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I’m a fantasy writer. I make things up–the wilder, the better. Years ago, I was a horror writer. I made up things that were intended to be scary.

Meanwhile, back in the real world this week, the New Mexico Appeals Court ruled that of course the state government can order Christians to do things that violate their religious beliefs. The court was referring to the 2006 case of a mom-and-pop photography business, owned by Christians, that declined to memorialize a lesbian pseudo-wedding. The fine for such “hateful” behavior was in excess of $6,000–a sum that is able to ruin a small business. Do what the lesbians want, or you lose your livelihood.

The original decision was made by the New Mexico Human Rights Commission. You would think these bloody things were unconstitutional. “Human Rights” denotes the practice of elevating the rights of homosexuals over the rights of everybody else. The practice has been honed to a fine art in Canada, where there is no constitution–only some “Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms” that somehow allows Canadian jurisprudence to proceed according to the assumption that Canadians have only those freedoms which the government says they have–on any given day.

As an example of fantastic thinking that would do credit to any fantasy writer, we have this from the official website of the Ontario Human Rights Commission: “The Supreme Court of Canada has made it clear that society must be designed to be inclusive of all persons…” Therefore, the OHRC has the authority to police the “organizational culture” of a company or a voluntary association, right down to the level of “informal social behavior, such as communication, decision-making and interpersonal relationships, which are the evidence of deeply held and largely unconscious values, assumptions and behavioral norms…” (emphasis added)

Warning, warning, warning! They are coming for your freedoms, people. Who’s “they”? The progressives; the elite; the wise; the whoopee crowd–why even answer? You know right well who they are! They mean to erase your liberty, and it’s already late in the day to stop them.

I’m a fantasy writer, and I can’t even begin to make up stuff like this.

Fiction abounds in criminal masterminds like Dr. Fu Manchu, Professor James Moriarity, Lord Reesh, et al. What they all have in common is, they’re smart. That’s why it takes someone like Sherlock Holmes to stop them.

We, poor devils, live in a real world dominated by stupid masterminds. Their schemes are too stupid to succeed, but they do just as much harm, maybe even more, than Moriarity and Co.

Our masterminds think socialism really works, there are 57 states in the United States, society is better off without marriage and the family, you can spend your way out of debt, and so on. Even the people we think are really smart are really stupid. Hundreds of Nobel Prize winners have signed on to the Humanist Manifesto II–a document that recommends a mix of atheism, abortion, suicide, and homosexuality as the solution to the world’s problems.

If you wrote a fantasy novel or a detective novel featuring the machinations of a really stupid mastermind, it would be classed as unimaginative fiction. People would think you were trying to write a Democrat Party platform. “Duh! How about we tax the pants off people who work, and give the money to people who don’t work? That ought to get the economy humming!” There are real-life stupid masterminds working on that very scheme even as you read this. And others just as addled.

Go ahead, try it yourself–try to write a story in which the villain is a big stupid idiot whose asinine ideas can’t possibly result in anything but chaos and misery.

You’ll find you’re writing about real life.

An inspiring news story from New Jersey!

Newark Mayor Corey Booker was awakened early this morning by the noise of the house next door to his being on fire.

The mayor rushed into the burning building and carried out a woman who would have died if he’d waited for the firemen. A city detective tried to hold him back, but when he couldn’t, he followed Booker into the house. Booker suffered minor injuries, for which he was treated at the hospital and released this afternoon.

“I’m no hero,” Booker said, adding that he didn’t feel at all heroic during his action, but instead experienced intense fear.

But of course he is a hero–and if there were more like him, the world would be a better place. Hats off to Mayor Corey Booker!

OK, I’m ready to write Book #6 of the Bell Mountain series, as soon as I clear away this mountain of work in front of me.

No, I don’t have a title, not yet. What I do have is the first and last chapters and some new characters. That’s all I need to get the show on the road. My Lord will give me the rest as needed.

A minute or two after I sat down to supper a few nights ago, I received those two chapters as an instantaneous burst to my imagination. Call it inspiration. I can’t begin to explain how it works.

Thank you, Father.

I don’t know about you, but around here we’re all in a dither about that hour of time we lost on Saturday night.  So… we’ve decided we aren’t gonna take it anymore!

I work right here at home, and my wife has retired, so here’s what we’re gonna do next year when it’s time to set the clocks ahead–to wit: we won’t. And I hope it starts a trend.

So as not to be totally contrarian, we’ll set them ahead 10 minutes a day; so in a mere six days, we’ll have caught up to everybody who still lets the government tell them what time it is. We’ll do that until they stop fooling around with the time.

We invite you all to join us.

Sometimes when I look up from work, I notice things in my own neighborhood that I never saw before.

At the neighborhood school, practically next door to me, the American flag hangs from the pole in tatters. The wind has torn it into several flapping pieces. The school never lowers the flag, leaves it out night and day, in all sorts of weather.

When I went to elementary school, the flag was lowered at the end of each school day, folded correctly according to flag etiquette (usually by Boy Scouts), and stored in a special locker until it was run up the pole the next day–unless there was foul weather.

Am I surprised that a public school today would show such flagrant disrespect to America’s flag?

Absolutely not one freakin’ bit!

Tomorrow at 7 p.m., at St. George’s Anglican Church in St. Catherines, Ontario, a group of feminist “priests” will perform The Vagina Monologues from the altar of the church.

I’ll have more to say about this in my column for News With Views this week. For the time being, let Christians pray for the reclamation of this church–before it becomes like the chaff which the wind driveth away.

If you don’t know anything about The Vagina Monologues, look it up on the Internet. You’ll be appalled by what these silly women propose to present from the altar.  I think I would put this on a par with Belshazzar and his concubines drinking out of the vessels from the Lord’s Temple in Jerusalem.

Tomorrow I will join dozens of other Americans in not watching the Super Bowl.

Oh, no! I’ll miss Madonna’s halftime show! Thanks, but I’d rather watch ants crawling in and out of the ant-hill. The Stupid Bowl halftime show is always some boring entertainer that you’ve already seen hundreds of times, whether you wanted to or not. The real trick is avoiding Madonna altogether.

But you’ll miss the six hours’ worth of pre-game coverage! Eh? What can they find to talk about for six hours?

I have banished TV from my home, but I still have to listen to an infinite number of radio ads with Stupid Bowl themes. These are almost indescribably offensive. In most of them, adult males are portrayed as the equivalent of poorly brought-up four-year-olds, who would be almost certain to defecate on the sofa if their long-suffering wives didn’t nag them constantly. And on Stupid Bowl Sunday, the talking heads who nag you all year about healthy eating turn around and exhort you to sit on the couch for 16 hours gobbling snacks and fast food.

Somewhere along the way, they supposedly get around to actually playing a football game–not that you’d notice.

Alas! Is it come to this? Are we Americans become so tame, so lame, so empty-headed, that we can be led around by the nose, and brought to invest so much time, so much passion, so much money in a freakin’ football game? I suppose 150 years of public schooling, with its emphasis on mindless conformity, has truly done its work. If we’re told to do it often enough, by enough voices in the media, who knows what we might not do? How else do you think a community-organizing mystery man, with no more biography than a robot or a lizard-man, gets elected president?

It must be some kind of hypnotism. You are passionately interested in the Super Bowl. You are passionately interested in the Super Bowl…

No, no, no! You shall not tell me what I’m passionate about! I refuse to waste my passion on a stupid football game! (But isn’t that kind of what you’re doing now, old sport?) All right, all right–I have gotten cranked up about it. Maybe football brings out the worst in me.

But really, it’s not about football at all. It’s about cultural slavery, and marching when they tell you to march, and stopping when they tell you to stop, and, finally, drinking the poison Kool-Aid…

Yesterday it was raining cats and dogs (as usual–and I don’t even live in Seattle), and as I was going out the front door, my foot slipped on the wet doorstep, my ankle buckled, and I was launched into a swan-dive to the cement sidewalk.

It could’ve been very nasty, but I escaped with a scraped knee and nothing else. Obviously God was watching over me. But I must also thank my judo instructors of long ago, who drilled us incessantly in the art of taking a fall. After all, if you can’t fall without getting hurt, you really can’t practice judo. Even after all this time, I have retained this skill. I might’ve wound up like Humpty-Dumpty, otherwise. Certainly I would recommend this training to everyone!

Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for the signal to start writing Book #6 of my Bell Mountain Series. Our artist, Kirk Douponce, says he’s ready to start work on the cover of #4, The Last Banquet, and I’m in the process of proofreading it. Hopefully it’ll be ready for publication by the end of this summer; and then we can all get to work on #5, The Fugitive Prince… provided I continue to survive any additional falls I might take.