Geoff Kennedy lives in Anchorage.
Civility - 11/21/2009 9:37 pm
Some random thoughts - 11/18/2009 9:24 pm
Human life: what's it worth to you? - 11/16/2009 8:02 am
Alien Abduction - 11/13/2009 10:36 pm
Support the troops, not the war - 11/11/2009 10:33 am
More rethinking Afghanistan - 11/10/2009 1:16 pm
Rethinking Afghanistan - 11/4/2009 3:59 pm
Spinning Hitler - 11/2/2009 11:27 pm
Goldstone interview - 10/26/2009 2:04 pm
Counting my biases - 10/16/2009 11:54 pm
Guilt, responsibility, blame and spin - 10/13/2009 2:28 pm
Where's Sigmund Freud when you really need him? - 10/8/2009 5:28 am
More fun with ink blot tests - 10/5/2009 4:45 pm
Happy Fortunate Eagle Day - 9/24/2009 11:40 am
"Race," politics and reason - 9/21/2009 11:01 am
Yes we can isn't necessarily, yes we will - 9/18/2009 1:47 pm
Blaming America(ns) first - 9/16/2009 8:18 am
Welfare mamas in Lexuses--at home and abroad - 9/11/2009 9:13 am
Personal and corporate responsibility - 9/10/2009 9:50 am
How about halting the silliness - 9/9/2009 11:45 am
This time I get to write the comments - 9/6/2009 8:41 am
Outsourcing your tax dollars - 9/4/2009 7:43 am
NOVEMBER 21, 2009 - 9:37 PM
The recent discussion of civility on these cyberpages disappointed me. Neither blogger defined civility but appeared to claim the guys who agree with them are civil while those who disagree are uncivil. Neither opposes civil discourse. So, if civility itself is not controversial, then what are we arguing about?
To me, civility begins with acting in a rational and consistent way. When I make my points, I use several devices to back up my arguments: I give examples of what I mean, I sometimes clarify my points with metaphors, I cite people with expertise on the matter at hand, I sometimes cite pertinent facts, I sometimes draw what I considerable logical conclusions from those facts, and I sometimes ask questions.
NOVEMBER 18, 2009 - 9:24 PM
Tuesday morning at my local supermarket, I saw a copy of “Going Rogue” already reduced 25%. I couldn’t resist such a bargain, went home with the 400-page book, decided to do what's best for Alaska, read the first 250 pages and then quit.
Ronald W. Reagan decided to solve our country’s problems by throwing taxpayers’ money at them and outspent all his predecessors combined.
George W. Bush decided to solve our country’s problems by throwing taxpayers’ money at them and outspent all his predecessors combined.
The current occupant decided to solve our country’s problems by throwing taxpayers’ money at them and outspent all his predecessors combined. Shouldn’t we therefore refer to our president as Barack W. Obama?
NOVEMBER 16, 2009 - 8:02 AM
I erred Friday when I said that we marked the 20th anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall the previous week. The anniversary took place last Monday.
A week after the wall collapsed, 20 years ago today, El Salvador terrorists broke into the home of six Jesuit priests and murdered them along with their housekeeper and her daughter who happened to be there at the time.
I lived in Kotzebue at the time and the parish priest was a Jesuit. His response was not to condemn the murders of his colleagues but to speculate on their theological beliefs. He did not explain why possibly holding unpopular theological beliefs was a capital offense. A fellow Catholic responded to the murders by accusing the victims of not being “even-handed” about people murdering them. Others cite national security and fighting communism, but don’t explain how murdering Catholic priests—the enemies of communism--fights communism and protects our national security
NOVEMBER 13, 2009 - 10:36 PM
On Thursday, Nov. 5, I suddenly realized alien abductions really happen.
That’s when I read an Italian judge convicted a CIA base chief and 22 other mostly American operatives of kidnapping a Muslim cleric in Milan in 2003. The guy literally was abducted by aliens.
I know it’s not politically popular to refer to Americans in other countries as aliens, but that’s what they are. And kidnapping and hauling people off to other places is just plain abduction.
According to the newspaper report, “Prosecutors said he was snatched in broad daylight, flown from an American air base in Italy to a base in Germany and then on to Egypt, where he asserts he was tortured.”
NOVEMBER 11, 2009 - 10:33 AM
In “Born on the Fourth of July,” Ron Kovic tells of attending a peace rally in a wheelchair after being paralyzed in Vietnam when some guy took advantage of Kovic’s helplessness and beat him up.
Kovic and other vets remind me of Christ. We honor them as saviors as they go to war, and, if they survive, we crucify them.
Often we hide our crucifixions. After the Iraq war broke out, I prayed aloud in St. Benedict’s for justice for our returning vets. A fellow churchgoer complained I was supporting more government spending. Consider that for a moment. Spending trillions on war is just dandy, but spending billions on the vets maimed emotionally and physically is being a “liberal.”
NOVEMBER 10, 2009 - 1:16 PM
In his recent blog, Brian Sweeney asserts that doctors are not clones. Yet, for some reason he acts like a clone of the spin doctors. Rather than address the issues involving the war in Afghanistan, he relies on the usual politically correct mantras—blame America first, isolationist, hindsight is always 20-20, etc. Recently, he complained about people not involved in “real debate.” Political spin isn’t real debate, Brian. It’s ducking real debate.
Like the spin doctors, he compares the war in Afghanistan to World War II and insists the “GKs” would have opposed standing up to the Nazis. Well, in fact, Brian, get your facts straight. I was around during the Second World War and did not oppose it. Nor did I oppose the Korean War. Opposing one war does not mean opposing all wars all the time. Didn’t you learn that in your freshman logic class in Dartmouth?
NOVEMBER 4, 2009 - 3:59 PM
A friend asked me to mention the upcoming documentary, “Rethink Afghanistan,” by Robert Greenwald to be shown this Friday at 7PM in room 118 of the Social Sciences Building at the University of Alaska Anchorage.
After considering the request, I thought it might be a good idea for me to do exactly what the movie proposes. I have never publicly opposed the war in Afghanistan, not because I supported it, but because the occupation of Iraq drew my attention and my outrage away from the other war.
I had to ask myself why we got into this Afghanistan war in the first place. From what I remember, our government accused the Taliban government of harboring al Qaida terrorists.
NOVEMBER 2, 2009 - 11:27 PM
Move over, Brian Sweeney and The_Insider. You’ve been outflanked. A new critic isn’t satisfied merely with calling me an anti-Semitic isolationist, but goes right for the Hitler card.
I’m accused of the “same tactics Hitler used when he wrote ‘Mein Kampf.’”
Now, I must confess I never read that tome. So I’m at a disadvantage here. Maybe the critic can specify what “Mein Kampf” said about the Goldstone Report, international law, US military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, Hamas terrorists, US foreign aid policies, the 1967 attack on the USS Liberty, civilian deaths in Palestine and Gaza, collective punishment and the right of American citizens to challenge their government’s stealing their money and sending it to foreigners who attack America.
OCTOBER 26, 2009 - 2:04 PM
Friends ask me what I think of Judge Richard Oct. 23 interview on Bill Moyers’ Journal. Here are my impressions:
The fact that he’s a Zionist Jew adds to his credibility. So does his experience in investigating war crimes in the Balkans, Rwanda and his native South Africa. When asked to investigate crimes by Israel in Palestine, he had refused unless being allowed to investigate crimes by Hamas as well.
The fact that death threats came, not from Hamas supporters but from Israel supporters is an important point. So is his observation that despite being a Jew in Palestine, his fears for his own safety were unfounded.
OCTOBER 16, 2009 - 11:54 PM
Some of the many responses to my last blog confused me. I didn’t know how to respond to the criticism that my essays are “slanted.” I couldn’t figure out what precisely what my “slant” was.
The best I can come up with is that some are outraged that I don’t see things the way they do and any deviation from their perspective must be “slanted.” I try to articulate a principle and cite some examples from real life to explain what I mean and to illustrate the principle. I choose the examples I think best illustrate my point. But some don’t like the examples, apparently because they do not advance the political agendas that such people want.
OCTOBER 13, 2009 - 2:28 PM
For those who missed the point of my Sept. 24 blog, I merely addressed the issue of “discovery” of other peoples’ territories to challenge the myth that our continent was not “discovered” until Europeans found it and to try a little role reversal. I did that because I found lots of double standards which our society merely takes for granted as the only way we’re allowed to look at things.
I played a little role reversal in my recent "dream" blog. What if Holocaust refugees landed on our shores and we were forced to sacrifice our lands for them. How would we react? Do people of other countries and religions have the same rights we do?
OCTOBER 8, 2009 - 5:28 AM
I had a strange dream the other night.
The international community, alarmed by the Holocaust in Darfur, arranged for a place to resettle the refugees—an East Texas town called Palestine (pronounced PAL-us-steen).
The city’s 18,000 residents complained it couldn’t absorb tens of thousands of refugees from Darfur.
But, soon after their arrival, the refugees joined the local Lions Club and started calling themselves Lionists, proclaiming God promised the land to them. After local elections, the Lionists claimed a majority on the Palestine City Council and passed eminent domain ordinances seizing property of longtime Palestine residents. Soon more and more refugees began settling on the West Bank of the Trinity River. The old time residents decided to fight back and formed the Palestine Land Owners group. A fist fight broke out after a PLO member complained East Texans shouldn’t be punished for the Holocaust, which they had nothing to do with. So the local police chief, newly elected after running on the Lionist ticket, called the Palestine residents a bunch of hooligans. He persuaded the city council to declare a curfew, closed down businesses owned by the Palestinites, said they couldn’t use local roads no more, and built a big fence to keep them away from the land they used to own before eminent domain took it away from them. After the Palestinites complained the fence kept them from going to work and buying groceries and a woman from the Seattle area got run over by a Lionist bulldozer, the Lionists got federal funds. When the Palestinites complained about being pushed around by big gummint, the Lionists said all the Palestinites were denying the Sudanese Holocaust. Then the Lionists played the race card and labeled the Palestinites bigots.
OCTOBER 5, 2009 - 4:45 PM
When stress becomes too much for me to handle, I can always turn to reactions to my essays. Laughter, the Reader's Digest used to say, is the best medicine.
Take, for example, reactions to my little commemoration of Fortunate Eagle Day and the guy who lampooned the “Columbus discovered America” mindset.
The_Insider provided the most laughter. After accusing me of either a “Catholic or Liberal… relentless guilt trip,” T_I proclaimed, “We are responsible for racism, genocide of Native Americans, killing of innocent Iraqis and Palestinians, American peace keepers and the environment.”
SEPTEMBER 24, 2009 - 11:40 AM
In March, 1973, as part of a project at the University of New Mexico, I asked a university librarian who discovered Europe. She couldn’t answer other than to say Europe is just there. I explained to her that America wasn’t “discovered” until someone from far away found it. Someone from far away had to “discover” Europe.
Six months later, Adam Fortunate Eagle answered my question. The Fallon, Nevada Native planted a spear at Rome’s International Airport and claimed Italy for the Chippewa Nation. On Sept. 24, 1973, someone had finally discovered Europe.
The Natives of Europe owe Adam Fortunate Eagle a big debt of gratitude. If it weren’t for him, the Natives today would be the ignorant, primitive savages they before Sept. 24, 1973.
SEPTEMBER 21, 2009 - 11:01 AM
Let’s apply reason, not political ideology, to the latest fustercluck over race and politics. Former President Jimmy Carter and several other dreaded “liberals” got fed up with signs comparing President Obama to apes, calling him a lyin’ African instead of an African lion, drawing Hitler-type mustaches on photos of the president, claiming he’s a Kenyan Muslim, etc. Carter and others suggested race-baiting may play a part.
So, predictably, Brian Sweeney, Jr. and others denied race has anything to do with hatred of and hostility for the president. So, now we have yet another round of shouting, name-calling, finger-pointing and politics as usual.
SEPTEMBER 18, 2009 - 1:47 PM
Lisa Murkowski’s Sept. 12 column, “North Slope seas contain oil and gas vital to US,” seems to channel Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign slogan, “Yes, we can.”
Alaska’s senior senator expressed confidence “subsistence activities and energy development CAN comfortably co-exist….offshore production CAN be safely conducted in Alaska’s federal waters….and the (Interior) department’s existing offshore plan CAN be confirmed.”
Alaska’s can-can girl also echoes what politicians were saying back when I lived in Fairbanks during the early pipeline days, “I strongly support RESPONSIBLE exploration and production in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas…. as much of (oil and gas) energy as possible should come from secure, reliable domestic sources that CAN be RESPONSIBLY produced.” (Emphasis mine)
SEPTEMBER 16, 2009 - 8:18 AM
Which president said, “Mistakes were made?”
a) Ronald Reagan
b) Bill Clinton
c) Both
d) Neither.
The correct answer is c). Reagan uttered those memorable words after first denying he had anything to do with trading arms with terrorists in order to finance his own terrorists. Clinton said the same thing after first denying he had “sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky.”
I don’t know whether either or both presidents were referring to the original actions they first denied or to lying about their original actions or both.
As a rather traditional American Christian , I view terrorism as a crime and a sin, doing business with terrorists a crime and a sin, and lying as a sin. Engaging in terrorism is, for me, an impeachable offense, a “high crime” indeed, and I argue that lying about engaging in terrorism is also a “high crime” and an impeachable offense. I view adultery as a sin and lying about adultery a sin. But that is primarily a personal matter between consenting adults and God, not a crime and not an impeachable offense.
SEPTEMBER 11, 2009 - 9:13 AM
When I visited Jim in suburban Jacksonville, Florida in October, 1962, he complained about the loss of his personal freedom to a government that forced him to pay social security taxes. That was the last time I saw Jim. He and my sister were killed in an auto accident in the Bahamas the following June. His $5000 life insurance policy did not adequately provide for their four children, including three-and-a-half-year-old Ronnie. She and her sisters depended on Jim’s social security taxes for their survival. Ronnie is now a grandmother living on Chena Hot Springs Road east of Fairbanks. Her husband Ralph complains about the loss of his personal freedom to a government that forces him to pay social security taxes.
SEPTEMBER 10, 2009 - 9:50 AM
After a detour or two to deal with the personal hostility expressed by people who don’t like my ideas but resort to name-calling instead of logic, I hope to get back to contributing to the marketplace of ideas. Here goes:
During my face-to-face meeting with Dr. Brian Sweeney, Jr., my most persistent critic, he began by questioning state money spent on Alaska villages, which he thought ought to be self-sustaining, and then complained about the dysfunctional people he sees who tend to see society’s sacrifices on their behalf as entitlements, not privileges.
I acknowledged the doctor has a point. I told him as a landlord, former husband and an uncle of four orphans, I have personal experience with the attitudes he articulated. So it is with real dialogue. I did not respond by saying, “Yeah, but,” as the stereotyped leftist he considers me would do. Not every poor person in Anchorage is like that, but some do fit the stereotype. You don’t need to tell me. I’ve had a major dose of that this summer.
SEPTEMBER 9, 2009 - 11:45 AM
One thing about satire: The targets rarely if ever get the point. Over the weekend, I decided to satirize all the ad hominem attacks, accusations and name-calling by making a statement about abortion and speculating how the name-callers and accusers would react to it. I wanted to satirize those who try to make my essays all about me instead of all about the issue I discuss. So what happened? The name-callers then accused me of making the issue “about me.” Go figure.
One character, who likes to accuse me of drinking Kool-Aid and wearing a tinfoil hat, complained (s)he never said I drink Kool-Aid from a tinfoil hat, and, then, of all things, asks that we stick to the issues. If you like irony, you gotta love it. Apparently, this person believes the issues are whether I hate Semites and wear a tinfoil hat.
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