This just blew my mind: “… Ferris Bueller, the person, is just a figment of Cameron’s imagination, like Tyler Durden, and Sloane is the girl Cameron secretly loves. One day while he’s lying sick in bed, Cameron lets ‘Ferris’ steal his father’s car and take the day off, and as Cameron wanders around the city, all of his interactions with Ferris and Sloane, and all the impossible hijinks, are all just played out in his head. This is part of the reason why the ‘three’ characters can see so much of Chicago in less than one day — Cameron is alone, just imagining it all.”
Russell Saltzman writing at First Things: “Why is torture wrong? These fourteen detainees are some of our worst enemies. The instinct to treat them as they have treated us is understandable, perhaps to a degree even irresistible, and rather terrible when unleashed. Yet torture is wrong because it can never serve a moral purpose. It serves instead only an immoral purpose: the destruction of an individual’s personhood. It is violence against the imago Dei, the image of God carried by every person.” (via)
There was some talk a week or so ago about how Texas Gov. Rick Perry was threatening to pull Texas out of the Union if the federal government kept trying to tell the states what to do … or something like that. While it’s unlikely that Texas will secede, Nate Silver over at Five Thirty-Eight takes a look at what Texas might look like if it decided to split into five separate states.
Its death has been predicted for a while now, but rather than going peacefully into the night, the US Postal Service lumbers on. Georg Jensen describes the sad mutation that the USPS has undergone in recent years: “Just as General Motors has in effect subsidized Big Oil by continuing to build gas-guzzlers in recent years, so has the USPS continued to subsidize Big Mail by shaping its operations to encourage what it now calls, revealingly, “standard mail”—that is, advertising junk mail.”
By far the coolest — and perhaps most disturbing — thing I’ve seen in a while. The part with Katie Couric is especially wild. The part with Sean Hannity is the funniest because it’s such great satire. Someone should do a whole album of newscasts auto-tuned like this. It would be hot.
With all the talk about how the GOP has to find its way again after the last two election cycles, it’s disheartening that fewer people are actually engaging in the thoughtful work of actually articulating what the right way should be for Republicans. I think this piece by Scott Payne is a good starting place to identify some core areas that conservatives should embrace or re-embrace, in some cases.
The U.S. military has begun arming soldiers in the field with the iPod Touch. The device is relatively cheap, durable, and can perform an amazing array of mission critical functions.
It should be no surprise, but the gradual demise of Sarah Palin as a viable candidate for, well, anything seems to be gaining steam. Reihan Salam: “Palin’s campaign antics can be forgiven. What can’t be forgiven is the ham-handed way she’s tried to build her national profile since she returned to Alaska. She’s abandoned the bold right-left populism that won over Alaska voters—and me—in the first place in favor of an increasingly defensive and harsh partisanship.”
Finally watched the series finale of ER. After not watching the show in 6 years, I found some closure. I feel satisfied.
Hugh Hewitt remains one of the sharpest minds in talk radio, and he writes an excellent piece for NRO on the importance of talk radio to our democracy. There are a lot of doubters predicting the decline of conservative talk radio, but as Hewitt points out, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Merlin Mann and John Gruber gave a great talk at SxSW about building a better blog and reaching the kind of audience you want to reach. It’s about an hour long, but it’s worth the time.
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