Bush's Last Month Sees Unemployment Hit 22%, According to Wingnuttia's Math

By this logic, Diane Feinstein's husband, and most of the Republican Party, Kellogg Brown & Root and the entire Pentagon Welfare Club are also unemployed. No wonder they are such a bunch of whiners.
About George Bush
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

religion and art

Maybe the issue is just the idea of a particularly "secular art." Ugh.

I know lots of artists who didn't grow up with the ram-rod of the catholic church jammed down their throats (as i grew up). Still, i am not quite sure i understand the disconnect one makes, (does one force it?) in looking at all that history, and believing one is doing something new, or in wanting to do something new.

The conclusion i always come to is not that we need a more secular art, but that we need less satanic religions.

torchlight parades for dummies

—with their messianic leaders, their torchlight parades, their xenophobic propaganda—

some stuff just leaps off the screen at you.

"The 1930s fascists were expert at using all the most technologically sophisticated communications technologies—the cinema, radio, newspapers, advertising—to spew their destructive, hate-filled message."

Go read Brad at SadlyNo.

The orthodoxy of the craven

Why does this sound so familiar?

The episode suggests one reason that the crisis went unchecked: A dangerous all-or-nothing orthodoxy had come to dominate the policy debate, where one was either for free markets or against them.

It reminds me of the artists' notion that one either lives within a tradition of artists' thinking or outside it. One either believes that no one can nor should ever really teach painting, teach expression, ie; one is in favor of the orthodoxy of free-form "do whatever you want." OR one is a member of some cultish neo-religious movement.

You can have your tradition - your philosophy - but certainly to argue in favor of it is to support the wholesale imposition of your philosophy onto others who are also free to make-up their own philosophies, presumably and preferibly those will be invented with as little historical or academically informed influence as possible. That is, your argument, because it takes the form of argument - regulated dialogue, logical inquiry - is invalidated because it imposes upon freedoms. A bit flat-earthish, but there you have a good excuse for the necessity of "marketing" chachkees instead of appreciating items, arguments,  and well-crafted artefacts.