In this column I pose questions and raise issues. I don't always agree with the conclusion, implied or stated. The purpose is to put a slightly different spin on each item and to promote discussion.

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• People who do not fear the truth, do not hate those who tell it.
• In pre-pop feminist days, our culture taught people how to be married. Now, it teaches us how to be divorced.
• If the military draft is reimposed, should women be drafted? Should they be allowed to fight on the front lines? Maybe. Here's how we might do that without undermining our military capabilities or sending thousands of ill-prepared women to their death: Since front line action is where the most promotions are earned, it makes sense that only enlisted soldiers should be afforded those opportunities. Hence, no draftees, male or female, should be sent to the front lines. Use them to fill support roles behind the lines. Allow both enlisted women and men to serve on the front lines, but require all of them to satisfy the same minimum physical and mental requirements. No "normalization" through lower standards for women. Thus, we avoid sex discrimination in both the draft and opportunities for advancement on the front lines.
• Here at The Backlash!, we have a strong "smirk ethic."
• Destroying Al-Qaida and Usama bin Laden is no more about retaliation and revenge than destroying a mad dog. It's simply about eradicating a threat to our existence.
• Many members of the press are critical of the states which are not joining the federal government's settlement with Microsoft. One of the silliest criticisms is that Microsoft products are the best, so why fight them? One of the (very legitimate) points of the government's case against Microsoft was that there are virtually no products on the software market that are better precisely because of Microsoft's monopolistic practices. IBM's OS/2 Warp, for example. They stopped with version 4 because, even for a giant like IBM it was virtually impossible to loosen Microsoft's monopolistic grip on the industry. Yet, every version of Warp was far superior in every respect to contemporary versions of Windows.
• Welfare subsidizes American corporations by allowing them to pay less than a living wage.
• If the reason to attack Afghanistan is because that country harbors terrorists, then when are we going to attack Idaho? Or Canada, for that matter? Notice for the humor-impaired: that was a joke! But in point of fact there are plenty of terrorist-wannabes in our own country, and the terrorist group that tried to blow up Seattle's Space Needle entered Washington state via British Columbia. So we ought to be careful what reasons we use to justify attacks on others lest those same reasons apply to us as well.
• Pundits who demand that moderate Muslims restrain the Muslim extremists are advocating nothing less than an extra-legal religious police order. That might fly in other countries, but in the United States it's illegal.
• During the past few hundred years, virtually every technological advance has been invented by Christians. If nothing else, Christianity is a cauldron of creativity. At the risk of making an understatement, the benefits it has provided to the world are enormous.
• It was absolutely evil for Usama bin Laden to commit the 9-11 act of terrorism. That's a given. We should go after him and his network, we should destroy them, and we should fortify our defenses against future terrorist attacks. All these things simply make sense. However, precisely whose interests are being served by the "war on terrorism" when it includes attacking foreign governments? We may not like those governments - certainly, I despise both the Taliban and Saddam Hussein - but their existence, while hateful, affects our lives less than what's on the menu for dinner. So while we might cheer their demise, their destruction provides no direct benefit to the American people. Which leaves us with the question: precisely whose interests are we serving?
• It is better to be teased than ignored, but it is always better to be ignored than bullied.
• Words to live by in the anti-heterosexual American workplace: "In the event I gave you the impression I find you even remotely attractive, please forgive me, it was purely unintentional." Or, we can grow up and restore flirtation, fun and family to the American way of life.
• Pop feminists are teaching women to ignore the circle of life, and to expect more than they are willing to give.
• It is often true that the behaviors of the child reflect the fears of the parent.
• The good father prepares his children for life by confronting them with challenges suitable to their age which they can successfully overcome. He encourages them when they fail, praises them when they succeed, helps them find their place in the world and instills confidence in their abilities. The good mother prepares her children for life by nurturing their empathy with her own. She gives them solace when they are sad, teaches them how to vent when they are mad and instills confidence in love. The good parents share one another's duties. They encourage curiosity and a desire to learn, establish appropriate boundaries and provide the discipline that will prepare their children for social life and personal success.
• If our forces find bin Laden (alive), maybe we should let him "escape" so he can lead us to the other networks in his network of networks.
• Interesting how, following 9-11, many liberal groups stopped complaining about racial profiling, and many conservative groups started.
• Isn't it interesting how the only way Brenden Fraser's good-hearted character in Blast From the Past could avoid being committed to a psychiatric ward was by becoming rich? Sadly, real life is often that way, too.
• On November 28th, we had a little snow in western Washington state. SUVs were parked everywhere. On the freeways, in the middle of downtown streets. I had no trouble at all navigating the three-inch accumulation in my 14-year-old Pulsar, but it was too much for the "sports utility" vehicles.
• One of my favorite commentators is Bill O'Reilly. More often than not I agree with his opinions. But I have to shake my head at the disingenuous way he sets up his guests. He often invites folks who actually share his views, asks them to speculate on how some person or politician, group or organization, nation or whatever could be or do or justify some act, policy, belief or condition, and then when they innocently offer off the top of their head a reasonable explanation, he starts taking pot shots at them. Should they recover quickly enough to reply with a pithy and plausible rejoinder, he loudly brushes them off and briskly moves on to something else or ends the segment. It's too bad a savvy and otherwise reasonable man has to resort to such vulgar tactics to get the ratings for his show.
• Human nature being what it is, which is most likely - that a non-Christian would judge the United States by American charity, or by the pious arrogance of the significant number of Christians who blithely dismiss non-Christians as Hell-bound sinners?
• Is bin Laden attempting to follow the script for Dune?
• Jehovahism in all its forms - Jewish, Christian and Muslim - has a long history of carnage and violence extending to the present (West Bank/Gaza, Bosnia & Croatia, Oklahoma City) that the Jewish and Christian critics of Islam conveniently ignore.
• Throughout history, virtually every technological advance has been condemned as sinful and an affront to God. Just like human cloning.
• President Reagan is famous for, among other things, "Reaganomics," or his supply side economics programs with their focus on increasing production, savings and investments essentially with tax breaks for businesses and the rich. The argument was that more money in the hands of employers and the rich would "trickle down" to the rest of us. But, during the 1980s and into the 1990s these policies served to widen the income gap by squeezing the middle class, a condition exacerbated by Clinton's policies encouraging corporations to export jobs through such means as NAFTA. Now, while Wall Street types are already abuzz with news the recession is over almost before it is begun, Bush Jr. has proposed a tax relief package which appears to put money back into the pockets of all Americans. Should this be the case, then it amounts to a demand side economic stimulus package because it will stimulate consumer demand. Just the opposite of Reaganomics.
• An average person raised in a good environment by respectful but disciplined parents is more likely to achieve extraordinary things than an extraordinary person raised in a bad environment by either permissive or disrespectfully harsh parents.
• Cows, pigs and chickens are in no danger of extinction because we raise them for food. Buffalos came back from the edge of extinction when some ranchers began raising them for food. There's a lesson there.
• Conservatives condemned Clinton for political posturing and nation building when he sent troops into Bosnia and began bombing Serbia to protect Muslims, but now that it's politically expedient, most of those same conservatives are parading Clinton's campaign as proof of why Muslims in the Middle East should respect America.
• What does a Muslim in Afghanistan who has no television know of or care about what Clinton did for Muslims in eastern Europe, or what Bush Sr. did for the wealthy and oppressive royal families in Kuwait?
• A lot of people seem to believe that biblical times were essentially like our own but with less technology and corruption. Despite that nothing in the Bible contradicts most of what secular histories have to say about the day, they are blithely ignorant of such basic things as average life span (most people died before 30), the lack of civil liberties, the squalid living conditions and how much alcohol people drank.
• Women who are offended by men's interest in women are sexist.
• Many pundits brush aside the multitude of Christian and Jewish extremists we have in our own country, and demand to know why educated Muslims are not standing up en masse to condemn their own extremists. It's called freedom of religion. If somebody wants to be an extremist, as long as that individual does not commit, collaborate or conspire in crimes against the rest of us, it's their Constitutional right.
• It may be one of the supreme ironies of history that the principles of Christianity in general, and the lessons of Jesus in particular, lend themselves far less to Capitalism than to Socialism.
• The Taliban is on the run. At least that's what it looks like. I sure hope so. But another possibility is that most of them are blending into the background and hiding in plain sight.