Vox Popoli

If the Easter Bunny didn’t reach your home this year, I may have the explanation:

Q: What happens if the dogs catch the Easter Bunny and eat him?
A: Well, I guess we’d end up with all the candy he was bringing to the children around the world.
Q: (wide eyes) Ooooh! I hope they get him!

Happy Easter, everyone!

ARCHANGELS: THE FALL Vol. III is complete:

When the Son of Man died, the darkness that had fallen about the land began to fade. The bloodthirsty crowd of mortals fell silent, as if for the first time they realized what they had done. Shame filled them and they departed quickly from Calvary, eager to leave behind the dead body that rebuked them in its innocent silence. But the darkness was in their hearts now, even as the one who claimed lordship over them howled in exaltation. The skies were lost to madness as his demons hurled themselves against the downcast Host of Heaven, who were still in shock at the death of the promised savior. One after another, they fell before the evil legions, raining down upon the earth like shooting stars. The Dragon urged them on, arrogantly certain of his victory.

We went to press yesterday, finishing up the final third in the trilogy. This one was a little harder to write, as we filled it with more text than one normally sees in a comic book and there was less Biblical text available on which to base the story. Also, it was felt that Christian Bookstore Association sensitivities did not allow for any graphic harrowing of Hell, which was unfortunate since that was something I was rather looking forward to writing.

But Focus on the Family seems to really like them – one of their editors volunteered to edit the third one – and so it will be interesting to see how people respond to them once they become more widely available in the next month or two. The general consensus seems to be that they’re somewhat unusual as CBA product goes, since the fantasy elements are both stronger and darker than is typically the case. (One guess as to who is responsible for that….)

There’s a pretty good chance that we’re going to be doing more comics this year with one of the larger CBA publishers. The two leading contenders, in my opinion, are ARCHANGELS: LEGACY, a concept about angelic battles of the past and how they related to historical events both real and fictional, and THE CHRONICLES OF KING DAVID, which is a concept designed around the Biblical David combined with recently uncovered archeological evidence and the New Chronology of Egypt that would involve three traditional novels and three-related graphic novels.

UPDATE – In answer to some questions, clicking on the gold cover of Volume III will take you to a place where you can order it. It will be a few weeks before they make their way to the Family Christian stores, Lifeways and a few other Christian bookstores that plan to carry them. As for who does the artwork, I believe Patrick did the cover himself, while the interior artwork is done by Deon Ruckols and Scott Sirag (pencils), Rus Sever (inks) and Jose Flores (colors and digital effects).

I driving in the car this morning, happily singing along to one of the all-time great one-hit wonders, the Bloodhound Gang, when it occurred to me that, in a simple chorus line, they had effortlessly managed to defeat the logic underlying decades of social science and atheist philosophy.

You and me baby ain’t nothing but mammals, so let’s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel….

What the Bloodhound Gang offers, aside from a few catchy riffs and the inimitable ubergeek line about one’s priorities where the X-Files are concerned, is reality versus hypothesis. Only Nietzsche was bold enough to directly confront the stark reality of a Godless, amoral universe, while his less courageous fellows are forced to wildly bend, twist and otherwise obfuscate the moral parasitism that they cling to in cowardice. But the airy possibilities they cite are nothing more than baseless theory, which falls flat on its face before the reality of godless amoralism put into practice every day by millions of young Americans.

And so, they are left grasping for ever more unlikely explanations to explain away that which surrounds them, instead of turning to the obvious answer. We are sinful, fallen beings living in a sinful, fallen world. Our only genuine hope is in the Cross and the man whose death we remember today, otherwise, if we are merely animals, who has the right to criticize the man, woman, boy or girl who chooses to live like one?

Drudge quotes the New York Times:

A 70-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex recently discovered in Montana, scientists reported today, has apparently yielded the improbable: soft tissues, including blood vessels and possibly cells, that “retain some of their original flexibility, elasticity and resilience.”

I’ll be interested to see how “scientists” explain how soft tissue survives seventy million years. I’m also interested to know how the seventy million year figure was reached. I suspect, of course, that they “know” it is seventy million years old because the dinosaur is supposed to have lived seventy million years ago. They might as well have said “a 70-gazillion-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex”; hardly anyone would have blinked an eye at that either.

As I’ve stated previously, I am a staunch advocate of the “I don’t know” theory of prehistoric timelines. I personally find Heinlein’s explanation in THE BOOK OF JOB that 6,000 years ago, God created an Earth that was billions of years old to be as likely as anything. But wouldn’t it be rather intriguing to see what the reaction of the scientific community would be to the discovery of a Tyrannosaurus rex with a monkey skeleton, or better yet, the soft-tissued remains of a homo sapien, in its belly? Coincidentally enough, I started writing just such a story not long after the last evolutionary contretemps* here.

*Strictly speaking, this may not be a precisely accurate usage here, as the word indicates a degree of unexpectedness. I can’t remember if I’d brought the subject up on purpose or not last time, but since I like the word and it is not necessarily inappropriate, I shall take the liberty of using it here. For the more obsessive-compulsive in our midst, please be assured that there is no need to investigate the matter. Not that this will stop you, of course.

Wes fails to follow the plot:

This is ridiculous. This is not about the government making “health care decisions.” This is about the government making a decision to put an innocent woman to death by starvation. Health care doesn’t come into it. And Vox, do you have any interest in justice? Isn’t it the government’s job to see that justice prevails? Here we have a case where a state government wants to see to it that one of its citizens dies. I’m sorry, but stopping a murder is a far cry from making “health care decisions.”

Isn’t it the government’s job to see that justice prevails? Actually, the government’s only job is to obey the Constitution. In fact, it is this pursuit of “justice”, which Thomas Sowell has mocked in his book THE QUEST FOR COSMIC JUSTICE, that has led the federal government to repeatedly violate the Constitution.

It is the federal government, with its Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security programs, that has laid the groundwork for what will soon be the demographically required euthanasia laws. Neither the federal nor the state governments have any interest in stopping this sort of murder, which is why the brothers Bush have both refused to take any direct action other than indulging in some meaningless Pilatean hand-washing meant to deflect the blame away from them.

The fact that this is primarily a state action rather than a federal one only goes to show how far the rot has spread. Usually the federal government has to pressure the states into following its directives, in this case the state happens to be anticipating them. Then again, there is a rather close relationship between the heads of both organizations, so perhaps that’s not surprising.

If you insist on clinging to the political fiction of a Democratic-Republican dichotomy, you will find the next twenty years as mystifying as the last twenty. If, on the other hand, you understand that beneath the fiction is an orchestrated effort to transform a theoretically decentralized constitutional republic into a fully centralized member of a supranational oligarchy, everything not only makes perfect sense, but becomes quite predictable. Thus, I can confidently predict:

1. uniform state euthanasia laws
2. a ban on home-schooling, probably federal
3. a political union with Canada and Mexico
4. an elimination of the right to trial by jury
5. elimination of the separation of powers doctrine (this is already effective, but not apparent)
6. a ban on all political speech by unapproved parties (already in the works)
7. emigration restrictions
8. legally recognized polyamorous relationships
9. a global tax to fund a UN military

Some of these sound outrageous, but they are eminently more practical than they were ten years ago. Why do I say that I can confidently predict them? Because they are absolutely necessary for the formulation of the system envisioned by the global governance groups. Demographics require the first. Propaganda requires the second. Administration requires the third. Efficiency requires the fourth and fifth. Weakening inherent resistance requires the sixth, seventh and eighth, and maintenance requires the ninth.

It is entirely possible that these things will not all come about, because the plans of men gang aft agley. Even if the ideal globalist system comes to pass, it will collapse of its own weight soon enough. The globalists are hoping that a US-style federalism will suffice to spread out that weight, but the crazed corruption of the EU indicates that their optimism in the architecture is misplaced. One need not be a Christian to see these things aborning, but I would think it would be somewhat troubling for a non-Christian to see how important elements of the apocalyptic vision of Christianity is being actively constructed in front of us.

For the Christian, of course, there is an important ray of hope that penetrates the nightmare. For if this is the last, bitter gasp of the Darkness, then the return of the King of Kings is nigh.

Annie quotes someone named John in DC:

Newsflash people. As I suspected, it’s, once again, the GOP judges who are staking out the position that Terri Schiavo should be permitted to finally die with dignity. Not only is the Florida judge a big ole Republican, but of the 3 appellated court judges deciding on this yesterday, the dissenter (i.e., agreed with the religious right) was a Clinton appointee, and the two judges who said it’s time to let Terri go were a Bush and a Clinton apppointee.

But oh, it gets even better. When an emergency appeal is filed with the US Supreme Court, it’s filed with one justice who gets to decide if they’ll take up the case. Well, last time the appeal was made to conservative Justice Kennedy, A REAGAN APPOINTEE, and rather than simply accept the appeal like a good Republican clone, he instead referred it to the entire court for THEM to decide. The entire court, the majority of which is republican appointees, voted it down.

Let me reiterate that. A Reagan judge declined to take the appeal – i.e., declined to save Terri – then the majority Republican appointed US Supreme Court declined as well.

So now the religious right and congressional republicans think even Reagan appointed judges are too activist and too liberal. Then who IS proper to be a judge if even a Reagan appointee is too liberal? Or, is the problem simply that the religious right and the GOP won’t accept ANY judge that doesn’t rubber stamp any and all of their extreme views?

Yeah, yeah, whatever. Look, as almost everyone knows, I don’t believe there is any difference between the two political factions. They both work towards the same ends, and their purpose is to take turns playing good cop and bad cop for their respective constituencies, both of which are dumb enough to repeatedly fall for the act, ad infinitum.

The Schiavo situation demonstrates one half of how the political leadership plans to solve the demographically doomed Social Security program. The meeting today between the three would-be regional governors of the future pan-American superstate demonstrates the other half. So, the good news is that you’ll be assured of receiving your retirement benefits, the bad news is that you won’t be collecting them quite as long as you might like.

I’m just wondering, if someone were to lock a judge in a closet and deprive him of food and water, would it be murder? Apparently not in the eyes of our legal system. And quite a few of those fellows are fairly old coots… the moral imperative suddenly becomes clear.

Starve a judge for Social Security!

From the Washington Times:

President Bush yesterday said he opposes a civilian project to monitor illegal aliens crossing the border, characterizing them as “vigilantes.” He said he would pressure Congress to further loosen immigration law.

Ladies and gentlemen, your Republican president! Too bad he’s loyal to the Union of the Americas instead of the United States of America.

He defends the borders about as well as he defends the Constitution.

The Supreme Court on Thursday refused to order Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube reinserted, rejecting a desperate appeal by her parents to keep their severely brain-damaged daughter alive.

The decision, announced in a terse one-page order, marked the end of a dramatic and disheartening four-day dash through the federal court system by Bob and Mary Schindler.

Justices did not explain their decision, which was at least the fifth time they have declined to get involved in the Schiavo case.

But when there’s a need to find an emanation or penumbra to kill an unborn child, well, the unelected nine-man American Commission can always find the time for judicial review. Mrs. Schiavo never stood a chance, you see, because demographics require killing off a lot more elderly people in the next thirty years.

Next up: the elderly….

Big Chilly reels in shock:

That book is excruciating. I am not a porn fan and this book, in my mind, qualifies as soft porn for women. Good grief. To give you an idea…

Only sexual tension can bring out her latent psi abilities so they put her in a suit that automatically kisses and massages her, starting with her lips and neck and finishing with her bits and pieces. But wait, it doesn’t work on her because “How could she respond to a machine?” No, she must be engaged emotionally too. So, this hunk has to do it (even though he really doesn’t want to because women on his planet are not treated this way, but he will if only to save the world). So, the first non-machine induced simulation ends (shortly after the spankings) with her bursting into tears for his failure to allow her to climax and him feeling terrible about what he’s done, but at the same with an ever growing respect for her as a person.

I am not kidding.

Hmmmm. Maybe it’s a good thing that women can’t write hard SF. Who knows what’s going to happen when you start mixing in black holes, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and higher mathematics in with tears over orgasmic difficulties.

Of course, it’s always been my impression that women did just fine with their mechanical massagers…. Well, ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long!

This doesn’t actually have anything to do with the Schiavo case, but I thought John Derbyshire’s choice of analogies was somewhat amusing.

—[Reader] Why don’t you just come right out and say you want to kill Terri Schiavo?

—[JD] Because I am a person who tries to be scrupulous in my use of language. If I hear someone say: “I want to kill X,” that signifies to me that the speaker is in a certain state of mind. I am not at all in that state of mind. Fooling around with words gets us nowhere. Strictly speaking, keeping children confined in schools all day is a form of imprisonment. Strictly speaking, clipping my fingernails is a form of self-mutilation. (I believe there is a Hindu sect that refuses to clip fingernails on precisely these grounds.) Would you, or any sane person, actually use the words “imprisonment” and “self-mutilation” in those contexts? Of course not.

Apparently I am not sane, as I would ABSOLUTELY use the word “imprisonment” to refer to those hapless children sentenced to ride on the infamous Yellow Bus. I’d also use the words “brainwashed”, “intellectually crippled” and “scholastically deprived” as well.

And starving someone certainly is killing them. I doubt Derbyshire would have the same delicacy about it being a question of murder were someone to starve their infant daughter instead of their brain-damaged wife. Although it’s not fair to accuse him of wanting to kill Mrs. Schiavo either; like most Americans he simply doesn’t have a problem with someone else killing her. I can’t take too much exception to that, there’s a lot of people whose demise at another’s hand would not cause me to shed a single tear.