inkbluesky

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It is difficult to describe artist-cartoonist-illustrator Ronald Searle. Some of his work reminds me of Edward Gorey and some reminds me of Mad magazine. Then again he was versatile enough to have also done some work for Disney. There is a blog that focuses exclusively on his work. Today the latest post features ‘THE SECOND COMING OF TOULOUSE LAUTREC’ - which is probably not safe for work. He is one of those artists that probably most of the western world at least has seen and would recognize the style, but don’t know who he is.

The List: The World’s Most Controversial Religious Sites

Yasukuni Shrine - Tokyo, Japan

What’s the rub: Among the souls enshrined at Yasukuni are 1,068 convicted war criminals. The shrine’s private overseers say these people were unfairly tried. But 14 are Class-A war criminals, including the military commander who presided over the 1937 Nanjing Massacre in China and the prime minister who ordered the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Potala Palace - Lhasa, Tibet, China

What’s the rub: Unchecked Chinese control. Tibet became a cause célèbre in the 1990s, as Hollywood stars led by Richard Gere protested the Chinese government’s attempts to make the historically autonomous province more “Chinese.” But as Gere’s star has faded, so too it seems has his cause. Tibet barely registers on the international media radar anymore…

Bob Jones University - Greenville, South Carolina, United States

Why it matters: While not a religious site per se, Bob Jones University (BJU) is nonetheless a pilgrimage center for political candidates hoping to court religious conservatives. Founded in 1927 by its evangelical preaching namesake, BJU is the self-declared “citadel” of fundamentalist Christian thought in the United States. For political candidates from both parties, a trip there is considered a litmus test of red state appeal.

There are a few more religious sites listed at the link with more background on each. BJU ( note the irony of the initials) is probably the only one that can be readily taken down a in importance - a completely undeserved importance at that. Treat them like the Faux News debates - if the Democratic candidates just stay away and note the reasons such as the school’s recently changed banned on interracial dating and their political back stabbing of John McCain in 2000 then all but the die hard kool-aid drinkers will have any respect for BJU. By continung to make pilgrimages there the canidates lead BJ an unearned and certainly undeserved legitmacy. As for Yasukuni Shrine, the place should be bull dozed, but the Japanese like every other nation in the world retains pockets of misplaced nationalism that makes that scenario unlikely. Lastly, China is likely to get little in the way of pressure of the U.S. because one, Bush needs them to help keep North Korea under control - another wall that the neocons have pushed us up against and two, conservatives have embraced China’s non-union cheap labor at the expense of American workers and made Muslims the new boogie man to replace communism to feed their addiction to paranoia.