JEWEL A. writes:

I found this version of Silent Night. From what I know about music and Arab culture, the Western scales, chord progressions and harmonies are utterly alien to Arabic culture, having only been assimilated in the last 100 years. If you listen to Byzantine Orthodox or Catholic music from the Middle East, you are listening to something that predates Western music notation and theory by more than a thousand years or so. The adaption of very European musical science into a very incompatible Arab musical science is, well, interesting to say the least.

Now here is Byzantine Orthodox singing in Arabic. Absolutely ethereal and heartfelt. Not alien to its own culture at all. It isn’t difficult to imagine at all that Mary and Joseph would have heard music like this in their own time. 

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  CHURCHES in Paris desecrated in observance of Advent. (Entry heading comes from Novus Ordo Watch.)

CH writes:

I don’t want socks. I’m tired of pizza. I’d like home-cooked meals. I’d like someone to share life with. Unfortunately, I’m tied into the Pizza Hell Matrix myself, what with there being hardly naught but cranky, ‘unfulfilled,’ “I Ain’t Cookin’ Crap for No Man” little girls running around in women’s bodies out there. The Pizza Industrial Complex has me sorely within its grip. The bastards know I’m like any other bachelor—I want to eat but I’m not the chef type and, despite all the things I could offer one of the women-children running around, I can’t find a single one who doesn’t seem to find the idea of cooking for me to be anything within her realm of things that don’t make her nauseated.

So Totino’s, DiGiorno or Tombstone it is, more often than naught.

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FROM Socksmith:

Cheesy, saucy, hot and delicious – how can you say no? Show your love for America’s favorite food with our men’s Pizza crew socks! Made of a soft, breathable cotton, nylon and lycra blend, these socks are perfect for a night of snacking and gaming with the guys.

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  THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes: This is an image from the Greco-Roman city of Pompeii, on the slope of Mt. Vesuvius, showing Terentius Neo and his wife, equally literate, equally civilized, equally real and actual.  The house of Terentius Neo was buried under volcanic ash in AD 79 during the famous eruption. This image, two thousand years old, is a refutation of every "progressive" or "post-modern" claim about the "oppressiveness" of Western Civilization, in which women have enjoyed historically unprecedented parity with men.  It helps in understanding Islam to grasp that, for the Koranic consciousness, this household portrait is an obscenity, down to the degree that it is an image, images being forbidden under sharia and under Islam generally. This is another Pompeian image, showing a young woman of perhaps eighteen or nineteen years of age, either contemplating a letter received from a correspondent, out in the world, or thinking what she might write to the same correspondent.  Again, the spiritual independence  of the young, female person is powerful and extraordinary.  This image too would strike the Ikwan mentality as obscene. --- Comments --- Dr. Bertonneau adds: Here is another image, also from Pompeii, showing a woman, in company with two friends, painting a picture.  Like Terentius Neo and his wife, or the young woman, this lady is cultured and elegant. In respect of the young woman: Notice her coiffure and dress, both immaculate and decorous, bespeaking a deeply held idea of form and appearance; notice also…

JEWEL A. writes:

Last week a horrific murder took place in the home of a sixth grade teacher in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Nicole Mathewson was allegedly murdered by two men who appear to be of mixed race. One is 16 and the other is 25. Police are calling the murder “grisly” but won’t describe the details. What the papers aren’t saying, is that the older one, Thomas Gregory Moore, professes to be a Muslim convert.

Moore is an expecting father. He had a good job as a barber and a criminal record. He has a foul mouth and is completely ghetto. So simple robbery maybe. The level of rage is quite another thing.

I just don’t have any more words.

I took these images from Moore’s Facebook page: (more…)

LINDA N. writes:

There are some interesting little coincidences emerging in the wake of the recent Australian terrorist incident. A woman named Nadia El-Mouelhy is said to have left the shop just before the incident began unfolding. According to the Sydney Daily Telegraph, she’s the chief executive of the Halal Certification Authority of Australia. (Other sources say she’s the wife of the HCAA.) That organization is often accused of bullying and extortionary behavior.

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    IT'S NOT every day that you can celebrate the birthday of a papal pretender. Get up and dance, folks! Join in the celebration of a flaming heretic! Red is for Marxism and it's also for tango. I know it's Advent, but this is no time for repentance. Grab a partner (preferably an atheist) and do the Bergoglio Tango. According to Public Vigil: The basic step is one step forward and two steps backward. The weight is shifted from left to right, but always maintaining more weight on the left. Get more instruction at Call me Jorge.

SEE Pete F.’s comment in this entry about why a chocolate cafe at Christmastime would be a logical place for an angry Muslim to attack.

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  AUSTRALIAN PRIME MINISTER Tony Abbott on the Muslim who took over a cafe in downtown Sydney: “The system did not adequately deal with the individual, there is no doubt about that,” Mr. Abbott said. Thank you, Mr. Abbott. That's profound. However, the system cannot adequately deal with Islam short of banning it altogether from Australia. Let everyone who openly professes Islam leave or be gently thrown out. There are plenty of other places to be Muslim. By the way, this is a trivial point, but why does Mr. Abbott go by the name of "Tony" instead of by his full name "Anthony?" Western leaders are overgrown children. There are no adults left in the world.

IT is good that God made diversity. The races and ethnicities have their own distinctive personalities. Diversity in the true sense is not diversity in the politically correct sense. Diversity in the politically correct sense was condemned by God as human arrogance and pride:

And they said: Come, let us make a city and a tower, the top whereof may reach to heaven: and let us make our name famous before we be scattered abroad into all lands. And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of Adam were building.

And he said: Behold, it is one people, and all have one tongue: and they have begun to do this, neither will they leave off from their designs, till they accomplish them in deed. Come ye, therefore, let us go down, and there confound their tongue, that they may not understand one another’s speech. And so the Lord scattered them from that place into all lands, and they ceased to build the city. And therefore the name thereof was called Babel, because there the language of the whole earth was confounded: and from thence the Lord scattered them abroad upon the face of all countries. [Genesis: 11:4-9]

Here is an interesting essay on the theme of ethnic diversity.  In “How Silent Night Reflects the German Mentality,” Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira examines the differences in how Germans and Italians celebrate Christmas.

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DON VINCENZO writes:

I previously wrote of the unprecedented action by the Leadership Council of Women Religious (LCWR), those who were formerly called “Sisters” and “Nuns” within the Catholic Church, in betraying their status as guardians of the Faith by their adoption of questionable tactics in carrying out their religious duties. When these women religious began a “Get On the Bus” Tour that supported the policy of the Obama Administration, the most anti-Catholic in our history, to seek amnesty for illegal aliens, anyone who examined the LCWR’s efforts would have had serious problems distinguishing this group of Sisters and Nuns from political operatives.

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A READER from Australia writes:

I was wondering whether you knew what was happening with Oz Conservative and Mark Richardson. I noticed while I was overseas that the blog was redirecting to a Google login page.

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STEVE from the Gold Coast of Australia writes:

May I start by thanking you for providing, through your website, what is really quite a wonderful and very rare resource to thoughtful people  as we observe, ponder, try to make sense of and live with the many quite toxic forces that are at work today in the West.

By “the West”, I mean Europe, broadly, but western Europe in particular, along with those societies founded, built up and still largely maintained by the descendants of Europeans, including but not limited to such traditionally English-speaking nations as the U.S., Canada, New Zealand and my native Australia. (more…)

FROM Thomas Droleskey at Christ or Chaos:

Who has recommend to [women] short skirts, sleeveless dresses, pants, shorts, and clownish pants suits, and so on?

Not only did women and girls buy and buy and buy the clothing that through the years became gradually shorter and skimpier and tighter and ever more unladylike, thus making the whole program of gradual nakedness a huge success, but something else happened at the same time; the sense of modesty and propriety, which God has instilled into their souls, became gradually more blurred and dim and fuzzy, until in so many it became totally blacked out and dead. They did not, and do not, know what happened to them. By blindly and stupidly following the satanic program of gradual abbreviation of attire, they destroyed in themselves a precious God-given gift–the sense of modesty–so that they have now made themselves incapable of distinguishing between modesty and immodesty, nor do so many of them care to know.

And not only have women destroyed in themselves God’s gift of modesty, but they have destroyed it in their children from their earliest years, so that a whole generation has been brought up without any real understanding of modesty without any desire to possess its beauty.

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  SAGE McLaughlin writes: It was said elsewhere on your blog (I cannot find the reference) that Bergolio's vision of the Church is essentially Soviet-- a global party ruled by "councils" of ideological conformists.  Such systems tend to bestow honor and professional advancement on those whose dominant personal traits are servility and ruthlessness. So it should not be surprising that Papa Bergolio, like his vile henchman Card. Kasper, is also a liar without shame.

  A gunman has taken over a cafe in downtown Sydney. Your first thought when you heard the news was, "Oh no, another Catholic fundamentalist." But it seems that's not the case. The New York Times does not initially identify the hostage-taker as a Muslim, but as an armed person with a black flag. The headline is: Black Flag Is Hoisted as an Armed Person Takes Hostages in a Sydney Cafe  This is Newspeak at its finest. The black flag features Arabic script and a Muslim declaration of faith. Prime Minister Tony Abbott does not want to rush to any conclusions. He is amazed that anyone would wish the peace-loving, tolerant Australians harm: “We don’t yet know the motivation of the perpetrator — we don’t know whether this is politically motivated — although obviously there are some indications that it could be,” Mr. Abbott said at a short briefing in Canberra, Australia’s capital. “There are people, even in a society such as ours, who would wish to do us harm.” “The whole point of politically motivated violence is to scare people out of being themselves,” he said. “Australia is a peaceful, open and generous society and nothing should ever change that, and that is why I would urge all Australians today to go about their business as usual.” [emphasis added] Jihadis don't want to scare Australians out of being their peace-loving selves. They want to scare them into being more of themselves. Whenever Muslims…

  "Nothing indicates better the nature of self-love, or should make it more hateful to us, than the idea that it is the rival of the love of God. Homines sunt voluntates, Men are their wills, says St. Augustine. We can bestow our whole love on but one only of two objects: God or self. If we put God first and refer all things to Him, then His love will make us good and pleasing in His sight, imparting a supernatural value to all our actions, and perfecting us as we grow in purity and simplicity.  If, on the other hand, we refer everything to ourselves, our self-love will upset God’s order in us, rendering us most displeasing to Him, vitiating actions otherwise holy, and lowering us in proportion to the sway it exercises in our hearts…. Such is the enemy we have to fight, with the help of grace: an enemy born with us, and in some way part of our very self.  Age, passions, habits, thoughts-- all, even our good qualities and occasionally our virtues, contribute to strengthen its hold upon us, and drive it deeper. It is so involved with ourselves that it seems almost impossible to distinguish it, and to attempt to destroy it is to jeopardize our very existence… We may assume as a fact, without fear of contradiction, that we are blind on many points concerning our perfection, and perhaps our salvation.  We should pray…