Yes there are atheists in foxholes!

Apparently!

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) -- A concert event organized by atheist, agnostic and other non-theist soldiers has been cleared by the Army to take place next spring at Fort Bragg, concert organizers and a spokesman for the post said Monday.

Organizers planned to hold the Rock Beyond Belief event this year, but they canceled after saying Bragg leadership was not providing the same support it gave to an evangelical Christian concert last fall.

Supporters hailed the Army's decision.

"You know those goosebumps you get when your favorite song hits that sweet spot? I got those," said Sgt. Justin Griffith, main organizer of the event and the military director of American Atheists, in an email. "I was overcome with joy and a sense of vindication."

The plan is to hold the event on March 31 at the main parade field at Fort Bragg, where the Christian-themed Rock the Fort concert was held. Famed atheist Richard Dawkins is scheduled to appear, along with musicians, speakers and other entertainment.

"This just might be the turning point in our struggle for acceptance," Griffith said. "I mean it. I get letters daily from service members asking for advice on how to `do something like what's going on at Fort Bragg'."

Final approval for the event came last week, Bragg spokesman Ben Abel said. The festival will get the same treatment from Bragg that other groups receive, he said.

Stephen Johnson, the man who appreciates the slow hunch

An impressive explanation of creativity by way of Bong Boing: Where Good Ideas Come From.



This is in many ways a response to Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.

Earlier this year Christopher Lydon interviewed the scourge of the multi-tasker over at Radio Open Source.

More hate crimes against Christopher Columbus

Out of the plumbers bags of tricks. When will this be considered harrassment?

DENVER—A Denver parade in honor of Christopher Columbus is on—despite a phony e-mail that circulated Thursday saying the downtown celebration was canceled for lack of funds.

The Sons of Italy's Columbus Day Parade Committee in Denver was shocked to learn of the e-mail sent to the media, which was signed by Sons of Italy President Richard SaBell. The fake e-mail said protesters had "ruined" the event and tarnished the legacy of an Italian hero.

SaBell rushed to assure people the e-mail was a hoax after local media and The Associated Press started reporting Saturday's parade was off. He said he reported the phony e-mail to Denver police.

"I feel violated," said SaBell, adding he didn't know who was behind the hoax. "This whole thing is bogus. The parade was never off."

Denver police said its computer crimes unit is investigating.

Colorado has observed Columbus Day since 1907 and is credited with being first to make the day a state holiday. Columbus Day has since become a federal holiday.

Policemen doing their job

I have a question: I'm all for cultural literacy but are policeman required to know "all of the beautiful people?"

AP: You're Bob Dylan? NJ police want to see some ID

Dylan, who is a cultural icon, acted with class. I have another question, can't anyone walk around without being asked for an ID?

Joe Queenan had a hard life but he's an honest man.

Here's a great review of Joe Queenan's new book Closing Time: A Memoir in the The American Spectator.

The passage that struck me:

Queenan calls any attempts to romanticize this poverty “a mythology concocted by those who were never poor” and tries to set the record straight...

Queenan doesn’t exempt himself from this judgment. Though he has made it financially and as a writer, he doesn’t believe poverty made him stronger but rather more uncaring and vicious than he otherwise should have been. That viciousness has made him a very effective critic if sometimes not a very lovable one. He attributes his survival as a youth and his success later in life to the Catholic Church, to a few oddball heroic shopkeepers who decided to hire the lad, and to his love of literature—while conceding rather backhandedly that his mum managed to keep the family out of even worse circumstances. Queenan’s intelligence was obvious from an early age and Philadelphia’s Catholic schools kept him out of the violent hellholes that were the city’s public schools. His faith didn’t last but its impact has.

Catholic schools have saved many urban souls. The world would be a horrible place without them. Queenan knows this; so do I. Those who claim to fight for the working class -- oddly by keeping it mired in poverty -- have not a clue.

A real find at four in the morning

Impressive performance.

Bono on Old Blue Eyes

Bono's very rich and rewarding interpretation of the Chairman of the Board, Frank Sinatra.

Me too!

One of the very few flaws in Dante's The Divine Comedy.

From 1918, a Statue of Liberty to remember

This amazing photograph from an U.S. Army base was taken in 1918 as men were preparing for World War 1. Titled "The Human Statue of Liberty," the photograph was taken at Camp Dodge in Iowa and used 18,000 men!

Lost in bizarro world: Prince makes anti-gay remarks

How can this be? The artist formerly declared as Prince now known as Prince makes controversial remarks.

Asked about his perspective on social issues—gay marriage, abortion—Prince tapped his Bible and said, “God came to earth and saw people sticking it wherever and doing it with whatever, and he just cleared it all out. He was, like, ‘Enough.’ ”

Hold on. The miniature singer who used to perform in bikini briefs, leg warmers and platform boots said what?

This is the effeminate musician who played the androgyny card big time with his wild, sexy costumes and provocative lyrics to create album-selling controversy?

The guy whose music was so darn dirty that it inspired Tipper Gore to slap parental advisory stickers on music deemed not suitable for minors?

He’s now against gays having equal rights?

Wow. Talk about alienating your base.

Why the change of heart? Hollywood asks:

What do you think? Is Prince, now a converted Jehovah’s Witness, totally off base? Will you continue to buy and listen to his music? Or do you agree with him?

If the music is good then don't worry about the politics. Why is it that patrons of the arts have to take an artist's politics so seriously?

The church of the insipid

The Episcopal Church is in trouble. And its woes go beyond the controversy around the ordination of gay men. For other reasons, some theological, the liberal or progressive wing of the Church of England has turned a great sect into an insipid modernist church. Flannery O'Connor, the Catholic novelist once said "You have to push as hard as the age that pushes against you." On the march, liberals roll over the traditions -- pushing modernity to all the edges of belief. That's too much for some people including Tony Blair, who are turning for something with a little more chest, and the full throat of purpose. George Will scales the diminishing returns of the progressive church with a dismal future.

Not "O Superman" but "O say can you see.."

O Laurie Anderson, let me sing your praises! Deconstructing the national anthem...

Can there be atheists in foxholes?

Do atheists have rights in an Army dominated by Christians?

A soldier claimed Wednesday that his promotion was blocked because he had claimed in a lawsuit that the Army was violating his right to be an atheist.

Attorneys for Spc. Jeremy Hall and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation refiled the federal lawsuit Wednesday in Kansas City, Kan., and added a complaint alleging that the blocked promotion was in response to the legal action.

The suit was filed in September but dropped last month so the new allegations could be included. Among the defendants are Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

Hall alleges he was denied his constitutional right to hold a meeting to discuss atheism while he was deployed in Iraq with his military police unit. He says in the new complaint that his promotion was blocked after the commander of the 1st Infantry Division and Fort Riley sent an e-mail post-wide saying Hall had sued.

Fort Riley spokeswoman Alison Kohler said the post "can't comment on ongoing legal matters" and offered no further statement.

As only she can mix it up

Camille Paglia is eclectic.

Is there a return to visionary Romanticism these days on classical music stations? In the last few months, I've heard an unusual number of works that heavily influenced me in my youth. Each of them has a passionate, rhythmic force or hypnotic lyricism: Leopold Stokowski's dynamic orchestral transcription of Johann Sebastian Bach's "Toccata and Fugue in D-Minor" (written for organ); Alexander Borodin's "Polovetzian Dances"; Ernest Chausson's "Poème" for violin and orchestra; and Ralph Vaughan Williams' "English Folk Song Suite."

The Stokowski transcription of Bach had an explosive impact on me when I first heard it on my parents' 45 RPM record before I had even entered kindergarten. This week Philadelphia's WRTI played a spectacular recording of it by the Philadelphia Orchestra (for whom the transcription was originally done), conducted by Wolfgang Sawallisch. The sonorities of those massed strings could make the earth shake.

The "Toccata and Fugue" is so thunderous, propulsive and over-the-top that it seems to prefigure the Led Zeppelin phase of early heavy metal. It's a clash of the titans: We're overhearing two quarreling aspects of Bach himself. The heroic, questioning, yet tragic individual voice looks forward to Romanticism, while the orderly affirmation of transfiguring collective faith looks back toward medievalism.

The Vaughan Williams "English Folk Song Suite" has special meaning to me because it was a splendid set piece of my concert band in the early 1960s at Nottingham High School in Syracuse, N.Y. The clarinets do a lot of heavy lifting in that piece. Alas, I played clarinet very badly (I was always last seat, third section), partly because I longed to play the drums -- considered unsuitable for a girl in that era.

To my surprise, I recently discovered that the "English Folk Song Suite" was originally written for military band and was not, as I had always thought, transcribed from an orchestral version. The date was 1923 -- a year after the publication of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," which registered the devastating disillusion of the generation that had lived through World War I, with its obscene carnage (over 8 million killed to redraw a few borderlines).

Thus Vaughan Williams' juxtaposition of folk song motifs with military riffs was a poetic relinking of British culture to its pre-modern agrarian past. That's exactly what Led Zeppelin did in their signature song, "Stairway to Heaven," which begins with the pipes of the medieval English countryside (whose fragrant herbs appear in "Scarborough Fair"). The savagery of war, with its wanton waste of young lives, would be purged and spiritually transcended through art.

But before purgation and transcendence, the bloodshed must stop. Bring the troops home from Iraq now.

I dissent from the last sentence but the woman is entitled to her opinion. Unlike other war critics, she actually thinks before she speaks.

Who is an American and who would want to be?

Must read: John McWhorter

I will never forget a conversation I had with two twentysomething Muslims not long after 9/11. One had been born and raised in the United States, the other had come here at a young age. It was clear from our conversation, though they gingerly avoided putting it explicitly, that neither of them entirely disapproved of what Osama bin Laden had done. There were, of course, multiple recitations of "I think what he did was terrible" - but delivered with a certain lack of emotional commitment. What came through was a sentiment that, in the end, something terrible had been necessary for bin Laden to get across a valuable message. . .

The killer quote however is this:

The urgency of defending the life we know, American life, against murderous barbarians would instantly wake us up to the value of what America, its flaws acknowledged, is, and what it has achieved.

To all the beautiful, one-worlders and postmodernists I have this to say:

I'm proud to be an American.

Got it?

The charlatans in full regalia: "White people suck"

Get a load of this! Racist Collectivists attack individuality and thus freedom. That's right individualism is a problem on the road to racially harmonic nirvana.

White people, you're privileged, and guilty, guilty, guilty of oppressing disadvantaged minorities. Denial only makes things worse.

This is the message currently emanating from the Seattle School District. Never mind that this dubious construct undercuts needed emphasis on minority student achievement.

District officials this month are sending students from four high schools to an annual "White Privilege Conference" in Colorado. The conference is billed as an "opportunity to examine and explore difficult issues related to white privilege, white supremacy and oppression" — "a challenging, empowering and educational experience."

The conference has little to do with mastering reading, writing, math and science; or with graduating from high school and keeping one's head above water in college. Those are the lessons high-school students should be learning, not that they will be given social promotions in the name of equity and inclusion.

The focus of Seattle Public Schools bureaucracy is clearly political indoctrination, not academics. The district is even planning an "equity summit" in the spring, which White Privilege Conference attendees are to help lead.

What's the thinking behind this theory of white privilege? For the 2006 conference, a paper by Tobin Miller Shearer (who is white) argued that white people could not enter the kingdom of God unless they confronted the way racism and white privilege shaped their lives and spirituality. He maintained that white people tend to be far too individualistic and need to acknowledge their membership in a group that is unavoidably racist.

Robert Jensen, a journalism professor writing in the Kansas City Business Journal, echoed those sentiments. Breaking free of white privilege means "challenging the pathological individualism of this culture so we can see how our successes and our failures are always partly social, not strictly individual," Jensen asserted.

So, there you have it. Somehow, in 2007 in the United States, "society," racial bias and stereotyping are still controlling forces, oppressing minorities.

I have a different view. What we have here is an institutional evasion of personal responsibility. Why is it such a great bugaboo to think that actions have consequences?

The emphasis in Seattle Public Schools on "institutional racism" and "white privilege" flows from unpleasant outcomes that must be spun politically to explain such things as the district's most recent state achievement test scores.

In core academic subjects, whites and Asians still exceed blacks, Latinos and Native Americans. The disparity is not simply a matter of color: School District data indicate income, English-language proficiency and home stability are also important correlates to achievement.

Racial politics and white guilt at its worst. I trust that likes of Shearer and Jenson have never experienced working class life in an Italian or ethnic "ghetto". They are collectivist idiots who should never be placed near the levers of power never mind a classroom. I would never send my kid to this "seminar." After all what would it do to his or her "self-esteem?"

Bravo for a honest non-vegetarian

Great article for those moderate meat-eaters among us. Required reading for those who want to challenge the sanctimony of some vegetarians.

Although vegetarians may think that surrendering human supremacy will reduce the harm that people do to the environment, any such effort is invariably counterproductive. Denying humans their supreme power means denying them their supreme responsibility to improve society, to safeguard the environment on which it depends and even--dare we say it--to improve nature as well.

Besides, humans are already sovereign--the trouble is that most of them don't realize it or, for political reasons, refuse to acknowledge it, maintaining instead that real sovereignty lies with God, nature or the free market. But real-life experience tells us otherwise. Since vegetarians began warning in the eighteenth century that the earth would run out of food unless everyone immediately shifted to potatoes and grain, the global population has more than sextupled, global per capita income has increased nearly tenfold even when inflation is taken into account, while consumption of meat, poultry and seafood has risen as well, up 37 percent in the United States since 1909 and even more strongly in less developed portions of the world. More people are living better and eating more richly than anyone in the 1700s would have thought possible. Regardless of whether they are consuming more meat and poultry than is good for them, it is yet another reminder, as if any more were needed, of how thoroughly Malthusian myths about limits to human productivity have been shattered.

Scarcity no longer serves as an argument for vegetarianism, and neither, for that matter, does health, since we know from studies of Okinawan centenarians and others that small amounts of meat and dark-fleshed fish are good for you; that moderate amounts of alcohol (which vegetarians for some reason appear to avoid) is good for you as well; and that plenty of exercise, a sense of well-being that comes from a strong social structure and, of course, universal healthcare are equally essential.

So the next time you tuck into a plate of tagliatelle Bolognese, a leg of lamb or a proper coq au vin made from some rangy old rooster that's had more lovers than most of us can dream of, you should see it not just as a chance to fill your stomach but, rather, as an occasion to celebrate humanity's ongoing struggle to create abundance out of scarcity. Venceremos! It's a lot better than wallowing in the silly defeatism of a diet of tofu and sprouts.