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MM asks: What the heck is Jabberwocky? I’m an AD&D geek, but I have not a clue. I wasn’t going to comment on Vox’s geekiness, though I was sorely tempted. How hot can Space Bunny REALLY be if she’s into a guy that:

Likes soccer

Drinks girly drinks

was an AD&D geek

Wears fu-fu Italian shoes

I guess bench presses and martial arts training negates some of that, but REALLY!!!

First, Bally isn’t Italian, it’s Swiss. Second, I wasn’t an AD&D geek. The vorpal blade was the weapon with which the beamish boy from the Lewis Carroll poem did slay the Jabberwock, and also appeared in the computer game Wizardry. I did defeat Werdna, so yes, there’s a few geek points there. TILTOWAIT!

And hot women always like the pretty boys. It is a law of the universe. See Grant, Hugh, Pitt, Brad and Beckham, David for details. Granted, I’m more Fight Club than Notting Hill, but the principle remains the same. As for Space Bunny, just imagine Sandra Bullock’s younger, blonder, smarter sister working as a fitness model and you’re pretty much there.

But conservative policy experts and a number of former Bush administration officials say there are more systemic reasons for the policy sclerosis. For three years, the president pushed policies conceived during his 2000 campaign for the White House, but with most of those ideas either enacted or stalled, policymaking has run out of steam, they said.

I’m pretty happy if the Bush administration is running out of policy ideas. Considering how much they’ve been trying to out-Dem the Democrats, a respite is in order. Now, if they need some fresh ideas, I’d be more than pleased to supply a few. I’d just make sure that the president had a Mont Blanc or two for all the executive orders he’d be signing.

After a cappucino or two, we’d get rocking. Department of Education – gone! Housing and Urban Development – gone! Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac subsidies – gone! Break for lunch. National Endowment for the Arts – gone! Federal gun laws – gone! UN ambassador – fired! UN membership – paper shredder, paper strips burnt and ashes flushed down the toilet. Set up a meeting with Alan Greenspan for tomorrow morning and call it a day. A frabjous day, indeed!

The historic Christ Church in Alexandria, which draws 800 to 1,200 people on Sunday mornings, lost a $900,000 donation to a building fund because of the Robinson consecration. In recent months, 10 families have left the church, 104 persons have not renewed their annual financial pledge and two parishioners say they have been told giving is down 20 percent. The Rev. Pierce Klemmt, rector of Christ Church, said people are giving less because they fear “the future” on sexuality. “Homosexuality is not a sin,” he said. “It is a gift from God, and I see this issue on the same issue as civil rights. Our brothers and sisters with the homosexual orientation should be supported and celebrated as any person should be.”

Civil rights is, by definition, not a Christian matter. And homosexuality is not a “gift* from God”, children are. Furthermore, a future based on homosexuality is a sterile one indeed. I don’t know which pagan god Mr. Klemmt worships, but it isn’t the Christian God of the Bible. Christianity is not about tolerance, it is precisely the opposite. Jesus preached parable after parable talking about exclusion, separation and division.

Christians are told not to judge non-Christians – that is for God alone – but have a duty to judge and discipline fellow Christians. As for the wolves in sheep’s clothing, it’s getting easier and easier to spot them. There are two choices. Kick them out, or allow them to destroy the church. Any other response is simply dithering.

* it is remotely possible, albeit unlikely, that Mr. Klemmt, whose name does sound suspiciously Teutonic, was playing with the unsuspecting reporter by making a bilingual pun, as “gift” in German translates as “poison”.

I read EXPANDED UNIVERSE over the last week, Robert Heinlein’s collection of short stories, essays and personal anecdotes collected over a long and distinguished writing career. The thing that struck me most was how, subsequent to WWII, this champion of individual responsibility for a time became a slavish champion of global dictatorship.

One thing that people who came of age in the nuclear age cannot understand is the extreme level of fear that nuclear weapons and radiation instilled in adults who had never known them. For a while, Heinlein seriously believed that the survival of all humanity depended solely on the immediate establishment of a one-world totalitarian government and wrote several short stories and essays calling for it.

This is the spirit in which the United Nations was formed, and I believe it provides the reason for the messianic attitude which the organization and its cheerleaders project. It is a spirit of fear, which, as every reader of Paul’s letters knows, is not given to us by God. It is also important to understand that this belief in the supreme importance of the UN is so strong, so emotionally-tied to the functioning of the globalist faithful, that literally any means justifies another step towards the end of world dictatorship imposing world peace by force.

Perhaps we are unwise to prefer to put our trust in the belief that mutually-assured destruction is better than totalitarian slavery. But even if we are, the technological imperative, as predicted by Carroll Quigley, ensures that the UN vision is untenable anyhow. Increasingly miniaturized weapons will only make the individual more and more powerful and dangerous; this will tend to weaken government institutions at all levels, even at the global level.

As always, those who sacrifice liberty for security will find that they have neither.

“All over the country there are offices that look like newsrooms and there are people in those offices that look for all the world just like journalists, but they are not practicing journalism,” he said. “They regard the audience with a cold cynicism. They are practicing something I call a pseudo-journalism, and they view their audience as something to be manipulated.” In a scathing critique of Fox News and some talk show hosts, such as Bill O’Reilly, Carroll said they were a “different breed of journalists” who misled their audience while claiming to inform them. He said they did not fit into the long legacy of journalists who got their facts right and respected and cared for their audiences.

One thing you can always count on is for the mainstream media to blame absolutely everyone and everything else for their declining quality and popularity except themselves. Not one journalist in a hundred has any serious respect for his audience. One editor at a major newspaper even came right out and told my syndicate that my column wouldn’t work in his paper because it would go over the head of his readership. Please. I wonder if that’s the message the paper’s sales staff is giving its advertisers?

Minneapolis City Council members plan to introduce a proposal Friday to ban smoking in all bars and restaurants in the city. Council Member Gary Schiff said Sunday that the proposal already has six sponsors, meaning only one more vote is needed to reach the seven required for passage. At least one other council member is leaning in that direction.

This is the sort of hunger for attention to which I referred in today’s column. I can guarantee that Minneapolis and St. Paul would NEVER be going for something abjectly stupid like this if it hadn’t already been done in New York. The Council members are probably arguing that if the Twin Cities have a smoking ban, it will make them a major first-tier city, just like New York.

Nothing annoys a big fish in a small pond like being reminded that he swims in a small pond.

From the Star Tribune: [Lutheran Reverend] Erdahl continues to favor ordaining gays and lesbians but recognizes that there are legitimate arguments on both sides. “We have room in the church for biblical literalists, and no one has kicked them out,” he said. “Can’t we also have room for those who say the Bible is more poetic or symbolic? I think we need room on this issue, too. We need to find a way through this. The real problem is legalism and those who say there is no room for anyone but people with my view. I hope we don’t go down the road the Methodists have gone down.”

Clearly he’d prefer the Episcopalian road of self-destruction. If people were hungry for literary criticism, they’d attend pretentious poetry seminars, not church. Can’t we have room for Christians who don’t believe the Bible? Can’t we have room for Christians who don’t believe in Jesus Christ? Can’t we have room for Christians who aren’t Christians at all?

The answer is no. That’s not legalism, that’s reality. Clearly Erdahl would have a major problem with anyone who would be so intolerant to say that his way is the only way. Who ordained this joker?

Katherine Lopez writes on NRO: Sen. Mark Dayton says it was “antithetical to democracy” for General Meyers to have called CBS to ask them to delay the photo release in their news report (noting that much of the rest of the story was public info since January). Meyers said he had cause to worry their release could put our troops in danger. That’s antithetical to democracy?

I can’t believe that I’m defending Mark Dayton, but yes, K-Lo, having a military officer request that a free press not publicize something unfavorable to the military is absolutely antithetical to allowing the people who the military are serving have the information necessary to make their decisions. It’s not censorship – if the general forbade CBS, that would have been censorship – but the “cause to worry” bit is total nonsense. First, the story has already been delayed. Second, the fact that troops are still in Germany sixty years after the fact indicates that we may never see an end to the Iraqi occupation, so the general could plausibly use this logic to argue that the photos should not be released until all the parties involved are dead of old age. Not, of course, that we actually have a democracy, but that’s another issue altogether.

I have little sympathy for arguments that revolve around weasel words such as could, may, might and possibly. In free country, there must be a free flow of information. Americans are fine with our troops killing enemy combatants; most of us would rather see a thousand enemies perish instead of a single American soldier. But cover-ups, even in good causes, cannot be permitted. I note that no one, except for a few knee-jerks in the press, had any qualms about the officer who fired a gun next to the Iraqi in order to find out where an ambush had been laid. That’s not the sort of thing we’re dealing with here, and the administration’s defenders would be wise to accept that reality and deal with it.

If half your argument is based on bringing human decency to a place that lacks it, you shouldn’t be terribly surprised to find that this sort of degrading abuse blows a very large hole in your position.

The [Gallup] poll suggests that only 21 percent of Americans believe journalists have high ethical standards, ranking them below auto mechanics but tied with members of Congress. More precisely, the poll notes that only one in four people believe what they read in the newspapers. Chicago Tribune Editor Charles M. Madigan may have put it best when he offered this advice: “If you are a journalist, you should probably just assume that you come across as a liar.”

A 2004 study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, part of Columbia University’s storied Graduate School of Journalism, underscores Madigan’s observation. “Since 1985, believability of the daily newspaper has fallen by a quarter, from 80 percent in 1985 to 59 percent in 2002,” notes the study, which includes data gathered by the Pew Research Center to form its conclusions. The study also points out that there has been a rapid decline in newspaper readership since the 1980s, with slightly more than half of Americans, 54 percent, reading a newspaper during the week. “The three television network news divisions and local news also saw significant drops from 1985, when they were all above 80 percent for believability,” the study reveals.

Why should anyone believe what they read in a newspaper or see in the news? I’ve been part of ten or twelve news stories at the local level, both television and newspaper, and on every single occasion, there were significant errors of fact. In the more recent cases, this happened in spite of my attempting to keep the details simple and straightforward. Once, I counted five errors in a little three sentence blurb.

Journalism too often combines ignorance with arrogance. It is a lethal combination, especially where the truth is concerned. If the details do not fit the reporter’s preconception’s, all too often he’ll simply ignore them or attempt to spin them in a manner that makes no sense. Journalism is not a profession, it is public relations for government and the two major political parties. The people I knew who wanted to pursue journalism as a career were far more interested in getting their faces on television than they were in any romantic notions of truth or world-saving. This is why I vehemently object to ever being described as a journalist instead of a writer. I consider it an insult.

I’m not a journalist and I never will be. As a technology entrepeneur, I work in the real world, more or less. Writing an opinions column is just something I do for pleasure. It’s not rocket science, and the fact that I’ve had any success at all only goes to show that Fred Reed was correct in stating that, for the most part, journalists are simply not all that bright.

Perhaps if newspapers would put the slightest attempt into making sure their journalists had even a vague clue regarding the subjects they’re covering, and removed people from writing about areas in which they’ve repeatedly demonstrated incompetence, those of us in the real world might take them more seriously. Don’t hold your breath.

During the course of this investigation I conducted a lengthy interview with Brig. Gen. Karpinski that lasted over four hours, and is included verbatim in the investigation annexes. Brig. Gen. Karpinski was extremely emotional during much of the general’s testimony. What I found particularly disturbing in the general’s testimony was the general’s complete unwillingness to either understand or accept that many of the problems inherent in the 800th MP Brigade were caused or exacerbated by poor leadership and the refusal of the command to both establish and enforce basic standards and principles among its soldiers.

Emotional and unable to accept responsibility. Shocker. Meanwhile, her lawyer has this to say: “Brig. Gen. Janis L. Karpinski is the first and only female general officer to lead soldiers in combat. She is a hero to the men and women of the 800th Military Police Brigade.”

Yeah, that may well be true. And judging by their performance at the prison, it may be part of the problem. Now, it’s entirely possible that the whole affair is yet another intelligence debacle – or masterstroke of conspiracy, for that matter, depending on what the goal was. In either case, who better to play the patsy than an incompetent female general incapable of understanding that the whole point of treating prisoners decently and well is to encourage others to surrender instead of continuing to fight.