I'm the Slime.

We knew it would be sickening, and apparently so did Mayor Greg Fischer's henchmen, seeing as they fought hard to keep the Amazon giveaway proposal under wraps.

Has Fischer resigned yet?

'Camp Alexa' and $2.5 billion over 20 years: What Louisville offered Amazon in HQ2 pitch, by Darcy Costello and Ben Tobin (Louisville Courier Journal)

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — If Amazon brought its second headquarters to Louisville, city officials pitched the company, it could settle its employees on a riverfront campus spanning both sides of the Ohio River, retire to a "Camp Alexa" retreat location at General Butler State Park and enjoy $2.5 billion in incentives over 20 years "based on the sharing of future revenues."

The 137-page bid for Amazon's "HQ2" project, which Mayor Greg Fischer's adfarm-near-me/">ministration has refused to release for two years, offers city-owned land and facilities downtown for an urban headquarters and sells the city's affordability, spirit of "exploration" and ability to serve as a regional talent magnet.

"Louisville is THE place to live, work, create and innovate," officials write in the document. "Swinging for the fences? Invented here. We believe that the homestretch is just the beginning. Just like our hometown hero Muhammad Ali, Louisville is the Greatest of All Time."

Roman God-Like Man.

"A monument is not a descriptive account of history, but instead a historical artifact that tells a story about power."

I have a new bucket list destination: the Citadel Museum.

The eight-ton Lenin's head used to be attached to the statue of the Soviet leader that stood at Leninplatz, in East Berlin, which as you'll recall is where I worked while employed for three weeks by the parks department in the capital of the GDR in the summer of 1989.

The statue was taken down after unification in spite of neighborhood opinion in favor of it remaining, and it would appear to have been dismembered. The head was exhumed in 2015.

I highly recommend clicking through and reading the article.

The Museum Where Racist and Oppressive Statues Go to Die, by Daniela Blei (Atlas Obscura)

Germany has found ways to display problematic monuments without elevating them.

LAST YEAR, URTE EVERT RECEIVED a 400-pound church bell imprinted with a small but unmistakable swastika, and she faced a conundrum. Evert is the director of the Citadel Museum in the Berlin suburb of Spandau, and the bronze bell—cast in 1934 for the ascendant Nazi regime—hung at the nearby Evangelical Church of Hakenfelde until the astonishingly recent date of 2017. Evert hoped to add the Nazi artifact to the museum’s permanent collection of toxic monuments: busts of militaristic Prussian rulers; statues of Aryan athletes and warriors; and an eight-ton granite head of Vladimir Lenin, which took two years of political and bureaucratic wrangling to dig out of the ground. But first, Evert had to weigh the risks of exhibiting a church bell installed during the Nazi period. What would the bell represent, and what could visitors learn from it? And could it become a kind of shrine for members of far-right or neo-Nazi groups?

Evert’s job at the Citadel Museum, which is housed in the former provisions depot of a Renaissance-era fortress, is to critically examine the culture of monuments. Rather than scrubbing the area of statues that symbolize racism, antisemitism, and other forms of violence and oppression, the museum aims to contextualize the past, putting uncomfortable realities on display in productive, educational, and sometimes challenging ways.

“Inside the museum, visitors confront at eye level statues and monuments that used to represent power,” Evert says. “You can touch everything. Nothing is put on a pedestal. You can talk about what makes you mad.” Since December, the Nazi church bell has been on permanent loan. It inspired a special exhibition on Spandau’s churches under National Socialism, a collaboration between college students and the museum ...

... The idea for a museum of spurned monuments came from Andrea Theissen, the former director of the Spandau Citadel, who curated the opening in 2016. Each statue was left in the condition she received it—many were dismantled under orders from the Allies—complete with bullet holes and damage from bombs. The museum’s message is clear: A monument is not a descriptive account of history, but instead a historical artifact that tells a story about power. In a setting that invites scrutiny, visitors can study Berlin’s monuments to grasp more clearly who had power and how that power was used.

In Undertow.

For those of you who know my friend Kim Andersen, Arnhem is his current home. We were to have visited in less than a month; alas, COVID postponed the trip until next September.

designing-itself-for-extreme-heat">How this Dutch city is redesigning itself for extreme heat, by Adele Peters (Fast Company)

“While we keep fighting climate change for coming generations, we have to adapt to climate change as we see the consequences of climate change today.”

In the Dutch city of Arnhem, the government now plans to replace 10% of the city’s roads with greenery. It’s one part of a new plan to adapt to the effects of climate change in the area, including flooding and extreme heat.

“The Netherlands has the ambition to be climate-proof by 2050,” says Cathelijne Bouwkamp, the city’s vice mayor. “In Arnhem, we translated this ambition in a strategy for the next decade, and as we need to act now, we made a plan of action for the coming three years.”

The city of 150,000, located about 60 miles west of Amsterdam, is already seeing changes. In a heatwave in 2019, temperatures surged above 100 degrees, around 30 degrees higher than average, putting vulnerable residents at risk of health problems. In 2014, heavy rainfall put much of the city underwater. For the past few years, the city has experienced serious droughts. It also has started adapting; a sprawling area near the Rhine river was redesigned as a floodable city park to capture water during storms. Some building facades have been covered in greenery, something that can help mitigate the effects of heat, and the city has taken some other early steps. But now Arnhem will go further.

Like other urban areas, pavement makes the city hotter as roads and parking lots absorb and release heat. Arnhem plans to identify underused roads and shrink them down, replacing them with planted areas that can help reduce both heat and flooding in storms. (It’s currently investigating how the asphalt could potentially be recycled.) It’s also carefully planning how the city can grow to accommodate a growing population.

A “heat attention” map plots out parts of the city where development shouldn’t happen, as in open areas near the river where winds help cool the area, and highlights neighborhoods that are at most risk during heatwaves. In the city center and other key areas, the government plans to build “cooling down” locations with shade and ponds, and will plant more trees along pedestrian and cyclist routes, so it’s more comfortable to travel on the hottest days.

The city will also incentivize citizens to add more green space on their own properties. “As a city we can not do this alone,” Bouwkamp says. “Most of the city’s territory is not public space but private property. So to motivate people to join us, we will subsidize neighborhood initiatives. This also has a social effect: more social cohesion and counteracting loneliness.”

At the same time, along with the rest of the country, the city is working to reduce climate emissions. A recent renovation, for example, converted 1950s-era social housing into zero-energy buildings that run on solar power and heat pumps instead of fossil fuels. But even as it’s necessary to limit future climate change, it’s also clear that the city has to transform now to deal with the effects that are already happening. “While we keep fighting climate change for coming generations, we have to adapt to climate change as we see the consequences of climate change today,” says Bouwkamp.

Life with the Macbeths.

The Astor Place Riot figures prominently in Shakespeare in a Divided America, by James Shapiro.

On the evening of May 10th, 1849, the streets outside New York’s grandest theatre, the Astor Place Opera House, ran with blood. The New York state militia opened fire on rioters who were part of a vast crowd, estimated at 10,000-24,000, who had gathered in one of the most furious demonstrations in the city’s history. About 20 people were killed and a hundred wounded. Newspapers called it a “massacre”, “wholesale slaughter” and an event “the most sanguinary and cruel that has ever occurred in this country”. That was hardly true, but the exaggeration is understandable. The theatre came to be called the Massacre Place Opera and Dis-Astor Place.

What was this about? The crowd’s determination to stop a performance of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, with the great English actor William Macready in the title role. Previously, rioters inside the theatre had violently interrupted his performance. Now, the rage against Macready had become deadly. It had its origins, bizarrely, in accounts of another performance by Macready, this time of Hamlet.

That's right -- the Shakespeare Riot. There's a hidden reminder at a New York City subway station.

The Forgotten Entrance to Clinton Hall (Atlas Obscura)

 ... But often overlooked, on the southbound entrance is a bricked up doorway with a lintel inscribed “Clinton Hall.” At one point, this led directly into the old New York Mercantile Library in the former Astor Place Opera House. The library, known as Clinton Hall, at 21 Astor Place, was created for the growing number of clerks in the city. With a membership of 12,000, the library held over 120,000 volumes, one of the largest periodical subscriptions in the city, cabinets of curiosities, and held lectures by such luminaries as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, and Mark Twain.

The address, named after America’s once-richest man, was the site of one of the most bizarre events in New York history. The library building’s previous tenant was the Astor Place Opera House, and in 1849 there took place an evening of violence, whose after-effects are still felt today: the Shakespeare Riots!

WHEN THE MUSIC'S OVER: This three-hour documentary film about George Corley Wallace is a must-watch.

I didn't expect to embark this week upon a long-delayed detour through the life of George C. Wallace (1919-1998) in order to process what obviously are a handful of unresolved issues from my upbringing.





Well, you never know when it's going to happen, do you? Ever since the advent of Donald Trump, the parallels between the coddled New Yorker and the rural Alabamian have been obvious and frequently discussed.

I sat them out, because I really didn't want to think about how my father and so many of his friends were huge Wallace supporters in the late 1960s.

Time to get my act together. Here's an article about the making of the documentary (which was released in 2000). I strongly recommend that you set aside three hours, with strong drink if that's what it takes, and watch the complete film.

My weekly ON THE AVENUES column this Thursday likely will explain the rest ... well, insofar as it can be explained.

Face the Face.

There's a reason for #DontBeAMaskHole.

I've said all along, and will now repeat, that it's the ultimate in despicable governmental cowardice to "encourage" face masks, but to allow retail workers to do the dirty work of enforcement.

A restaurant subject to health department guidelines regarding hygienic standards, generally now including face masks, must obey (and most are aboard) or face sanctions. Meanwhile elected officials from BOTH major political parties see no issue with issuing unenforced mandates leading to ordinary workers being compelled to act as police on behalf of spineless politicians.

It's bullshit, and it needs to stop. I live in a place called New Albany, Indiana, and the unmitigated, calculating drivelers currently serving in elective office here can be the place where rationality begins.

Fed up with anti-maskers, mask advocates are demanding mandates, fines — and common courtesy, by Marc Fisher

 ... In a country stumbling to control a rampant and deadly virus, masks are effective and popular weapons. Three-quarters of Americans favor requiring people to wear face coverings in public to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus, including 89 percent of Democrats and 58 percent of Republicans, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll in July.

Now, with the nation reeling from more than 5 million infections and nearly 170,000 virus-related deaths, a rising sense of outrage is leading this silent majority to push back against the smaller but louder anti-mask contingent.

Instead of flashy protests and confrontations, however, mask supporters are expressing their exasperation in quieter ways, writing letters to local newspapers, posting on social media, patronizing businesses identified as mask-enforcers on dedicated Facebook groups and urging state and local officials to mandate mask-wearing in public.

So far, 34 states and the District have adopted mask requirements. Now, mask advocates want police to enforce those orders, a move some police chiefs have said they are reluctant to make. They are seeking legal protection for retail workers put in the awkward position of enforcing mask rules. And they are lobbying for a coordinated federal mask policy ...

Joe Hill.

When the Kamala Harris announcement was made last week, one of the first tweets I saw (Twitter being my de facto news feed) was from Bernie Sanders, in support.

My view is that after we elect Biden, what we’re going to do is everything that we possibly can to move his adfarm-near-me/">ministration in a progressive direction. Biden has told me, and I would not say it if he hadn’t made the same statement publicly, that he intends to be the most progressive president since FDR. That’s a noble ambition, and our job is to hold him to that goal. I think millions of people are prepared to do that.

This week or next, maybe I'll be able to finish a particularly vexing, ongoing ON THE AVENUES column draft, in which I've been trying to sort through the arguments and counter-arguments running through my brain with respect to my choices in this year's presidential election.

I'm not there yet. But you can see where I'm headed.

Bernie Sanders on How He’ll Rally Progressives Tonight, by John Nichols (The Nation)

In an exclusive interview with The Nation, the Vermont senator says backing Biden/Harris is the start of their work, not the finish.

JOHN NICHOLS: When you were campaigning for president, you spoke quite frequently about the New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt’s “Economic Bill of Rights.” It was part of your effort to frame the 2020 election around fundamental issues and the need for structural change. Obviously, you didn’t know at the time that Covid and mass unemployment, and a rising demand for racial justice, would heighten the sense of urgency. But even before the crisis unfolded, you saw a need for a politics that was focused on transformative change.

BERNIE SANDERS: Absolutely. Absolutely. It is imperative that we not only deal with all of the injustices and inequalities that exist in our society today, which of course have been made worse by the pandemic and the economic meltdown, but it is also imperative that we start, in the 21st century, to rethink our value systems.

What Roosevelt did in his State of the Union speech in 1944 was really quite extraordinary. For whatever reason—we were in the middle of a war then and, of course, he died a year later; the media was not particularly sympathetic—what he said back in 1944 has been largely forgotten. But what he said was extraordinarily profound and revolutionary.

What he said is that, yes, our country has political freedom. We have a Constitution. We have a Bill of Rights. We have freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, etc., and that’s all great. But what we have to do is go beyond just political rights and into economic rights.

In other words, it’s not good enough that you just have the constitutional right to vote (that’s good!), to protest (that’s great!), to assemble (that’s wonderful!), and freedom of religion (great!).

What we have got to be talking about, Roosevelt said in 1944, is that economic rights are human rights, and that means you are entitled, as an American, to decent housing, to decent health care, to a decent job, to a decent retirement. Economic rights are human rights, and you’re not going to be a really free person unless we guarantee those rights. That was an extraordinarily profound statement!

What I tried to do in the 2020 campaign is talk about Roosevelt’s 1944 speech and how we make it relevant to the year 2020 ...

Just Go Away.

Of course Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer should resign, if for no other reason than persistent incompetence, although you're advised to deploy a Galt House-sized grain of salt when digesting today's purely partisan GOP no-confidence measure.

At the height of the BLM protests, I was paying attention nightly to District 19 councilman's Anthony Piagentini criticism of Fischer from the right; Piagentini would have called in the black shirts if allowed. Lots of quasi-Peronist ambition in this one, don't you think?

It's true that Fischer's "bourbonism" mantra has ceased to cast a spell; he'd bungled matters hideously, and it's hard to imagine that any substantive bloc of support remains.

Fischer just needs to go away, but the push certainly doesn't need to come from the fascistic opposition. Democrats need to do it, and they won't.

Welcome to L'America.

Louisville Metro Council to consider no-confidence vote in Mayor Greg Fischer, by Darcy Costello (Louisville Courier Journal)

Louisville Metro Council Republicans are calling for an unprecedented no-confidence vote in Mayor Greg Fischer and suggesting he resign — a move Fischer has dismissed as a political game.

The resolution, filed Monday with all seven Republicans as co-sponsors, says a new mayor is essential to bring needed change in the Louisville Metro Police Department and that a lack of trust has been fostered by "false claims" of transparency and accountability from Fischer.

It goes on to urge Fischer to resign and to work with the Metro Council to "establish a transition to ensure that the community can begin the process of healing."

The legislation will be assigned to a committee, where it could be voted on next week and sent to the full Metro Council for its consideration as soon as Sept. 3. It has no Democratic co-sponsors ...

Man from the Magazine.

Alexander Lukashenko is the offspring of another universe.

He graduated from the Mogilev Pedagogical Institute (now Mogilev State A. Kuleshov University) in 1975, after 4 years studying there and the Belarusian Agricultural Academy in Horki in 1985.

He served in the Border Guard (frontier troops) from 1975 to 1977, where he was an instructor of the political department of military unit No. 2187 of the Western Frontier District in Brest and in the Soviet Army from 1980 to 1982. In addition, he led an All-Union Leninist Young Communist League (Komsomol) chapter in Mogilev from 1977 to 1978. While in the Soviet Army, Lukashenko was a deputy political officer of the 120th Guards Motor Rifle Division, which was based in Minsk. He later rejoined as a tank specialist.

In 1979, he joined the ranks of the CPSU. After leaving the military, he became the deputy chairman of a collective farm in 1982 and in 1985, he was promoted to the post of director of the Gorodets state farm and construction materials plant in the Shkloŭ district. In 1987, he was appointed as the director of the Gorodets state farm in Shkloŭ district and in early 1988, was one of the first in Mogilev Region to introduce a leasing contract to a state farm.

The Soviet system, of which Belarus was a component until the USSR fell apart in 1991, functioned to advance non-entities like Lukashenko. In some ways, like making a university education available to those of hardscrabble upbringings, this was admirable.

And, glancing at Lukashenko's CV, it can be seen that he knew exactly how the bread was buttered. In short, he gravitated to the political organizations attached to the military and agriculture, proving his bona fides in these groupings, where the real power resided. It's entirely reasonable to imagine that had the USSR not collapsed, Lukashenko still would have emerged as a regional power broker.

How much any of this matters now is an open question. This article explains it quite well without quoting the late Kenny Rogers ("The Gambler").

We also can assume that Lukashenko has a nest egg in the Bank of the Kremlin should event require relocation.

'We will perish': embattled Lukashenko sends SOS to Putin, by Andrew Roth (The Guardian)

Belarusian leader seeks Kremlin support against external threats as analysts predict an end to his rule

 ... Putin has stopped short of offering support or an endorsement of Lukashenko, who is facing the gravest crisis of his career. It is likely that Moscow will wait and see whether Lukashenko can survive the next weeks or even days, as protests and labour strikes grow and pressure mounts on him to leave office.

“Now it’s clear that Lukashenko’s era is over, and I think that’s clear for everyone in Moscow, including in the Kremlin,” said Dmitry Suslov, a professor and foreign affairs expert at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics.

Even if the Belarusian leader does limp through this crisis, Suslov said, his model of president-for-life probably will not. People around Lukashenko are reported to have already sounded out the Kremlin on fleeing to Russia if he is deposed, according to a Bloomberg report ...

Natural's Not in It.

I suppose it's time to update the scorecard. I believe there as yet are one or two eateries that have not reopened since the pandemic, but also have not announced a definitive closing.

ON THE DRAWING BOARD
Agave & Rye (former Hull & High Water, story below)
Monnik Beer Company (former Bank Street Brewhouse on Bank)
True North Coffee House (new ownership for Quills)

OPENED IN 2020
8th Street Pizza (Breakwater; reopening)
Board and You Bistro & Wine Bar
Legacy Pizza & Bakery
Recbar 812
Fistful of Ale (nanobrewery/beer bar extension of pre-existing Fistful of Tacos)

CLOSED IN 2020
Longboard's Taco & Tiki
Primo's Delicatessen
Roadrunner Kitchen
The Standard (will function as event space)

What have I forgotten? Meanwhile, here's the Agave & Rye story.

Agave & Rye taking over former Hull & High Water space in New Albany at WLKY

Less than a year after opening its first Louisville location, Agave & Rye has already signed another lease to expand the concept into Southern Indiana, Louisville Business First reports.

The Cincinnati-based restaurant concept opened its Baxter Avenue eatery in February, and is now planning to open its second area location at the former Hull & High Water space at 324 E. Main St. in New Albany, Indiana.

Agave & Rye tweeted the news on Friday, along with the news of its new Rookwood, Ohio restaurant opening in September, and another location in Troy, Ohio, planned for November 2020. The new eateries would brand's total locations to seven, with four already-established restaurants in Louisville, Lexington and Covington, Kentucky, and Liberty Township, Ohio.

Shit Towne.

The thoughts expressed here are generalized. They're not about any one person, trend or object. 

You can convince yourself to live with ignorance, because ignorance is merely an absence of knowledge, and there's always a possibility that with hard work and education, there might yet be a measure of enlightenment.

But mean-spirited envy, casual pettiness and sheer malice -- well, those are always harder to cope with. They come from places where the light seldom reaches.

Out-foxed by the fix; dip-shit-shot by the townie dimwits; thirty years, toxic dirty river city ... and has anything really changed here for all this effort?

Honestly, not really.

It's where you want to be -- providing you're dysfunctional at best, and a sociopath at worst. It's not where I particularly care to be, any longer. What this means isn't clear, at least yet.

H.L. Mencken understood, and explained on the eve of the Scopes trial in 1925.

"Such obscenities as the forthcoming trial of the Tennessee evolutionist, if they serve no other purpose, at least call attention dramatically to the fact that enlightenment, among mankind, is very narrowly dispersed. It is common to assume that human progress affects everyone - that even the dullest man, in these bright days, knows more than any man of, say, the Eighteenth Century, and is far more civilized. This assumption is quite erroneous. The men of the educated minority, no doubt, know more than their predecessors, and of some of them, perhaps, it may be said that they are more civilized - though I should not like to be put to giving names - but the great masses of men, even in this inspired republic, are precisely where the mob was at the dawn of history. They are ignorant, they are dishonest, they are cowardly, they are ignoble. They know little if anything that is worth knowing, and there is not the slightest sign of a natural desire among them to increase their knowledge.

"Such immortal vermin, true enough, get their share of the fruits of human progress, and so they may be said, in a way, to have their part in it. The most ignorant man, when he is ill, may enjoy whatever boons and usufructs modern medicine may offer - that is, provided he is too poor to choose his own doctor. He is free, if he wants to, to take a bath. The literature of the world is at his disposal in public libraries. He may look at works of art. He may hear good music. He has at hand a thousand devices for making life less wearisome and more tolerable: the telephone, railroads, bichloride tablets, newspapers, sewers, correspondence schools, delicatessen. But he had no more to do with bringing these things into the world than the horned cattle in the fields, and he does no more to increase them today than the birds of the air.

"On the contrary, he is generally against them, and sometimes with immense violence. Every step in human progress, from the first feeble stirrings in the abyss of time, has been opposed by the great majority of men. Every valuable thing that has been added to the store of man's possessions has been derided by them when it was new, and destroyed by them when they had the power. They have fought every new truth ever heard of, and they have killed every truth-seeker who got into their hands."

Alabama Song.

How does the search for the next whiskey bar factor into Bourbonism, Greg Fischer-style?

Has Fischer resigned yet?

Brecht Was a Revolutionary, by Marc Silberman (Jacobin)

Not only did Bertolt Brecht transform German drama, but his work captured his radical commitment to socialist politics and the emancipation of working people.

... Brecht was no rosy-eyed utopian, but an artist-intellectual who developed his critical faculties through the experience of political reversals and historical ruptures. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the ossified socialism identified with it is a powerful indictment of traditional left utopianism. But Brecht’s project of a more just, egalitarian society never sought to provide answers on how to make the world better. Rather, his writings are scripts for how to ask questions, how to formulate the right questions for a given situation that is untenable and therefore must be changed.

While Brecht believed in the power of reason that enables people to recognize the problems around them and to solve them, he was neither a narrow-minded rationalist nor a naive believer in the inevitability of progress and human emancipation. Thus, his critique of emotions, which is frequently misunderstood or implemented as a dramaturgy of “coldness,” was not directed against feeling or spontaneity as such but rather against the function of emotions in traditional theater. Like interventionist thinking, Brecht’s belief in reason is a functional concept that enables individuals to determine their interest and to act on its behalf, in other words, a principle of reasoned action excluding neither passion nor emotion ...

WHEN THE MUSIC'S OVER: How NA Confidential is evolving.

If you're just tuning in, or perhaps feel a tad confused, NA Confidential is not a music blog -- although music is a big part of my life.

These past few weeks I've taken to using songs to title my posts. Given the leaden weight of sheer, willful stupidity that has become the hallmark of American society, I find that it soothes me to listen to a song, then post thoughts and links beneath it.

It matters not whether the two are related, as the bulk of discussions in which I find myself engaged these days tends to feature me referencing a blog post I wrote and/or other source reading, and someone else filled with dazzling insight gleaned entirely from glancing at the title but not bothering to read the words therein.

This said, there'll be times when I'm more explicit, using a header borrowed from The Doors: WHEN THE MUSIC'S OVER, followed by a conventional title.

Like today.

In terms of subject matter, regular and genuine readers already know that while not entirely denuded of municipal social commentary, the blog is being reduced to a size capable of being stuffed into an emptied can of kippers.

Where it leads, I can’t yet say.

To prevent my friends and neighbors being punished for my truth-telling, certain local topics will remain off-limits. It’s what I must do. Fortunately I’ve studied the lives of dissidents, artists and free-thinkers in the former Soviet Union and other totalitarian societies, and they’ve taught me how to self-censor and defer to the power elites with dignity.

One wishing to "come back" must first go away.

Vive la résistance!

Grow Old with Me.

If you're asking how we can help the elderly without nursing homes and similar institutions, my friend LDP has the answer.

They stay in their homes with community supports. I help run a company that does this for people with developmental disabilities and it can easily transfer to the elderly community. In fact, there already is a program in Indiana that does this through the Aged and Disabled Medicaid waiver. Nursing facility lobbyists don't want community supports to happen because it means that they lose profits. They push institutionalization instead. Every Medicaid patient is "worth" $83,000 a year to them. Community supports can be done at that rate or even less. We have made it seem like nursing facility placement is the only option and this is patently untrue. I am not disparaging nurses or CNAs at all. Keep them; lose the facility.

I hope he doesn't mind me quoting him. This article seems to be an excellent introduction to the topic. I recommend reading the entire essay. It will make you think long and hard.

It’s Time to Abolish Nursing Homes, by Sara Luterman (The Nation)

If three out of four Americans want to spend their final years at home, why do so many of us end up in institutional care?

 ... Nursing homes allow for an economy of scale. Feeding, washing, and otherwise seeing to the needs of elderly and disabled residents all at once is more efficient than addressing those needs on an individual basis. But this efficiency comes at the expense of human dignity. Ari Ne’eman, a senior research associate at the Harvard Law School Project on Disability, points out, “From Grandpa Simpson to Junior Soprano, popular culture constantly acknowledges our society’s worst-kept secret: Nursing homes are awful places to live.

Unfortunately, we’ve set up our health care and human services systems to send vast numbers of seniors and people with disabilities there anyway.”

That leaves us with a few basic questions: Why do nursing homes exist? How have they so thoroughly embedded themselves in the American life cycle? And what can we do instead? ...

ON THE AVENUES: In My Merry Oldsmobile.

“C’mon you stupid motherfucker, keep going – fuck that pussy bicycle rider.”

The voice emanating from behind the wheel of the spluttering, battered and duct-taped SUV sounded like a toxic cocktail of bubbling midsummer’s tar, job site mud, finely aged horse manure and industrial solvent.

I’d been casually waved through the intersection at the 4-way stop by the attentive fellow piloting the pickup in front of the SUV, managing to pedal only a few feet before the abrasive vowel movement commenced, punctuated by blasts on the horn, and quite likely to have included murky rim shots off a spittoon had someone thought to install one in the middle of the street.

At any rate, the furious driver passed up the opportunity to turn right and chase me down Culbertson, preferring to continue honking and screaming about those “fucking cunt bicycles” for a long block, until the obscenities became muffled by the tall brick walls of the old Robinson-Nugent building.

True story.

Wait – did I mention that the driver screaming at me was female? Alas, I've always had this effect on the ladies.

---

Welcome back, cyclist!

Less than 20 miles into the recent revival of a very small sliver of my former two-wheeled habit, my aching derriere may have been in pre-season scrimmage mode, but already New Albany’s internally-combusted denizens of non-calmed, automobile-centric streets were in peak mid-season blind rage.

It’s been quite a while, but there were occasions during my previous life on a bike when objects were thrown in my direction, and drivers displayed a nonchalant eagerness to run me off the road. Far worse has happened to others, as in this horrible account of automotive entitlement in an article about the way potential safety improvements are routinely blocked and averted by auto manufacturers.

The Life-Saving Car Technology No One Wants, by David Zipper (CityLab)

“Early in the morning of August 10, 2019, a man in a Dodge Charger drove along Miami’s MacArthur Causeway. Encountering traffic, he swerved onto the shoulder and accelerated to 100 miles per hour — more than double the speed limit. That’s when he slammed into a man riding his bicycle. The force of the impact was so powerful that the rider was decapitated. The driver had been inebriated at the time of the crash, according to police who spent five months investigating the hit-and-run.

“The cyclist’s death that night was one of an estimated 38,800 that occurred on American streets last year. Pedestrians and cyclists accounted for 8,800 of those fatalities — 23% of the total, up from 6,300 in 2010, when they comprised just 17%. During that period, fatalities for automobile occupants fell.

“In other words, America’s roads are getting safer if you’re inside an automobile, and more deadly if you’re outside of one.

Can someone help me understand exactly what it is about access to an automobile that brings out the very worst in people?

Two months ago when the peaceful and powerful Black Lives Matter protests began nightly in Louisville, I lost count of the simply stunning number of times that an on-line diatribe along the lines of “kill them all and let God sort them out” included a snarky reference to Greg Fischer as “Mayor Bike Lane.”

Admittedly, Fischer was flailing, although for polar opposite reasons. Still, just think about it for a moment.

There at the confluence of novel pandemic and historical racism, with fear, loathing and various viciously sociopathic buttons being pushed, ones dating back to the arrival of the first colonists in North America, the perennially weak-minded among us were frantically googling their own points of reference in search of opprobrium to heap on Fischer, and they landed almost immediately on bike lanes, wild-eyed and foaming at the mouth about the way these libtard obstacles to automotive pre-eminence ostensibly add one, maybe even two minutes to a typical trip across town by their car – perhaps even worse, compelling them to occasionally glance away from their mobile devices and pay attention to what they’re doing.

Again, the dulcet tones: “C’mon you stupid motherfucker, keep going – fuck that pussy bicycle rider.”

This is merely one manifestation of automobile supremacy, which not only is a form of imperialism (defined as “the practice, or advocacy of extending power and dofarm-near-me/">minion”), but surely is the last remaining form of blatant imperialism almost entirely absent social stigma.

As a cyclist once noted, “We’ve gotta be perfect. If a negligent driver kills someone, people see it as a necessary evil. But if a cyclist runs a red light, or a scooter hops onto a sidewalk alongside a busy street, we are just jerks driving crazy little vehicles with no regard for the law.”

When Americans settle into their plush sofas on wheels -- 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. When I drive, it must be recognized and wrestled to the floorboard every single mile. Such are the depths to which automobile supremacy has smothered us all, even those who know better.

Imperialism ... because after all, space must be seized to accommodate cars at the expense of non-car users. We demand to warehouse our cars on public ground at no cost to ourselves. We expect cheap fuel and will support seemingly limitless violence (foreign wars, domestic economic coercion) in order to get it.

We'll also go to any self-delusional length to characterize this addiction as freedom. The list of destructive behaviors is seemingly endless, and yet we've made automobile supremacy the basis of civilization at the present time.

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To be sure, the first step toward improving conditions for non-drivers of any stripe (walking, biking, using wheelchairs, etc) would be an attitude adjustment on the part of drivers; with lobotomies too expensive, at least being subject to the sort of peer pressure that precludes most of us from urinating on the produce at the supermarket might be a nice start.

There are laws against the bladder hydration of cauliflower, and we could use more of those, too, as they pertain to driver behavior, but only if governmental officials accompany legislation (far-fetched, I know) with enforcement mechanisms … and yes, pie-in-the-sky hasn’t ever been quite this unlikely.

Come to think of it, there’s no way of knowing for certain that my verbal abuser on 8th Street wasn’t a government employee.

Am I right?

During my brief time returned to the saddle, there has been ample time to ponder the way so many Americans misunderstand the whole notion of a bicycle’s uses and utility. Take Nawbany, as the most convenient and representative example.

To survey the actions (and more importantly, non-actions) taken by municipal higher-ups for the past decade or more is to quickly see that as it pertains to their attitude toward bicycles, it's as if none of them have ever been to a place in America or abroad where people use bicycles to commute and fulfill actual daily tasks (like they'd use a car to achieve), as opposed to riding a bicycle strictly as a recreational conveyance - often, by loading a bicycle onto a bike rack on a vehicle and driving to a place to ride it.

Conversely, in our planet’s genuinely functional bicycle-friendly cities, the idea is to connect one's front door to a safe route to food, drink, shopping and a haircut in addition to accessing the recreational pathway.

Recall that almost all the pragmatic bicycle infrastructure suggested in Jeff Speck’s street grid plan was stripped from the final version. By equipping most of the historic downtown business district with east-west bike lanes, Speck aimed at helping residents living in the more densely populated districts inside the beltway to transport themselves to downtown amenities by bike instead of car.

It’s conceivable that our movers and shakers grasped this intent, although I doubt it. Simple non-comprehension fits Occam’s paradigm far more logically. Regardless, the conscious decision was made to not pursue genuinely multi-modal transport options, pushing bicycles to the recreational periphery of the city.

The most recent triumphant revelation is a plan to extend the Ohio River Greenway via the levee to the expensive little pocket park next to Silver Creek, where people can store their cars as they pretend to fish for toxic aquatic life while smoking cigarettes and drinking bad light beer.

It’d be a quarter-mile of path, maybe, as well as cute, albeit serving no real constructive purpose as it pertains to people who want to ride their bikes to connect from neighborhoods to the center, presumably because any allowance for the latter would inconvenience drivers. It makes no sense whatever, and I wish someone would explain it to me instead of refusing to discuss it.

However, I'm blackballed; dear reader, might you be acquainted with a journalist of the intrepid sort who might ask these questions of the powers that be?

If so, and if the questions actually are asked some sweet day, can you awaken me when the moment arrives?

I’ll be napping over by that 8th Street spittoon, bicycle chained dutifully to my ankle, waiting for that driver to come past again. She's really getting an earful this time.

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Recent columns:

August 6: ON THE AVENUES: Surrender.

July 30: ON THE AVENUES: Guys.

July 23: ON THE AVENUES: These overdue mask mandates should help us separate the bad actors from the good.

July 16: ON THE AVENUES: Daniil Kharms, Marina Malich, and writing for the drawer about nothing ... pre-Seinfeld.

Expectations.

If there remains anyone out there who insists COVID-19 is no worse than the common cold, refer them to this free read at The Economist.

Or read it to them. Maybe that's better.

Nicholas Christakis on fighting covid-19 by truly understanding the virus (The Economist)

The latest coronavirus is different from past ones, so requires a different response.

SEVEN VARIETIES of coronavirus infect humans: four give us the sniffles; one causes a deadly disease smouldering in the Middle East since 2012; and two erupted into full-on pandemics. The first caused SARS and it petered out quickly. The other causes covid-19 and it has hobbled the global economy. Why the difference?

It is not only a matter of the public-health response or governmental incompetence (though that has certainly made things worse). It also has to do with the underlying epidemiology of the pathogen, which we are coming to appreciate, after little more than a half-year of experience. Viewing covid-19 through the lens of SARS can lead to flawed responses. Understanding how the novel coronavirus is different is essential for identifying how society can best confront it ...

... What do the differences between yesteryear’s SARS-CoV-1 and the current SARS-CoV-2 tell us about how to respond today? There are critical insights that must be heeded if countries are to protect their people and economies.

Cutting to the chase.

Since we cannot rely on symptoms to identify cases, testing needs to be widespread and the results returned rapidly if not immediately.

After all, a thin cotton swab shoved up your nostril beats a thick plastic tube jammed down your trachea. And though some people resist face masks, perhaps they will come to see that they’re better than closing the economy or counting body-bags. Given the epidemiology of the virus, the best response is to do what has been voiced by health officials but not always adhered to in our communities. Until an effective vaccine is developed and becomes widely available, farm-near-me/">minimise social interactions, keep our physical distance, implement widespread testing and yes, wear masks.

The distinctive characteristics of the virus behind covid-19 mean it will inexorably infect a large percentage of the world before the pandemic has run its course—an epidemiological parameter known as the “attack rate.” For SARS, the attack rate was infinitesimal: only 8,422 people out of a global population of 6.3bn in 2003, just 0.00013%. For covid-19, at least 40% of the world’s 7.6bn people will probably become infected, with millions of deaths. We have a long and sorrowful way to go. So we had better respond wisely.

Don't Cry Out Loud.

I had no idea that Grandpa Jones of the long-running series Hee Haw was from Henderson County, Kentucky -- same as my mother, although he was born 19 years before her.

Jones liked to say that truth is stranger than fact. It isn't known whether he ever visited New Albany, which puts this thoughtful axiom to the test on a daily basis.

In fact, I'd go so far as to argue that Hee Haw provides more sound a basis for marketing Nawbany than other suggestions made over the years, up to (and including) the immortal "Come To City," which came close to causing a riot back in 2011, the final year of Doug England's third term.

If you're new to the (ob)scene, "Come To City" is a saga worth revisiting.

From 2011 and 2015: Regaining consciousness in a city “coming” to? Or, the infamous Come to City marketing fiasco of 2011.

"Top-down is superfluous when the grassroots are mobilized, and now, more than ever, small business has the means to come together and take a seat at the table."

Of course, these disasters were pre-COVID, now a line of demarcation between past and present, although curiously the Sherman Minton Bridge has a way of circling back to take pounds of flesh from the general vicinity of our posteriors (as in 2021).

Truth? It's still stranger than fact. In other recent news, there is this.

New Albany comes up with fun idea to get people to explore city, by Andrew Chernoff (WLKY)

Scavenger hunt created based on the game "Monopoly"

It's important for people to support businesses during this COVID-19 pandemic, especially local businesses.

Develop New Albany came up with a fun way to get people to do so. The idea that "Develop New Albany" came up with is a scavenger hunt based on the game "Monopoly" ... 

Why Don't We Do It In The Road?

David Thrasher has been engaged by the city (UEA?) to restore the Coca-Cola "ghost sign" on the east-facing brick wall of the building currently occupied by The Root, above the roof line of Pints&union.

For the next two photos, one from New Albany and the second from Los Angeles, file under: symmetry.

Foreshadow much?

It's a tale of three parking spaces. If they can be used for one thing, then ... well, you know.

As for dining in the street (well, amid the disposable parking spaces) as a pandemic-evasion tactic?

It's happening throughout America and the remainder of the planet, and you can read more here.

The caption of the photo from the Los Angeles Times reads, "Brandon and Rose Astudillo of Glendale eat dinner at Baracoa Cuban Cafe in Atwater Village in a new outdoor seating area that occupies three parking spaces."

I can't make the subtle hint any broader, can I?

Previously:

Let's Do It (Let's Fall in Love).

Miracle Man.

Religion and politics intersect at the point of power, and how best to keep it. Hypocrisy only seems to be the inevitable consequence. In fact, it can't really be hypocritical if power was the basis for the equation from the very start.

Jerry Falwell Jr. might well have been telling the truth about his unzipped trousers. But this isn't the point, is it?

The Last Temptation of Jerry, by Jeet Heer (The Nation)

A scandal at Liberty University proves that white evangelicals are starting to copy Trump.

Jerry Falwell Jr., recently deposed as president of Liberty University, is a new type of Christian sinner. The figure of a pious hypocrite is as old as religion itself, an inevitable by-product of the fact that any moral system will be upheld by flawed people. But usually godly miscreants try to keep their transgressions secret.

A prime example is Jimmy Swaggart, who was disgraced and defrocked after revelations of hiring sex workers in 1987. Furtive, sweaty, twitchy, and given to wailing, “I have sinned,” Swaggart acted like an escapee from the fictions of Fyodor Dostoevsky or Flannery O’Connor: a God-haunted and superstitious primate driven by compulsions he could neither understand nor control. As creepy as he is, Swaggart has given every evidence of a complex and tormented inner life.

Falwell Jr., by contrast, is a shallower creature who has not tried to hide his misdeeds. Rather, he has flaunted them. The latest scandal involving Falwell Jr. grew out of a photo he himself posted on Instagram, showing him with his arms around a woman who was not his wife, both parties with their pants unzipped. “Yeah, it was weird,” Falwell admitted in a radio interview. “She’s pregnant. She couldn’t get her pants zipped and I was like trying to like… I had on a pair of jeans I haven’t worn in a long time and couldn’t get zipped either. So, I just put my belly out like hers. She’s my wife’s assistant, she’s a sweetheart. I should have never put it up and embarrassed her. I’ve apologized to everybody. I promised my kids I will try to be a good boy from here on out.”

This explanation wasn’t sufficient, coming as it did on top of a long list of previous scandals, including still unexplained land deals he made with his pool boy and photos seemingly showing him drinking and dancing at a Florida nightclub. These photos were a problem because Liberty University holds its students and staff to strict moral standards. Students can receive demerits if they dance with a partner of the opposite sex and be expelled for drinking. Sex outside of marriage is prohibited for students.

As Politico reported last year, Falwell Jr. was notorious for flouting these rules, taking an exhibitionist’s glee in lewd conversations ...

Hospital Radio.

We've been listening to Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, for much of this blog's existence. During that 15-year period, Amazon has become the tail that wags the dog, with Apple, Facebook, and Google competing to be the flea with the second-place trophy.

One rather wishes that a few of those delusional Republicans in mid-prattle about "competition" could explain how monopolies and free markets can co-exist. They can't. Perhaps that's why they're so quiet -- but it doesn't have to be that way.

And the Democrats? Don't get me started on their cowardice in the face of monopolistic entities like these.

Amazon Is a Private Government. Congress Needs to Step Up, by Stacy Mitchell (The Atlantic)

Reining in the tech giants will help restore American democracy.

 ... The hearing was one of the final steps in the subcommittee’s bipartisan, yearlong probe into whether Amazon and three other tech companies—Apple, Facebook, and Google—are abusing their market power to thwart competition and entrench their own dominance, and if so, what Congress should do about it. The committee is expected to release its report in early September, and it could well be damning. The report may call for regulating the tech giants’ behavior, splitting them up into smaller companies, or both.

Despite all of this, Amazon’s share price barely budged after the hearing, suggesting that Wall Street harbors little fear that anything will come of the investigation. The very next day, Amazon announced record profits ... these developments illustrate the challenges facing lawmakers who want to rein in the U.S.-based tech titans. Even if they can put forward a convincing case that, for instance, Amazon is unfairly crushing small companies, most Americans can hardly imagine that the government will act, or even that it can.

The problem isn’t just that Amazon employs more lobbyists than the U.S. Senate has members. It’s that the machinery of government has been dysfunctional for so long that Americans forget it even exists. This is especially true when it comes to questions of how the economy is structured. Both political parties long ago abdicated their responsibility to be a check on the accumulation and the abuse of private power. Americans who believe this deference to big business is unwise have been conditioned to see ourselves as helpless.

snip

For that reason, what happens next in the investigation is crucial. The committee’s work is that of a democracy rediscovering its capacity to determine how the economy should operate—and how to hold the powerful accountable to the law. Its ultimate outcome will speak to two of the most consequential economic questions Americans face. One is whether a handful of tech giants will continue to wield outsize power over our commerce and communications. The other is whether we’re still capable of governing ourselves.

snip

The burden is on the subcommittee to show Americans that what Amazon and the other tech giants are doing is both wrong and harmful. Armed with witness statements and internal company documents, the subcommittee and its staff are framing an argument: Although these companies may still produce the occasional innovative product, they’re not nearly as inventive as they would have us believe. Rather, they have achieved their extraordinary reach through raw power. The tech giants have become gatekeepers, and they exploit that control to advance their own interests. At the hearing, the subcommittee members translated the sometimes-arcane language of antitrust law into words everyone understands. They talked of spying, stealing, and bullying.