(no subject)

A little something that divertimento turned up from Whiskey Bar: Free Thinking in a Dirty Glass:

I, Republican

The three laws:

1. A Republican may not injure a corporation, or, through inaction, allow a corporation to come to harm.
2. A Republican must obey the orders given it by corporations except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A Republican must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

I’m hoping that one of these days, the rank and file of the Republican party will be sufficiently dissatisfied with their leadership that they can get back to their traditions of fiscal conservatism and states’ rights. I’m getting cognitive dissonance from having a Republican government pumping up the deficit while the Democrats are trying to rein it in...

It's all very clear to me now

We’re watching an episode of The Saint that introduces the notion of an artist blackmailing people and getting the money delivered as extravagant payments for bad art.

So much 20th century art makes sense now! The stuff that sells all out of proportion to its aesthetic value is actually the result of initial blackmail payments, followed by influential people (who have enough money to be worth blackmailing in the first place) touting the art as having that kind of outrageous value. Once the trend is established, innocent artists create more of the same to serve as a smoke screen.

The next iteration, of course, is to have someone initiate the blackmail process in order to affect the price of a particular segment of the art market...