I Knew Him, Horatio - On the other hand, the Donk seems to be...well, an Oxfordian. At the very least, determinedly anti-Stratford. But there's good and bad in everyone.

Speaking of Adventures in Paranoid Thinking - Let's say you were the Government, which meant that you were inclined to lie, shade and generally make stuff up if you thought it would enhance your status and interests, and that you were as inclined to do this overseas as domestically. And you recently put out a bunch of planted news stories because you'd been in a small war and had a bigger one in mind. How could you enhance their credibility? How about by loudly announcing that you were thinking about creating a department to plant news stories in the future, then, when the outcry came, saying that you had no idea what came over you, and thank heavens that was done with. You weren't going to make up news stories after all. Honest.

(See eerily-similar musing by Ginger Stampley.)

Wilderness of Stephanies - Unqualified Offerings has not gotten caught up in the Stephanie Dupont craze. But (he's everywhere!) the Illuminated Donkey has - and how. If you read only one blog post this year, it must be - one of mine. Let's not get carried away. However, check out this "interesting adventure in paranoid thinking," and googling, complete with ironically appropriate Ayn Rand allusion in the title.

Some of us are old enough to remember the days when you just assumed that any "woman" you met on the net was really a guy.

Where Are They Now Dept. The Illuminated Donkey has the last word we citizens are likely to get on the momentarily-famous "Egyptian Radio" case. Millenium Hotel security guard Ronald Ferry pled guilty to lying to the FBI about finding the radio in the safe in Egyptian diplomat offspring Abdallah Higazy's room safe after the attack on the World Trade Center towers. (The Hotel was so close to the WTC that it is still closed.) Ferry's lawyer "told reporters his client 'thought he was being a good citizen' by trying to help the FBI build a case against Higazy," perhaps in hopes of scaring some sense into military tribunal enthusiasts. (One more time: The problem with saying hostile terrorists don't deserve the protections of the legal system is that the whole point of a trial is to determine whether someone is a hostile terrorist in the first place.)

The plea and the conviction prove conclusively that Ferry lied about finding the radio in the safe but that it somehow, as Ferry says, was in Higazy's room, or that Ferry planted the radio himself and isn't admitting to it, or that he was in league with someone who planted it, or that Ferry lied about that too and is only partially owning up to his actions in his plea, or that the diplomacy angels settled on Ferry as a way to rescue a well-connected Egyptian fellow from a heap of trouble or, well, almost anything. As the Donk says, "I still don’t expect to ever really find out what happened here."

This might be a good time to mention the Unqualified Offerings motto: Never confuse politics with current events.

That's More Like It - The Great Texas Blog Outage is over. Both Virginia Postrel and Ginger Stampley are back on the job after their respective bouts with actual productive work and the flu. Rejoice, World, and get thee thither, if you ain't yet gotten.

Side note: While neither Virginia nor Ginger would fit the title, wouldn't a great Austin Lounge Lizard-inspired blog name be "Another Stupid Texas Blog?"

Tasteless Football and Terrorism Comparison - Remember reading that the lesson that the bin Ladenites among the mujahidin took from the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan was that superpowers were vulnerable, so therefore the US was vulnerable too? Unqualified Offerings found itself thinking of that and this recent offering about conference Super Bowl streaks at the same time today:

But if you start with a working assumption that the best team in the league wins the Super Bowl, and that to be the best you have to beat the best, implications arise. NFC Team A beats AFC Team X this year's Super Bowl, so it's the best team in the league. Who will represent the NFC in next year's Super Bowl? Either Team A or a team that can beat Team A. Who will represent the AFC? Either Team X (best in conference) or a team that can beat Team X. But our simplifying assumption was that Team A is better than Team X, because it won. So being able to claw your way past Team X does not imply that you are necessarily up to the challenge of Team A-level football.

Gentle readers, the Soviet Union was Team X. We are Team A.

The Jordan Roles - So Michael Jordan may be done for the season and, let's face it, may be done for his third basketball career. The (radio) talk in DC is whether he returns to the Wizards' front office or lights out for the territory.

It's a truism in basketball journalism and punditry that if Jordan doesn't return to his President of Basketball Operations job that that's okay, because he stunk at it. I disagree. Jordan ran personnel for the Wizards for about 14 months. He did not sign any big deals for marquee players and the team did poorly. But the Wizards were in an impossible cap situation. What's more, they were sitting on some of the highest-priced driftwood in the league. They had Juwan Howard, who will never be better than very good, making $18 million a year, Mitch Richmond, one of the great pure shooters in the days when he had legs, making, I believe, ten million a year, and worst of all, Rod Strickland, whose picture appears next to "problem child" in the latest American Heritage Dictionary, making another oversized pile of money.

This being the NBA, every one of these aging or simply overpriced boat anchors had a guaranteed contract with at least another year to run. I saw something close to the same team the year before, with tickets I got free, and I felt cheated. No effort, no pride, no nothing.

Jordan moved them all in a single spring. He found the perfect mark for the Juwan Howard con in Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban. Until the day that deal happened, almost no one in basketball believed the Wizards had any hope of getting Howard off their payroll. Dallas just traded Howard away last week, which has to raise the "coup factor" of Jordan's original deal. He played chicken with Rod Strickland just long enough to get Strickland to agree to a contract buyout worth 50 cents on the dollar.

To evaluate Jordan's front office work, you have to know just how bad the team's situation was - the franchise had spent several years trading large, relatively-affordable young men for smaller, more expensive old guys. That's not quite a recipe for success. Jordan undid the financial damage the team had done to itself in a lot less time than fans and media here thought possible.

He drafted a high school player number one. The fact is, almost any team picking in that spot was going to draft a high school player, and probably the same one Jordan picked. The bargain acquisitions he's made have given the team at least an interim upgrade in size, talent, energy and, you know, interest in actually playing basketball. This year's team is very mediocre without Michael Jordan, which is way better than stupendously bad, which was what the Wizards were before Jordan put on his management suit.

Bizarro Car Trip - Tonight I was riding with my friend Frederick Pollack, one of the country's best poets and a lifelong Marxist.

"Fred," I told him, "I find myself using the word 'imperialist' unironically lately."

"Are you well?"

Then on the ride home, we were discussing the history of European Jewry, about which Fred knows rather a lot. That required an adversion to the medieval Church's theory and system of "the just price," which, Fred noted, was declared to be the cost of production plus the cost of distribution, with no profit and interest forbidden.

"The only problem," Fred said, "was that you can't have a functioning economy without interest."

"Or fixed prices," I offered.

"Exactly."

And not a bearded Spock in sight.

Wither Canada (sic) - It occurs to me we could do something useful with this benevolent hegemony I keep hearing about. If we intrigue on behalf of Quebec independence, the breakup of the Canadian federation would divide the talent pool just enough to give the US the talent edge it needs in Olympic hockey. Getting rid of the Soviet Union worked wonders - now the Belorussians play on a different team from the slightly-less-belo Russians, who play on a different team from the Ukrainians. Put Martin Brodeur and Mario Lemieux on the Quebec team with maybe one solid line, and leave Anglo-Canada with no frenchies. We will not have to hear carping from "Europe" either - self-interest will put the Czechs and the Swedes on our side, at the very least. Crikey, the Czechs already did the national breakup thing and they were golden just four years ago.

We simply define Quebecois sovereignty as a human rights issue. Bonus: Canadian nationalists have insisted for decades that the US has secret plans to annex their country. We can torture them by refusing to do so. Best of all, our action will have been wise and just, because it will have been our action.

Preemptive Google - Everybody does it, though they say it lowers your resistance to colds and if you do it too much, you go blind. When I sign some disagreeable petition and you want dirt, here are the Jim Henleys I am and am not:

I am

The roleplaying game geek Jim Henley
The poet Jim Henley
The computer-game Front Page Sports Football Pro Jim Henley
The Jim Henley who posted an Elvis Costello concert review in the early 90s
The Jim Henley in the archives of the Gene Wolfe mailing list

I am not

The zoologist Jim Henley
The Sacramento Bee Historian
The President of the Mainland Building and Construction Trades Council in Nova Scotia
The fellow who explained the origin of "an eye for an eye"
The fellow who appears in fishing tournament results, even though I keep claiming that fishing material will appear here

Most especially I am not

Susan McDougall's brother

We Make Do Other sites not only get useful referrer information, but they get actual search strings from major engines that found them. All Unqualified Offerings gets is a list of unconnected keywords. In many cases, not only can it not figure out how those words found this domain, it can't even figure out why someone would type most of them into a search engine in the first place:

unqualified
insupportable
precariousness
progresses
distinct
initiation
dabbler
recollections
equivalence

I get the first and the last one. The word "dabbler" may lead someone to one of my gaming sites. No doubt some of my readers do find this site noteworthy for the distinct precariousness of its insupportable positions, though.

Cleared for Takeoff - I know I've had occasion to mention Airstrip One items before, and mostly favorably, but I want to stress what a valuable site it has become. Chiefly, Airstrip One has become the best source for links on the situation in Afghanistan. By an amazing coincidence, as soon as the Administration shifted its rhetorical focus to Iran, Iraq and North Korea, most warbloggers did too. But as a minor matter it's worth noting that: The US and Britain still have troops in Afghanistan; there is still fighting in Afghanistan; bin Laden and Mullah Omar are still on the loose; and the West (including the US and Britain) have taken on a nation-building project whose prospects for success are, at best, ambiguous.

Hawkish readers will hate Airstrip One on principle, equating "anti-anglosphere" with "anti-american." That's a crock, but a familiar one these days. No doubt they would consider this Emmanuel Goldstein puncturing of imperial mascot Mark Steyn somehow anti-american, too. But sound advice is what you get from a friend:

A wonderfully barking article from Mark Steyn. Some little gems:

The ‘axis of evil’ is actually a pretty sophisticated construct.

That's not really the problem is it? The problem is that in response to one problem - an international terrorist network - you produce a different enemy. One (Iraq) has less connection with Al Qaeda than, ooh, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia; another (North Korea) is an atheist state with no tradition of Islam; and the third (Iran) had been on the opposite side of a proxy war with Al Qaeda within Afghanistan since before George Bush had learned the name of the president of Pakistan.

The problem with the axis of evil is that it is too sophisticated. Overly simplistic suggestions like "get Bin Laden and get out" would actually be a bit more popular.

Note the nice irony of a European urging the Bushies to be less sophisticated.

Wilderness of Mirrors, Great Game Edition - Steve Coll says that one of the problems for Afghans with their recent history is that they don't even know what their recent history is:

To a greater extent than any other armed conflict on the planet, Afghanistan's unfinished 24-year war has been shaped by rival foreign intelligence agencies: The Soviet Union's KGB, America's CIA, Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, Saudi Arabia's General Intelligence Department and Iran's multiple clandestine services. They primed various Afghan factions with cash and weapons, secretly trained guerrilla forces, financed propaganda and manipulated political conventions.

When spies help construct a civil war, one seed they sow is confusion. Afghans today have little basis to trust their own recent history; too much remains hidden.

Coll's piece focuses more specifically on the early-1980s KGB than that lead-in promises. Vodalians will find ourselves saying, "What about Saudi Arabia's General Intelligence Department?" (See "The Vodalus Approach" at right.) But he provides at least a sketch of more recent history, a gift that keeps on giving, in his conclusion:

The clandestine structure of the Cold War-era Afghan war anticipated the character of the fractured, deception-laden civil war that raged there during the 1990s. After Moscow and Washington withdrew, regional intelligence agencies -- in most cases trained, inspired and funded by the CIA or the KGB during the 1980s -- intervened directly. They often used the same covert methods pioneered by their mentor agencies. Pakistan's still-obscured role in aiding the rise of the Taliban between 1994 and 1996, and Uzbekistan's clandestine support for ethnic Uzbek warlords reigning in Mazar-e Sharif are two examples among many. In addition, after his expulsion from Sudan in 1996, Osama bin Laden introduced his stateless terrorist network to Afghanistan -- a secret brotherhood that operated as a conspiracy within the Taliban's Pakistani-supported conspiracy.

A consequence of this history for Afghans is evident in today's headlines. When political violence occurs, it is very difficult for anyone to express confidence about its origins. A government minister was killed 10 days ago by a cold, hungry, angry mob at the Kabul airport. The country's interim government, eschewing the obvious, made arrests and announced that the minister had been assassinated in a covert plot, perhaps with international dimensions. Now it has backed away from that assertion. Which is true? Sadly, either seems plausible.

Advantage (Barely): Unqualified Offerings - Michael Wilbon has an excellent appreciation of the USA-Russia hockey game in Saturday's Washington Post.

(Four) Last Words on the Olympics' "Good Old Days" - "The East German Judge."

Worthy Of Their Hire - I remember the years of "amateur" Olympics - Mark Spitz and Eric Heiden and, especially, Sugar Ray Leonard, Maryland's Pride. I remember the Miracle on Ice and even, prepubescently, Peggy Fleming. Oh the lost years of glory, before professionalism, sponsorships and the Dream Team, when athletes competed for the love of sport itself. Now NBA players and NHL players and money-grubbing pros have ruined the games.

Faced with that much crap, one hardly knows where to start.

Glory Days, then. At the time of the Olympic revival at the end of the 19th Century, "amateur" was how upper-class young men kept out the riff-raff. Championship-caliber athletes from working-class and poor backgrounds had to turn pro. By my childhood, "the amateur ideal" had morphed into affirmative action for socialist countries: corporate money and perks, bad; government money and perks, good! I remember a mini "outrage" that Mark Spitz touched off after winning one race. He walked around the pool, hands outstretched, waving to the crowd in celebration. What was the outrage? He was carrying his sneakers as he did so! Why, he might, might be slyly trying to endorse...whatever brand they were. No one knew. No one cared. (Note to younger readers: there was a time when no one gave much thought to brands of athletic footwear. We had no personal rocket packs back then either.) But Jim McKay (note to younger readers: Olympics coverage did not always suck) reported that there were demands that Spitz be stripped of his medal for this possible commercial contamination of the amateur clean room.

And Russian hockey players lived like dukes.

To the extent that the Olympics was supposed to enable, "peaceful competition among nations," the West had to fight with one hand tied behind its back. Many landmark Olympic contests in those days took on political overtones from the Cold War. Our claim in the twentieth century was that market economies were better than command economies, and we kept getting thrown into sporting contests where we were forbidden to bring the strengths of a market economy to bear: if our system rewarded our best athletes for being our best, it disqualified them for Olympic competition. If their system rewarded their best athletes for being their best - well, that was okay.

Even apart from the Cold War, the Olympic system problematized amateurism. What you gained was an artificially lit stage for a certain class of athlete-in-embryo, depending on the commercial opportunities of a given sport. Take boxing. Sugar Ray Leonard's Olympic fights stick in my mind more than his professional fights do. But Leonard in his professional prime was surely a better fighter than Leonard at the end of his amateur career, and his professional opponents were better, by and large, than his amateur ones. In the amateur days, the US Olympic basketball team had a role as a showcase of promising talent, but if there's one thing we've learned since 1992, it's the chasm in ability between professional basketball players and their amateur counterparts.

In the "amateur" Olympics, the best athlete Western athletes were advertising themselves. Leonard made himself bankable. Spitz earned himself a (piddling) entertainment career; Johnny Weismuller, a much better one. A parade of figure skaters made themselves famous in the Olympics so they could make themselves rich in the Ice Capades and like shows. Professionalism wasn't banished, merely sublimated. Lost to a parallel universe were unnumbered Olympic moments of athletes who, once they'd made the sometimes difficult decision to turn pro, could no longer compete in The Games.

And the members of the IOC lived like bandit chiefs.

Nothing focuses complaints about how professionalism has ruined the Olympics quite like men's basketball, though one hears similar complaints about hockey. The words I hear most often are "pointless" and "unfair," especially when discussing the real (1992) Dream Team. It depends on your definition of fair, of course, and the purpose of the Olympics themselves. The Dream Team and their opponents played on the same court, with the same ball and the same rules. The goal of sport is not to be equal to your competition, it's to be superior. That the Dream Team was. This was still a useful political point to make in 1992. Americans had complained for years that, were we able to send our best athletes (meaning: pros), those Commies would see just what was what. The first Dream Team was an unprecedented collection of talent and a thing of beauty in its own right. And whatever complaints you might (justly) lodge against subsequent US basketball teams, the Olympics clearly meant something to the original edition. If the goal of sport, and Olympic sport, is to discover just how good humans can be at something athletic, the Dream Team was instructive.

And it was great for foreigners.

No, really. I am not just talking about the Hapless Foreign Opponents who testified that getting crushed by their American idols was the thrill of their lives, either. F.A. Hayek said that when you destroy markets, you destroy prices, and when you destroy prices, you destroy information. Before 1992, basketball programs in other countries simply didn't know just how good it was possible to be at their sport. The Dream Team showed them, and international basketball has gotten steadily better ever since. Some day a European center will even learn to play defense.

Contrariwise, the NHL-vs.-USSR games of the 80s proved that the Russkies really were pretty good at hockey. Needless to say, as soon as Russian players got the chance to earn NHL money, they took it, too.

With hockey, the rumblings in sports media are not whether NHL players are good for the Olympics, but whether the Olympics are good for the NHL. The League comes to a full stop; the players risk injury. Why does the NHL even let its valuable players compete? There's the promotional value, yes. But I think the NHL doesn't want to alienate its foreign talent pool. While NBA players seem decreasingly interested in playing for the Olympic team, NHL players seem to relish playing for their countries. If the NHL forbids it, they have unhappy players and maybe something more. Someone might try to start a viable European league; some players may sit out Olympic years altogether. (Or worse, given the habits of European hockey players, they might obey the league and just whine all year.)

Which brings us to the final paradox. Professional basketball players and hockey players are rich. While there is some endorsement value, playing in the Olympics will not make them meaningfully richer. In their financial stratosphere, playing in the Olympics practically counts as giving it away. NBA players (I mean the US ones) seem far less willing to do this than NHL players, but USA basketball still fills its roster. What possible reason for joining the US basketball team can there be? Patriotism, a sense of duty, the desire to go somewhere different and meet strange people, the chance to show how good you are at your game on the world stage. Why do hockey players represent their national teams instead of taking the month off? They're not showcasing their abilities in hopes of a professional career - they already have one. It would seem they like playing hockey, and they like playing hockey for their countries. Patriotism and the pure joy of sport always were supposed to be the Olympic ideals.

Friendlies - Tonight's excellent USA-Russia hockey game puts me in mind of two related things, one of which goes here, the other in another item.

You hear people complain that this year's USA-Russia matchup doesn't mean and couldn't mean what 1980's "Miracle on Ice" game meant. How true. Now say it with me: Huzzah!

Here are some reasons why the 1980 game meant so much: Afghanistan. (Um, let's skip that one.) The Brezhnev Doctrine. "Malaise." America Held Hostage. (No, the Russians didn't do it, but we needed a break.) MAD. Sakharov. Russia's hockey tradition and the United States' lack of same. And especially, the unequal "amateur" system in force at the time, a structural advantage for socialist countries.

Almost everything that made the Miracle so memorable for those of us who saw it is something our two countries, the world and the Olympics are well rid of. In place of Systems in Conflict tonight we got - hockey. The thing itself. The US is a better hockey country than it was two decades ago. (When I was a kid fan in the 70s there was a single US player in the NHL.) The Russian players are guys that, eight months of the year, someone in North America is cheering for, because they're in the NHL somewhere. National pride of a benign sort was still at stake for players and fans alike, but it's no Twilight Struggle. May you not live in interesting times, he said, wistfully.

Men Behaving Badly - in Saudi Arabia, according to this Elaine Sciolino story in the International Herald-Tribune. The story would be more heartening - bored youth strain at the bonds of oppressive theocracy - if so many of the incidents Sciolino recounts didn't involve young men harrassing women. Not just "harrassing women" by an expansive spring-ovular-in-women's-studies definition either, but in a narrow, creepily-threatening or actually violent way. (Some of the stories also involve women flouting the rules Saudi society lays down for them, including - yuck! - "smoking water pipes filled with fruit-favored tobacco" at restaurants.)

The Saudi line has always been that its severe patriarchy was all about respect for and protection of women. Mrs. Offering and I actually knew someone who bought that - a roommate of Mrs. O's from her twenty-something days who converted to Islam and married a Saudi man she met at the Islamic Center in DC after a brief, Saudi-style courtship. The massive respect of Arabian society for women just thrilled her. (She never failed to enthuse about the "female-only" malls she'd heard about where women could shop without the danger and bother of having men around. Of course, she could have had that here. Just build a mall where the electronics store is on one side of the food court and the clothing stores and home furnishings places on the other.)

I don't believe the "respect for women" line for a minute. The point is, that's what the regime tells its subjects and, most likely, themselves. So rebellion against the values of the regime inevitably becomes bound up with bugging the hell out of chicks. Or, as a convert to a different religion once wrote: "Meet the new boss / the same as the old boss."

Mr. Offering, Your Petard Is Ready - Reader Ronald Carpio volunteers for the hopeless job of keeping Unqualified Offerings honest:

You have a point that encouraging an increasingly hostile Europe to arm itself may not be the smartest idea. But isn't the main reason why Europe has been relatively under-armed, the presence of massive US forces? You've advocated a neo-isolationist foreign policy before; if the US moves in that direction (which I think is pretty unlikely) and pulls its troops out of Europe, then they will have no choice but to massively upgrade their militaries. The way things are now, they can complain all they want, but that's all they can do...

This is a good damn question!

My instinct is that there's a difference here, but I'm not prepared to defend the point in detail yet. More later.

Snarf Alert - It's not just the book description of this Amazon.com entry, it's the reviews. The first one reads like the sort of e-mails people send the Tony Kornheiser radio show. (Via Andrew Sullivan's site.)

I've Got a Little List... - ...and Glenn Reynolds lengthens it. A Brit named Irwin Stelzer writes a column for the London Times about the contempt for Europe among Administration figures and neocon hangers-on at a dinner party Stelzer attended. While Stelzer notes that "The military weakness of Europe is only one factor that is causing the EU to be seen as irrelevant" by Americans in Stelzer's circle, it's the military weakness that Instapundit.com fixes on.

The European Union is a cheshire cat creature whose organizing principle goes by the trade name democratic socialism. In place of the grin, a pinched mouth. The disappearing body is, of course, the "democratic" part. You know what part persists. The EU elites express their dislike of the United States openly, and speak of becoming a counterweight to American power. To repeat, whatever one calls an American encouraging the EU to strengthen its military, "anti-idiot" it ain't. (And the Airstrip One boys think only Brits can't see where their own national interest lies.)

On the Other Hand - The same Mr. den Beste has a fine piece on one of the great scourges of recent history.

You May Not Be As Anti-Idiotarian As You Think If... I don't want to sound like I'm picking on Stephen den Beste specifically in the following item - both hawkish pundits and other warbloggers have have said similar things - but he has the virtue of being easiest to link:

Tom sends this link to a discussion on his own forum. In it, he himself points out that the US defense budget is 40% of the entire world's defense spending. He's horrified about that. So am I. But when Americans see that number, our reaction is that it is not that the US is spending too much, but rather that the Europeans are spending too little

...

The way to solve that is not to try to drag us down to your level, but for you to pull yourselves up to ours. Don't bitch to us because you are weak and ineffective. Get off your asses and start working.

For the last thirty years, the Europeans have been neglecting their militaries because they were certain that the US would pick up the slack for them. They didn't have to have strong armies and navies because they knew that if their interests were attacked that they would be defended by ours. There's long been an undercurrent of resentment here about that; we feel used.

Um. As many commentators have pointed out, European elites are increasingly hostile to the United States. Encouraging people who are increasingly hostile to us to build bigger armies is anti-idiotic how?

Everything Old Is New Again - People complained during the Cold War that the US preferred complaisant military dictators to less reliable democratic alternatives. Fortunately, whatever the merits of those arguments, those days are - excuse me. This just in:

As I circulated among the politicians and intellectuals of Islamabad earlier this month, Musharraf's fight with the militants was dismissed, despite the drama of the abduction of U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl. "The jihadis will get only a fraction of the election vote," was the obtuse but common refrain. Never mind that 100,000 unemployed Pakistani men, educated only in hatred and trained only for war, may pose a threat bigger than their slice of the electorate. The power struggle, as the politicians see it, is between them and Musharraf.

The general, it is widely reported, wants to graduate the return to democracy, extending his term as president for another three years, and establish a military-dominated national security council to oversee the civilians. History supports him: During a disastrous decade of failure, four successive civilian administrations failed to complete their terms amid worsening extremist violence and ever-more-spectacular displays of corruption. But the unchastened civilians are determined to block the constitutional changes Musharraf seeks. That means eroding Musharraf's still-high popularity among voters -- which means, in turn, that the general's new alliance with the United States may make a fat political target.

That's Jackson Diehl, a pretty reliable bellwether of establishment thinking, in today's Washington Post. My point is neither that Musharraf is especially execrable nor democracy in itself a panacea. The analytical parts of Diehl's column even have some value: to the extent that the Musharraf regime is identified with pro-US policies and that regime and civilian politicians are at odds, a struggle over transition to civilian rule will tend to put US interests in Pakistan at risk.

What disgusts me about Diehl's piece is, first, its blinkered contempt for these mere civilians shortsightedly insisting that a military dictator actually make good on his promise to quit the office he violently seized. They are so shortsighted that they seem more concerned with the political future of their own country than the undeserved fate of a single (courageous) American reporter. Second, his stunning take on recent Pakistani history: "successive civilian administrations failed to complete their terms amid worsening extremist violence and ever-more-spectacular displays of corruption," as if the Pakistani military and intelligence establishment never so much as lifted a finger to undermine civilian rule by, say, fomenting extremist violence.

In a lifetime of reading the papers, I've seen a bunch of military dictators come and go. To my recollection, every one of them averred that "Now is just not the right time" to leave office, every time they were asked. And there has always been someone like Jackson Diehl around to agree.

I Have Seen the Future And It Rocks - Sometime in late 2000, Mrs. Offering and I were sitting in the family office, discussing some song then current on country radio. She was sure she had heard another version before, and wondered who wrote it and who else had recorded it. We turned, literally, for no part of Unqualified Headquarters is large, most especially the office, to the PC and its always-on broadband connection. About two minutes of search-engine time later we had our answer. It's the kind of question that, in living memory, waited on trips to bookstores that may or may not have the right book on the reference shelf. I turned to Mrs. Offering and I said

"The 21st Century kicks ass!"

And it does, despite everything that has happened since. It kicks ass for reasons having nothing to do with the Civilizing Mission that the neocons believe will purge us of "decadence" and "frivolity" like, oh, having a conversation with your spouse about something that enriches both your lives and, at the moment when it will do the most good, enriching them further because a free, wealthy society makes knowledge easier than ever to come by. What I've learned since the massacres of last year and the war against our attackers and the attempts to mutate that war into a consuming and endless crusade is that we have to work to make sure the 21st century keeps kicking ass. The first step toward that is to insist on the goodness of the good.

Why do I bring this up? Because I just burned my first CD tonight, and it's so damn cool to be able to do that.

Your Regularly-Scheduled Weblog - In a transparent conspiracy to warm Unqualified Offerings' heart, Primo Ultimo Samizdatist Perry deHavilland actually noticed that there was no new material here two days in a row, and sent a kind enquiry. This site actually did worry that people would think it was Balloon Juice or Ain't No Bad Dude, taking entire weekends off, as that has never been the Offering Way. But it was one of those weekends. UO decided to bear down and complete the computer move, which was, as always, an odyssey of wonder and horror. As Robert E. Lee said, it is well that transferring stuff to new computers is so terrifying, or we should grow too fond of it.

Also, Unqualified Offerings does not know how to tell you this, but it has...other blogs. They don't mean what you mean to it, Loyal Reader, oh no, but they are, among other things, a good way to get familiar with Movable Type before converting this site over.

(Note: These blogs are related to various role-playing games that Unqualified Offerings plays, and enjoys, at its advanced age. If that sort of thing floats your boat, you can find sites for two Amber characters, Robin and Carton, and a site for a campaign I run using R. Sean Borgstrom's stunning Nobilis rules. The Robin site has a nice piece of image-editing: the "painting" there started life as a photograph. The Carton blog is in a stage of design that web developers call "fucked up in most browsers." The Nobilis blog is the one that, eventually, may come closest to being of interest to regular readers of this site.)

Music Notes - Having still not moved most of its applications from the old computer, Unqualified Offerings has used music, both streaming and downloaded, to remind itself what a pleasingly fast machine it now owns. To that end, UO has discovered a nice college radio station, KEXP, from Seattle.

Also, you can get two preview MP3s from the forthcoming Elvis Costello album, When I Was Cruel, from a major fan site. They are pretty legit, having been released through rollingstone.com. "45" is especially good, though I'll admit to a moderate preference for the early acoustic versions available on fan-produced bootlegs. I'm not completely sold on "Take Off Your Head (It's a Doll Revolution)" yet.

Update: KEXP is playing Robbie Fulks right now!

Disadvantage: Unqualified Offerings! - Andrew Hofer invents a new badge of shame in his "Rapid Droppings" sidebar and pins it on John Feinstein:

The first observation of Ad Axisem in the WSJ:John Feinstein - "Axel of Evil" ...

Yup. Fixed skating. That's a lot like sponsoring terrorism and developing "WMD's".

But Unqualified Offerings was there first!

Let This Cup Pass From My Lips - Andrew Sullivan writes today that

What that event did was end isolationism. What it proved is that a reluctance to get involved in the world wasn't merely a moral or strategic choice of whether to intervene in other countries - i.e. Bosnia, Haiti, Somalia, Rwanda. It was a matter of necessity to prevent an attack on America itself.

In the few years before the massacres of September 11, 2001, American neo-isolationists from Cato to Chronicles, and likely quite a number of pinkos too, argued that American foreign policy, especially in the Middle East, threatened to inspire massive terroristic violence against the United States. The least one can say is that massive terroristic violence against the United States by Middle Eastern terrorists doesn't falsify their claims.

Sullivan concludes that

the empire so feared by people like Gore Vidal is no longer a theory. It is a reality. This preponderance of real global power is literally unique in the history of the world. And the one thing holding it back - America's ambivalence and isolationism - is lying in the rubble of the World Trade Center. The further you get from America, the clearer this is. And we have only begun to think through the full consequences.

Now he tells us.

What a Relief - Unqualified Offerings worried when the fine Balloon Juice blog announced a redesign. (It used to use the same pleasing template as Jason Soon's excellent Catallaxy Files.) However, while this site retains its firm belief that three colors are enough for anyone, it has to appreciate that Balloon Juice has stuck with appropriately narrow, readable columns. Next up: Balloon Juice redesigns the Airstrip One site.

Triple-Axel of Evil - Hey, let's start saying that the figure-skating scandal could be the International Skating Weasels' Enron! They Say that even the referee alleged that the judges were up to funny stuff. The theory is that the French judge lined up with the, uh, Unified Team judges as part of a deal to get UT votes for a gold for a French ice dancing pair later.

Fitting punishment: Let it happen, but require the French to make a solemn public declaration that they take ice dancing seriously.

(In transition from old computer to new. New computer works - just haven't moved everything over yet. So posting pace remains light for the next few days.)

Tech Notes - Fast computers are really fast.

Ghetto Rising - Cutesy remarks below consigned the "science fiction ghetto" to the dustbin of history, and indeed, Unqualified Offerings believes that Tom Disch is largely right: sf now rules the culture. However, prejudice has persisted in dinosaur communities like independent literary bookstores and...the Motion Picture Academy. Seems that whenever I see a fantasy/sf pic bragging that it has been nominated for umpty-ump awards, or one them, it's all for technical awards like special effects, cinematography, best key grip, best fluffer etc. But Lord of the Rings has been nominated for some heavy-hitter awards too - Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor along with the usual cinematography, makeup, musical score, effects suspects.

Free at last, free at last and all that. (Be advised that the Academy Awards are still a racket and you still should not care.)

Split-Screen Republicanism Watch
We do the national greatness stuff abroad and the leave us alone stuff at home.
Andrew Sullivan

Many war-related bits in Best [Neocon-Approved Items] of the Web today. Almost no non-war-related items. Come to think of it, that's the case most days. Pretty soon we'll have to start calling it Picture-in-Picture Republicanism.

Those Who Do Not Learn From History Are Pretty Funny - PendingPundit (aka Air Force Virginia) sends the following report from the Huntington College region of Montgomery, Alabama.

Old Cloverdale is swarming with alterna-kids who are flirting with Marxism on an allowance. Anyway, while at a booth at one of our favorite local restaurant, we found ourselves unable to ignore the strident tones of the hipster at the booth behind ours; let's call him Boho Joe. After spouting a tedious laundry list of all of the BMWs, beach houses and boats that his dad had bought recently, Boho Joe decided to educate his two friends at the table about the Enron "scandal". After proclaiming that 218 members of Congress had accepted contributions of $10K or more from Enron, he announced, and this is a direct quote, "Enron is going to be the Republican's Watergate!"

Au Revoir - A wonderful thing happened this weekend at Unqualified Headquarters - Offering Boy's computer died. It was a hand-me-down from Mommy and Daddy and has commenced the most godawful grinding sound when attempting a POST. (That's Power On Self Test for you post-blog-era babies.) Offering Boy has lots of educational software and really does benefit by having a machine. More importantly, Mr. and Mrs. Offering benefit by not having to share their computer with him.

But it would be overindulgent to buy a brand new computer for a five-year old, wouldn't it.

Hence, UO prepares to sign off so it can set up its new 1.7G P4, with 256MB of Rambus memory, a 40GB hard drive, GeForce2 video card and, oh yes, a 24x10x40 CD-RW. I sense a new entry in the Joys of Capitalism series coming soon. (Unqualified Offerings reluctantly decided that the vile licensing of Windows XP was a lesser evil than the instability of the aging kernel in Windows 98. Ask it again if its mp3's start disappearing.) This site will return once the new machine can reach the net.

Unqualified Offerings - Weekly Standard Parody Edition - Got a nice note from Gary Farber of the Amygdala blog. Having kind words from him and Patrick Nielsen Hayden too makes me feel that I've finally broken out of the libertarian ghetto and into the science fiction ghetto. (Anyone else old enough to remember when there was a science fiction ghetto?) Gary makes an extremely relevant correction to the historical record that Thomas Nephew, Charles Johnson and I managed to mangle. (Note: It is not my intention to spite either Newsrack [Nephew] or Little Green Footballs [Johnson] for links. From Farber's item you can find all relevant documents.) Gary's piece also has several good links to articles on settlements and the "peace" "process" from - gasp! - non-blog sites. You won't get anything like that here tonight!

I got Movable Type successfully installed last week and have started a couple of blogs focused on role-playing game campaigns I am in, partly to get a feel for the program. When I feel good and ready, I'll start the (gasp) conversion.

The bad timing award for the month goes to blog addict Justin Raimondo, who referred to "Reason – which is, itself, formerly a libertarian magazine, and is now just another magazine," and has previously written that Reason now stands for the principle that empire is okay so long as we all have drugs. As he was writing these things, the March issue, with a fiercely anti-interventionist cartoon by Peter Bagge and an article about the difference between prudence and hysteria by Jesse Walker, was in the mail. (I'm leaving aside his ill-mannered and, to my mind, off-base comments about Virginia Postrel and Andrew Hofer because I try to leave aside everyone's ill-mannered comments, with the exception of my own. But Justin is not going to wrest this site's "Dove of the Year" award from Alan Bock like that...)

Now speaking of Andrew Hofer and game theory, I've been thinking of other possible instances of his "threat power" thesis. Many bloggers have cited the following report since December:

In a speech to mark Iran's "Jerusalem Day" on December 14, former President Hashemi Rafsanjani said the establishment of Israel was "the most hideous historic occurrence in history," and the Islamic world "will vomit her out from its midst," according to Peres's letter.

Rafsanjani told a crowd at the stadium in Teheran University that the day is approaching in which the Islamic world will possess atomic weapons.

"On that day, the strategy of the West will hit a dead end, since a single atomic bomb has the power to completely destroy Israel, while an Israeli counterstrike can only cause partial damage to the Islamic world," he said.

Now there are a number of ways of looking at this nasty little utterance. One popular one is to take it straight, as Andrew Sullivan does. My own reaction was that it was the gasbagging of an out-of-work pol, likely having more to do with scoring rhetorical points in some domestic political contest than any imminent operation. But it could be an application of game theory, with at least part of the Iranian government trying to maximize their threat power. The attempt may well come back and bite them in the ass. Dangerous stuff, game theory.

Split-Screen Republicanism Watch
We do the national greatness stuff abroad and the leave us alone stuff at home.
Andrew Sullivan

On February 8, President Bush told the Cattle Industry Convention and Trade Show he wants Congress to pass a $73.5 billion farm bill. (Link via A Coyote at the Dog Show.)

Healthwatch - National Review Online runs an article by Kathryn Jean Lopez warning that condoms are less than perfectly reliable at stopping the transmission of STDs. On the basis of these findings, an unsigned NRO companion piece urges the nation's young people, in the strongest possible terms, to "restrict their sexual activity to rim jobs and tit fucking."

Ragged Old Flag - Unqualified Offerings watched the Opening Ceremonies, probably the only part of the Olympics that it will watch. I wanted to see the WTC flag. It and the Star-Spangled Banner rendition were very moving, and it was nice that the announcers were mostly able to shut up for the duration. I had apparently misunderstood though - I thought that the US Olympic team was going to carry the WTC flag in the parade. That would have been better, the difference between "bloody but unbowed" and just bloody. I love my country a lot more than I love my flag, but flags have their uses; chief among them is use itself. Those firemen at the awful scene knew that the most important need touching that flag was to put it to work. Immediately.

One of the things I've done since September 11 is reconsider the national anthem itself. It is a greater work than I appreciated. Note that Key does not glory that the flag in Baltimore Harbor has been preserved for special occasions. He exults in the fact that it "yet waves."

Now That You Mention It - Andrew Sullivan can no more drop the Paul Krugman story than Democrats can lay off the Enron. Today he thunders,

The point is and was that Krugman sees and saw nothing wrong with feeding at the corporate trough for doing next to nothing.

This sounds very much like my vision of the ideal job. I only regret the impracticality of putting "feed at the corporate trough for doing next to nothing" on the Objective line of my resume.

I could get a lot of weblogging done with a job like that.

Poppy's Way - Sometimes I have a hard time staying awake through David Ignatius' columns, but his latest has some interesting ideas about dealing with "the Axis of Evil." He does a useful compare and contrast with Bush's anti-Mullah rhetoric when discussing Iran and Reagan's "evil empire" speech at the beginning of the end of the Cold War. First he discusses the impact of Reagan's coinage within the USSR itself:

[Ignatius's Russian host] turned to me, an American visitor, and said something I have never forgotten: "How can it be," he wondered, "that the United States has elected a president who dares to tell the truth about the Soviet Union? We thought that America, with all its money, had become decadent. But now you have called us by our true name."

I never looked at Reagan in quite the same way after that. In the very naivete of his comment, he had broken through a barrier. He had given ordinary Russians and East Europeans hope that communism would not be a permanent condition. The "Evil Empire" was gone within less than a decade.

Ignatius notes that people within and outside the Bush Administration believe that the Islamic Republic of Iran finds itself in a similarly pre-revolutionary state, with some evidence, and writes:

The Bush argument is that it makes no more sense to ally with a halfway reformer such as Iranian President Mohammed Khatami than it would have to embrace Yuri Andropov when Soviet reform efforts were beginning in the early 1980s. Better to encourage the true revolutionaries.

The practical problem with this argument is that it's dangerous -- both for the Iranian revolutionaries and for the United States. What coaxed Soviet communism toward its eventual collapse was a combination of carrots and sticks. The United States nurtured Soviet dissidents in part by keeping the doors open. Even Reagan continued to do business with the Communists in Moscow -- discussing a sweeping arms-control agreement at Reykjavik, Iceland.

I think the most effective lesson for managing the collapse of the Iranian mullahs comes one administration further along, Dubya's Dad's. I had no use for the man at the time, I was pleased to vote against him twice and would cheerfully have kept doing so. Once on 17th Street NW, I threw his motorcade the finger on my way to work - it was around the time James Baker's post-Tienanmen trip to Beijing first made the news. And Bush drove all of us loyal New Republic readers nuts during 1989 by utterly failing to rise to the rhetorical occasion of all the ferment in the Warsaw Pact. Half Europe demanded freedom, the Soviets stood revealed as exhausted and unwanted colonialists, and tongue-tied Poppy spoke barely a word of encouragement. He treated Gorbachev as if he mattered and the Soviet Union as if it were a going concern. He could not have seemed more out of touch.

He knew exactly what he was doing.

What he was doing (with John Major's help) was making artfully sure that Soviet reactionaries had nothing resembling an excuse to claim "Western interference" and that Soviet moderates had no reason to fear it. All the while allowing events to spin out of Russia's control. As bitter leftist Elvis Costello recognized in the aftermath of the Soviet breakup, "It wasn't an accident it wasn't a mystery / it was calculated and the rest is history." Except Costello made it sound like it was a bad thing.

Dubya has been careful to avoid his father's mistakes. "I will avoid my father's mistakes" might be practically the whole of his program. But when your dad gets it right, your dad gets it right. Iran has ripened into pre-revolutionary ferment with no substantial US covert or overt effort. The average Iranian, not having seen an American diplomat, soldier or spy for two decades must think that Mullahs ranting on about the Great Satan are, like, so twenty minutes ago. There is nothing remotely resembling a pretext for Iranian reactionaries to blame the country's troubles on the United States. That's a weapon I'm loath to give up.

Booknotes: Ignatius's first and least tedious novel, Agent of Innocence, is damned near indispensible to understanding the present moment. And hey, I hear Warrior Politics is out of stock anyway. So you need something else to read.

What's In a War - Good Michael Kinsley column today in which, among other things, he provides a useful working definition of what remains a slippery term:

As this column and other nit-pickers have noted before, terrorism is a squishy concept. But if the word means anything at all, it embodies the concept that even in war, the end can't justify the means. Terrorism is something or other that is bad even when used by the good guys in a good cause. It is a tactic or weapon that is inherently immoral.

Kinsley also tackles the "mission creep" problem.

Wilderness of Mirrors - The Matt Welch Region - Matt Welch proves he is no slouch at either conspiratorial speculation or segues in this item.

Gamesmanship - Andrew Hofer has a useful piece on More Than Zero today about the difference between using an analytical tool and making a moral judgment, partly in response to Justin Raimondo, and partly in response to Thomas Nephew, from whom one just can not escape these days. I still think there is a large factual question at stake. Hofer's analysis of the State of the Union address seems to rest on the assumption that Bush's rhetoric is meant to have a deterrent effect by threatening to widen the war. The neocon crowd believes that Bush's rhetoric heralds widening the war in fact. Both sides can't be right.

Divine Wind and Divine Afflatus - Richard Cohen's piece about suicide bombers and the Japanese kamikaze program has drawn a lot of praise. The part about the kamikaze is problematic:

These kamikaze attacks were both effective and terrifying, but they were also a clear sign that Japan had gone nuts.

The kamikaze attacks were an important element in the dehumanizing of Japan. They encouraged, maybe the right word is "permitted," the use of the atomic bomb. After all, the enemy was not rational. It was barbaric. It would never surrender. It would fight to the last square inch. Better to incinerate them all.

Unqualified Offerings commends to Richard Cohen's attention Gerhard Weinberg's m-word* history of World War II, A World at Arms. Weinberg's book militantly avoids apologetics for the conduct of the Axis Powers. (Warbloggers will also enjoy his treatment of the French.) For instance, Andy Kashdan might profit by Weinberg's discussion of the decision to drop the atomic bomb. But he takes pains to point out the rationality and military effectiveness of the kamikaze program.

The Japanese reached the point where they lost pilots more quickly than they could train even minimally competent replacements. What's more, American anti-aircraft measures had become so effective that the likelihood of a Japanese pilot dying on his first mission approached certainty. In other words, any mission became a suicide mission. Turning the planes themselves into bombs was a way of making them effective suicide missions. And I believe they were able to make suicide planes more quickly and cheaply too.

Now you can say that the Japanese should have known the war was lost by then, and surrendered rather than take that fearsome step. Hell, argue that they shouldn't have started it in the first place and I'll agree with you. So will Weinberg. But every country has its "If we're in it, we've got to win it" McCains to bear. The Japanese could hope that a stiff enough defense might convince the US to drop the demand for "unconditional surrender." It didn't work, but it might have.

You can argue that the government was ruthless to foster a dynamic in which young men volunteered to fly to their deaths, and that the young men themselves were crazed. The first part is true enough, but States have historically found insanity at least as useful as sanity in wartime. The second may be true. But military life through peace and war is a continuum of risk that starts at "someone could get hurt doing that" and does not stop short of the knowing walk to your own death. The deliberate decision to "take a few of them with me" leads to posthumous medals in this country too. Read the encounters between Young Jim and the kamikaze pilot in JG Ballard's great Empire of the Sun. Then lend your copy to Richard Cohen.

I hate Palestinian suicide bombers not because they make war, or because they sacrifice themselves in the process, but because they make squalid war, a war on dance clubs, pizza parlors, bus stops. On the people in them, that is. It's not as if the West Bank and Israel lack for military targets, but the suicide bombers are having none of it.

Nephew Notes - Over on Little Green Footballs, a discussion broke out about Thomas Nephew's piece on settlements and suicide bombers.The Newsracker smuggled my name into the discussion. What I can't help noticing is that his essential points went essentially unaddressed. At least not directly. Proprietor Charles Johnson writes

Most observers believe that the deal Barak offered Arafat at Camp David was, by far, the most generous deal the Palestinians are ever going to get; basically it gave them everything they wanted, except the "right of return" -- and Israel will never compromise on that.

Let's say that "most observers" are right, and not just most observers at Commentary either - that the Barak Plan really was the most generous deal the Palestinians are ever going to get. That doesn't make it generous as such. A "most generous" deal the Palestinians could ever hope for that includes perpetual Jewish settlements under Israeli jurisdiction, crisscrossed by roads which Arabs are forbidden to even use, among other impingements on sovereignty, hardly counts as everything the Palestinians wanted. The settlements constitute a principle of "the right of return for me, but not for thee." Unaddressed in the LGF discussion was Thomas Nephew's point that, since Oslo, the Israelis haven't just insisted on maintaining existing settlements - they built 20,000 more housing units. And who was in charge of that program? Why, for much of the time it was Housing Minister Ariel Sharon!

But it gets worse. Because here's another thing "most observers" believed and stated at the time: Barak could not have sold his plan to the Israeli parliament and electorate if Arafat had accepted it unmodified. The very authorities the hawkish bloggers revere, the Krauthammers and Pipeses and Kellys, excoriated Barak for offering as much as he did, and so did the Israeli right. People argue - actually, Unqualified Offerings is one of them - that Arafat should have made a counter-offer. But when we do that, we are saying he should have pushed Barak for more when Barak had already promised more than he could deliver.

I agree with TN: I don't think a Palestinian Charles Johnson or Stephen Den Beste would stand it for one second. I still blame the Palestinian leadership for the utterly self-destructive way they have pursued their conflict with Israel. There may not be a more murderously dysfunctional polity in the last half century. But while they may be their own worst enemies, they are not their only enemies.

Consider the Source - Everyone is dumping on Teddy Kennedy for this Super Bowl-related statement:

At a time when our entire country is banding together and facing down individualism, the Patriots set a wonderful example, showing us all what is possible when we work together, believe in each other, and sacrifice for the greater good.

Really, people should not be so quick to sneer. Teddy Kennedy has a lot of personal experience with "face-down individualism" after all. Also, sometimes even in the congressional record, typos and editing errors bedevil understanding. We know that the Kennedys have the common touch, that their struggles are our struggles, their dreams our dreams, their nightmares surely our own. I believe the Senator may believe that in those nightmares the entire country has to face drowned individuals.

Libertarianism and my Sister, The Continuing Series - Eve Tushnet wrote a long, thoughtful e-mail about "The Citizen or the Police" that raised some points worth expanding on. (Charles Dodgson has a rebuke to the same piece on his site, and he seems quite proud of it, but Eve was ahead of him in line, so it has to wait for another day.) I initially thought that Eve would put a public version of her response on her site and I would work from that, but instead this will be a "reader mail" piece.

Minor matter: Eve seized on a loophole that specifically related to my discussion of abortion. I closed that loophole here.

Her main argument, elaborated in telling detail, runs as follows:

First, I think the "what if it were my sister?" thought experiment is a great starting point to get people to question and re-evaluate the power of the state. It also appeals very strongly to my belief in family loyalty.

But it can't be more than a starting point, for two reasons. First, it relies on intuitions alone, and everybody's intuitions on this subject will differ. For example, I know people whom I _definitely_ wouldn't trust to turn in their sisters for theft, fraud, perjury, or, in some cases, anything short of child abuse. On the other hand, I _really really would_ want the abortionist who profited from my sister's (hypothetical) desperation to end up in jail. And I know lots of people would, despite their sorrow and compassion, really want their sister in jail for killing their unborn niece or nephew. There has to be some way of determining whose intuitions are right.

Second, intuitions are shaped to at least some extent by our culture and our moral beliefs, so political theory has to address what our intuitions _should_ be.

First, I agree that "What if my sister" is a starting point rather than an ending point. I consider that a feature, not a bug. I agree that people's intuitions on the matter will differ, and that there are people for whom blood ties utterly trump anything approaching ethics. This is a self-limiting problem so long as the first principle is followed. ("What if it were my sister?") Note that I am not an anarcho-capitalist and that the point of my original piece was not that compliance with all laws should be voluntary. People who would not agree their sisters should be punished for theft, fraud and perjury do not support laws punishing others for theft, fraud and perjury. If society has a preponderance of such people, it gets the fate it deserves - it collapses. Otherwise, the society has a preponderance of people who do accept that those are such bad things that even those near and dear to them should be accountable for violating those laws.

I get the impression that there are libertarians who desire to do away with politics altogether - put it this way: they write as if one could make politics go away. I don't think one can. Abortion is a perfect example of an issue that would vex even the night watchman state. Because the question of the personhood of a fetus is a moral question, not a political one. If the fetus is a person, or should be treated as one, then the state must defend its life from its mother even as the state must defend the born child's life from its mother or father. If the fetus is not a person, and must not be treated as one, then the state must not. Under the "my sister" principle, if you take the personhood of the fetus so strongly that you would

• jail your sister for having an abortion,
  
• jail your sister for performing an abortion,
  
• forcibly restrain your sister from obtaining an abortion, or
  
• forcibly restrain your sister from performing an abortion
  

then you should support laws criminalizing abortion. I wouldn't and I don't. I understand why others would. Dan Quayle flunked this test, so I can't take his moral standing seriously.

Naturally, if you think the state should destroy your sister's company for providing a free web browser with its software, and you are okay with the state whoring for other people's sisters' companies in the process, you should support antitrust laws too.

Elaborating on her second point, Eve continues

(...you can't shape people's intuitions to be perfect, of course--but we do need a standard of what it would mean to improve our intuitions.) It seems to me that what abortion is should be more important in shaping those intuitions than what we feel about it today. (Imagine asking a Roman Senator whether he thought his sister Messalina should be jailed for exposing their crippled son; or asking John Calhoun if his brother should be jailed for whipping a slave.)

More on this tomorrow, but the first thing to say is that it is an abomination to feel your brother should be allowed to whip a slave or even own one, but a worse one to feel that only your brother should be allowed to whip and own slaves.

Toward a Post-Blogger World - Unqualified Offerings has a working installation of Movable Type on its server, thanks to the timely help of Michael Croft and the support forum at movabletype.org. There's work to be done before converting the main site here to MT and off Blogger, particularly when it comes to the site template and importing the old entries. On the site template, Unqualified Offerings requires only that the site a) have narrow columns, b) be devoid of visual interest and c) be light green. Like now. On importing entries, and typing new ones, Ginger Stampley warns that

MT will barf on any entry where the 20th word is in, but doesn't close out, an HTML tag (e.g., a link, a quote, etc.). The import doesn't have a validator, but you can't tell.

You will get an error somewhere, normally when you generate the Categories pages, when you attempt to rebuild with an entry that meets this criterion. Use the excerpt tag to create a short excerpt to avoid this problem.

I'm not going with Blogger Pro because it still represents a single-point-of-failure outside my control (Pyra), and the price structure would have me paying about $6 extra per month at the rate I post. Blogger the phenomenon and Pyra the company remain a great force for good.

Movin' on Up - The Good News: I have an office for the first time, not a cube. The Bad News: a) They're not paying me anything more; b) When we consolidate floors I'll almost certainly lose it; c) I'm still in it! (But going home, finally.)

Geek Alert - For those who understand the true meaning of SOTU, Patrick Nielsen Hayden alerts the world to a cool link of whom all other cool links are but shadows.

Joys of Capitalism - All last week, ESPNRadio's Mike and Mike in the morning show broadcast from New Orleans, and for the last few days their guest was legendary chef Paul Prudhomme. On the last day, he spoke of starting out as a line cook, in what were apparenly expensive restaurants, in a moving way. I have to paraphrase:

When I was a line cook, I used to really concentrate on my work. I would tell myself, 'maybe this is for somebody's birthday, or anniversary. Maybe this is the only time they'll ever be able to afford to eat here,' and I would want the meal to be memorable for them. Coworkers would have to poke me if they wanted to snap me out of it.

The reminiscence doesn't just speak well of Prudhomme's decency, or his ability to "motivate himself." It speaks well of his understanding. There are people for whom fancy restaurants are a fact of their daily existence. There are others for whom they are yearly or even unique occasions, who saved their sheckels or shot the moon. Their meals have the tang of satisfaction (I earned it) or a nagging fiscal dread (I can't afford this).

We hear that things like Super Bowl attendance are "for the rich," and relatively few people could attend one on a whim. But if it's the most important thing in your life, you can save, or borrow, or cultivate connections. I could have gotten to one Super Bowl by now, if it were that important to me, and I've never been close to rich. The Hawaiian Honeymoon, the late-model pony car, dinner at the Palm. How badly do you want them? Capitalism constantly asks not just "What will you do?" but "What will you do instead of all the other things you could be doing?" In the wrong mood, one finds it not just an intimidating question but a damned nosey one. All costs are opportunity costs. Marxism probable had the appeal it did (and does), because it promised an end of questioning. Make bread in the morning, steel beams in the afternoon and go fishing in the evening, or whatever it was. Even "actually existing socialism" as it developed could silence The Question: by producing less bounty, it required one to forego fewer things.

Speaking of Football Trends - The AFC is on a minor Super Bowl hot streak, having won 4 of the last 5 Super Bowls. Three different teams collected those four trophies too. Back in the days of the famous NFC streak, suffering AFC fans spent a lot of time trying to explain or explain away their conference dropping 13 Super Bowls in a row. Was it simply 13 heads in a row on a coin, something the statisticians warn you can happen? Was it a coincidence that a handful of dynasties (Redskins, Cowboys, Giants, Niners) arose in quick succession in a single conference? Were NFC teams (gulp) really better, the way their fans and radio idiots claimed?

Around about year 13, I decided the streak was a phenomenon of path dependence. Even taking into account the handful of games that could have gone either way, 13 in a row is a trend. But the "superior conference" explanation didn't hold up either. During the streak there were years in which the NFC had an edge in the interconference record, years in which the AFC had the edge, and years of relative equality. (Each team plays four games a year against teams from the other conference. Tote up those wins and losses by conference and you can declare one "stronger" than the other, or both about equal.) But if you start with a working assumption that the best team in the league wins the Super Bowl, and that to be the best you have to beat the best, implications arise. NFC Team A beats AFC Team X this year's Super Bowl, so it's the best team in the league. Who will represent the NFC in next year's Super Bowl? Either Team A or a team that can beat Team A. Who will represent the AFC? Either Team X (best in conference) or a team that can beat Team X. But our simplifying assumption was that Team A is better than Team X, because it won. So being able to claw your way past Team X does not imply that you are necessarily up to the challenge of Team A-level football. Either being Team A or beating Team A does. Once you have a champion come out of a conference, you have a competitive bunch of coaches and general managers spending thirteen hours a day figuring out how to get past the champion. Meanwhile, in the other conference, the staff has to spend all that time figuring out how to get past the team that lost anyway.

At this point, the site's younger readers must feel like Steven den Beste reading Justin Raimondo. This man is making no sense! they cry. You're lucky if you even make the playoffs the year after you win the Super Bowl.

Yes, children, that is true - these days. But it was not always so. Only since the salary cap came do teams auto-destruct with the regularity we grown used to. (Yes, free agency plays a role, but the salary cap has much more impact on team stability than free agency alone would.) It used to be you had to actually become good enough to take advantage of your rival's slight decline.It was Jack London's NFL then. Also, nobody rode Segways. But then, nobody rides them now either.

The thing about the path dependence theory is that it implies that once a team from the out conference finally breaks through, it should become the foundation for a new streak. Now path dependence favors the former outs. That sort of looks like it may be happening, with the AFC's 4-1 run the last five years. You would think the effects of path dependence would decline in an era that rapidly churns champions, though.

Two Is a Trend? - They say that defense wins championships and, until very recently, they have been wrong, at least when it comes to the NFL. Go back a couple of years:

2000 Saint Louis Rams
1998-1999 Denver Broncos
1997 Green Bay Packers
1996 Dallas Cowboys
1995 San Francisco 49ers
1993-1994 Dallas Cowboys
1992 Washington Redskins
1991 New York Giants

Let's redo the preceding as a list of quarterbacks:

2000 Kurt Warner
1998-1999 John Elway
1997 Brett Favre
1996 Troy Aikman
1995 Steve Young
1993-1994 Troy Aikman
1992 Mark Rypien
1991 Jeff Hostetler

The trend is pretty clear: Great offense and a top-notch quarterback plus a solid but not necessarily spectacular defense wins championships. You have to go back to 1991 to find a real defense-wins-championships Super Bowl outcome, and really, back to 1991 to find a so-so guarterback winning. (Don't tell me about Mark Rypien. For that one year, he walked on air.) "They say" a lot of nonsense mostly. Even when you go back far enough to take in the 1985 Bears and the 1970s Steelers, teams noted primarily for their defense make up a minority of NFL champions.

Until the 21st Century.

The 2001 champs, the Baltimore Corporate Welfare Queens, had a murderous (as it were) defense and a simply competent offense. They actually won the Super Bowl the way idiots on the radio spend all season telling you how Super Bowls are won, right up until the time some marquee passer slaloms his finely-tuned scoring engine past the other contenders. I thought it was a fluke. I thought God wanted to humble Unqualified Offerings by showing it that Statism Pays if He wants it to. And Unqualified Offerings didn't even exist yet!

You get into teleological problems anyway trying to say "offense won" this game or "defense won" that game. Both teams put both kinds of units on the field. Take Super Bowl 34 - ahem, Super Bowl XXXIV: St. Louis 23, Tennessee 16. It was the lowest combined points total for a Super Bowl in five years, and the lowest winning score in nine. Did "defense win" that game, because the score was low, and because the final play was the famous tackle-on-the-one? Or did offense lose the game because Tennessee just didn't have enough pop to put the ball across the goal line when it needed to? Or did offense win the game because you can keep a great offense like the Rams down for awhile, but sooner or later they will have their moments (as they did last night). The winning score was along touchdown pass, hardly what one thinks of when imagining ways in which "defense wins championships."

Even I would say that defense won the championship in last night's Super Bowl.

That's two in a row. Accident? Coincidence? Conspiracy? Too soon to tell, of course!

You've Got Mail - Virginia Warren (aka "Air Force Virginia") writes, anent "The Citizen or the Police,"

If people want to live under a know-it-all authoritarian regime their whole lives, why don't they just live with their parents? At least your parents love you; the State can't.

She has some other interesting remarks to be incorporated into the too-long promised follow-up to the original piece.

Jeremy Lott writes to point out his new Reason article with a paradoxical sub-hed: "Burning Sensations: How would-be censors promote free speech." Check it out.

"Damaged Justice" writes to admit that Netscape is evil, evil, but also to put in a good word for Mozilla:

The upshot? Netscape will continue to suck -- it'll just crash less. If you want a *real* alternative, give the latest Mozilla milestone a go. I still keep IE around for emergencies, but they're few and far between.

Damaged Justice is (not so) secretly also named Ian Rowan, and he has a weblog named "Music for Misanthropes."

And Ginger Stampley writes to point out that one of Gene Wolfe's publishers has happened upon, and praised, Unqualified Offerings' standard "The Vodalus Approach" (link at left in the "best of..." section) in his fine weblog, Electrolyte. How cool is that? The author also praises Ginger's blog, as well he should.

Another Way Of Looking At It - Virginia Postrel and Andrew Hofer think Bush's State of the Union address makes strategic sense because it amplifies our threat power. I wish I could convince myself that they were right, but you can read Andrew's argument and Virginia's commentary on it and decide for yourself.

Halftime - First crucial test passed: No lip-synching, no instrument-miming. Huzzah. Unqualified Offerings is a softie and teared up during "Where the Streets Have No Name," as the long list of the dead scrolled past. But it might have been less ambivalently moved if a) Bono had mugged less; and b) he looked less like Bill Maher wearing ski goggles.

The Dog Ate My Eerie Prescience - Unqualified Offerings' prediction that New England would upset Saint Louis was, um, eaten by Blogger! That's it! Would a site that constantly refers to itself in the third person lie to you?

An Actually Super Bowl - Wow. That was a game. And everyone's been too polite to mention that there were two seconds left on the clock after Vinatieri's field goal.

Interesting synchronicity: For years the conventional wisdom was that the only reason to watch the Super Bowl is for the ads. Now a year in which the ads were nothing special, but the game is.

Actually, three of the last five Super Bowls have come down to the final drive, and the two before that - Green Bay-New England and Pittsburgh-Dallas - were competitive going into the fourth quarter. So as the NFL regular season gets worse, the postseason gets better.

Pick-a-Header Dept. This can go under "The Media Really Does Suck" or "Split-Screen Republicanism Watch" as suits you. Apparently the Bush budget proposal will include at least some cuts in discretionary domestic spending. The Washington Post news headline? "Bush Budget About to Show Its Darker Side." I can't help but think that if you got the editors in a room and tried to explain how biased the wording was, they'd profess themselves completely unable to see it that way. More loaded language, from the article itself:

This [highway program] budget mechanism, called the Revenue Aligned Budget Authority (RABA) formula, works well in an expanding economy but results in a large cut when the economy slows.

So if spending drops, it means the formula doesn't "work well?" O you Keynesians, you will say you want to "prime the pump" in slack times. But tell me that, if the formula were structured so that spending declines in expanding economies the Post wouldn't be telling us that it "works well in a recession but results in a large cut during boom times." Now tell me with a straight face.

The U.S. Conference of Mayors wrote the White House and Labor Secretary Elaine L. Chao last week protesting a proposal to eviscerate spending for a youth job training program, from $225 million this year to $45 million next year.

There's a great newspaper-of-record type word: eviscerate!

Now then, we do the media really does suck stuff at the beginning and the split-screen Republicanism watch stuff at the end. According to the article, the budget will be two treeel-lion dollars big. Doctor Evil doesn't have a pinky adequate to the task of saying that number aloud.

Administration officials have said that government spending other than for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid is expected to grow by 9 percent next year, compared with the 4 percent growth this year. But when defense, homeland security and the economic stimulus are set aside, the spending increase drops to 3 percent, or barely more than the rate of inflation.

Which means that even when you set aside even the flimsiest excuses for spending increase (economic stimulus) and continue to treat 1930s-era programs like Delhi cattle, when you set aside all parts of the budget deemed untouchable, spending on the supposedly touchable parts of the budget still goes up. Before negotiations, compromoises, compromises, continuing resolutions and so-called emergency bills.

Whee.

What He Said - Maybe someone would listen to blood'n'guts Pournelle, if no one else?

I fear the new war. It is well intentioned, but there is no way out as we are conducting it. Our goals are not to make ourselves feared, or be left alone, but to put the world right. We can't do that, but we have enough power to try.

Let me say it again: our goal ought to be to make certain that the ruling class in every nation understands that it is very much to their interest to avoid having their territories used as places to conspire against the United States, to launch attacks on the United States, or even to learn how to attack the United States.

There are regimes which have already violated this rule. They should be brought down, in blood, with their rulers hounded off the face of the earth. I'll go further and say that we ought to establish monuments, visible monuments, in their capitals as reminders. Then we come home.

We aren't good at running the world. The Brits were at one time but they have lost heart. They don't have any ruling class to export. There's no one capable of putting the world right. What we can do is be ourselves.

"We are the friends of liberty everywhere, but we are the guardians only of our own." Guarding our own can require overseas interventions. It shouldn't require an empire.

You Run Along Now - Emmanuel Goldstein has got himself a nice weblog, Airstrip One, which I check several times a day. And he was doing so well about staying out of the Guantanamo Bay discussion there for awhile, on the British-nationalist grounds that it's an American issue, not a British one. But then he weakened:

Now I'm not a fan of the liberal media (and I don't think the bay of brigs is a Limey's business) but they need to be defended. Let's be clear here, Guatanamo Bay raises a lot of questions. To me the legal innovation of "unlawful combatants" is a worrying development (see Alan Bock for a more detailed exposition of the doubts on this front). To others the conditions of the American penal system seem somewhat horrific.

I actually thought that was one of Alan Bock's weaker columns, and there aren't many bigger Alan Bock fans than me. So, as EG would say, Let's Be Clear Here:

• Mazar-e-Sharif
  
• The hospital revolt
  
• At least two uprisings in Pakistani prison camps
  

That's a trend. And the trend is, We'll kill you if we get even a moment's opportunity to do so. This is way past Hogan's Heroes.

And in the name of all that's decent, man, do something about those column widths on your site finally, would you?

Split-Screen Republicanism Watch

We do the national greatness stuff abroad and the leave us alone stuff at home.
Andrew Sullivan

Charles Dodgson picks up on a WaPo article about what Charles calls "The Safe and Pleasant World of Tomorrow." Says the Post:

Federal aviation authorities and technology companies will soon begin testing a vast air security screening system designed to instantly pull together every passenger's travel history and living arrangements, plus a wealth of other personal and demographic information.

Says Charles - well, Charles says several things, all quotable, but let the conclusion suffice until you read his piece yourself:

Rights concerns are minimal, of course, since no one is obligated to use the system. If you don't want your living arrangements, travel history and demographic data to be collated and spit out on demand, just stay in your room and never go anywhere.

Unqualified Offerings knew there was a reason it bought off Charles' blogspot banner the other week.

Speaking Truth to, Well, Not Power Exactly - Thomas Nephew has an important item about suicide bombers (bad) and settlements (also bad). After noting that, since Oslo, Israel has built 20,000 housing units for settlers in the occupied territories, he concludes

I don't for a second hold with suicide bombings of civilian targets. That, more than anything else, is why I have been closing my eyes to the settlements issue; the people who do such things are not seeking real negotiations, in my view. If Israel dismantled every settlement and retreated to pre-1967 borders, such people would continue their war; to them, Israel itself is the provocation, not the settlements. Such people must be defeated no matter what; at the end of the day, Israel's right to defend its citizens against such criminality is paramount and undeniable, by any means necessary.

But in the long run, and in fact even in the middle and short run, Israel's right to occupy Palestinian(/Jordanian) land and provoke, humiliate, and sometimes abuse its inhabitants is not paramount and is eminently deniable**. I should think even the most fiery "warbloggers" over here (in fact, especially the most fiery ones) might well find themselves ardent Palestinian nationalists if they were to walk a mile in Palestinian shoes, and would find themselves sorely tempted to split hairs, set aside scruples, and lie, cheat, steal and kill generally in the fight against their enemies.

Mr. Newsrack agrees, as do I, that the Palestinians should not have rejected the Barak plan out of hand, though he does not note that the Barak Plan as written not only left the settlements intact but also gave Israel exclusive control and even use of a network of roads connecting the settlements and criscrossing "Palestine," meaning that Barak offered the Palestinians a state of rags and tatters.

Old Media Odyssey - This is hardly the first capital and credit crunch the American economy has suffered. Heck, even in the go-go eighties, truly visionary entrepreneurs had trouble getting funded. I remember when my buddy Doug and I quit our bookstore jobs to publish a line of art-books-on-cassette. "Listen to a Great Artist on Your Next Trip" was our can't-miss slogan. Plus, we pointed out, think of the production savings! You don't have to pay for all those expensive reproduction plates.

But even then old media had trouble seeing the value of new media.

So I turned my attentions to the then-scalding magazine field. My first idea was a subject that touches everyone, in at least a minor way, every day. But the powers that be were cool to the prospects for UPCWorld: The Magazine of Universal Product Codes. Their excuse was that all the action was in the so-called vertical markets, highly-specialized magazines that enabled advertisers to saturate a particular target audience.

Hence my proposal for Black Beekeeper, which would guarantee that every pair of african-american beekeeping eyeballs in the United States saw your ad. I still think it could have been huge. In its field, I mean.

Thank heavens I have the internet now.

Marketing Campaign Idea - This one's offered for free - after this, interested companies have to pay. Unqualified Offerings loves Uncle Ben's Brown and Wild Rice, Mushroom Recipe, and The Littlest Offering shares its enthusiasm. She not only loves the taste, she apparently finds it an incredibly amusing food too. Just this morning (yes, we ate this product for breakfast today), she made a big production of begging daddy's rice while Mrs. Offering looked fondly on, laughing merrily after every swallow. And there's your slogan:

Uncle Ben's Brown and Wild Rice - A Guffaw in Every Spoonful

Institutional Acronymism - All this talk about SOTU in the bloggerverse and print media. But for those of us in the Amber geek portion of the bloggerverse (this one, and that one and, of course, right here at Unqualified Headquarters), we've been talking about SOTU for years now. So when "SOTU analysis" makes no reference to the famous Library Scene or the relationship between Pattern and Trump, it takes us maybe an extra moment to catch up with what everyone else is saying.

I think I deserve a federal subsidy.

Waco World - Paper Topic: We are told by many this week that, as Charles Krauthammer puts it, "the real war, is not about last Sept. 11. It is about preventing the next Sept. 11 -- and in particular, a nuclear, chemical or biological Sept. 11," and we are told that the way to do this is to make war on countries that are potential threats - e.g. have programs to acquire nuclear, biological or chemical weapons, a general hostility to the US, Israel, the West - whether or not they have done material harm to the United States or give evidence of planning to do so. Is this international impulse congruent with the domestic impulse to ensure perfect safety through gun control and the sort of behavior modification characteristic of what conservatives long since nicknamed "the Nanny State?"

What They Really Thinks - Unlike William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer has never been a White House Staffer, just a columnist and a doctor. So even when pursuing the same program as Kristol, there's less spin:

Thank God for North Korea. Mentioning it is the equivalent of strip-searching an 80-year-old Irish nun at airport security: It is our defense against ethnic profiling. Right now North Korea is too destitute and too isolated to be capable of anything but spasmodic violence. But it has the virtue of being non-Islamic.

Look Over There! - Things had been so quiet on Eve Tushnet's site that Unqualified Offerings was starting to worry. On 1/8 she posted that she had joined an Objectivist reading group - after that, nothing. UO had visions of an apartment full of multi-level marketers and mechanical engineers refusing to let her leave until she agreed to six simultaneous, incompatible definitions of "selfishness."

But Eve escaped, and been assimilated by the Bloggerborg, with a third-level Blogspot domain to prove it. Her new site already has a couple of interesting items on it, including an interesting reflection on activist psychology called "Food Not Bombs." Check it out.

This weekend Unqualified Offerings will finally get around to a "Libertarianism and my Sister" sequel of sorts, based on some interesting remarks of Eve's via pmail. (See "The Citizen or the Police," linked at left, for the original.