While I am not generally a fan of fantasy or science fiction, I am a fan of good stories, guns and smart humor. The author of the book, Larry Correia, is a competitive shooter and gun dealer. Consequently, he demonstrates a solid knowledge of firearms throughout the novel. However, he never bogs down the story with a Tom Clanyesque exploration of minute technical details.

The story is funny, action packed, with characters that are colorful and entertaining. There is even a conservative/libertarian limited government vibe that runs through the story. MHI has a shaky relationship with federal regulatory agencies and law enforcement. In short, whether you like fantasy/scifi or not, Monster Hunter International is a book I can’t recommend highly enough. I literally could not put the book down and I am absolutely pregnant with anticipation over the sequel.

Speaking of monsters, check out this great song from Skillet, a Christian rock band.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I would pretty much define the ultimate in bad publicity as a headline on Drudge reading, “Devil at Work in the Vatican.”  That’s certainly going to feed the untiring Vatican conspiracy mongers, of whom there is never a shortage.

The story, based on the comments of the Vatican’s chief exorcist, is itself unremarkable.  Fr. Amorth points to the abuse scandals and heterodoxy, which are certainly a sign of spiritual disorder, but one would have to expect the devil to be at work in the best of times.  He was with Christ in the wilderness, so he will certainly be with the Pope in the Vatican (plus, the food’s better in Rome).

Btw, I’m off to the wilds of Pennsylvania for a few days.  See you next week.

Mike Stivic, a.k.a. Meathead, the liberal graduate student in All in the Family, reflected society’s belief in the cultural superiority of youth, but he was a leading indicator of something else: He lived in his father-in-law Archie Bunker’s home. What are today’s “basement boys” doing down there? Perhaps watching Friends and Seinfeld reruns about a culture of extended youth utterly unlike the world of young adults in previous generations.

And . . .

Although Cross, an aging academic boomer, was a student leftist, he believes that 1960s radicalism became “a retreat into childish tantrums” symptomatic “of how permissive parents infantilized the boomer generation.” And the boomers’ children? Consider the television commercials for the restaurant chain called Dave & Buster’s, which seems to be, ironically, a Chuck E. Cheese’s for adults—a place for young adults, especially men, to drink beer and play electronic games and exemplify youth not as a stage of life but as a perpetual refuge from adulthood.

As I sometimes try to drive home this point to other young men with whom I’m attempting to mentor, I’ll ask them to try this:

“Picture, in your mind, your ideal representation of the manly hero – a George Washington, a Robert E. Lee, a George Patton, a Douglas MacArthur – and then try to picture them sitting in front of the TV in baggy shorts, an earring, a wine cooler watching Friends and reacting to something by saying Dude! What’s wrong with that picture? Now, ask yourself: How do you want to be thought of?”

Not all readers will understand my point. I hope most of you over 40 will.

You can read the rest of Will’s piece here.

“Help us tell the real story. Your story. Right now. Congress needs to hear from women who have experienced wanted pregnancies where there was a sever health risk to the fetus, causing the women to choose abortion…. This is just the type of real and compelling story to illustrate how an abortion ban would affect women all over America.”

I have 305,310 compelling abortion stories; each is the story of a child killed by a Planned Parenthood abortion in 2007.

Everyone is aware that people suffer. Planned Parenthood and other pro-aborts are hardly tilling new soil there.  But the idea that alleviating suffering justifies the killing of another is untenable. The case of R v. Dudley and Stephens has some great language for this discussion. The case involved murder charges against survivors of a shipwreck who, after supposedly casting lots, ate the cabin boy who was a fellow castaway in the lifeboat. When reading the case for criminal law, I was struck by the following language, which is an great response to the “hard cases” in bioethics (emphasis mine):

It must not be supposed that in refusing to admit temptation to be an excuse for crime it is forgotten how terrible the temptation was; how awful the suffering; how hard in such trials to keep the judgment straight and the conduct pure. We are often compelled to set up standards we cannot reach ourselves, and to lay down rules which we could not ourselves satisfy. But a man has no right to declare temptation to be an excuse, though he might himself have yielded to it, nor allow compassion for the criminal to change or weaken in any manner the legal definition of the crime.

And that’s not the only problem at Justice. More, including internal links, here.

It was Pickett’s Charge of the Confederates at Gettysburg in 1863, a horrendous, bloody carnage that could have been avoided, had not their commander, Gen. Robert E. Lee, been so determined to do it his way — a massed frontal assault against a nearly impregnable position.

It is to just such a political Pickett’s Charge that President Obama now summons congressional Democrats on behalf of his health care reform proposal, a last desperate gamble to overcome a sturdy, strengthening line of Republican opposition reinforced beyond measure in recent months by the knowledge they stand with a solid majority of their countrymen. Obama and Democratic brigade commanders Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi know there will be terrible casualties among their troops come November, but still they urge them on, to sacrifice their jobs, careers and political futures for … 2,700 pages of new bureaucratic rules, mandates, directives and edicts that will surely destroy the finest health care system in the world.

So this would make Obama General Lee?  He’s gotta love that.  Teddy Kennedy, I suppose, would be the fallen Stonewall Jackson, who might have turned the tide had he not died before the decisive battle.  Harry Reid has the ponderous ego and glacial reactions of Longstreet.  Nancy Pelosi will have to serve as the fashionable, jetsetting Jeb Stuart (unfortunately, she’s not absent from the scene in the early stages).

Let’s get a regiment over to hold Little Round Top, the key to the whole battlefield.  I nominate Paul Ryan for the role of Chamberlain.

This whole Union thing is going to take some getting used to, but there’s something to be said for it.  Overwhelming numbers, a heady dose of moral superiority, imputed innocence.

How about Billy Yank as the new Ole Miss mascot?

Poor Ole Miss, They just can’t handle a decision of this magnitude.

Hat tip to Ace of Spades.

Well, this is interesting.  Maker’s Mark has decided to do a limited edition bottle in UK blue featuring the mug of John Calipari. Proceeds will go to benefit a UK music outreach program, which makes sense given that bourbon helps one to endure the average symphony program these days.

I do hope Maker’s realizes that they will have to forfeit credit for the sales after Calipari leaves UK on probation.  (I kid, I kid.)