I came across this photo, which I like very much:

Well, I guess that I don’t like the photo all that much, but I certainly like the captions.

Two facts should stand out when considering the Second Amendment. First: it is not a grant of a right. The government does not create rights. Instead, it is a prohibition against the federal government infringing on a right that already exists. Second: the purpose of an armed citizenry was to make government tyranny impossible. Our right to guns is not based on the need to protect ourselves from local punks, it is based on our right to be free from government tyranny.

Jefferson said “The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time. The hand of force [he meant government] may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.” Rights come from God and they are intact even when government uses force to deny the free exercise of those rights. The right to keep and bear arms is one of those rights.

I grew up in Houston, Texas. It only snowed once every six years or so, and that snow would melt within a day. This makes me sensitive to people who’ve never seen snow and how it can paralyze a city. Therefore I submit this photo, shot from my front yard.

We lived through the snow and ice.

Eight degrees is nothing to sneeze at; but I successfully avoided all frozen pipe calls, kept my old truck running, escaped the ditches and oncoming cars that awaited me on every side of the slick streets, and kept the fireplace at home stoked and radiating. And the crisis passed.

Now, one week later, it’s 70 degrees in Memphis and the forecast says it will continue for several days.

Eat your heart out, Indiana.

And what does a Fundamentalist get his son for Christmas? Here is Wesley with his new T-shirt and Taurus PT-132 semiauto:

We had a great day at the Barley household this fine Christmas. I was going to go to work, but The Voices said to stay home and clean the guns. So we’re doing our part to spread the message of the angels: “Peace through Superior Firepower.”

Yes, we Barleys live in a world where “gun control” means hitting your target. The Kingdom of God will be a time of universal peace. This isn’t it. In a fallen world such as ours, thugs need more than a smile and an assurance of unconditional positive regard. They need the fear that comes from knowing that their prey might be armed. And if they guess wrongly and attack us, we hope to assist the city of Memphis in its beautification program by eliminating a little of the trash at no charge to the taxpayers.

And should you dislike the idea of shooting an attacker dead, I suggest that, in the event that you happen to be attacked yourself, that you call out for a social worker to counsel the poor, disadvantaged punk who’s about to feed upon you. If that doesn’t work, maybe you should hope like heck that there’s a trained handgunner nearby.

In the final analysis, we are the richest and most free nation on earth because our military forces defeated those who would have enslaved us. People in hellholes across the third world work hard and live carefully, but they still don’t enjoy blessings such as ours. Other people, such as their government or bandits, make it impossible for them to flourish and grow rich.

We are a free people only because other people, evil people, cannot overpower us and steal what we have produced. Such people are out there. Make no mistake, they’re there. The newspaper is filled with stories of such people. The primary restraint against them is firepower.

I have my health and my family. There are a number of millionaires who’d gladly trade places with me, because I’m richer than they. But I can continue to be rich only if evil men are restrained by the fear of deadly force. God bless our military, and God bless all the responsible gun owners who stand ready to defend themselves and their families this Christmastide.

A big ol’ storm has paralyzed the midwest, and Memphis isn’t doing so well, either. When I crawled under a house yesterday morning, everything was fine. When I emerged some hours later, the city was covered with sleet, with more coming down all the time. By the time I set out for home (a fifteen-minute drive under ordinary conditions), it was dark and just at the time when rush hour is worst. It took an hour and a half to get home. Nobody was driving over 20 mph, and most of the time, when we were moving at all, we were going about 5 mph. All of the streets were packed with bumper-to-bumper traffic, as the Interstates were impassible.

Thus it is in the South. We don’t know how to drive in ice and snow, and it just doesn’t pay to spend hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars preparing for a storm that might occur once every three or four years. We have no snowplows, very little salt and sand, and apparently a governmental workforce that isn’t too enthusiastic about getting overtime hours.

Today the roads were iced over. You could drive 40 mph, but you couldn’t stop! So folks were still creeping along like a snail on his way to see his mother-in-law. Combine that with a backlog of plumbing jobs I had to get to and you can imagine why I see little attraction in the song “It’s the *most* wonderful tiiime of the year.”

Ah, remember the halcyon days of working for a plumbing company. I put in for my vacation months in advance; I broke it up so that the days would adjoin my regular days off. I’d put another log on the fire, put my feet up, and let the Company fend for themselves. Christmas was a great time.

Now I can no longer tell the Company to go jump in the lake. I am the company. So I fight the single-digit weather and the icy streets, solving one problem after another, because folks rely on me and turning them down would be the equivalent of throwing them to the wolves.

But it’s still too doggone cold.

Here’s a great video that everyone should view.

These are the words to “Homeward Bound,” the song playing in the background:

In the quiet misty morning when the moon has gone to bed,
When the sparrows stop their singing and the sky is clear and red.
When the summer’s ceased its gleaming, when the corn is past its prime,
When adventure’s lost its meaning, I’ll be homeward bound in time.

Bind me not to the pasture, chain me not to the plow.
Set me free to find my calling and I’ll return to you somehow.

If you find it’s me you’re missing, if you’re hoping I’ll return,
To your thoughts I’ll soon be list’ning, and in the road I’ll stop and turn.
Then the wind will set me racing as my journey nears its end,
And the path I’ll be retracing when I’m homeward bound again.Bind me not to the pasture, chain me not to the plow.
Set me free to find my calling and I’ll return to you somehow.

Rhodesia, once the breadbasket of sub-Saharan Africa, has become Zimbabwe, an economic and political basket case. I just learned from a contact in South Africa that Air Zimbabwe is going bankrupt and will soon close. They can’t get enough passengers. It seems that Zimbabweans are now so thin, they can be faxed to their destinations.

Joe Blundo, of the Columbus Dispatch, wrote a fine column on Nov. 24. Unfortunately it is not available on the newspaper’s web site, so I’m reproducing it here. If they sue me, I’ll take it down.

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The flood of American liberals sneaking across the border into Canada has intensified in the past week, sparking calls for increased patrols to stop the illegal immigration. The re-election of President Bush is prompting the exodus among left leaning citizens who fear they’ll soon be required to hunt, pray, and agree with Bill O’Reilly. Canadian border farmers say it’s not uncommon to see dozens of sociology professors, animal rights activists, and Unitarians crossing their fields at night.

“I went out to milk the cows the other day, and there was a Hollywood producer huddled in the barn,” said Manitoba farmer Red Greenfield, whose acreage borders North Dakota. The producer was cold, exhausted, and hungry. He asked me if I could spare a latte and some free-range chicken. When I said I didn’t have any, he left. Didn’t even get a chance to show him my screenplay, eh?”

In an effort to stop the illegal aliens, Greenfield erected higher fences, but the liberals scaled them. So he tried installing speakers that blare Rush Limbaugh across the fields. “Not real effective,” he said. “The liberals still got through, and Rush annoyed the cows so much they wouldn’t give milk.”

Officials are particularly concerned about smugglers who meet liberals near the Canadian border, pack them into Volvo station wagons, drive them across the border, and leave them to fend for themselves. “A lot of these people are not prepared for rugged conditions,” an Ontario border patrolman said. “I found one carload without a drop of drinking water. They did have a nice little Napa Valley cabernet, though.”

When liberals are caught, they’re sent back across the border, often wailing loudly that they fear retribution from conservatives. Rumors have been circulating about the Bush administration establishing re-education camps in which liberals will be forced to drink domestic beer and watch NASCAR.

In the days since the election, liberals have turned to sometimes ingenious ways of crossing the border. Some have taken to posing as senior citizens on bus trips to buy cheap Canadian prescription drugs. After catching a half-dozen young vegans disguised in powdered wigs, Canadian immigration authorities began stopping buses and quizzing the supposed senior-citizen passengers. “If they can’t identify the accordion player on The Lawrence Welk Show, we get suspicious about their age,” an official said.

Canadian citizens have complained that the illegal immigrants are creating an organic broccoli shortage and renting all the good Susan Sarandon movies.

“I feel sorry for American liberals, but the Canadian economy just can’t support them,” an Ottawa resident said. “How many art-history majors does one country need?”

In an effort to ease tensions between the United States and Canada, Vice President Dick Cheney met with the Canadian ambassador and pledged that the administration would take steps to reassure liberals, a source close to Cheney said. “We’re going to have some Peter, Paul & Mary concerts. And we might put some endangered species on postage stamps. The president is determined to reach out.”

The International Chicken Sequencing Consortium reported today that they have sequenced and analyzed the genome of the chicken. If you don’t believe it, this cartoon, which is self-explanatory, will prove it:

This feat is supposed to help scientists in their study of human genetics, since 2.5% of the chicken’s genetics overlap with ours. But you already knew that we were like chickens. For instance, they have feet, so do we. They have a head, eyes, mouth, beating heart, etc., and so do we.

And why are we so much like chickens? According to International Chicken Sequencing Consortium, it’s because those genetic elements were preserved for 350 million years while we and the chickens were evolving from our common ancestor.

The family resemblance is unmistakable:

Col. Sanders, the cannibal, never realized this. He probably thought that God created the heaven and the earth and put the chickens here for us to fry. But, thanks to Darwin and the International Chicken Sequencing Consortium, we know better. The old view, that we’re supposed to eat fried chicken, is now called “speciesism.” It’s now considered wrong (by some of the more consistent thinkers within the leftist intellectual movement) to think that your species is better than another, or that you have a right to eat the other species.

Behold, Mr. Potato Head really is my brother!

One of the topics that arise during this season is “whom do we thank?” That wasn’t a problem in previous generations, but this is the twenty first century and you can’t stop progress; so the question looms large. It wouldn’t even arise if we weren’t inheritors of the Western Christian tradition, which gives us Christmas, Easter, and other nagging little vestigial organs that have to be redefined by the guardians of civil liberty.

One cute suggestion appeared on National Public Radio quite a few years ago. The commentator concluded “we thank ourselves!” Imagine that, a holiday to thank ourselves. I suppose that we could have a holiday to thank one another, but that seems to be what Christmas has become among the revisionists. No, that definition of Thanksgiving will never do.

Another popular choice is that we thank the Indians. Of course, since they weren’t from India, we really should be more accurate and refer to them as aborigines. The easy word was “natives,” but that conjures up the image of semi-naked, spear carrying savages–so we can’t use it any more. Anyway, some of the aborigines helped the Pilgrims, so the mythology behind this choice says that the Pilgrims owed their prosperity to them and threw them a multi-culti party.

The truth is, of course, that this is a holiday for thanking God the Father Almighty, maker of Heaven and Earth, “the God that hath made and preserved us a nation.” The Bible says that every good and perfect gift comes down from Him.

But not all of God’s gifts come directly from him. Many are delivered through secondary means. In the first years of the Pilgrim efforts here, they were devout worshippers of God, but nevertheless nearly died of starvation. God did not intervene on their behalf and provide food. Instead, he allowed them to consider, believe, and implement the system of private property taught in the Scriptures, which they had foolishly set aside in favor of a communistic system imposed by their colony’s sponsors in England. Under the communistic sysem, as reported in a diary,

the young men . . . did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense. The strong . . . had not more in division . . . than he that was weak and not able to do a quarter the other could; this was thought injustice. The aged and graver men to be ranked and equalized in labors and victuals, clothes, etc . . . thought it some indignity and disrespect unto them. And the men’s wives to be commanded to do service for other men, as dressing their meat, washing their clothes, etc., they deemed it a kind of slavery, neither could many husbands well brook it. . . . For this community of property (so far as it went) was found to breed much confusion and discontentment and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort.

They decided to adopt a free-enterprise system of society:

All their victuals were spent . . . no supply was heard of, neither knew they when they might expect any. So they began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery. At length . . . the Governor (with the advice of the chiefest among them) gave way that they should set corn every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust to themselves. . . . And so assigned to every family a parcel of land . . . . This had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means the Governor or any other could use, and saved him a great deal of trouble, and gave far better content. The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn, which before would allege weakness and inability, whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression.

The diary went on to say that there was never any food shortage once the private property system was implemented.

There’s a time to pray and there’s a time to act. Had they continued to languish in their socialistic lagoon, they would have prayed themselves into early graves. Freedom made the difference for this nation. May God help us to preserve and extend the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.