Lobenthal.com

The privileging of ignorance in this country certainly extends up to the editorial boards of major newspapers.

Why are we not surprised that it was the Daily News’ editorial board, not Sanders, who didn’t know what the F what they were talking about?

P.S. OK, that was a bit harsh. As Mark Ehrenfreund writes for syndication:

“The interviewer’s next question seemed to conflate two separate sources of authority — the Treasury Department and the nation’s central bank. ‘You do, just by Federal Reserve fiat, you do?’ Sanders was asked.”

But what is not harsh is to say that the same corporate media that allows Paul Ryan to wave unexamined charts around and pretend that what he’s espousing has any connection to empirical data, and then condemns Sanders for not laying down every piece of policy pipe months in advance of a possible action as president nine months from now, risks losing all credibility.

Could this be the same “mainstream” media that has given Trump’s factless, hate-ridden drivel a pass for months and months, that actually worked as enabler for his campaign via its completely disproportionate and fawning coverage?

about the way that “mainstream” Western “journalism” keeps juggling those double standards as corruption looms large in the Panama papers. At Consortium News, he decries the way that the media industry:

“no longer even tries to apply common standards to questions about corruption. If you’re a favored government, there might be lamentations about the need for more ‘reform’ – which often means slashing pensions for the elderly and cutting social programs for the poor – but if you’re a demonized leader, then the only permissible answer is criminal indictment and/or ‘regime change.'”

is the attempt by right-wing plutocrats to destroy America’s system of free public education, the same way that the real crisis in Social Security is the right wing’s attempt to end it.

Diane Ravitch.net is a great place to go if you want to know about the charter school/privatization scam, and btw both our president and our governor are among the most complicit pitchmen.

Ravitch is, of course, one of the country’s leading education scholars. You know, someone who actually knows something about what she’s talking about, if that’s not too tautological for you. In other words, a true rarity in our public discourse.

Ravitch has been uncompromising about insisting that corporate titans stick to selling stuff and keep their noses out of education policy about which they are either under-informed, or view simply as a potential means of vast self-enrichment, taxpayer-funded of course.

Talk about takers!

Th Tea Party: people working their tails off, for free, to elect the candidates who will do them the most harm.

“beneficial” humility. Beneficial to the artist, to the art form, to the audience.

It doesn’t mean that Flagstad didn’t have a healthy sense of her own worth, but that she understood the enormity of the task of reaching perfection in such a role–its virtually inexhaustible potentials.

It’s what we all need to do: aim at a point farther than where we’ve gotten. And let our ambition be directed where it belongs and toward the right things.

Returning to the Met as Isolde in 1951 after a ten-year-absence, Kirsten Flagstad received 19 curtain calls after act 1.

If she didn’t know how to sing Isolde, who did?

Yet when Flagstad sang Isolde as a guest in France just around the same time, Regine Crespin recounts in her superb memoirs that fifty-five-year-old Flagstad told the very young Crespin that if she could just be able to sing Isolde five more years, she would really know how to do it.

They’re great, but —

If I had to do it all over again, I might have pursued a graduate degree in classics, but when I look at the, so to speak, degree to which the academy has aggressively pursued a strategy of acreditization monopoly, my hackles rise.

My aunt DR. Lila Gordon, who earned a Ph.d in education in middle age, would recount the words of an advisor, who told her class: “You think you’re the smartest but you’re really just the most persistent!”

Accumulating knowledge–what could be better? The value of the degree, however, depends in large part on the imagination and capabilities of the recipient, and his/her ability to think creatively and independently. Does the graduate degree aid those abilities? Not always.

I was thinking about this again as I read Thomas Frank’s essential and very upsetting new book Listen, Liberal, in which he describes the way that both the Clinton and Obama administrations privileged degree status over competency and above dedication to the public good. In so many cases, the degree-brandishers proved to be fiascos in government.

They don’t croak. I learned this with my own ears last weekend when I went on a tour of vernal pools in the woods at county-owned Muscoot Farm in Northern Westchester.

Frog mamitchkas will schlep almost a mile to get to one of these seasonal ponds, formed annually by run off and rainwater. The pools don’t outlast the warm weather, so they don’t stock fish and thus the frog larvae are spared predation.

It was a bit past peak egg-laying; a week earlier the clucking of the amphibious was “deafening,” in the words of tour guide Paul Lewis.

Unseasonably (whatever that now means) warm weather meant that the hatchlings were now swimming around churning the surface of the water. Scooping up a handful put one up close with the teeming tadpoles.

Needless to say, that scoop was immediately replaced in the pool.

We need our frogs!

Why are the young flocking to Sanders?

It might just be that they’d like a shot at a future!

Les Leopold at Alternet spells it out.

(One of them.)

We can be brilliant about individual areas of inquiry and investigation, but we are so blinkered when it comes to common sense.

Cosseted in her fever dream of coronation, Hillary Clinton thought she’d cruise to primary victory by telling us how little she would do for us and how much she wanted to work with Republican extremists.

Now she’s done a massive flip-flip and says she’s for coal after being against it as a clean energy source. Oh, and she loves nuclear power.

Come to think of it, if the human race had any common sense, would it have created nuclear power? Low-level radiation produced daily, ever-present danger of meltdown, waste that stays high-level radioactive for thousands of years–how clean can you get?

This is what’s called electable in todays world of rancid “punditry.”

Does this woman, btw, realize how close Indian Point is to her Chappaqua home, and does she have any idea of what’s going on with radioactivity-contaminated ground water there?