BARLEY SERVICES: no ordinary plumber

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.

Man bitten while trying to convert lions to Christ. I don’t think he got this from the Bible . . .

I predict that my fortune does not lie in political forecasting.

All of the experts thought that the race would be close; I did not. Is it stupid to disagree with the experts? Yes, most of the time, it is. It goes against my grain to say so, but it’s true. It sure was true last night.

We live in a time where it’s difficult to trust anyone. Not only is there the age-old tendency for people to lie in such a way as to serve their own agendas, but we now have the problem of people having to cover their backsides legally or professionally. Hypothetical example: suppose Asians outscore Caucasians on an intelligence test (which, so far as I know, they do). You simply cannot express an opinion that they are genetically superior. If you want to keep your status as an expert and retain whatever professional employment you have, you simply must attribute the high scores to something cultural, even if you believe the opposite of what you’re forced to say. Onlookers learn not to trust experts when they see that going on.

On election eve, 1980, I was selling encyclopedias for a living in Greenville, South Carolina. As I drove out to a home, I heard All Things Considered on NPR (National Public Radio). The reporter was interviewing an expert. “What’s going to happen tomorrow, Buzz?” The expert replied, “Beulah, it’s just too close to call.” Yeah, right. The next day Ronald Reagan won 489 electoral votes compared to Jimmy Carter’s 49.

What was that expert’s problem? I suspect, but cannot prove, that he was a ’70s lefty and simply couldn’t go on NPR and say Beulah, the nation has abandoned us wholesale and the election is over before it even begins tomorrow. That right-wing demagogue Reagan represents a huge majority of America now; he’ll win by a landslide. What’s worse, in a mere 24 hours the Republicans are gonna control of the Senate for the first time since 1955. I could just puke! No, integrity be danged, he was going to swallow hard, keep a straight face, and say what he had to in order to keep his standing: “It’s just too close to call.”

Well, I knew last night that the expert opinions had been against me. I also knew that, apparently, polling has become a fine art and the results are accurate. But I decided to bet it all on a long shot anyway. Kerry seemed like such a poor candidate, I expected the table to tilt Bush’s direction at the last hour and all of the dishes to come sliding his way.

Oh, well; hopefully it’s over now. I apologize to the thousands of readers whom I misled. And I send my condolences to Osama bin Bedsheet, holed up somewhere in Sandyland, scanning the horizon daily for the American messenger that’s going to usher him into the presence of Allah. So long, big guy. I know you tried.

It’s 6:42 as I write. I will again go on record as predicting a landslide for Bush. Currently all I’ve heard is that Georgia, Indiana, and some third state (Virginia?) had gone for Bush and Vermont had gone for Kerry (of course).

If I’m wrong, I’m wrong. Let’s see what happens.

The Bewhiskered One himself appeared on videotape this week urging Americans to elect John Kerry as president. Well, that wasn’t exactly what he said, but you get the point.

He uttered that Michael Moore nonsense about Bush continuing to listen to the children reading their book after he heard of the attacks, and had the gall to claim that those minutes enabled his goons to successfully finish their murders. People who know how leadership functions know that this claim is ludicrous.

Sammy also made the remark that Americans, four years later, still didn’t understand what it would take to make him quit murdering us. All we have to do is the opposite of what Bush has done.

It reminds me of junior high school when the bullies offered terms of surrender to those of us who were weak and wimpy. If we let the Muslims take over the world, impose Islamic law on us, and saw off the heads of whoever they think needs it, then they’ll not fly airplanes into our skyscrapers.

Sounds like a deal to me. Vote for Kerry!

I’m a member of the American Academy of Religion, the preeminent association of teachers of religion in colleges and graduate schools. There’s almost no prestige in this status; I paid my money and signed up. Nevertheless, as a member, I’m in contact with what goes on in the field.

Something came in the mail today that is so typical of AAR-type mindsets, I thought it might be good to record it for posterity. It’s a catalog of new books, and one of the blurbs seemed worthy of comment:

[John Doe] argues that church Christianity is handicapped by two great errors–an interpretation of Jesus the co-equally divine Son of God incarnate and the belief that there is a controlling supernatural world beyond this world. We need to go back and start again from the historical Jesus and his message and create a modern version of his kingdom religion–a religion that is immediate, beliefless, and entirely focussed upon the here and now.

The “two great errors” that this author dislikes are, of course, historic Christianity. It’s what the apostles believed, what the Church Fathers believed, and what Christians, Catholic and Protestant, have always believed. If you’re an average American, you believe it, too.

If you do believe it, I ask you this: do you want to feed your kids to teachers like this at the local Hellhole University, and pay money for the privilege to boot? Let me assure you, I live and work in this field and this guy is nothing strange. Send a kid to a college that isn’t expressly evangelical in its beliefs and you can expect such things to be pumped into his head vigorously.

Adam Young has written a masterful essay on what’s wrong with the modern concept of an American president. Join the revolution; check out the Constitution Party.