Alan K. Henderson's Weblog

[P]ornography raises expectations of perfect bodies, of casual, almost anonymous sex being spectacular, and most important of all, decoupling sex from emotion. Guys have always done this, although in my generation, at least among the guys that I knew, this was recognized as an poor substitute for the ideal. For girls, this was much less acceptable.

It appears, from what I learn from talking to a younger generation, this notion that sex and love were an ideal worth waiting for has been abandoned. (Waiting for marriage, which has for generations been an ideal that many young people aimed for, but didn't accomplish, seems to have been completely abandoned.) "Friends, with benefits" is a widely used phrase among my daughter's generation to refer to people with whom one has sex for mutual pleasure, but with no deep emotional attachment, and no expectation of it.

Noam Chomsky, the distinguished U.S. political scientist and professor at the Massachusetts Technological Institute, exposed the reactionary policy of George W. Bush’s government during a master conference entitled "Dilemmas of domination" at the 25th Assembly of the Latin American Social Science Council (CLACSO).

Chomsky, in the presence of President Fidel Castro, made reference to the U.S. government’s manipulation of the population so as to be able to unleash the aggression on and subsequent occupation of Iraq, on the basis that an oft-repeated lie becomes a truth.

David Nassar, former field director of the Arab-American Institute of Washington, D.C. (AAI), now directs the PASSIA "Civil Society Empowerment" project. He also authored and collated the corresponding booklets. Nassar says that the USAID-PASSIA program was designed specifically "to meet the specific needs of Palestinian society."

And what are those "specific needs"? On page seven of the booklet entitled "Advocacy and Lobbying," published in January 2002, David Nassar asks, "What are the large groups that your audience in Palestine are to fall into?" Answer: "Everyone from the Chairman on down. PIC members and the press." He states flatly that the average reporter "often does not respond but write(s) what they are told to write." Readers of this American taxpayer-funded exercise are instructed to, "hit their targets as we (AAI) do in the U.S. all the time", where, "the goal does not necessarily have to be identified."

One such "target" is on page 13: The United States Congress, which "cut aid to the Palestinians for not improving the way in which the PA deals with suicide bombers (italics mine)." The objective was, "To do whatever we needed to stop this resolution," sponsored by Senators Diane Feinstein, D-CA, and Mitch McConnell, R-KY.

On page 16, we learn that the last thing Mr. Nassar did before leaving the United States "was to organize four press conferences in the State of Ohio. Because the Members of Congress from that State have contributed to violence in the Middle East by rejecting the Palestinians' calls for freedom, one of the words we really wanted to make sure was in there." Only afterwards did they determine "who should be a source and look for a credible messenger. Because it is important (if the Palestinians) are to win to provide the idea that everybody wins."

Hypocrisy is a favorite liberal smear.

Hypocrisy and the murder of abortionists seem to be the only unforgivable sins in the liberal Bible. Rush is guilty of the first.

In short, he spoke in favor of a strong moral system and then failed to live up to that system. That makes Rush a hypocrite, they say.

But the truth is that anyone who subscribes to a moral system [is] a hypocrite.

California is Matthew 13:24-30 on crystal meth. Drop 34 million people into the most variegated topography on the planet. Make half of them xenophobes, and the other half xenophiles. Divide the economy between frenzied entrepreneurs and enervating bureaucracies. Send the cost of living into the stratosphere. See what survives. If you're smart, watch all this from a safe distance (like the Breadbasket or Dixie, ref the map linked above [link is here]).

The perpetrators of the October terror attacks were under Imad Mughniya, Hizbollah's chief terrorist. And he was under the dual sponsorship of the Syrian and Iranian intelligence services. Baathists and Khumanists [Khomeni supporters] were in a joint venture, not just to eject US influence from the Eastern Mediterranean, but to pre-empt the stabilization of Lebanon, and of the establishment of a democratic, multiethnic and terrorist-free Republic in that little country.

The day after I introduced the Student Senate bill, I was fired from my job at the Department of Campus Programs.

I was suddenly accused of breaking and entering the programming office to flip through personnel and payroll files in order to see budget figures for the Department of Campus Programs. The charge was ludicrous, not least because these figures are a matter of public record which can be obtained openly by any member of the university, according to the President.

It got worse. The university administration proceeded to attack The Hawk's Right Eye, the only conservative publication on campus. Three days after The Hawk's Right Eye was distributed, RWU's president Roy J. Nirschel sent an e-mail letter to the entire student body accusing our paper of flirting with racism and "cross[ing] seriously over the lines of propriety." "The university will not condone publications that create a hostile environment for our students and community," Nirschel wrote. The university is "too busy for hate," he told the student body. We have since offered $25 to the first reader to find racist rhetoric in The Hawk's Right Eye; no one to date has been able to do so.

Then came the death-blow. The administration cut off all funding to The Hawk's Right Eye. This act is totally in violation of the Roger Williams University student handbook which says, "Roger Williams does not discriminate on the basis of…political affiliation." According to RWU, "such discrimination is prohibited by Title IX of the Education Amendment of 1972."

The administration did so abruptly and in the middle of a semester, in contradiction of standard procedures which require funding decisions to go through the student senate.

Many of the Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe came to America with a passionate belief in one form or another of socialism, and those Jews tended to vote for third party left-wing candidates when offered the choice. Though their candidates were, with the exception of some local races in immigrant neighborhoods, roundly unsuccessful, Jewish socialists and communists left a seemingly indelible stamp on the collective political identity of American Jews.

The depths to which some people will descend in their frantic attempts to distinguish Rush Limbaugh from the hundreds of thousands of other Americans who run afoul of narcotics Prohibition every year are nicely pointed out by Alan Henderson; some right-winger over on NewsMax extruded this:

Apparently junkies and alcoholics aren't experiencing pain, just having fun. Yeah, sure thing. No pain in their lives at all. And that's some fun, pal. Especially when you haven't eaten for a week or bathed for a month.

First, there are direct, violent attacks by extremists on Christian communities...Second, there is civil war and communal violence where the Christian community has resisted the spread of radical varieties of Islam...Third, there is widespread [legal] discrimination against Christians in Muslim countries...Fourthly, blasphemy and apostasy laws disproportionately target minorities. [This should be treated as a subset of the third example - AKH]

I'm still studying the blog phenomenon so my opinions are still in a state of flux. But they are worrisome. While they're obviously a function of free speech in and of themselves, the right-wing bloggers (seems to be most of them for some reason) often use their Borg-like structure to stifle free speech.

Specifically, they link up to an article or cartoon or whatever that they disagree with. That link spreads like wildfire, and soon they're all asking their readers to deluge the relevant creator or writer's publications with hate mail.

To the non-initiated editor the sudden deluge of hundreds or thousands of e-mails might seem like a spontaneous outburst of rage from his readers; in reality, it's an orchestrated Internet lynch mob.

From the moment a recreational drug user puts the first straw to his nose, the first joint to his lips or the first needle in his arm he KNOWS that what he is doing is illegal.

For whatever reason, he has made a moral choice that his "normal" state is insufficient and needs to be augmented – so much so that he is willing to assume the risk of arrest and/or incarceration. And his resulting addiction should come as no surprise. He knowingly operates outside the law from the get-go. This is vastly different from Limbaugh's scenario.

In Rush's case the drugs were legal and prescribed for the management of pain. He had no reason to question his doctor about the propriety of their use. There was no need for him to wrestle with any moral question in the beginning. By the time morality became an issue, the drugs had pinned him to the mat.

Still, he managed twice at least to try to break the hold. What happened to Limbaugh could happen to your grandmother. It HAS happened to grandmothers – and grandfathers and aunts and uncles.

Limbaugh took a dim view of recreational drug use. He preached against the importers and the dealers and the users. Because of this he is now gleefully proclaimed to be a hypocrite by his perennial detractors and by some fans acting like jilted lovers.

The Chinese army runs all space activities from its brand new mission control facility located 30 miles northwest of Beijing. The control center is packed with U.S.-made computers supplied during the Clinton administration.

In fact, the Chinese military space effort owes much to the former U.S. president. The Chinese army succeeded in obtaining a wide range of U.S. missile technology from the Clinton administration, including satellite control facilities, satellite image processing facilities, missile nose cone design, multiple warhead delivery systems, guidance systems, kick-motor designs and computer systems for ground and space control.

In addition, documents show that the Chinese military obtained radiation-hardened chip technology, including space-based encrypted control systems, with the personal approval of President Clinton. Radiation-hardened computer chip technology is considered to be a key element of atomic warfare because it gives the Chinese army the ability to fight and control its forces during nuclear combat.

"A nasty new slave labor tyrant that pays his mortgage from slave labor just moved into the space neighborhood and he didn't move in for the view," stated a senior Canadian intelligence source.

"Its time for a neighborhood watch program."

The voters of California who handed Gray Davis a tremendous defeat and Arnold Schwarzenegger a spectacular victory threw all cautionary instincts to the wind. They held Gray Davis responsible for every misfortune suffered by California in the last five years. Most of these misfortunes, such as a declining economy and job losses, are national phenomena not within the control of the governor.

To return to point 3 [that Australia's and Western Europe's per capita GDP is roughly 70% of America's], most Americans have no idea how much better off they are than, say, most Canadians or Europeans; and I suspect that few Americans living on or near the Atlantic or Pacific Coasts realize how much less expensive the cost of living is in the middle three-fifths of the country.

In his five years in office, the California budget grew from $74 billion to $110 billion. He inherited a $10 billion budget surplus; now the state faces a $38 billion deficit – the largest ocean of red ink in the history of the states. The state payroll swelled by 25,000 employees during just his first three years in office, a larger increase than the next three biggest states combined. The bond rating service Moody's has downgraded California bond ratings twice.

Florida has a Republican governor and both houses of the legislature have Republican majorities. With no tax-and-spend Democrats in power to Just Say Yes, fiscal responsibility is in vogue.

Cato gave Gov. Jeb Bush one of just two As and stated that he "is the real tax-cutting fiscal conservative in the family. Property taxes were cut by $1 billion, the business intangible tax by $600 million and he took the unusual step of walking the halls of the Capitol himself asking members of both parties to oppose a sales tax hike sponsored by members of his own party."

An analysis by the American Legislative Exchange Council of state tax policy during the past decade found that the 10 states that cut taxes the most created twice as many new jobs as the 10 states that raised their taxes the most. Ironically, states that cut taxes enjoyed much better economic growth and subsequently collected more taxes. It should be noted that virtually all states enjoyed huge gross tax revenue increases in the past 10 years, but the crunch came as a result of even higher rates of spending.

"As a working mother raising a 4-year-old son, the first lady has concerns about the negative influences that the entertainment industry can have on young children and teen-agers," spokeswoman Meghann Siwinski said. "During a public appearance, she inadvertently used a figure of speech to express those concerns."

"Perhaps Friday's frightening incident will make you realize that a brightly lit stage with pounding music and a screaming audience is not the natural habitat for tigers, lions, or any other exotic animals," PETA Vice President Dan Mathews wrote.

"The only natural thing that happened on that stage was that this majestic animal lashed out against a captor who was beating him with a microphone because he wouldn't do a trick," Mathews continued. "No matter how much you say that you love the wild animals whom you have confined continents away from their natural homes, you are still the men who have subjugated their wills and natures to further your own careers."

According to the Times, as of Saturday evening, about 1,000 readers had canceled their subscriptions to protest the handling of the Schwarzenegger story. In addition, the Times admitted getting as many as 400 phone calls critical of its coverage - many angry, some profane.

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"Yes, it is true that I was on rowdy movie sets and I have done things that were not right, which I thought then was playful but now I recognize that I offended people," Schwarzenegger told a crowd of supports in San Diego.

"Those people that I have offended, I want to say to them I am deeply sorry about that and I apologize because that's not what I'm trying to do," he added.

During a long conversation with a senior administration official, I asked why Wilson was assigned the mission to Niger. He said Wilson had been sent by the CIA's counterproliferation section at the suggestion of one of its employees, his wife. It was an offhand revelation from this official, who is no partisan gunslinger. When I called another official for confirmation, he said: ''Oh, you know about it.'' The published report that somebody in the White House failed to plant this story with six reporters and finally found me as a willing pawn is simply untrue.

At the CIA, the official designated to talk to me denied that Wilson's wife had inspired his selection but said she was delegated to request his help. He asked me not to use her name, saying she probably never again will be given a foreign assignment but that exposure of her name might cause ''difficulties'' if she travels abroad. He never suggested to me that Wilson's wife or anybody else would be endangered. If he had, I would not have used her name. I used it in the sixth paragraph of my column because it looked like the missing explanation of an otherwise incredible choice by the CIA for its mission.

My brief love affair with the press guys who had the courage to be embedded with the troops during the fighting is probably over, especially since we are back being criticized by the same Roland Headly types [referring to the clueless Doonesbury reporter] that used to hang around the Palestine Hotel drinking Baghdad Bob's whiskey and parroting his ridiculous B.S...

The only reason the GIs are upset (not demoralized) is that they cannot touch those taunting bags of gas that scream in their faces and riot on cue when they spot a camera man from ABC, BBC, CBS, CNN or NBC. Then they know the next nightly news will be about how chaotic things are and how much the Iraqi people hate us.

The MSNBC reported on the air that "dozens of GIs" were badly burned when two RPGs hit a truck belonging to an Engineer Battalion that was parked by a construction site. The truck was hit and burned, three GIs received minor injuries (including the driver who burnt his hand) and three warriors of Allah were promptly sent to enjoy their 72 slave girls in Paradise.

A mosque in Fallujah blew up this morning while the local imam, a creep named Fahlil (who was one of the biggest local loudmouths that frequently appeared on CNN) was helping a Syrian Hamas member teach eight teenagers how to make belt bombs. Right away the local Feyhadeen propaganda group started wailing that the Americans hit it with a TOW missile (If they had there wouldn't have been any mosque left!) and the usual suspects took to the streets for CNN and BBC. One fool was dragging around a bloody piece of tin, claiming it was part of the missile.

The cameras rolled and the idiot started repeating his story, then one of my guys asked him in Arabic where he had left the rag he usually wore around his face that made him look like a girl. He was a local leader of the Feyhadeen. We took the clown in custody and were asked rather indignantly by the twit from BBC if we were trying to shut up "the poor man who had seen his mosque and friends blown up."

I told the airy-fairy who the raghead was and if he knew Arabic (which he obviously didn't) he'd know he was a Palestinian. I suggested we take him down to the local jail and we'd lock him and his cameraman in a cell with the "poor man" and they could interview him until we took him to headquarters. They declined the invitation. Guess what played on the British Broadcasting System that evening? Did the Americans blow up a mosque? See the poor man who is still in a state of shock over losing his mosque and relatives? Yep. The Palestinian.