Courtesy of Galley Brother B.J.–a list of things one fellow would do if he was elected Evil Overlord:

#8 After I kidnap the beautiful princess, we will be married immediately in a quiet civil ceremony, not a lavish spectacle in three weeks’ time during which the final phase of my plan will be carried out.

#17 When I employ people as advisors, I will occasionally listen to their advice.

#23 I will keep a special cache of low-tech weapons and train my troops in their use. That way — even if the heroes manage to neutralize my power generator and/or render the standard-issue energy weapons useless — my troops will not be overrun by a handful of savages armed with spears and rocks.

#26 No matter how attractive certain members of the rebellion are, there is probably someone just as attractive who is not desperate to kill me. Therefore, I will think twice before ordering a prisoner sent to my bedchamber.

#44 I will only employ bounty hunters who work for money. Those who work for the pleasure of the hunt tend to do dumb things like even the odds to give the other guy a sporting chance.

#48 I will treat any beast which I control through magic or technology with respect and kindness. Thus if the control is ever broken, it will not immediately come after me for revenge.

#52 I will hire a team of board-certified architects and surveyors to examine my castle and inform me of any secret passages and abandoned tunnels that I might not know about.

#90 I will not design my Main Control Room so that every workstation is facing away from the door.

#98 # If an attractive young couple enters my realm, I will carefully monitor their activities. If I find they are happy and affectionate, I will ignore them. However if circumstance have forced them together against their will and they spend all their time bickering and criticizing each other except during the intermittent occasions when they are saving each others’ lives at which point there are hints of sexual tension, I will immediately order their execution.

Wretchard makes an interesting point about the consequences of blogs:

Internet self-publishing (blogs) have introduced a genuine element of volatility into the political system. Anyone who watched the Terri Schiavo meme unfold would have noticed how it could take unexpected turns, almost like a live and squirming thing. Indeed, some have argued that the Schiavo story damaged President Bush and the Republican Party. However that may be, it should be clear that Internet memes do not behave like ad campaigns. They are far more uncontrollable and dangerous than the public relations objects of yesteryear. There is a certain irony in the fact that the Gomery inquiry is dealing with a corrupt public relations ad campaign (Adscam) costing hundreds of millions of dollars that is now being done to death by a blog costing several hundred dollars. That fact alone and what is implied by it should give pause.

My own view is that as the world becomes more dependent on information, the cost of purposely maintaining error grows ever higher. It is becoming too expensive to maintain an elaborate lie. The effort necessary to maintain apparent consistency with verifiable information simply grows to high too be worth it. Any database professional knows that the principal strategic danger to information assets is not a physical crash; there are recovery strategies to deal with that. The strategic danger is bad data. A company can recover from a server crash in a few hours; but it can never recover from persistently inaccurate information about its own operations. No information professionals except politicians will knowingly admit self-deception into their sanctum. And the Internet will make them pay the price for that.

Worth thinking about.

Mark Steyn gets the secular media’s misunderstanding of the Pope:

the Guardian thought Karol Wojtyla was “a doctrinaire, authoritarian pontiff”. That “doctrinaire” at least suggests the inflexible authoritarian derived his inflexibility from some ancient operating manual – he was dogmatic about his dogma – unlike the New York Times and the Washington Post, which came close to implying that John Paul II had taken against abortion and gay marriage off the top of his head, principally to irk “liberal Catholics”. The assumption is always that there’s some middle ground that a less “doctrinaire” pope might have staked out: he might have supported abortion in the first trimester, say, or reciprocal partner benefits for gays in committed relationships.

My dear friend and travel writer Kathy McCabe now has a weblog entitled dreamofitaly.blogspot.com. It makes for a terrific addition to her newsletter “Dream of Italy: The Insider’s Guide to Undiscovered Italy.” (Her subscription-based newsletter comes highly recommended by such authorities as National Geographic Traveler, USA Today, and others.) But for those of you who are contemplating making a pilgrimage to Rome for the funeral of John Paul II, you will especially not want to miss this weblog, with its up-to-date information on transportation and accommodations in the Eternal City. Check it out!

Charles Johnson notes an interesting happening in San Francisco: The city board of supervisors has voted to force bloggers to register with the city’s Ethics Commission. And pay a registration fee, too!

David Adesnik has a fabulous post on the documentary Super Size Me, BoBo morality, and the plight of the lumpenbuergertum.

You should read it in its entirety, but here’s a taste:

Brooks identifies the SUV as the ultimate Bobo vehicle because of its pseudo-ruggedness, but I think he’d now agree that the smart set has come to regard SUV’s as a guilty pleasure. Someday, it will loath them as it does McDonald’s.

Scott Johnson delivers another body blow to the Republican “talking points memo” on Terri Schiavo. This story keeps getting worse for the Post and ABC.

George Weigel on Wojtyla in the Wall Street Journal. Not to be missed:

Some will dismiss him as hopelessly “conservative” in matters of doctrine and morals, although it is not clear how religious and moral truth can be parsed in liberal/conservative terms. The shadows cast upon his papacy by clerical scandal and the misgovernance of some bishops will focus others’ attention. John Paul II was the most visible human being in history, having been seen live by more men and women than any other man who ever lived; the remarkable thing is that millions of those people, who saw him only at a great distance, will think they have lost a friend. Those who knew him more intimately experience today a profound sense of personal loss at the death of a man who was so wonderfully, thoroughly, engagingly human–a man of intelligence and wit and courage whose humanity breathed integrity and sanctity.

So there are many ways of remembering and mourning him. Pope John Paul II should also be remembered, however, as a man with a penetrating insight into the currents that flow beneath the surface of history, currents that in fact create history, often in surprising ways.

In a 1968 letter to the French Jesuit theologian, Henri de Lubac, then-Cardinal Karol Wojtyla suggested that “a degradation, indeed a pulverization, of the fundamental uniqueness of each human person” was at the root of the 20th century’s grim record: two World Wars, Auschwitz and the Gulag, a Cold War threatening global disaster, oceans of blood and mountains of corpses. How had a century begun with such high hopes for the human future produced mankind’s greatest catastrophes? Because, Karol Wojtyla proposed, Western humanism had gone off the rails, collapsing into forms of self-absorption, and then self-doubt, so severe that men and women had begun to wonder whether there was any truth at all to be found in the world, or in themselves.

This profound crisis of culture, this crisis in the very idea of the human, had manifested itself in the serial crises that had marched across the surface of contemporary history, leaving carnage in their wake. But unlike some truly “conservative” critics of late modernity, Wojtyla’s counter-proposal was not rollback: rather, it was a truer, nobler humanism, built on the foundation of the biblical conviction that God had made the human creature in His image and likeness, with intelligence and free will, a creature capable of knowing the good and freely choosing it. That, John Paul II insisted in a vast number of variations on one great theme, was the true measure of man–the human capacity, in cooperation with God’s grace, for heroic virtue.