'TIS THE SEASON TO BE GREEDY? 

Catholic author and blogger Mark Shea offers a pithy and timely comment on materialism and capitalism in the Season Formerly Known as Christmas on his Facebook page: 

":...Capitalism, like fire, is a useful tool if it is subjected to the Holy Spirit and profits take a firm back seat to more important goods like the love of God and Neighbor. Allow it to be the primary good (in other words, worship it as an idol) and it becomes, like all idols, a mortal enemy of God and man as it burns and rages out of control with greed and envy (among other mortal sins)...There's a reason Leo XIII wrote Rerum Novarum..." 

Rerum Novarum was Pope Leo XIII's encyclical on the rights and duties of both labor and capitol. Written in 1891, it's often cited by historians as sparking early and widespread Catholic participation in the American labor movement.

POLITICALLY CORRECT CHRISTMAS GREETING

It's that "most wonderful time of the year" again, so a fellow curmudgeon sent in the following updated and sanitized safer version of Christmas well-wishing in the Post-Christian Era.

Feel free to pass it on to the Scrooges, Grinches, ACLU lawyers, and secular fundamentalists on your own Yuletide list:


Holiday Seasons Greetings to You

Please accept with no obligation implied or implicit my best wishes for an environmentally-conscious, socially-responsible, low-stress, non-addictive, gender-neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasions of your choice or the secular practices of your choice with respect to the religious/secular persuasions and/or traditions of others or their choice not to practice religious/secular traditions at all.

And a fiscally-successful, personally-fulfilling and medically-uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally-accepted calendar year 2013 of the Common Era, but not without due respect of the calendars of choice of other cultures, and without regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability, religious profession, sexual preference, or choice of computer operating system of the wishee.

(By accepting this greeting, you are accepting the terms herein as the wishee. This greeting is subject to clarification or withdrawal at any time and without notice. It is freely transferable with no alteration from the original greeting. It implies no promise by the wisher to actually deliver or implement any of the wishes for him/herself or others and is void where prohibited by law and is revocable at the sole discretion of the wisher. This wish is warranted to perform as expected within the generally accepted application of good tidings for a period of no more than twelve months, or until the issuance of a subsequent holiday.)

AL QUEDA’S USEFUL IDIOTS:
At Least One Columnist “Gets It” About Islamo-Fascism

(First published June 15, 2004) 

In his very thoughtful column yesterday at National Review Online, Victor Davis Hanson addresses a central Western liberal attitude which will inevitably lead to the demise of the West if something isn’t done to reverse it.

The West, especially Europe, says Hanson, has been playing into the hands of Al Queda and other militant Islamists through self-loathing combined with ignorantly regarding them as mere nutcases and unthinking fanatics who “don’t understand” us. On the contrary, he asserts, they understand us all too well, and perhaps better than we understand ourselves. And that is what makes them so dangerous, on some level even more dangerous than the Nazis and the USSR were:

..[T]oo many of us deem bin Laden's new fascists unhinged — their fatwas, their mythology about strong and weak horses, and their babble about the Reconquista and the often evoked "holy shrines" are to us dreamlike.

But I beg to differ somewhat.

I think the Islamists and their supporters do not live in an alternate universe, but instead are no more crazy in their goals than Hitler was ...Nor was Hitler's fatwa — Mein Kampf — any more irrational than bin Laden's 1998 screed and his subsequent grainy infomercials. Indeed, I think Islamofascism is brilliant in its reading of the postmodern West and precisely for that reason it is dangerous beyond all description — in the manner that a blood-sucking, stealthy, and nocturnal Dracula was always spookier than a massive, clunky Frankenstein.

Like Hitler's creed, bin Ladenism trumpets contempt for bourgeois Western society. If once we were a "mongrel" race of "cowboys" who could not take casualties against the supermen of the Third Reich, now we are indolent infidels, channel surfers who eat, screw, and talk too much amid worthless gadgetry, godless skyscrapers, and, of course, once again, the conniving Jews.

Like Hitler, bin Ladenism has an agenda: the end of the liberal West. Its supposedly crackpot vision is actually a petrol-rich Middle East free of Jews, Christians, and Westerners, free to rekindle spiritual purity under Sharia ...an Israel to be nuked, a Europe to be out-peopled and cowered, and an America to be bombed and terrorized into isolation. This time we are to lose not through blood and iron, but through terror and intimidation: televised beheadings, mass murders, occasional bombings, the disruption of commerce, travel, and the oil supply.

It was hard for the Islamic fascists to find ideological support in the West, given their agenda of gender apartheid, homophobia, religious persecution, racial hatred, fundamentalism, polygamy, and primordial barbarism. But they sensed that there has always been a current of self-loathing among the comfortable Western elite…If anyone doubts the nexus between right-wing Middle Eastern fascism and left-wing academic faddishness, go to booths in the Free Speech area at Berkeley or see what European elites have said and done for Hamas. Middle Eastern fascist killers enshrined as victims alongside our own oppressed? That has been gospel in our universities for the last three decades.

...bin Laden understood the importance of splitting the West, just like the sultan of old knew that a Europe trisected into Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and Protestantism would fight among itself rather than unite against a pan-Islamic foe...

If after four years of careful planning, al Qaedists hit the Olympics in August, the terrorists know better than we do that most Europeans will do nothing — but quickly point to the U.S. and scream "Iraq!" And they know that the upscale crowds in Athens are far more likely to boo a democratic America than they are a fascist Syria or theocratic Iran.

Just watch.

CAVING IN TO "ISLAMIC LAW":
Will the West Sacrifice Its Freedoms to Placate the Implacable?

At least one American columnist thinks so.

Back in 2006 at the height of the controversy over some editorial cartoons critical of the radical wing of Islam, Washington Times columnist Diana West got it right in the op-ed piece "Cartoon Rage," about the Western media's cowardly response to ongoing militant Muslim riots and threats over the cartoons:

"...We dress up our capitulation in fancy talk of 'tolerance,' 'responsibility' and 'sensitivity.' We even congratulate ourselves for having the 'editorial judgment' to make 'pluralism' possible. 'Readers were well served... without publishing the cartoons,' said a Wall Street Journal spokesman. 'CNN has chosen to not show the cartoons in respect for Islam,' reported the cable network....

"...Calling these cartoons 'unacceptable,' and censoring ourselves 'in respect' to Islam brings the West into compliance with a central statute of sharia [Islamic "law"--JE]. As [Danish newspaper] Jyllands-Posten's Flemming Rose has noted, that's not respect, that's submission."

Amen!

PEGGY NOONAN WRITES ABOUT 9/11 ...IN 1998

Noted Conservative Columnist Saw the Signs of the Times

Below is an eerie passage from a piece written by columnist Peggy Noonan on Nov. 30, 1998.

It was republished on Sept. 18, 2001 at the Wall Street Journal web site opinionjournal.com, where the entire piece can be read:

There Is No Time, There Will Be Time
....Something's up. And deep down, where the body meets the soul, we are fearful. We fear, down so deep it hasn't even risen to the point of articulation, that with all our comforts and amusements, with all our toys and bells and whistles . . . we wonder if what we really have is . . . a first-class stateroom on the Titanic. Everything's wonderful, but a world is ending and we sense it.

I don't mean: "Uh-oh, there's a depression coming," I mean: We live in a world of three billion men and hundreds of thousands of nuclear bombs, missiles, warheads. It's a world of extraordinary germs that can be harnessed and used to kill whole populations, a world of extraordinary chemicals that can be harnessed and used to do the same.

Three billion men, and it takes only half a dozen bright and evil ones to harness and deploy.

What are the odds it will happen? Put it another way: What are the odds it will not? Low. Nonexistent, I think.

When you consider who is gifted and crazed with rage . . . when you think of the terrorist places and the terrorist countries . . . who do they hate most? The Great Satan, the United States. What is its most important place? Some would say Washington. I would say the great city of the United States is the great city of the world, the dense 10-mile-long island called Manhattan, where the economic and media power of the nation resides, the city that is the psychological center of our modernity, our hedonism, our creativity, our hard-shouldered hipness, our unthinking arrogance.

If someone does the big, terrible thing to New York or Washington, there will be a lot of chaos and a lot of lines going down, a lot of damage, and a lot of things won't be working so well anymore. And thus a lot more . . . time. Something tells me we won't be teleconferencing and faxing about the Ford account for a while.

The psychic blow--and that is what it will be as people absorb it, a blow, an insult that reorders and changes--will shift our perspective and priorities, dramatically, and for longer than a while. Something tells me more of us will be praying, and hard, one side benefit of which is that there is sometimes a quality of stopped time when you pray. You get outside time.

Maybe, of course, I'm wrong. But I think of the friend who lives on Park Avenue who turned to me once and said, out of nowhere, "If ever something bad is going to happen to the city, I pray each day that God will give me a sign. That He will let me see a rat stand up on the sidewalk. So I'll know to gather the kids and go." I absorbed this and, two years later, just a month ago, poured out my fears to a former high official of the United States government. His face turned grim. I apologized for being morbid. He said no, he thinks the same thing. He thinks it will happen in the next year and a half. I was surprised, and more surprised when he said that an acquaintance, a former arms expert for another country, thinks it will happen in a matter of months....

--by Peggy Noonan, originally published in Forbes ASAP magazine, 11/30/1998

"UNTIL THEN..."

A Magnificent Tribute to Our Guys and Gals in Uniform

This Flash presentation first appeared in 2006. It was moving and beautiful then, and remains so now. It incorporates some wonderful photography of our troops "over there," together with a recording of Marta Keen's gorgeous song "Homeward Bound," the lyrics of which are as follows:

In the quiet misty morning when the moon has gone to bed,
When the sparrows stop their singing and the sky is clear and red.
When the summer’s ceased its gleaming,
When the corn is past its prime,
When adventure’s lost its meaning,
I’ll be homeward bound in time.

Bind me not to the pasture, chain me not to the plow.
Set me free to find my calling and I’ll return to you somehow.

If you find it’s me you're missing, if you’re hoping I’ll return.
To your thoughts I’ll soon be list’ning, and in the road I’ll stop and turn.
Then the wind will set me racing as my journey nears its end.
And the path I’ll be retracing when I’m homeward bound again.

Bind me not to the pasture, chain me not to the plow.
Set me free to find my calling and I’ll return to you somehow.

In the quiet misty morning when the moon has gone to bed,
When the sparrows stop their singing,
I’ll be homeward bound again.

-Music and Lyrics by Marta Keen