The Gregory Brothers: Auto-Tune the News #6

The Gregory Brothers present: auto-tune the news

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Picture of the Month in the #IranElection Collection

Messy Properties

Der Spiegel: "Chocolate Company Promises Melt-Free Revolution"

Chocolate is just as much a part of Switzerland as the Alps. Now, global market leader Barry Callebaut has developed the product that competitors have been hopelessly puzzling over for 60 years -- chocolate that doesn't melt and is low in calories.

Serious mountain climbers know the problem all too well: Packing chocolate in your rucksack only ends in frustration when you reach the summit. If you're walking in freezing cold temperatures, the chocolate bar becomes a rock-hard block that's impossible to bite into without breaking your teeth. But, then again, if the sun is beating down, it won't take long before the chocolate melts into a gooey mess. In the worst-case scenario, you reach the mountain top, finally at your destination, and it's completely liquified.

And even if the temperature is just right, there's still the problem of weight gain. As most of us have finally realized, chocolate is not one of the staple foods of the skinny minnie.

But one Zurich-based chocolate manufacturer thinks it has a solution that could make these problems a thing of the past. Barry Callebaut, whose annual output of over 1.1 million tons of cocoa and chocolate products makes it the world's largest producer of chocolate, has developed a type of chocolate with completely new properties. According to the company's head developer, Hans Vriens, the chocolate has up to 90 percent fewer calories than regular chocolate.

What's more, high temperatures can't touch it (...) >>>

More chocolate ... Wiki ... the movie

"The Stoning of Soraya"

The director of the movie, Cyrus Nowrashteh talks to Roger L. Simon and Lionel Chetwynd on PJTV.

Topics of discussion are the origin and background of the film,  the making of, the attitude of Hollywood, feminists and the Left in the face of the savagery of Sharia law towards women.

Starring James Caviezel, Mozhan Marnò and Shohreh Aghdashloo.

The Official site.

Watch the slideshow on IMDb.

Page on IMDb.

Update:

Below is the director sitting down with Natalie Foster:

Your Choice: Liberty or Tyranny

You're watching an interview with Mark Levin, author of “Liberty & Tyranny” which debuted as No. 1 on the New York Times Bestseller list and has retained that position for five straight weeks.

Art Without Objective Value

The process in which our world is being deconstructed is the following. It is best made visible in art and culture, but through its anti philosophy it slowly permeates every walk of life, until one day we find ourselves plunged into the black hole of nihilism.

Narrative: "Morality is relative and depends on your point of view; the same is true of beauty and any other value; our values are middle class; values are evil, Western constructs; objective art (science, music (tones), drama, literature (language, letters) ballet (movement), culture, education, gender, family, religion, etc.) must be liberated from the constraints put upon it by evil, Western, objectivists; old culture must be attacked and destroyed."

This process of the hatred of the good for being good cannot go on forever without consequences.

City Journal: "Beauty and Desecration - We must rescue art from the modern intoxication with ugliness", by Roger Scruton

At any time between 1750 and 1930, if you had asked an educated person to describe the goal of poetry, art, or music, “beauty” would have been the answer. And if you had asked what the point of that was, you would have learned that beauty is a value, as important in its way as truth and goodness, and indeed hardly distinguishable from them. Philosophers of the Enlightenment saw beauty as a way in which lasting moral and spiritual values acquire sensuous form. And no Romantic painter, musician, or writer would have denied that beauty was the final purpose of his art.

At some time during the aftermath of modernism, beauty ceased to receive those tributes. Art increasingly aimed to disturb, subvert, or transgress moral certainties, and it was not beauty but originality—however achieved and at whatever moral cost—that won the prizes. Indeed, there arose a widespread suspicion of beauty as next in line to kitsch—something too sweet and inoffensive for the serious modern artist to pursue. In a seminal essay—“Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” published in Partisan Review in 1939—critic Clement Greenberg starkly contrasted the avant-garde of his day with the figurative painting that competed with it, dismissing the latter (not just Norman Rockwell, but greats like Edward Hopper) as derivative and without lasting significance. The avant-garde, for Greenberg, promoted the disturbing and the provocative over the soothing and the decorative, and that was why we should admire it. (...) >>>

Related:

- Stephen Hicks: "Why Art Became Ugly"