Vox Popoli

1. Michael Vick is massively overrated. The stupid practice of anointing “superstars” before they’ve accomplished anything – anything at all – simply has to stop. I particularly loathe the idea that a quarterback who is a superior athlete is therefore a superior quarterback. You’d think the Kordell Stewart Experience would have taught those media bozos something. I’d much rather have Drew Brees, (8 TD, 2 INT, 100.0 Rtg), behind center than Michael Vick, (2 TD, 3 INT, 77.7 Rtg) right now.

2. Donovan McNabb has upped his game, without question. But he still can’t touch Mr. Culpepper.

3. Any running back can go for 150 combined yards in the Denver or Minnesota offenses. I think I saw Imelda Marcos going for 90 and 90 against Houston on Sunday.

4. I thought the analysts were smoking crack when they picked Green Bay to win the NFC North, but I never dreamed that the Pack would start out 1-4. It’s strange to think it, but we may have already seen Brett Favre’s last playoff game. At this point, they don’t look as if they’ll be able to catch Chicago for third in the division and they haven’t even played the Vikes yet.

5. The Patriots are unbelievably solid. It’s great to see a reminder that team play is more important than unproven “superstars” manufactured by the NFL’s marketing department. But you know Tagliabue is pulling for Indy to knock them off this year. I don’t see it happening. Peyton Manning may yet learn to win the big game, but as the Sports Guy says, you’ve never heard anyone say that Tony Dungy outcoached anyone. Belicheck, on the other hand, is fast approaching Pantheon status.

6. Seattle may have ruined its entire season with that fourth-quarter collapse. Everyone was wondering if they were for real after that 4-0 start. Not so much, is apparently the answer.

7. The Saints are impressively dysfunctional. Over the last three years, I’ve never seen a team perform so erratically. Tampa has looked atrocious this year; I still can’t figure out how New Orleans managed to lose to them.

8. Arizona is going to be a good team in two or three years. People forget that Denny built most of his playoff teams around defense prior to the arrival of Randy Moss. He’s doing the same thing in Arizona and based on what I’ve seen of McCown’s play, he’s likely to be doing the same plug-n-play quarterback thing too.

9. Surprisingly, the Lions don’t suck this year. They should not be mistaken for a potential playoff team, however.

From the Washington Times:

“Here, ABC’s Peter Jennings reluctantly agreed. ‘I know we weren’t as on the ball as we should have been’ about the war, Jennings offered by way of apology. Warming up to this theme, Jennings also admitted that ‘we were not quick enough to say [the Swift Boat ads] are demonstrably false.’ In other words, the regular network news divisions are, if anything, too favorably disposed towards George W. Bush. And anybody who tells you different is a crazy, right-wing liar. Lay off my friend Dan Rather, Jennings demanded; ‘I don’t think you ever judge a man by only one event in his career.’

This is an impressively inaccurate use of the word “demonstrably”. I like to use it myself, but I only use it when I am willing and able to demonstrate the truth of what I’m saying. But for all that Jennings is now insistent that the Swift ads are false, he and the rest of the network news have completely failed to demonstrate that they are so.

37 Piranha

27 Grizzlies

I’m still only 2-3, I was dumb enough to drop Marcus Robinson for Nate Burleson, (looked like a good move for all of about ten minutes on Sunday), Ahman Green has got the dropsies again, Jerome Bettis is vulturing Duce Staley, (who is otherwise a freaking MACHINE), Chad Johnson is underperforming, Peerless Price is every bit as worthless as I was afraid he’d be and Jerry Porter is so useless I had to drop him. So, basically, I’m relying on Daunte scoring between 15 and 20 points per game, Bubba Franks and his vintage biweekly 2 catch, 2 TD performances, and the S.0.D. coming back strong from suspension in three weeks.

On the other hand, I’m not a large bovine with an L stamped on his head, courtesy of Tha Fish. Life is good….

Craigp learns not to mess with Space Bunny, the hard way:

Craigp, as I believe I stated earlier, I’ve not done a country by country study of who does or does not have more personal freedoms and I already established what that meant in the context of your assertation that the US is supposed to be “a shining example of freedom”

It’s easy enough to prove that Craig is utterly, totally and hopelessly wrong. First, Space Bunny is correct in saying that her choice of where to live says nothing about where freedom is greatest. And while she has not done a country-by-country study, the Heritage Foundation has. Following are the Index of Economic Freedom’s top ten list of most free countries, from most free to least free.

Hong Kong

Singapore

New Zealand

Luxembourg

Ireland

Estonia

United Kingdom

Denmark

Switzerland

United States

Ironic, is it not, that the USA is considered less free now than the country from which it declared independence. The differences can be glaring, for example, the maximum Swiss federal income tax is only 9 percent, compared to 38 percent in the USA, while Ireland’s tax on corporate net income, at 16 percent, is less than half the USA’s 35 percent.

Petty personal freedoms are also greater, as anyone who has seen Italians smoking anywhere and everywhere can testify. The USA does have the advantage of less imperial bureaucracies than the countries of Western Europe, but to blithely assert that the USA is still a shining example of human freedom to the world requires an almost total avoidance of the relevant facts.

From Drudge:

House and Senate move to set rules for states that would turn driver’s license into a national ID card…. Developing….

That should end what little remains of state sovereignty, not that much of it was left anyhow. So, yes, in answer to all that have asked, I’d certainly prefer the unavoidable idiocies of a pure democracy over the new federal feudalism that is being forced upon us by the globalist aristocracy.

This isn’t conspiracy theory, it’s right out in the open. In fact, it’s been predicted for more than 2,000 years. You didn’t seriously think world government was going to happen by itself, did you?

One of these days, everyone who has mocked the United Nations as a harmless debate club is going to be very, very shocked when they learn that UN law has supplanted US law. The English have already learned this with the European Union and it hasn’t upset them unduly. Unfortunately, most Americans will just shrug and assume that’s the way it’s supposed to be.

Slashdot collects reports of a new superchimp:

Shelly Williams, a U.S. primatologist affiliated with the Jane Goodall Institute in Maryland, captured the apes on video in 2002 with the help of local people and was once briefly confronted by a group of four of them in dense forest. This, along with other evidence, makes her think that there is a chance the animals could be a new species of great primate — in other words, an undiscovered genetic relative of humans.

Other possibilities are that it is gorilla-chimp hybrid, or a new sub-species of chimp that would be 50 percent bigger than its largest cousins. Anecdotal evidence about the unusual apes dates back to photos taken by European hunters in 1898, when the region was the Belgian Congo.

The trail was then picked up in 1996 by Karl Ammann, a Kenyan-based Swiss photographer, who was intrigued by local tales that the forests were inhabited by large ferocious apes that could kill lions.

The best part about Slashdot, however, is always the comments. “I for one welcome our new hitherto unknown giant congolese ape overlords.” Damn dirty apes! Where’s Mr. Heston when we need him?

As vociferous as my opposition to the Bush administration is, even the supporters of the Kerry campaign give me the willies. I watched about two minutes of Forbes on Fox, and this little androgynous quasi-male was lying so badly about how Kerry and Edwards would take on the trial lawyers that he couldn’t even look at the camera. Not only that, but he went out of his way to sneak in a reference to Halliburton, which just sounded desparate and stupid in the context of the conversation.

Talking points are good, but not when you are completely ignoring the subject at hand when asked a direct question. Combining that behavior with a visually disturbing sexual persona makes you wonder who on Earth wanted to put this little lump on television.

Nobody wants to see that. Nobody.

By the way, one reason that the media is blacking out Badnarik’s campaign is because he does not pay his Federal income tax. One writer on NRO’s Corner wondered why Badnarik’s failure to file hasn’t been hammered on by the press; it’s because allowing a man who teaches classes on the Constitution to speak publicly on the subject would demolish the grand charade. Just to give one example, if you file a Freedom of Information Act request to get your IRS Master File and have it decoded, you’ll find that you are classified as a corporation engaged in taxable activity.

For example, one acquaintance of mine just learned to his surprise that he is, according to the IRS records, a corporation manufacturing trucks for export.

Nate nearly blows a gasket:

Hey, I thought you didn’t advocate democracy, much less digital anarchy…. What in the blue Hell were you thinking when wrote that? For crying out loud, one may be a good thing but the latter is Abomination!

Like Nate, I don’t have much regard for democracy. But I never miss an opportunity to hammer it into people’s heads that what we have in the United States, (and what we are exporting to the Middle East), does not even come close to approximating genuine democracy.

Second, if constitutional republicanism with limited suffrage is not an option, I’d prefer pure democracy over the current charade, that is neither constitutional republicanism nor democracy but claims to be both simultaneously.

This brings us to what we might consider modern literature and two of the earliest exponents of early romance or fantasy are H. Rider Haggard and William Morris* who both developed the template for quest fantasy as we are familiar with it today. William Morris’ fantasies owe something to Malory and medieval romance and Lin Carter calls The Wood Beyond the World (1894) with its sea voyage to a magical kingdom “the first great fantasy novel ever written”. However, Morris’ magnum opus is The Well At the World’s End (1896), which clearly influenced Tolkien. This novel is set in a completely imaginary world and tells of a prince’s quest to find the fountain of youth.

Morris defined what we now know as genre fantasy. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom sequence, begun in 1912, started the heroic fantasy genre that was continued by Robert E. Howard in Conan the Conqueror (1935) whose hero was violent and barbaric. Far more mannered was The King of Elfland’s Daughter by Lord Dunsany (1924) which was a direct descendent of William Morris and an inspiration to both E.R. Eddison and J.R.R. Tolkien.

One thing I always find interesting is how George MacDonald always goes unmentioned when it comes to discussions of modern fantasy literature. His first fantasy novel, Phantastes, was published in 1858, long before William Morris or Lord Dunsany, and his work was a far greater influence on seminal fantasy writers CS Lewis and JRR Tolkein than either Morris or Dunsany. In fact, the beginning of The Princess and the Goblin will be almost disturbingly familiar to anyone who has read The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, as it involves a little girl wandering around a large house….

MacDonald clearly deserves far more credit than he is given, as he was publishing long before Jules Verne had first seen print and before HG Wells was even born. The fact that he was a minister and a prolific author of sermons may be one reason that the notoriously secular writers of fantasy are somewhat reluctant to recognize that their genre was first created by Christians.

*Morris was clearly familiar with MacDonald; he later acquired MacDonald’s house and lived there.