From Vdare.com:

An Orwellian Christmas
By Tom Piatak

[Also by Tom Piatak: Take Back Christmas! and Happy Holidays? Bah! Humbug!]

Traditionally, the writer most associated with Christmas was Charles Dickens. But today, Christmas in America is far more likely to be Orwellian than Dickensian.

Long before the advent of political correctness, Orwell wrote, “Freedom is the freedom to say 2 + 2 = 4. If that is granted, all else follows.”

I was reminded of Orwell’s great insight by a recent skirmish in the War against Christmas at a private school east of my hometown, Cleveland.

A seventh grader there made the mistake of saying that two plus two equals four. He called the decorated tree in his homeroom a “Christmas tree.” 

When I was in seventh grade, such a statement would have been as controversial as saying the sky is blue. After all, Christmas is the holiday that causes tens of millions of Americans to celebrate by putting up decorated trees.

But, at this school, students are required to say that two plus two equals five: the decorated tree must be referred to as a “holiday tree.”

Because of his insistence on speaking the truth, this seventh grader was labeled an “anti-Semite” and a “Nazi” by classmates.

Far from reprimanding the students who absurdly equated Christmas with Nazism, his teacher threatened to discipline the seventh grader if he persisted in calling the decorated tree by its actual name. He was also warned that he must not wish anyone a “Merry Christmas.”

Needless to say, this bit of nastiness was justified on the Orwellian grounds of “diversity” and “tolerance.”

Interestingly, even though Jewish students are a minority, the school also displays menorahs and dreidels (but no nativity scenes) and puts up lights in blue and white, the Hanukkah colors. No one is threatened with discipline for mentioning that holiday.

I was also reminded of Orwell when I was preparing for a recent talk to the Cleveland chapter of the Federalist Society on the legal aspects of the War Against Christmas. At least some federal courts harbor a thinly-disguised hostility toward Christianity, justified in Orwellian terms.

Of course, as VDARE.COM has pointed out, the First Amendment is not the reason for the War against Christmas. The school where no student may say “Christmas” is a private school, not a public one. And the War Against Christmas rages in lands with no First Amendment. Last week, the New York Times reported that there was widespread outrage in Italy because a school near Como had decided to substitute the word “virtue” for “Jesus” in an Italian carol the students were performing—in the interests of “diversity,” of course.

But the First Amendment (and the “wall of separation” between church and state it supposedly embodies) has certainly proven a valuable weapon for those intent on obliterating any public mention of Christmas.

Needless to say, that is not what the First Amendment was intended to do. As Justice Joseph Story, the leading commentator on the Constitution in the first half of the nineteenth century, explained,

“The real object of the amendment was not to countenance, much less to advance, Mahometanism, or Judaism, or infidelity, by prostrating Christianity, but to exclude all rivalry among Christian sects, and to prevent any national ecclesiastical establishment which should give to a hierarchy the exclusive patronage of the national government.”

Indeed, several New England states had established churches well into the nineteenth century.

Often, however, current jurisprudence stands Story’s words on their head. In Skoros v. City of New York, a federal district judge upheld the New York City schools’ policy of displaying Islamic crescents and menorahs, but banning nativity scenes. In upholding this policy, the court lauded the schools’ “diversity policy,” writing that

“Without a diversity policy, a winter holiday display in New York City’s public schools would be dominated by images representative of Christmas.”

Citing Supreme Court precedent, the court concluded that

“an explicit Christian religious symbol such as a crèche need not be included in a Christmas time display to counterbalance the display of a menorah before the message is reasonably perceived as one of inclusion.”

This is the point: in today’s America, what “diversity” and “inclusion” actually mean is that symbols of America’s Christian heritage must be excluded—and expelled.

In Orwellian terms: “inclusion” is exclusion. “Diversity” is conformity.

And, of course, freedom is slavery.

In amazing contrast is the California district court decision in Eklund v. Byron Union School District, which upheld an eight-week long “study module” for seventh graders that required students to recite Islamic prayers and participate in activities intended to approximate the Five Pillars of Islam, and also encouraged students to create Islamic banners, take Arab names, and wear Arab garb.

The court ruled that “Role playing activities which are not in actuality the practice of a religion do not violate the Establishment Clause”—citing Ninth Circuit precedent upholding reading assignments that discussed witches and instructed students to pretend to cast magic spells.

One is tempted to resort to Orwell’s newspeak to explain these decisions: Islam and witches, good; nativity scenes, “ungood.”

Fortunately, other federal court decisions suggest a strategy for a successful counterattack: emphasizing the unmatched cultural significance of Christmas.

The Eighth Circuit has recognized, in Florey v. Sioux Falls School District, that “carols have a cultural significance that justifies their being sung in the public schools.”

And the Fifth Circuit has recognized, in Doe v. Duncanville Independent School District, that

“a position of neutrality towards religion must allow choir directors to recognize the fact that most choral music is religious. Limiting the number of times a religious piece of music can be sung is tantamount to censorship and does not send students a message of neutrality.”

At my talk to the Federalist Society, I illustrated this point by playing a recording of “Es ist ein Ros’ entsprungen” (we know it as “Lo, How A Rose E’er Blooming”) from my favorite Christmas CD.

Aside from its amazing beauty, there were several notable aspects about this recording.

It was sung by children, showing that age is not an insuperable obstacle in introducing students to cultural excellence.

This particular version was recorded in East Germany, showing that even an atheist state, officially hostile to religion, was able to recognize value in Christmas.

The carol was sung in German, showing that teaching students about Christmas is an ideal vehicle for teaching them about true multiculturalism. Indeed, my own collection of Christmas music features carols sung in German, French, Italian, Latin, Spanish, Polish, Catalan, Welsh, and Ukrainian, in addition to English. No other holiday matches the cultural breadth of Christmas.

Also significant was the fact that the music was composed by one great composer, Michael Praetorius, and that the singers came from the choir of St. Thomas in Leipzig, among whose former choirmasters was Johann Sebastian Bach. This CD features Christmas music by both Bach and Praetorius as well as two other towering geniuses, Palestrina and Handel. It’s also one of 40 Christmas CDs I have, each featuring something unique and not found in the others.

No other festival has inspired even a tiny fraction of such great music. It is absurd that those whose profession is to teach now discipline students who even mention the name of the holiday that inspired this outpouring of beauty.

Perhaps the schools should follow this test instead: equal emphasis on all winter holidays that have music written for them by Johann Sebastian Bach.

Even crèches, regularly expelled from schools and other public places, could serve a secular educational purpose. In addition to helping explain the origin of Christmas, they could be used to introduce students to the Western artistic tradition.

The first crèche was created by Francis of Assisi, whose life was recorded in paint by Giotto, one of the founders of Western painting. The Metropolitan Museum of Art recently spent a record $45,000,000 to acquire a painting of the Madonna and Child by a contemporary of Giotto’s, Duccio. Even though the painting is no larger than a sheet of typing paper, the Met felt the purchase price was justified by Duccio’s great importance in the Western artistic tradition—a tradition inextricably bound up with Christianity in general and Christmas in particular.

Indeed, Duccio, like Giotto, painted many scenes inspired by Christmas—including the painting purchase by the Met. According to a Met spokesman quoted in the December 10, 2004 New York Times, the museum is going to display its prized acquisition starting on December 21:

“There was a strong desire to have the Duccio on display before Christmas because there’s such an interest in its history as a devotional picture.” [“The Met Unveils a Masterpiece, Its Most Expensive Work of Art,” by Carol Vogel]

If our schools can spend eight weeks teaching students about Islam, surely they should be able to teach students about the holiday that has been at the heart of our own civilization for centuries.

One need not accept the divinity of Christ to recognize—and even be awed by—the beauty His birth inspired. I doubt the Met decided to purchase Duccio’s painting for reasons of Christian piety.

A friend tells me that her Jewish mother-in-law observes Christmas each year by going to a performance of “Messiah” and to Midnight Mass, because of her love for the music. Some of the best Christmas music I know was recorded by Joel Cohen and his Boston Camerata. Great Jewish conductors such as Eugene Ormandy and Leonard Bernstein recorded albums filled with wonderful Christmas music. Recently, America’s greatest conductor of choral music, including Christmas choral music, was Robert Shaw, a Unitarian, not an orthodox Christian.

A greater appreciation for the unparalleled cultural significance of Christmas should lead to greater tolerance of the public celebration of Christmas in all its facets. After all, the beauty that inspires even many non-believers was the result of a tradition that valued Christmas and what it means.

A society that treats “Christmas” as a dirty word and assiduously tries to prevent school children from learning anything about it—especially the parts of Christmas that are beautiful or sublime —is unlikely to add to that beauty, or even pass along the beauty it received from earlier generations untouched by the War against Christmas.

Despite the continued onslaught against Christmas and the Orwellian arguments served up to justify it, I remain optimistic. Each year more and more people come to recognize that a War against Christmas is being waged, and they start fighting back.

I was also encouraged by the Federalists’ reaction to my talk. And one audience member, an Orthodox Jewish lawyer, offered a valuable piece of advice.

He said that Christians need to grow backbones.

He was right. We need to be able to stand up and say “two plus two equals four” again.

If we can do that, as Orwell wrote, “all else follows.”

Tom Piatak writes from Cleveland, Ohio.

From The Corner on National Review Online:

OUR FRIENDS
by Andrew Stuttaford

Here’s a delightful story from the Saudi dictatorship:

“Jeddah (AsiaNews) – A Saudi citizen converted to Christianity has been arrested and jailed. Emad Alaabadi was taken into custody last November 29, at Hofuf, a town in eastern Saudi Arabia, but the news was reported only a few days ago by the International Christian Concern (ICC), a Washington-based human rights group. AsiaNews local sources have confirmed the report, and also say that he “is not the only Saudi Christian in jail at the moment: there are also others”. According to news obtained by ICC, other Christians – at least 3 or 4 – appear to have been arrested along with Emad.”

Now, I understand perfectly well that – for now – the West still has to have dealings with the repulsive regime that runs 'Saudi' Arabia, but I am at a loss to understand how anyone – let alone anyone professing a strong Christian faith – is willing to treat its representatives as honored guests, sponsors or friends.

And if you think I’m referring to the Bush family, you are right.

From HollywoodJesus.com:

U2: How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb
Review by Michael Ray

How do you top the fame, fortune and popularity that are already equated with U2? Bono and The Edge are household names among music fans, and the band’s career has spanned 25 years. With the hype and anticipation surrounding the release of How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, anything less than stellar reviews would be underachieving for the boys from Ireland.

Is the album a solid piece of work? Definitely—it will push U2’s already successful career forward. But it isn’t necessarily groundbreaking for them. It bears little resemblance to the experimental albums of Zooropa and Pop (both of which I love, for the record). It’s also a noticeably different vibe than the widely successful All That You Can’t Leave Behind, which reestablished the band’s fan base in 2000. All That You Can’t is a set of songs that brings back memories of the early U2 days, namely The Joshua Tree. Whereas, How to Dismantle, with its haunting melodies and sexy guitar layers, sounds much more like something from the Achtung Baby era. Indeed the classic pieces are all here: Edge’s trademark guitar sounds, Bono’s distinctive soaring vocals, and the spiritually charged lyrics.

The music is not purely loud rock n’ roll; in fact, the opening single “Vertigo,” with its catchy guitar riff, provides the biggest punch of the album. The rest of the disc settles into a steady cohesive groove, consisting of pop rock tunes and ballads with a definite acoustic emphasis. The band has always been able to write strong melodies, and this album is no exception. However, as a whole it fails to take the band in any new direction. While the creativity of past work (the aforementioned Pop album, for example) revealed an unusual and innovative side to the band, this album fails to create much excitement. It’s a comfortable fit for the fans, and a pleasure to listen to, but I’d hoped the band would have continued to push the bounds of today’s rock landscape instead of settling for a conservative U2 sound.

What isn’t static is the band’s spirituality, which permeates the entire production. Bono continues to deftly weave together romantic, spiritual, and political imagery in his lyrics. In fact, Bono’s lyrics may be the most explicitly “Christian” that they’ve ever been. He’s become more outspoken in recent years about his faith and doesn’t shy away from writing modern-day rock n’ roll hymns for an un-churched audience. They may not fit into a typical evangelical or mainline church, but Bono and the boys haven’t failed to serve and promote the Judeo-Christian God in a distinctive and powerful way.

The songs on this album indeed have much to say. The Christian message of compassion is represented in the song “Miracle Drug.” Bono empathetically writes to everyone suffering in the African AIDS crisis, telling them that “love makes nonsense of space and time” and beneath the cries of the victims is the voice of Jesus reminding us to help bring comfort and relief (“I was a stranger, you took me in”).

In “Love and Peace or Else” (a song that represents what “Bullet the Blue Sky” might have sounded like on Pop), the band cries out for a cease fire in the Middle East: "lay down your guns, all your daughters of Zion, all your Abraham sons.” Instead of the incessant fighting which has disrupted the region for years, the prayer is for the current generation to develop “a brand new heart.”

The grace of God is the theme of “All Because of You;” In a poetic play on words, Bono uses the name of God that was given to Moses in Exodus 3:14, “I Am.” The Lord is given credit for bringing life and meaning—“You heard me in my tune, when I just heard confusion” and “I’m alive, I’m being born . . . all because of you, I Am.”

“One Step Closer” is a modern sequel to “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” displaying the emotional intensity of a weary wanderer in the world. In the midst of doubt, pain, and sorrow, there is still the hope of moving forward (“one step closer to knowing”). Love and mercy are learned through the trials of life, for “the heart that hurts is the heart that beats.”

The album concludes with “Yahweh,” a beautiful contemporary song of worship. “Take this shirt,” writes Bono, “and make it clean,” and “take this soul . . . and make it sing.” The road of sanctification is long and difficult, because there is “always pain before the child is born.” Every believer has wondered why Yahweh allows “the dark before the dawn,” but God continually reassures us of his presence in the world, and this brings hope (“the sun is coming up on the ocean”).

U2 continues to deliver this hope to the shadowy places of the world through artful and inspiring music. Even in the seemingly frivolous world of pop music one can find God’s grace at work, for as Bono reminds us, “blessings are not just for the ones who kneel . . . luckily” (“City of Blinding Lights”). This album affirms that God’s love is available to all people, and that it is only by His grace that anyone can experience true life. This realization drives us to our knees in humility, where we can all join the band in singing the final lines of “Yahweh”: “Take this heart . . . and make it break.”

From HollywoodJesus.com:

The Scouring of the Shire
By Greg Wright

In The Fellowship of the Ring, Frodo witnesses a frightening vision, courtesy of the Mirror of Galadriel. The placid, agrarian Shire is being despoilt and burnt, and peace-loving Hobbits like Samwise Gamgee are being scourged with whips.
It is only a vision, of course. As Galadriel tells Frodo in Tolkien’s novel, the Mirror does not necessarily show what will happen, but what might yet happen—and each potential future rests on our actions in the here and now.

And in the here and now, we know that in Peter Jackson’s filmed adaptation of Tolkien’s novel a despoiled Shire is simply not in the cards. As long as the Extended Edition of the final film was in the offing, though, the Tolkien purists among us could cling to those Mirror images with desperate hope, thinking maybe—just maybe—they were clips of further footage related to the episode that Tolkien called “The Scouring of the Shire.”

But the slate of added scenes is now set in stone, and Jackson’s version of the story features no such scouring. Jackson’s languid, contemplative conclusion to his Return of the King will remain as symphonic—and as dissonant, to some viewers—as it was in the original theatrical release.

And as I have asked more than once over the last three-plus years, is such disappointment any great tragedy? After all, can I praise Jackson for his daring and artistic integrity one December, then rake him over the coals the following November because his Extended Edition doesn’t suit my fancy? The answer is, of course, yes, I can, whether it’s fair or not—disappointed critics can be as capricious as a disillusioned Denethor when they please.

Yet in spite of critical license, I will decline castigation of Jackson’s effort, judging that good stewardship of Tolkien’s art warrants another, better response: clarifying why The Scouring of the Shire was so important to Tolkien, and explaining, perhaps, why it is rather less important to Jackson.

Tolkien’s Scouring
In Tolkien’s original story, Frodo and his companions take more than six months to complete their return journey to the Shire following the downfall of the Barad-dûr. During this time, a diminished and spiteful Saruman leverages his prior trading connections with the Shire, wresting control of most of the Shire from the Hobbits. “Sharkey’s Men,” as Saruman’s lackeys are called, intimidate their shorter, furry-footed humanoid cousins with threats, clubs, imprisonment and economic thuggery. Rumor has it that Sharkey’s Men may even have killed some Hobbits. Trees are cut to fuel new engines and mills, crops are shipped off to distant points at obscene profits, cozy Hobbit-holes are razed to make room for ghastly houses, and additional scores of traitorous “Shirriffs” are recruited from among the Hobbits to help “keep the peace.” In short, Saruman turns the Shire into the kind of average post-rural, proto-industrial fascist Western nightmare that Marx would have loved to hate.

Oddly enough, it seems that Gandalf has some inkling of the trouble Saruman has been causing; but not only does he do nothing to prevent it, he sends the Hobbits back to clean up the mess on their own. “I am with you at present, but soon I shall not be,” Gandalf tells the homeward-bound Hobbits while in the Bree district. “I am not coming to the Shire. You must settle its affairs yourselves; that is what you have been trained for. Do you not yet understand? My time is over: it is no longer my task to set things to rights, nor to help folk do so. And as for you, my dear friends, you will need no help.”

Gandalf is correct, of course. The Hobbits prove quite capable of routing Saruman’s thugs, of sending the illegitimate Shirriffs scurrying, of freeing the captives, and, in the long term (with Galadriel’s far-sighted help), of healing the broken land. Merry and Pippin, in particular, use their knighthood and increased physical stature to good advantage. And even the final mercy that Frodo shows to Saruman proves to be the Wizard’s own undoing, as the ever-fawning Wormtongue ultimately deals the fatal blow to his thankless—and pointedly graceless and merciless—master. But the victory comes at a cost. Men die. Hobbits die. Lots of them. The Shire is scoured, but at great cost.

The Significance of the Scouring
And this gets at the heart of the importance of The Scouring of the Shire. For Tolkien, the end of the story was not, and could never be, merely the destruction of the Ring and the fall of the Barad-dûr. The last battle of the War of the Ring was fought in Bywater, not Cirith Gorgor. Tolkien believed that the great battles are not just fought “over there”—the battles that really matter are those closest to home.

The Scouring of the Shire is a call to social action. What good is it, Tolkien asks, if we send a few good men—the youth of an entire generation, in the case of World War I—to fight in a foreign land if we foster corruption and abuse at home? What we ask in that case is for the survivors to fight yet another war when they return. Much has been made about parallels between Tolkien’s narrative and the events of World War II, but perhaps it is no accident that The Lord of the Rings has soared to phenomenal popularity in America over nearly half a century overshadowed by the specter of a much smaller war in the jungles of Viet Nam. Even in 2004, that war raged on in our Presidential campaign. The scouring of our own shire continues.
And appropriately so, given the present war in Iraq: The Scouring of the Shire is also a reminder that evil, even in diminished form, is still pernicious and insidious, fully potent in any environment that harbors, excuses or nourishes it. What our own Shirriffs did in Abu Ghraib was no less scandalous than the beheadings that continue at the direction of the Sharkeys of the modern age. Thuggery is still thuggery. Complicity is still complicity, and evil is still evil.

But the Scouring is also an acknowledgement of injustice in the face of an unreasonable mercy. Sure, Gandalf was right that the pity of Bilbo—the pity that stayed the elder Hobbit’s hand and let Gollum live to see several thousand more days—did rule the fate of Men: that in the absence of mercy, Gollum would never have been present at Mount Doom to salvage Frodo’s failure. But back in the Shire, Tolkien raises an even more nagging question: why, when twice given the chance to do otherwise, did Gandalf show mercy to Saruman—the Wizard who should have known better, the Wizard to whom mercy was most definitely not deserved?

If only Gandalf had slain Saruman, the wretched wizard would never have gone on to ravage the Shire. The taking of one life would have spared nearly a hundred others.

We might as well ask (and perhaps Tolkien wishes us to): Why does God allow evil to persist? As Saving Private Ryan argued, the evil bastard you show mercy to today will still be an evil bastard tomorrow. The practical solution is: Show no mercy, for you will receive none.

But Tolkien’s answer is not so pragmatic. Rather, it’s Biblical. We show mercy not because it’s deserved, nor because it’s practical, but because it’s the godly thing to do. “While we yet sinners,” the Apostle Paul observed—while we still God’s enemies—“Christ died for us.” We show mercy because God has shown mercy to us, even while we are unrepentant.

And this leads to a troubling observation: that social justice may seemingly be subverted by impractical spirituality. And Tolkien has this to say: Yes, even diminished evil will prosper whereever it may find safe harbour; but Trouble in the Shire is not the end of the story: good will also prosper, even if it finds no safe harbor—and ultimately, good triumphs. The day will come, Tolkien says, when all our Shires will be scoured. There is a Redeemer, and as the prophet Malachi said, “Who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears? For he will be like a refiner's fire.” Tolkien’s Gandalf, as a servant of that Secret Fire, has as full confidence in that future as did Tolkien.

The Gaping Hole in Jackson’s Adaptation
And what about Peter Jackson? In the first place, presenting the story of The Scouring of the Shire would dictate a fourth film—one with its own exposition, its own story arc, climax and resolution. There is simply no way even a four-plus hour film could sustain such a self-contained narrative in its closing scenes.

But at the end of the day, the crux of the issue is more philosophical than cinematic: Tolkien has far less confidence in human potential and the power of purely human fellowship than does Jackson. And why not? Two World Wars taught Tolkien that only faith in an external, greater Good could sustain him. Yet astounding human potential, and the fellowship found in an amazing production team, did manage to bring Jackson through his war to bring Tolkien’s Rings to the screen.

So Jackson has little use for lessons about external evil and external good; he has even openly expressed doubts that such things exist. Dominic Monaghan, Viggo Mortensen, John Rhys-Davies, Sir Ian McKellan and others have far more interest in social action than Jackson. And at Helm’s Deep we already found out the extent to which Jackson’s vision of mercy differs from Tolkien’s.

Without interest in or sympathy with Tolkien’s themes, and in the face of narrative and commercial pressures, what’s a director to do? Punt, and leave the pricklier issues to the books. And that’s probably as it should be.

So as you pick up your Extended Edition DVD on December 14, think about The Scouring of the Shire, because you won’t find it on video. Think about picking up the book, too, and reminding or finding out for yourself what The Lord of the Rings is really about. And remember that, for Tolkien, the Return of the King wasn’t just about Aragorn.

From washingtonpost.com:

Just Leave Christmas Alone
By Charles Krauthammer

"Holiday celebrations where Christmas music is being sung make people feel different, and because it is such a majority, it makes the minority feel uncomfortable."
-- Mark Brownstein, parent, Maplewood, N.J., supporting the school board's ban on religious music in holiday concerts

"You want my advice? Go back to Bulgaria."
-- Humphrey Bogart, "Casablanca"

It is Christmastime, and what would Christmas be without the usual platoon of annoying pettifoggers rising annually to strip Christmas of any Christian content? With some success:

School districts in New Jersey and Florida ban Christmas carols. The mayor of Somerville, Mass., apologizes for "mistakenly" referring to the town's "holiday party" as a "Christmas party." The Broward and Fashion malls in South Florida put up a Hanukah menorah but no nativity scene. The manager of one of the malls explains: Hanukah commemorates a battle and not a religious event, though he hastens to add, "I really don't know a lot about it." He does not. Hanukah commemorates a miracle, and there is no event more "religious" than a miracle.

The attempts to de-Christianize Christmas are as absurd as they are relentless. The United States today is the most tolerant and diverse society in history. It celebrates all faiths with an open heart and open-mindedness that, compared to even the most advanced countries in Europe, are unique.

Yet more than 80 percent of Americans are Christian, and probably 95 percent of Americans celebrate Christmas. Christmas Day is an official federal holiday, the only day of the entire year when, for example, the Smithsonian museums are closed. Are we to pretend that Christmas is nothing but an orgy of commerce in celebration of . . . what? The winter solstice?

I personally like Christmas because, since it is a day that for me is otherwise ordinary, I get to do nice things, such as covering for as many gentile colleagues as I could when I was a doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital. I will admit that my generosity had its rewards: I collected enough chits on Christmas Day to get reciprocal coverage not just for Yom Kippur but for both days of Rosh Hashana and my other major holiday, Opening Day at Fenway.

Mind you, I've got nothing against Hanukah, although I am constantly amused -- and gratified -- by how American culture has gone out of its way to inflate the importance of Hanukah, easily the least important of Judaism's seven holidays, into a giant event replete with cards, presents and public commemorations as a creative way to give Jews their Christmas equivalent.

Some Americans get angry at parents who want to ban carols because they tremble that their kids might feel "different" and "uncomfortable" should they, God forbid, hear Christian music sung at their school. I feel pity. What kind of fragile religious identity have they bequeathed their children that it should be threatened by exposure to carols?

I'm struck by the fact that you almost never find Orthodox Jews complaining about a Christmas creche in the public square. That is because their children, steeped in the richness of their own religious tradition, know who they are and are not threatened by Christians celebrating their religion in public. They are enlarged by it.

It is the more deracinated members of religious minorities, brought up largely ignorant of their own traditions, whose religious identity is so tenuous that they feel the need to be constantly on guard against displays of other religions -- and who think the solution to their predicament is to prevent the other guy from displaying his religion, rather than learning a bit about their own.

To insist that the overwhelming majority of this country stifle its religious impulses in public so that minorities can feel "comfortable" not only understandably enrages the majority but commits two sins. The first is profound ungenerosity toward a majority of fellow citizens who have shown such generosity of spirit toward minority religions.

The second is the sin of incomprehension -- a failure to appreciate the uniqueness of the communal American religious experience. Unlike, for example, the famously tolerant Ottoman Empire or the generally tolerant Europe of today, the United States does not merely allow minority religions to exist at its sufferance. It celebrates and welcomes and honors them.

America transcended the idea of mere toleration in 1790 in Washington's letter to the Newport synagogue, one of the lesser known glories of the Founding: "It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights."

More than two centuries later, it is time that members of religious (and anti-religious) minorities, as full citizens of this miraculous republic, transcend something too: petty defensiveness.

Merry Christmas. To all.

Battle for the future not over
By Patrick J. Buchanan

December 15, 2004

With Bush's 51 percent victory, Colin Powell's departure and the purge at CIA, many on the Old Right seem sunk in Bunyan's Slough of Despond. They assume the neoconservatives are now free to pursue war without end.

Yet, six weeks have now passed since Nov. 2, and there is as yet no conclusive evidence George Bush is looking to widen the war in Iraq or launch wars on other axis-of-evil nations. Consider:

With the recapture of Fallujah, U.S. generals have indicated a need for more troops to neutralize other strongholds and pacify the Sunni Triangle before January elections. John McCain told "Meet the Press" that we may need 40,000 to 50,000 more. In the Weekly Standard, Tom Donnelly of AEI has called for an enlargement of the U.S. Army of 480,000 and pumping up defense spending from 4 percent to the 5 percent or 6 percent of GDP Reagan spent in the decisive years of the Cold War.

Why do we need the ground troops? Because, writes Donnelly, our real war is "a contest between liberalism and radical Islam to supplant the crumbling autocracies that have dominated the region since the fall of the Ottoman Empire." Our war is about "preserving Pax Americana."

The neocons have in mind taking down Middle East regimes and occupying their nations with U.S. troops, who would train and fight with indigenous forces to crush insurgents who resist American "hegemony."

"[America] will continue to contribute the lion's share of the blood and treasure in the effort to transform the greater Middle East," writes Donnelly, but it's "impossible to have a Bush Doctrine world with Clinton-era defense budgets. The problem for the United States is not imperial overstretch, it's trying to run the planet on the cheap."

To which some of us might respond: The problem for the United States is trying to run the planet in the first place.

What is critical, however, is not what neocons say, but what Bush does. And while he still rhapsodizes about democratizing the world, he has yet to will the actions to attain the neocons' ends. There is no evidence of any large imminent increase in U.S. forces, or of 40,000 more troops embarking for the Sunni Triangle, or of a Bush plan to raise defense spending to Donnelly's "$500 or $600 billion for the foreseeable future."

Consider Iran. Relying on reports from an exile group we once labeled terrorist, Powell has warned that Iran may be at work on a nuclear warhead for its Shahab-3 missile, which can reach Israel. The neocons and Sharonites have been howling for Bush to effect the nuclear castration of Iran by bombing now.

Yet, there is no evidence Iran is working on a warhead, or has built a bomb, or has the fissile material for a bomb or the operational facilities to create the weapons-grade uranium or plutonium needed for a bomb.

The heavy water plant at Arak that would produce plutonium does not come on-stream until 2014. And while Iran has apparently converted "yellowcake" to uranium hexafluoride, the first step in producing highly enriched uranium, there is no evidence Iran has constructed a cascade of thousands of centrifuges needed to extract critical U-235 from U-238 and enrich it to 90 percent.

Thus, Iran has no nuclear arsenal. And as President Bush has yet to warn us to brace for the consequences of a U.S. strike, it would appear his near-term agenda does not include a Bush Doctrine preventive war on the mullahs' regime.

The same seems true for North Korea. In that Weekly Standard, AEI's Nick Eberstadt calls Bush's approach to Pyongyang "dangerously flawed." He urges the "readying [of] non-diplomatic instruments for North Korea threat reduction" – i.e., sanctions, blockade, air strikes or invasion.

But again, there is no evidence Bush is contemplating any such action, which could ignite a Korean war we are unprepared to fight.

What appears to be happening is this: While there is no shortage of neocon war plans for a Pax Americana, President Bush is bumping up against reality – a U.S. Army tied down and bleeding in Iraq, the rising costs of war, soaring deficits, a sinking dollar and an absence of allies willing to fight beside us or even help. He is facing the Vietnam dilemma.

Does he plunge deeper into Iraq in hope of victory, risking all, or cut his losses and revert to a more affordable, less ambitious foreign policy that secures the nation, but no longer seeks to convert the world to the American idea of democracy?

For 15 years, some of us have warned that if we fail to adopt a traditionalist foreign policy, the world will, to our humiliation, impose such a policy upon us.

Bush is at a crossroads. Conservatives, rather than wringing our hands, must re-engage the debate. All is not lost. All is never lost.

Christianophobia
By Patrick J. Buchanan

December 13, 2004

"'Tis the season to be jolly." But, as usual, not for all of us.

It is the Christmas season, that time in December when all good Christians celebrate the birth of the Savior of mankind, born in a stable in Bethlehem, 2,000 years ago.

It is a time of family gatherings and gift-giving, of joyous music and fond memories. For some, it is one of the few days of the year, Easter being the other, when they return to the old church for the feast day that yet retains its hold upon them from childhood.

Even many non-believers celebrate, for Christmas joy is contagious.

But not for all. For some, it is not too much to say that they hate the idea of Christmas with a deep abiding hate, not just the "Bah, humbug!" dismissal of old Scrooge. They want Christmas dead.

As usual, they are busy at work, going to court to get Nativity scenes expunged from public squares, demanding that statues of Mary, Joseph and the infant Jesus be removed from department stores and parades, checking vigilantly to see that any and all caroling at public schools is free of such outrages as "Silent Night." For people such as these, even Santa has become an intolerably divisive figure who must be purged from public life.

And this year, again, they are meeting with some success, especially with a business community for whom Christmas has always been about sales volume, not salvation.

Target stores have told the Salvation Army it may no longer station volunteers at store entrances, with their red kettles, and solicit charitable contributions for the poor. The 30-year tradition that reaped the Army $9 million a year has been terminated

The reason? Says Target, unconvincingly, it is so the company can have a consistent policy of no solicitations outside its stores. But in recent years, the gay lobby has pressured Target to ban the Army because it is Christian and rejects homosexuality as sinful.

Now Macy's has stopped using the phrase "Merry Christmas" in all store advertising, replacing it with what Macy's calls the more inclusive "Season's Greetings" and "Happy Holidays."

But how is it "inclusive" to exclude the Christians' greeting? Is that not anti-Christian? Why would the Macy's of the "Miracle on 34th Street" do such a thing? Why would Federated Department Stores, Macy's parent company, impose such a policy?

By Newton's laws of motion, an object moving in a given direction will continue to do so unless an outside force intervenes. What hidden force intervened to cause Macy's to reverse course and suddenly sever its ties to Christmas? Who insisted that Macy's cease to mention Christmas, the holiday around which its selling season is built?

It is hard to believe some Macy's executive took it upon himself to make so offensive a decision as to expunge "Merry Christmas" from the store, when so many of Macy's most loyal shoppers were certain to be disheartened and hurt. Who is trying to kill Christmas?

It needs to be said. What we are witnessing here are hate crimes against Christianity – the manifestations, the symptoms of a sickness of the soul, a disease a Vatican diplomat correctly calls "Christianophobia," the fear and loathing of all things Christian, coupled with a fanatic will to expunge from the public life of the West all reminders that ours was once a Christian civilization and America once a Christian country.

Americans are among the most tolerant of peoples. No one demands that any dissenting adult or child be made to say the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag, or join in Christmas caroling, or be forced to say a prayer before class, or go to church at Christmas. The Christian majority only asks that they be free to be themselves, to exercise their freedom to express their love of their Savior as the First Amendment has always guaranteed.

But what are we to make of Maplewood, N.J., where the Columbus High School brass ensemble was ordered not to play a single Christmas carol at their holiday concert, not even an instrumental version. Parents and students were outraged. "This is censorship at its most basic level," said student Ryan Dahn. Correct, Ryan.

In Denver, officials of the annual Parade of Lights refused to permit in the parade a float carrying the banner "Merry Christmas" with members of the Faith Bible Chapel congregation, who were to sing Christmas carols. Approved was a float sponsored by Two Souls, an American Indian group that considers homosexuality holy.

While Christmas often brings forth the best in some of us, because of who and what is being celebrated, that is not true for all of us. For some, it brings forth the purest malevolence. Why? Sadly, because they do not know Him. Nevertheless, Merry Christmas – to all.

From washingtonpost.com:

The Defense Secretary We Have
By William Kristol

Wednesday, December 15, 2004

"As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They're not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time."

-- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, in a town hall meeting with soldiers at Camp Buehring in Kuwait, Dec. 8.

Actually, we have a pretty terrific Army. It's performed a lot better in this war than the secretary of defense has. President Bush has nonetheless decided to stick for now with the defense secretary we have, perhaps because he doesn't want to make a change until after the Jan. 30 Iraqi elections. But surely Don Rumsfeld is not the defense secretary Bush should want to have for the remainder of his second term.

Contrast the magnificent performance of our soldiers with the arrogant buck-passing of Rumsfeld. Begin with the rest of his answer to Spec. Thomas Wilson of the Tennessee Army National Guard:

"Since the Iraq conflict began, the Army has been pressing ahead to produce the armor necessary at a rate that they believe -- it's a greatly expanded rate from what existed previously, but a rate that they believe is the rate that is all that can be accomplished at this moment. I can assure you that General Schoomaker and the leadership in the Army and certainly General Whitcomb are sensitive to the fact that not every vehicle has the degree of armor that would be desirable for it to have, but that they're working at it at a good clip."

So the Army is in charge. "They" are working at it. Rumsfeld? He happens to hang out in the same building: "I've talked a great deal about this with a team of people who've been working on it hard at the Pentagon. . . . And that is what the Army has been working on." Not "that is what we have been working on." Rather, "that is what the Army has been working on." The buck stops with the Army.

At least the topic of those conversations in the Pentagon isn't boring. Indeed, Rumsfeld assured the troops who have been cobbling together their own armor, "It's interesting." In fact, "if you think about it, you can have all the armor in the world on a tank and a tank can be blown up. And you can have an up-armored humvee and it can be blown up." Good point. Why have armor at all? Incidentally, can you imagine if John Kerry had made such a statement a couple of months ago? It would have been (rightly) a topic of scorn and derision among my fellow conservatives, and not just among conservatives.

Perhaps Rumsfeld simply had a bad day. But then, what about his statement earlier last week, when asked about troop levels? "The big debate about the number of troops is one of those things that's really out of my control." Really? Well, "the number of troops we had for the invasion was the number of troops that General Franks and General Abizaid wanted."

Leave aside the fact that the issue is not "the number of troops we had for the invasion" but rather the number of troops we have had for postwar stabilization. Leave aside the fact that Gen. Tommy Franks had projected that he would need a quarter-million troops on the ground for that task -- and that his civilian superiors had mistakenly promised him that tens of thousands of international troops would be available. Leave aside the fact that Rumsfeld has only grudgingly and belatedly been willing to adjust even a little bit to realities on the ground since April 2003. And leave aside the fact that if our generals have been under pressure not to request more troops in Iraq for fear of stretching the military too thin, this is a consequence of Rumsfeld's refusal to increase the size of the military after Sept. 11.

In any case, decisions on troop levels in the American system of government are not made by any general or set of generals but by the civilian leadership of the war effort. Rumsfeld acknowledged this last week, after a fashion: "I mean, everyone likes to assign responsibility to the top person and I guess that's fine." Except he fails to take responsibility.

All defense secretaries in wartime have, needless to say, made misjudgments. Some have stubbornly persisted in their misjudgments. But have any so breezily dodged responsibility and so glibly passed the buck?

In Sunday's New York Times, John F. Burns quoted from the weekly letter to the families of his troops by Lt. Col. Mark A. Smith, an Indiana state trooper who now commands the 2nd Battalion, 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, stationed just south of Baghdad:

"Ask yourself, how in a land of extremes, during times of insanity, constantly barraged by violence, and living in conditions comparable to the stone ages, your marines can maintain their positive attitude, their high spirit, and their abundance of compassion?" Col. Smith's answer: "They defend a nation unique in all of history: One of principle, not personality; one of the rule of law, not landed gentry; one where rights matter, not privilege or religion or color or creed. . . . They are United States Marines, representing all that is best in soldierly virtues."

These soldiers deserve a better defense secretary than the one we have.

The writer is editor of the Weekly Standard

From the Arts Journal blog "Serious Popcorn:"

Not So Rich
By Martha Bayles

Last spring, Frank Rich screened "Kinsey" and found it "an intelligent account of a half-forgotten and somewhat quaint chapter in American history."

Now he finds the film more timely. Indeed, his column in yesterday's New York Times held up "Kinsey" as the harbinger of a returning dark age, as religious conservatives hatch a new, post-electoral "plot against sex in America."

Golly, when I heard that "Kinsey" was attracting the usual spitballs from the usual suspects, I just took it as another skirmish in the Thirty Years War between publicity-seeking preachers and keister-covering broadcasters. To judge by Rich's account, though, the situation is more serious than that. Indeed, the battlements of sexual enlightenment are being stormed by an army of Bible-reading Orcs.

This is odd, given that only last week Rich was reassuring us that red-state couch potatoes enjoy televised T&A just as much as blue-state ones do. That struck me as a singularly uninteresting observation, but about all we can expect from a critic who (to paraphrase Charles Peguy) would go to any length to avoid being thought a prude.

Still, I can't help but wonder whether Rich is really worried about the end of nonmarital nooky as we know it, or whether he's just running short of ideas. To quote Peguy directly: "A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket."

A Christmas Carol
By GK Chesterton

The Christ-child lay on Mary's lap,
His hair was like a light.
(O, weary, weary is the world,
But here is all aright.)

The Christ-child lay on Mary's breast,
His hair was like a star.
(O, stern and cunning are the kings,
But here the true hearts are.)

The Christ-child lay on Mary's heart
His hair was like a fire.
(O, weary, weary is the world
But here the world's desire.)

The Christ-child stood at Mary's knee,
His hair was like a crown,
And all the flowers looked up at Him,
And all the stars looked down.

From Chronicles magazine website:

WAR ON CHRISTMAS IS A WAR ON THE WEST
by Samuel Francis

December is not even half over, and already the war on Christmas has started. Out in the Red State of Colorado, where traditional culture supposedly thrives, the city of Denver has waded into a little cultural gunplay that is attracting national attention. But Denver is not the only battlefield. Increasingly, it looks like Christmas may be pitched in the same trashcan as the Confederate Flag.

In Denver, local merchants have for years sponsored a pallid festival called the "Parade of Lights," which sported Santa Claus but no Christian images. The "mood," as The New York Times described it last week, "was bouncy, commercial and determinedly secular." The Parade "shunned politics and anything remotely smacking of controversy, including openly religious Christmas themes that might offend." (Well, not entirely.)

It's interesting there's someone in Denver who thinks that "openly religious themes" in a Christmas event "might offend." It's even more interesting to consider that someone in Denver actually would be offended by such themes. But perhaps most interesting of all is that nowhere in the entire New York Times story, despite several references to "the controversy," is a single person or group identified who actually admits to being offended by religious imagery.

The people who were offended were local Christian groups fed up with the absolute refusal of local businessmen to mention religion at all. This year, the Faith Bible Chapel sought permission to run a float in the Parade of Lights that carried explicit religious themes, with a choir singing hymns and carols. Permission denied. Too controversial, you see. Can you imagine what would happen if somebody in a Christmas parade actually started singing "Silent Night"? The horror, the horror.

Michael Krikorian, a spokesman for the Downtown Denver Partnership, which sponsors the parade, says they don't allow "direct religious themes," and that includes "Merry Christmas" signs and singing or playing traditional Christmas hymns. "We want to avoid that specific religious message out of respect for other religions in the region," Krikorian smirks. "It could be construed as disrespectful to other people who enjoy a parade each year."

But the horror of being misconstrued apparently extends only to Christian themes. The Parade of Lights, as the Rocky Mountain News reported, "includes the Two Spirit Society, which honors gay and lesbian American Indians as holy people; a German folk dance group; and performers of the Lion Dance, a Chinese New Year tradition 'meant to chase away evil spirits and welcome good luck and good fortune for the year.'" Sounds sort of like a "specific religious message," no?

Nevertheless, denied permission to chase away the evil spirits of their choice, "hundreds" of Denver area Christians showed up on the sidewalks anyway and sang "carols about mangers, shepherds and holy spirits, handed out hot chocolate and spoke of their faith."

There you go. The witchcraft trials can be expected to start any day now.

In fact, nothing much happened, except the businessspersons now say they are going to have to "re-evaluate" the event. "This was always just supposed to be a cutesy parade, for the kids," says Jim Basey, president of the Downtown Denver Partnership. "The purpose was to get bodies downtown." No offensiveness for Basey.

Denver is not the only city to enjoy a little Christmas cultural warfare. The Washington Times reports that the mayor of Somerville, Mass., has issued a public apology for "mistakenly" calling the local "holiday party" a "Christmas party," while "School districts in Florida and New Jersey have banned Christmas carols altogether, and an 'all-inclusive' holiday song program at a Chicago-area elementary school included Jewish and Jamaican songs, but no Christmas carols."

In Washington, a school banned a play of "A Christmas Carol" because of Tiny Tim's prayer, and neighboring libraries banned Christmas trees. The website Vdare.com sponsors an annual scrutiny of the "war against Christmas." It has lots more examples.

Christmas, to be fair, is not an exclusively religious holiday, though Christians are entirely right to insist on preserving that meaning, among others. It's a celebration that has been around so long it has acquired non-religious meanings as well, but meanings that go well beyond Santa Claus and Frosty the Snowman. It's a festival that comes from the heart of the traditional West, which is why music, literature, films and common social customs center around it so much.

At least some of the people who want to abolish it are not intentionally anti-Western. They're people who have simply disengaged themselves from their own civilization and are entirely indifferent as to whether it survives or not. Being strangers in their own land, they no longer have a clue as to what Christmas and its symbols mean, and it's not only Christmas that's "just supposed to be a cutesy parade." It's everything else their civilization has created.

A Painful Merry Christmas
By John Mark Reynolds

Our society is hard on cheerful people. Smart people are cynical,"ignorance is bliss." Go to a serious movie and you are in for a tough emotional time, happy movies tend to be silly. No one says, "get real" to someone sad, though often our sorrow is as false and self-indulgent as our happiness. Pessimism and cynicism, about most everything, sound clever on television while an optimist or idealism is the language of a clown.

That makes "Merry Christmas" a hard sell. There is an entire sub-culture of witless newspaper columnists who write yearly defenses of Scrooge and holiday hatred. Reasons for annoyance range from commercialization to annoying Christmas music. And yes, being trapped on a bus with a group of children singing the Twelve Days of Christmas can drive one partricide.

Defenses of Christmas aren't much better than the attacks. Remember: cynics get intelligence, believers are good hearted, dimwits. Defending anything based on religion, such as Christmas, must rely on feeling and not intellect, says our culture. Christmas is good, because it is about family, as if family is an unmixed blessing for most people. Christmas is good, because it is about "belief," especially in the spirit of Santa. Since Santa does not exist, and recent holiday movies demand we believe in him, this seems like a call to madness. Christmas is also supposed to be about the "child within," but in a culture in dire need of grownups this seems dangerous as well. Jesus once said to be like a little child regard to humility, but irrational Christmas marketers aren't saying that. Christmas seems to involve believing in the unbelievable in order to regress to childishness.

Christmas is about the birth of Jesus, the incarnation of God and Man. If true, it is pivot moment of history. If false, it is useless. Best reason and best experience argue that it is true. My heart bears witness to His gentle Voice. My mind demands that I accept the truth of history. This moment when Heaven and Earth were brought together is the answer to the pain of our existence and that is the very problem with both cynicism about Christmas and most defenses of the holiday.

The cynics see a world of pain and embrace it. Chaos is basic to their vision of the world, but their very rationality denies this view. The defenders act as if platitudes can solve problems. Warm hearts are not enough against cold reality.

Christmas is for a world of pain. Christmas is good news, because it shows God comes down to Earth and saves us. Such news makes merry, but remains realistic. It is for sin, but about redemption. It denies nothing about human hurts, but does not rest content in them.
Birth involves pain. The Virgin that conceived, bore a son in pain. The stable was not comfortable and Joseph was no Bradley birth coach. Mary brought forth the Son of God with no pain killers, not even an aspirin. Her reward? She held a baby who was God. Jesus was really a baby with all the needs and demands of a small infant. However, from the start, His mother must have seen the difference. I have had four children and not one has been greeted with angels, shepherds, and kneeling kings. Mary saw of all this in the first year. She also was told that a sword would pierce her heart.

Christmas is so true, because it never forgets pain. It allows families to come together, but begins with a family in flight from evil and tyranny. It was famously better to be Herod's pig than his son, so Christmas has never been unable to see the need for redemption even in family values. However, Christmas does not wallow in the evil. Herod is not allowed to dominate Christmas, not because of belief in belief or shmaltzy hopefulness, but because Christ is greater. God becoming flesh defeated the killer on the throne. His terror was not greater than Christ's power.

The abortionist tonight is less than the faithful, frightened girl carrying her child to term. The Dutch hospitals, Herods with post-modern ethics and modern tools, are less than the brave pastor who condemns them. Not because we wish it, but because the good sides with God. God is greater, more real, than the evil that disguises itself as pragmatics. Evil is not ignored, but it is not glorified.

The historic church understood the balance of Christmas. Advent, a time of fasting, came first. Before the good news of the Angels came reflection the Day of Doom, Christ's second coming. Advent delivers the hard news of sin, death, and judgment in the softening light of Holy Christmas. That is the nature of Advent and Christmas. Advent delivers the hard news and Christmas redeems it.

The old Christmas songs talk about sin and hurt. The new Christmas ditties do not. Christmas Scrooges have not songs at all, just a "bah, hum bug." The old songs were true. "God rest ye merry, gentleman, let nothing you dismay" is the truth. The gentleman are not merry, they can be merry despite a tendency to dismay only if they "remember Christ our Savior was born on Christmas day." Whatever our pain, we can have rest and merriment, because of a deeper truth. This is not cheap and it can never be marketed. It is good and beautiful.

I love Christmas. I love it when I am hurting. It brings me joy at all times. The incarnation, God becoming man, brings the ideal and the actual together. The Christmas lights in the dark remind me of the Light that came to a dark world. Gifts remind me of God's gift to us of His Son.
The green tree reminds me of life eternal. Even Santa is a cheerful, if silly, reminder of Saint Nicholas, the great defender of the faith. The traditions of Christmas are based on facts that give us basis for good feeling. I can become merry (almost jolly!) when someone sings the old carols. In this world of sin, where meek souls will seek him still, the dear Christ enters in, and for this rule we can find joy in this tired old world.

Let earth receive her King!

From www.washingtontimes.com

'Mired in a religious war'
By Sam Harris

Published December 2, 2004

Perhaps it is time we thought the unthinkable about Iraq. Perhaps it is time we considered the possibility that we will break everything we touch in that country -- or everything we touch will break itself. However mixed or misguided our intentions were in launching this war, we are attempting, at considerable cost to ourselves, to improve life for the Iraqi people.

    Despite the numbers of Iraqi dead and the travesty of Abu Ghraib, the Iraqi insurgents know that we did not come to their country to rape their women or to kill innocent civilians. Every thinking person in the Muslim world understands that if our goal had been to kill Iraqis and steal their oil, millions of Iraqis would now be dead and their oil would be flowing. The terrible truth about our predicament in Iraq is that even if we had invaded with no other purpose than to remove Saddam Hussein from power and make Iraq a paradise on Earth, we should still expect tomorrow's paper to reveal that another jihadi has blown himself to bits for the sake of killing scores of innocent men, women and children.

    The Iraqi people have been traumatized by this war and by decades of repression. But this does not explain the type of violence they wage against us on a daily basis. War and repression do not account for suicidal violence directed against the Red Cross, the United Nations, foreign workers and Iraqi innocents. War and repression would not have attracted an influx of foreign fighters willing to sacrifice their lives merely to sow chaos.

    We are now mired in a religious war in Iraq, and elsewhere. Our enemies, as witnessed by their astonishing willingness to slaughter themselves, are not principally motivated by political or economic grievances. Anyone who imagines that terrestrial concerns account for terrorism by Muslims must explain why there are no Palestinian Christian suicide bombers. They, too, suffer the ordeal of the Israeli occupation. Where are the Tibetan Buddhist suicide bombers for that matter? The Tibetans have suffered an occupation far more brutal than any we or the Israelis have imposed on the Muslim world. The truth that we must finally confront is that Islam contains specific doctrines about martyrdom and jihad that directly inspire Muslim terrorism.

    Unless the world's Muslims can find some way of expunging the metaphysics that is fast turning their religion into a cult of death, we will ultimately face the same perversely destructive behavior throughout much of the world.

    Wherever these events occur, we will find Muslims tending to side with other Muslims, no matter how sociopathic their behavior.

    It is time we admitted that we are not at war with "terrorism." We are at war with Islam. This is not to say that we are at war with all Muslims, but we are absolutely at war with the vision of life that is prescribed to all Muslims in the Koran. The only reason Muslim fundamentalism is a threat to us is because the fundamentals of Islam are a threat to us. Every American should read the Koran and discover the relentlessness with which non-Muslims are vilified in its pages. The idea that Islam is a "peaceful religion hijacked by extremists" is a dangerous fantasy -- and it is now a particularly dangerous fantasy for Muslims to indulge.

    It should be of particular concern to us that the beliefs of devout Muslims pose a special problem for nuclear deterrence. There is, after all, little possibility of our having a cold war with an Islamist regime armed with long-range nuclear weapons.

A cold war requires that the parties be mutually deterred by the threat of death. Notions of martyrdom and jihad run roughshod over the logic that allowed the United States and the Soviet Union to pass half a century perched, more or less stably, on the brink of Armageddon. We must come to terms with the possibility that men who are every bit as zealous to die as the September 11 hijackers may one day get their hands on long-range nuclear weaponry.

    It is not at all clear how we should proceed in our dialogue with the Muslim world. But deluding ourselves with euphemisms is not the answer. Our press should report on the terrifying state of discourse in the Arab press, exposing the degree to which it is a tissue of lies, conspiracy theories and exhortations to recapture the glories of the 7th century. All civilized nations must unite in condemnation of a theology that now threatens to destabilize much of the Earth. Muslim moderates, wherever they are, must be given every tool necessary to win a war of ideas with their coreligionists.

    Otherwise, we will have to win some very terrible wars in the future.
    
   Sam Harris is the author of "The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason.

From www.washingtontimes.com

God bless Hillary Clinton
By Tony Blankley

President Bush has announced his domestic legislative agenda for next year: Social Security reform, tort law reform, tax reform, an energy bill and conservative judicial appointments. If he gets most of that done, he will have gained an historic legislative record. While we don1t yet know all the details, I look forward to strongly supporting those efforts next year.

    But I have a hunch that there will be a large unwanted guest in Washington next year-- Immigration and border control reform legislation. No, I don't just mean the president's guest worker proposal that is unlikely to pass the Republican House of Representatives. And I don't just mean House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner's driver license and amnesty provisions (good as they are) that were cut out of the intelligence reform bill a few weeks ago, and for which he has been promised a vote next year.

    What I suspect may be a gathering storm on President Bush's horizon in 2005 is a confluence of factors that will force on Washington a fundamental immigration reform -- one that will seek to genuinely secure our borders. This is something that up until now neither the Republican Party nor the Democratic Party has wanted, and that the mainstream media have not pressured the politicians to deliver on.

    As I discussed in a column last January, the Democratic Party has opposed serious efforts at border control both because they are the historic party of immigrants and because they are in the sway of radical ethnic interest groups.

    And, as I pointed out then, the Republican Party has also resisted genuine reform both because they are afraid of offending Hispanic voters and because business and agricultural interests like the constant flow of cheap labor. More subtly, both parties are disinclined to force reform because upper-middle class Americans of both parties have come to rely on cheap domestic help, and couldn't afford such help if they had to pay Americans at substantially higher salaries.

    But I suspect that these considerations may well be overwhelmed in 2005 by larger political forces unleashed on September 11, 2001. The recently signed intelligence reform bill was passed with vastly publicized claims of trying to make America safe from terrorists -- a claim that is laughable as long as illegals can enter and stay in America without obstruction. Mr. Sensenbrenner's efforts both highlighted this absurdity and created an assured legislative opportunity to address it next year.

    While his proposals are limited, the legislation carrying his bill could quickly become the vehicle with which genuine immigration reformers force their way through the Republican/Democratic blockade which has for years stymied real reform.

    Adding piquancy to this legislative challenge for President Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress is the entrance from stage right of Hillary R. Clinton, 2008 Democratic Presidential Nominee, presumptive.

    In the last few weeks the ever cold-blooded Miss Hillary has started to stake out a position to the right of the Republican Party. Just listen to her Pat Buchananesque defiance: "[I do] not think that we have protected our borders or our ports ... we can do more and we can do batter?I am, you know, adamantly against illegal immigrants... Clearly we have to make some tough decisions as a country, and one of them ought to be coming up with a much better entry-and-exit system so that if we are going to let people in for... work...lets have system that keeps track of them... People have to stop employing illegal immigrants."

    These are hardly idle pensees coming from The Iron Maiden of Chappaqua. Rather, it is a part, and a big part, of her calculated strategy to shed her liberal image and seize the White House from the Republicans in 2008 by attacking them on the most vulnerable part of their right flank: open borders, illegal immigration and lax anti-terrorist security.

    I never thought I would write the following words, but: God bless Hillary Clinton. Though her motives are cynical, their effects may well be vital both to our national security and to our sovereign responsibility to control our borders.

    Republican presidents and congressional leaders have for years effortlessly and painlessly given short shrift to conservative Republican congressmen calling to secure our borders and end massive illegal immigration. But they ignore Hillary at their mortal peril.

    Immigration and border legislation in 2005 is likely to be the last chance the Republicans have to put their stamp on those issues. Their failure to do so would: 1) give Hillary three years to champion such Buchananite reform; 2) visibly split the Republican Party on the issue; 3) thereby undercut the Republican unity President Bush will need to pass his Social Security and Tax reforms, and 4) set up Hillary to patch together an unlikely, but formidable, electoral coalition of disenchanted border-security Republicans and main street Democrats for the 2008 campaign.

    As Hillary knows better than most, politics makes strange bedfellows.

The Nativity Sermon
by Saint John Chrysostom

"I behold a new and wondrous mystery!

My ears resound to the shepherd's song, piping no soft melody, but loudly chanting a heavenly hymn!

The angels sing!

The archangels blend their voices in harmony!

The cherubim resound their joyful praise!

The Seraphim exalt His glory!

All join to praise this holy feast, beholding the Godhead herein... on earth and man in heaven. He who is above now, for our salvation, dwells here below; and we, who were lowly, are exalted by divine mercy!

Today Bethlehem resembles heaven, hearing from the stars the singing of angelic voices and, in place of the sun, witnessing the rising of the Sun of Justice!

Ask not how this is accomplished, for where God wills, the order of nature is overturned. For He willed He had the powers He descended. He saved. All things move in obedience to God.

Today He Who Is, is born ! And He Who Is becomes what He was not! For when He was God, He became man-while not relinquishing the Godhead that is His...

And so the kings have come, and they have seen the heavenly King that has come upon the earth, not bringing with Him angels, nor archangels, nor thrones, nor dominions, nor powers, nor principalities, but, treading a new and solitary path, He has come forth from a spotless womb.

Yet He has not forsaken His angels, nor left them deprived of His care, nor because of His incarnation has He ceased being God. And behold kings have come, that they might serve the Leader of the Hosts of Heaven; Women, that they might adore Him Who was born of a woman so that He might change the pains of childbirth into joy; Virgins, to the Son of the Virgin...

Infants, that they may adore Him who became a little child, so that out of the mouths of infants He might perfect praise;

Children, to the Child who raised up martyrs through the rage of Herod; Men, to Him who became man that He might heal the miseries of His servants;

Shepherds, to the Good Shepherd who was laid down His life for His sheep;

Priests, to Him who has become a High Priest according to the order of Melchizedek;

Servants, to Him who took upon Himself the form of a servant, that He might bless our stewardship with the reward of freedom (Philippians 2:7);

Fishermen, to the Fisher of humanity;

Publicans, to Him who from among them named a chosen evangelist;

Sinful women, to Him who exposed His feet to the tears of the repentant woman;

And that I may embrace them all together, all sinners have come, that they may look upon the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world!

 
Since, therefore, all rejoice, I too desire to rejoice! I too wish to share the choral dance, to celebrate the festival! But I take my part, not plucking the harp nor with the music of the pipes nor holding a torch, but holding in my arms the cradle of Christ!

For this is all my hope!

This is my life!

This is my salvation!

This is my pipe, my harp!

And bearing it I come, and having from its power received the gift of speech, I too, with the angels and shepherds, sing:

"Glory to God in the Highest! and on earth peace to men of good will! "

From The Los Angeles Times:

The music clerks who can spin your world
Amid jewel boxes and vinyl, they live to open your ears.
By Scott Timberg

Dec. 9, 2004

Amid jewel boxes and vinyl, they live to open your ears. Obscure. Snobbish. Frighteningly hip. Think "record store clerk," and the stereotypes aren't particularly kind.

Are they going to insult us because we're looking for Billy Joel's latest disc? Will we have to prove our indie-rock credentials just to buy a Belle & Sebastian CD? Don't they listen to anything normal?

But as scary as the words "May I help you?" can seem, it's the clerks who often shape how, and how seriously, we hear music. Sure, a smug one can shut us down. But a good one will excite enthusiasm and curiosity — will take us down new musical avenues or help us find the right gift for a friend or relative: His or her deep knowledge of obscure recordings can lead us to sounds we didn't even know existed. All we have to do is find the right person.

Given that Southern California is packed with record stores, it shouldn't be that hard. And yet it can be: We've all gone into a chain store and spoken to a clerk whose musical knowledge was limited to songs used on TV commercials. Makes getting patronized seem like a favor in comparison.

It's why some clerks evoke such fondness, even loyalty to the point that fans follow their favorites from place to place the way others might pursue a hairstylist or bartender.

Ric Menck, a veteran drummer for the bands Velvet Crush and the Tyde, goes to a record store almost every day, mostly the giant Amoeba Music in Hollywood and the smaller, vinyl-crammed Freakbeat in Sherman Oaks.

He started young: His earliest musical memories are as tied up with the opinionated, contentious clerks he met as they are with the records he bought.

Now, Amoeba draws him partly for Jimi Hey — a vintage-clad, longhaired one-time member of the L.A. band Beachwood Sparks who is an aficionado of melodic rock from the late '60s and early '70s and looks the part.

"One day he pulled out this psychedelic children's record from the '60s," Menck says. "He explained it to me, but it was so esoteric I couldn't even grasp what it was. I pride myself in knowing a lot of obscure stuff, but he's amazing. He's created this aura around him."

At Freakbeat, he seeks out Bob Say, who "loves vinyl records more than anything else," Menck says. "He holds them in his arms, he gets giddy when he finds one he's been looking for."

The L.A. landscape

Of course, record store clerks have a lot to answer for. The most famous portrayal of them — the intense losers in the film "High Fidelity" — shows them as downright frightening.

"What did he ever do to you?" John Cusack's shop owner asks a clerk played by Jack Black who has just chased a customer from the store.

"He offended me with his terrible taste!" Black barks back.

"You're totally elitist," another "High Fidelity" customer says to the clerks. "You feel like underappreciated scholars."

Walk into the major independent record stores around Los Angeles — Rhino Records, Aron's Records, Fingerprints in Long Beach, Poo-Bah Record Shop in Pasadena or Amoeba Music, which has swallowed some of the best clerks from other stores the way the Yankees once poached rival teams — and you can find enough underappreciated scholars to fill a decent English department.

Though chains typically employ young people for whom the job is transitional, Tower and Virgin each offer erudite staffers. Julie Remick at Virgin Sunset, for instance, is as passionate a jazz clerk as you'll ever find. "Music is my savior," she says. "It keeps my inner spirit alive."

At larger record stores, the arrangement of clerks can resemble an old World War II movie in which the macho Texan, the Brooklyn Jew and the simple boy from the plains all pull together for the defense of the U.S. of A. In record stores, it's the alt-country buyer with the Buddy Holly glasses, the skinny indie rocker who could belong to the Decemberists, the goth in her Joy Division T-shirt and the dreamy, abstract jazzhead — all in service to the music.

"Obsessive-compulsive," Cliff Davis, an R&B-loving Amoeba clerk who has peddled records for a decade, says when asked about his peers and their mix of dedication and arrested development.

"Once you get in, it's hard to get out," says Davis, who wears a shaggy, grown-out Afro. "Records became like a monkey on my back. I worked other jobs, but I realized I was missing it. What I liked about record stores was the characters: It's like a link to this whole underground culture. I get bored aboveground really easily."

It's the same story at smaller independents like Echo Park's Sea Level Records, where Todd Clifford is a co-owner. As the store's sole employee, he works seven days a week. He recently left for his first vacation since opening the spot three years ago.

"I'd like to stay home one of these days and clean my apartment," says the easygoing, sleep-deprived Clifford, 30, standing behind a counter piled with unstocked vinyl and a plastic castle of dried-up Sea Monkeys. With his pallor, scruffy chin and bed-head, he looks as if he hasn't been outside in a while.

But being in the store 360 days a year means he knows almost every single disc in his indie-centric store. He knows without checking that he just sold his last copy of Pavement's "Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain." He has four of the new Elliott Smith. Two of the new Delgados' record, one copy each of the band's other albums, a box of four more on the way.

"One of our goals was to be indie and not be snobby about it," Clifford says, opening a box to chomp a piece of pizza that will serve as the day's main meal. "A lot of my friends still like that Justin Timberlake record that came out a couple years ago." He confesses to a weakness for early Neil Diamond.

"But my job as a record store guy," he admits, "is to occasionally make fun of things."

'A desire to serve'

"When I talk to a clerk now, I almost feel like I'm jousting," says Steven Mirkin, a local rock critic who visits stores every weekend. " 'Oh, you think you're hip? Well, how about this?'

"There's such a sense of hipster entitlement. With the guys at the Aron's buyback counter, you got the sense that they were judging you — it was like a moral judgment," Mirkin says. Some record stores, he suspects, go out of their way to find nasty clerks, as a badge of cool.

The better clerks, he says, make finding music a pleasure. "It's almost like certain restaurants have professional waiters, like at Musso & Frank or Spago: When you sit down you feel comfortable being in their hands. It's not just connoisseurship — it's a desire to serve."

If a love of obscurity is what unites clerks of all kinds, whether Western-shirted or dreadlocked, Freakbeat's Bob Say says that such passion comes in part from wanting to help his customers. "It makes people think, 'I've got something no one else does.' There are lots of great records that are popular. But the thrill of the chase is not there."

Elvin Estela, a clerk at Fingerprints Records who looks like a younger Arthur Lee from the '60s band Love, tries to use his interest in rare music to connect with mainstream customers looking for something new.

"I ask them what their favorite records are," says Estela, who — under the name Nobody — also DJs and records otherworldly electronica albums out of the vinyl that comes into the store. "Whatever they choose, I can always find an obscure alternative. If they like the Doors, I recommend Gandalf, a dark psych band with upfront keyboards. If they like the Beatles, I recommend the Aerovons, an American band that flew to England just to record their debut album at Abbey Road.

"The main thing I notice here is that the same 20 records sell," Estela adds. "But there are like 200 or 300 more groups that are on that level: I think the Pretty Things should be mentioned in the same breath as the Who."

Underneath all the debates about the relative worthiness of one band versus another, however, the appeal of obscurity is sometimes simpler yet: By seeking out esoteric work, new or old, easy listening or Tropicalia, even people with years of dedicated listening can find something that returns them to that excited feeling when they heard the Velvet Underground or Charlie Parker or Hank Williams for the first time.

"Every week I'm finding something I've never heard of," Sea Level's Todd Clifford says, "that I think is the best thing ever."

The school of cool

Although some music freaks champion a small specialty store or two, those who shop for a variety of styles often favor Amoeba Music, partly for the staff. "Amoeba, hands down, is the best place in the whole universe," says Anne Litt, a DJ for KCRW-FM (89.9). "They can find anything. It's like they send their clerks to cool school."

The dean of Amoeba's cool school is Karen Pearson, 43, a philosophically minded Berkeley native who's been working in record stores for a quarter of a century. She hires the staff at the Sunset Boulevard shop, where as many as 90 people toil at any one time.

She looks for creative people with an erudition about music. But knowledge, she says, isn't enough. "There's plenty of music nerds who can't deal with people." When she interviews someone, she wonders, "Can this person handle a really high level of human interaction? Can they stay calm?"

Good thing, too, given that customers can be difficult in their own right. One of Pearson's star students is Jason Moore — an intricately side-burned Oklahoma native and resident metal-head — who says the main challenge of his job is avoiding confrontation. Moore works the buyback counter, where people sell their old CDs and records for cash or credit.

"One guy said, 'Man, if we were in a field right now I'd fight you,' " says Moore, who with his rugged build and horseshoe tattoo looks as if he'd probably win. "People break things all the time — they'll break their CD or a record. People go off on you." One customer started yelling when he passed on her CDs. "She said we were piping marijuana through the air-conditioning."

The quirky, obsessive quality of an indie store's staff, Pearson says, is the biggest difference between indies and the chains, so she reads as many as 50 new applications a day. She met about 500 people before the store opened three years ago, on her way to stocking the place with 220 full- and part-time staffers.

The personality of that staff — their favorite records and films, their thoughts on politics, their quotes from Thoreau — are collected in a zine-like booklet called "Music We Like" that's offered free at the store.

Pearson looks for "an affability, a warmth, an enthusiasm," someone who can open people's ears to new music. But Pearson, who considers record store people "a tribe" who guard the culture's memories, isn't looking for normal folks, exactly.

"The record store joke is that we're total geeks," she says, "but we're not the comic book store. We can still function.

"But there's a particular type of character, the ones who don't stay in the lines, who I think is disappearing from indie stores in general, whether record stores or bookstores, because retail is becoming so homogenized as the big boxes take over. A lot of my job is to guard against that."

The lifer

With his tattered sweaters, wispy beard and hangdog charm, Michael Davis of Poo-Bah could be a late-night jazz DJ drawn by R. Crumb. There are, by all estimates, dozens of eccentric, serious-minded record clerks in Southern California; Davis, who has been peddling records for 30 years, is one of the longest-lasting.

If any type is disappearing from American culture, it's career dilettantes like him. At 54, he says, "I'm one of the older crazies left in this industry." He combines a teenager's enthusiasm with an old-school hipster's lack of affect.

Davis has worked at Poo-Bah since 1979, and though in February the store moved to a Colorado Boulevard location that brings in more mainstream traffic, it's still known as the San Gabriel Valley's alternative store.

When Davis was a kid in San Bernardino in the mid-'60s, legendary British DJ John Peel was spinning for local radio station KMEN. One day he played the Who song "Substitute," then unavailable in the United States.

"That was my first experience of hearing a song on the radio that I couldn't buy at the record store," Davis recalls. "And it was devastating, a little bit traumatic. Like, 'Why?' "

That moment sent Davis searching for music's unknown pleasures, and he got into all kinds of odd corners, with a special fondness for the blues-damaged art music of Captain Beefheart and the genre collisions of Frank Zappa, whom he interviewed for alternative papers.

"Then, like a lot of people at the end of the '60s, I got into jazz, while rock 'n' roll, with a few exceptions, began to repeat itself. James Taylor wasn't my trip; Miles Davis was."

These days, his customers are as discerning as he is; they're the kind of serious music fans who walk in "looking for a really specific album by Peter Brotzmann" — the European free jazz pioneer — "but it's on a label that just left our distributor. Or it's, 'Have you seen this?' 'Yeah, it's been out of print for 20 years — I saw a copy 10 years ago.' "

Davis' long tenure behind the counter allows him to track changes of taste like a sociologist, as when the British Invasion band the Zombies recently became popular with indie kids and began to influence younger groups like the Shins.

"They're an example of a band that somehow, over the years, ends up interesting people again," Davis says, explaining that it's hard to predict this kind of revival. "I mean, who cares about the Swinging Blue Jeans anymore?"

Many of the best new bands, he says, are what he calls "the new generation of Gang of Fours," referring to the political punk band from Leeds whose tight rhythm section has inspired Interpol, the Rapture, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

But unlike older music fans who can't listen to Pavement because they sound like the Fall, Davis doesn't dismiss new bands that build on old models.

"Hey, the Stones started out ripping off R&B people," he says. "Sometimes when a band's starting out it takes a while for them to develop their own sound. Like the Rapture: They combine pieces of other bands well. Will they develop into something that sounds uniquely theirs?"

He's willing to wait to find out. "I see myself as totally jaded," says Davis, who says his fondness for music sometimes feels increasingly masochistic. "But my level of jadedness hasn't destroyed my love of music."

From The Boston Globe:

Don't let your blog get lost in the fog
By Hiawatha Bray  

Originally Published November 8, 2004

It's official. Weblogs matter. A few of them anyway.

In the election cycle just ended, the blogs made a serious presidential candidate of former Vermont Governor Howard Dean.

They savaged the credibility of CBS News after the network broadcast fake memos damning President Bush.

And bloggers caused a stock market slide during Tuesday's election, by leaking early exit polls which falsely suggested Bush would lose.

Yes, blogs matter. But probably not yours.

There are millions of them, and few are read by anyone. That's mainly due to the banalities that pass for content on most blogs.

But even good blogs can go unread, without a little extra effort to attract visitors.

What's needed are some eyeball magnets -- blogging tools that will bring new traffic to your site. And there are plenty to choose from.

Syndication, for one. That's the popular practice of adding a tag to your blog that will automatically let readers know when you've added material.

On many popular blogs, you'll see a link marked RSS, XML, or Atom. Plug that link into a syndication software program, and you'll get an update every time the website is updated. Most avid blog readers use syndication programs to keep tabs on their favorite sites. Adding syndication to your own blog can deliver a quick boost in readership.

The leading blog-hosting companies, like Google Inc.'s Blogger, provide syndication; it's just a matter of switching it on and adding a bit of extra code to your blog. If you're serious about expanding your audience, it's the first move to make.

How about a spot of blog beautification?

Another Google tool called Hello is perhaps the simplest system for adding photographs to a website. Hello automates the process. Just tell it the address of your blog-hosting service, then use Hello to search your hard drive for the pictures you wish to post. Push a button and you're done.

A new Web-based service called Flickr is also worth a look. Sign up at www.flickr.com and you can put dozens of photos on the Flickr site. Then you can cut and paste a chunk of HTML Web code into your blog, to display the pictures there.

Next, you can try raising your profile. The simplest way is to post more frequently. No matter how small your readership, they'll at least keep coming back if you put up new material every day. Besides, frequent updates will cause search services like Google to bump your blog higher in its search rankings.

You can contact Google and try to get your blog listed in its directory service. Unlike the main search engine, Google Directory uses human reviewers who sort websites into broad categories. The reviewers only choose sites they consider especially interesting, so you had better polish up the quality of your blog. Once it's ready, you can go to directory.google.com and submit your blog for consideration.

How about advertising your blog on other blogs? It's easily done, and for free.

BlogSnob offers a clever advertising service to about 5,000 active bloggers. After signing up at blogsnob.simpleads.net, you create your own advertisement, and add a bit of Web code to your site. Now every time someone visits, it displays ads for other blogs in the BlogSnob network. And visitors to other member blogs will see your ad. You can have your ad shown on any BlogSnob site, or limit it to sites with similar content, where visitors are more likely to be interested in your writings. BlogSnob claims to serve up 12 million ads a week. That's a lot of potential visitors.

The best blogs are two-way conversations. Most blog tools give readers a way to comment on your postings. But some blogging tools offer a particularly potent system called TrackBack. Invented by blog software company Six Apart Ltd., TrackBack encourages bloggers to comment on each other's writing by linking to each other's blogs.

Say you're using TrackBack and you want to comment on something you read on another TrackBack blog. You pop open a TrackBack link in your browser, type your comment, and enter it. The TrackBack software posts your comment on your own blog, and sends a copy to the other blog, along with a link to your website. Now everybody who reads the other fellow's site will be invited to check out yours, as well.

TrackBack lets bloggers create communities of shared interests. You'll generally use it to comment on the same topics featured on your own blog. And your readers will share those interests, perhaps on blogs of their own.

An exchange of TrackBacks can generate dozens of links to new blogs, and expose your site to a host of new readers.

Google's Blogger doesn't offer TrackBack, but you can get it in Six Apart's Typepad and Movable Type blogging packages, as well as several others.

If you're serious about developing an audience for your blog, these tools ought to help -- but not as much as learning to write.

Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com.> 

From The Corner At National Review Online:

IF ONLY BERNIE KERIK COULD SAY THE SAME...
[Michael Graham]

"I am, you know, adamantly against illegal immigrants."—Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

This is why the Bernard Kerik issue resonates. It has nothing to do with second-guessing the Bush White House vetting process. It’s the fact that the head of law enforcement in NYC and the potential leaders of homeland security could have such a blatant disregard for the law.

And everyone outside the Bush administration sees what the White House won’t: That enforcing immigration law is a key part of homeland security. Will the next DHS nominee be any more serious about illegal immigration that Kerik? Not unless President Bush suddenly gets serious about it, too.

From ABCNews.com:

Michael Crichton Takes on Global Warming in Latest Work
Author Says Environmentalists Are 'Fomenting False Fears'
By JOHN STOSSEL

Dec. 11, 2004 - So often what you think you know may not be so. And it's a reason I love the book just out from America's top-selling thriller writer, Michael Crichton. He's the man who created the popular TV medical drama "ER," wrote "Jurassic Park," which ranks among the top 10 grossing films of all time, and much more.

Crichton's books and movies have grossed more than $4 billion. Now, he's tackling global warming in his latest techno-thriller, "State of Fear."

Crichton is an extraordinarily bright man. He paid his way through Harvard Medical School writing his thrillers. He told "20/20" he based "E.R." on what he witnessed as a med student at Harvard. "It was just experiences that I had had in the emergency room," Crichton said.

He says Anthony Edwards' and Noah Wiley's characters on "E.R." are based on him, describing them as "a little fumbling, not sure of themselves -- nice people."

When he wrote "The Andromeda Strain," the story of an organism from outer space that threatens to wipe out mankind, Hollywood came calling, and his medical career was over.

Ideas Ahead of Their Time

Thirty-five years later he is still meticulously melding fiction with cutting-edge science, which continues to open him up to criticism.

He was called anti-science when he wrote about the perils of manipulating DNA for cloning in "Jurassic Park." After writing "Disclosure," the story of a man who is sexually harassed by his female boss, he was labeled a sexist. But he was also prescient. At the time of "Jurassic Park," few people talked about cloning. Now it's often in the headlines. And sexual harassment of both women and men has been featured in newsmagazines.

Will he be similarly ahead of his time with his new book? "State of Fear" expresses skepticism of the claim that global warming is real and imminent.

The controversy the book is bound to stir up almost kept Crichton from writing the book. "I'm 62 years old. I've had a good life. I'm happy and I'm enjoying myself," he said. "I don't need any of the flak that would come from doing a book like this."

The tall and handsome Crichton -- he was once named one of People magazine's "50 Most Beautiful People" -- is a bit of a reluctant celebrity. "I don't really like to be in public at all. I get nervous. I sweat. My face gets red. I get flushed. I'm just not a public person, if I can help it. I mean I would never, ever appear in public if I could help it," he said.

Environmentalists Fomenting False Fears?

He spent three years researching "State of Fear." It's a thriller with footnotes, graphs and scientific references. In it he argues that the threat of global warming has been exaggerated by environmentalists.

"I'm saying that environmental organizations are fomenting false fears in order to promote agendas and raise money," he said.

In "State of Fear," environmental groups set off terrorist acts to focus attention on global warming.

Crichton agrees the Earth is getting warmer. But he says there is little to worry about because the climate is always changing and there is no evidence to determine if the changes are manmade or natural. In fact he says, climate scientists admit they can't predict what temperatures will be in 100 years.

"My view of this is that the media is like the guy going down the street with a sign that says 'The End of the World is Near,' and he picks a date and the day comes and goes, and the world doesn't end. So he doesn't stop with the sign. He goes home, makes another sign, puts a new date on it, and starts marching again. That's the way the media is," Crichton said.

He argues that researchers who study global warming often exaggerate the problem in order to get grants, often using celebrities to promote their cause.

By taking on global warming, Crichton hopes to ease some people's worries.

"I don't know what it is. We seem to be very ready to think it's all coming to an end. At least take in the possibility that actually everything might be going to be OK," he said.

Environmental Group Responds

In response to the use of its public service announcement in this "20/20's" segment, the Union of Concerned Scientists sent the following statement:

We hope Michael Crichton fans enjoy his new science-fiction thriller, while keeping in mind there is a very strong consensus among the vast majority of climate scientists that global warming is under way and human activity is a primary cause. Every time we drive a car, use electricity from coal-fired power plants, or heat our homes with oil or natural gas, we release carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases into the air.

Technologies exist today that can cut emissions of heat-trapping gases and make a real difference in the health of our planet. These changes often have other positive benefits such as improving air quality, saving consumers money, reducing our dependence on oil, and creating new jobs and business opportunities.

Our political and business leaders have a responsibility to help move us toward a cleaner energy future. Public investments should shift away from polluting fossil fuels to support for clean renewable energy such as wind and solar power, more fuel-efficient vehicles, and more energy-efficient technologies. People from all walks of life can play a role in slowing global warming by advocating for smarter government policies, better corporate practices, and informed consumer choices.


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