LONDON–Of 3,000 viewers of UKTV Gold television surveyed, a quarter believe Winston Churchill was mythological and almost half thought the same of King Richard the Lionheart. More than that believed Sherlock Holmes was a real man.

At least, that’s what they told the pollsters. I confess, if someone called me to ask whether I thought various people were fiction or non, I might start making up all kinds of answers. But if they had a camera in my face, I’d probably answer as truthfully as I could.

Having read Bryan Appleyard’s praise, perhaps mockingly, of Obama, linked from Books, Inq., I feel compelled to link to this fascinating video linked from the American Spectator. Obama, along with many artists, call us to hope for undefined change and say “Yes, we can.” I wouldn’t say, as the blogger John Tabin says, that the video is creepy, but it is remarkably vapid. This rhetoric of empowerment regardless of policy or character has failed many American voters and their communities for decades.

Let me close by quoting a more famous Democrat than the one above, one who at least got the idea right, if not some of the actions:

In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility–I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it–and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.

And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you–ask what you can do for your country.

My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.

Finally, whether you are citizens of America or citizens of the world, ask of us here the same high standards of strength and sacrifice which we ask of you. With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.

Some people at Woolworths, a British retail chain, thought a good name for “a whitewashed wooden bed with pull-out desk and cupboard intended for girls aged about six” would be Lolita.

“What seems to have happened is the staff who run the website had never heard of Lolita, and to be honest no one else here had either,” a spokesman told British newspapers, according to Reuters.

Next up, a line of girls clothes called Maggie’s Street. After that, maybe a line of cutting tools under the name Raskolnikov. More positively, perhaps they could sell a line of kites called Hassan’s.

Researchers argue that less than 1% of “green marketing” claims are true or not misleading. From the report, “State of Green Business 2008”:

Consumers’ skepticism was given credence in a report on “the six sins of greenwashing,” which found that the overwhelming majority of environmental marketing claims in North America are inaccurate, inappropriate, or unsubstantiated. After examining 1,018 consumer products bearing 1,753 environmental claims, researchers concluded that all but one made claims that are either “demonstrably false or that risk misleading intended audiences.”

(I’m gunning for most obvious headline of the year with this post. But what am I doing posting on environmental propaganda? I think some other bloggers are influencing me. Tsk, tsk.)

Cold today, but merely cold. Nature did not add insult to injury, and for that I’m quiveringly grateful. Thank you, Master! Thank you for torturing me less!



If I were a leftist, my heart would go pitty-pat over this story (by way of the Thinklings). The guy who ran CleanFlix, a now-defunct service that served up sanitized versions of movies for family viewing, turns out to have been a p*rn merchant, and has been arrested for sex with underage girls.

The story doesn’t say whether he made any claim to be a Christian. And I’m not sure what the moral is—never do business with anybody until you’ve had a private investigator follow him around for a month? I remember an anecdote I read years ago, written by a guy who’d worked for a p*rn magazine. He once asked his boss, “What’ll I do with all these letters telling us we’re going to Hell?” And the boss replied, “Keep ‘em. Maybe we can sell them Bibles someday.”

But it’s a black eye for the pro-family movement, fairly or not. At least it’ll be spun that way.

Over at City Journal, Andrew Klavan has posted this tremendous, magisterial essay on the evolution of war films in American culture. You’ll want to take time and read this.



I’m going to stray into politics now, which I try to avoid within these precincts. However, I won’t be hyping any candidate, as you’ll see.

This morning I was listening to Laura Ingraham, as I generally do at work. She was criticizing some things fellow talker Michael Medved had said on one of the TV news channels last night.

“Now he’s saying,” said Laura, “that all the rest of us in talk radio are liberals!”

As proof she played a clip from the interview. In the clip, Medved said, not that the other talk show hosts (who generally oppose the candidacy of Sen. John McCain, whom he supports) were liberals, but that they were “thinking like liberals,” because they were (in his opinion) responding to McCain on an emotional rather than a rational level.

Laura apparently didn’t notice that her own response in fact demonstrated Medved’s point. She was making an emotional response to something she imagined Medved had said, rather than paying attention to his actual words and responding to them in a reasoned manner.

By the way, I’m not a McCain supporter. I admire the heck out of him for his Vietnam War service, and I respect his devotion to his principles. I’m just not sure what all of those principles are.

But conservatives ought to engage in reasoned, civilized discussion. Let’s leave the theatrical outrage over imagined insults to the other side.

I haven’t seen snow like this except on a screen, much less the sleds they are using.

“By day the Lord commands his steadfast love, and at night his song is with me, a prayer to the God of my life.” (from Psalm 42 ESV)

My hair’s getting kind of long. It’s below my collar, and probably longer than is strictly suitable for a Bible school librarian. I take it as a sign of great sophistication around work that nobody’s brought it to my attention yet.

I intend to get it cut next week. But this weekend we have the annual Viking Feast of the Viking Age Club & Society, so I figure I’ll keep it long until then.

Also it helps keep me warm.

I’ve worn my hair longer than not most of my life, and have continued to do so even though fashion has long since passed me by. My motivations, so far as I can discern them, are historical. Continue reading I meditate on the length of my hair →

I wonder how many people hold politically conservative values but shy away from labeling themselves conservative due to the baggage they associate with the term. I wonder how many people hold these values while voting for political leaders who oppose them. I know voters are individuals, voting and abstaining for good and bad reasons, but I think part of the blame for this disparity falls on those of us who call ourselves conservative. We have not communicated well enough, or as Bertie Wooster might say, we’ve flubbed it before giving it a good go. Ok, he wouldn’t say that, but you get the idea. Don’t you? Nevermind.

On Monday, we honor Martin Luther King, Jr., and columnist Jackie Gingrich Cushman writes about the typical ideas associated with the day, but I have another idea. I think King’s words are apt for today’s conservatives.

“For many years we have shown an amazing patience,” King said, and I think conservatives have shown a good bit of patience as well. We have, as King went on, sometimes given our American brothers in government and elsewhere “the feeling that we liked the way we were being treated.” But today I say we need to be “saved from that patience that makes us patient with anything less than freedom and justice.”

Freedom and justice are what conservatives promote. We want nothing less for our American brothers than life, liberty, and opportunities to pursue happiness. I tend to think we have been too patient in our attempts to be understood—-patient and a bit wrong-headed.

Conservatives don’t want to cut government spending. We want to keep bureaucracy from hamstringing your freedom.

Conservatives don’t want to cut taxes. We want you to keep as much of your hard-earned paycheck as possible. We also don’t want to punish you for succeeding in business or saving over the years by taxing you unfairly.

We don’t want to throw out immigrants who are trying to make a new life for themselves in our country. We want a stable process for welcoming immigrants into our country.

And we don’t want to deny women healthcare choices. We defend the lives and freedoms of every man and woman from conception to old age.

Conservatives champion loving our neighbor as we would ourselves, which includes defending the helpless and helping the poor and orphaned, but here’s the rub between us and liberals; Continue reading Conservatives Have Been Too Patient →

Alisha Harris of World blogs on a law firm that has asked the IRS to scrutinize one of the firm’s clients, a pastor who delivered a political sermon. Harris writes that the firm, The Becket Fund, “maintains that a pastor should even be able to endorse or condemn certain candidates from the pulpit, as long as he is speaking privately to his congregation.” The tricky IRS code has only been on the books since 1954. One of the Becket Fund lawyers said, “For a hundred and seventy odd years of our history, people were allowed to speak freely without fear of losing any tax exemption and our country was not turned into a theocracy because of it, not even close.”

I agree. I don’t know what problems must be overcome in our current tax code, but I don’t understand why pastors or non-profit organization leaders must mussel themselves on specific political issues or people. People should be able to talk openly about anything, especially government.