Credit Where Credit is Due Oh Yes! Dept. - Unqualified Offerings is pleased to report that Justin Raimondo credits this site by name for coming up with the term "split-screen republicanism," especially since, ahem, he hasn't always done so.

Raimondo's Friday column is a response to Glenn Reynolds' most recent FoxNews.com column. For my part, I think that Justin both mistakes the intent of Reynolds' column and finds its central flaw. When Reynolds writes about how "we have to be able to trust the government," I don't think he's urging the people to trust the feds or expressing his own faith in them - he's calling for the feds to actually act in a trustworthy manner. Where I agree with Justin is that, structurally, we can't trust them. All the demands that federal law enforcement and intelligence act honorably are wasted. Where there is secrecy and vagueness of mission, there will be chicanery and bureaucratic self-interest.

A note on an old, unrelated issue: A few months ago, some bloggers noticed the relatively low number of hits they were getting from attacks on them in Justin's columns and from there questioned his traffic claims for Antiwar.com. There are two reasons why you'd get low referrals from antiwar.com regardless. For instance, I got no referrals from Friday's article. Why? Because his link to my site was to a Google cache page. Someone may have clicked through from the Google cache page to the actual Unqualified Offerings site, but they'd show up as referred by Google, not antiwar.com. The other reason is that, assuming I'm a typical antiwar.com reader, I don't actually click through many links from Justin's columns. He puts a lot of links in there, and if I followed them all I'd read nothing but antiwar.com stuff all week. (Yeah yeah, I know: you figured that was the case anyway. You're killin' me, you know that?) And the prose has a certain...propulsive quality that tends to carry you right past opportunities to click out.

Jihad in Baltimore - The great Post reporter Richard Leiby profiles Abu Mujahid, ne Aukai Collins, in the Washington Post. Mujahid is a Euro-American prison convert to Islam who fought in Chechnya and southeastern Europe. According to the post, in his book memoir, My Jihad, he angrily rebukes the idea that terrorism can have any legitimate function in Holy War as he conceives it.

Mujahid currently lives in a Baltimore slum. He worked for years as an informant for the FBI and CIA. There was a falling out. He now gets strip-searched every time he enters the country. He says he tried to warn the FBI about 9/11 hijacker Hanji Hanjour. The FBI says Mujahid never mentioned Hanjour.

Fascinating story.

Taking Political Correctness to an Absurd Degree - No, not the Pledge decision. UO can't get worked up about that. It's this: an MSN.com promo this morning on grilling has a picture that shows the grill being tended by a, well, a vaginal-american. The infamy!

Last Thoughts (For Now) on Domestic Anthrax - Anthrax did not prove to be anything like a "weapon of mass destruction." But someone killed five people. That someone has to pay. And if the feds are delaying the murderer's comeuppance for political purposes, they need to pay too. (NB: UO opposes the death penalty.)

Which leads to a final speculation. Someone within the FBI may feel the same way. If there's a greymail or political convenience bump on the road to justice, getting the names of domestic suspects out there may represent someone's attempted detour around it.

Q: Vox populi vox handgun?
A: Exactly.

Q: Do you like that idea?
A: Let's close with a final cautionary note from Greg.

Even if Hatfill is as guilty as Richard Jewe...er, bad example.

Q: The FBI has been wrong before, in other words.
A: I thought I said "Let's closewith..."

Q: Hey, I'm just as much in charge around here as you are. Could they be putting names out to try to scare a suspect with the specter of a vigilante?
A: They certainly could.

Q: Thank you.
A: Yeah, right.

UO Watch Watch - Unqualified Offerings can handle being caught in a rhetorical dodge, but it's embarrassing being caught in a rhetorical dodge it didn't know it was taking. In an e-mail headed "UO Watch," reader/gaming buddy Greg Pearson writes anent the anthrax speculation item below to point out that, while all that stuff about "greymail" is very nice, greymail could apply to a pure-domestic or recruited-domestic anthrax suspect. Thus, UO still left its interviewer (also UO) hanging as to its real suspicions.

Greg is right. The hell of it is, this site didn't think of that at the time. It was thinking of greymail purely in the context of a 100% domestic-scenario suspect. So UO thought it was saying that it still favors the domestic scenario, based on what it's read so far.

Is that clear?

Greg also says a couple of other interesting things:

I don't, to be honest, find the fact that he was in Iraq to be very interesting. If you're Iraqi intelligence and you're trying to recruit someone for a covert operation against the U.S., a high security, heavily guarded UN inspection mission doesn't seem to be the ideal recruiting ground.

This gets an eh. If you're Iraqi counterintelligence, you'd bend yourself to finding out everything you could about every UNSCOM inspector - not least because, as we've since learned, the CIA was using UNSCOM personnel to spy on Iraq and probably foment coups against Hussein. That would mean that if there was some pressure point in the life of an UNSCOM scientist that would make him an especially ripe recruiting target, they'd have a chance to find it. (For instance, if you were involved in a biological attack in the third world in your youth...)

But Greg's right. The Iraq-recruits-a-germ-scientist scenario is far-fetched. What's moderately less far-fetched? Greg again:

The fact that he was with UNSCOM, though, does interest me. Since its dissolution, former UNSCOM members (of whom Richard Butler is the most visible) have made something of a career of going on CNN and complaining that nobody (read "congress and the media") takes the threat of bioterrorism seriously.

And then, what do we get? A small, limited bioterrorist attack targeting congress (which holds the federal purse strings) and the media (which dictates the national agenda). Lot's of publicity for bioterrorism, not many people actually get hurt. Just what a nice, patriotic but disillusioned biowarrior might want to see. He has plenty of motive all on his own; why drag Iraq into it?

Greg even sees the problem with his own theory!

Of course, the great flaw in that theory is that it doesn't really leave us with anyone to bomb.

Greg's UNSCOM speculation is not far from some of the musings in the latest Barbara Hatch Rosenberg article, which UO has been meaning to blog for a few days. UO is sort of put off by the fact that Hatch Rosenberg works for the Federation of American Scientists. Bruce Rolston recently caught that organization out in an absurd hyping of the threat of a so-called "dirty bomb." (Read Rolston's piece! It's a textbook example of the political weblog at its best.) However, Hatch Rosenberg's name appears nowhere on the dirty bomb article, she's been following the anthrax case since last fall and appears, on the basis of her article, to be very wired in to the investigation. (Note to Avedon Carol: I take it all back!)

Change of Plans - The Talking Dog mocks this third-tier blog by referring to Unqualified Offerings as a "weblog powerhouse." Hey, from your lips to our stat servers ears, TD! Anyway, TD e-mails to say that if we're bringing Palestine into the Union, that we won't need 53 states.

Actually, if you proposed making the new state of Palestine ALSO part of the USA, we probably wouldn't have to divide Texas: we could count on the Palestinians to vote whichever way the Jews didn't; Karl "Turdblossom" Rove can get that "reach out to Muslims" thing in full gear-- and in '04, Bush would be certain to carry BOTH Michigan AND Palestine-- more than offsetting Joe Lieberman's victories in New York, California, DC, Connecticut and Israel!

Remember, you don't have to flatter the Talking Dog into sending you e-mails. You can get commentary like this on his website every day, with no self-abasement needed.

Big Tent - Another pinko blogger caught linking to right wing isolationists! Check out his one-act play about The War Against Bad Things^TM.

Unqualified Offerings feels obligated to mention that socialism still sucks.

One Down - Warblogger Andrea Harris, who must read this site just to keep her blood pressure up, vociferously disassociates herself from the odious Larry Kudlow, as Unqualified Offerings sort of requested. "Sort of" because Harris also avows "I am not a libertarian -- small "l" or large "L" or any of that" and it was specifically interventionist libertarians with whom UO was concerned.

Next: UO demands that libertarian interventionists disassociate themselves from the odious Michael Ledeen.

We Don't Need No Stinking King - At Unqualified Offerings, our motto is, "Content isn't just king, it's a hermit king." At Anton Sherwood's Sightseeing in Plato's Cave, Content lives all by itself. Unqualified Offerings wishes that Sherwood would condescend to narrow his text columns, but then, Unqualified Offerings wishes a lot of bloggers would condescend to narrow their text columns. But even in wide columns the site is a good read.

I was reading The Spike by Damien Broderick (I'm up to the part about the complexity of controlling zillions of nanomachines) and a fellow passenger asked what it's about. People are paid to summarize books better than I can, so I passed it over so she could read the covers. She asked whether the tone is alarmist (no, but it is cautious) and then said, ``You know, they had that same technology in Atlantis. It's not the first time around.''

Later she asked, ``What technology do you think they used to build the Pyramids?'' ``Ramps and rollers.'' ``And how do you explain the fact that they had electricity?'' (I confess I haven't felt any need to do so.) She told me that an Egyptian archaeologist - not English or German, she emphasized - has found `electrical' wires and what appears to be a lighting filament in Tutankhamn's tomb. Wonders never cease - and it would seem they have no beginning either.

One of his items is a response to an Unqualified Offerings piece:

I would add that it's very handy for `Them' to be able to use the `black helicopter nuts' as symbols of their opposition as a whole. I guess the only way to prevent that is to ensure that the first catchy symbol is a sane one. Protest movements need smart marketing.

A quibble: I thought the meth lab appeared later, when the FBI needed the drug exception to Posse Comitatus so they could borrow military equipment.

Never let it be said that Unqualified Offerings allows unresolved issues to linger for more than weeks at a time! Here's an ABCNews.com report about how the BATF invoked a methamphetamine lab from 1987 - before Koresh took over - to justify Army involvement in 1993. Koresh actually threw the operators of the meth lab out of Mount Carmel when he took over.

The "black helicopters" meme is an ironic one. One thing we can be sure of is that there are helicopters flying missions all over rural America - looking for marijuana plots. "Now the DA's got a chopper in the air," as a great songwriter has it. Most helicopters look black from below, and drug-war choppers will have that same unmarked-but-official look one sees in souped-up Crown Vics.

The War on Drugs has been an increasingly militarized operation by the US government within US territory against American citizens. Add to that paramilitary operations at Waco and Ruby Ridge and the land-use wars of the the so-called Sagebrush Rebellion you never hear about any more. Unqualified Offerings thinks the basis for a lot of antigovernment conspiracy theories in rural America is:

o Our government is us.
o We wouldn't do this kind of stuff to ourselves, would we?
o Therefore, there must be some sinister outside force behind it (the UN, the Elders of Zion, the Trilateral Commission).

A syllogism resting on two faulty postulates guarantees a false conclusion.

The Principal of Uncertain Principles is your Friend - Unqualified Offerings mentioned this new weblog a few days ago. On the evidence of his postings since then, we are already way past flash-in-the pan status. Two meaty pieces weigh in on the gender disparity in undergraduate degrees. There's a substantial item on quantum computing, and a couple pieces on Bush's Middle East the speech and reaction to it in the blogosphere and elsewhere. Quotable bits:

Is it just me, or do most of the warblog crowd make Bush sound like some sort of ineffectual feudal overlord out of a bad fantasy novel? While the King sits in his White Palace and issue proclamations, the scheming Duke of State runs around pursuing his own nefarious plans, and tries to sway the King from the path of righteousness. Meanwhile, the noble Baron of Defense offers steadfast service and bold strategy, and the wise and kind Enchantress of National Security offers wise counsel.

You can almost see Ian McKellan playing Donald Rumsefeld in the inevitable movie. (Well, OK, maybe not.)

Still is this any way to run a country? Maybe American-style government isn't what the Palestinians need after all...

And

This isn't Star Wars where simply knocking off the head of the Evil Empire is enough to make computer-generated peasants and midgets in furry suits dance with joy at the ushering in of a new era of peace and liberty. If Yasser Arafat were to disappear off the face of the Earth tomorrow (in some hypothetical manner which couldn't be blamed on the Mossad), it wouldn't solve the problem.

And

Everybody has a scheme for how to make a quantum computer, given money, time, money, equipment, money, and eye-popping advances in technology. And some money. Everybody also has a list of reasons why all the other schemes won't possibly work, and there've been some ugly fights in the field. To say that most claims in the field of quantum computing need to be taken with a grain of salt is an understatement-- there isn't enough salt in all the seas to supply the metaphor for the necessary degree of skepticism. It's been an entertaining time to be in physics.

Live Free or Die - This is demi-cool. You can sign the Declaration of Independence over the internet via the National Archives Website. (Link via Greeble blog.)

What would make it more than demi-cool?

1) If you could use your own handwriting, as opposed to the three style options they give you.

2) You get to print a copy of the Declaration with your signature among those of the DWEMs. But what would be really cool would be if the Archives kept a database of all the new "signers" and you could see your name among them.

Unqualified Offerings has read that you could not get the Bill of Rights adopted today if it were up to the people who respond to opinion polls. We would have to change our name to the Republic of Yes, But. Maybe. It seems to UO that a list of citizens who affirm our founding documents, starting with the Declaration, might have a tonic effect on our rulers.

Wilderness of M-my-my-my - Reading this interesting Hartford Courant article on Amerithrax non-suspect-oh-perish-the-thought-we-just-sometimes-like-to-cart-truckloads-of-evidence-from-people's-homes Steven J. Hatfill makes Unqualified Offerings realize that the distinction between the "domestic" and "imported" scenarios may not be so neat:

Hatfill later became a member of UNSCOM, the United Nations-sponsored group that went into Iraq after the gulf war to look for that country's biological weapons stockpiles.

Another member of UNSCOM was David Franz, who later became the colonel in charge of the Fort Detrick infectious disease center. Hatfill worked at the center from 1997 to 1999 in the virology department. He has never claimed to have worked with anthrax, but in 1999 he was involved with a CIA-run course on chemical and biological weapons.

Hatfill, Franz and other domestic non-suspects have been in Iraq, which opens up at least the possibility that they were recruited there, or afterward. In an effort to get at the tangle of possibilities, Unqualified Offerings immediately set out to interview itself on the matter.

Q: Are you saying this Hatfill guy did it?
A: No no no. And tell Dr. Hatfill's lawyer that too. I'm just linking to an interesting article.

Q: Does Hatfill seem like a lucky guy to be around?
A: From the Courant story:

In the late 1970s, when Hatfill was in Rhodesia, an anthrax outbreak killed hundreds and sickened thousands of villagers. In 1993, an African news agency reported that a former officer from the white minority army's special forces claimed that the anthrax outbreak that killed 182 and sickened more than 10,000 people between 1978 and 1980 was launched by the army.

All of the fatalities, and all but a handful of those sickened, were black. Other members of the white government's army have denied that the outbreak was a deliberate attack, claiming it was part of a natural pattern of anthrax in the region.

On his college biography and his resume, Hatfill says he worked with the Rhodesian army and a group called the Selous Scouts during the time frame of the anthrax outbreak. The Selous Scouts were an elite unit of the white Rhodesian government's army that specialized in tracking and killing enemy units in the back country.

Q: Is there an important disclaimer that immediately follows the quoted text?
A: Yes.

One former classmate, Mark Hanly, who is now a pathologist in Georgia, said he always doubted Hatfill's military claims.

Q: And does the disclaimer itself have a disclaimer?
A: As it happens, Yes.

Another classmate remembers Hatfill as a military enthusiast.

"He carried a lot of weapons around all the time, RPGs [rocket propelled grenades] and stuff like that. On the weekends he would go with the army and they would do special forces kind of stuff," said David Andrewes, a classmate who now lives in Massachusetts.

Q: Rhodesia, hunh. Weird. I wonder if there's any other Rhodesia angle to the anthrax story.
A: Does this count? The Courant says

Not far from the medical school in the nation's capital, Harare, is the upper-middle-class suburb of Greendale. The anthrax-laced letters to Daschle and Leahy each contained the same fictitious return address: 4th Grade, Greendale School, Franklin Park, N.J. There is no Greendale School in New Jersey. But there is a grade school by that name in the Harare suburb.

Q: Golly. Anyway, you point out that Hatfill spent time in Iraq and other "domestic" suspects may have too. Are you changing your "Iraq had nothing to do with this" story?
A: I never had an "Iraq had nothing to do with this" story. I had a "On the basis of what we know, an Iraqi connection is far from proven" story.

Q: If Iraq recruited an American scientist to start mailing anthrax around, does that make an Iraqi connection to 9/11 more likely?
A: Yes indeed. IF.

Q: And?
A: Again. Still not proven. Hatfill may be innocent. I, ahem, presume that he is. The fact that a domestic anthrax attacker was in Iraq is the beginning of suspicion, not the end of proof. There has to have been a limited pool of talent qualified to undertake the UNSCOM mission. That pool is going to substantially overlap with the limited pool of talent capable of producing and disseminating weaponized anthrax.

Q: Could there be a political angle here?
A: Yes. As the Courant says, "Steven J. Hatfill is either a pawn in an FBI attempt to recharge its stalled anthrax investigation, or a potential suspect who holds critical clues to solving the case that has bedeviled the agency for the past nine months." One obvious "pawn" scenario is that the government has decided on war with Iraq and needs to gin up enthusiasm. Since Hatfill does have a circumstantial Iraqi tie, he'd be the ideal name to drag out in public.

Q: But that would mean the FBI was allowing the government to politicize a serious criminal investigation!
A: You can be pretty fucking disingenuous sometimes, you know that?

Q: Is that your theory then? Or are you an "Iraq did it" guy now, or what?
A: As I said, "On the basis of what we know, it's too soo - "

Q: Don't be such a weenie.
A: Okay, I still think the most probable explanation of what's going on is greymail.

Q: "Greymail?"
A: Fancy espionage case term. It happens all the time, I understand. Person is suspected of spying because, well, the person is a spy. Person retains slick lawyer who makes a specialty of these cases. Lawyer sadly informs government that to defend his client, if the case goes to trial he will be forced to use this, this this this and this classified information, which will mean that this classified information will likely become public. By an amazing coincidence, these bits are embarrassing to the government. Government says, Hold on a minute... Client ends up with a plea bargain or no prosecution at all.

Q: What embarrassing information would a domestic anthrax suspect have that would make the government afraid to arrest and try him?
A: The obvious possibility is that we still have an offensive biological weapons program. Or anyway had one well after we officially renounced biological weapons more than a quarter-century ago.

Q: You really are an anti-government extremist aren't you.
A: (Shrugs.) Just considering. There's one other possibility...

Q: Oh?
A: Call it the "supervillain scenario." They know who Anthrax Boy is, and they've confronted him. And in between "bwa-ha-ha-has" he's mentioned that he has other germs and delivery systems out there, and they launch if anything happens to him.

Q: Seems farfetched.
A: Those towers looked pretty sturdy, didn't they? Ever see 'em?

(Link via Antiwar.com.)

Sigh - Libertarians tend to think Clarence Thomas is the most reliable defender of individual liberty on the Supreme Court. The high-school drug testing decision shows just how low a standard that is.

(Link via What She Really Thinks.)

Fifth Column Watch - Unqualified Offerings begs its readers to be vigilant against the new threat of icthyoterror.

Note to Toiler: Another PRC-al Qaeda angle?

Department of I Resemble That Remark - Istanblog has more reason to fear Bush's new middle east policy than the rest of us:

Bush told allies he "won't be putting money into a society" dominated by corrupt leaders.

For an American living in a country dominated by corrupt leaders, which receives massive amount of money directly and indirectly from the US government, this sounds pretty scary. So the question is, should I believe that Bush is a man of his convictions, or that he's a lying politician?

See his take on the theoretically-big Rose Garden speech too. (Turns out to be the same link I already gave you.)

Department of Grrr! When Libertarian Samizdata added a "Havens of Flourescent Idiocy" section to their links list, I thought it was a little over the top. Reading Blowback on the internet-radio royalty decision, I have to reconsider:

Where do all those smug, self-satisfied techno-libertarian weasels stand on this? This issue illustrates the vacuousness, and the subservience to the whims of Big Capital, of their nonsensical positions. Their triumphalist rhetoric is a masochist moan, delighting in submission...

Criminy. Once more for those who weren't paying attention the first time: The royalty decision was made by the duly - we won't say constituted - organ of the regulatory state. The royalty decision was your federal government at work. It was your precious guardian of the public good, the federal government - hell, the Library of Fucking Congress, repository of all that is sober and well-indexed. And the People's Tribune, the "In a Democracy, the Government is Us," made its decision explicitly on the basis of which channel supposedly most benefitted Big Capital and for no other reason. The net radio royalty decision represents regulatory capture in its starkest form.

(Link via Avedon Carol, dammit.)

Department of Eeew! - Daddy Warblogs unearths an appalling NRO article by Larry Kudlow. The Daddy accuses Kudlow of advocating an invasion of Iraq purely for the sake of US business interests. Why does he draw this stale, tired paranoid conclusion? Because Kudlow comes right out and says so.

Now and then someone talks about whether pro-war libertarians should take "anti-war libertarians" seriously or not. Hey, it's your call, guys. But know that I'll take you folks more seriously when you start separating yourselves from bastards like this. If it leaves less time for making fun of Robert Fisk again, hey, there's a war on and we all have to make sacrifices.

Just You Wait - Unqualified Offerings is tired, Egypt, tired. Therefore it planneth not to write any major pieces tonight after all. Just a few bits here and there. Meantime, Ginger Stampley says the problem with the Reynolds Plan for keeping the War on Terrorism from dragging on by taking out Iraq and Saudi Arabia right away is that it wouldn't work.

Glenn Reynolds was surprised by UO's "Now he tells us" remark in the follow-up, writing that he thought he had been obvious about it. As I responded to him via e-mail, he has indeed frequently written that the most effective way to protect the country from terrorism is to wipe out the terrorists (NGOs and states) on their home ground before they get here. But unless I've misread, he's always framed his preference as a security argument rather than a liberty argument. That is, "This is the most effective way to protect ourselves" rather than "This is how we best protect our rights from being usurped by our own government." This last part is the part that's new to me, a multiple-daily-visits Instapundit reader for the last nine months. But I may have missed it.

Meanwhile, John Braue, known to Instapundit writers as "another writer" whom I quoted, has a follow-up item of his own, in which he explains why he doesn't think it far-fetched to predict the end of liberal democracy in this century. Braue is more hawkish and more conservative than I am. I am finding him a writer of considerable heft despite those obvious flaws. (He said with the trademark deadpan irony for which this site - and dozens like it - are known.)

My take on declining political participation is that it is itself a kind of vote: to the extent lower voter participation rates reflect a decline in interest in politics it reflects a concomitantly greater increase of interest in nonpolitical life. The political sphere should let them get about it by circumscribing itself. What we get instead is the government-media-policy class earnestly declaring their intention to "make politics relevant" to people again - that is, to force those uncaring bastards to pay attention to us, dammit. An old friend of mine who reads this blog believed that the cold war was just a jobs program for engineers and mathematicians. There's an extent to which he wasn't wrong. To that same extent, the welfare state is a jobs program for the high school poli-sci club. Unlike the chess club, however, when they grow up they have ways of forcing you to take an interest in the same things they did.

I'm not a non-voting libertarian, for all that I sympathize with the bumper sticker that says, "Don't Vote. You'll Only Encourage Them." But actually voting - for all candidates at all levels of government - is something a citizen does at most one day out of 365. It simply can't outweigh what you do the other 364.

E Pluribus Unum - Unqualified Offerings generally avoids presidential speeches, devoting that time to more productive pursuits. But out of a sense of duty, it has read Bush's Middle East speech of the other day. This site has all kinds of thoughts, but the first one is this: remember how The Talking Dog cheekily suggested making Israel the 52nd State? Well, on the basis of the President's speech, it's clear that Palestine is slated to become number 53. We're apparently not only going to lay out its entire governmental structure, we're also going to help them set it up, and surely toss some block grants in for good measure.

Best unintentional humor part?

This will require an externally supervised effort to rebuild and reform the Palestinian security services. The security system must have clear lines of authority and accountability, and a unified chain of command.

Advice from the country whose interservice jealousies did so much to make the September Massacres possible:

"See this Org chart? Don't do it like this."

Anyway America, Unqualified Offerings hopes you like the Middle East, because it's yours now.

My Spider Sense Is Tingling - Virginia Postrel has a long, fascinating item about superheroes, terrorism, and the necessary violent fantasies of little kids. Check out "Killing Monsters."

UPDATE: Fixed a bad link, thanks to a head's up from Michael Croft.

War vs. War On - Glenn Reynolds agrees that freedom is worth the odd nuke - which is nice, since Unqualified Offerings woke up this morning wondering, "Did this site really write that?" He raises a couple of objections to UO's conclusions. One of them is just the old "not all slopes are slippery" argument. That's true enough, but doesn't in itself determine whether any given slope is slippery. (Is the progression from the Effective Death Penalty and Anti-Terrorism Act to USA-PATRIOT not a slippery slope, for instance?) The other (allied) argument is stronger, and genuinely intriguing:

My nightmare scenario, in fact, is one in which the "war on terror" starts looking like the "war on drugs." Which is why I'm in favor of invading Iraq, giving the al-Sauds the boot, and in general fighting a genuine war rather than settling into long-term chronic-illness mode. The bureaucrats naturally favor the latter, as it involves less accountability (you can't really "lose" a "war on" as opposed to a "war" -- you just need more money!) and long-term funding. But in opposing honest-to-goodness war in favor of law-enforcement techniques, you make the police-state aspects of a "war on" (like the War On Drugs) far more likely to materialize.

Well now he tells us, the cynic might say. But believe it or not, UO is not a cynic. And it's nice to see a pro-war libertarian making an argument on the basis of concern for - American liberty. But Unqualified Offerings thinks that, while Reynolds' concerns about an unending "war on" are acute, that the expansive war he favors - against Iraq and the Saudis, with occasional other targets thrown into the mix too - doesn't avoid the "war on" problem. UO thinks that the war has structural requirements that will make it as endless as any "war on." UO furthermore believes that US policy, particularly Bush administration policy, is being made by people for whom the endless part is a feature rather than a bug. Spelling out some of the reasons why will have to wait until tomorrow, though. (It's UO's gaming night.) So all readers, new and old, are invited to return.

Or Get Off the Pot - John Braue shows the alluring skull beneath the skin of all the talk about the US fostering "liberal democracy" by force of arms.

And democracy within the member states of the Final Alliance? I have written on that in the past. Suffice to say for repetition's sake that I see no hope of democracy on the national level in the West lasting out this century.

We needn't like this future. I don't like it. But I think that if we want a different future, we should decide what it should be and how to get it, and to decide right now.

Already on it!

Unqualified Offerings finds Braue's musings on the prerequisites and outcomes of his "Final Alliance" to be entirely plausible, and deeply, deeply scary. The evidence is accumulating steadily already. Prominent hawks, to their credit, have criticised this or that government grab for control in the guise of warfighting. Which is not to say that they can have what they want - an expansive war against "terror" or "islamofascism" or "jihadism" or tyranny AND a free society.

The time is coming to ask, Which do you want more, the freedom or the war? Because this may not be a hypothetical question. It's looking less and less like one, for all the reasons John Braue adduces. So pick.

Obviously, Unqualified Offerings picks the free society. Let's assume that keeping such liberties as we have and maybe, perish the thought, expanding them, treating the threat of stateless terrorism as a police and intelligence matter and state terrorism as a matter for deterrence and retribution, not "preemption," makes America somewhat less secure. Let's even say that the price of, oh, habeas corpus, a prohibition on torture and something akin to privacy is a major attack on an American city sometime in the next ten years. A tactical nuke or an epidemic that will kill people in the high five figures or low six. (These are realistic "worst case" numbers, as I've argued before.)

Would it be worth it? Hell yes. It would hurt a lot. And afterward we'd have to clobber the perpetrators like we clobbered Afghanistan, just to prove attacking us isn't a casual business. This is, to repeat, a big damn country. A mighty country. A country that ought to have the guts to remain true to itself at some cost. And some benefit. Like still being this country, and not some other in the same place we used to be.

What's in a Name Dept. - Daddy Warblogs fact-checks the ass of Warblogger Watch:

I really must change the title of this blog. And why do I get the impression that the Warbloggerwatch guys only read my stuff in the expectation of finding wall-to-wall babykillin' rhetoric? They look, they find none, but nonetheless go away and append the nom de guerre "prominent sabre-rattler" to my good name. OK, so I'm going to say this nice and loud so that no one will get it wrong in future:

And then he does. Unqualified Offerings admits to having been slow to catch on to the Daddy Warblogs experience, and partly because of the (actually very clever) name. He's proving himself one of the most independently-minded and intellectually adventurous warbloggers around, regardless.

Where Do You Get Your Ideas? - Your antigovernment extremist types like Unqualified Offerings not only oppose centrally planned economies, they are skeptical of government regulation of the economy to protect the public. They even conjure up a spectre called "regulatory capture," whereby the institutions that supposedly exist to control the big players in an industry end up serving the biggest players in that industry. Where do such unsporting notions come from? Let's ask Marc Fisher of the Washington Post, writing about - why, he's writing about the death knell of internet radio!

But the sounds of freedom dimmed last week, when the Librarian of Congress, James Billington, decreed a fee scale that's likely to silence most Internet stations.

Billington approved a structure that lets traditional broadcast stations pay royalties only to the writers and publishers of songs they play, while Web stations must pay those fees plus extra royalties to the record companies and performers of the music. Billington accepted the recording industry argument that traditional radio could keep its exemption from those fees because airplay promotes record sales.

Good thing we have an author of books on Russian history deciding what new-technology business structures will be "fair!" (One might wish he knew a little more Russian history.) And a good thing he's making decisions based on which medium supposedly best serves the pecuniary interests of existing conglomerates!

We Get Letters and then we don't respond. I owe several of you e-mails. E-mails make me happy. They prove the existence of that most wondrous of things, an engaged readership. So I suck ass letting them go for any length of time. I'm going to work on catching up over the next couple of days.

Out on a Limb - After repeatedly avowing - accurately - that he had not, repeat not, accused the Israelis of being behind the September massacres, Justin Raimondo now walks right up to the edge of saying otherwise, depending on what you think "facilitation" means.

The recent revelations by ex-FBI wiretap translator Sibel Edmonds of an unnamed "Middle Eastern country" with agents inside the FBI obstructing, mistranslating, and misdirecting official investigations make the question of "foreknowledge," "pre-knowledge," or whatever you want to call it moot. As I pointed out in my last column, the Edmonds allegations raise the ante considerably, from passive foreknowledge of 9/11 to the sinister possibility of Israel's active facilitation.

I'd be the last person to say, "No! Israel would never do such a thing!" Israel has a government, it has a national security establishment and an intelligence apparatus. Governments, national security establishments and intelligence apparatuses do crummy things all the time, and deliberately. And the US government's attempt to whitewash Israeli intelligence activity in this country inspires rather than quells suspicion in some quarters.

But still.

Justin's column completely ignores multiple reports of Israeli warnings to the US of a planned al Qaeda strike in the US, including reports that appeared on his own website. I have a hard time seeing that as other than bad faith. If he doesn't believe these reports, even though he has previously implied that he accepted the accuracy of some of them in his own columns, then he needs to explain why.

He assumes that if Israel has spies somewhere, those spies must have, before the fact, uncovered whatever turned out to be important after the fact. He assumes that the various Israeli operations in the US - the "art students," the moving companies, the possible moles among FBI translators - must be coordinating seamlessly, perhaps the least plausible assumption of all. He ignores the possible drug angle. (Israeli gangs seem to control a lot of the Ecstasy trade; the "art students" seemed to concentrate particularly on DEA offices; and intelligence agencies and drug gangs go together like sin eaters and stale bread.)

On the question of motive I have only a couple of things to say. "Now they'll know how it feels" is a pretty speculative payoff for a high-risk operation - which is what the "facilitation" of a massive attack on your most important ally is. For one thing, whenever the US wants something in the Arab world, it tacks against Israel at least tactically. Happened in the Gulf War. Happened last winter. That our famously changeable administration is singing a tune congenial to Ariel Sharon this week is no guarantee that it will still be singing it next week. Israel's critics have always said that its domestic US lobby has an unbreakable grip on Congress and American policy anyway. If that's true then why would Israel need to make sure that "Now they'll know how it feels?"

There are several reasons, having nothing to do with antisemitism, why Israel gets under the skin of movement libertarians and other isolationists. Hardcore libertarians and isolationists oppose foreign aid. Israel is the single biggest recipient of US foreign aid. It's the direct cause of foreign aid to the second-biggest recipient, the fuzzy, big-eyed government of Egypt. Libertarians and isolationists oppose entangling alliances. Many US supporters of Israel speak as if there was no meaningful distinction between US and Israeli interests. Libertarians hate socialism and other forms of collectivism. Israel is a socialistic, collectivist society. Libertarians believe property rights are the foundation of almost every other freedom. Israel is just awful on property rights, particularly the property rights of Arabs.

To argue for the elimination of foreign aid means, inevitably, having to answer the "What about Israel?" question. Ditto to argue against interventionism generally. You simply cannot advocate what, for lack of a better term, I'll call "isolationism" without having to address the problem of Israel. That inevitably requires arguing that no, Israel shouldn't have US aid, including US military aid, and that requires saying why, and then the trouble starts.

There are indeed politicians, columnists and, yes, webloggers, who dismiss any criticism of Israel as antisemitism. There are also Israeli partisans who argue in bad faith. And there are interventionists and, for lack of a better word, imperialists, for whom Israel is simply a convenient excuse for the grand design they would pursue regardless. (Of course there are also antisemites who cloak their hate in criticism of Israel.) So it gets frustrating to be a movement libertarian or paleoconservative. Israel can become their - no, let us be clear, our - Great White Whale.

And then, too, the trouble starts. After clarifying Israel's flaws we start minimizing those of its enemies. Yasser Arafat, a venal, self-interested charlatan, the very exemplar of Hayek's principle that under socialism the worst rise to the top, becomes "the father of his country." Theocrats become reformist visionaries. Military dictators become - reformist visionaries.

The Palestinian and larger Arab and Muslim struggle against Israel is itself rooted in collectivism, socialist mindsets and group hatred. It isn't individualism, classical liberalism or republican prudence that makes the Pakistani laborer and intellectual so burn with rage on behalf of the Palestinians. It is religious chauvinism. There is nothing antiwar about Pakistan's approach to Kashmir, nor anything isolationist about Saudi and Iraqi subsidies to the families of suicide bombers.

None of this is an argument for giving Israel a blank check to fulfill the territorial dreams of its maximalists, or even to continue subsidizing the bulldozing of houses and confiscation of land. It isn't an argument for making Israel's survival a core US interest. It isn't an argument for pardoning Jonathan Pollard or letting his successors work unmolested. But it's a caution against confusing a disproportionate US involvement in Israeli business with a disproportionate evil in Israel as such.

The attacks on the US last fall were deeply, deeply evil acts. To accuse anyone of perpetrating or knowingly allowing them is to accuse them of a great evil. That's a serious claim and calls for serious evidence. That's why perfectly reasonable people insisted on evidence against al Qaeda last fall, and when they didn't feel they got it, opposed the war. (My view is that what we learned from the war establishes al Qaeda's and bin Laden's culpability definitively.) It's why some of us insist that the Iraq hawks have not come close to meeting anything approaching a standard of proof of Iraqi involvement in the September massacres. And it's why it's as reckless or moreso to speculate about Israel actively facilitating the attacks on the basis of the evidence we have.

What About the Murder of your Red Indians? - The title of this piece comes from a USSR-era joke. The punch line depends on an old tactic of Soviet officialdom: confronted with complaints about this or that human rights abuse, throw Slavery or the Indian Wars back in the American face and pout. (Given that the Russians also had slavery until the 1860s - they just didn't import from so far away - the Indian Wars made a better snappy comeback.)

What brought the joke back to me was a letter from The Talking Dog to Eve Tushnet about her views on the Middle East. No, not the clever bit about making Israel the 52nd state. (And it is clever. See why TD doesn't propose making Israel the 51st state. You'll have to do some scrolling to do this because TD, ahem, does not have item-specific anchors.) No, it was a separate, serious e-mail to Eve that stuck out, especially this part:

As to the stolen land argument, I daresay the occasional Navajo or Sioux might have better reason to question a certain other country's legitimacy than those of Palestinian Arab descent. There are land grabs, and then there are acts of genocide accompanied by land grabs. Israel can, at worst, be accused of the first one. The United States? Well, let's move on...

Now I don't bring this up to have a Cold-War style laugh at the Talking Dog's expense. It wouldn't be fair, for one thing. Even a casual reading of his entertaining and engaging site makes it clear that TD is no knee-jerk likudnik. What I see in his writing is the principle that Yitzhak Rabin enunciated: to pursue peace as if there were no terrorism and fight terrorism as if there were no peace.

No, the reason I bring it up is because, all so's-your-old-man maneuvering aside, I think TD has hit on the precise analogy for the struggle between Israel and Palestine. In a tribal struggle for collective dominion over a land, the line between combatant and noncombatant blurs. A homestead on the Plains contained civilians by our lights, invaders by the lights of the Sioux. A Lakota hunting camp contained women and children as far as the Sioux were concerned, the "infrastructure" of murderous rebellion to the Army.

Natalie Solent feels keenly the death of every Israeli child, and presents each fresh horror with stunned disbelief. But from King Philip's War to Wounded Knee stretches a sequence of bilateral atrocity in which nothing that has happened in the last fifty years in the land between the Jordan and the Med would have trouble fitting. The Arabs consider the Jews to be invaders. The Israelis consider the Palestinians to be savages. Certainly Israel has at times been invasive and the Palestinians have been savage. They've been subject to the same flights of apocalyptic fervor that in the nineteenth century gave the American continent Panther Across the Sky and Wovoka. Even the imbalance of power is analogous.

I say all this as an American of European descent who has no intention of giving the continent back to its original inhabitants. Nor do I expect, or wish, Israel's Jews to pack up and set sail for someplace else. But the savagery of the Israeli-Palestinian war is nothing unprecedented. It is tantamount to structural.

Reading Around - Some goings-on in punditspace.

Brendan O'Neill makes clear which pigeonholes he doesn't fit into.

Virginia Postrel returns from hiatus.

Somehow in discussing Eve Tushnet's weekend, er, offerings, I missed a superb piece on how not to be pro-life:

First, any stance that treats children as punishment is anti-family, anti-life, and deeply anti-Christian.

There's more. All excellent.

Perhaps feeling peevish at being described as "semi-retired," Perry deHavilland cocks his ear trumpet, clangs his walker over to the Granville Automatic and bangs out a half-hearted defense of Randians.

We Interrupt This Libertarian Isolationism to bring you the following bulletin. Unqualified Offerings has learned that catfish are worth fishing for.

1. They are big.
2. They fight hard.
3. You do not have to use the sort of bait that Francesco Redi might use to disprove spontaneous generation.

There is a deep, slow stretch of Seneca Creek a couple of miles above the Potomac in a currently-rural section of Montgomery County. A long unused rope swing hangs down into the water. The bank is steep there, with the shore a full four feet above the waterline. Unqualified Offerings has believed for some time that it was home to sizable finny friends, but had not been able to prove it. Last night around dusk, it tried the water with a largish, green Rebel Crawfish. As your professional fishing writers say, BAM! I figured I had a big bass. The fish stayed deep and ran a lot. I was using my ultralight rod with four-pound line, so it could do that if it wanted. I fought that fish for something like 5 minutes when it slipped the hook. So I cast out again and, yes, BAM! This one I fought longer. It was a genuine rod-doubler. The activity made several other big fish show themselves too. Again it stayed deep and again I thought, mistakenly, I had the biggest smallmouth of my life on the line.

But no. When I got it to what passes for the shore down there, I saw the whiskers and the soft dorsal. It was easily the size of my leg from the knee down. There was no question of lifting it up to my level as a dead weight. I wasn't eager to mess with the whiskers anyway, and the storebought catfish I've eaten always struck me as having an overly meal-y texture. So I just lifted until the line broke off.

I don't really care if you call it, technically, a catch or not. It was a blast.

Political Self-Test Test - So which self-test is best? Or, to get all reflexive and metacontextual, which self-test does this self prefer?

First, a late entry in the sweepstakes, The Political Quiz Show. It comes via Ginger Stampley via Avedon Carol. (The League of Extraordinary Sherbet-Colored Blogs strikes again!)

I have to say, this one sucks so bad I couldn't even finish it. It's not just that the results restrict themselves to the one-dimensional left-right continuum, but that practically every question imprisons one in bad choices. Consider

2. Which do you trust more:

The Pentagon or
The U.S. Postal Service?

The executive branch or
The legislative branch?

The FBI or
The IRS?

The CIA or
The Peace Corps?

The Joint Chiefs or
The United Nations?

Christ in kneepads, I don't trust any of them! I can't consider any of the pairings personally decideable and I don't have either obvious opt-out option: "Equally trustworthy"; "Equally Untrustworthy."

3. What about private institutions and people? Which do you trust more?

Trial Lawyers or
Doctors?

Union leaders or
Business executives?

Professional athletes or
Team owners?

Trust to do what, exactly? I suppose on a feelie level I would pick doctors over trial lawyers.

The Political Quiz Show has example politicians along its continuum. Interestingly the "most liberal" person they can imagine is Jesse Jackson and the "most conservative" is Ronald Reagan.

So, here's my political self-test test answer. Find links in previous items, please. It's late.

1. Ideology Selector - Most flexible. Questions seem representative. Deepest range of results.

2. Political Compass - Rather Brit-centric. Questions seem written from a "left" perspective. Conflate "libertarianism" with personal license.

3. Politopia - This one is much worse than the two ahead of it. The questions are functional but boring.

4. The Political Quiz Show - Questions can't even be meaningfully answered unless you accept a great deal of the "dominant paradigm" those buttons are always urging us to subvert.

Say It With Me Now!

Who has the most readers??

Drudge!

Who has the BEST readers????

UNQUALIFIED OFFERINGS!!!!

Several loyal readers wrote in to suggest that the political self-test I was thinking of in the item below is The Political Compass. Kathy Kinsley wrote to suggest that it's actually the Politopia quiz from the Institute for Humane Studies.

I've seen the Political Compass quiz before and taken it. (I'm a 4.88/-2.77, if you must know.) I haven't seen the Politopia quiz. (According to Politopia, I'm between Drew Carey and Ayn Rand, which actually gives me an idea for what The Drew Carey show could do if that Mimi chick ever left...)

But dammit, neither of them are the one I was thinking of! I don't think. I distinctly remember two features of the quiz I have in mind that neither test under discussion has: first, you got to weight the questions as Very Important, Somewhat Important or Not Important as you answered them. This strikes me as a crucial innovation. Second, when you completed it, it gave you a "fit list" of several political philosophies in order of match.

So, um, while you really are the best readers a political diarist ever had, I decided to just find the thing myself. And I did! It's called the Ideology Selector. It could stand updating. It takes a long time to load. But damn if they don't have me pegged:

#1 Left-libertarian
#2 Libertarian
#3 Paleo-libertarian
#4 Radical
#5 Paleoconservative
#6 Centrist
#7 Third Way
#8 Conservative
#9 Neoconservative
#10 Liberal

Each ideology comes with a link to an allied website - Cato for "Libertarian," mises.org for "Paleo-Libertarian," The Rockford Institute for "Paleoconservative" and so on. The link for Centrist is worth the cost of taking the test, which is a ton of popup ads. I have to say, their idea of left-libertarianism (based on the example site they link to) looks a lot more left and a lot less libertarian to me. I can hang with being called a "left-libertarian." I can't hang being classed with the anarchists. Too many meetings.

I wonder if this is going to queer my link on C-Log...

Of Making Many Blogs... - Chad Orzel, who has been running a booklog for some time, has started a general weblog too, Uncertain Principles. He is kind enough to cite the influence of Unqualified Offerings on his blog title, saying that his title is "in the tradition of self-deprecating weblog names ." (I've always thought I was the best self-deprecator in the world. I am the greatest! Self- deprecator!)

Chad is a physicist and while his weblog is still very new - it has, um, two items so far - his introductory item has interesting thoughts on the metaphorical misuse of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle by humanists and literary types.

Keep an eye on this one.

Libertarianism in Normal-Land - With Perry deHavilland in something approaching semi-retirement, Brian Micklethwait has become my favorite active Libertarian Samizdata contributor. And his essay today on the plain meaning of words and "fixed-sum economics," among other things, is simply the best contribution to libertarian philosophy I've seen this year.

Fail to deal with it and there are two characteristic ways in which the fixed quantity of happiness/wealth fallacy will deal with you.

People who are nice, and who don't like the idea of making other people miserable, restrain themselves from getting rich and happy. We see that syndrome all around us, and especially at political demonstrations of the concerned variety.

But then there is the screw-you-Jack response, which consists of saying that I want to be happy and goddammit I've a right to be happy! And that if that means others have be unhappy, then to hell with them!! And we see that all around us also, in the form of exuberantly busy capitalists who just want to get rich, and if that means they have to think of themselves as quasi-criminals, then so be it. They can live with it. With friends like these, capitalism doesn't need enemies. (Screw-you-Jack capitalism is especially rampant in the financial world, where it takes a little bit of imagination to realise just how much good you are doing for the world by, e.g., placing a bet on the price of next year's corn crop. It's obvious that you do a bit of good for other people if you sell them newspapers and sweeties, but perhaps not quite so clear that you and your confreres are actually making modern agriculture possible if you trade in agricultural futures.)

These two characteristic social types, the self-sacrificing conscience-ridden misery and the selfish capitalist bastard, dance a sort of self-reinforcing dance with each other, each reacting in horror to the other's existence, but neither realising how much, intellectually speaking, they have in common. The unifying error is that in living your life you are condemned to choose between your own happiness and the happiness of others, between selfishness and altruism.

There's more. Keep your eye on this Mickelthwait fellow.

OH What the Hell - I long since decided that The World's Smallest Political Quiz was essentially a libertarian push-poll. Not that there's anything wrong with that! But since it's being rediscovered by the blogosphere this weekend, I figured What the heck. And perhaps it has some utility after all. Specifically, my little corner of punditspace is typically described as "libertarian and conservative." I'm seeing bloggers with self-described libertarian leanings testing out as borderline conservatives according to the poll, which fits with the expansive hawkishness common among warbloggers. Without further ado, Unqualified Offerings' chart looks like this:

A more sophisticated political self-test was making the rounds a few months ago. It not only had more questions and more answers (five instead of three), you got to weight the question as to its importance. At least in my case, the results were uncannily accurate. I'd love to find it again.

Ya Never Know Dept. - Why does Unqualifid Offerings not dismiss claims of Jihadist or Iraqi involvement in the Oklahoma City bombing, given that this site has been pretty dismissive of what passes for evidence of Iraqi involvement in the massacres of September 2001?

Because it remembers that when McVeigh neared his date with doom, the thing he seemed to want to talk about more than anything was Iraqi civilian casualties. What's more, the way he chose to compare the dead from the Murragh Building with the dead from Iraq sounds exactly like the way the Iraqis or sympathetic jihadists would speak of the issue themselves.

The dilemma of "black ops" terrorism is stark: You want to avoid retribution by hiding your involvement. And yet, like all terrorists, you want to send a message. That's a tough straddle. Circumstantially, the McVeigh operation would look like a partially successful attempt at it.

Why only partial? Because if it did happen that way, McVeigh's recruiters failed to take into account that nobody around here much gives a shit what a mass murderer has to say about the ethics of violence.

It's About Time! - For once, Eve Tushnet is working (read: blogging) weekends. Good stuff on identity, individuality and authority. And the second installment of "The Politics of Dancing."

Speaking of which. Now playing: Warren Zevon, My Ride's Here. This is the successor to the "comeback" record, Life'll Kill Ya. It took me a little longer to really connect with, but now, by gum, I am blown away. If you were disappointed by Elvis Costello's When I Was Cruel, I nevertheless doubt you will be disappointed by this one.

News that Stays News Department - This afternoon, while walking through the assisted-living facility where the Matron of the Offerings lives, Unqualified Offerings found itself unaccountably singing - aloud - the Violent Femmes' "Blister in the Sun." Not too loud, mind you, but audibly. Then UO realized that one day, and before too long, this site and people like it, will still be singing the Violent Femmes in such buildings, as residents. And do you know why, Loyal Readers?

Because quality lasts.

Thought for the Day - In The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom had no end of bad things to say about rock and roll. It occurs to Unqualified Offerings that the complete and only refutation of his arguments required is "Acadian Driftwood," by the Band.

UO realizes this thought for the day comes straight from the department of late hits, but ars longa, vita brevis etc.

Hands Across the Water - Turkey has made the World Cup semifinals in some sport or other. The US did not. Now, the World Cup semifinals were probably sour anyway, but Unqualified Offerings moves that, in honor of Istanblog, the blogosphere adopt Turkey as its team for the duration. I believe the call is something like

TURKIYE!!

Try it out. And post a supportive pro-Turkey message to your weblog, if you have one.

This Is Sports Center with Unqualified Offerings - Diana Moon says Bill Bruford is all wrong about why Americans don't like soccer. Paul Farhi in the Post gives credence to the "Americans don't like it because there's too little scoring" theory.

Adds Taylor Twellman, a former University of Maryland star now with the MLS's New England Revolution. "Criticizing soccer for not enough scoring is just a cheap way of saying, 'I don't understand the game. I don't want to watch it.' It's not a boring game, if you understand it."

"It's funny," Twellman says. "You don't hear the same criticism about hockey. What's the difference between soccer and NHL hockey?"

(Actually, there's quite a bit of difference. The NHL champion Detroit Red Wings averaged 3.1 goals per game this season. The MLS's two division-leading teams, the San Jose Earthquakes and the Columbus Crew, are averaging 1.46 and 1.38 goals per match, respectively. The Women's United Soccer Association's best team, the Philadelphia Charge, is chugging along at 1.9 goals per game.)

The scoring issue is vexed. In fact, hockey is the fourth of the major team sports in the US, behind football, baseball and basketball, and it's not a close fourth. Of course, Canadians love hockey. (They just can't afford it.) Ironically, they're the same people who attribute the alleged superiority of their brand of gridiron football to the fact that "there's more scoring." (And let's complicate things still further! Unqualified Offerings once took this particular disagreement to its guru in these matters, Mr. Excel. Mr. Excel said that the average CFL team scored about 3.5 more points per game than the average NFL team. That is, the average CFL game features the equivalent of a single extra touchdown.)

Needless to say, if scoring were all Americans care about, arena football would be more popular than NFL football, basketball would be more popular yet, and straight-rail billiards, where scores in professional play routinely hit 10,000, would be the undisputed king of sports.

The most intriguing explanation Unqualified Offerings has heard comes from suddenly-national Washington sports radio personality Steve Czaban. Czaban's theory, not on his website but spoken on Sportstalk 980's sports reporters show the other night, is that soccer's lower appeal to Americans is because it lacks intermediate successes. Football has first downs. Baseball has hits. Basketball dispenses with intermediate successes in favor of lots more scoring successes. Hockey has little in the way of intermediate success opportunities, but it does have around twice the shots-on-goal that soccer has. And there's a tangible change in pitch and tempo during power plays.

In soccer it's mostly all or nothing. You don't get that regular gauge of "How'm I doing?" You also don't get many statistics. And American sports fans love statistics. (I tried to find the blogger who recently made this point so I could link to him. If someone clues me in I'll add a proper credit.)

The mark of a good hypothesis is that it sheds light on problems beyond the one it was designed to solve. In the case of the Czaban Theory, the bonus is that it explains why so many of us don't bother to tune in a basketball game until the fourth quarter. Basketball makes scoring so promiscuous that a single basket is devalued. Scoring deflates from "success" to "intermediate success." The real success is the final score, and only the end-of-game baskets seem material to it.

UO provisionally accepts the Czaban Theory as the last word on American coolness to whatever the hell that game was we were unaccountably interested in for the last couple of weeks.

UPDATE: Added the link to Paul Farhi's article that I left out the first time. One noteworthy "they just don't get it" feature of the article is the way the American soccer players and coaches come across as utter scolds. They are as condescending as any postmodern academic. I predict it will make them every bit as popular.

The Personal Aspects of Blogging - There are two flies in this office. They have been here all week. They are fast. They never land. I am going to go mad.

Blogology - Eve Tushnet has a full report of the blog panel she participated in Wednesday night. (Apologies to Eve for my absence; I had company to entertain.) The report makes it clear, without anything even approaching self-puffery on Eve's part, that the organizers were very, very smart to include her on the panel. Here's one striking insight of hers as a taste:

The final nifty characteristic of blogs that I discussed was the personal nature of the writing...

That also makes it easier for others to be persuaded--we can imagine what it would be like to live all day as a leftist, a conservative, a pro-lifer, an Objectivist, and we can see that it needn't make us lousy people. So much of contemporary politics is about personal preferences and affiliations--were the leftists you knew condescending? Were the conservatives rich bigots? Who do you want to hang out with--a Gore voter, a Bush voter, or a Nader voter? Blogs show that there are leftists/conservatives/whatever who don't fit your stereotypes--there are people who are kind of like what you might be like if you were a leftist/conservative/whatever. And seeing people who you might want to be like can help you evaluate their beliefs without worrying that if you start agreeing with them you'll turn into a jerk.

Go read.

Before We Were So Rudely Interrupted I had completed a long post about a matter that broke out on Andrew Olmsted's eponymous site today. Andrew is as fair as the day is long, and it's summer, so his site is a good place to start. I have more to say but not the will to say it now.

Condemned to Repeat It - Loyal Readers who tried to log on in the last hour or so will have discovered that "it" happened again - the Movable Type database got corrupted in mid-post. The good news is that I knew how to rebuild everything after the last time, and was able to do it relatively quickly. The bad news is that, once again, item-specific anchors are hosed. If you linked to a specific Offering in the last two weeks, well, sorry. If you have the energy and more patience than the problem deserves, you could update with the new link to the same item. But why would you bother.

This is getting frustrating. I like Movable Type fine, but it's twice this month it's eaten my entire site, for whatever reason. Ginger is right about backups. It seems like the only prudent thing to do is to download the entire database folder to my hard drive before a posting session, just in case. Whee.

Monopole of Evil - Ginger Stampley notes that Bill Clinton has beaten another rap. That's how Unqualified Offerings read it anyway.

Back to the Future - Reader Mary La Croix, whose name meets all Canadian regulations pertaining to bilingual onomastic content, and who previously delighted UO readers with her guidance on proper tea preparation, announces that the ass of this site has been fact-checked: "Unqualified Offerings went live on October 21, 2002," UO claimed, implausibly, last night. It meant, of course, that Unqualified Offerings went live on October 21, 1002, with hard-hitting, controversial and yes, thoughtful critiques of what it considered the overly bellicose illuminated manuscripts of Glen Raginwald and the displaced celtic monk Andrew Suileabháin, then fulminating against the angles on behalf of the jutes.

Unqualified Offerings is glad we cleared that up. Instapunditwatch also noted the error, which I suppose takes her on the first step down the road of becoming Unqualified Offerings Watch as well.

That would be so cool, to have my own personal scold. Outside the family, I mean.

Lifeboat Games - Here's a very good Instapundit post, about whether the country should mass-vaccinate against smallpox, given that the vaccine poses rare but measurable health risks.

My own feeling is that we should vaccinate. That's because vacccination doesn't just have a preventive value, but a deterrent value: terrorists are less likely to attempt to use smallpox if the target population is vaccinated. And that's important because any effort by terrorists to use smallpox produces a high likelihood that it will spread around the world and once again infect people in places where lousy healthcare and infrastructure will make it hard to get rid of. I think that possibility has to be weighed in the balance: by vaccinating, we're not just protecting Americans, but Indians, Somalians, Cambodians, etc. (Interestingly, the Islamic world, because of bad healthcare systems and the tradition of the Haj, is especially vulnerable to such "collateral damage," though I'm not sure the terrorists are smart enough to realize that -- or perhaps inclined to care even if they do).

Upstarts! - Now there is Instapundit Watch, which says it "Fact checks Instapundit's ass, because he doesn't bother to." The site models itself on Warbloggerwatch, right down to the initially anonymous proprietor, though IPwatch is a better-designed site and said proprietor writes more gracefully than WBW founder "Eric A. Blair." (Warbloggerwatch has since added better writers.)

But tell Unqualified Offerings: Who do you have to fuck to get a link in this town? Don't let all these Johnny-Come-Latelies cloud the blogosphere mind, darnit. This site was warbloggerwatchin' and Instapunditcheckin' back in the day. Word, Yo.

Unqualified Offerings went live on October 21, 2002. On October 22, it gently chided Instapundit for leaping to conclusions about bin Laden and the assassination of Rehavim Ze'evi. The next day it chided Andrew Sullivan rather less gently for his disappointment that the President wasn't nuking someone in response to the anthrax attacks. (Unqualified Offerings lives close enough to Fort Detrick to be very glad the President has held off so far.)

It's not like it ended there, either. But don't take my word for it. We keep these archives around for a reason. Was it some parvenu leftie antiblogger who wrote

If Reynolds is going to restrict his energies to promoting greater zeal among the menfolk, he risks attaining to the condition of ideal Confederate womanhood.

Ahem. I think not.

Of course, Unqualified Offerings admits to liking Instapundit a lot more than Instapunditwatch does - it agrees with him on many domestic issues and supports, on balance, war in Afghanistan, so perhaps this site is just...wobbly?

Oh There You Are - Either the Post finally put the Pincus article on al-Qaeda strategy online, or I just finally teased it out of their search engine. Unqualified Offerings considers it a must-read.

Also, What's Your Superpower is back online. And there's a successor quiz that, well, if it doesn't kill the whole meme still counts as a valiant effort.

What stupid online quiz are you?

Road to Serfdom Department - "The Prince George's County Council voted unanimously yesterday to allow Dryclean Depot to open in an aging strip shopping center in Bowie, ending a dispute that had divided the panel along racial lines," Wednesday's Post tells us. (Tuesday's Post told us about the divide.)

The council voted to allow the store to operate in the Marketplace center on Route 450, but with the provision that no more large discount dry cleaning stores be permitted in small neighborhood shopping centers in the county. They will still be allowed in industrial areas or large regional shopping centers.

The dispute pitted the applicants, two African American men, against independent dry cleaners, mostly Korean Americans, who said the discount operation could destroy their livelihoods.

There are nine members of the PG County Council, and

Councilmember Audrey E. Scott (R-Bowie) had introduced a bill to block the chain from the Bowie site, and in earlier votes, the council's four other white members sided with her, while its four black members sided with the applicants.

That Republican Party really does distinguish itself by its devotion to free market principles, huh!

White democrats voted with Scott yesterday. After the thing blew up, everyone voted to allow the Dryclean Depot to open today.

"This was never, ever, ever intended to pit certainly the Koreans against the African Americans, or the blacks against the whites on the council," [Scott] said. "It was most unfortunate, and it was a successful attempt to divide the council."

Which is what happens when political bodies make it their business to apportion opportunity like spoils. Here in Montgomery County, we "enjoy" the flip side of the same phenomenon, a "pro-business" Democratic Council Chair who keeps finding insufficiently upscale communities to "redevelop," which always means the county throwing small businesses out to hand the land underneath them to large chains and contribution-happy construction firms.

Unqualified Offerings has nothing against large national retail establishments, actually. It used to work for one. If a LNRE thinks it can make money in a neighborhood, fine. Provided they bear their own expenses. But it's pathetic for governments to subsidize out-of-town giants at the expense of local businesses. Especially if those local business are successful in their own right. (Here in Wheaton, MD, the retail vacancy rate is less than 10%. Our Council Chair wants to put those people out of business for the sake of the Discovery Company and such folks.)

So is there anyone in Prince George's County to speak on behalf of free enterprise? Yes:

Cole said he was also "disappointed a little that this whole thing played out as a racial issue, instead of as free and simple competition and changing the game midstream."

Yesterday's 9 to 0 vote followed an emotional hearing, during which Terrell and Cole tearfully told how they'd left their careers and invested their savings to open a dry cleaners, which they may own after two years.

The Dryclean Depot investors. The only pity is that they had to beg their putative betters for the opportunity.

That Way Madness Lies - Sideshow links to a Christine Quiñones item that links to a Richard J. Ochs piece suggesting

the anthrax attacks on Capitol Hill coincided with the debates on the USA PATRIOT Act. So apparently Congressmen passed the bill without reading it too closely because they were too scared of possibly getting killed by their mail to pay adequate attention to the legislation they were reviewing. Once USA PATRIOT passed, the anthrax attacks stopped as suddenly as they started.

So is it possible that Congress, and the major news organizations who also received anthrax letters at that time, are pulling their punches because they're aware that someone, who the FBI knows works inside the government, may try to off them with some other less conspicuous biological agent if they get too far out of line? Given the administration's obsession with secrecy, I can imagine that even talking about a threat of this sort might constitute cause for arrest and indefinite military custody. Recall the constraints on librarians even saying they've been served with a USA PATRIOT search warrant.

Unqualified Offerings is what Bill Clinton used to call an anti-government extremist. So it would be the last weblog to say "But our leaders would never do something like that!" But what we have here is a speculative cui bono and nothing more. And it leads down a road my southpaw confreres might better not travel.

As an anti-government extremist ("sowing a climate of fear and division^TM" - Bill Clinton) I remember the mid-nineties. Hell, I remember usenet in the mid-nineties. And I remember occasionally running into some fellow anti-government extremist or other, in print or in person, getting worked up over speculation that David Koresh had ties to intelligence agencies, or whether some of the Bradleys at Mount Carmel mounted flame throwers, or whether this international organization or that UN body had ordered this or that depredation; that is, a lot of people trying to find some "they" or other. What I told them is, "If there is a 'they,' they'd far rather you worry about the UN or the Rothschilds than about the things like no-knock raids, the profusion of federal SWAT teams, civil asset forfeiture and the administrative law court system, all overt, structural issues that got born in broad daylight. They'd rather you talk about how Waco had to be a UN plot than about the known facts that the BATF lied about a methamphetamine lab to get a warrant, and that the FBI spent six weeks trying to drive the Branch Davidians nuts - using the same psychological warfare tricks (sleep deprivation, lights, noise etc) we used on Manuel Noriega - so that afterward the President could say:

"Well, they were crazy."

The enthusiasts of the ridiculous theories - say "least provable" if you prefer - became the unwitting allies of the forces in power.

Same shit, different administration. And looking like one that is just as willing to demagogue their opponents as loons and traitors. Don't make it easy for them.

League of Extraordinary Sherbet-Colored Blogs - Over on Sideshow, Avedon Carol says she likes the new design of Unqualified Offerings, which pleases this site. Sideshow is also looking pretty spiffy these days, having become quite legible and clean-looking. Appropriately for the unabashed leftist, her trim color is pinkish (with shades of plum). Perhaps Unqualified Offerings (lime sherbet), Sideshow (plum sherbet) and What She Really Thinks (blackberry sherbet) will form a superhero team. Not an especially...butch superteam. But you get the idea.

How Long? - Mixed in with some energetic attacks on "conservatives" in general, Jeff Hauser makes some essential points:

1) Not everyone accused of terrorism will be guilty; one only needs to understand how frequently people are wrongly convicted of capital murder -- something you would hope could only occur after the greatest precautions by law enforcement -- to realize that this concern has some merit. Which is important because. . . .
2) This "situation"'s very nebulousness means it has neither a beginning nor end point.

...

So, the conclusion is that if we are sufficiently frightened NOW to undermine the Constitution, we need to recognize that logically, those Constitutional protections are never going to return. Never. That's the problem with defining war so broadly -- the tradeoffs we might make for anomalously threatened circumstances during a legitimate state of war invoke far greater threats to liberty when that status WILL NEVER BE REVOKED.

Michael Kelly and Jonah Goldberg tell us there's a war on and we can't get all fetishistic about our personal freedoms. Meanwhile Bush Administration figures and neoconservative policy organs tell us said war could last 10 years or a generation. How hard is it to see what those two allied claims add up to?

(Link via Sideshow.)

More Unfinished Business relating to our country's proven attackers, al Qaeda. This Post story talks about the difficulty of tracing the organization's financial assets. I was struck by this part especially:

Bonner and other senior U.S. officials said they believe bin Laden's inheritance from his wealthy Saudi family was far less than the $300 million that was commonly reported. Some officials said the amount was likely closer to $30 million, and that most of it was spent forming al Qaeda in the late 1980s and early 1990s in Africa and in Afghanistan.

U.S. officials believe al Qaeda derives much of its current funding from two sources: what Dam called "informal methods of moving their money," through Islamic charities and private remittance systems called hawalas, and storing money in "commodities like gold or diamonds, converting the commodities to cash only as needed."

If bin Laden is not as rich as everyone thought, it starts to make sense that Mohammad Atta tried to get a US government loan to kill us. Note also what is conspicuously absent from the list of funding channels: money from established governments and their intelligence agencies.

On the Rare Sense of Proportion front, the article says

The administration recognizes that "hawala dealers provide an important service" in low-cost money transfers to Muslim populations, particularly in parts of Africa with no access to formal financial services, he said. "We do not think that banning hawalas altogether is the answer."

Maybe we could spare some American institutions too, like, oh, judicial review and such.

Unfinished Business - Some interesting developments in the war against our actual attackers, al Qaeda, recently. This Sunday story from the Washington Post discusses the window into current al Qaeda strategy opened by the Saudis arrested in the "Gibraltar plot." Sadly, it accompanies a Walter Pincus article, "Al Qaeda Aims to Destabilize Secular Nations," that I can't find on the Post's website. The gist of the Pincus article is that the new Evil Plan comprises:

1. Geographical dispersal. For pretty obvious reasons.

2. Continued spectacular attacks on US soil aimed at large body counts and destroying the economy.

3. Small-scale attacks against American and Jewish targets in "countries where the population is muslim but the government is secular.

It's probably the best possible evil plan for them, given the circumstances. I've always thought al Qaeda's attacks on the US had an economic warfare component. Heaven knows that some of post-9/11 security measures, both already implemented and proposed, come with measurable economic costs already. And that's without additional attacks.

It appears, though, that al Qaeda cannot routinely pull off attacks of the scale of the September massacres on US soil. The attempts to destabilize muslim governments may appear more promising, and they've already started. The synagogue attack in Tunisia was part of it. The idea is to force the governments to crack down on "good muslim" terrorists in defense of evil Americans and Jews, theoretically outraging the ordinary muslim citizens and, it goes unsaid, those elite sectors capable of toppling the government in Egypt, Pakistan or Jordan. Pakistan, with its nukes, remains the jewel in the terrorist crown.

The plan sounds awfully like the terror war in Egypt in the late 80s and early 90s though, and that one didn't work out so well for the terrorists. You could argue that it helped freeze Israeli-Egyptian intercourse at a very low level as Hosni Mubarak's government moved to coopt the anti-Israel sentiment that partly animated his country's rebels. But Mubarak is still there, fatter and more aloof than ever. And recent reports of 9/11 tend to indicate that working Egyptian-Israeli intelligence contacts continue.

Since Egyptian Islamic Jihad merged with al Qaeda and veterans of its leadership are high in al Qaeda's structure, the destabilize strategy has the whiff of nostalgia trip about it. (A deadly one, to be sure.) It promises years of squalid, low-level violence, terror and reprisal from Gibraltar to the Himalayas. With tribunes who would put their nations through such, who needs a Great Satan?

The other picture that emerges is al Qaeda evolving from a monumentally bad-tempered NGO into something even less tangible. The war in Afghanistan has acted as a kind of atomizer, spraying a terrorist mist across the world now:

They were ordered to flee Afghanistan to whatever areas of the world they had previously operated from, including Asia, the Persian Gulf, Africa, Turkey and Europe. Bin Laden's decree directed them to launch terrorist attacks once they had become established in familiar areas.

"Members who were very knowledgeable about one region had to go back to that region to prepare and perpetrate terrorist attacks," said a senior Moroccan official.

Bilal specifically noted that operations against European targets could be launched from North Africa, and operations in the Persian Gulf from Yemen.

Although some in Gardez received very general orders, others, such as the Saudis, two of whom were married to Moroccan women, were given specific targets.

This does not, repeat not, in itself represent a failure of the war against al Qaeda in Afghanistan. al Qaeda didn't bring thousands of people to terror training camps in Afghanistan for the purpose of having thousands of people in terror training camps in Afghanistan. You do that precisely so that you can then send them out to commit acts of terrorism around the globe. The war on al Qaeda may have been mishandled, allowing too many of the enemy to escape. But to the extent that al Qaeda dispersed this winter and spring, they did it on our timetable rather than theirs. Agents will have been sent out with less planning and fewer resources than can have been intended.

But what we can expect for the next several years is many small cells acting with little supervision, three or four or six or eight guys who just think up a way to kill some people and do it. It will be a challenge, particularly for the smaller, poorer (muslm) countries where the bulk of the violence will occur, and for the US effort to protect western targets in those countries.

That Seventies Show - Josh Marshall is convinced, tonight anyway, that Pat Buchanan was Deep Throat. He has a couple of items on the topic here and here. From his site, I found a link to a pretty interesting college project. Long but worth reading, even if you're not a Watergate obsessive. (I'm not.)

Marshall gets a little concerned, at the end, at an apparent "unqualified denial" by Buchanan of his Throatedness. But this site knows from "Unqualified," and Buchanan's statement, at least as Marshall transcribes it, is easy to see through:

And after a few yadas, Sawyer pressed Buchanan and he responded by what I heard as "I, Patrick Buchanan, am not Deep Throat."

As a hero of Joshua Marshall's political party once put it, it depends what your meaning of is is. Or rather, what your meaning of am is. Am. Um.

I, Patrick Buchanan, am not Deep Throat. Now.

But I was.

Question: Let's suppose it turns out that Buchanan was Deep Throat, making him a secret hero of constitutional government. Is that going to totally mess with a lot of people's minds or what?

Drunk with Power Department - Ideas Etc. has replaced its Virtual Toner Cartridge^TM and now comes to you in clean, readable black type. Unqualified Offerings is grateful, grateful and will not even mention the serif font.

Israel and 9/11 Warnings - When Unqualified Offerings tells its readers that there is another piece on Antiwar.com about the behavior of Israeli Intelligence in the run-up to the September massacres, it expects there will be much groaning. But wait:

The complex and often uneasy relationship between Israel's Mossad and the U.S. intelligence community is emerging as a prime reason for the catastrophic failure of the CIA and FBI to act on advance warnings of an impending attack on America.
Eight days before the September 11 attack, Egypt's senior intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman, informed the CIA station chief in Cairo that "credible sources" had told him that Osama bin-Laden's network was "in the advanced stages of executing a significant operation against an American target."

Prior to that, the FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley had revealed, there was a similar warning from French intelligence.

Both warnings, Globe-Intel has established, originally came from Mossad.

The article is by Gordon Thomas of Globe-Intel, author of Gideon's Spies, a book I have not read.

A golf clap for Justin Raimondo, who has pushed pretty hard the theory that the Israelis kept what they knew about al Qaeda in America to themselves so that "Now you'll know how it feels" for giving prominent play to a seemingly authoritative piece that says otherwise. It will be interesting to see what impact the Thomas piece has on Justin's own columns. It will be just as interesting to see if the folks who have pooh-poohed the "art students" story as an "urban legend" will now trumpet it as proof that if only we had trusted the Israelis... So what happened, according to Thomas?

The Israeli intelligence service chose to pass on its own intelligence to Washington through its contacts in French and Egyptian intelligence agencies because it did not believe its previous warnings on an impending attack by the bin-Laden network had been taken seriously enough in Washington.

And why is that?

Behind this admission is the long-standing suspicion that both the FBI and CIA have about Mossad and its ongoing activities in the United States.

Ostensibly, Israel denies it has ever spied on its most powerful ally. But the reality is otherwise. Both the FBI and CIA regard Mossad as a clear and present danger to U.S. national security. It places the Israeli spy agency just below the espionage totem pole that has China's Secret Intelligence Service at its top.

I've suspected for some time that while the Israelis passed on warnings of an al Qaeda operation against the US, that they probably blunted the effectiveness of the warnings to protect their own "sources and methods" - that is, spy operations on American soil.

The Face Is Familiar But the timing is off. Junkyard Blog has been the prime source of speculation on the possible identity of Jose "Abdullah al Muhajir" Padilla and John Doe #2 of Oklahoma City Bombing fame. His long, careful, sober account of the evidence for and against is here. It's a solid job of collating and teasing out possibilities.

More than anything, it's timing that makes me doubt that Padilla was Doe. In all the instances we know of, al Qaeda terrorists chosen for major jobs have first undergone lengthy training and indoctrination at camps (usually in Afghanistan) built for that purpose. This is not even unique to al Qaeda - the PLO, PFLP, Kurdish and Kashmiri separatists have all made the training camp a rite of passage. Even the 70s-vintage "red armies" of Western Europe were likely to go camping, either behind the Iron Curtain or in the same Middle Eastern camps the PLO factions used. By the Junkyard Blog's account, Padilla got out of prison in 1993 and didn't go abroad until 1998. The OKC bombing happened in the spring of 1995. It seems to be al Qaeda practice to make sure a promising American muslim convert is good and indoctrinated.

This is not to say that al Qaeda could not have had a hand in OKC. It's a layer more explanation than parsimony demands - McVeigh and Nichols didn't need Jihadists to come up with a motive for terrorism. But parsimony sometimes gets more than it demands, so who knows. But even if they turn out to have been operating partly at the behest of al Qaeda (or Iraq, for people whose dark thoughts tend that direction) McVeigh and Nichols do not appear to be muslim converts. They would be a whole different class of asset. (A kind that your-middle-eastern-villain-of-choice does not seem to have resorted to since.)

Now, it's possible that Padilla participated in OKC on a freelance basis and only joined al Qaeda afterward. But if not guided by al Qaeda, how does an ethnic-minority gangster in Florida end up in the orbit of white-supremacist veterans in the southwest?

It just doesn't hang together. Which is not a criticism of Junkyard Blog's work on this question, by any means. It's only because he put all the dates and places together in one handy spot that I'm able to resolve the question to my satisfaction.

(Link via Lake Effect.)

The Unqualified Offerings Effect - Sadly, the What's Your Super Power test now gives a Page Not Found error. No doubt all the extra bandwidth from Unqualified Offerings readers. Or not.

Caught You - Um, Me - Of course, Unqualified Offerings has played some fairly frank numbers games itself, and been willing to rely on utilitarian arguments. It has taken pains to deflate the portentous term "weapons of mass destruction" because it thinks that inflated danger estimates are being used to stampede the American people over the cliff of endless war. In taking these pains, it is responding to enthusiasts for empire and intervention making a "pragmatic" case - "We'll all die!" - for the United States abandoning a prudent reluctance to engage in major wars.

Utilitarianism is dangerous, but it has a role to play.

When Is a Challenge Not a Challenge - I have not seen a lot of response to Brendan O'Neill's challenge of early June:

Now, how about some of those who hide behind the numbers coming out as either being for the war, or against it?

There are some pretty good reasons why: The simple truth is that most bloggers have long since made their positions pretty clear. If you're not sure that Glenn Reynolds supports not just the war in Afghanistan but an extensive program of "regime change" in multiple countries in the Levant and the Gulf, that Ken Layne wants to depose the Saudi monarchy, that Matt Welch favors military action in Afghanistan and against al-Qaeda, or that Israel could take no action to which Charles Johnson would materially object, you haven't been paying attention. Most webloggers make their positions manifest with everything they choose to cite or not cite. Most of them have, at one point or other, offered reasons for their views.

War supporters cite low casualty figures because war opponents made so much of inflated estimates, both before the war and during. And if you don't like their doing that, it could be worse. Back before we learned that civilian casualties in Afghanistan would be as low as they are, a number of prominent hawks disgraced themselves by arguing that kiling civilians was no worse than killing enemy combatants. Many of these same hawks further disgraced themselves by suddenly deciding that it was unconscionable to kill civilians after all, if and only if the killers were Palestinian. It is indeed unconscionable for Palestinians to kill civilians. The disgrace lies in the serial hypocrisy. At the moment when it looked like America would kill large numbers of civilians, the concern of too many hawks was to legitimize the act in prospect. Once the country dodged that moral bullet, they felt free to criticize others for what they had been willing to countenance for themselves.

But this is another case of Unqualified Offerings losing the thread, which is why supporters and opponents of the war in Afghanistan talk about casualty figures. We're a practical people, particularly on this side of the pond. Utilitarianism, dangerous as it is philosophically and politically, runs deep. War opponents adduced high civilian casualty predictions as a reason to oppose the war. Alexander Cockburn even made it a racial issue, saying that an exchange rate of five brown lives for every white life augured about 30,000 Afghan dead. (He was working from the early 6-8,000-death estimates for the WTC. When the famous Marc Herold casualty figures came out, claiming 3,000+ Afghan civilian casualties, some leftists argued that we had, essentially, hit our limit: since the number of Afghan dead had now topped deaths from the September massacres, the war was now numerologically unjust. Certainly there is some level of suffering that many Americans, even those who otherwise support striking back at our attackers, would consider "too much." Those are the people that war opponents and war supporters have been trying to sway.

Since some doves were using casualty figures to critique the war, some hawks made it their business to rebut the figures - particularly since the casualty numbers constituted such weak arguments. But I know of no hawks who pretend not to be pro-war. (Glenn Reynolds' occasional claims to favor a foreign policy of minimal foreign intervention if only that were possible are not remotely plausible enough to confuse his readers about his actual views.)

I can't think of a single warblogger or pundit who has discussed civilian casualties whose views on the various wars occurring or pending were not explicit - indeed, if they were bloggers it was often so that they could make their support for the war(s) explicit.

That's the rub of course - "wars occurring or pending." We have more than one war to talk about, and will. (And have. But you get the idea.)

Self-Approbation Watch - Unqualified Offerings has added a couple of items to the "Best of..." section. One of them is its Spidey-smack of David Broder, "To Speak Up and Remove All Doubt," which generated a fair amount of kind mentions. The other is last week's "Weapons of Some Destruction," a skeptical look at a current totem phrase.

That item carried forward ideas from an early piece, "Silver Linings," which I have also added. It was where this site first propounded a general claim that casualty predictions and initial claims are almost always inflated by as much as an order of magnitude. It has stood its first key test - Afghan civilian dead estimates versus actual Afghan civilian deaths - pretty well. It could grow wearying, I realize, if I made a habit of informing you that this old piece or that one "turn out to be even better than I thought!" But at the time "Silver Linings" came out (early November) this site's only readers were, literally, Ginger Stampley, Michael Croft and my wife. So it seemed worth reviving.

Cheap Imperialism Metaphor Watch - From the gripping firsthand account of the carbombing of the US Embassy in Karachi by Kamran Khan:

The physical security cordon -- heavy planters like those outside the U.S. Capitol, waist-high concrete barriers, the towering perimeter wall, all the layers of reinforced concrete set up to protect the consulate -- had worked. But it appeared to have the effect of deflecting the blast back toward the street. Abdullah Haroon Road was littered with car parts, human parts and blood. Across the street, broken electrical lines sizzled and snapped in the grass of Freere Hall Park, a lovely, tidy expanse of green around a beautiful mansion.

They Know What You've Been Thinking - In other news, Amygdala and Istanblog both took the what's your superpower tests. Unqualified Offerings finds the results...disquieting.

With This Rock Dept. - With just the support of Israel and Turkey, the uberhawks tell us, the US can conquer, occupy and transform first Iraq and then "six or seven" middle eastern nations into modern, more-or-less democratic countries.

Here's the latest from Istanblog on the prospects for an orderly succession to ailing Prime Minister Ecevit:

So the possible post-Ecevit outcomes are 1) an ultra-nationalist who finds Turkey's human rights record to be too soft, 2) an Islamic moderate who the military is trying to get thrown in jail for "embarrassing the military" and praising the proto-Taliban a decade ago, 3) a coup, or 4) a miracle. My crystal ball suggests 1, 2, and 3 could well happen in succession, over a relatively short time (a year?)

The whole piece provides supporting detail.

Back in the Saddle - Gary Farber has apparently gotten tired of unpacking boxes at his new place. (He just moved within the last week or so, so there is no chance that he has finished unpacking boxes.) He's returned to lighting up the Amygdala board with item after juicy item, and there isn't a single one of them that you don't need to read. So get thee hence!

Gender Gap If you are

a) a father; and

b) a crass materialist

Unqualified Offerings has some very good news to pass along. Per-household spending for Father's Day has jumped in one year from around $52 to around $95 (projected for this year). That's within two bucks of Mother's Day spending for the first time ever. And since we're not into, like, flowers and shit, presumably we'll get some swag that lasts out of this deal.

Mind you, the top item on this site's wish list blows the lid right off the average.

Cut the Cord - Just deleted the Old Blog on Blogger. We are flying without a net now.

On the Move in the blogosphere:

Grasshoppa has its own domain now. Plus a clean, readable design. (Same one he had on Blogspot actually.)

John Cole of Balloon Juice is back at the keyboard and on the prowl. Unqualified Offerings is grumpy that he didn't acknowledge this site as one of the many that has redesigned recently, but maybe he's a Netscape 4 user or something. John also has a startling revelation: He was "Sgt. Stryker's" pseudonymous sidekick, Sgt. Schultz. Note that, at press time, he had not confessed to also being Stephanie Dupont.

Speaking of the artist formerly known as Sgt. Stryker, his site sports a major redesign too.

Meanwhile, Ideas Etc. is breeding blogs. He's adding separate weblogs for football and books, while contrariwise folding his blog-review endeavor into his main page. A threatened beer blog was killed in the crib.

Kevin also recently celebrated a birthday. Unqualified Offerings wishes him many more, plus the wisdom to reset the text color of his main blog to a nice, readable black from the default MovableType grey.

The delightful and expert Kathy Kinsley also recently celebrated a birthday. There's been a lot of loose hype lately about Sekimori-designed-and-coded weblogs. But Unqualified Offerings would not trade web gurus with anyone.

Mail Call I - Kevin Maroney writes anent code names, Mohammed Atta, Johnelle Bryant and the competence of our sworn foemen.

A recent New York Review of Books article on code names for military
operations pointed out that British Intelligence figured out the nature of Operation Seelowe (Sealion) from its name. The Soviets probably figured out Barbarossa from its name, too. It's like bad guys all have read the "How to Be an Incompetent Supervillain" handbook.

Further, you say "It suggests that al Qaeda's best and brightest are neither particularly bright nor all that terrific." I have for months been referring to al Qaeda as "hiring people who can't blow off their feet if you put explosives in their shoes". Praise Allah, the merciful and compassionate, for that.

Indeed!

Re the contention of Unqualified Offerings that a professional covert outfit will not give away its intentions by choosing a meaningful code name, I suspect cases like Barbarossa and Sea Lion were what inspired that postwar rule in the first place.

As to the competence of al Qaeda's available humanoid resources, UO is pretty much with Kevin. This site had a long and fruitful conversation about things terroristic with Toiler last night, and some thoughts are still bubbling around. However, for the time being Unqualified Offerings believes that Johnelle Bryant's account of her meetings with Mohammad Atta is bushwa. Unqualified Offerings is not saying that this is a calculated official deceit like, well, John Ashcroft's claim to have prevented a dirty-bomb attack. But it wonders if Bryant isn't like those people who call the police to confess to high-profile murder cases because they want to be helpful and they feel bad about the whole thing.

Sure, Atta likely did meet Bryant in her office. But don't bet on her recollection of the details.

Toiler, by the by, says that the "China theory" is not in his estimate the most probable theory of al Qaeda behavior.

New Frontiers in Desperation among online advertisers. Today, a popup ad scooted away from UO's mouse pointer when it went to close the ad. So this site had to make an extra effort to track it down and kill it. Now that pisses Unqualified Offerings off.

Wilderness of Mirrors - Czech ambassador to the UN Hynek Kmonicek is adamant that Mohammed Atta met Iraqi diplomat/creep Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani in April 2001, according to the Prague Post:

"At the time [of the meeting] I was in Prague," he said. "It's not like they [the Czech government] sent me a cable saying, 'Say this because you are our ambassador.' It's not like that. I was the person who had to [expel] al-Ani."

Unqualified Offerings has a soft spot for Czech diplomats and admits to being less convinced the meeting didn't take place than it has been. Mind you, the Czech Republic is not just a NATO member, but one of the most pro-American countries in the EU, so they have a natural desire to say "helpful" things. And there's the point-of-pride angle: if you were Czech intelligence and you did get a little overenthusiastic last fall, you'd have a tendency to stubbornly dig your heels in.

As to establishing the meeting, the Czechs could produce their actual evidence - surveillance logs, eavesdropping transcripts and the like. And none of that "sources and methods" crap either. "We follow suspicious foreign diplomats around in multiple cars and train directional microphones on them. Oh, and we tap their phones if possible. Surprise!"

Of course, if it turns out the meeting took place, that doesn't in itself demonstrate Iraqi involvement in 9/11. If you were al-Qaeda, you might arrange to have Atta meet someone from Iraqi intelligence so that it would be discovered. bin Laden denied involvement in the September massacres after the fact. The operation clearly sought at least plausible deniability for al-Qaeda. Laying a trail to another plausible suspect would be a good way to do that.

On the other hand.

That kind of thing can cut both ways. Let's say you were Iraq and you were behind the attacks in Washington and New York. You'd want to lay a trail to another plausible suspect yourself. Like al-Qaeda. al-Qaeda is a pretty loose-knit group, so you can appropriate a few of their human resources to your own purposes. Then you have one of your agents all but tell a US official, "I am an evil agent of Osama bin Laden. That's O-S-A-M-A..." when in fact you are an evil agent of Iraq.

It's a tricky business. Faced with the uncertainties, the average hawk will adopt a Kill 'em all and let god sort them out approach. Innocent as he may be of involvement in the September massacres, Saddam Hussein doesn't belong to the class of fuzzy, big-eyed things.

Unqualified Offerings remains convinced that "you might've" or "you might" are crummy reasons for a republic to go to war, though. That hasn't changed.

Online Quizzes: For Good - Or Evil - Ginger links to two of those online quizzes that have become so popular lately, the ones that are the geek equivalent of the "How Passionate Are You?" self-tests that run in the likes of Redbook and Good Housekeeping. (Conspiracy theorists note: The items originally appeared in What She Really Thinks but have been moved to Ginger's gaming blog. Hm!)

The two tests make an excellent compare and contrast. "Which Superhero Are You" is like all too many of the profusion of self-tests now: Too damn obvious and concomitantly unimaginative. Here are the first two questions from it:

1. If you possessed a super power, what would it be?

Virtual invulnerability, X-ray vision and the ability to fly like an eagle
Catlike agility, a sixth sense and a certain stickability where walls are concerned
A set jaw, pointy ears and a terrible singleness of purpose. What more does one need?
Freakish strength, a brain the size of a pea and the temper of a crazed and goaded hippo

2. You regard your special power as...

A great responsibility to be used solely for the benefit of humankind
An annoying imposition that plays havoc with your love life
As good an excuse as any to rampage through town as a leather-clad vigilante
A hellish curse. Voodoo monsterism. The ruin of countless shirts and trousers

Too put it simply, if it's not crushingly obvious how 1,2,3 and 4 map to a handful of specific superheroes then you aren't the sort of person who would bother to take the test in the first place. PLUS since you know in advance of the scoring which answer maps to which hero, you can aim for the hero you want. You might as well just make like Michael Keaton and say "I'm Batman!" as bother to answer the questions you know will declare you as such. Also, the questions are not stated in ways that map plausibly to the test-taker's own life. Compare an alternate number 2: If I had a superpower I would regard it as: a) a treasured gift; b) a real hoot; c) a burden; d) all of the above. Or you could weight the options, as I've seen in some of the better tests out there.

Of course, designing tests to do that would be hard. Putting together Which Superhero Are You is easy. The Which Superhero Are You? test deprives the taker of the chance of personal discovery and wastes one's time.

Now compare the superior What's Your Superpower? The first two questions:

1. How would you describe your sense of humor?

I'm usually considered to be pretty funny. I'm the first to crack a joke
I'm not much of a joker, but can have a good laugh now and then.
I like physical humor, and love a good prank.
I don't joke.
I don't laugh much, it's just the way that I am.

2. Which food do you like best?

Red Meat
Fish
Vegetables
Candy
Doesn't matter - as long as there's LOTS

The first thing you can say about What's Your Superpower is that you can't tell where any given question is going. The second thing is that it is a genuine self-test. You're not choosing among the well-known schticks of four obvious heroes. You can meaningfully answer the questions as yourself. In fact, you might as well. Note also that in the first test, option a) maps to the same result for each question, as do options b, c, and d. A is always the "Superman answer," B is always the "Spiderman answer" etc. In the Superpower test, it's by no means clear that "I don't joke" (fourth option of question 1) and "Candy" (fourth option of question two) have anything whatsoever to do with each other. It seems more likely that they do not. In fact, different questions in the Superpower test have different numbers of choices, from as many as six to as few as two.

The arguable weakness of this second, better test is that the connection between "your super power" and your answers doesn't necessarily strike the test-taker as inevitable. But Unqualified Offerings can't gainsay

	All the great heroes can fly. And thats what I am, a great hero. I am well rounded. I have a good sense of right and wrong. I seek to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people, but my friends always come first, especially if it's a romantic interest. Despite my amazing gifts, I prefer a quiet position away from the limelight, maybe among the clouds. What's your superpower?

(Note: If you're a Netscape 4 user, you're missing some text inside the lower-right box of the table above. Nothing urgent, but may Unqualified Offerings remind you that there are better, newer browsers out there.)

UPDATE: Ginger e-mails to say Unqualified Offerings is getting old and weak-minded, though that's not how she puts it. "I don't publish online quiz results anywhere except on my gaming blog," she writes, "and since WSRT and TFD aren't even on the same MT installation, it's hard to post to one when I mean to post to the other." Next she'll be claiming that a half-educated street punk with a frequent flyer card is not the sort of person you'd ask to acquire radioactive material for you.

A Bridge to the 21st Century - Unqualified Offerings now pings weblogs.com when it updates. That's supposed to enable regular readers to be alerted when there's new material here. It's all very technical and scientific, but Ginger Stampley seems to understand it.

Useful Contact Info - Much as been written about the unaccountably nameless parents who had a lawyer threaten to sue a teacher in Arizona for flunking their daughter. (See Joanne Jacobs and the Arizona Republic story she cites.) Now Natalie Solent has dug up contact information for the high school, the school district and - oh yes! - the lawyer. With long distance rates lower than ever, you might find them worth using:

Sunrise Mountain High School 623-487-5125

Peoria AZ Unified School District 623 486-6000

Attorney Stan F. Massad 623-487-8100

People at those numbers should be able to answer any questions you may have about why they do the things they do.

Spot the Traitor - No, it's not Unqualified Offerings adjunct fellow Kevin Maroney writing to another blogger. UO keeps a big tent, with big flapping flaps or whatever. Yes, it's Jose "Al Muhajir" Padilla. But in this fine and savage item, Avedon Carol's suspect list is considerably longer than that.

The Soviet Union had to pay Robert Hanssen a million bucks to spy on us for them. But even he didn't give away American secrets on television.

Read the whole thing. Note that fast-becoming-a-usual-suspect Michael Kelly plays a minor villain, which has become something of a trend. Developing...

Coming Attractions - Got good e-mails about spectrum, codenames and Johnelle Bryant; plus vague plans to respond to Brendan O'Neill's "Do you or don't you support the war and why" challenge; a mainstream Republican critique of lewrockwell.com; some thoughts on Jason Soon, Abraham Lincoln and the Know-Nothings; plus thoughts on Eve Tushnet's major piece on the Middle East and more. Of course, I'll also be working late tonight, so we'll just have to see how everything shakes out.

In other news, Natalie Solent is back, and she's been drinking.

Our Long Virtual Nightmare Is Over - More or less. Regular readers of What She Really Thinks know that this site suffered a MovableType database meltdown. The ultimate solution involved reimporting all entries. That means that the site hasn't lost any items (not even the ones it would have profited by losing...) but I suspect any previous item-specific links are now broken. So apologies to those who have recently linked to individual posts here.

Bloggage resumes on the other side of a good night's sleep.

Et Tu? - Now it's Andrew Sullivan, of no-item-specific-links-that-work.com, who claims to have "Gone Fishing?" Does anyone really believe him? Remember, blogfans, only trust political diarists who really go fishing when they say they are.

This Will Go Down UP on Your Permanent Record - For a dozen years, Unqualified Offerings took job applications from graduates of the DC public school system. It got real angry doing this, seeing the misspellings of ordinary words, the poor grammar, the pitiful inability to follow directions. As far as UO was concerned, at the very least the administrators of the school system were good prospects for a civil fraud case, and there were days it believed that the criminal fraud provisions should apply. I'm not talking about fraud perpretrated against me, the employer. I mean the fraud perpetrated against their former students. These young people were being given diplomas, a claim that they had received an education.

Yes, the experience had a lot to do with my eventual turn towards libertarianism, and no, I don't believe it was a matter of money - per capita DC schools funding is among the highest in the nation.

Today's Post contains a story about something very close to actual fraud in the DC public schools. At Wilson High School, one of the top public schools in the city, a teacher discovered that administrators were raising student grades after teachers submitted them, without consulting the teachers. This is not just iffy-sounding, it's a violation of the city's contract with the teachers' union.

Of the 250 to 300 cases that he reviewed, Martel said, he found 29 Wilson grades that appeared to have been improperly inflated. In 11 of those cases, teachers confirmed to a reporter that the grades they awarded were later boosted without their knowledge. In the other 18 cases, the teachers involved either did not return phone calls or could not be located.

Two of the changed grades are bizarre.

Wilson teacher Damian Kreske said two of his students' grades were changed in a zoology class. He said the first student came to class for only three weeks of the semester and the second student "disappeared from class the second half of the semester and never returned."

He said he gave the first student an F, which was later changed to a D, allowing the student to graduate last year. He gave the second student an I for "Incomplete," which is supposed to become an F if the student fails to finish the work. But the grade was changed to a C. That student is to graduate this year.

There may be more funny business too, including students getting credit for courses they didn't take and transfer students having grades from their old schools retroactively raised when they transfer to a new one. As they say, developing...

Whadda We Want? MINDFUL Violence! - We being US sportsfans! (Eve, you're excused from this item.) WashPost Metro columnist Marc Fisher says the reason soccer will never catch on in the states is its lack of - intellectual appeal.

During four years I spent in Germany, a bona fide soccer country, I covered the game and the fan riots that mark both victory and defeat (either outcome is an excuse for car burnings and rending of garments).

That soccer inspires deep emotion cannot be denied. But there turne out to be little tie between that passion and the deep analysis of strategy that is commonplace in American sports...

Which is not to say our sports are gentle. We like 'em plenty rough, too. But our sports do not celebrate futility as soccer does. Our sports include action on a fairly regular basis. And our sports reward rigorous study.

Cf. Oh yes! Unqualified Offerings on the intellectual virtues of American football, from January.

What about the dream of soccer promoters that all those little kids who now play the sport will grow up to be eager spectators? Fisher does not believe, Wendy:

Don't hold your breath. Soccer appeals to little kids and their parents because it's easy and safe; kids run around for an hour and go eat cookies. It's the perfect game for a generation of parents who;ve never met a safety device they didn't immediately declare a necessity. No one gets hit by a pitched ball, pops a knee on a bad pivot or breaks a bone in a tackle.

Sadly, Unqualified Offerings cannot provide you with a link to the entire article at this time. It can not presently be found on the Post's website. (Yes, this site typed the quoted material for you, its loyal readers, by hand. (Perhaps it appears there secretly, as part of a message to internet-using terrorists.) Here's the Post's Marc Fisher index page, where a link should appear in due course. Unless Big Soccer gets to them...

Radio Radio - Matt Welch links to a Kate Sullivan interview with music-industry weasel Mel Karmazin of Viacom.

Mr. Viacom is evil, evil! But I can't endorse her conglomeration is the fault of deregulation thesis:

The reason four companies control radio is because of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. For most of radio's history a company was allowed to own only two radio stations in any given "market" (one each of Am/FM), and a total of 7 stations nationwide. These laws were written to ensure diversity of ownership and broadcasting, and to protect little-guy broadcasters from the Blob.

Back when radio was invented, you see, people had this goofy concept that the airwaves were a public resource, like national forests.

The '96 Telecom Act made it possible to own eight stations in one market and an unlimited number nationwide. Overnight, radio became the playground of the fabulously wealthy, and Mom & Pop radio station owners couldn't compete against the much deeper pockets of these mega-corporations.

On a minor level, the odious rules against microbroadcasters are themselves regulations, enforced at the behest of large commercial stations and those weasels at PBS. On a major level, I can't shake the suspicion that the government's original declaration from the 20s that spectrum was a scarce resource created facts rather than reflecting them. Consider how much more efficient everything imaginable has gotten since the 20s - engines, computing devices, and yes, antennae - and ask yourself how come we still "need" .4_MHz to either side of every FM station?

I suspect that, with a sound system of property rights in wavelength, including real ownership with resale rights, there would have been an incentive to push technologies that would enable spectrum owners to subdivide and sell off their "territory," leading to MORE diversity with less regulation than we STILL have, Telecommunications Act of 1996 notwithstanding.

Incest is Best - Brendan O'Neill thinks that "There is far too much blog-on-blog linking and blog-v-blog debating, and not enough interaction with the outside world wide web." Unqualified Offerings has added him to its links list just to spite him! No, actually it has done this because a) it's been meaning to for some time; and b) his site is indispensible.

Remedial Reading Watch - Glenn Reynolds is either the least sincere man in the blogosphere or, well, he has reading problems sometimes. Check out this item from this morning:

IS ARAFAT MAKING A NUCLEAR THREAT HERE? That depends on what you mean by "disastrous explosion."

Reynolds goes on to offer the charming advice, "Just kill him. I'm with Den Beste on this, I think. He's outlived any usefulness he might have -- except perhaps as a warning to whoever comes next about what happens if you make what even seem to be nuclear threats."

This is what we might call the "airport security school" of foreign relations. It's akin to strip-searching someone because you overhear them saying "You da bomb!" in the baggage check line. Any fair - no, any competent reading of the article Reynolds links to reveals Arafat to be speaking metaphorically, and somewhat grandiosely. He is saying there will be an explosion of violence - war, riots, terrorism, what-have-you - if Israel doesn't withdraw from PA-administered territories.

Arafat may be right about this or he may be wrong. He is certainly making a thinly-veiled threat of more war in the region. But any inference of a "nuclear threat" comes so far out of left field you couldn't see the game from there, let alone meaningfully comment on it.

It's Not About the Occupation Dept. - According to Agence France-Presse, relaying a report by Israeli public television, Israel has build fifty new settler outposts in the occupied territories since Ariel Sharon's election in February 2001.

In March, Israel's left-wing Peace Now movement said there were 34 new settlements composed of 250 buildings that had been constructed in the occupied territories since February 2001.

The group conducted an aerial survey showing that most of the new sites were between 700 and 2000 meters (yards) from existing settlements.

A study published by the human rights organization B'Tselem in May said settlers control nearly 42 percent of the occupied West Bank through a strategic placement of communities and buffer zones.

The study was based on unpublished documents collected from Israeli municipal officials since September 2001.

Sharon has consistently ruled out negotiating on settlements with the Palestinians, despite objections from the Labour party, his main partner in Israel's unity government.

Some 200,000 settlers live in nearly 150 settlements across the West Bank and Gaza.

A freeze to settlement building was highlighted by the May 2001 Mitchell Committee report as one of the main confidence-building measures needed to revive political negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians.

Second Genesis - Some are impressed, some scandalized that four political aides concocted the sweeping "homeland security" reorganization in ten days. Get Donkey is scandalized because he says that's not the way it happened at all. The link is to just one of a series of GD items identifying the reorg as the Hart-Rudman Commission report with the serial number filed off. Scroll up and down for the others.

Further Reading - RGB^* Greg Pearson sends this link to a Stimson Center report, "Ataxia: The Chemical and Biological Terrorism Threat and the US Response," by Amy Smithson. I've only begun reading it, but it's fascinating. Too soon to tell if she concludes that this site is all wet in its comparatively optimistic view of so-called WMDs. If that turns out to be the case, well, whoever said the life of the mind^TM was without risk? I can always denounce her on the basis of her appearance, if necessary. Once I find out what she looks like.

^*"RGB" - Official Unqualified Offerings abbreviation for "Reader and Gaming Buddy."

80s Revival Watch - "Nerve gas found at Uzbek base" according to the Associated Press. No one has been injured and there's no evidence that the base has suffered a recent attack. Rather,

The traces are suspected to have come from chemical weapons once stored by the Soviet Union at the base, King said. The contamination was thought to be “left over from a much earlier time,” he said. Uzbekistan became independent when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

The base at Karshi Khanabad is being used as a staging area for the US war in Afghanistan now, and was likely used for the same purpose by the USSR in the old days. In those same old days, one of the big controversies was whether the Soviets were using chemical weapons in Afghanistan. The Uzbek find would be at least circumstantial evidence that they did.

Fun Fact: If you Google 'Afghanistan USSR "chemical weapons" ' the second result is the site of a UFO "researcher" with a radio show. He has a biowarfare page that references "Ken Alibek, a former deputy director of the top secret Soviet-era biowarfare program, who defected to the West." "Ken Alibek" would seem to also be Kanatjan Alibekov, referenced in "Weapons of Some Destruction" below. Small world. Or, if you're a UFO researcher, cosmos.

Second Thoughts - Rather than publish it, Unqualified Offerings should just lie down until this paranoid feeling goes away, but the more it thinks about it, the more the Johnelle Bryant interview sounds like a crock of shit. Darned if I can figure who would propound it or why, though.

Don't Go There - Over on the Illuminated Donkey, Ken Goldstein has posted a Larry King-column parody item. This is Not a Good Idea, Ken. Not Not Not. The similarity between a typical weblog and Larry King's USA Today columns is way too strong to go drawing attention to it.

Ken's comments functionality is also allowing his site to become a vector of the dire "King of America" meme, the deeply mistaken judgment that that album is Elvis Costello's best or on the short list of his best. It's easily in the bottom third of Costello's oeuvre. The lyrics are so-so, the melodies slack and mid-tempo. As for the singing, there's "caressing the vocal," and then there's "copping a feel." The difference between KOA and top-notch Costello is easy to measure: simply compare "American Without Tears," from the album, with "American Without Tears, Part II (Twilight Version)" from the outtake vehicle of your choice. The music is more taut, the singing less affected, and the lyrics astoundingly fresher and more acute. Compare:

Outside in New Orleans
the heat was almost frightening
while inside my hotel room
was freezing and unkind
On TV they prosecute
anyone who's exciting
so I put on my overcoat
and went down to find...

from the supposed "real song" ("American Without Tears"), with

December 1965 in Caracas
when Arnie LaFlamme took
his piece of the pie
Well he packed up the casino chips
the IOU and the abacus
and switched off the jukebox
in "A Fool Such as I"

from the supposed afterthought. A comparison of the complete lyrics to AWT and AWT#2 is instructive. For an aural comparison, you can currently find AWT#2 on the bonus disk that comes with the Rhino reissue of Blood and Chocolate, which by the way is a much better record than King of America and Unqualified Offerings is glad we straightened that out.

Speaking of Linking - Scotland can fairly claim to be where laissez-faire capitalism began. Now it returns in "Freedom and Whisky," run by Scotsman David Farrer. The title of the blog comes from Burns. Well it should!

F&W is emphatically not a warblog, so it makes a nice change of pace. It concentrates on British economic and political issues, with an emphasis on Scotland. Items tend to be short and direct. Check it out.

That's the Way You Do It - The unwritten commandment of the blogosphere is that thou shalt not abuse thy fellow second or third-tier blogger. (Unqualified Offerings is a third-tier blog, if anyone is keeping score.) But the fallback rule is crucial: say anything you want about someone, but at least link them while doing so. I've seen this rule violated by some bigtimers. But Diana Moon gets it right on Letter From Gotham. When in the course of an "I'm rubber and you're glue" moment she calls Jim of Objectionable Content "a fanatic and an ideologue" (enough such on both sides and peace would be at hand), she honors the Code of the Blogosphere. This genuinely matters.

Phew! Those Brits are just full of ideas! The ones in the government anyway - apparently Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Hoon suggested to the Indians that a joint UK-US military force could patrol Kashmir. Here's the good news: India quickly said forget it. No sooner said than done, India!

Let a Hundred Flowers Blog - Eve Tushnet said something important the other night at the DC blogger bash. Rhetoric is more important than political action because I'm convinced politicians do what they're forced to do by circumstance, she said, and the rhetorical context is a major component of the prevailing circumstance.

Blogs may be an inefficient mechanism for social and political change, but they're probably not as inefficient as voting, and maybe not even as inefficient as running for office.

Lifeboat Games - So what are we doing to defend the country from that handful of highly-infectious biological agents? Good question. The CDC Health Issues links to "Bioterrorism" and "Biological Agents" get you "Page Not Found" errors, presumably as a "security measure." However, if you poke around, you can find the executive summary of the "Interim Smallpox Response Plan & Guidelines." The CDC notes that there is insufficient quantity of vaccinia virus for an "indiscriminate" vaccination campaign. (Question: How much vaccine could the feds buy with the proceeds of the farm bill?) The CDC recommends a "ring vaccination" approach that focuses on citizens closest to an infected citizen, and on - healthcare workers and government employees.

1. Public health personnel in the area involved in surveillance and epidemiological data analysis and reporting whose support of these public health activities must remain unhindered

2. Logistics/resource/emergency management personnel whose continued support of response activities must remain unhindered

3. Law enforcement, fire, and other personnel involved in other non-direct patient care response support activities such as crowd control, security, law enforcement, and firefighting/rescue operations.

2. and 3. are where your mayors, city council types, congresscritters and their staffers slip into the vaccination line ahead of, well, the rest of us.

Evaluation of the potential risk for aerosol transmission and initiation of vaccination for non- direct contacts will be done by CDC, state, and local public health personnel. The decision to offer vaccination to non-direct contacts of smallpox cases will be made jointly by Federal and the State health officials.

"Non-direct contacts" = "regular folks who haven't, to that moment, come into the presence of a known smallpox sufferer."

Weapons of Some Destruction - If we're going to think straight about WMDs, we need to clarify what will and what won't serve to visit mass destruction. Once we start asking that question, chemical weapons appear to drop right off the list, and so do most germs.

Chemical weapons are creepy; don't get Unqualified Offerings wrong on that score. But in terms of lethality, eh. For instance, one of the big items in the brief against Saddam Hussein is his destruction of the Kurdish town of Halabja with chemical weapons. Reading accounts of the massacre, it appears that, while it was horrific, and certainly a war crime, it remains that

o Geographically, Halabja was almost ideally suited to attack by chemicals, with mountains to the north, east and south.

o The Iraqi air force bombarded Halabja repeatedly throughout the morning of March 17, 1988.

o One account says the Iraqi Air Force also used cluster bombs - the wording suggests that these were not chemical agents but regular explosives.

o Another claims that Iraq used artillery on the western routes out of town to prevent escape.

o The same site puts Halabja's population at 45,000.

o Casualties: 5,000 dead, 7,000 injured per that account.

Some of the injuries are horrific. Let no one mistake UO's meaning here: Halabja was not nothing. But in uniquely suitable conditions - a fishbowl, no meaningful defenses, sustained bombardment - the kill rate was 10% and the casualty rate about 25%.

It's just not possible for a terror attack to replicate those favorable conditions. Even if your real concern is Israel's, rather than America's, security, there is no chance that an Iraqi or Iranian missile attack could duplicate the key elements of concentration of the agents, duration of the assault, and foreclosure of escape routes that Iraq achieved at Halabja.

You can do at least as well flying jets into skyscrapers if you're feeling surly. Indeed, you can do a lot better - if you're a terrorist and not a large counter-insurgency force operating on your own territory.

The terror assault using chemical weapons that we know of is Aum Supreme Truth's sarin attack on the Tokyo subway. Committed ideologues, confined space, crowded conditions: 12 dead.

The body count does not compare favorably to a single truck bomb.

Unqualified Offerings suspects that determined terrorists could find a way to produce hundreds of deaths in a chemical weapons attack. But that leaves chemical terrorism well within the range of lethality from existing, non-chemical terrorist options.

Biological weapons are not so easy to dismiss. But one of the agents it looks like we can knock off the list of weapons of mass destruction is anthrax.

There are two recent anthrax incidents to consider. We know about the letter attacks in the US - a dozen or so dead, several more sick, and most of the dead older or otherwise infirm to begin with. No, it wasn't a very efficient delivery mechanism. The question is what would be better? I've seen people suggest that terrorists could pump anthrax (or chemicals) into the ventilation system of a single building, infecting almost everyone within. Well, probably, yes. As we know all too well, there are other ways to kill people in buildings, however. Again, it's destruction, and it's terror, but it's not mass destruction. The "cropduster option" may well kill people, but it's not clear you get enough concentration of the agent to infect whole cities' worth of people at once.

The other data point is the outbreak at Sverdlovsk. That was, to the best of our knowledge, an accident. A biological weapons plant vented anthrax into the atmosphere for, by one estimate, an hour and a half or so. Deaths: 64+. Dr. Kanatjan Alibekov, who headed the USSR's biological weapons program for a time after the Sverdlovsk release, speculates that had the prevailing winds been pointed toward Sverdlovsk rather than away, death rates would have been in the five-figure and maybe the six-figure range.

The claim is unavoidably speculative, and over and over we see advance casualty estimates overstate actual casualties by as much as an order of magnitude. Two things to keep in mind about "speculative Sverdlovsk": the delivery mechanism, an entire factory full of anthrax upwind of a nearby city, would be hard for terrorists or an enemy government to replicate; also, you have to take into account 1970s-era Soviet healthcare versus 21st-century US healthcare. What's more, the Soviets had to keep the nature of the trouble secret in 1979. One likes to think, at least, that we would not be operating under that burden.

You can kill people with anthrax. It doesn't look like you can kill more people with anthrax than you can with exploding vehicles.

Smallpox has some promise as a genuine WMD, if you can deliver it. It's very infectious, which anthrax isn't. I think the estimates of as many as 100 million deaths in the event of an attack using smallpox in the US are the usual wild overestimates by parties with an interest in hyping the numbers. I suspect the country would quickly institute effective countermeasures to limit the spread of infection. I also think that those countermeasures would involve some nigh-ruinous economic costs. Worst-case scenario: a couple of million dead and many billions of dollars in damages.

That's pretty massive destruction.

Then there are nukes. The least you can say about the sort of nuclear weapons one can really imagine terrorists getting ahold of - the so-called "container bombs" that would come into a port city with regular freight, and then blow up - is that it would be more lethal than available vehicular explosives (truck bombs, planes full of jet fuel, like that). The Hiroshima bomb killed 200,000. It was air-detonated, which a terror-nuke probably wouldn't be. Estimated death rate for a terror-nuke: five figures, six if everything breaks their way.

That's also pretty massive destruction.

Note: Some of the preceding is just teasing out some political implications of the famous "Red Thomas e-mail," The "Real" Deal about Nuclear, Bio, and Chemical Attacks. I am saying that "weapons of mass destruction" is on the way to being a voodoo phrase, and that the enthusiasts of allegedly prophylactic war use it for the same reason left-wing pressure groups invoke "the children" - as a political soporific. The phrase is being used to anesthetize the critical faculties of the body politic, when our critical faculties are what the problem most calls for.

Aside from counterterrorism and national defense in general, our real "weapons of mass destruction" problem is nukes and a handful of highly-infectious biological agents.

One-Liner of the Week - Considering the late-arriving shinbone of Chandra Levy, Gene Healy writes:

Why do I get the feeling that the D.C. police force would have trouble finding porn on the internet?

Wobbly Watch - Ginger "Content is Queen" Stampley has added an item of visual interest to What She Really Thinks. Shame!

Playing Catchup - Unqualified Offerings was going to draw everyone's attention to Charles Dodgson's acute comments on the Bush security reorganization plan. But everybody else and his brother have already done that. Advantage: Electrolite!

Speaking of Electrolite, PNH has yet another indispensible, pithy item there this morning, one that suggests that he is in New York, but not of New York:

Both Jarvis and Yglesias give Rowley points, albeit grudgingly, but it's hard to avoid being struck by the attitude that sees "midwestern" and "midlevel" as infra dig. From here it looks like the problem is that the people in charge of our security think pretty much exactly like Jeff Jarvis and Matthew Yglesias--which is to say, like a well-connected East Coast media maven and a smart Harvard undergrad. For people like them, or like Robert Mueller and George Tenet, someone like Coleen Rowley is and always will be the sort of person you ignore. After all, she's a drone. Single-minded in a weirdly, you know, unironic way. All in all, midlevel: the very definition of "a cog." Okay, sure, maybe she could accidentally know something important, but how could she possibly have any real big-picture insight?

Jarvis and Yglesias are good guys, but (wittingly or unwittingly, I can't quite tell) they're offering a window into exactly why we're where we are.

Rowley has done pretty well for an inconvenient woman in a scandal though. It's been, what, a week now? and nobody has yet attempted to dismiss her on the basis of her looks.

I've a Feeling We're Not in Montgomery County Anymore - What's one hint that Garrett County, in far western Maryland, does not think the way the Baltimore-DC suburb-Annapolis triangle of the Free State does?

"Ollie North Road" in Oakland, MD.

One Man's Terrorist... - During intra-establishment schmoozing yesterday - excuse Unqualified Offerings! During FBI Director Robert Mueller's lunch with Washington Post editors yesterday, Mueller spoke at length about the Moussaoui case and the evidence available before... you know. Let's look at one specific item from the story:

In her letter to Mueller, Rowley wrote that the French reports "confirmed his affiliations with radical fundamentalist Islamic groups and activities connected to Osama bin Laden." She argued that agents had enough evidence in hand "within days" of Moussaoui's arrest to provide probable cause for a warrant.

Headquarters officials, however, insist that the French information detailed no direct ties between Moussaoui and any designated terrorist group, a requirement for obtaining a FISA warrant. The Chechen rebels, while believed to have links with bin Laden, were not considered a terrorist group by the State Department.

As it happens, the Chechen rebels have long been considered terrorist groups by the Russians. Not that we would listen to them. In fact, in the aftermath of the September massacres, there has been much chin-pulling by sober commentators about how the United States must not "let" the Russians use the excuse of a "war on terrorism" as an excuse to violate Chechen rights. Al Qaeda support for Chechen rebel groups has been pretty well established, but then, al Qaeda support for the Kosovo Liberation Army was pretty clear too, and we fought an entire war on behalf of the KLA only three years ago.

We are pretty persnickety about whom we allow other countries to designate as terrorists. In this case, fastidiousness about applying the label to Chechen rebel groups seems to have been a factor preventing the issuance of the FISA warrant to search Moussaoui's effects.

It matters because of some of the talk I heard last night at DC Blogfest. We would only conquer bad countries that attempt to acquire "weapons of mass destruction," bad per some recognized index of aggressiveness and authoritarianism, including support for "terrorists." I argued last night, and the news this morning only reinforces the view, that the notion that we could derive and apply a standard of "preemption" that would be fair, just and prudent, and recognized as such by others, is a fantasy. A dangerous fantasy, both morally and practically.

In the Moussaoui case, the very definition of "terrorist groups" was hostage to the diplomatic imperatives of the US foreign policy bureaucracy. Any program of prophylactic war will be hostage to the agendas and biases of the institutions charged with carrying out the policy and the advocacy organs with the greatest enthusiasm for using military force.

The Awful Truth - Andrew Sullivan links to an ABCNews interview with Johnelle Bryant, manager of a Florida office of the US Department of Agriculture, in which she recounts Mohammed Atta's attempts to get a loan from her office for "a cropduster" in the spring of 2000. ABC News reports that, according to captured al Qaeda bastard Abu Zubaydah, the original plan was to pack a small plane with explosives and use it as a bomb.

Sullivan has one thing to say about the interview. Unqualified Offerings has a couple. Sullivan:

Sorry, but I found this ABC News interview mind-blowing. Mohammed Atta might as well have worn a sandwich board saying "I AM A TERRORIST WITH WILD STARING EYES AND WANT TO RENT AN AIRPLANE!!!" I guess hindsight is easy - but sometimes it's also obvious.

Unqualified Offerings can see where Sullivan is coming from, based on the text of the story. For instance:

"At first, he refused to speak with me," said Bryant, remembering that Atta called her "but a female." Bryant explained that she was the manager, but he still refused to conduct business with her. Ultimately, she said, "I told him that if he was interested in getting a farm-service agency loan in my servicing area, then he would need to deal with me."

Throughout the interview, he continued to refer to Bryant as "but a female," and Bryant said, "He would say it with disgust."

And

When Bryant explained that there was an application process, Atta became "very agitated." He thought the loan would be in cash, and that he would have no trouble obtaining it to purchase an aircraft.

He also remarked about the lack of security in the building, pointing specifically to a safe behind Bryant's desk. "He asked me what would prevent him from going behind my desk and cutting my throat and making off with the millions of dollars in that safe," said Bryant, who explained that there was no money in the safe because loans are never given in cash, and also that she was trained in karate.

And (BIG text block coming!)

Before leaving Bryant's office, Atta became fixated with an aerial photo of Washington that was hanging on her office wall.

"He just said that it was one of the prettiest, the best he'd ever seen of Washington," she said, remembering that he was impressed with the panoramic view that captured all the monuments and buildings in one photograph, pointing specifically to the Pentagon and the White House.

"He pulled out a wad of cash," she said, "and started throwing money on my desk. He wanted that picture really bad."

Bryant indicated that the picture was not for sale, and he threw more money down.

"His look on his face became very bitter at that point," Bryant remembers. "I believe he said, 'How would America like it if another country destroyed that city and some of the monuments in it,' like the cities in his country had been destroyed?"

Atta also expressed an interest in visiting New York, specifically the World Trade Center, and asked Bryant about security there. He inquired about other American cities, including Phoenix, Los Angeles, Seattle and Chicago. Prompted by a souvenir she had on her desk, he also expressed interest in the Dallas Cowboys' football stadium, mentioning that the team was "America's team" and the stadium had a "hole in the roof."

Atta also talked about life in his country. "He mentioned al Qaeda, he mentioned Osama bin Laden," said Bryant. "I didn't know who Osama bin Laden was … He could have been a character on Star Wars for all I knew."

He boasted about the role that they would one day play. "He said this man would someday be known as the world's greatest leader," she said.

Bryant and Atta shook hands on his way out. "I told him I wished him luck with his endeavor," remembered Bryant.

One could imagine Dr. Evil sitting before Ms. Bryant, chewing his pinky and asking for a loan to buy "death ray parts," and Ms. Bryant explaining that USDA couldn't finance death-ray construction until the applicant produced an exterminator's license, but you might want to try the bank downstairs and have a nice day. Unqualified Offerings can nevertheless sympathize with Bryant, because it used to manage retail stores, and you see some strange rangers when you work with the public. This next part does seem a little hard to miss, though:

But that wasn't the only time she saw Atta. He returned again, slightly disguised with glasses. He claimed to be an accountant for Marwan Al-Shehhi, who was with him, and said he wanted $500,000 to buy land for a sugar-cane farm.

Look,when embittered customers return to you in disguise, that's a sign.

I have to say, I am forced to wonder just how much of this interview is, well, true. Now you'll class me with the conspiracy theorists, but it's not like that necessarily. Memory is an active process, as Elizabeth Loftus has shown us. Could Bryant's memory have mutated substantially over the months since her encounter? I can't come up with anyone who would benefit by her putting this story around if it were false. So it's either a serious misrecollection, or it's largely true.

Let's assume it's largely true then. Along with other information we have, it suggests something at once dismaying and heartening: these people aren't that good. Remember "The Big Wedding" story of a couple of weeks ago. The Public Nuisance usefully pointed out that the al Qaeda code name practically screamed "Large Martyrdom Operation."

Unqualified Offerings should have noted at the time that the choice of code name was poor tradecraft on al Qaeda's part. A professional intelligence outfit will make sure its operational codenames are bureaucratic and uninformative. "MK/Ultra" - that's a code name.

We have every reason to believe that Mohammed Atta was one of al Qaeda's stars, and that the ringleaders of "The Big Wedding" were the class of the outfit. The September massacres were, as al Qaeda operations go, unprecedented in terms of daring, scale and, I would wager, complexity. You're not going to send Abu Shmoe to run that. And yet, if Bryant's account is to be believed, Atta couldn't even avoid yakking about his covert "employer" during the course of operational business. That's stunningly inept. The codename is insecure too, so the problem goes above Atta.

This implies that the level of support and training by professional intelligence agencies - good ones - must be even lower than we think. It suggests that al Qaeda's best and brightest are neither particularly bright nor all that terrific. The dismaying thing is that our manifold professional security organs couldn't stop these clowns from committing the biggest war crime the United States ever suffered. The heartening thing is that a group no better than this can be beaten. More importantly, a group no better than this that does get ahold of nasty germs or glowing bombs should tip its hand in any number of ways ahead of time.

After Party-Action Report - Last night was, more or less, DC Blogfest II, instigated this time by the CATO mafia of bloggers. It was much larger and noisier than Midatlantic Blogfest. Repeaters from the first event included Eve Tushnet, Dave Tepper, Will Wilkinson, Unqualified Offerings and Mrs. Offering. There were a lot of bloggers there from what is known locally as the "Atomic Billiards crowd," a group that tends more toward personal diaries than political ones. They apparently imagine that people care about their, um, fishing trips and, uh, party-going.

Dave Tepper pointed out that he's largely made the transition from political diarist to personal, because he figured he'd said what he has to say about politics already, and also that readers seem to like the more personal items. (His useful item on market fragmentation in the music biz, though, mixes personal reflection with economic analysis.)

Eve Tushnet brought her Yalie posse, Sara Russo and Shamed Dogan. I also got the chance to meet Brian Kelly of Libertyblog, who does pro bono work for the Republican Liberty Caucus and bore my rantings about the uselessness of the Republican Party with tremendous grace.

Thanks to Brink Lindsay, Radley Balko, Julian Sanchez and Gene Healy for organizing the event. (UO only wishes Leon Hadar had dropped by.) The venue, Rendezvous, gets only about a quarter of a golf clap: despite the fact that blogfest was pretty much their entire clientele that night, and it was a group of yakkers rather than dancers, they refused to turn the music down.

After-Action Report - Dialog with a gaming buddy:

GB: How are the fish?
UO: Disgustingly healthy.

Here follows a brief list of excuses for this site's lack of success on the North Branch of the Potomac, Maryland's avowed answer to the Snake River in Montana.

1) Flood. All the rain the I-95 corridor of Maryland and Virginia has not been getting, Western Maryland and West Virginia have. The river was high and muddy.

2) Statism. Hey, these are government trout! Naturally they will do everything in their power to frustrate me.

3. Timing. Tuesday afternoon I lost the prime fishing hours of 6-8pm because I ran out of line. The North Branch is a stone-bottomed river, and its flow is so fast, and has washed down so much sand and dirt from the bottom, that the stones form a labyrinth of nooks and crannies that is two or three layers deep. Consequently it's very easy to hang up a lure on the bottom and very hard to bounce it free. I lost literally every lure that was not a shallow-running plug - spinners, spoons, deep-running plugs, even jigs specifically-designed to bounce happily along rocky bottoms. Each lost lure meant a certain amount of lost line, too, until I reached the point where I had only a few rod-lengths of line left. And no spare line in the car (poor planning). So I had to cut Tuesday's fishing short to reprovision. Then I was late getting started Wednesday because of, um, sloth. Didn't hit the river until after 8am.

3) Ignorance. Experts recommend you hire a guide your first times on the North Branch. UO didn't do that.

The fishing itself was saved by Deep Creek Lake - the few towns along the North Branch are small and have no lodging. So I ended up at the Lakeside Motor Court Tuesday night, and took about a half hour at dusk to cast from the motel docks. And caught a lively 16" smallmouth on my ultralight rod, which was quite the adventure. This fish had a spouse or business partner or sycophant fish that followed it all the way to the dock, presumably asking, "Where the hell are you going?" the whole time. Presumably my fish had a chance to explain after I released him.

Deep Creek Lake is gorgeous, but I've almost always been there during prime July and August - prime summer vacation season, but the worst time of year to try to fish a popular lake. Once the lake warms up and school lets out, the pleasure boat traffic becomes brutal.

The North Branch itself is also, I can confidently state, one of the prettiest places on the face of the earth. And I will have my revenge. Oh yes.

I'll Never Lie to You - From time to time one weblogger or another has announced that they've "Gone Fishing." Have they really? Not at all. They're just speaking figuratively. What have they got to hide?

Unqualified Offerings really is going fishing (weather permitting), and will be back Thursday morning.

Don't Miss Item of the Day - Matt Welch is not a proponent of Endless War, but he has a (ferociously entertaining) brief against Dubya anyway:

To make an inappropriate basketball analogy, Bush's rhetorical flourishes are starting to feel like Vlade Divac flops -- very convincing at times, pointing toward some incontrovertible truths (Shaq bludgeons people with his left shoulder, and there are a lot of "evil folks" out there worth defeating). But at some point, the gap between the performance and the actual reality is so obviously large, Vlade/Bush "loses credibility with the refs," as stoner Bill Walton says. In other words, the exaggerated motions, instead of convincing you of the veracity of the deed in question, actually suggests the direct opposite. By the end of the Sacramento-L.A. series, Divac couldn't get any calls at all. By the end of this month, I predict, if Bush can't square his rhetoric with his offensive relationship with the House of Saud, if he continues to deliver pious lectures about free trade & Fast Track Authority while setting tariff-reduction back 10 years, if his administration continues engaging in tawdry ass-covering about Sept. 11 culpability, then many people who were predisposed to cutting the man some slack after Sept. 11 will start asking the metaphorical question: "Where's Shaq?"

Which reminds Unqualified Offerings that it was just plain wrong in predicting a Kings victory Sunday night, proving once again that, while I may know football, I don't know jack about hoops.

Another Thing I Hate About You - "What's the bug up Broder's ass in the first place?" asks Avram Grumer of Pigs & Fishes. He then answers.

It’s a bug I’ve taken to calling Insufficient Frowney Face.

Certain subjects in our culture are designated as necessarily somber; no civilized person is supposed to talk about them without a somber, respectful tone and a frown pasted firmly into place. The mandatory frowney face — absence of this when talking about the officially somber subject places one beyond the pale of civilization.

Certain modes of expression in our culture are designated as inherently anti-somber. Not just humor, but most forms of fantasy, no matter what narrative tone is adopted, are considered to necessarily lack any degree of frowney face. So a fantasy movie or TV show that includes designated somber subjects is therefore guilty of insufficient frowney face. So two of the most powerful items in our cultural toolkit — humor and fantasy — are officially off-limits if you’re trying to deal publicly with a national tragedy.

Meanwhile, Eve Tushnet gets even more vexed over Broder's "innocent America" than Unqualified Offerings did:

I HATE this cliche. I hate how America didn't lose its innocence with slavery--or the removal of the Cherokee--or the Civil War--or the World Wars--or Hiroshima and Nagasaki--but a pretty president pulls a Lincoln and suddenly America's lost her virginity? What kind of blinkered, privileged, everything-everyone-hates-about-the-Boomers perspective is this? C'mon.

This morning, it occurred to Unqualified Offerings that there was at least one passage of Broder's piece it had failed to jeer at and felt remorseful. It will now attempt to rectify that failing. Broder:

Actually, it is two movies in one -- part Andy Hardy and part "RoboCop 3."

The Andy Hardy part is a sweet, sentimental story about an awkward teenager and his feelings for the aunt and uncle who are raising him and for the girl next door. The other part is where someone should have asked: Do we really want to do this?

Unqualified Offerings: You can just imagine what Broder would have to say about the "Andy Hardy part" - awkward teenager gets the power to strike back at the popular kids who torment him and uses it - if Spiderman had come out eight months after Columbine.

More From Nobilis - One of the great things about the game is the many epigraphs author R. Sean Borgstrom has scattered throughout the rulebook in sidebars. These are "excerpts" from works that do not exist in our world but supposedly do exist in the world of the game. (Very Borges. And that's a good thing.) A particularly delightful example is the very first example on the fan site Borgstrom started.

Of all the epigraphs in the book, the one Unqualified Offerings most commends to the attention of its readers is this one:

Once, a man was so well-loved that he set the fields ablaze and the
peasants didn't mind.

Then he killed all the animals, and gave his folk dust to eat, and they didn't mind.

Then he dirtied the water with blood from his wars, and they didn't mind.

Then they tortured him slowly to death on the Stone Wheel, and when his heirs asked the peasants why, they said, "We thought he liked that sort of thing."

- from Parables for Our Modern Age, by Jackie Robinson

The applicability of this epigraph to current events is left as an exercise to the reader.

You can buy Nobilis online at Wizard's Attic.

Story of the Week so far is the censorship of literary passages on the New York State Regents Exams, as reported in Sunday's New York Times.

Ms. DeFabio said that as a result of an objection recently received from an author, the department had decided to use ellipses in future exams. She also said she thought it worthwhile that the department consider marking passages that were altered, but did not believe that it was necessary to ask authors' permission to change their work.

One passage was derived from Frank Conroy's memoir, "Stop-Time." The changes include replacing "hell" with "heck" in one sentence and excising references to sex, religion, nudity and potential violence (in the form of the declared intent of two boys to kill a snake) that are essential to an understanding of the passage.

The best blogging on this story so far comes from Patrick Nielsen Hayden. (Andrew Sullivan also weighs in, not that one can link to it.) As a former student of Regents' College (now, apparently, Excelsior College), New York State's acclaimed distance learners program, Unqualified Offerings is especially chagrined.

It should surprise no one that the article contains several quotes by NY Education Department officials, but not one expression of regret or contrition. The article says that many of the affected authors will hold a press conference today.

That Oughtta Work - Jim Hoagland, who parrots the conventional wisdom of the foreign policy elite as reliably as David Broder parrots the corresponding consensus on domestic policy, has an idea for preventing a major, possibly nuclear, war in South Asia.

Hot preemption has been a necessary corrective in Afghanistan and the West Bank. But anti-terror strikes must not become a springboard for settling old, existential scores in the Asian subcontinent. [Okay, why? - UO] American, British and other international pressure to shut off infiltration by Pakistani-controlled forces -- now -- and to get India to demobilize along that frontier is a small price to pay for avoiding that outcome. But time for diplomacy is melting away.

Unqualified Offerings is a dove, okay? But what is this "pressure" that Hoagland thinks will convince the Pakistani government - all of it, both its public and clandestine organs - to "shut off infiltration by Pakistani-controlled forces," which is to say, give up the dream of attaining all of Kashmir? Here's the thing: Pakistan really cares about Kashmir. They think about it even when we're not thinking about them. Even Pakistan's liberals approach Kashmir as a "blood and soil" issue. The conservatives add religion and see it as the object of Holy War. (They have a name for that kind of thing in Islam. It's very important to them. You could look it up.)

The likely dynamic at work is that Pakistan has stepped up support for Kashmiri violence because of the cooperation it has extended to the US and Britain recently, on its western flank. To the extent that Pervez Musharraf's cooperation against al-Qaeda has been sincere, he exposes his right flank to, well, the Islamofascists - in the ISI, the military and the madrassas. Approving or merely allowing increased covert action in Kashmir becomes Musharraf's way of demonstrating to the hardliners that he's not a sellout.

You can see what giving in to "American, British and other international pressure" would do to that strategy.

So: Kashmir matters to Pakistan as a whole. Kashmir is crucial to Musharraf's political survival and, military governments being military governments, likely his biological survival as well. What's left? Oh yes, Hoagland's imagined carrot: getting India to demobilize along the frontier.

Indian demobilization prevents an Indian invasion, yes. But it doesn't solve Kashmir. India is the status quo power in the Himalayas. It has what it wants already. Pakistan wants what it hasn't got. A demobilization that freezes the current territorial partition is India's win and Pakistan's defeat. If demobilization just gives Pakistan the opportunity to get back to infiltratin' and supportin' then India rushes back in pretty quick and we're back where we started.

Pakistan might accept a demobilization if one of those dreary conferences to "settle the status" of Kashmir came along with it. But India won't. That's not what status-quo powers do.

So all the "international pressure" in the world seems beside the point. Unless - David Broder take note - Hoagland means "pressure" like one of those rooms supervillains have, where the walls close slowly in on the occupants, threatening to crush them if they don't do the villain's bidding.

That might do it.

To Speak up and Remove all Doubt - If you still weren't convinced of the merits of Spiderman: the Movie, even after Unqualified Offerings detailed its virtues and, as a bonus, explained its relevance to The Issues of Our Day, demur no longer. Senescent dumbass David Broder (note: This is not going to be one of those "thoughtful" pieces for which this blog is known) not only dislikes it, he worries about it. His 16 column-inches of pursemouthed disapproval appears in today's Post under the scary hedder, "Web of Violence." Why does he do this? No, it's not to remind readers of Raymond Chandler's immortal quip about "old ladies of both sexes, and neither sex." That just sort of happens. Broder thinks it's all just too painful.

I was appalled -- first, that such a film had been released eight months after suicidal hijackers had flown airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and, second, that so many of my neighbors -- people whose judgment and standards I would usually never question -- thought Columbia Pictures and Hollywood had served up great entertainment in this no-longer-comic comic-book tale.

I was there because the most reliable movie critic I know, my 13-year-old grandson, Daniel, had recommended "Spider-Man" to me. Half the people in the theater for this PG-13 rated film were his age or younger. That did not make me feel any better.

It so appalls Broder that his neighbors have a better sense of proportion than he does that he doesn't even notice how self-refuting his complaint gets. Kids tend to be less attuned to the news than adults and more resilient. The average 12-and-under-American will have been far less traumatized than 13-and-older Americans like David Broder and Unqualified Offerings. So to the extent Spiderman is supposed to evoke post-traumatic stress syndrom in our fragile American psyches, a higher proportion of children in the audience is better than a lower proportion. Tough little bastards, our youth!

In 1962, when the first Spider-Man comic appeared, the notion of making his alter ego a New York City kid was unobjectionable. We were an innocent country then, not yet familiar with assassinations, urban riots and terrorist attacks. Putting fantasy into a real-world setting seemed a cool idea.

Now, with all that behind us and documentaries showing the mayhem of 9/11 appearing on CBS and HBO, simulated violence in New York is a lot less defensible.

Oh please. Not this "innocent country" crap again. Dave. Boobalah! You may have been innocent. The country was not innocent! Heaven knows New York City was not innocent. Paleocon social critic Thomas Fleming of Chronicles once opined that it was all over, morals-wise, for the Big Apple by 1800. (Note: America wasn't innocent in 1800 either.) And Dave, if you read any of those comics instead of just having a research assistant look up Spiderman's creation date for you, you'd know that that comic and others dealt with those assassinations and urban riots while they were going on! Why? We'll get to that.

The sheer bizarreness of Broder's claim that somehow the calamity, the outrage that was the September massacres makes it "less defensible" to make a superhero's alter ego a "New York City kid" shows just how completely he fails to understand where superheroes come from and why they attract us.

But there are long minutes where the demented villain -- a corporate mogul, not a Middle Eastern terrorist -- is flying his jet-powered aerial sled through the canyons of New York office towers, blowing out windows, cracking walls, crashing cornices onto terrorized pedestrians and causing the kind of chaos we saw, as Morgenstern said, all too recently.

The heroine perches on a shattered balcony afraid to jump. When she finally lets go, in a moment painfully evocative of the World Trade Center jumpers, Spider-Man is there to grab her. Would that it were so.

Yes, you dolt! Would that it were fucking so! It's so simple that even a respected major media columnist with decades of tenure ought to be able to understand it: We don't crave heroes to defend us from the things that don't threaten us. Does David Broder think that Bob Kane had an instant hit with Batman because those innocent Americans of the thirties and forties didn't fear urban gangland crime? Would Broder please, then, explain film noir? Does he think Superman caught on because those same Americans weren't anxious about technology, space and scientific progress -sources, not just of Superman, but of so many of the menaces Superman combatted?

Superheroes honor our fears. What's uncanny is the extent to which a movie completed before 9/11 so eerily honors our fears after that awful day. Here are some words you'd think Broder could have fit into his sixteen inches somewhere: catharsis, irony, bittersweet.

This is the point where you might expect Unqualified Offerings to say something macho like, "If I ever start sounding so stupid, put a bullet in my head." Forget that! If I ever start sounding so stupid, give me a sinecure at a major daily with a matching salary and too much face time on theoretically-respectable television. So long as none of you actually listen to me, there will be no harm done.

I thought about the conversation with a child psychologist in Williamsburg, Va., who explained that the young people she sees in her practice are so accustomed to high-speed violent confrontations on TV and in the movies they watch that they almost literally cannot stay calm enough to read or study or sit in a classroom.

"Spider-Man" would not be "a hoot" to her.

And Raymond Chandler could tell you why!

SturdierPost.Com Dept. - My, but the Washington Post's columnist page is a rich source of material today! Any libertarian blogger worth the name should be able to get several items out of it, especially if that blogger happens to be feeling chatty.

First off, the always reliable Mary McGrory, from the assisted-living wing of liberal punditry. Her column is about, well, that's the part that people will misunderstand. She talks about government lawyers and Coleen Rowley and Robert Mueller and George Tenet, and the way the government failed to stop actual terrorists before the fact while detaining possible non-terrorists afterward. Orrin Judd takes out after McGrory for the cognitive dissonance of blaming the FBI for not aggressively detaining terror suspects before 9/11 AND for aggressively detaining terror suspects after 9/11. This just shows, I am afraid, that Judd completely misunderstood the point of McGrory's column, as seen in this passage:

I know it is risky -- and no end presumptuous -- to speak for the dead. But I am tempted beyond my strength by a coincidence. The first awarding of the Elliot Richardson Prize for excellence in public service, in honor of the peerless public servant from Boston, occurred at a moment of explosive revelations about current government lawyers. Richardson's fourth and last Cabinet post was attorney general. He quit rather than fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox -- and saved the nation.

I feel sure my old friend Elliot Richardson would salute Coleen Rowley, the general counsel of the Minnesota FBI office who blew the whistle on the constipated thinking of her superiors.

McGrory's core concern in this column is to make sure everyone knows that she was Elliott Richardson's friend. Can Orrin Judd deny it?

Ain't No Dude Without a Task Before Him - Over on AintNoBadDude, Brian Linse wrote:

After reading the memo from FBI agent Rowley, it is impossible to imagine that the American people will continue to have any faith in the agencies that are tasked with protecting us from terrorism. The truly upsetting thing, however, is that President Bush still does seem to have faith in them.

Brian, Dude! The next step is to realize that "the agencies that are tasked with protecting us from terrorism" are not, fundamentally, different in character and competence from the agencies charged with protecting us from risk, destitution and bad hair days, - to wit, the organs of the Welfare State.

I don't bring this up merely to sound like Perry de Havilland. (I just can't help sounding like Perry de Havilland.) I bring it up because it's past time that intelligent folks like you began the hard and, I daresay crucial, work of imagining what a non-statist liberalism would look like.

Try Try Again - Reason recently ran a parody of NRO's The Corner that wasn't, um, funny. This one is. (Via Electrolite.)

Busy as a Bee - It's a canard to argue that people like Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz are nothing but Israeli stooges. No, Paul Wolfowitz wants to run the whole darn world:

In a subtle change of wording U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz on Wednesday stated unambiguously Washington's position on the issue of Taiwan independence.

Briefing reporters in Washington ahead of his attendance in Singapore at an Asian security conference sponsored by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), Wolfowitz stated "we're opposed to Taiwan independence."

You expect Republicans to kibitz on matters Asian, of course, especially as they touch on the Chinese. But you sure don't expect them to punk slap Taiwan. Before Osama elbowed his way to the front of the line, China was the preferred rivalry the National Greatness types hoped to gin up into the organizing principle of US policy. So what happened? Oh:

Speculation has emerged among conservative commentators that during Hu's visit the Bush administration sought and gained Beijing's cooperation in the next phase of the U.S.-led war on terror ¡X namely military action in Iraq. In return, there have been suggestions that Washington may have agreed not to irritate Beijing over Taiwan, leading to the current toned-down rhetoric and weak U.S. support for the island in its recent World Health Organization (WHO) bid.

With respect to Iraq, Wolfowitz stated that while no decision had yet been made about possible military action, the United States was firmly committed to tackling the menace posed by countries that sponsor terrorism and seek to acquire weapons of mass destruction. "As he (President Bush) said in the State of the Union message, that's not something we can continue living with forever," said Wolfowitz.

For his part, Hu was said to have returned home satisfied with U.S. support for Beijing's "one China" policy and assurances of not supporting Taiwan independence. Hu was also able to secure the pledge of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that Washington and Beijing would work toward renewed military-to-military exchanges that were curtailed following the EP-3 incident over Hainan Island in April 2001.

Democrats grumble that George W. Bush "wasn't really elected." But it's worse than that. In a weird way, the US seems like it's being run by Saddam Hussein. The extent to which this Mesopotamian pissant, at best a regional headache, has come to dominate our national life is nothing short of dumbfounding. Did I miss some abdication ceremony?

More NBA - The irony is that while the NBA's unfathomable refereeing is the worst thing about the sport, its unfathomable salary cap is probably the best. Nobody understands how it works - I doubt there are a dozen journalists in the country that could really explain it; heck, I suspect a minority of most team administrators could tell you how it works. I figure there's a two-man shop in the league office that does the whole thing in an Excel sheet with incomprehensible links "to another workbook. Do you want to update those links now?" One of them will produce pie charts on request. Sure hope they don't root for any specific team!

But however it works, the NBA has reached the Holy Grail of professional salary structures: The players get paid; the owners cap expenses; the rosters hit what I would argue is the "sweet spot" of stability. Trades are few, but they happen. (Both Sacramento and New Jersey owe a lot of their success this season to a single smart trade apiece - for Mike Bibby in Sacramento's case and, for New Jersey, Jason Kidd.) Players retire, players get drafted, occasionally they get cut. A handful switch teams during free agency. However, rosters seem to turn over less each season than they do in the NFL or MLB. While the occasional team attempts to completely rebuild, you don't see the ubiquitous roster overhauls that characterize the NFL offseason for almost every team in that league.

Basketball has cleverly structured their cap so that a free agent can almost always make significantly more money re-signing with his current team than switching. For that reason and that reason alone, Chris Webber stayed in Sacramento. For that reason and that reason alone, the Kings, if they advance to the finals Sunday, will do it the old-fashioned way - by having worked to become incrementally better than the incumbent champions over time. You don't get that in football any more. Instead you get a random reshuffling of the talent level and a sui generis season every year.

I'll take basketball's talent management system over football's any day. If only the sport's other problems - a pointless grind of a regular season; officiating seemingly intended to inspire paranoia - didn't largely blow the deal.

Advantage: Random Reminiscences? - Mike "Epoch" Sullivan has a game-oriented weblog called "Random Reminiscences" rather than "I Can't Be Bothered to Provide Item-Specific Permalinks." In that weblog he claims to have hated Netscape 4 longer than Unqualified Offerings has! Ah but do you hate it as much, Mike? That is the question. Does Mike have anything to say that matches "It's the 8-track of browsers" for pith and vinegar? Call UO Eve Tushnet, but this suggests a contest: Submit your own brief bit of vituperation against Netscape 4.x. Unqualified Offerings will print the best here, guaranteeing the winner fame, fortune and honor. It says so here.

More Hard Thoughts About Iraq - Selenously psuedonymous Diana Moon disdains Arabs and the diplomats who love them. But she says an arab-loving diplomat offers the most insight into the dynamics of US Iraq policy.

The Trial - Over on Ideas, Etc., Kevin Holtsberry complains about the officiating in (what is now) last night's Lakers-Kings game. Hey, he's right! Aside from an evident bias toward the Lakers, it's hard to see any logic behind the way the game was called. (The more mild-mannered may prefer to call it a bias toward the home team.) NBA officiating is so bizarre, when not downright suspicious, that I just can't enjoy the sport the way I'd like to. I've watched less of the playoffs this year than any year in the last five. It wears on one. (No, of course I don't watch regular season NBA games. Do I look immortal? Life is precious.)

It occurs to me that in its sheer unfathomability, NBA officiating perfectly matches NBA financial rules. To pull a Paglia (quote myself):

Basketball's cap is so complex that no one even tries to explain it - you find any number of football articles explaining, at least on summary level, the effect of this player's bonus acceleration or that player's roster incentive on the team's cap number. No basketball article says more than "salary cap restrictions prevent/require Team X from [blank]."

The question becomes, is there any aspect of the sport that is intelligible. It's not the tattoos...

Anyway, Kings win on Sunday, as Kevin says. In Sacramento, some of the calls and non-calls will go the other way. Oh, and congrat's to Ken Goldstein's beloved Nets.

Small Emergency Backup Blog - In all the excitement, Unqualified Offerings has gotten locked out of its own blog. Since posting a brief item on Tuesday, UO has been unable to log in to Movable Type with the same login that has worked for months now. (Recall that UO has other blogs.) Weird. Top minds are working on the problem. In the meantime, you get the old look because this is the old tool - this site had not deleted its blogger account yet, so what the heck. It's retro. It's the blog equivalent of a throwback uniform. What doesn't appear on the main page are the MT-published posts from Monday-Thursday. However, they're available on the new May archives page.

UPDATE: Thanks, as usual, to Kathy Kinsley, Unqualified Offerings has successfully recovered its password and resecured its site. We return you to your regularly-scheduled blog.