Alan K. Henderson's Weblog

"Again," said Gibson, "it's evil distorting what's good. What is more tender and beautiful than a mother and a child? So the Devil takes that and distorts it just a little bit. Instead of a normal mother and child you have an androgynous figure holding a 40-year-old 'baby' with hair on his back. It is weird, it is shocking, it's almost too much - just like turning Jesus over to continue scourging him on his chest is shocking and almost too much, which is the exact moment when this appearance of the Devil and the baby takes place."

The minister was not happy with me. He waited a few cold seconds of silence and then talked past me to Mel. "And that scene with the ugly baby. What was that?"

Mel said, "I dunno. I just thought it was really creepy. Didn't you think it was creepy?"

Minister guy: "But what is it supposed to mean?"

Me: 'Satan brought a friend. He wanted to share it with a friend."

Mel laughed. "Yeah, he brought a friend!"

Minister guy persisted with exasperation, "But WHERE did you get that from?"

In other words, "You DIDN'T get it in the Bible, because I KNOW the Bible."

Mel, at this point was getting just as exasperated, "I dunno. I guess I just pulled it out of my a__."

FABULOUS! It still makes me laugh! The minister was appropriately horrified. I just thought it was perfectly appropriate.

Danny "Doc" Kelley (Paul Francis), Tears of the Sun

Reverend Oliver (Rene Auberjonois), The Patriot

Samwise Gamgee (Sean Astin), Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

The expressed goal of environmentalism is to prevent man from changing his environment, from intruding on nature. That is why environmentalism is fundamentally anti-man. Intrusion is necessary for human survival. Only by intrusion can man avoid pestilence and famine. Only by intrusion can man control his life and project long-range goals. Intrusion improves the environment, if by "environment" one means the surroundings of man--the external material conditions of human life. Intrusion is a requirement of human nature. But in the environmentalists' paean to "Nature," human nature is omitted. For environmentalism, the "natural" world is a world without man. Man has no legitimate needs, but trees, ponds, and bacteria somehow do.

This is another way to describe the age-old concept of class warfare. The Achilles heel of this concept (at least one of them) is the assumption that one class of individual is inherently at war with another. The logical conclusion is that the "enemy" classes much be completely eliminated, either by getting members of the "enemy" classes to join one or more of the "allied" classes, or - as Communists and the proto-Communist French Revolution did - by physically destroying the members of those classes.

A relative few Far Leftists, Theodore Kaczynski and Johnny Muhammad being two exceptions, prefer to fight the perceived war through genocide. Many within the nonviolent majority will still excuse genocidal tactics when such are used against their enemies. South African apartheid therefore attracts greater emotion than does the Soviet gulag, even though the latter was astronomically more murderous.

The Left often supports the use of racketeering - affirmative action quotas, hate crime, hate speech crime, forced "multicultural" indoctrination, redistributionist tax policies, etc. - as a legitimate weapon in the War on Class. These people are divided into two camps. Some simply want to be able to beat up on the "wrong" classes from here to eternity. Others want to use such coercive programs for force people to convert to the "right" classes.

Oh, there's one part of the status ladder that the author forgot: all other life forms vs. humanity. The Pleistocene Liberation Organization's answer to this problem is a) vast reductions in the human population through birth control and a ban on malaria-destroying DDT, and b) an environmental apartheid program under which human access to most of the Earth is prohibited, effectively placing all people on reservations.

Among the Christian scriptures, then, the Gospel of John presents the clearest declaration of the deity of Jesus. From the beginning of his gospel, John declares Jesus to be the logos, the fundamental animating principle of the universe in Greek philosophy, equating him with God.

Then John puts Jesus in conflict with the Jews in chapter 8 of his gospel when the Jews there invoke their Abrahamic heritage. Jesus responds there, "Before Abraham was, I am." From the response of the Jews there (they try to run him off the edge of a cliff, but somehow he seems to pass through their midst unharmed) it is clear they understood what he meant -- the Greek wording, ego eimi, is the same wording used in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, in Exodus 3 to translate The Name of God, i.e., ego eimi ho on. This is just one of several specific instances of the equivalence being declared.

OK, so now we have Jesus saying he's God -- but when he's praying to his Father, who's he praying to? The conclusion the church draws from this is that the Son and the Father must both be God. Now, take this the next step. Judaism declares that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is Lord; Christianity picks up that thread and affirms that Jesus is Lord. Then Luke, writing in The Acts of the Apostles, describes the Day of Pentecost, wherein the Spirit of God, the ruach, is given to, i.e., falls upon, those who have professed faith in Jesus as Lord. Elsewhere in the Christian scriptures, the Holy Spirit is referred to as the Lord.

People may very well say to you, "Well, God needs the creation as much as the creation needs Him, because God needs to love something." Or they may say, "God needs to be face to face with something." But the reason this is not so is the Trinity. Because God is a personal God on the high order of the Trinity, God Himself was everything He needed in the area of communication and love. The persons of the Trinity loved each other and communicated with each other before the creation of all things. Therefore we must not cross this line: God exists, and He did not need to create. He willed to create.

Indians use the American flag in precisely the same way that American schools use the image of the Indian. It’s all about strength. The human heart enshrines emblems of strength.

It happens at very Indian pow-wow. The evening begins with a grand entry of all the dancers into the arena. The color guard leads with the eagle staff and the American flag, together with a state flag, military flags, and whatever other flags are appropriate for the occasion.

Then there is a special flag song. This is the moment the American flag is honored by American Indians – in the way only Indians can do it.

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Not only do we honor it with prayerful song, we wear it! American flag themes have been woven into our dance regalia for decades. Indians wear the flag in dance, in our cultural celebrations. It fascinates us. It is a sacred thing to us, not an article of daily dress.

And when Americans dress up like Indians, and use Indian images for their school teams, it’s really the same intuition. Most Americans have a deep appreciation for the awesome Indian warrior. He represents something very powerful to them – a natural strength, even savagery, which is dear to the heart of most every man. It’s a macho thing. It’s a warrior thing.

"Our fundamental condition for cooperating with Germany was a free hand to eradicate every last Jew from Palestine and the Arab world. I asked Hitler for an explicit undertaking to allow us to solve the Jewish problem in a manner befitting our national and racial aspirations and according to the scientific methods innovated by Germany in the handling of its Jews. The answer I got was: 'The Jews are yours.'"

Some students said they believe Coulter does not accurately represent the Republican Party.

Penn State College Democrats secretary Alex Smith said Coulter is so far right that she does not represent most of the Republicans' views.

"It reminds me of the recent ads featuring Sen. [Arlen] Specter against running Sen. [Patrick] Toomey," he said. "Toomey's slogan is, 'He's not far right, he's far out.' Far out is exactly how I would explain Coulter."

Another plot the men were cooking up would have involved hijacking of more airplanes. The Sears Tower (Chicago, Illinois), The Pentagon (Arlington, Virginia, the Washington Capitol (Washington, DC), the White House (Washington, DC), the Transamerica Tower (San Francisco, California), and the World Trade Center (New York, New York) would be the likely targets.

If, on the other hand, Bush had known what the Clinton Administration knew - that alQaidaa had plans to use commercial airliners as bombs and fly them into buildings - specifically the CIA -- this would be a serious charge. But they did not know it, because the Clinton team never told them.

Although the Clinton security team knew that Operation Bojinka included blowing up the CIA building in Langley, Virginia, it kept this information from the rest of the government. When Dale Watson, chief of the FBI's International Terrorism Operations Section testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in February 1998, he withheld this vital information. He identified Operation Bojinka only as a plot to blow up U.S. air carriers, and assured the senators that the FBI had the situation under control.

It is possible that Clinton never received the information about Operation Bojinka, since his lack of interest in national security matters throughout the course of his administration has been noted by many - including his chief political advisor Dick Morris, and his chief "biographer" Joe Klein. February 1998 - the date of the FBI testimony -- is also the month after Monica Lewinsky became a national celebrity.

One late-summer Saturday morning, the president asked me to pick up a few days' worth of PDBs that had accumulated in the Oval Office. He gave them to me with handwritten notes stuffed inside the folders and asked that I deliver them back to the NSC.

I opened the PDB to rearrange the notes and noticed the heading "Operation Bojinka." I keyed on a reference to a plot to use commercial airliners as weapons and another plot to put bombs on U.S. airliners. Because I was a pilot, this naturally grabbed my attention. I can state for a fact that this information was circulated within the U.S. intelligence community, and that in late 1996 the president was aware of it.

"If you still think homosexual "marriage" won't affect you, think again. Your job may be at stake! Legal recognition of unnatural unions is the ultimate societal affirmation. Once the state approves of homosexual "marriages," the full weight of the law will be brought down against men and women of faith who believe in Judeo-Christian values." - Gary Bauer, in his newsletter for his organization, Campaign for Working Families. Actually, you won't only lose your job, you'll be forced to sing show-tunes every Sunday. Is there no end to the humiliation?

A federal judge has awarded back pay and damages for emotional distress to a Christian employee who objected to his employer's policies requiring him to "respect and value" the differences of his gay colleagues. Specifically, Albert Buonanno objected to language in an AT&T Broadband employee handbook stating that "each person at AT&T Broadband is charged with the responsibility to fully recognize, respect and value the differences among all of us," including sexual orientation. The company fired Buonanno after he refused to sign a "certificate of understanding" acknowledging that he agreed to the policy.

CUBAN universities have welcomed more than 13,945 foreign students from 113 countries, via a cooperation program that is systematically growing.

This program, which is free of cost to the students, began in 1961 and increased during the 1970s in response to requests by African and Middle Eastern countries, mainly for middle-level education, according to an April 10 article in Granma daily.

There's a Florida statute which is very clear -- the Florida legislature wrote it for the express purpose -- it's very clear that a subpoena must be used, and the purpose of the subpoena is to notify the patient.

Then there's a hearing where the law enforcement authorities tell a court what they're looking for, and narrow the search so that they don't get to see the whole medical file.

There are things in people's medical files that are irrelevant to whatever it is would be searched. But this prosecutor ignored the statute, a statute, by the way, he had been admonished for ignoring two years ago by this same appellate court and stormed into the offices of four of my doctors with search warrants, with the sole purpose of intimidating the doctors and their staff.

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You know, probable cause, which is what the state said they had to seize the records, can be manufactured out of thin air, and a judge, as has been demonstrated in my case, says, okay, yep, you've got probable cause -- but they didn't have probable cause, because if they did, they wouldn't have written in their brief they had no idea what to charge me with till they could see all the medical records.

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Yesterday Jim Martz, the prosecutor on the case representing the Palm Beach state attorney, said that the reason they used a search warrant was that they were afraid that I or my doctors would alter or remove the records if they had used a subpoena...[D]octor shopping means I am misrepresenting a medical condition to doctors. That means the doctors are victims, so this whole notion that I would collude with my doctors to have them remove records (a crime punishable by a 15-year conviction on a felony for tampering) is absolutely offensive and outrageous. And senseless.

How can I be deceiving and colluding with the doctors at the same time?

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I'm just pointing out here that an excuse was offered by the state attorney prosecutor, why they skirted the statute requiring the subpoena, and in the process they impugned the reputation of these doctors by claiming that they had to go this route because the doctors might have destroyed or altered the records.

In a society that presumes innocence, for this man to go before the court of appeal and presume guilty on the part of these doctors, is offensive to me, and I wanted to take time here to explain this in a way satisfactory to me as well as to you.

Not another wardrobe malfunction ... feisty rock singer Alanis Morissette poked fun at Janet Jackson's notorious breast-baring episode by stripping on stage to reveal cartoonish fake nipples and pubic hair.

Morissette, hosting Canada's annual music awards, said the stunt, in which she appeared in a provocative skin-hugging body-suit was intended to expose US "censorship."

The singer, renowned for her angst-ridden lyrics, told the audience at the Juno Awards in Edmonton "we live in a land where we still think the human body is beautiful and we're not afraid of the female breast."

"Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens."

"If it were up to me, I wouldn't teach long division until high school." - Robert Hetzel, eighth-grade math teacher at O'Keefe Middle School in Madison, Wisconsin. Hetzel is a supporter of the Connected Math Project, a controversial curriculum that claims it teaches "far more than proficiency with computation and symbol manipulation. It encompasses the ability to use mathematical tools, resources, procedures, knowledge, and ways of thinking to make sense of new situations." Critics say the program eschews fundamental math skills in favor of essay writing. (April 3 The Capital Times)

In the end, the race came down in part to regional loyalty: Mr. Rodriguez swept his San Antonio base, and Mr. Cuellar won 85% of the vote in Laredo. But many political observers believe there was an ideological component as well. "Henry proved that you can run as a moderate, get the community to listen to you and win," says a former Hispanic colleague of his in the Legislature.

But with the BIA in charge, "it's pure communism," says Russell Means, "and it's an abject failure. Just like it was in the Soviet Union. It's failure. You've created a dictatorship by the Bureau of Indian Affairs."

But once this issue is buttoned into a suit of civil rights, neither homosexuality nor marriage need be discussed.

The civil rights movement argued that it was precisely the utter innocuousness of racial difference that made segregation an injustice. Racism was evil because it projected a profound difference where there was none--white supremacy, black inferiority--for the sole purpose of exploiting blacks. But there is a profound difference between homosexuality and heterosexuality. In the former, sexual and romantic desire is focused on the same sex, in the latter on the opposite sex. Natural procreation is possible only for heterosexuals, a fact of nature that obligates their sexuality to no less a responsibility than the perpetuation of the species. Unlike racial difference, these two sexual orientations are profoundly--not innocuously--different.