How can we possibly be so cruel as to lock people up for life.

That's a good point but it's really an argument against the corrupt prosecutorial practices than against the death penalty.Prosecutorial practices in America are a scandal. Conrad Black has written powerfully on this

Avatar ie Dances With Smurfs was one of the worst films I have ever seen. 2001 was one of the best, but so unlike other films that a different scale of values must be used to judge it. Like a lot of great films, it is uneven, I grant you. It will live forever. The appalling Avatar is half forgotten already.

Kathryn jean Lopez and her endless endless harping on this have made me stop reading the once great National Review. Basically you could stop abortions if you had a police state, and even then you'd have backstreet ones. That is all there is to it. If people seeking a ban put a tithe of the money energy and passion they put into lobbying, into looking after girls and women and adopting babies, there would be very few abortions. And NOW, Please, can we get in with saving the world from Obama. Or do you insist on returning to this endless useless pointless waste of time?

Nor at the medium to lively frat houses.

"Ponderous" was the all-time greatest surrealist/novelty song.

Richard Epstein! Peter Robinson! Long and Lileks, too. Many more.

Not exactly a state funeral, like Churchill's. but it's near enough.most especially, the Queen doesn't go to non family funerals by protocol but she made an exception for in 1965. This is her other exception.

Let's wait a moment here guys. I loathe the group-rights, grievance-mongera as much as anyone, but in rare cases profound sex confusion does exist. It's no whim and seems to arise naturally, with no "nurture" causes at all, let alone brainwashing. So cool it.

Just, uh say, just, a cottonpickin minute!

Women in  or anywhere near combat is an evil idea. I read in  in George Macdonald Fraser's recent "Light On At Signpost" its wholesale refutation -- I might almost say its utter destruction and damnation. This work of cultural hygiene is achieved wholly by rationale argument, buttressed by evidence, with the authority of personal experience of total war. 

GMF was a writer of histories, romances, movies, sometime deputy editor of a great newspaper, the Glasgow Herald. He served as a soldier in the 14th Army that ejected the Japanese from Burma in the second world war, and as an officer in the Gordon Highlanders in Palestine (as then it was) and Egypt after the war. 

He knew what he was talking about. 

Personally I enjoyed Fred's question. It was that question that made me think at all about the nature of divine authority. 
Mightn't be axiomatic though. It could be held to follow from perfect wisdom and goodness.
In CS Lewis's Voyage to Venus, the character Dr Ransom, (confronted by Professor Weston with the idea that God's authority is based on his spiritual nature and it's purity), counters. "We worship him because he is wise and good, not because he is a pure spirit."
In some essay or other CSL performs the thought experiment "If per impossibile God's had no power, His perfect goodness by itself would entitle Him to exactly the same obedience we owe Him now." 
[Quotes from memory, and probably not quite exact.]
And Severely: be nice to Fred. 

Easily, Monty Python and the Holy Grail had the most disappointing ending of any film I've seen.

The makers themselves seem to have come to see it as a disappointment. Their next film, The Life of Brian, makes damn sure it finishes big. Several jokes come one after the other, each resolving a subplot, and then there is the big number, Always Look on the Bright Side Of Life, musically very strong, and a lovely twist on the traditional "pep-up" number that was a tradition feature of the musical. 

Holy Grail was perhaps funnier, but badly let down by the ending. 

Everybody: read T.A. Shippey's Road To Middle-earth.  This is brief but covers most of the problems of the critical reception of LOTR, the Hobbit, and The Silmarillion. I came away realising what Tolkien's work is: an Epic, but written for people who are used to reading novels; by itself sufficient explanation of  supposed lack of women.

Also  JRRT, born in 1892, lived at a time and entered a profession and class where a man could have little to do with women, to an extent that simply does not occur today.  School, university, the army, the Western Front, university. All male, and this was not Tolkien's fault. 

In addition, Tolkien was an orphan, raised largely by the monks of Birmingham Oratory. He had one brother.

The importance of the Great War can't be overstated as a factor in his generation's development. Those who served in it often had their deepest ties with others like them; it was an all male fellowship. Even the immediately following "just too young" generation (thing Orwell, Evelyn Waugh) were cut off from them, emotionally and in other ways, and this breach was noticed and mourned over on both sides.

Here's a part of GK Chesterton poem The Secret People. This part deals not with Atheists per se, but with what has since GKC's time become known as the New Class.
They have given us over into the hands of new unhappy lords,
Lords without anger or honour, who dare not carry their swords.
The fight by shuffling paper, they have bright dead alien eyes,
And they look on our love and laughter as a tired man looks at flies,
And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs.
Their doors are closed in the evenings, and they know no songs.

A good manager can demonstrate that some jobs are more fun, even easier, to do well than to do badly. 

Is this a lost art?