrest in Baltimore this week feels more like a movement that's bound to spread than the mere outburst of a few "thugs."

It's not about police versus thugs, but the way that we all -- ALL -- are made to dance like marionettes to the tune of the 1%, which is the only entity profiting from purpose-built and ongoing societal schisms.

Surely it is not insignificant that in New Albany, per 1,000 residents, the arrest rate three years ago showed three times as many blacks as non-blacks. As Jeff noted:

It's easy to offer judgments and commentary about Baltimore and other cities. It's harder to ask questions at home. With just a few days left until the primary, which candidates will publicly ask about this?

The envelope, please ... and the answer is, none. But we have another prayer inclusion resolution coming to council next Monday.

Choices for reading are endless. Last week we took a glance here: Take time to consider Heinberg's "Fight of the Century: Localization in a Globalized World." President Obama's comments also are worthy of note: "This is not new. This has been going on for decades."

In The Nation, Dave Zirin steps in where the usual sports stenographers fear to tread with Apartheid Games: Baltimore, Urban America, and Camden Yards, while at Jacobin, an older piece written during the time of Ferguson explains When Rioting is Rational.

The late Junior Seau: "Degenerative brain disease linked to repeated head trauma."

Let's check back with a topic sure to liven your enjoyment of the NFL this playoff weekend.

ESPN: Junior Seau and our "appetite for destruction." (May, 2012)

As human sports go, are boxing and football exempt from personal moral scrutiny merely because people have a choice not to participate?

The Seau autopsy report is finished, and the verdict, while not unexpected, is chilling.

Seau Suffered From Brain Disease, by Mary Pilon (New York Times)

The former N.F.L. linebacker Junior Seau had a degenerative brain disease linked to repeated head trauma when he committed suicide last spring, the National Institutes of Health said Thursday.

The findings were consistent with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease widely connected to athletes who have absorbed frequent blows to the head, the N.I.H. said in a statement. Seau is the latest and most prominent player to be associated with the disease, which has bedeviled the sport in recent years as a proliferation of studies have exposed the possible long-term cognitive impact of head injuries sustained on the field.