seems like it might be a boring article until you see the photos and how cartoony these people were. so weird! they look like concept artwork for a movie or Sebastian Kruger caricatures or something:

weird drunkards.

watch?v=qybUFnY7Y8w

I showed this video to darren recently and I know it made a huge impression. I myself have been thinking about it a lot ever since I saw it. Vito rocks.

While all the talk about the alleged “death of conservatism” that followed Obama’s election was hilariously off-target, it certainly doesn’t bode well for the conservative movement if it adopts the strategy of silencing its own intellectuals.  Case in point: David Frum, who has written thoughtfully about the GOP’s tactical errors during the health care debate, has apparently been ousted from his position at the American Enterprise Institute.  The life-blood of any political philosophy is open, honest debate and a capacity for self-criticism.  I’m not saying liberals are necessarily any better – witness the rough treatment given to Joe Lieberman.  Regardless, I’d much rather see a conservative movement led by  George Will, David Brooks, and David Frum than by Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck.  

William F. Buckley is rolling over in his grave…

mostly posting this because it seems really ridiculous to me that something like this could be possible. it’s almost like why bother being an artist anymore – or at least a photographic one? i mean at the end of the road this video seems to be traveling down, you could imagine taking a photo and then using the “make good” tool to turn it into a classically balanced or artistic photograph. i’ve never been one to balk or fear any brave-new-world shit, so it’s not that i think this is bad. it just sort of gives you pause when you get a glimpse of something that’s basically commercially available when 30 seconds prior you would have snorted at even the possibility of something like that being created. any other thoughts?

[Warning – this post is essentially one big spoiler]

Anathem (2008), speculative fiction writer Neal Stephenson’s latest novel, is nothing if not ambitious. Building from the principle that at its best, science or speculative fiction should hold up a sort of refracted mirror to our world, allowing us to appreciate the difference between our present and our possible futures (or alternate presents, or even alternate pasts), Anathem not only presents the reader with a convincing portrait of an alternate Earth – Arbre – but offers up an entire Arbran intellectual genealogy that reads as an alternative evolutionary model for our own Western intellectual tradition.  This invented tradition has Western science not emerging (as it did on Earth), as a byproduct of or critical response to the strictures of institutionalized religion, but presents both religion and science as descending from a single creation event or myth, the two having bifurcated after a decisive, potentially supernatural encounter.

(more…)