The last hoo rah?

“To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them.”

Dear Reader,

As you have by now doubtless heard, after one hundred and thirty-four years of protecting mainstream American values, The Colonel is most likely nearing its fateful end.

But who’s going to cover the real news, you ask? Who’s going to hold our liberal politicians accountable? Here at The Colonel, we’ve been asking ourselves those same questions. In 1996, while the networks remained silent, we alone told the world about the milestone trial of an endlessly fascinating man named O. J. “The Juice” Simpson. While the Times and Post filled the headlines with “international news” and “domestic policy” stories, we dared to go to Boulder, Colorado to tell the world again, and again, and again, about the horrific murder of a country-ballad-singing nymphet named JonBenét Ramsey. And who can forget the day we first broke the news about President Bill Clinton’s four-way tryst with Paula Jones, Monica Lewinsky, and Slobodan Milosevic. In fact, our value to this country can be summed up in a question: what was the only news source that, from 1892 to 1894, dedicated two years of coverage to President Grover Cleveland’s illegitimate son Oscar Folsom Cleveland? Yes, The Colonel, of course. Since 1871, The Colonel has led with honesty, relevance, and, most of all, professionalism. For news that matters, the world has always looked to us.

But now all of that is about to change. Unable to continue fighting the guerilla war waged against us by the liberal elite, The Colonel will soon be forced to surrender and spend several months in a torture-free liberal prison, where we will most likely have to undergo some kind of New Age, get-to-know-yourself-better rehabilitation program. Yes after years of perpetually fighting lawsuits brought against us by Habitat for Humanity, suffering the slanders circulated by PETA, and enduring Amnesty International’s seemingly endless campaign of bullying, harassment and humiliation, The Colonel has nearly had enough!

Indeed, who would bear the whips and scorns of secular humanism, the socialist’s wrong, the pacifist’s contumely, the pangs of despised hippy love, the Flag Burning Amendment delay, the insolence of the Special Prosecutor’s office, and the spurns that patient merit of the un-Christian takes, when he himself might his quietus make with a bare bodkin?

Certainly not us … at least not without YOUR support! That’s right, The Colonel needs yes-men like you to join our rag-tag team of go-getters and brownnosers. No prior editing, publishing or writing experience? Uneducated? Illiterate? No credit? Bad credit? No problem. If you have an unsubstantiated opinion of how our government should be run, then we’ve got a place for you!

Remember: only YOU can save us! Otherwise, it’s only a matter of time before liberal syndicates like the Sierra Club nail The Colonel to the cross. Don’t let our next issue be our last!

Fondly,
Yuriy Bronshteyn
Colonel (soon to be ex-)
Editor/Publisher

The Death of Morals

By Albert Camus

Since I last said goodbye to my faith, suffering and heartache have been my only companions. Every morning as I awake and gaze at the sunrise, I see only a jet-black abyss. My existence is the endless repetition of a meaningless joke. Having rejected the divinity of my former Lord Jesus Christ, the ethics of right and wrong, black and white have dissolved into a sea of gray relativity. I know not who I am or what I do.

For instance, since renouncing God, I have increasingly found myself overwhelmed by an animal urge to break into the workrooms of my colleagues at night to steal their office supplies. Aside from respect for my peers as human beings, what would stop me in a world without Christ? Minus the constant supervision of God tracking my thoughts and threatening me with eternal damnation for impropriety, I have taken to cheating on my wife with casual strangers, women, men, children, close relatives, small farm animals … and why not? Certainly my inborn heterosexual orientation, my adult understanding that it is wrong to debauch a minor, my biological aversion to incest, and my complete lack of sexual interest in farm animals will not suffice to stop me – only God can! Yes, despite overwhelming scientific evidence that human beings evolved a capacity for and a proclivity toward sympathy and that, consequently, all people are born with an intuitive moral sense, I am unable to walk the virtuous path in life without Jesus’s guiding hand.

My experience is nothing new among those who have purged Christ from their hearts. A few weeks ago, I overheard an atheist acquaintance of mine commenting:
“I have of late...lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.”

Soon afterward, the man proceeded to kill an elderly courtier, the courtier’s son, two of his own childhood friends, and then his own uncle. Who among us has not heard this story repeated, ad nauseam? Who among us does not know dozens of seemingly “well-adjusted” atheists leading seemingly “successful” professional lives in medicine, law or academia who inevitably end up waging a killing spree against people who did not share their atheist beliefs? Who among us has not heard of the seemingly daily reports of yet another atheist killing his pawnbroker Aliona Ivanovna and her sister Lizaveta for no apparent reason?!

These accounts are typical, because the emptiness of God’s absence is great.

Perhaps great enough to make me one day bomb an abortion clinic, torture detained prisoners or deprive gay people of equal protection under the law.

SG Takes the Lead in Provost Search

By Silence Dogood

After an extensive search, the University has now chosen its next provost from an impressive list of America’s most eligible academic elite. This was obviously a position vital to the University’s future and one that needed to be filled by someone with vision, insight, and the leadership qualities that UK needs to move ahead in the highly competitive field of higher education.

The search team should be commended for choosing Professor Kumble Subbaswamy – a man who will move this University forward. His selection proves that the University is more than just a “good ol’ boys club” – it is an employer that values competence, not connections.

But what made this selection process truly special was student involvement, thanks to the selfless efforts of Student Government President, Becky Ellingsworth. Yes, as the student body representative to the selection committee, Becky once again led the way, turning the student voice into what was sometimes described by other committee members as a “deafening roar.” Becky personally made sure students were informed about who the candidates were, how they would lead the University and about their differing visions and plans for UK’s future. At one point, the candidate forums actually had to be moved to Commonwealth Stadium to accommodate the students Becky rallied to hear the candidates speak.

We should all be proud that the new Provost is not an institutional crony, but an enlightened leader chosen with a large amount of student input - input led and collected by student body president and student advocate, Becky Ellingsworth.

Thanks, Becky Ellingsworth for, as usual, putting the students first.

Vietnam: Still a minefield...of smoking deals

Hillary Eason
Good Brown Correspondent

SAIGON, Vietnam - Your tread is delicate. Through the steaming jungle heat, cries ring out on all sides. All around you, the dark-skinned natives, nodding heads bent under their quaint little hats, eye you as prey. You spring forward, reach and seize it: a Louis Vuitton, under your underarm, priced at the unbelievable rate of five dollars.

To be completely honest, Vietnam is kind of beating a dead horse with the whole war thing. Everywhere you go it's land mine this and My Lai Massacre that. Sure, that sort of thing is interesting, but do they not realize that it's also really, really depressing? And you know what, Vietnam, I hate to break it to you, but those battles were all kind of waged a long time ago. It's time for this country to take a long, hard look at its legacy and acknowledge where its strengths really lie: knockoffs and prostitution.

Here's a little factoid for you. Did you know that North Face bags are made in Vietnam? That means you can buy it straight from the kid who made it. That's right - you can finally cut out the middleman! You know all those times you wondered if your stuff fell apart because it was made by a drip, or a dork, or a handicapped kid - the kind who got made fun of by all the others because his deformed hand prevented his stitching from being as straight as Master demanded? Now you can check him out for yourself. If you're afraid that Phuong's open wound might have dripped into the pockets of your duffel slash backpack, just send him back to the factory. They'll only beat him for a few minutes, he'll learn a valuable lesson, and while he's there, he can send one of the stronger kids from his kindergarten class to offer you better merch. You get your luggage, he gets his rice ration...and capitalism works its magic once again.

And don't forget the thriving sex trade you'll have access to in Vietnam. The "happy ending" at the end of your massage, the one you can't get your wife to give you, will run roughly twelve cents around here - and that's before you threaten to price the services in the next stall. Most of these Oriental lady dragons have trained on the streets of Saigon and Jakarta, and from what I've heard, their services are worth at least fifty cents. That's a savings of thirty-eight cents - nothing to sneeze at in a country where selling plasma will basically allow you to buy a bag of medium-quality heroin. Think about that the next time you accidentally pick up a transvestite again on Limestone and "she" tells you she can't break a fifty.

Of course, it's unfair to just take take take from this giving country. Leave a legacy! Bring candy and throw it into a crowd of kids - the fight you'll start will keep you laughing for days, and once the scrappy one on the edge has knocked his best friend unconscious for your O! Henry Mini, he'll have a Western taste sensation like he's never dreamed. Teach them American words - but make sure they're ones they'll use, like "what the hell." Bring the shirts you've decided you're too mature to wear and distribute them to poor kids. Sure, it may seem a little odd to see a three year old wearing a tank that says "One Tequila Two Tequila Three Tequila Floor," but he doesn't understand it. Hell, he'll probably never learn to read. And it keeps the sewage off.

Yes, there is life after the war. This is a fine country for Westerners - almost enough to question why we abandoned imperialism in the first place. Sure, the Tet Offensive was significant enough to be written about in some book, but it's written down - why keep talking about it? Instead, let us ensure that this country's new legacy - of postcards, Tiger Beer and t-shirts that say "This Body Is Y2K Compliant" - lives on.

Dear Reader,

From the indictment of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libbey to the resignation of Mike Brown, from the failed nomination of Harriet Miers to emerging ethics questions about current nominee Samuel Alito, and from the mounting insurgency abroad to the growing opposition to the war at home, one thing remains indisputable: a vast left-wing conspiracy against President Bush threatens to pull apart the very fabric of democracy…most likely to use that fabric to produce a transcontinental T-shirt bearing an enormous likeness of Che Guevara.

Yes, partisanship is to blame for Vice Presidential Chief of Staff Scooter Libbey’s perjury and obstruction of justice. Partisanship is to blame for President Bush’s decision to allow Mike Brown, a Republican Party activist who was fired from his last private sector job, to serve as the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Partisanship is to blame for the failed nomination of Harriet Miers, a candidate who admitted having only minimal interest in Constitutional law, to the Supreme Court. Partisanship is to blame for Samuel Alito’s decision, on multiple occasions, not to recuse himself from cases in which he had a clear conflict of interest with the litigants. Partisanship is to blame for the deaths of over 30,000 Iraqi civilians since 2003. Needless to say, partisanship is also to blame for the President’s sagging approval ratings. Nevertheless, here at The Colonel, we refuse to let the liberal media drag us into the mud. In the spirit of the holiday season, we are willing to forgive and forget all that left-wing journalists have done, from uncovering Watergate to exposing American prison abuse, to soil this nation’s once pristine sheets.

Of course, we have not abandoned the task of cleaning those sheets either. In this issue, we openly confront the lies of evolution in an “Open Letter to the Kansas School Board” and, in “Point-Counterpoint,” let the Conservative Crusader loose on James Madison – the founding father widely recognized as the general “author” of the Constitution and the specific architect of the First Amendment Establishment Clause – in a debate on the Constitutionality of church-state separation. Be not deceived: our conservative bark still has bite! But it is now a more compassionate bite, a bite that no longer comes guaranteed with exposure to an especially virulent strain of the rabies virus. That’s right, for the first time in its one hundred and thirty-four year history, The Colonel has accepted for publication a fair, well-reasoned, nonsensationalist editorial: “Jesus, Meet Evolution.” The world of fake journalism may never again be the same! Happy Holidays!

Fondly,
Yuriy Bronshteyn
Colonel Publisher

A tribute to W. C. Williams

THE FACE BOOK
By Hillary Eason
Centre College

so much depends
upon

the friend
button

beside the drunken
photo

of my hook
up last
night.

Point-Counterpoint

The Conservative Crusader takes on James Madison, the fourth President of the United States, on the separation of church and state (moderated by Colonel Publisher Yuriy Bronshteyn)

[Bronshteyn]: Madison, you’re a Godfearing man – do you think we need more religion in our legal system?
[Madison]: [E]xperience...has shewn that every relaxation of the alliance between law and religion, from the partial example of Holland to the consummation in Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, etc, has been found as safe in practice as it is sound in theory. Prior to the Revolution, the Episcopal Church was established by law in this State [of Virginia]. On the Declaration of Independence it was left, with all other sects, to a self-support. And no doubt exists that there is much more of religion among us now than there ever was before the change, and particularly in the sect which enjoyed the legal patronage. This proves rather more than that the law is not necessary to the support of religion (Letter to Edward Everett, Montpellier, March 18, 1823).
[Crusader]: Yeah, yeah, but those are just the occasional perks of separating politics and religion, not reasons why government-supported religion is bad. What wrong could possibly come from government-supported religion?
[Madison]: If the Church of England had been the established and general religion and all the northern colonies as it has been among us here and uninterrupted tranquility had prevailed throughout the continent, it is clear to me that slavery and subjection might and would have been gradually insulated among us. Union of religious sentiments begets a surprising confidence and ecclesiastical establishments tend to grate ignorance and corruption all of which facilitate the execution of mischievous projects (Letter to William Bradford, Jan. 24, 1774).
[Crusader]: That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t mean government can’t make laws respecting religious establishments. That’s for the authors of the Constitution to decide, people like the principal author of the Constitution and the architect of the First Amendment Establishment Clause, James Madison…not people like you, James Madison.
[Bronshteyn]: Bravo! Sounds like check mate to me! What say you Madison: does not our government at least have the right to make laws respecting religious establishments?
[Madison]: The Constitution of the United States...declares, “Congress shall make no law respecting a religious establishment.” (Veto Message to Congress, Feb 21, 1811)
[Bronshteyn]: By God man – art thou mad?! How can we even distinguish Congress and religion?! This country was founded by Christians for Christians!
[Madison]: I admit that it may not be easy, in every possible case, to trace the line of separation between the rights of religion and the civil authority with such distinctness as to avoid collisions and doubts on unessential points. [But] the tendency to a usurpation on one side or the other or to a corrupting coalition or alliance between them will be best guarded against by entire abstinence of the government from interference in any way whatever, beyond the necessity of preserving public order and protecting each sect against trespasses on its legal rights by others. (Letter to Rev. Jasper Adams, Spring 1832).
[Bronshteyn]: The entire abstinence of government?! What sort of Christian are you?! What about the philanthropic aspects of religion? Can government at least aid the charitable and educational projects of religious groups non-preferentially?
[Madison]: A bill [that] vests in the church an authority to provide for the support of the poor and the education of poor children of the same, an authority which, being altogether superfluous if the provision is to be the result of pious charity, would be a precedent for giving to religious societies as such a legal agency in carrying into effect a public and civil duty. (Veto Message to Congress, Feb 21, 1811)
[Bronshteyn]: But our government needs religion to help carry out its public and civic duty! More importantly, what you’re advocating will uproot the priesthood! It will abolish morality as we know it! We will see the end of devotion!
[Madison]: The civil Government... possesses the requisite stability, and performs its functions with complete success, whilst the number, the industry, and the morality of the priesthood, and the devotion of the people, have been manifestly increased by the total separation of the church from the State (Letter to Robert Walsh, Mar. 2, 1819).
[Bronshteyn]: Total separation of the church from the state?! And then what? The abolition of slavery? Interracial marriage? Civil rights for homosexuals? If this is where it starts... where will it end?!
[Crusader]: Settle down Bronshteyn - Madison’s missing the point. He and other activist liberals can make up all the crazy stories they want about the ‘total separation of church and state,’ and so on, but at the end of the day, we don’t have to guess how the framers wanted the Constitution to be interpreted because they left an extensive written record of what they meant. To interpret the Establishment Clause we need only concern ourselves with how the Clause’s author wanted it to be interpreted. Isn’t that, after all, what ‘strict constructionism’ is all about?

Jesus, Meet Evolution

Why it’s okay for Christians to believe in Darwin
By Bryan Collinsworth,
Sarah Lawrence College

It used to be that if you wanted to provoke the wrath of God, you had to do something really horrific, like enslave an entire race of people to build your pyramids.

These days, though, you just have to vote for the wrong school board candidate. At least that’s televangelist Pat Robertson’s take on last Tuesday’s ousting of eight Dover, Pennsylvania school board members who had mandated the teaching of intelligent design in local science classrooms.

“I’d like to say to the good citizens of Dover: If there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city,” Robertson warned on the November 9 broadcast of his televised insanity (also known as The 700 Club). “And don’t wonder why He hasn’t helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I’m not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city.”

Of course, even many conservative Christians dismiss Robertson as a shamelessly immoral fraud (though the White House apparently does not). His tirade, however, was only the latest in a series of attacks on the religiosity of those Doverites who dared oppose teaching intelligent design as science. During the campaign even neighbors accused the challengers for school board of being un-Christian, anti-God, and in bed with the dreaded ACLU, terrorists, and pedophiles. There’s only one problem: Most of the newly elected board members are people of sincere and devout faith. Of the four Republicans and four Democrats (although they all ran on the Democratic ticket), at least two hold leadership positions in local churches, and even the group’s stance on intelligent design can’t be construed as anti-religious: They simply assert that since the concept is more about faith than science, it is more properly broached in religion and humanities courses.

For the countless Americans who comfortably balance belief and science every day, the discovery of Christian evolutionists in Dover won’t raise any eyebrows. But it will strike many others as a rare contradiction. This is understandable: Conservative Christian leaders have been working for twenty years to reshape the American lexicon and popular consciousness until the word “Christian” refers not to a broad range of self-professed—and often progressive—followers of Jesus Christ, but solely to right-wing fundamentalists like themselves.

These efforts, however, cannot mask the reality that it is perfectly possible to be a good Christian and embrace evolution at the same time. How? The simplest explanation is that science answers “how” questions while faith answers “why” questions, and never the twain shall meet. Unfortunately, it’s not always that easy: Faith often embraces and builds upon certain assumptions about how the universe works, and science often digs beneath those assumptions, seeking to unlock the secrets of what many consider the divine.

Evolution is a case in point: For certain Christian traditions, science’s contention that all life on Earth developed through millions of years of mutations clearly invalidates their assertions that everything originated exactly the way it’s described in Genesis. This might not be so bad, except that that “how” creation story is intimately tied to the “why” of these believers’ faith. For very conservative and fundamentalist Christian traditions, a literal reading of Genesis sets up many of the religious concepts and morals they hold dear: that men and women were created for biological partnership with distinct gender roles, say, or that our ancestors’ eating of forbidden fruit makes all humans sinners, with salvation available only through Jesus Christ.

Moreover, this approach to the creation story is the first expression of a central tenet of fundamentalist faith: that the Bible is the literal and infallible word of God, and that as such it offers clear, unquestionable lessons for how we should live our lives. After interpreting Genesis in this way, conservative Christians proceed all the way through Exodus and Leviticus to the Book of Revelation, constructing their entire edifice of theology and morality from a narrow reading of carefully selected passages.

An admission that things in the beginning were not so cut-and-dry, then, wouldn’t just undermine the creation story and its religious lessons; it could cast doubt on the entire concept of scriptural authority and the uncompromising moral code that religious conservatives derive from it. If we question the Bible’s account of creation, could questioning its stance on homosexuality or original sin be far behind?

While intelligent design abandons this literal approach to Genesis, it too is an effort to defend a narrow understanding of Christian theology— namely, that God acts primarily through overt interventions in the physical world, and that a theory of evolution which makes such intervention unnecessary could be taken as evidence that God is not present in any aspect of existence. This is why ID advocates are struggling to force Godly interventions back into biology by any means necessary.

What motivates all of this pushback against evolution, then, are fears that science threatens not only the “how” but the “why” of Christian faith. The real danger, though, is only to exceedingly narrow and literalistic interpretations of that faith. The best way for Christians to resolve this conflict is not to attack science, but to embrace a broader and deeper approach which can not only accommodate evolution but fulfill the full potential of Christianity itself.

Conservative preachers sneer at this approach as a cop-out or a concession to “secular humanists,” but they push the limits of their own rigid standards all the time—starting with Genesis. After all, the wellknown “Biblical” story of creation is actually a combination of two different accounts. In the first (Genesis 1 – 2:3), God makes the world in seven days, with plants first, then animals, and humans last of all. In the second (Genesis 2:4 – 3:24), God makes everything in one day, starting with a human, then plants and animals, and finally splitting the human into man and woman.

This contrast illustrates the limits of narrow literalism from the first verse of the Bible, but it also points to the real power of the text. Millions of believers have dwelled on these stories with all their contradictions not because they were desperate for a simple account of human origins, but because they found in them immense insight into the mysteries of the universe and our existence within it. While a literal reading of the seven- day account leads only to petty disputes and outrageous questions, a meditation on its spiritual significance inspires awe at the vast complexity of our cosmos, our earth, and ourselves.

This is where the Bible begins to take on its real power and authority: not as a precise account of physical truth, but as a deeply resonant revelation of moral and spiritual truth. If we insist on approaching the tale of Adam and Eve as literal truth, we come out of the story with little more than frustration that our ancestors could be so stupid as to condemn all humanity by trusting a talking snake. But if we let go of this literalist fixation and dig to the moral and spiritual heart of the story, we confront a fundamental tenet of Christianity: that the Garden of Eden drama is played out every day, by our neighbors and ourselves; that we are not just condemned by the temptation and sin of our predecessors but by humanity’s perpetual weakness in choosing evil over good; that we have all made choices to eat forbidden fruit for which we desperately want and need redemption.

Opponents of evolution fear that modern science advances a “materialist” worldview in which every aspect of existence is approached only on a crude, physical plane. But the literalist approach to scripture is precisely this—only when Christians move beyond it do we encounter the most meaningful realms of spiritual understanding and revelation. Thus, while intelligent design advocates desperately try to make science validate a clumsy interventionist God, C.S. Lewis envisions in The Screwtape Letters a Deity for whom the linear progress of evolution means nothing, because It operates beyond the bounds of space and time, intimately involved in “the whole, self-consistent creative act.”

The greatest Christian believers throughout history have understood and embraced these depths of the faith, and continue to do so today. In 1996, Pope John Paul II declared of science and belief that “ truth cannot contradict truth,” acknowledging that while evolutionary theory may challenge literal creationism, it can never challenge the basic spiritual message of Christianity: that humans face suffering and need redemption; that the vision, light, and life of Christ offer, for many, the means of that salvation. Many U.S. denominations, including the Episcopal Church, United Methodist Church, and Presbyterian Church, USA have taken similar stances.

The Bible is not a scientific text. But neither modern science nor modern fundamentalism can challenge it as an incredibly powerful historical, psychological, moral and spiritual document. As the great sage of another religion, Master Yoda, once said, “Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.” We should approach Christian scriptures and faith in the same way.

Brian Collinsworth is an intern for the Faith and Progressive Policy Initiative at the Center for American Progress. This article was originally published by Campus Progress (www.campusprogress. org).

Dear Reader,

It’s been a busy summer, full of nominations and confirmations, Justice Sundays and Thirsty Thursdays. From the many triumphs of the long-since-over war abroad against religious fundamentalists to the many tribulations of the never-ending war at home against secular humanists, you can rest assured that we at the Colonel are here to distill everything to its binary simplicity of right versus wrong and good versus evil.

As the newly liberated Iraq begins to resemble America during the peaceful and prosperous years of the early 1860’s, Colonel Beat Poet Rupert Fike reminds us of what it is we were fighting for (back before combat operations ended in May 2003). In case any of you were starting to grow skeptical, Fike goes further to show once again that this administration is at least as in touch with global problems as Mary Antoinette was with the plight of her peasants in late 1780’s France. Washington Correspondent Sam Staggs also tells us about President Bush’s nutritious long-term vision for the new Iraq. In an unrelated story, Jeff Gannon, the Colonel’s other Washington Correspondent, then reports about a new essay scholarship sponsored by the White House.

Further, as John Roberts’ nomination to the Supreme Court rekindles the benign embers of Roe v. Wade, the Colonel’s own Conservative Crusader – the people’s champ - humiliates Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker – a man once described by his former colleagues at MIT as “the most articulate person in the world” – in a barbaric anything-goes cage match on the issue of abortion. Check it out in this month’s Point-Counterpoint!

And of course, most importantly, as Colonel Intergalactic Bureau chief Alex Bibbey reports, our long campus nightmare of a disputed SG election will soon be over. Yes, the cosmological power vacuum created by the absence of a UK student body president will soon be filled by the only judiciary worthy of the case (and no, obviously I’m not talking about the activist University Appeals Board that unequivocally settled this issue in May). At last, Student Government will be run by someone who represents us, the students as opposed to the faculty, staff or worst of all, the UK parking police!

Perhaps the lesson to be learned is this: no one can stop the bloodstained wheels of progress: not Allah, not science, not even an impartial institutional appeals process at a second-class university.

Fondly,
Yuriy Bronshteyn
Colonel Editor

By Spencer Conco

It is a clear, yet shameful fact that more young women are having sex everyday. Unable to see beyond their lust for the next penile fix, most females have already forgotten the original purpose of intercourse.

This was clearly demonstrated in Illinois where several women recently paraded into a local pharmacy and demanded that the white knights behind the counter give them their pregnancy stopping, evil loving birth control pills or, as they should be known, Jesus Weep Tablets. Of course, the righteous pharmacists turned away those promiscuous whores and shameful married couples on moral grounds. In response, however, they received a harsh reprimand from Illinois’ ethics-free governor Rod Blagojevich. Later, Blagojevich even issued an executive order forcing the state’s pharmacists to fill all future prescriptions for so-called “legal drugs.”

It certainly makes me long for the days before Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), a time when anyone caught using birth control in the Constitution State faced a hefty fine or a sixty-day prison sentence. Now today’s Jezebels are free to trample upon America’s values with impunity. The fact is, if you don’t stand up for the rights of our apothecaries, Blagojevich’s sex-crazed government will eventually silence morality forever. In fact, you can support pharmacists’ rights the next time you go to your local drug store. Just walk in and if the man behind the counter refuses to give you the Excedrin your doctor proscribed, don’t argue with him: just pray out the pain! Unlike you or me, pharmacists know right from wrong. They went to school for years to make moral decisions about your body so that you won’t have to.

On Persecution

by Zell Miller

Rarely in public discourse has the analogy of the Holocaust been used discreetly. Rarely also have two groups of people experienced such similar atrocities as Jews throughout the Third Reich and Christians during the twenty-first century.

As any friend of Jesus living in America today knows, and “completely” is a strong word, but the struggles and sufferings of our two peoples have been completely identical. Just as Hitler systematically killed millions of Jews, secular humanists have systematically killed millions of dollars of funding for faith-based programs. Just as Jewish children were persistently humiliated by Nazis, young Christians are persistently humiliated by the educational system in classes like “BIO 150: Jesus Was a Lie” or “HIS 101: Jesus Was a Homosexual.” Christian families are cajoled by societal pressure to live in drab suburbs, just as Jewish families were once cajoled by German soldiers into concentration camps. Christians cloister themselves in churches ear-marked for their religion on Sunday morning, just as the Jews were packed into railroad cars ear-marked for mass extermination. Good Christian men and women are simply being intellectually hounded and intellectually rounded up into intellectual death camps.

And it’s only going to get worse. Even as you read these words, the Senate is debating a Constitutional amendment to systematically feed America’s Christians to zoo lions. Now is your chance to speak up: call Senator Mitch McConnell at (202) 224-2541 RIGHT NOW and tell him to vote NO on the “Feeding Christians to Lions/Final Solution” amendment. Tell him that you’re fed up with the American government pushing around devout Christian men and women. Tell him that you’re tired of seeing Christians deprived of their basic human rights. Someone has to draw the line somewhere. Just think: if this is where it starts…where will it end?

Point-Counterpoint

The Conservative Crusader takes on Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate in defense of “ensoulment.” Moderated by Focus on the Family President James Dobson – henceforth to be known as “Andre the Giant.”

[Giant to Crusader]: Is there a specific point at which the body is suffused with a soul?

[Crusader]: Of course - personhood begins at the moment of conception.

[Pinker]: “[But] research on human reproduction shows that the ‘moment of conception’ is not a moment at all. Sometimes several sperm penetrate the outer membrane of the egg and it takes time for the egg to eject the extra chromosomes. What and where is the soul during this interval?”

[Crusader]: Basking in God’s glory. Next question.

[Pinker]: “[But] even when a single sperm enters, its genes remain separate from those of the egg for a day or more, and it takes yet another day or so for the newly merged genome to control the cell. So the ‘moment of conception’ is in fact a span of twenty-four to forty-eight hours.”

[Giant to Pinker]: With all due respect Dr. Pinker, I think you’re missing the Crusader’s point. Within the span of these one to two days, there is a specific point at which the genes of the male sperm and the genes of the female ovum fuse to form the full genome of the individual. This genome contains the complete sequence of DNA eventually found in every cell of the developed adult human. The genome is also the engine that drives embryonic development. Why won’t you just admit that the soul could easily emerge in the embryo at the specific moment during conception when the genome is formed?

[Pinker]: “As the embryo’s cells begin to divide, they can split into several embryos, which can develop into identical twins, triplets and so on. Do identical twins share a soul? Did the Dionne quintuplets make do with one fifth of a soul each? If not, where did the extra four souls come from? Indeed, every cell in the growing embryo is capable, with the right manipulations of becoming a new embryo that can grow into a child. Does a multicell embryo consist of one soul per cell, and if so, where do the other souls go when the cells lose that ability? And not only can one embryo become two people, but two embryos can become one person. Occasionally, two fertilized eggs, which ordinarily go on to become fraternal twins, merge into a single embryo that develops into a single person who is a genetic chimera: some of her cells have one genome, others have another genome. Does her body have two souls?”

[Crusader]: How the h€ll should I know! Yeah, I guess the Dionne quintuplets turned out alright with twenty percent of a soul each. Shows you can do a lot with a little. Very entrepreneurial, I’d say. And yes, that crazy girl you’re talking about probably has two souls. Around here we got another name for such a “chimera” – we call her possessed.

[Giant to Pinker]: Listen Pinker, I’m a professor myself – a clinical one, not an ivory tower princess like you – and I like my ethics spelled out in black and white. The biology may be muddled, but at least ensoulment leaves me with something more important than a nuanced understanding of the issues, something I like to call: morals slash values.

[Pinker]: “The idea that ensoulment takes place at conception is not only hard to reconcile with biology but does not have the moral superiority credited to it. It implies that we should prosecute users of intrauterine contraceptive devices and the ‘morning-after pill’ for murder, because they prevent the conceptus from implanting. It implies that we should divert medical research from curing cancer and heart disease to preventing the spontaneous miscarriages of vast numbers of microscopic conceptuses. It impels us to find surrogate mothers for the large number of embryos left over from in vitro fertilization that are currently in fertility clinic freezers…The demand by both religious and secular ethicists that we identify the ‘criteria for personhood’ assumes that a dividing line in brain development can be found. But any claim that such a line has been sighted leads to moral absurdities.”

[Crusader]: I say, life begins at conception. What could be more intuitive than that?

by Rupert Fike

For a late-sleeping American
in a West African village,
what wakes one each morning
are whump, whump, whumps -
millet pounded in the courtyard pestle
by girls singing, even occasionally
clapping, their wood mortars
pausing in mid-air to share that joy
before the crushing downstroke,
what meals grain into pre-flour,
what will be boiled, poured, cooled,
what will become today's Toh,
pudding finger-food, staff of life
dipped in eggplant/palm oil sauce
then raised to lowered mouths
while smoky mopeds whine by,
roosters cry, and goats nanny
in tribal dust under mango trees.
But in Niger, this saddest summer,
there are few whumps
(millet is scarce--first drought,
then locusts--Biblical plagues).
And the babies can't swat flies--
they just cry ... and die,
same as cattle after eating sand,
same as their Fulani herders,
herdless now, who dive down wells--
while leaders of "developed" nations,
who only saw Niger as uranium piles,
remain silent, air-conditioned.
And, as countless flies buzz
over blistered Sahel lips,
that silence translates as,
"Let them eat yellowcake!"

Dear Reader,

By now you are doubtless well aware of the plethora of reading choices sprouting up on the campus of the University of Kentucky. From The Catalyst to The Enzyme, from The Inhibitor to The Restrictor, and from The Receptor to The Activated G-Protein Coupled Hormone-Receptor Complex, you will find that all of them have two things in common: flaming liberal bias and a peculiar interest in obscure scientific nomenclature.

However, here at The Colonel, we believe neither in science nor in left wing propaganda. We base our views not on rational reasoning or empirical observations of the physical world, but on our subjective feelings of how things should be. We believe not in helping street-people, but in our 2nd amendment right to shoot people on the street. In short, we seek to give voice to good old-fashioned bourgeois American values that are otherwise ignored by the mainstream press, the music industry, Hollywood, etc.

Yet to these other publications we turn not a blind eye or a cold shoulder but a warm eye and a vigilant shoulder. We welcome opinions that differ from our own and look forward to heathen liberal disapproval. These other publications form a necessary opposition to our admittedly moderate conservative views. Together we are equal and opposite forces combining to form a dynamic equilibrium...much like the Fox News Channel. We are the Hannity to their Colmes and together we bring you coverage that can only be described as Fair and Balanced.

Thus we encourage you to explore both The Colonel and our communist competitors, so long as you read everything with a grain of salt and at least 2 spoonfuls of sugar.

Fondly,
Yuriy Bronshteyn
Colonel Editor

The content of this paper is Copyright © 2005 by The Colonel and may not be reprinted or retransmitted in whole or in part without the express written consent of the authors. All previously copyrighted creations in this publication are copyrighted to the creators.