The emergency closing of the Sherman Minton bridge needs to be addressed with adroitness. Newspaper accounts put the daily traffic flow across that span at upwards of 70,000 vehicles a day. The ability of the two remaining car bridges, the Kennedy Bridge and the Clark Memorial Bridge, are woefully inadequate to handle the sudden increase in traffic which they will face for the duration of the closing of the Sherman Minton Bridge.
Some have called for reliance on car pools,staggered shifts, and flexible work hours to meet the challenge. This wake up call underscores the foolishness of ignoring maintenance. It points out at the local level the compromised status of our infrastructure. It should represent a true national challenge, something like the "Sputnik moment" of the late fifties. It should force us to question the sense of putting all the eggs of our transportation system in the single basket of personal automobile commuting.
It should, and it could, but it probably won't. And it certainly won't by Monday morning when some kind of "geddon" will await those damned to make the trip by car to Louisville and back to meet the requirements of their jobs.
So here's a modest, perhaps counter intuitive, proposal of how we might muddle through this "cartastrophe" in the coming weeks.
Close the Clark Memorial Bridge to personal vehicles. Allow that span to carry only buses and emergency vehicles on the traffic lanes. Pedestrians and cyclists could use the sidewalks. It will do commuters little good to jump on a bus which will be stuck in barely moving traffic. There will be little incentive for car drivers to leave their cars parked if there is no expedited way of crossing the river. If buses are given free flow through designated streets and a green light at the Clark Bridge, I think those who see the buses rolling as the car bound sit mired in traffic may quickly decide that, at least during this particularly trying period, it would be wise to rely on mass transit.
It would be up to transportation experts to figure out how neophyte bus riders can be directed to their destinations once they've successfully crossed the river and de-bused at Union Station or some other central point. The first and biggest obstacle will be the bridge crossing itself.
The need to provide for easy cross-river travel of emergency vehicles is simply obvious on its face.
Once normalcy returns to daily traffic patterns it will be up to us as a community to recognize the vulnerability of our transportation non-system and proceed with a reasoned discussion of Twenty First Century alternatives. The alarm has sounded. Will there be sufficient will to meet the challenges and prepare for a better future?
Saturday, September 10, 2011
Saturday, September 3, 2011
President Obama, It's Not as if You Have to Reinvent the Wheel
Yesterday, President Obama, for reasons known only to him, continued his march to Appeasamattox, as he threw the regulation of smog overboard. Frankly, it's getting tiresome and indefensible.
The President could learn something from one of his great predecessors...
The President could learn something from one of his great predecessors...
Saturday, August 13, 2011
Morons Inc.
As most people know by now, Willard "Mitt" Romney thinks corporations are people. He has some legal precedence for that view, regardless of how distasteful the notion is to us mortals who also happen to share the appellation. If personhood for immortal business arrangements rankles you a bit, here's a link to challenge the concept.
Romney's fellow Republican notable, Kentucky senator Rand Paul, tweaks the construction just a bit to say that, "people are corporations." The Republican tendency of proffering corporate welfare to large defense contractors will work under the Romney view, in fact making him a veritable 21st century FDR. The Paulian interpretation is a bit more of a problem. If people are corporations, then it follows, the Tea leaves would not favor giving welfare to corporations.
In a society/polity which contemplates and tolerates such nonsense, it would be well to contemplate other deep theoretical issues. At least these fellows below had science and logic on their side.
Romney's fellow Republican notable, Kentucky senator Rand Paul, tweaks the construction just a bit to say that, "people are corporations." The Republican tendency of proffering corporate welfare to large defense contractors will work under the Romney view, in fact making him a veritable 21st century FDR. The Paulian interpretation is a bit more of a problem. If people are corporations, then it follows, the Tea leaves would not favor giving welfare to corporations.
In a society/polity which contemplates and tolerates such nonsense, it would be well to contemplate other deep theoretical issues. At least these fellows below had science and logic on their side.
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Of Demagogues and Demigods; Of Charlatans, and Sheep
Just ahead lies the abyss, we are told. We are offered a way back, a hand to guide us away. We must seek out the foul perpetrator of our current malaise. We must pursue him into the grave, exhume him, repudiate him and abandon that which he set in place as he saved Capitalism from devouring itself. The demagogues of the right, he of the fat head, and his disciples, wish that the noble Roosevelt (at this point either one suffices as an enemy of the right) arise, renounce his egalitarian deeds and expunge them from the national consciousness before retreating to his grave. The odious Limbaugh says, "Roosevelt is dead. His policies may live on, but we're in the process of doing something about that as well."
Yes, we're doing something about his policies. If we follow the radical elements of the Republican Party, a.k.a. Teabaggers,we'll be desiccating the fields that allowed a social safety net to be woven, a net which protects us from the inevitable vicissitudes of life, which, sans Social Security and Medicare, would now include the market-borne ravages of old age, infirmity, and poverty: a shrinking middle class, diminished educational opportunities and a general de-lustering of the "American Dream" . We're throwing American jobs overboard with both hands as we seek to enrich "shareholder value" by freezing costs through near-slave wages overseas while letting profits rise here. The sky's the limit on profit when the cost of labor is debased to Chinese, Vietnamese, Singaporean levels, but the sale price here is what the market will bear.
Goods manufactured in low wage countries are often of inferior quality. A cynic may propose that reservations to buy such schlock may be overcome if the wages of Americans, the top of the class in the consumer universe, are retarded by union busting, fear, and further job propulsion away from our shores. Then shoppers are forced to buy as cheap as it comes, because that's all they can afford. All according to plan in a society where the bar is always lowered for the poor and middle class as the sights of corporate movers and shakers are always raised.
Again to the precipice. We face a crisis. Obama has ruined the country. We should never have allowed such as him to occupy the White House. Yet wasn't this man dealt a royal flush of woes? His predecessor inherited a surplus. Obama is handed the wheel by the drunken teenager who has steered the car toward a cliff; each wheel looser than when he pulled the car out of the driveway. The first thing to do when the surplus was booked was to excuse those who paid taxes during the boom years--strike one against fiscal sanity. The second thing was to chase a phantom into the quagmire of war with all such expenditures "off the books"--strike two against fiscal sanity. He also added corporate apologists to the Supreme Court, who have upheld business interests over citizens' interest and rights. One of the most egregious and long-reaching is the Citizens United case which bestows rights upon corporations that are super-human, and for which mere human powers are no equal--strike three. You're out. Next batter. Oh yeah, bottom of the ninth, you're down 14 trillion to 0.
Within the confines of the asylum, Cheney asserted that,Reagan proved "deficits don't matter." Ask Eric Cantor if that view still holds sway. Obama addressed the peculiar book keeping tricks which kept Bush's wars "off the books", so now he is saddled with the responsibility of being a responsible executive, wishing the bills weren't there doesn't mean they aren't due.
As the country, thanks to illegal, orgiastic behavior by the country's bankers, sank into something which smelled a bit like a depression, steps were taken to save one of the largest, if not the largest, manufacturing components of the U.S. economy, the auto industry. In retrospect the Teabaggers say it should have been allowed to fail. That element of the Republican Party truly has a death wish. And it's not a wish directed at itself, it is, rather, directed at the middle class, by depriving those slackers of: universal education, publicly-funded health care, a decent job with rising expectations for workers and their families, clean air and water, reasonable protection against usurious banking practices, and a world whose priorities are not driven by fear.
The greatest mystery to me as that the Tea Party and its devoteas are, by and large, members of the very class they are working to undermine. They see nothing wrong with being led by the Koch brothers, Karl Rove, Limbaugh/Beck et.al.,Grover Norquist, Rupert Murdoch and Fox News as those thugs seek to build a society in which the rich get richer and the devil take the hindmost.
Yes, we're doing something about his policies. If we follow the radical elements of the Republican Party, a.k.a. Teabaggers,we'll be desiccating the fields that allowed a social safety net to be woven, a net which protects us from the inevitable vicissitudes of life, which, sans Social Security and Medicare, would now include the market-borne ravages of old age, infirmity, and poverty: a shrinking middle class, diminished educational opportunities and a general de-lustering of the "American Dream" . We're throwing American jobs overboard with both hands as we seek to enrich "shareholder value" by freezing costs through near-slave wages overseas while letting profits rise here. The sky's the limit on profit when the cost of labor is debased to Chinese, Vietnamese, Singaporean levels, but the sale price here is what the market will bear.
Goods manufactured in low wage countries are often of inferior quality. A cynic may propose that reservations to buy such schlock may be overcome if the wages of Americans, the top of the class in the consumer universe, are retarded by union busting, fear, and further job propulsion away from our shores. Then shoppers are forced to buy as cheap as it comes, because that's all they can afford. All according to plan in a society where the bar is always lowered for the poor and middle class as the sights of corporate movers and shakers are always raised.
Again to the precipice. We face a crisis. Obama has ruined the country. We should never have allowed such as him to occupy the White House. Yet wasn't this man dealt a royal flush of woes? His predecessor inherited a surplus. Obama is handed the wheel by the drunken teenager who has steered the car toward a cliff; each wheel looser than when he pulled the car out of the driveway. The first thing to do when the surplus was booked was to excuse those who paid taxes during the boom years--strike one against fiscal sanity. The second thing was to chase a phantom into the quagmire of war with all such expenditures "off the books"--strike two against fiscal sanity. He also added corporate apologists to the Supreme Court, who have upheld business interests over citizens' interest and rights. One of the most egregious and long-reaching is the Citizens United case which bestows rights upon corporations that are super-human, and for which mere human powers are no equal--strike three. You're out. Next batter. Oh yeah, bottom of the ninth, you're down 14 trillion to 0.
Within the confines of the asylum, Cheney asserted that,Reagan proved "deficits don't matter." Ask Eric Cantor if that view still holds sway. Obama addressed the peculiar book keeping tricks which kept Bush's wars "off the books", so now he is saddled with the responsibility of being a responsible executive, wishing the bills weren't there doesn't mean they aren't due.
As the country, thanks to illegal, orgiastic behavior by the country's bankers, sank into something which smelled a bit like a depression, steps were taken to save one of the largest, if not the largest, manufacturing components of the U.S. economy, the auto industry. In retrospect the Teabaggers say it should have been allowed to fail. That element of the Republican Party truly has a death wish. And it's not a wish directed at itself, it is, rather, directed at the middle class, by depriving those slackers of: universal education, publicly-funded health care, a decent job with rising expectations for workers and their families, clean air and water, reasonable protection against usurious banking practices, and a world whose priorities are not driven by fear.
The greatest mystery to me as that the Tea Party and its devoteas are, by and large, members of the very class they are working to undermine. They see nothing wrong with being led by the Koch brothers, Karl Rove, Limbaugh/Beck et.al.,Grover Norquist, Rupert Murdoch and Fox News as those thugs seek to build a society in which the rich get richer and the devil take the hindmost.
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Are There Evil People in the World? Are There Evil Fanatics?
YES....The answer is given in today's New York Times.
KABUL, Afghanistan — Insurgents tricked an 8-year-old girl in a remote area of central Afghanistan into carrying a bomb wrapped in cloth that they detonated remotely when she was close to a police vehicle, the Afghan authorities said Sunday.
Related
Car Bomb Blast at Afghan Hospital Kills at Least 20 (June 26, 2011) Only the girl was killed in the blast, which occurred Sunday morning in the village of Uwshi in the Char Chino District, said Fazal Ahmad Shirzad, the police chief of Oruzgan Province.
Mr. Shirzad said he believed the girl was unaware that the bag she had been given by Taliban insurgents held a bomb. Her body was “taken to a nearby security check post, and the police called her relatives,” he said.
Meanwhile, in Logar Province in southeastern Afghanistan, the death toll rose to 37 after a bombing on Saturday at a small-town hospital, said Dr. Mohammed Zarif Naibkhail, the director of public health for the province. He said that at least 53 people had been wounded.
But, he said, the actual number of casualties was probably much higher. “Local villagers rushed to the hospital right after the explosion and took the bodies of their relatives to their own villages,” he said.
In other parts of the country, four NATO soldiers were killed. Two of them were Spanish soldiers who died when an improvised explosive device detonated in Badghis Province in western Afghanistan, the Spanish Defense Ministry said. The other two soldiers died in separate episodes in southern and eastern Afghanistan, according to a NATO statement.
Afghan radio stations also reported that rocket fire from Pakistan over the last week had led President Hamid Karzai to register a former complaint with the Pakistani president, Asif Ali Zardari, at a regional terrorism meeting in Iran on Saturday. Mr. Zardari promised to investigate, said Mr. Karzai’s spokesman, Waheed Omar.
The unexplained rocket fire will be a topic of discussion when senior government figures from the two countries meet this week, Mr. Omar said. The Afghan National Security Council discussed the matter on Sunday.
According to Mr. Omar, President Zardari and the Pakistani Interior Ministry said the rockets, which hit Kunar and Nangarhar Provinces, were not fired by the Pakistani Army.
Mr. Omar said 470 rockets had been fired, killing at least 18 people and wounding 17. Since Pakistan’s tribal areas border eastern Afghanistan and are largely outside the Pakistani government’s control, it is possible that insurgent groups are responsible. But some Pakistani insurgents have set up bases in Kunar and Nuristan Provinces in Afghanistan to carry out attacks in Pakistan, raising the possibility that the rockets may have been fired by the Pakistani security forces.
“We want this resolved peacefully,” Mr. Omar said. He added that if the Pakistani government was not responsible, it should say so publicly and find and stop the attackers.
General Mohammed Zahir Azimi said that Afghan military forces were “ready to retaliate” if instructed to do so. A NATO spokesman said coalition officials were not aware of the rocket fire because they did not have troops in the areas where it occurred.
Ray Rivera contributed reporting from Kabul, and Taimoor Shah from Kandahar, Afghanistan.
KABUL, Afghanistan — Insurgents tricked an 8-year-old girl in a remote area of central Afghanistan into carrying a bomb wrapped in cloth that they detonated remotely when she was close to a police vehicle, the Afghan authorities said Sunday.
Related
Car Bomb Blast at Afghan Hospital Kills at Least 20 (June 26, 2011) Only the girl was killed in the blast, which occurred Sunday morning in the village of Uwshi in the Char Chino District, said Fazal Ahmad Shirzad, the police chief of Oruzgan Province.
Mr. Shirzad said he believed the girl was unaware that the bag she had been given by Taliban insurgents held a bomb. Her body was “taken to a nearby security check post, and the police called her relatives,” he said.
Meanwhile, in Logar Province in southeastern Afghanistan, the death toll rose to 37 after a bombing on Saturday at a small-town hospital, said Dr. Mohammed Zarif Naibkhail, the director of public health for the province. He said that at least 53 people had been wounded.
But, he said, the actual number of casualties was probably much higher. “Local villagers rushed to the hospital right after the explosion and took the bodies of their relatives to their own villages,” he said.
In other parts of the country, four NATO soldiers were killed. Two of them were Spanish soldiers who died when an improvised explosive device detonated in Badghis Province in western Afghanistan, the Spanish Defense Ministry said. The other two soldiers died in separate episodes in southern and eastern Afghanistan, according to a NATO statement.
Afghan radio stations also reported that rocket fire from Pakistan over the last week had led President Hamid Karzai to register a former complaint with the Pakistani president, Asif Ali Zardari, at a regional terrorism meeting in Iran on Saturday. Mr. Zardari promised to investigate, said Mr. Karzai’s spokesman, Waheed Omar.
The unexplained rocket fire will be a topic of discussion when senior government figures from the two countries meet this week, Mr. Omar said. The Afghan National Security Council discussed the matter on Sunday.
According to Mr. Omar, President Zardari and the Pakistani Interior Ministry said the rockets, which hit Kunar and Nangarhar Provinces, were not fired by the Pakistani Army.
Mr. Omar said 470 rockets had been fired, killing at least 18 people and wounding 17. Since Pakistan’s tribal areas border eastern Afghanistan and are largely outside the Pakistani government’s control, it is possible that insurgent groups are responsible. But some Pakistani insurgents have set up bases in Kunar and Nuristan Provinces in Afghanistan to carry out attacks in Pakistan, raising the possibility that the rockets may have been fired by the Pakistani security forces.
“We want this resolved peacefully,” Mr. Omar said. He added that if the Pakistani government was not responsible, it should say so publicly and find and stop the attackers.
General Mohammed Zahir Azimi said that Afghan military forces were “ready to retaliate” if instructed to do so. A NATO spokesman said coalition officials were not aware of the rocket fire because they did not have troops in the areas where it occurred.
Ray Rivera contributed reporting from Kabul, and Taimoor Shah from Kandahar, Afghanistan.
Saturday, June 18, 2011
Father's Day 2011
My father worked at Breece Plywood on Thirteenth Street along the floodwall. He worked there from 1937 until 1969, around the time it closed. His office was parallel to the railroad tracks, and I used to love going there on those occasions when he had to go in for one reason or another and I happened to be out of school. Sometimes the boiler tender would allow me to sling a few shovels of coal into the massive furnace, or blow the whistle which marked off some noteworthy point in time. Often I would slide a Coke out of the machine which had a serious design flaw that lined up an open cell every so often and left a bottle vulnerable to attentive pilchers.
Although the time I shared with my father at Breece's was mainly in the Sixties, the factory and offices as I saw them could have easily been seen in the same condition four or five decades earlier. It was a place frozen in time.
My father hit his teen years about the time the country hit the skids and fell into The Depression. I recall an event my dad told me of a scene he witnessed through his office window, and though he didn't explicitly say it, I believe the event must have taken him back to his own childhood in those cold days of austere deprivation. He saw two children about eight or ten years old walking down the railroad tracks. These were neighborhood kids, he figured, since he had seen them walking the tracks from time to time. He began to notice they would carry between them a bushel basket and every once in a while they would bend and place something in the basket. After a couple days of this he walked out to ask them what they were doing and they said they were picking up coal, which had fallen from the passing rail cars so they could keep their house heated. He asked around the plant who the kids were, and somebody knew them. He called the coal company and had several tons of coal delivered to the address. They probably never knew how it happened, but at least for that winter they knew warmth.
Thanks to my dad for that lesson. Now, on his tombstone are the words, "what you have done to least of my brothers you have done to me." He was a good man, and I miss him.
Although the time I shared with my father at Breece's was mainly in the Sixties, the factory and offices as I saw them could have easily been seen in the same condition four or five decades earlier. It was a place frozen in time.
My father hit his teen years about the time the country hit the skids and fell into The Depression. I recall an event my dad told me of a scene he witnessed through his office window, and though he didn't explicitly say it, I believe the event must have taken him back to his own childhood in those cold days of austere deprivation. He saw two children about eight or ten years old walking down the railroad tracks. These were neighborhood kids, he figured, since he had seen them walking the tracks from time to time. He began to notice they would carry between them a bushel basket and every once in a while they would bend and place something in the basket. After a couple days of this he walked out to ask them what they were doing and they said they were picking up coal, which had fallen from the passing rail cars so they could keep their house heated. He asked around the plant who the kids were, and somebody knew them. He called the coal company and had several tons of coal delivered to the address. They probably never knew how it happened, but at least for that winter they knew warmth.
Thanks to my dad for that lesson. Now, on his tombstone are the words, "what you have done to least of my brothers you have done to me." He was a good man, and I miss him.
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
For What It's Worth
As time draws near for the City Council's consideration of the River View plan, here's where I stand. I'd like to lay out a much more reasoned, lengthy explication of my position, but the sand has fallen through the glass.
I expect to vote for the inclusion of the River View project into the T.I.F. district, which is the only vote before the Council now. That district will include the shelved project by Holliday and Goodman.
The ball will then be in the court of the entity referred to as Mainland Properties. That entity will need to convince banks that it can sell unfinished condo space in a soft market at the rate of $257.14 per square foot. Incidentally, the penthouse unit priced at $1.26 million is parsed out at $260 per square foot. For my money, I'm springing the extra three bucks to get whatever constitutes a finished product.
At the depth of the current recession in mid-2009 the price per square foot for houses in New Albany was $78 per square foot. By May 2011 it had rocketed to $82 per square foot. LINK HERE
I believe in the renaissance of downtown New Albany. I believe in order to keep that renaissance rolling we must think big. I believe we, in the seats of decision makers, in this time, must insist that what we do today is prudent and beneficial not only to ourselves and our contemporaries but to our descendants generations beyond the horizon.
Please consider the inventory of available land opening on to our river heritage, our river view, and decide if this is the best opportunity, if this is the best time to extract that parcel of land from the commons of the citizens of New Albany, present and future, and place it into private, for-profit hands.
Please consider the vital role that the citizens of New Albany must play in determining the current and future use of this critical piece of land in the city's heart. And consider that you must step forward to help the City make the right decision.
Many have weighed in, both for and against the project. Think about those in the unbelievable year of 2213--our Quadracentennial-- who will look back at what we have done today. Will it have been right? Will have stood the test of time? Was it a wise move? Was it a quick grab for fleeting gain?
If the citizens of New Albany decide to move forward with this project, in recognition of the momentous decision before us, I believe it is reasonable to ask the developers to hold a design competition to maximize the civic value of this piece of ground. Sure, this is New Albany, Indiana, in the broad view, the epitome of no place special, but it is a place ready to make a community commitment of $12 million to back up a private commitment of $40 plus million in a fervent attempt to save its downtown, its heritage.
If New Albany steps up to the plate, will Mainland Properties follow?
I expect to vote for the inclusion of the River View project into the T.I.F. district, which is the only vote before the Council now. That district will include the shelved project by Holliday and Goodman.
The ball will then be in the court of the entity referred to as Mainland Properties. That entity will need to convince banks that it can sell unfinished condo space in a soft market at the rate of $257.14 per square foot. Incidentally, the penthouse unit priced at $1.26 million is parsed out at $260 per square foot. For my money, I'm springing the extra three bucks to get whatever constitutes a finished product.
At the depth of the current recession in mid-2009 the price per square foot for houses in New Albany was $78 per square foot. By May 2011 it had rocketed to $82 per square foot. LINK HERE
I believe in the renaissance of downtown New Albany. I believe in order to keep that renaissance rolling we must think big. I believe we, in the seats of decision makers, in this time, must insist that what we do today is prudent and beneficial not only to ourselves and our contemporaries but to our descendants generations beyond the horizon.
Please consider the inventory of available land opening on to our river heritage, our river view, and decide if this is the best opportunity, if this is the best time to extract that parcel of land from the commons of the citizens of New Albany, present and future, and place it into private, for-profit hands.
Please consider the vital role that the citizens of New Albany must play in determining the current and future use of this critical piece of land in the city's heart. And consider that you must step forward to help the City make the right decision.
Many have weighed in, both for and against the project. Think about those in the unbelievable year of 2213--our Quadracentennial-- who will look back at what we have done today. Will it have been right? Will have stood the test of time? Was it a wise move? Was it a quick grab for fleeting gain?
If the citizens of New Albany decide to move forward with this project, in recognition of the momentous decision before us, I believe it is reasonable to ask the developers to hold a design competition to maximize the civic value of this piece of ground. Sure, this is New Albany, Indiana, in the broad view, the epitome of no place special, but it is a place ready to make a community commitment of $12 million to back up a private commitment of $40 plus million in a fervent attempt to save its downtown, its heritage.
If New Albany steps up to the plate, will Mainland Properties follow?
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