Lobenthal.com

is one of the reasons that developers run the city, de Blasio has disabled the Landmarks Preservation Commission, and why Manhattan (and Brooklyn is becoming) is so grotesquely overbuilt.

Cem S. Kayatekin at The Conversation outlines a way out of the morass:

“To meet the dual challenges of affordability and climate change, New York must wrest its financial livelihood from the grip of property taxes, restructuring its economy such that the city’s municipal finances – and by extension, governance – serve a broader array of interests and sectors.”

I will go into this in the essay I’m writing on The War on the Arts in America.

David Masciotra at Salon goes into it very well at Salon, citing the facts that
“Three-fourths of the public is unaware why the U.S. fought a cold war with the Soviet Union, and 41 percent are unfamiliar with the term “Auschwitz.”

And he goes on to explain:

“America’s perverted priorities of giving tax breaks to the wealthy while its public schools decline into states of disrepair, along with a shallow and superficial news media operating under the demands of corporate ownership, are largely to blame for America’s failures, but the general public is not exactly resistant.”

In D.C., two Wednesdays ago, a world of poseurs and criminal frauds dissembling their asses off.

On stage at at the Metropolitan Opera, a microcosm where creative duplicity is innocuous–and sometimes delightful as well as instructive.

It’s a coverup of the facts vs. creative distillation of personal interpretation of life’s big and little realities.

Once I’m in my seat I’m not concerned about decrying the Misty hype or anything else peripheral to what’s on stage. It’s a pleasure to see a good performance. I wanted to enjoy her debut as Kenneth MacMillan’s Manon. And I did.

It looked well-coached, delivering on details that provide subtlety amid the primary colors of the McMillan palette. She didn’t pull to all the obvious stops. Cory Stearns gave her strong partnering support: she looked really good at the top of a lift. The final duet, which is rightly tuned as desperate and high-pitched but can seem only hysterical, was powerful and poignant.

Really, what a debut should be.

Lucien K. Truscott at Salon:

“I’ve spent my entire life trying to figure out how the entire nation of Germany, all of its ordinary citizens living in cities and towns and villages across the country, could have stood by while their own government rounded up people and stuck them in hastily built, disgusting concentration camps, and then proceeded to kill them by gas or bullets or starvation or overwork or disease or simple filth and neglect.

“This was the week I think I finally understood it.”

don’t like it when presidential aspirants stick it to corporate greed.

At Raw Story, Bob Brigham covers the outbreak of platform suppression that occurred when corporate “news” anchor Savannah Guthrie couldn’t handle Kirsten Gillibrand’s inculpation of corporate greed.

I’m tired of hearing crap about Injustice Roberts being in institutionalist. What he is is an incrementalist, who has strategized his attack on American democracy to unfold in stages. His current endorsement of partisan gerrymandering, together with his gutting of the Voting Rights Act and his dismantling of limits to corporate interference in elections, is the coup de grace. He is one of the most dangerous, extreme Chief Justices in the history of our Supreme Court.

In Patricia Mears’ office at FIT, she’s got Ballerina: Fashion’s Modern Muse all diagrammed out on her exhibition board.

Talking to an American educator who teaches abroad, she noted that it may take some years for curriculum changes to manifestly impact the Zeitgeist: I thought of how civics was dropped years ago from the public school curriculum and the way that today so many Americans seem to be totally ignorant of the way that American democracy is designed to function. And eliminating music and art from the required curriculum has surely been both symptom of, as well as cataclysmic influence on America’s cultural decline.

Juan Cole at Informed Consent:

“Trump created this crisis by breaching the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Having pocketed Iran’s mothballing of 80 percent of its uranium enrichment program, Trump slapped the harshest sanctions ever seen against any country on Iran, unilaterally and in the teeth of opposition from NATO allies and the permanent members of the UN Security Council. In other words, he screwed Iran over.”

She cries foul on the gigantic, ever-increasing military budget.

“These are huge checks being written to Boeing and Lockheed Martin, when we should be cutting checks to everyday people struggling to make ends meet.”