Help Wanted: Blathering Numbskull

As reported by CNS News, June 14, our beloved IRS is advertising for a “diversity and inclusion specialist,” with a starting salary of $123,758 a year. CNS quoted the tax agency’s help-wanted ad as saying the diversity specialist [please pass the barf bag] will “serve as a change agent–“ugh! blap!–“to provide strategies, solutions, training, tools, resources–” here it comes–“and thought leadership“–yes, thought leadership, whatever the sod that is–” on diversity and foster inclusion…” He, she, or it will also “build internal awareness” for diversity and inclusion.

I wonder what “internal awareness” means. I wonder what happens to you if you don’t have “internal awareness” for diversity and inclusion.

Has anybody noticed that, used in this context, the words “diversity” and “inclusion” have absolutely no rational meaning? So what we’re really talking about here is $123,000 and change, ponied up by the defenseless American taxpayers, for someone to prate and babble about things that are totally meaningless.

Oh–this prating fool who will cost us $123,000 will also be empowered to “effect minor disciplinary measures, such as warnings and reprimands”. And for those who like their crapola to finish with a flourish, the ad winds up with this:

“At the IRS, you will use your skills… to help make America stronger.”

I think my appendix just popped.

Teaching the Romance of Suicide

A teacher at a trendy Manhattan prep school has raised a ruckus by assigning 9th-graders to write suicide notes. You can get the full story by reading “York Prep Teacher Asks Students to Compose Suicide Notes In School Assignment,” by Rebecca Klein, June 12, in The Huffington Post (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ ).

The 9th-graders were reading The Secret Life of Bees as part of their literary education (lol!), and as one of the characters in the book commits suicide, the kids were assigned to write suicide notes, presumably as a means of gaining a deeper understanding of the character’s motivation. I haven’t read the bloody thing, and probably never will. It seems to be the usual exercise in racial scab-picking and injustice-collecting, anti-white and anti-male, and so on. Anyhow, the main thing is, the teacher had the kids write suicide notes. At least one parent remarked, “We pay a lot of money to send our kids to the school.” Sucker.

Toward the end of Ms. Klein’s article there are links to reports of similar incidents in Britain and France. So maybe playing up suicide is the newest cutting-edge fad in secular “education.”

Guess what–we all pay a lot of money to send our kids to school! Whether it’s a public high school or a fancy-schmancy prep school, it sucks up money like a black hole. The only difference is whether you pay it as a school tax or tuition.

Might I suggest, just as a general rule of life: Do not let strangers educate your children.

Unless, of course, you want your kids to learn about sodomy, gender-bending, suicide, socialism, class warfare, racial warfare, and all that other stuff that “educators” are so fond of.

Really, people–what else do these clowns have to do, to prove to you that they are a menace to your children?

In the Year 2030…

Image result for constitution being shredded

The old crystal ball last night showed me some pictures that made me uneasy about my country’s future.  I saw the top news stories for the year 2030.Here are some of the lowlights.

*Senate rejects “path to citizenship” for Caucasian Americans. Said Majority Leader Abdel-Aziz al-Zarkawi (D-Nuevo York), “I don’t know why anyone even suggested it.” The vote against the measure was unanimous, with all 100 Democrat senators voting no.

*To celebrate the mid-point of his fifth term in office, President Barack Hussein al-Akbar Obama issued Executive Order 15,971,202, allowing no one but “gays” to serve in local, county, state, and federal police forces.

*The last copy of the United States Constitution was destroyed in a formal shredding ceremony at the White House. “From now on, I am the Constitution,” said President and Exalted Leader Obama.

*A gallon of gasoline will now cost you $12,000.

*The aging Bill Ayres was sworn in as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. He took his oath on a copy of The Communist Manifesto, administered by Associate Justice Kim Kardashian.

*Human sacrifices were performed today in Washington, D.C., before the Colossus of George Soros, to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the 500-foot tall effigy. Since the Washington Monument was torn down to make room for it, compulsory attendance laws have made the Colossus of Soros the most-visited site in America.

Think the crystal ball is kidding, folks? Maybe. But what they’re doing to our country, they’re doing right before our eyes.

God save us.

 

A Potboiler With a Vision

Every now and then–especially in his books about “Barsoom” (Mars)–Edgar Rice Burroughs would have a penetrating, almost prophetic vision that would go unrecognized because it was decades ahead of its time.

In Synthetic Men of Mars (1939), Ras Thavas, the Master Mind of Mars, embarks on a project to create artificial human beings. He grows them out of culture vats. These creatures, called “hormads,” very seldom seem to turn out quite right. In fact, some of them are such a mess as to be of no use at all. But Ras Thavas, like John Hammond in Jurassic Park, is convinced he can impose his will on nature if only he tries hard enough.

Well, something goes horribly wrong in Vat Room #4. Instead of producing individual hormads, the vats have begun to pump out a solid mass of writhing, hungry, ill-assorted body parts; and no one is able to stop it. It just grows and grows and grows, shooting forth monstrous heads and clutching hands, disconnected legs, undifferentiated tissue like a gigantic amoeba… yech! And if something isn’t done about it soon, it’ll take over the whole lab complex, then the whole island, and, theoretically, could keep on growing until it covers the entire planet and devours everything.

Now that’s what I call a vision. Not only did ERB anticipate cloning, and all that stuff. More importantly, his image of the all-consuming mess in Vat Room #4 is right on target as a metaphor for all-consuming statism. You know–the kind that aspires to a world government that can direct planning and land use for every little village on the planet, and, under the pretext of doing what’s best for us, swallow up every last one of our liberties. The kind of mess that Hitler, Stalin, and Mao did so much to pioneer. The kind that listens in on everybody’s phone calls.

The kind of hell you get after “progressive” thieves and murderers get through with “fundamentally transforming” your country.

In Synthetic Men of Mars, John Carter comes along with his air force and fire-bombs the hideous mass out of existence.

I don’t think our hideous mass will be quite so easy to get rid of.

A Truly Beautiful Film

One of the gems of our video collection is The Secret Garden (1993), directed by Agniezka Holland and based on the 1910 children’s literature classic by Frances Hodgson Burnett.

It’s a simple story. A little girl whom nobody wants takes over an abandoned garden that nobody wants, and shares it with a little boy whose widowed father is afraid to want him. Out of this comes love, and healing, and redemption.

Those are the things that God does. Throughout the Gospels, most of the actions performed by Jesus are acts of healing. In time, the Bible teaches us, God through Jesus Christ will heal this entire fallen world. We are privileged that, in many cases, God allows us to work with Him and for Him.

This film yesterday brought me to tears. The cinematography is gorgeous, the music score gentle and soul-stirring. Although there is no overt mention of Jesus Christ or Christianity, and even some bits of mumbo-jumbo or “magic” engaged in by the children, the message of the story could hardly be more Christian if it tried.

We are all in need of healing, many of us more than we know. All of Creation is in need of it–and will get it. God has so promised. Meanwhile, there are smaller healings and redemptions all around us. These are, as it were, small down-payments on the larger project: signs that God is nigh, that God is working in His world. He has not forgotten us. He never will.

It’s a rough ride, a lot of the time; but the day of regeneration is at hand and will not be delayed. God has already marked it on His calendar.

 

 

‘The Fugitive Prince’ Now on Sale

The author is always the last to know, but now I know: Book 5 of the Bell Mountain Series, The Fugitive Prince, is now on sale.

You can order it here by clicking “Books” or “The Fugitive Prince” and putting it in your cart; or from the Chalcedon Store at http://www.chalcedon.edu ; or from amazon.com .

Will one of you be the first to review it on the amazon.com page?

A Lost Movie That Maybe Better Stay Lost

In 1927 Tod Browning made a silent movie called London After Midnight, starring Lon Chaney Sr. as an evil character returned from the dead as a predatory monster. The film, considered a horror classic, no longer exists. The last known copy was destroyed in an accidental fire in 1967. If you happen to have a copy, you could sell it for a fortune.

In 1928 a man on trial for murder offered as his defense the claim that Chaney’s performance in London After Midnight made him temporarily insane and drove him to kill someone. The jury didn’t buy it.

So, okay, one movie did not drive one individual to commit murder.

But what about a colossal, endless flood of sleazy and unwholesome movies, TV shows, novels, comic books, video games, political speeches, and public education? Could such a deluge of filth, going on without interruption for 70 or 80 years, tear a big chunk of Western society loose from its moral moorings? Or  can we just wallow in this muck forever without being in the slightest bit affected by it?

Just asking…

How Did C.S. Lewis Do It?

I was all set to rail against the government scarfing up tens of millions of Americans’ private phone, email, and Facebook records–but Sen. Dianne Feinstein has like totally set my mind at ease about that. She says they do this in case someone might become a terrorist in the future. Well, now I feel a lot better. Don’t you?

While our country melts into a boiling mass of corruption, I’ve just reread The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the first of C.S. LewisChronicles of Narnia (the first one he wrote, I mean). It’s good to get away for a little while, when I lie down in bed.

Every time I read the chronicles, I stand in awe of Lewis’ technique. He makes it look so easy, you just might fail to notice it. The story just flows; and in one paragraph, without even a hint of skimping on the details, he gets more action done than any other writer can accomplish in two or three whole pages. For me, looking at it with the eye of a writer, it looks like magic! All of this stuff happens, or a character is introduced and you learn to know everything about him that you need to know–and yet only a few sentences have gone by. And yet, incredibly, nothing has been left out, either. Pure wizardry!

It’s so simple, any reasonably intelligent child can read it and enjoy it. It’s so deep, any receptive adult can dive into it headfirst without having to worry about cracking his skull on the bottom.

The fact that it was written in Christ’s service doesn’t hurt it, either.

Big Brother is Listening

Get over to the Drudge Report today and check out the stories at the top of the page: under the leadership of our First Voter Fraud President, the federal government is hauling in millions of telephone records a day.

They say they’re doing it to protect us from terrorists.

The only problem with that is, this bunch in Washington thinks we are the terrorists, and those guys over in the Middle East, with the turbans, and the bombs strapped to their bodies, are their friends. We know that because cadets at West Point are taught to view Baptists and Catholics as every bit as bad and dangerous as al-Qaeda, and the “president’s” adviser on “religious diversity” in the military, one Mikey Weinstein, is on a jihad to purge Christianity from the armed services. We know it because they’ve got the IRS harassing non-progressives and demanding to know the content of our prayers.

Now they’re studying our phone calls.

Because I don’t believe it’s possible that there might really and truly be “millions” of potential terrorists hiding in our midst, I’ve got to believe Big Brother is spying on a lot of us who aren’t terrorists. And we just let him go on doing it.

You can be sure that, hundreds of years from now, when people look back on the history of the United States, they will most certainly not say, “This was their finest hour.”

 

Now That’s Writing!

Who is the most prolific novelist of all time? Do you know? Can you guess?

I always thought it was John Creasy. Born 1908, died 1973, Creasy wrote under 28 pseudonyms and had over 600 of his novels published–mystery and crime novels, spy thrillers, romances, and westerns. His first book was published in 1930, and he was only 65 when he died. So that’s 600 books in 43 years, for an average of almost 14 novels per year.

And lest you think he just cranked out a lot of rubbish, in 1962 he won an Edgar Award for Gideon’s Fire, and in 1969 was voted a Grand Master Award by the Mystery Writers of America.

But I was wrong. The most prolific novelist ever was not John Creasy.

It was Barbara Cartland.

Dame Barbara (1901-2000) lived longer than Creasy and had a longer career, and more than 700 (!) of her novels were published, starting in 1922. She started with flashy, controversial, “sex among the rich and famous” novels, then settled down to write historical romances.

In fact, her career is still going on–she left at least 160 unpublished novels, which ought to be enough to hold her fans for the next few decades.

In 1983 Barbara Cartland wrote 23 novels.

I must remember this, the next time I feel moved to describe myself as a productive and prolific writer.