Author: VD

The plaintiff’s bar wants to keep religious people off the jury, because they believe in personal responsibility. Won’t they be in for a surprise, when those legions of highly ethical atheists pop up and throw their nefarious plans to win massive damage awards into disarray.

Somehow, this reminds me of how the courts go into panic mode whenever anyone within a five-mile radius of the courtroom utters the words “jury nullification”.

Isn’t it interesting how the most corrupt institutions in the USA – the courts and Wall Street – always rely on abstract theoretical arguments to justify their existence, while daily behaving in a manner that almost precisely contradicts their justifications.

LV points out: “The Ents were really dissed, being presented as whiney sniveling cowardly appeasers, where in the book, they were mightily disturbed, but merely slow to anger and action. Not being hasty is not being French.”

It’s true, having them get “tricked” by Merry was rather lame, but I don’t think Jackson had the time to show their slow rise to anger. I think LV is being too harsh, here. Jackson kept the essence of their nature intact, and furthermore, I submit that any clumsiness here must be forgiven by the awesome and overpowering attack on Isengard. He really surpassed my expectations there.

To be honest, I never much liked the Ents anyhow. I’m definitely a Rohan guy. Space Bunny is an Aragorn fan, and I understand the teenyboppers quite like Legolas, but I think that one starry-eyed female writer is correct in saying that Eomer is unfairly overlooked. After Faramir, he was my second favorite character in the books; unlike Faramir, the films did him justice.

As much as I like Cate Blanchett as an actress, I wasn’t terribly fond of her as Galadrial. She was adequate, but she wasn’t as ethereal and overpoweringly beautiful as my mind’s eye pictured. I can’t think of an actress I would have preferred, though. I also thought it was interesting how the elven armor was definitely influenced by the Ulthuan High Elves of Warhammer. The process goes full circle.

RS asks: Would you consider Tolkien to have been a Christian?

I really dislike answering this sort of question. It does not fall to me, or any other man, to judge another man’s soul. However, we can certainly say that JRR Tolkien was a devout Catholic, considered himself to be a Christian, was instrumental in leading CS Lewis to accept Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior, and wrote a literary masterpiece that is rife with Christian references, analogies and metaphor.

In other words, if he was not a Christian, I don’t know who is. And if we judge Tolkien by his fruits, as we are instructed, there can be very little doubt as to the nature of the tree. In other words, yes.

By this same metric, I very much doubt that Adolf Hitler was a Christian, his sometime public protestations to the contrary notwithstanding. His blasphemous attempts to usurp the role of Jesus Christ would alone appear to rule him out as an antichrist, not to mention the small matter of his massive body count and notorious hatred for God’s Chosen. But the truth is, we do not know the truth of what was in either man’s heart at the end.

It is possible to imagine that Hitler repented of his sins in the Berlin bunker. In near-total ignorance of his life, it is possible to imagine that Tolkien secretly abjured Jesus Christ and embraced Belial. But both possibilities, especially the latter, are so uncharacteristic of what we know as to be monstrously absurd, in my opinion, and not worth the breath required to discuss them. For my part, I hope to one day leave as bold a Christian testimony behind as did Mr. Tolkien.

JM writes about a friend at a certain university who was assigned to write an essay on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. After writing one supporting the Israeli side, her professor refused to grade it and told her to rewrite it – either supporting the Palestinians or writing objectively – in order to receive a grade.

What do you say I give this professor a jingle? As my brother used to say, I FEEL a jacuzzi coming on!

Now they’ve cloned white-tailed deer. Why? We don’t have enough? While I don’t have anything against hunting, I’ve never quite understood the allure of driving three hours north and freezing your rear end off sitting in a tree in the north woods in order to wait for a glimpse of the very same animal that is in your backyard, en masse, every single night. I remember one evening when my Dad and brothers had left to go hunt, and two hours later, I barely managed to avoid running over three deer less than fifty yards from the house with the truck. And no, we did not live in the country.

I have to say, as much as it still boggles my mind that Man has developed cloning technology in my lifetime, I’m a little disappointed with the results. I hope someone is building a secret army of clones somewhere or something, because the reality is really falling far short of all the science fiction I’ve read. Where’s my laser pistol? Where’s my lightsabre? The real globalist conspiracy has to be the most boring conspiracy ever – what lousy excuse for a conspiracy to take over the world has a web site announcing their intentions? A web site, by the way, they don’t bother to update.

And if you’re going to clone something, clone Morgan Fairchild. Can’t have too many of those.

I’m not sure how I feel about cloning. I don’t know enough to have an opinion on it, although from what little I understand, I can’t support either the destruction of conceived but unused people or the use of clones for harvesting or study purposes. My technophilic instincts tend to war against my ethics here, to a certain extent.

According to Len Pasquarelli: It hasn’t yet been officially announced, but the starting quarterbacks for the Pro Bowl will be Steve McNair (of Tennessee) and Daunte Culpepper (Minnesota).

Good onya Daunte! This only goes to show why fans should not be voting for All-Star games – or at least that their votes should not be taken as a serious indicator of a player’s skill. In keeping with this season’s Black Quarterback Watch, here’s yesterday’s results:

Culpepper: 20/29 260 yds 69% 8.97 avg 3 TD 1 INT 117.0 rating

D. McNabb: 17/27 238 yds 63% 8.81 avg 1 TD 2 INT 72.8 rating

The ESPN fans, as I mentioned before, favored McNabb over Culpepper as the starter by 51 percentage points. Ludicrous. Week 16 actually wasn’t a bad game statistically for McNabb. But as usual, the Eagles weren’t in the game because of him, they were in it because of Brian Westbrook’s punt return – although the defense was no help at all. McNabb even made a very nice play in the pocket to avoid what looked like a certain sack, then seemed to overthrow Chad Lewis but the TE managed to go up and get it for a vital 4th-quarter first down on third-and-long. But that last INT that gave the game away was pretty bad. Not exactly the crunch-time performance that is supposed to excuse his “misleadingly” average stats.

Okay, but overrated. That’s my verdict. Still. And yes, I’ll continue hammering this into the ground for the rest of the season. It’s football. This is what we do. If anyone wants a long-winded rant on how Two-Minute Tommy Kramer was a better quarterback when he was drinking, I can deliver that too. My theory is that his balance was off without the beer in one hand.

A spokesman for Mr Berlusconi said the prime minister had been telephoned recently by Col Gaddafi of Libya, who said: “I will do whatever the Americans want, because I saw what happened in Iraq, and I was afraid

Not that this will stop Jean-Francois Kerry or numerous other Democratic cretins from insisting that the two events are unrelated. Then again, most Democrats still believe in the tooth fairy, the labor theory of value and wealth through taxation, so I see no reason why they should start being bound by objective reality now.

Couldn’t help but notice that there appear to be some newcomers to the blog today. I hope that you’re enjoying it. There’s a good bit of archives to plow through here if you’re so inclined, a few ill-considered rants and some interesting, if random links here and there. Stop by again sometime.

I try to blog four times a day, but the mileage varies depending on mood, current events and numerous other vagaries. Feel free to let me know what you think.

Random observation of the day – I think my two favorite Christmas carols are Silver Bells and Good King Wencelas, with a slight edge to Silver Bells.

You can see why this gentleman was a little less sanguine about The Return of the King. The Physics Geek says it’s been linked up the wazoo around the blogosphere, but since there may be a few of you new to this brave new world of the all-conquering blog, I figured it was worth posting. It made me laugh, anyhow.

Now, if everyone would just be satisfied with posting links on their blogs instead of sending me “Send This to 10 STRONG WOMEN You Know” or stupid videos of cartoon babies dancing to horrid pop songs, the world would be a better place. Not any less dangerous, perhaps, but indubitably better.

I was most pleased to see an article by Fred Reed being posted on the WND Commentary page today. He’s a great expatriate freedom writer, who regularly puts to shame the perverted modern American notion of what it is to live in a free society. I recommended him to WND’s commentary editor a few months ago; he’s a great writer and if you enjoy my stuff, you’ll love his.

Here’s his archives. They’re well worth going through.