The older you get, the more staying in shape is like being the Red Queen of Wonderland: You have keep running faster and faster to stay in the same place.

I want to wish you all a healthy and strong 2004. I can’t tell you how to achieve this, however, because I’m not you and we all have our individual differences and preferences. What I could do is tell you what works for me. This means I don’t have to insert any boilerplate blather about “consult your physician before doing any of this stuff.” You get to make up your own mind about that, and adapt for yourself whatever you think may be useful...

None of all the momentous events that occurred in 2003 -- the recovery of the US economy, the invasion of Iraq and military overthrow of Saddam’s regime, the capture of Saddam, the capitulation of Libya’s Kaddafi, you name it -- was the most important. The single most important event of 2003 is the one that didn’t occur: there was not one single successful terrorist attack in the United States.

This is the single greatest achievement of the year -- and note the identifier achievement. This is not a lucky accident -- although luck and chance played a role as in most everything else in life. But those who are truly wise know that to a very considerable extent, you make your own luck, and this is what George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and John Ashcroft have done.

One of the most amusing sights of 2003 was to see so many people turn their brains into jello over John Ashcroft. Anyone who has personally known Ashcroft can testify to his decency and integrity. Yet he and his Patriot Act became the focal point of hate for both the Loony Left and the Loony Right -- the Hollywood Left and Dizzy Dean Democrats see eye-to-eye with Jane Fonda Libertarians like Lew Rockwell, Pro-Moslem Conservatives like Grover Norquist, and Hate-Israel Paleocons like Pat Buchanan…

It wasn’t that long ago that a good many European Jews swore an oath: Never Again. Never Again will Nazi-like anti-Semitism be tolerated. Never Again will Jews be meekly herded down a path that leads to Zyklon-B showers.

So in response to the explosion of anti-Semitism in France, what is the advice of France’s chief rabbi, Joseph Sitruk? Replace yarmulkes with baseball caps.

"I ask young Jews to be alert, to avoid walking alone, to avoid wearing the yarmulke in the street or in the subway and consequently becoming targets for potential assailants," Rabbi Sitruk cautions. "I ask them to replace the yarmulke with the baseball cap.” This is the best way, he warns, “to protect our young people."

Au contraire, Monsieur Rabbi. The best way for your young people to protect themselves would be for them to learn how to beat the crap out of those who attack them. Someone needs to make Rabbi Sitruk write 500 times on a blackboard the French translation of: The Best defense Is A Good Offense…

Tony Blankley, the erudite editorial editor of The Washington Times, certainly knows his Toynbee. I can attest to this, with all 12 volumes of Arnold Toynbee’s masterwork, A Study of History, residing on my bookshelf.

Toynbee studied the rise and fall of entire civilizations rather than individual countries or ethnic groups. His model for the success and failure of civilizations was challenge-and-response. Those that rose to a challenge flourished, while those that didn’t failed.

Tony, however - who is both my neighbor and friend of long standing - focuses on one of the most fascinating yet little understood insights of Toynbee’s model: that without challenges, a successful civilization will stagnate and culturally implode.

In other words, Western Civilization will die unless there is a challenge to it. Islam, the whole civilization or culture of Islam with Jihadism as its most extreme manifestation, has become that challenge. “In the strangest possible irony,” writes Tony in his new book, Jihadism is giving the West a “chance to regain its faith in itself.”

The thunderous boos of New England Patriots fans in Boston Stadium during the performance of black racist singer Kanye West during the NFL Kickoff Show September 8th are only the start of a massive backlash.

West’s earlier claim - at a fundraising telethon for Katrina victims - that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” was appropriately condemned by First Lady Laura Bush as “disgusting.” That’s going to be the view of more and more Americans towards the left’s deranged politicalization of Katrina.

The Left Stream Media’s warnings of how Bush’s alleged “failures” regarding Katrina are going to hurt Republican candidates in 2006 is just wishful thinking. One reason is that 2006 is shaping up to be The Year of the Black Republican.

This coming revolution in US politics will take place in a huge swath of America, from Chesapeake Bay to Lake Superior, and it has the potential to gut the Democrat Party.

One of the many markers distinguishing civilized from primitive and traditional societies is that the former possess the concept of luck, both good and bad, while the latter do not.

There is no word for luck in the language of many American Indian tribes such as the Navaho, African tribes such as the Azande, Amazon tribes such as the Yanomamo, or New Guinea tribes such as the Dobu. The concept is absent, literally inconceivable, in their thinking about the way the world works.

How could something, anything, happen out of sheer blind chance? Whatever happens to anybody, good or bad, it was caused by spirits placated to be benevolent or goaded to be malevolent. Man is always the toy of demons. That’s a primitive mind at work.

Thus the primitive compulsion to find someone to blame for misfortune. Since there really is no such thing as sheer misfortune, tragedies must always be someone’s fault, the someone who incurred the anger of the spirits and brought down their punishment suffered by all.

So the primitive mentalities of leftist intellectuals and politicians within hours of the horror of Katrina began a chorus of blame, pointing their spiteful superstitious fingers at President Bush.

The founding hero of ancient Athens was Theseus, son of the god Poseidon and a human mother. On his initial heroic quest, he encountered a giant named Procrustes who promised his victims he wouldn’t rob and kill them if they could fit into his bed of iron. If they were too short or long, Procrustes would stretch or amputate them to death. Theseus’ killing Procrustes was a common theme of classical Greek art:



The Bed of Procrustes has ever since been the symbol of forced conformity. Such a bed has been built in Iraq - the proposed Iraq Constitution , which Iraqis will vote to pass or reject on October 15. The question is: who are the Mesopotamian Theseus and Procrustes?

The great fear is that Islam will force Democracy to fit in the constitutional bed. But it just might turn out the other way around. For that’s the bet its American designers have made.

It matters not a whit whether Marx was an atheist, for that only meant he wanted to supplant other religions with his own. Or whether Mohammed believed in a god named Allah, for Allah was only the name of the voice he heard in his head dictating a Recitation (thats what Koran means in Arabic).

Allah is just as much a figment of Mohammeds imagination as the New Socialist Man (the different species of humanity that will come into being with the triumph of The Proletarian Revolution) was of Marxs. Both are delusions of tyranny.

Marx and Mohammed are ideological brothers. More than that, Marx and Mohammed are metaphysical brothers. They share the same view on the nature of reality. Their fundamental bond is a denial of the Law of Non-Contradiction.