Some people wonder aloud why there are those, mostly from backgrounds where access to information is limited, who believe the world was created in six days. I wonder more at those, from backgrounds where information is plentiful, who believe that capitalism is just, economics is a science, Rachmaninoff is a great composer, and Spiderman 2 is an interesting movie.

I have more patience with the defensiveness of the uneducated than the arrogance of the educated, but I stand by what I said before: by denying Bullshit its role and proper place, you lose the ability to communicate anything of objective worth.
---

On the front page of the NY Times this morning, below the fold, is a photograph taken be a camera hovering two feet above the ground, of a naked emaciated child with her head leaning on her mother's thigh.

Get up and walk away from the keyboard, into the middle of whatever room you're in. Bend forward and put your hands in front of your face as if holding a camera; close one eye and look towards the ground with the other and imagine that child at your feet. Move your index finger downwards toward your thumb and make a clicking sound, and see if you can understand what you've become.

I hate photojournalism.
I hate the educational mandate that teaches the acquisition of knowledge before imagination.
---

I have no fear of Islam, Judaism, or Christianity; one can argue with any theological defense of violence. In any language there's debate over the meaning of words, Koran or Constitution makes no difference. But what can defend against the pure mechanistic rationality of scientistic logic, or the illusion that it can be made to apply to our lives without stripping away their complexity? What defends us from the likes of Brad DeLong, from the polymath who poses as a humanist?