Poetry Saturday - [This week's poem actually deals with a libertarian red meat issue. I was very happy that the Hudson Review chose to publish this (in 1998), as it flouted my assumptions about what even the best sort of New York magazine would print. The actual visit took place in January 1996, when my friend Bruce Fleming (half the graphic genius behind The Jackie Starlight Homepage) and I went looking for some sun and ended up instead on what we came to call The Texas Carnage Tour. And yes, there apparently are plans for a "real museum."]

How the Ground Lies

Hazards Here, the sign says: Broken Glass,
Deep Water, Open Pits, Sharp Metal, Nails,
Rubble Piles, Unmarked Washouts, Wildlife.
ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK, in block letters.

We enter, but we might as well be gods
for all that anything can harm us here.
Just as we took the farm road east from Waco
we'll take it back again, no worse for wear,
having bestowed three dollars on the squatter
who calls herself a bishop. She keeps to her shack
but offers us toilet paper for the outhouse;
is sorry that today she can't sell pamphlets.
"Of course," I say. "It's Saturday." Her sabbath.

What are we risking? Some embarrassment
at the tar paper shed with her exhibits -
photos of burning buildings; lists of the dead;
copies of irrelevant court papers?
Contamination from the marker where
the wrong sort planted a memorial grove?
Granted the sharp edge of the outhouse drain pipe
is a genuine danger to our most mortal parts.
But that negotiated we become
untouchable - except for a faint sense
that if somebody asked why we were here
our answer would be no more satisfactory
than were the answers of our predecessors.
To check on our investment? To be able to say
that we were here before the real museum?

We like the way the place has been picked clean
of totems of easy sympathy. No broken dolls;
nothing with bullet holes. The tangled grasses
have long since eaten what there was of ash.
Two hulks of buses evince nothing but
the patient fires of rust. The pile of refuse
runs to box springs, metal sheeting, drums.

Then the ground beneath my feet flexes.
A patch of yellow metal peeks through dirt.
I tell my friend that we are standing on
the buried school bus that nobody reached,
the trap door blocked with rubble the tanks made.
Enough has washed away that we can see
into the entrance tunnel, but it is
too much like meeting a celebrity.

Better to stand and see how the ground lies:
the stacks of concrete pylons; the wide fields;
the farm pond in the omnipresent wind.
It looks like the opposite of what it is.
It looks like someplace that the world passed by,
a farm whose soil gave out, or a garage
the Interstate put off the beaten path.

© 1998, 2002 by Jim Henley

Wither Canada [sic] Dept. - Wendy McElroy is a little alarmed at the possibility that the War of 1812 may have been for naught.

A Fanboy's Notes - Jim of Objectionable Content tips Unqualified Offerings to the fact that Jess Nevins' annotations for League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume II, Issue 2 are up. That suggests that it's high time UO get itself to a comic book store again, since it does not yet have issue 2.

Jim further notes that he found this information via Nitricboy, which looks like a very interesting book blog. Nitricboy might better call himself Catholic Tastes Man, as his coverage ranges from comics to literary fiction, all reported on with enthusiasm. Nitricboy's site is a classic "link blog" so you won't have to wade through nearly as much gasbagging as you do here.

Jim's own site is more a cultural blog than a political blog, for all that UO values his incisive political writing. He seems to have done the definitive digging on the Jackie Mason/Ray Hanania flap, and left little of the Mason camp's spin...spinning.

Celebrating "Let's Push Jim's Buttons Day" Tony Adragna urges Congress to remove Major League Baseball's anti-trust exemption.

Baseball is not a monopoly. Its competitors include the NFL, the NBA, college football, college basketball, hockey (look! straight face!), soccer (okay, let's not get carried away), the X-Games, amusement parks, movie theaters, DVDs, concerts, whitewater rafting and just hanging out in the back yard. American consumers do not have a "baseball budget" that they simply must spend on America's Former Pastime. Major League Baseball is a consortium of businessmen competing for the country's entertainment dollars. Americans have an entertainment budget that could be spent on any number of things (or not spent), and that is what baseball is trying to get a piece of. Whether it's "Where do I go?" or "What's on the tube?" professional baseball, properly considered, faces massive competition. Ballpark or movie theater? The ballgame or Buffy? That baseball "consumers" have other choices available to meet their entertainment needs is clear from the game's declining popularity.

Baseball also has to compete for its share of the talent pool - young athletes deciding, as they move through high school, which sport to concentrate on. Theoretically they are even competing with other sports in the corporate welfare sweepstakes for stupid stadium deals from stupid local governments, although that competition is mitigated by the fact that governments can always just make you give them more money to shovel into the pockets of sports owners. (And well-connected local construction magnates...)

One reason the owners and players settled for the first time without a work stoppage or an outside arbitrator is that they strongly suspected the sport could not bounce back from a work stoppage - in other words, that Major League Baseball could die or suffer lasting injury.

If baseball is a monopoly, its "monopoly power" isn't doing it much good.

Getting to Yes - The Talking Dog thinks Jackie Mason should have kept Palestinian comedian Ray Hanania on the bill but used his headline status to subject Hanania to bullying and unfunny japes onstage.

She's So Unusual? - Ginger Stampley wants you to know she's having plenty of fun, thanks.

Same-Old Same-Old - When Unqualified Offerins saw the first press reports this morning on Freedom Forum's poll on American attitudes toward the first amendment, it wished, as happens occasionally, that it were not a confirmed non-drug-using non-drinker. (Link via Counterspin.) Now that it has seen the actual survey results (PDF here) it is far less worried. (Link via Instapundit.)

Bad stuff: On the "title question," Do you think the First Amendment goes too far? the percentage of people choosing bad answers has indeed increased in the last five years. Also, the overall numbers suggest that a cliche of civil liberties alarmism is true: you could not get the First Amendment adopted as written in today's polity. Good thing the DWEMs stuck it where it would be hard to get rid of!

On the other hand: After the title question, several follow-up questions ask people their opinions of the constituent parts of Amendment I - expressing opinions, restrictions on the press, exercise of religion etc. (Freedom of Assembly takes it in the shorts questionwise.) An interesting pattern emerges. On constituent parts questions, the longitudinal data shows almost no movement in attitudes over time. From the perspective of a libertarian (civil or uncivil), the data is not especially good. In most cases the "pro-liberty" responses come in between 50 and 60 percent. But they are not statistically worse than they were five years ago. (Some questions have only two years of responses. They tend to show little change either.)

Consider what we might call the "Skokie Question," number 39:

Any group that wants to should be allowed to hold a rally for a cause or issue even if it may be offensive to others in the community.

(Yes, poll questions suck. 39 could conceivably cover Hydra or the Serial Killers Guild. Belay that rant.) The 1997 results

Strongly Agree 38%
Mildly Agree 34%
Mildy Disagree 10%
Strongly Disagree 15%
Don't Know 3%

The 2002 results:

Strongly Agree 33%
Mildly Agree 34%
Mildy Disagree 13%
Strongly Disagree 18%
Don't Know/Refused 2%

The "combined liberty index" (SA+MA) drops 5 percent over 5 years - about 8 basis points. And that's one of the biggest swings. Would Unqualified Offerings prefer to live in a country where the results were

Strongly Agree 95%
Don't Know/Refused 5%?

Sure. Though

Strongly Agree 5%
Refused to Answer (forget this "Don't Know" crap) 95%

has its appeal too. The point is, this wasn't that country in 1997 either.

The flag-burning numbers don't budge (Q19). The "naughty music" numbers show a 10% increase in pro-liberty answers (Q16). On questions about current levels of restrictions on components of the first amendment (speech, press, religion etc.), the same supermajorities find the current level of restrictions "about right" in 2002 as did in 1997 (look 'em up). (Of course, since restrictions have arguably increased over the last five years...) Two thirds of respondents specifically say that Muslims should be allowed to hold a rally for a cause or issue even if it may be offensive to others in the community.(No longitudinal data on this one, but that's essentially the same percentage as supports the general case.)

Conclusion: It's disquieting that half the respondents said the "the First Amendment goes too far." It's disquieting that that number has rocketed upward in the last four years. But when you break it apart, attitudes toward the actual freedoms are not appreciably worse than they have been. (Which makes it hard for Glenn Reynolds' thesis, that the worsening attitudes are because people are peeved at big media coverage of the war, to be true.)

The good news appears to be that, while you couldn't get the First Amendment passed today, you couldn't get it repealed either. Huzzah for inertial, undemocratic Constitutions!

Of Unmaking Many Metacontexts... - In an interesting post, Kathy Kinsley explains why she has been excerpting odd bits of "Islamist" doctrine from available websites. I'm not sure the effect equals the intention, but it's good to have her thinking laid out. For my part, I disfavor the term "Islamist," after some consideration. The term I prefer for our actual enemies is "Jihadists." I don't really care if someone wants to keep muslims from using musical tones on their cell phones. I care very much if someone wants to kill me. Whether there exist people who could fairly be called "Islamists" but not be fairly called Jihadists is an open question, I admit. But it seems conceptually possible.

Kathy makes an interesting comparison between the Islamists and Christian Reconstructionists, noting an exchange she had with Gary North. The comparison is fruitful. I wouldn't want to live in Gary North's world any more than Kathy does, but in this world North can be an interesting writer. I don't mind North being an interesting writer. I very much mind him being a theocrat.

Gjertrud Schnackenberg's book, A Gilded Lapse of Time, concludes with a long poem, "A Monument in Utopia." In it, Stalin is not a dictator but a library patron, who spends his time composing a poem - a scary poem, but not such a bad one. By the title, Schnackenberg implies that this is as close to utopia as we can get - the worst people still exist, but have no power. (Interesting overview of Schnackenberg's work by Christina Davis appears in The Boston Review. For a roman a clef in which a thinly-disguised Schnackenberg, often resented for her looks and "power marriage" to the late philosopher Robert Nozick, appears as a vampire, try Paul Lake's enjoyable Among the Immortals.)

All of which is to say...something. About the problematic distinction between rivals and enemies I suppose.

The Problem with Bloggers is They Don't Have Editors - Fixed a bunch of stupid typos in posts from yesterday evening forward. Yuck!

The Lessons of War, and a Contest - Radical anti-interventionist historian Joseph Stromberg is having a contest to name the big war, the one the hawks want us to fight against everyone who ever looked at the US cross-eyed. Unqualified Offerings favors, of course, The Million Mom War, though for some weeks it considered the "Trojan War," in honor of its supposed prophylactic qualities. Ginger Stampley has suggested the Forever War, though not to Joseph Stromberg specifically. (Perhaps some of you would prefer The War to Improve Mankind, The War to Raise the Peoples of the Middle East from Savagery to Civilization, the War to Humiliate Arabs for Their Own Good or something in that line. Try to make it catchy, though.)

On the history front, Stromberg recollects what some of our more vocal hawks were saying before the September massacres:

That said, I have to add that Neo-Cons were up for a war – any war – long before that day, and that their literary productions since have simply gilded the warlike lily with a certain amount of high-toned "strategic" reasoning.

It was about a year and half ago, after all, that Serjeant-Major Derbyshire of Her Majesty’s Too-Late American Dragoons was calling for all-out war with China, from the poop deck of NRO, because a US spy plane was forced down with no casualties. The difference between the Neo-Cons at the beginning of 2001 and the Neo-Cons from 9/11 forward is just the difference between the Neo-Cons sober and the Neo-Cons drunk. The indignation they felt in the first months after 9/11was not wholly without art, nor was it entirely lacking in the wisdom of the serpent.

Now, a lot of hawkish bloggers were minding their own business before 9/11. What UO has always wondered, though, is if they really know what their allies - who have been at this warhawk business for quite some time - are about.

The Passing of the Dark Ages - It's probably a sign of something salutary in the culture that a popular new song on country radio involves prison, bloodhounds, the murder of a cheatin' spouse and a jailbreak, even if the song isn't all that great. The tune is just Garth Brooks' "Rodeo" salvaged in an episode of musical dumpster diving. The "clever plot" is clever, but unfolds as slowly and obviously as the Bush Administration's Iraq policy. The singer, Blake Shelton, has Nashville's required good looks, though more on the rough trade side than we've come to expect.

But it's a man singing about something besides how much he loves his wife and kids even though he gets tired after working all day, and that's progress. Don't let on to Clear Channel.

The Richard Reid of Plagues - The CDC expects West Nile Virus cases to peak soon, according to MSNBC. That means the Republic may be spared.

THE U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 75 new cases on Thursday, bringing the year’s total cases to 555.

The population of the U.S. on April 1, 2000 was 281,421,906.

The virus, which can cause encephalitis, a severe brain inflammation, has been blamed for 28 deaths this summer, including deaths reported Thursday in Ohio, Illinois and Michigan.

2,367,000 Americans died in 2000, give or take a few. 86,967 people died in Michigan in 2000. Michigan's population in 2000 was 9,938,444, give or take a few. (Michigan pop link is PDF.)

According to MSNBC, you can best minimize your exposure to West Nile Virus by

From April to October, minimize time spent outdoors at dawn, dusk and in the early evening, when mosquitoes are most active.

For most of the months from April to October, these are among the most pleasant hours to be out of doors, at least around here. They are the times to cook out and (near to UO's heart) the best times to fish.

Wear long-sleeved shirts and long pants when outdoors.

Like most illnesses, West Nile Virus is most dangerous to the very old and very young. These are also the folks most vulnerable to heat stroke. ("From 1979 –1999, excessive heat exposure caused 8,015 deaths in the United States." - Centers for Disease Control. That's an annualized rate of about 400/year. Unqualified Offerings leaves an annualized rate of West Nile Virus deaths as an exercise to the reader.)

Make sure that doors and windows having tight-fitting screens.

Generally a good idea anyway. But run a quick estimate in your mind of how many WNV deaths ubiquitous tight screens would prevent.

Remove water-holding containers from your property, such as discarded tires, tin cans, ceramic pots and plastic containers to eliminate standing water, which serves as breeding grounds for mosquitoes.

Also a good idea, just because it sucks to get bitten by mosquitos. They itch.

Change the water in bird baths at least once a week.

Yeah yeah yeah. Do you promise I'll live forever if I do?

Drain water from pool covers and keep pools and hot tubs cleaned and chlorinated

Because otherwise, ick.

So there you have it. Things that are worth doing regardless, things that are probably at least as dangerous as West Nile Virus and things where the loss of pleasure and utility far outweigh the risk. Come talk to us again when these mosquitos get their hands on radioactive material.

UPDATE: Thanks to Instapundit for the link to this item. Thanks to Carey Gage of CognoCentric for spotting an extremely elementary math error owing to a UO misreading of "1979" as "1997." An earlier version of this item said the annualized heat-related death total was "more than 2500." It's about 400. That seems to make increasing the exposure of children and old people by bundling them up in the hottest weather no more dangerous than exposing them to possible WNV-bearing mosquitos. But not clearly less dangerous.

Shh! - Eve Tushnet says the libraries she volunteers in are much better than the "average" libraries UO maligned below. She likes the idea of alternative library providers though.

She continues to worry the Allan Bloom rock bone to good effect too.

Fortunate Fall - The Redskins are losing to New England 14-0 so far. Good. Unqualified Offerings does not believe preseason success is totally meaningless. But it firmly believes that a team benefits from a conspicuous preseason failure in either the last or next-to-last game. Keeps players from getting a swelled head. Aids - what was that coachspeak word? - focus.

Last Thought on Saddam - Needless to say, for Saddam to want to risk giving possibly-disloyal terrorists nukes to sneak into the US, he would have to figure he stands to gain something thereby. So would the terrorists. Something besides ruin the best market for his country's sole export. One reason for a non-interventionist foreign policy is to reduce the perceived gain from such shenanigans.

Good Riddance - Reader Munham Yam too is relieved that the Olympics will be giving DC-Baltimore a miss. He writes

As a fellow metro Washington DC resident (and bug-chucker; didn't notice the fishing part of the blog) I too exult in our loss of the Olympic bid. Hooray! Less traffic! Less tourists! No bonus attention from terrorists!

I was listening to WMAL (dips head in shame; I'm too young for that) and was half-tempted to call up Chris Core to tell him to shut-up and stop being indignant over our loss. I don't know if I'll even be in the area in 2016, but it's good to have this peace of mind for the future.

Sure, the area's tourist industry would have gotten a boost, but do they ever weigh that income versus the decreased productivity of those who get annoyed and leave town for a while?

Personally, I hope Toronto or Rio gets it.

Rio would be cool. Lots of bikini shots.

E-mail from Gotham - Selenously pseudonymous Diana Moon of Letter from Gotham e-mails to draw my attention to this piece on Saddam and deterrence (as if I didn't read her, faithfully, every day!). Diana notes that

...not all rational people come to the same conclusions when faced with the same facts. Take a look at the history of science. Scientific discovery is made up of rational people who come to very different conclusions regarding the evidence. Only after long intellectual battles are scientific truths admitted. Why should the “real world” of politics and resources be any more peaceful than the rarefied realm of scientific discourse? (Answer: it isn’t.)

See her site for the rest of her argument. She's entirely correct, of course. Deterrence can fail. That WSD-level deterrence has not failed over a 60-year period (going back to Hitler's non-use of poison gas against the allies), despite opportunities to fail in the Cold War, the subcontinent, the middle east and East Asia (don't forget nuclear rivals the PRC and the USSR), does not mean it can't fail.

Firstly, this is simply one more speculative harm - it could happen - of the sort Unqualified Offerings surveyed in "The Million Mom War." Secondly, it is certainly true that one of the components of successful deterrence is successful communication, precisely to minimize the chance of the sort of miscalculation Diana considers. Alas, as your TD points out in the item below, communication is just not what this administration is into. It is crushingly obvious that making sure Saddam acts sensibly is the opposite of the current bunch's goal. They'd clearly like, more than anything, to goad Saddam into something irrational, so they can say see! told ya so!. That way they could wholeheartedly dive into fighting the war they'd much rather fight than that dreary one the September massacres called them to fight - the war against our actual attackers, al Qaeda, that is going ever-so-well while the Administration pines for a sexier card.

Unqualified Offerings has been hearing about that "preparing to refight the last war" cliche all its life, but never expected it to be true so literally.

Outside of a (Talking) Dog - Unqualified Offerings has two last installments from your Talking Dog for the week. TD is back in his Talking Dog House as of today. As always, the Talking Dog comes to you in hard-hitting, unexpurgated, unedited-by-UO form. Here was Wednesday's missive:

Continued thanks for allowing me into your (blog) home. It looks like we may have the roof back on over at the Talking Doghouse, but I'm not sure we're going to move back in there full-time until the weekend (when I think the paint will be dry), so I sure appreciate your letting me stay over a bit.

Anyway, you have served food for thought with your libertarian sampler plate (please bring me some more filet of sacred cow-- and I want to hear it MOO.)

Norah Vincent, of course, as duly picked apart by Julian Sanchez, actually gives us the underlying basis of not merely selfish yuppiedom (ITS MY BAR! I DON'T CARE IF YOU OWN IT AND SMOKE YOURSELF AND WANT OTHER PEOPLE
TO BE ABLE TO SMOKE HERE! I COME HERE! ITS MINE! ITS MINE! ITS MINE! And you have to respect my cool lesbian lifestyle, too, you damned prudes, which includes setting up and running non-smoking drinking establishments that I like! Nyah!), but of the entire NIMBY-based environmental movement. Hence, a source no less august than today's New York Times documents opposition to a proposed wind farm near Cooperstown, New York where the neighbors are asserting a property right to "the view". This is the same argument raised by the Nantucket Sound yachtsmen who oppose an OFFSHORE wind farm near Cape Cod. They join other opposition to similar facilities around the country ably documented by... Unqualified Offerings.

The old joke is that the developer wants to build a house in the woods, while the environmentalist already owns one. In short, what I call the "King Arthur's son" (from Monty Python and the Holy Grail) view of property rights: "Some day lad, all this will be yours!" (what, the curtains?) Fortunately, in libertarian land (at least in my province) we have an EASY solution to this: if thy neighboring property owner developeth his property in a manner fully conforming to zoning regulations or duly waivethed by the proper authorities as in the public interest and not constituting a legal "nuisance" to you or your property, either buy out thine neighbor and do what YOU want, or shutteth the hell up. Otherwise, what ends up happening is called: Vermont. A really pretty state, except that the people who end up still living there really can't afford to live there because nothing can be built anymore because everyone has the right to protest ANY new development (plus they have to smell smoke from power plants wafting over from Upstate New York and Massachusetts, because those places have power plants that burn hydrocarbons, because wind farms are ugly.) Some people might consider all this to be a GOOD thing; they are welcome to move to Vermont. Actually, New York City pretty much operates the same way, without the clean air or ski slopes. (Which reminds me: I'd better write my protest letter regarding that thing across the street that they're planning to build...)

And as to the "public good" of public libraries, I think Unqualified Offerings ably points out the unanticipated consequences of providing a public good when the free market would be able to do it just fine (i.e., the public provision of said "good" crowding out of more efficient private provision of that "good"). Of course, I might want to let patrons of my private library (the one I built next to the wind farm) smoke and eat fatty foods while on the premises, thereby driving up the state's health care costs. Fortunately, I have no doubt the state will protect me from such acts of violence to the social order (I confess my error).

Seth Farber, www.thetalkingdog.com, brooklyn, ny

And Thursday:

What a nice week this seems to be for you: both the Littlest Offering off to 1st grade, and now Mrs. UO having a birthday. Well, those are the good parts of life: the parts that hang around stay with you, unlike the stuff that we blog, which pretty much gets archived and forgotten about by the end of the darned month! Well, as I said recently, we've put the finishing touches on the Talking Doghouse, and the inspector says we can move back in full-time by the weekend. We sure do appreciate your hospitality...

Many thanks to UO for linking to Objectionable Content's "Stop Hating Imperialism Or We'll Destroy You". Jim (the other Jim, that is) is absolutely right in his analysis: the modern Arab world is not only inured to humiliation, it has come to SEEK IT. Just as, in America, the more spectacular the failure, often times the bigger the legend (New Coke? Edsel?), in the Arab world, it has been so long since a big victory over anyone important that BIG DEFEATS are NOW SOUGHT OUT! If you can't win-- then LOSE BIG!

Of course, as a lawyer, I view the world's international legal problems as solvable, well LEGALLY. (Wait a minute-- that makes SENSE-- no wonder I'm not in the Bush Administration.) In short, Iraq is ALREADY under a UN RESOLUTION not to develop or HAVE "Weapons of More Destruction" (note, UO's description of "Weapons of Some Destruction", while itself brilliant, changes the middle letter to "S", confusing me). That UN Resolution, Security
Council Resolution 687 (http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/peace/docs/scres687.html) nicely spells it out: Iraq pretty much agrees not to develop or have WMDs, and turn over the ones it does, and submit to complete inspections to ensure its compliance. A new resolution calling for the immedaite enforcement (say- how about by SEPTEMBER 11th-- wouldn't that be poetic?) of the prior UN resolution is pretty much veto proof, because otherwise, NO UN resolution can be enforced! The alternative is to withdraw 687, but then, GUESS WHICH WORLD'S ONLY SUPERPOWER has a V for Veto over that issue!

In an ORDINARY presidential cabinet (one stuffed with poltically connected LAWYERS, as opposed to veracity-challenged businessmen and the occasional senator's wife), the IMMEDIATE tactics would have been to (1) insert more troops till we get to about 100,000 troops around Iraq (we ALREADY have close to 50,000 operating in that theatre NOW), (2) lobby our UN buddies for the aforementioned resolution IMMEDIATELY ENFORCING UNSC Resolution 687, (3) lobby our buddies in Congress to make sure that all of this is nice and legal and we have no "War Powers Act" crap, and, this is critical, (4) lobby our buddy Pooty Poot to INSURE Saddam that we have NO INTENTION of hurting Pooty Poot's investment in the place-- mi 5 billion, su 5 billion-- and thus, Pooty Poot must tell Saddam in no uncertain terms that Saddam, THANKS TO GLOBALIZATION, need no longer have a nuclear (and/or chemical or biological) arsenal as his ultimate insurance policy, because he has 5 billion Pooty Poot dollars worth of insurance! And if Saddam (and Pooty Poot) don't play ball, we have 100,000 USA Republican Guard troops (that only works with a GOP Administration!) ready to kick the shit out of Saddam once and for all, forever. (In other words, "regime change" is not the GOAL, but merely a by-product of not playing ball with us to get rid of the WMDs, which would no longer be welcome because Saddam would be OUR PARTNER in protecting Pooty Poot's investment.)

We used to call that sort of thing "diplomacy". Back when we had presidents who could spell "diplomacy".

Well, thanks for the hospitality.

Seth Farber, www.thetalkingdog.com, brooklyn, ny, usa

Note: While the views expressed by the Talking Dog do not necessarily reflect those of Unqualified Offerings, UO found itself thinking similar thoughts about "diplomacy" when it read the story about Iran keeping some senior al Qaeda operatives tucked away on the border with Afghanistan. The striped-pants set has things called demarches for just this type of occasion. Far be it from the current batch to resort to such, you know, gambits. From the Washington Post:

Asked whether the United States will issue a formal communication to Iran on the matter, McClellan said the American position is already "well-known."

You get the feeling that the last thing the United States wants is for Iran to actually turn over al Qaeda people.

Apologistics - Between UO's gaming night and Mrs. Offerings' birthday celebrations, this site is behind on some interesting mail that came in yesterday, including the latest from your Talking Dog. More tonight, though that birthday continues, so it's not clear how much more tonight.

Labor-Saving Devices Cont. - Unqualified Offerings has been planning an item called "Intervention: The Socialism of Kings," comparing the utopianism of the uberhawks to the utopianism of, well, commies. But UO takes its time getting around to these things and now Jim of Objectionable Content has largely written it. It's tucked into a piece called "Stop hating imperialism or we'll destroy you!" This is lengthy, elegantly-written and lucidly conceived. The whole thing is required reading, but here are a couple of excerpts:

Confronted with evidence that the defeats and humiliations of the past have not produced the sort of Arabs or Muslims that he wants, Nick Denton retorts with the typical cry of the failed utopian: his ideas were never properly implemented. If they had been, then the dream of a liberal Arab Muslim world would be a reality. As with the communists, proper implementation of Denton's idea is a frightening concept...

Much, much more.

Sacred Cow? Yum! - Interesting essay on privatization and public libraries by little-loved (among bloggers) Lew Rockwell. Rockwell notes something that is hard for any honest American to gainsay - most public libraries suck:

Well, you know what? Many public libraries have been a disgrace for decades. Like most public institutions, they are architectural monstrosities. They have terrible hours, which they blame on underfunding. Their selection is often severely limited, vacillating between being out of date and carrying only the latest, tackiest bestsellers. Others have gradually purged all books that offer ideas the ruling regime rejects.

In an effort to attract more users, they have become the leading distributors of videos, CDs, and DVDs, thereby competing with for-profit businesses and doing so at taxpayer expense. And it was the public libraries, with their computers and net access, that managed to shut down the internet café business of the mid-1990s. With public libraries offering the same services for free, why should anyone pay?

Certainly the selection at your average public library compares poorly with the selection at your average Borders. But you have to buy the books at Borders, right? (Well, once the cafe closes.) Even that need not be the case:

I recall in my childhood near Boston a used bookstore that lent bestsellers for a dime a day. It was a thriving service that brought people into the store, a mutual benefit for the public and the firm. But then the public library horned in on this small bookstore's business, and did so at public expense, forcing it out of business. In a small but serious way, it was the triumph of book socialism.

For many years Unqualified Offerings worked for a major mall-based chain that got its start as a "lending store." They could come back. Of course, were that to happen, the publishing industry would go running to Congress to get the feds to strong-arm the retail sector into submission. Since the regulatory state exists to prop up favored businesses in the name of helping "the people" (think RIAA; think ethanol), they'd have a decent chance of it too. Which shows how deep the problem of statism really runs, and in which direction.

On a non-profit basis, it would be a snap to raise money for every kind of library in rural areas or the inner city. What business would turn down a chance to be seen as public-spirited by donating money? What matron of a wealthy family wouldn’t love to browbeat her husband into giving tens of thousands to the cause of literacy among the poor?

Then there are the benefits of peace and quiet:

Private libraries are not subject to the crazy political controversies that constantly afflict public libraries. Should public-library computers be able to access porn and hate sites? Should they carry Mark Twain? Shouldn’t they have a section designed only for blacks? What about gays and lesbians, who pay taxes to support the libraries. Why shouldn’t their interests be observed as well? But that offends other people who similarly pay for libraries.

All this nonsense disappears with private libraries.

Your Right to Swing Your Arm Ends Wherever the Hell I Say It Does - Julian Sanchez takes out after a very bad defense of a very bad proposal, NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg's proposal to ban smoking in bars. (LA Times link requires registration. Julian Sanchez' Notes from the Lounge link does not.) Julian:

In other words, not only do you have a basic human right to attend a bar you like, you have a right to go there and dictate terms to both the owner and other patrons. Unlike confused smoking-fiends like me, good libertarians like Norah understand how unimportant property rights are. If you don't like the ground rules the owner has set -- and maybe the music level, volume, and decor -- the owner (and all the patrons who liked the old rules) had better damn well accomodate you... Now, we'd better instruct resort owners to drain their pools, because non-swimmers who want to hang out in that cute concrete hole shouldn't have to go elsewhere. And we'd better take all the wheels off busses, because hey, I might want to just chill in that backseat without being subject to the risks of moving in traffic. Yeah, I'm being silly, but so is what seems to be Vincent's principle: if you provide a service, I'm entitled to benefit from it in my most preferred form.

There's plenty more where that came from.

Mroww!

I've never seen Ann Coulter except in still photographs, but the tone of her words in transcripts is often sullen. Yet she doesn't convey sullen sexuality. What she conveys is a sort of drunken desperation, as if she'd go home with just about anyone. She certainly has bad manners. I hope to god she doesn't speak in her higher register much, she's bad enough already. Maybe if she gets drunk enough she's fun, but she comes across as such a harridan that it's hard to imagine anyone wanting to wake up to her.

Oh, god, I need more coffee.

Avedon Carol, proving that "delightfully catty" is not an oxymoron.

Some News is Good News - The Washington-Baltimore bid to host the 2012 Olympics died today. Thank heaven for that. Years of public works expenditures for the sake of an awful month of traffic and security hassles the area did not need.

Houstonian Ginger Stampley is celebrating her own city's victory in the quality-of-life sweepstakes too.

Looking for a Term - In 1990, feminist opponents of the Gulf War argued that Saudi Arabia wasn't worth defending because of the kingdom's horrible treatment of women. Hawks pooh-poohed these ridiculous concerns.

In 2002, hawks want war or something very like it with Saudi Arabia, and their horrible treatment of women is one of the important reasons. (See this lengthy Reid Stott piece for one example, though Stott's brief against the Saudis is multitudinous.)

So what should we call those silly chicks from a dozen years ago? How about "premature anti-wahabists," in honor of the "premature anti-fascists" of mid-century?

Tasteful Gifts - But I could have gotten Brink Lindsey and Glenn Reynolds thoughtful gifts if I had only stumbled on the Origami Boulder site in time. Check it out!

(Link via Scrappleface.)

They Say It's Your Birthday - Brink Lindsey and Glenn Reynolds both get a year older today. Best wishes, and Unqualified Offerings will hold off dealing with BL's most recent posts on libertarianism and intervention (esp. in Iraq) for another day, instead of a present.

Your Talking Dog Home Away from Home - Time once again for your daily dose of the Talking Dog, from the only weblog big enough, bold enough and bad enough to say, Hey! Bring on the guest voices! Unqualified Offerings isn't afraid!

(It beats working.)

Dear Jim:

I can't thank you enough for agreeing to be my home page in exile; it's way above the call of duty spelled out in the blogger code.

I'm so happy for you to hear that Offering Boy is off to first grade. What a big day! In NYC, I think school starts in about a week or so.

Wait a minute-- I KNEW I was forgetting something. MRS. TD AND I HAVE FORGOTTEN TO MAKE SCHOOLING ARRANGEMENTS FOR THE (NOT THREE FOR SEVERAL MONTHS) BABY TD. I THINK WE CAN BE SURE THAT HER LIFE IS PRETTY MUCH OVER, AS WITHOUT A TOP PRE-SCHOOL, THERE'S NO WAY SHE'LL GET INTO A TOP GRAMMAR SCHOOL (LET ALONE MIDDLE SCHOOL, HIGH SCHOOL, COLLEGE, OR GRADUATE SCHOOL.) WHAT HAVE WE DONE! Actually, for some reason, I'm not all that worried about Baby TD (who, I think, will henceforth be called the "Loquacious Puppy"), though I am sure that our neighbors (and the entire Upper West and Upper East sides) are considering calling social services over our educational faux pas.

Anyway, onto the dark side of REALITY. We move on to someone RETICENT. His fellow podiatrists have described him as the kind of guy who just wasn't outgoing with the medical supply salespeople; not a cut-up (sorry) at the big foot doctor functions. Still, the guy seems to have had a time-consuming hobby that DID NOT involve the internet: Podiatrist Robert J. Goldstein from the Tampa area in Florida (perhaps still holding a grudge about not getting into medical school) was arrested with enough explosives to impress the guys on the dais at a Hamas banquet, with apparent plans to blow up something like 50 mosques.

The question I have-- perhaps someone in bloggerland can answer it-- is-- is Dr. Robert Jay Goldstein in any way related to the evil mad man Barak Goldstein who shot up Hebron a few years ago killing like 29 people? Goldstein is a common enough name, certainly, but to have the same M.O. and the same last name kind of makes me wonder...

Still, one can imagine the NEXT meeting of the Pinellas County Podiatric Association. Say, did you hear about Bob Goldstein? Who are you talking about? That guy who always sulked in the corner? Him? He WHAT? Oh-- so THAT'S what he meant by "I've got enough explosives in my basement to blow up 40- maybe 50 mosques and I'm looking for a wheel-man-- are you in?" Maybe I should have taken it more seriously; I always thought it odd that his waiting room had old copies of "Soldier of Fortune" (with articles cut out)...

Seth Farber, www.thetalkingdog.com, brooklyn, ny

Unqualified Offerings should note that your TD did manage to upload a short piece to his site last night, braving ice, snow, a dial-up connection and (ick!) Microsoft FrontPage to do so.

Tempus Fugit - My god - Offering Boy starts first grade today. Wish him luck!

Cooler Heads - Interesting bits from Alan Bock's latest column.

On the Administration's suggestion that the 1991 Congressional authorization is sufficient to renew large-scale offensive operations against Iraq today:

I know that one of the reasons for getting a law degree (besides having an attitude of virtual worship for an abstract concept called "the law" inculcated by people with a concept of the sacred somewhat different than you or I – and who seem to have missed Otto von Bismarck's admonition about law and sausages) is to be able to argue with at least a modicum of persuasiveness and a wee bit of legal precedent for whatever position is in one's client's immediate interest. But this is such a strained interpretation – of the Constitution, of the 1991 resolution, of the powers inherent in being commander-in-chief – as to be almost eye-popping.

UO is agnostic on the legal question. It would be just like Congress to draft something sloppy enough that they couldn't be held accountable for how it was used. On the practical question, this site has been urging the necessity of congressional authorization for any war of conquest for quite some time.

On "libertarian fratricide:

(Incidentally, I hope I can suggest without violating my own precepts too much, that the inclination in some libertarian quarters to dismiss Cato as an establishment tool and nest of slobbering warmongers is not one I share. I've noted often a tendency, shared by generally minority persuasions across the spectrum, to be more interested in attacking those relatively close to one in ideological terms than in going after genuine adversaries. Or maybe it has to do with the reason squabbles in college faculties are sometimes so bitter: the general political rule that the more pitiful the power involved the bloodier the battle.

Thus Leninists, Trotskyists and Stalinists used to reserve sharper barbs for one another than for capitalists, and conservatives, libertarians and various branches of libertarians are often more impassioned about heretics than about dedicated statists. In the current conflict both prowar and antiwar libertarians have traded really nasty comments. I'm inclined to think this is a constant in ideological politics that no amount of preaching can deter, but I'll try to avoid it as much as possible and concentrate more on criticizing dedicated enemies of freedom than on those with whom I have only a few disagreements. If this aside violates my own admonition I apologize for my mild hypocrisy.)

For this phenomenon, there is plenty of blame to go around on both sides.

On a visit by Rep. Chris Cox (R-CA) to the Orange County Register offices:

Republican Rep. Chris Cox, who came by the Register for an editorial board meeting Monday, put it a little differently. "I don't see how you can deal with future adversity, which is almost inevitable in a military conflict," he told us, "if you have empowered the entire political class to say 'I told you so,'" He thinks an executive decision to begin a war without a congressional resolution, at the very least, would be a serious mistake. Based on things he says he knows from confidential briefings, he said there are reasons to be seriously concerned about what Saddam Hussein is doing, but he's not ready to say that it justifies a war just yet.

Chris Cox wouldn't want to be classified as an early critic of military action, like House Majority Leader Dick Armey or former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft. When push comes to shove he will probably support the administration. But he wants to see it done right – carefully considered, on the basis of concrete evidence and a fairly specific battle plan and exit strategy, by a Congress given time to air a full debate.

"When a pollster asks 'Would you like to see Saddam Hussein removed?' without offering specifics about how or at what cost, that doesn't tell you much that's useful about U.S. public opinion," Rep. Cox said.

Interesting stuff, as usual for Bock, who after all did win UO's "Dove of the Year" award for 2001.

Giving in to Terrorism - In an uncharacteristically soft-headed liberal-type response to a problem, I'm going to link to some more Scrappleface items. Scrappleface has taken to mass e-mailing other bloggers about new items on his weblog, a practice UO disfavors. UO tends to be faintly embarrassed for bloggers who do this.

But this Scrappleface guy is funny. So. Scrappleface: I promise to read your site every day from now on if you promise to take me off your list. Everyone else, check out:

Top 10 Reasons to Criminalize Homeschooling

NEA 'Not to Blame' for American Intolerance

Slogan Chanters Sway Senator's Vote

NYC Stalkers Seek Marriage Rights

Note: While this item is a softheaded liberal-type response, Scrappleface is not himself a liberal-type guy, nor even a libertarian one really.

Journalism as Literature - Glenn Reynolds links to an AP story about a Tampa MD arrested with a cache of explosives, a bunch of weapons and a "mission template" for blowing up area mosques and a local Islamic education center. Unqualified Offerings was struck by the beauty of a single sentence in the article.

Goldstein's fellow podiatrists were stunned by the arrest.

There's something classical in that.

Web-Slanging - Avram Grumer of the fine Pigs and Fishes blog e-mails that Unqualified Offerings' ideological tics prevented him it from accurately conveying the flavor of the excellent Spiders comic UO cited yesterday. Not that Avram put it so impolitely. Quoting UO's jest that "Its point appears to be to show how much more fabulous the War on Terrorism would be if Gore were President." Avram demurs:

I'd say that its point appears to tell a story about about the humanizing effects of communcations technology, set in an alternate world, and that it mentions Gore as president to establish that it _is_ an alternative world.

I don't think it can be taken seriously as a literal depiction of a Gore presidency's war on Al Qaeda. For one thing, it requires a million or more of the high-tech spider devices to have been designed and manufactured in a month or two.

When you're right, you're right, and Grumer is clearly right. (But what about the all-female combat unit, huh Avram? Huh?) Any of this site's right wing readers who gave Spiders a miss because of the President Gore thing should do themselves the favor of reading the comic anyway. Eve Tushnet has added to the critical literature on the comic by aptly adducing the concept of "dynamist war." You get to see a chick in a burqa blow away a Taliban bully with a handgun. As for "dynamist war," imagine something like SETI@Home for the war on terror, but where it wasn't just your computer's spare processing power that participated, but you too.

Speaking of Music Blogs The Minor Fall, The Major Lift is back from vacation, and they've got reviews of some new CDs you've just got to have.

From the Warhorse's Mouth - There are political blogs and technical blogs and music blogs and philosophical blogs and personal blogs. Then there's Unqualified Offerings, which has pretty much become a Millenium Challenge 02 blog. Kind reader Michael Ladd sends a link to the Army Times article that started it all.

The first thing that needs to be said is that the article, by Sean D. Naylor, is superb. In terms of quality of reporting, it far outshines the articles on the controversy in the civilian press. Really, the Washington Post and others would have better served their readers by simply buying the reprint rights to Naylor's article, their own pieces being little more than rehashes and selections from Naylor. (And what do you think you do on this site, Jim? Answer: That, plus I bitch more, plus I do tell you to go read Naylor. And occasionally I manage a minor witticism.)

But where was Unqualified Offerings? Oh yeah. The other thing is that, judging by Naylor's much fuller account, the speculative defenses of the scripting and constraints on "Red Leader" Riper in Millenium Challenge 02 offered by various readers seem, while sound in general, far less plausible in this case specifically.

Interesting excerpts, not intended as a substitute for reading the original:

Gen. William “Buck” Kernan, head of Joint Forces Command, told Pentagon reporters July 18 that Millennium Challenge was nothing less than “the key to military transformation.”

Central to the success of the war game, Kernan said, was that the U.S. force (or Blue Force) would be fighting a determined and relatively unconstrained Opposing Force (otherwise known as the OPFOR or Red Force).

“This is free play,” he said. “The OPFOR has the ability to win here.”

“Not so,” Van Riper told Army Times. “Instead of a free-play, two-sided game as the Joint Forces commander advertised it was going to be, it simply became a scripted exercise. They had a predetermined end, and they scripted the exercise to that end.”

Van Riper, who retired in 1997 as head of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command, is a frequent player in military war games and is regarded as a Red team specialist. He said the constraints placed on the Opposing Force in Millennium Challenge were the most restrictive he has ever experienced in an ostensibly free-play experiment.

Riper on the specific reason he quit as Red team leader

He did so, he said, to avoid presenting one of his Opposing Force subordinates with a moral dilemma. That subordinate was retired Army Col. George Utter, a full-time Joint Forces Command employee who, as the Opposing Force chief of staff, was responsible for taking Van Riper’s commands and making them happen in the simulation.

But several days into the exercise, Van Riper realized his orders weren’t being followed.

“I was giving him directions on how I thought the OPFOR ought to perform, and those directions were being countermanded by the exercise director,” Van Riper said. The exercise director was Air Force Brig. Gen. Jim Smith, Utter’s real-life boss at Joint Forces Command.

Matters came to a head July 29. “That morning I’d given my guidance for what was to happen, and I found that [Utter] had assembled the staff and was giving them a different set [of instructions] based on the exercise director’s instructions to him.”

To save Utter from having to choose between following the orders of his commander in the war game and obeying those of Smith, Van Riper stepped down as the Opposing Force commander. However, the retired Marine, who was participating in the exercise on a contract with defense giant TRW, stayed on at the war game as an adviser.

On Riper himself:

Van Riper’s single-mindedness can sometimes rub other experiment participants the wrong way, said a retired Army officer who has played in several war games with the Marine.

“What he’s done is he’s made himself an expert in playing Red, and he’s real obnoxious about it,” the retired officer said. “He will insist on being able to play Red as freely as possible and as imaginatively and creatively within the bounds of the framework of the game and the technology horizons and all that as possible.

“He can be a real pain in the ass, but that’s good. But a lot of people don’t like to sign up for that sort of agitation. But he’s a great guy, and he’s a great patriot and he’s doing all those things for the right reasons.”

That's a lot of excerpts. But that's still a minority of Naylor's total text. There's lots more, all of it fascinating.

Your Unofficial Talking Dog Refugee Relief Agency - Unqualified Offerings has offered itself (tongue in cheek) as a substitute for other bloggers before, and even had its own volunteer unofficial substitute once. But this is new territory. The Talking Dog e-mails that his "editor" is on vacation, which leaves him unable to update his site. This editor appears to be an actual person, not the free-to-cheap software or service the rest of us manage with. There is a lawyer joke in here somewhere. So, instead of substituting for your TD, it looks like UO must simply open a displaced blogger's camp and publish TD. (Insert colonialism joke here.) Herewith, the latest from your Talking Dog. As always, the views of the Talking Dog do not necessarily represent the views of Unqualified Offerings, but are damn funny anyway:

I hope you had a relaxing proto-fishing trip; it sounds about as relaxing as my pseudo-weekends have been this summer. As you can probably tell from my site, which is not updated daily like it has been, well, for a while, something is different (its stuck on last Friday!): my friend and editor (the guy who has BOTH knowledge of MS Frontpage and more importantly a highspeed connection) has left town all week; I sort of hinted that was coming (last Thursday) and tried to designate you as my "the editor is on vacation" site. Unclear if it worked; only YOUR stat server knows for sure...

Oh yeah. Saddam is just setting up for human shields, just like he did last time (GWI) (and what he does everytime it looks like we will bomb the crap out of Baghdad). He has a finite book of tactics, which he updates from time to time. He obviously liked what he saw at Jenin, in terms of the political cost to the Israelis of having to go house to house (not to mention the military cost).

The difference, of course, is that the Palestinians, those in Jenin anyway, were hardened terrorists, who kind of wanted to fight on, merrily took civilian hostages (see "Church of Nativity") and otherwise were a royal pain in the ass. Saddam's troops tend to surrender a lot; yes, some of them, the "Elite" Republican Guard (an inseparable phrase, kind of like "Druse Militiamen") may fight hard, but the ordinary Iraqi solider has about as much desire to die for Saddam as Hamas leaders have of running for the Knesset on the Likud line.

Of course, Saddam (say- in WWII-- was Hitler regularly referred to as "Adolf"?) is making a dangerous assumption we would abandon our sual "bomb the crap out of the enemy" strategy (especially since our air power remains largely wedded to Stealth B-2's based in Missouri-- perfectly suited to
desert warfare because they don't work in the rain) just because of high civilian casualties. Saddam forgets that just because HE doesn't care about Iraqi civilians, there is no reason the country that merrily bombs Afghan wedding parties in an allegedly freindly country CARES EITHER.

Obviously, we can be pretty sure that Papa B. is now going wobbly on Saddam (AGAIN), since he seems to have sent in official White House Nanny James Baker to say "we have to go to the UN first"-- as good a kiss of death to invading Saddam as I've seen (perhaps we can ask the UN Human Rights Commission and Chairman Qaddafi if its ok with THEM if we invade Iraq... )

Of course, Al Qaeda does seem to be operating inside of Iraq after all; just not in parts of it under the control of Saddam! (Why are we invading Iraq again? Oh yes-- mid-term elections coming up; I keep forgetting.)

It continues to amaze me just how good Saddam is at real-politik (or more accurately, jackal-politik) Of course, he does this despite APPARENTLY hostile parties on all sides (Iran, with whom he waged a decade-long war all the while maintaining diplomatic relations), NATO member Turkey (with whom he shares a distaste for all things Kurdish), and Kuwait and Saudi Arabia (who you'd think might hold a grudge over that war thing), yet he not only holds on, but with as firm a grip as ever. (If, say, the Palestinians were one-tenth as effective as Saddam in real-politik terms, they would have not only had their own state by now, but that state, in a joint operation with the Israelis, would have liberated Lebanon and Syria and be poised to impose democracy in Jordan and Iraq by now; instead, they are relegated to watching Yasir steal aid money and rejoicing at the murder of children.)

Anyway- notice that Saddam has recently given Russia (the guys with... a UN Security Council veto!) a HUGE economic stake in his continuity... Speaking of UNSC vetoes: France would just be a thorn for the fun of it, and China... never mind!

So, we will see how this turns out. I just view the "urban combat" thing as "business as usual."

As Unqualified Offerings has said before, if never so literally, The Talking Dog, ladies and gentlemen - he'll be here all week."

Wilderness of Germs: An Anthraxblog Update - The Agitator suspects, like a lot of people, that Stephen J. Hatfill is the new Richard Jewell. Counterspin wonders, contrariwise, if he isn't the new OJ Simpson - or Ward Weaver. Glenn Reynolds pronounces himself "agnostic," but avers that

even if Hatfill turns out to be guilty, these things still reflect badly on Justice. The problem predates Ashcroft, of course, but he certainly hasn't done anything to make it go away.

Farber Out of Joint - Gary Farber notes his own eerie prescience regarding Saddam Hussein's likely defense strategy in the event of renewed offensive operations in the ongoing US-Iraq War (1991-2002). As a keen student of the works of Philip K. Dick, Unqualified Offerings believes our course is clear: remove Farber to an undisclosed location, likely without his knowledge, and get maximum official use out of his precognitive talents.

Standing Athwart Geography Yelling Stop - Worldnet Daily picks up last week's Qatar News Agency report on statements by Dr. Osama Al-Baz that Egypt would not permit US warships to transit the Suez Canal on a mission to conquer Iraq. Al-Baz is described as Hosni Mubarak's closest political adviser. The original QNA report was August 17 and it seems not to have been picked up or amplified since.

It's not clear that this is more than gasbagging on the part of Al-Baz, Egypt being pretty hacked off about the recent suspension of US aid over the Dr. Sa'ad Eddin Ibrahim case.

A State Department spokesman told WorldNetDaily the U.S. was unaware of Al-Baz's comments regarding the passage of U.S. warships through the 100-mile canal.

"I'm not even sure the canal treaty [between Egypt and the U.S.] would permit that," he said.

It seems likely that if it needed to, the US could quickly force its way through the Canal unless Egypt actually blocked it to all traffic with wrecks. What's unclear is whether US forces even needs to transit Suez to get to Iraq. The Eqyptians may know that the US does not, and be taking the opportunity to engage in a little pseudo-defiance. It's a useful indicator of the Arab mood, though of course the hotshots running US policy are as likely to simply add Egypt to the list of countries that have to be "fixed" as anything else. What's one more?

Cooking with Unqualified Offerings - All right, go ahead and have the endless war to make us all safe forever. It will just give Unqualified Offerings time to test all the recipes at Pepperfool.com, which it just discovered this evening while searching for a dry rub for ribs. (UO chose Mike's Baby Back Rib Dry Rub.) Points off for having a bunch of vinegar-based "Carolina style" pork sauces, but only one with mustard.

UPDATE: Oh my god, these ribs are fantastic! It's not just the rub - it's a tip on the recipe page that UO hadn't considered. UO lacks a smoker, alas. The Mike's Rub direction, though, to push all the coals to the outside edge of the grill and put the meat in the middle, worked great. Two hours of very low coals later, mmmm!

Spiders - This web comic that Jim of Objectionable Content just cited is pretty damn cool. Its point appears to be to show how much more fabulous the War on Terrorism would be if Gore were President. Unqualified Offerings doesn't believe that for a minute. But it's still pretty damn cool. If you're into comics as a narrative form, Spiders makes some interesting use of horizontal and vertical webspace.

Umpty-Ump Is a Trend - Now it's Anthony Zinni joining the list of high-ranking military men with Middle East expertise who want nothing to do with a regime-change war against Iraq. From the Tampa Tribune:

Zinni said an Iraqi war would be expensive and would draw down the armed forces' manpower, which is already ``stretched too tight all over the world.''

Worst of all, Zinni said, a war against Iraq would antagonize America's friends in the Middle East.

``We need to quit making enemies that we don't need to make enemies out of,'' he said.

Note to hawks: Time to add Zinni to the character-assassination lists.

I Laughed, I Cried, I Was Moved Dept. - Scrappleface discovers another innovative product from Big Content. (Link via Instapundit.)

And Christine Quinones has a fine sonnet on a grief familiar to millions.

Drug Hawks Unclear on the Concept - Drug czar Asa Hutchinson worries lest Nevada pass a ballot initiative legalizing possession of small amounts of marijuana.

“That would leave Nevada with one of the most liberal policies on drugs. … What kind of tourism will Nevada attract?” Hutchinson said.

(From the Reno Gazette-Journal via Reason Online.)

Speaking of Materialistic American Capitalism the country urgently needs, we are told, alternative sources of sustainable energy - unless those sources would be, um, in a real place on, you know, earth. Eastern Pennsylvania now joins the list of places (Northern California, Washington State, Cape Cod) where local enviros and political activists oppose industrial-strength windmill projects. (See Philadelphia Enquirer story.)

The Story Behind the Story Behind the Story - Police in Vancouver, BC, pose as squeegee people to catch drivers without seatbelts, according to this Globe and Mail story. (Link via Reason Online.) But wait! How can Canada have squeegee people? I thought injustice and homelessness were a product of materialistic American capitalism?

Noteworthy passage in the Globe and Mail, by the way:

Constable Reid said police often break laws during the course of their work in order to enforce other laws.

Now Ain't the Time for your Tears is the title Counterpunch gives to this Dave Marsh article on music industry chicanery. An excerpt:

[Fred] Wilhelms became former national director of the AFTRA Health and Retirement Funds because he refused to roll over and play dead about the record industry's deformed income reporting that deprived artists of benefits. Before that, Wilhelms worked as an auditor New Jersey construction trade unions. He says that compared to the record industry, those guys constitute a monument to scruples.

There's a lot more. And Marsh offers to send you his transcript of Wilhelms' testimony before the California State Senate if you e-mail him at the address on the bottom of the Counterpunch article.

Game Theories, Continued - The Millenium Challenge story continues to generate interesting reader mail. Eric Mauro, whom Unqualified Offerings hereby declares an Adjunct Fellow, writes

Wasn't Oakley playing the civilian leader of Blue country? [Red - UO.] (I'm guessing he's against the Iraq war strictly from his past behavior, he's always
seemed very multi-culti for a republican) Why do they have a civilian leader if not to explore the political possibilities. Somebody somewhere has to play all these moves out on the chessboard.

UO understands the points previously made by Bill Dowling and Mike Sullivan on this site about focusing wargame exercises and playing enemies "in character." At least in theory, their points provide answers to Eric's questions. However, UO thinks two things:

1. A hot item is that General Riper's tactics sank most of the Blue fleet in the Persian Gulf and it had to be "refloated" to continue the exercise. If the purpose of the exercise was really to play out, say, the post-landing portion of the invasion, why bother having free play during the pre-landing stage? Suspicion: the exercise really was pretty general and the invasion fleet was considered "fair game" until Riper started winning. Important nuance to suspicion: Let's say Red "won" the sea battle. It is probably still worthwhile, for the purposes of the exercise, to refloat the fleet to fight the land-forces battle so long as you don't pretend that Red's naval victory never happened.

2. As for Mike Sullivan's point about staying in character, UO concedes the general principle. However, it sees a huge potential for biased referees to use "You're not playing in character!" as an excuse for the other side's losing. And as Mike also knows, a good ruleset should preclude, as much as possible, behaviors that the designers consider to be beyond applicability. For instance, you can bet that the rules did not allow Red to attack blue with space-based lasers, or to convince Iceland to intervene decisively on the Carmine side. Apparently the rules did permit Riper to use motorcycle couriers instead of transparent radio communications. The question becomes, can we make a reasonable case, from the outside, that it would be out of character for "Red Leader" to do this? It seems hard. (How about, "he gassed his own people?" That's supposed to end all other discussions!)

Values Clarification - Wendy McElroy has an interesting item in McBlog about some writing she's done and is doing for Penthouse Magazine:

It would be indiscreet of me to mention the free speech organizations who stayed afloat for years only because of Penthouse's generous financial support. (Those orgs shy away from the association...just like the libertarian orgs who don't put their "porn donors" in fund-raising letters. Frankly, if I were those funders, I'd walk.)

Like I said...I don't get it. Those who criticise Penthouse (of my acquaintance, at least) are willing -- nay eager! -- to write for establishment 'zines that advocate bombing civilian populations (Iraq/Afghanistan/Palestine), violating civil liberties en masse (TIPS/feds after deadeat dads), and wreaking all manner of misery on human kind. But a 'zine that shows consensual sex between adults -- a travesty!

Well That Didn't Work and not because Offering Boy lasted a full half-hour into the first evening's fishing session before declaring that he didn't want us to fish any more. Suitably bribed with the prospect of regular visits to Funland at Deep Creek Lake if he bore the fishing trip's lengthy periods of fishing, somewhat gracefully, he got better and better over the next day. He even discovered his inner otter the next morning, having a good hour's fun sliding down a natural sluice on the North Branch of the Potomac at the Wallman area. (Note to anyone who finds this item with a search engine: No indeed, it would never be safe to let a six-year-old do this kind of thing on the North Branch below Jennings-Randolph Reservoir, a treacherous tailwater. Most times of the year it would not be safe above the reservoir either. It wouldn't have been safe in June, when Unqualified Offerings was last at Wallman and the North Branch was swollen with heavy rains. But this was the low-water days of August, under a watchful adult eye.)

Offering Boy actually held up better than UO could sensibly have expected. (He loves motels. Maybe he'll grow up to be a drifter!) It was the car that let down the side. At the very least, the overdrive is shot, and maybe the transmission generally. It's in a Cumberland, Maryland, transmission shop for research. La Familia Offering is back together in Silver Spring, thanks to the efforts of Mrs. Offering and the Littlest Offering at recovering the boys.

UO had just determined, by experience and the advice of a travel book, that there is no point fishing the North Branch or the Savage above their reservoirs in high summer, and was preparing to adapt its target list accordingly too.

So while we can't say "It's great to be back," back we nevertheless are.

"Gone" Fishing - It's time for Unqualified Offerings to make what will probably be its last expedition to the wilds of Western Maryland this summer, in search of government and free range trout. In the "Are you sure this is a good idea" category, this website will be accompanied by six-year-old Offering Boy, at the latter's insistence.

However, you need not necessarily fear a drought of (lower-case) unqualified offerings. And not just because most other bloggers and professional pundits are at least as unqualified as UO! No, it's because the way the whole fishing thing works, the middle of the day is largely wasted time. So this site expects to pop into the Oakland, MD public library during those stretches, from which it has blogged before. There's an outside chance that that won't happen, in which case, this site will be back in business sometime Sunday. But most likely: more tomorrow.

One Year Later - Unqualified Offerings is a softy, but this Dateline interview with Flight 93 widow Lyz Glick really got to it.

Lyz Glick: “It was difficult those first few weeks, because everything is a memory. You know I walk in and I go to the laundry and Jer had done a load of laundry before he left. And I take his T-shirts out of the dryer. And what am I going to do with them? Do I fold them? You know? So I folded them. So it was tough. And now I consider myself married to my house. Because I could never imagine selling it...

Whoah! Gene Healy on Iraq. Whoah!

Thought for the Day inspired by an e-mail from Radley Balko, aka The Agitator.

Hotel taxes: taxation without representation?

Data point: 17 Cities Sock It To Travelers To Pay For Stadiums, from the Travel Industry Association of America.

InstaSpank - Patrick Nielsen Hayden of the superb Electrolite blog breaks the previous Unqualified Offerings feedback speed record with an expression of displeasure regarding the item below on Brendan O'Neill, animal rights and the left:

Oh please. I flunked out of Left Loyalism 101 a long time ago, but still. I really don't think most people on the "left" have a problem with the incredibly pressing humans vs. animals question. Overheated quotes from college-age airheads are No Fair; we don't want those people, either. (Or people foolish enough to write outraged emails to Brendan O'Neill.)

Sometimes I think the "blogosphere" functions as a machine for reassuring righties that all left types are as crazy as the ditziest college lesbo-vegan, and reassuring lefties that all right-wingers are barely suppressed maniacs who live on ammunition and raw meat. Arguably, this is an everybody-happy outcome that qualifies as a "win-win." As Golden Age SF writer Arthur Leo "Von" Hayek foresaw, the market provides for every need. Quant suff!

But what does Patrick know? He's a liberal.

Higher Than Hegel Can Count - Okay, it was actually Marx's modification: First time as tragedy. Check. Second time as farce. Check. Now tell Unqualified Offerings one thing...

WHICH TIME IS IT WHEN MUAMAR GADAFFI GETS ELECTED TO HEAD THE UN COMMISION ON HUMAN RIGHTS????

(Link via Samizdata.) UO supposes that they're not even pretending any more. Love that outfit though. (See picture accompanying article.)

Gaming the System - Reader/Gaming Buddy Bill Dowling e-mails a provisionally kind word for the Joint Strike Force command. (See Heads I Win, Tails You Lose below.)

My understanding of government-run wargames is that they tend to exist in order to play out certain situations.

As an example, say you wanted to run a simulation to see what would happen if we invaded Iraq and fought a long ground war. Certain Iraqi counter-tactics would preclude that happening (such as chemical weapon strikes on Tel Aviv). If you allow the Iraqi player to use any weapons reasonably at his disposal, you won't learn what would happen if we invaded Iraq and fought a long ground war. You'll learn what the people running the simulation think Israel's response would be.

This take is plausible, and similar to Mike Sullivan's below. UO seems to recall that the outcome of Millenium Force 2002 was presented as validating new warfighting concepts, so it isn't so sure.

Bill was also not happy with UO's report of Radley Balko's proposal for DC Nonstatehood, writing, in a different e-mail:

As a District of Columbia resident, I enjoyed being characterized as someone who "will vote for Democrats," and is "largely poor and black."

As for the District's ideal of Taxation Without Representation and the commuter tax: How can you argue that the voters of Maryland and DC are not represented when their representatives have kept the commuter tax from becoming reality? Sure, the voters of Maryland and Virginia "can't vote District politicians out of office," but so what? It's the United States Congress which controls whether a commuter tax will ever be enacted. You even describe their efforts to enact one as agitating Congress.

Maryland and Virginia voters have plenty of representation in the government that has the power in this situation.

(On the other hand, I'm against the commuter tax)

In fact, Bill is white and fabulously wealthy, or at least he keeps up with the electric bill, as his home is always well-lit whenever Unqualified Offerings has been there. He's sandbagging us on the (not) voting for democrats thing though.

Bill's right that Maryland and Virginia have representation in Congress and that Congress would to approve any commuter tax - under the present system. But Unqualified Offerings wrote

"Taxation without Representation" is actually the District Government's ideal.

Under the present arrangement, Maryland and Virginia have a say, however diluted, in whether the District can pass a commuter tax. But the present arrangement is not of the District Government's choosing. DC's local political elite would like an end to Congressional oversight - true home rule in the form of statehood - and a commuter tax. Their ideal (there's that word) would be a system where they could tax commuters without the commuters having any say-so.

On the question of DC, local government and statehood, Eve Tushnet has excellent considerations in So Far From God, So Close To The United States and Washington, D.C.: District of Chaos (not an anti-DC piece, despite its title)

Cute as a Button - But enough about Unqualified Offerings. What about Janeane Garofalo? Unqualified Offerings adjunct fellow Kevin Maroney pronounces himself, via e-mail, "happy for her if she can get" the $50K Clear Channel lists as her performance fee. "[T]hat's 2.5x a night with Weird Al Yankovic..."

Kevin also suggests that "Black 47 for $3500 probably beats BR5-49 at $7500" for the Best Buy trophy, which would seem to mean that, like Unqualified Offerings, he thinks $300,000 for Shania Twain is on the steep side. (UO thinks that "We'll let you live if you attend this concert" is just slightly too much to pay.)

Which reminds this site. Last summer, UO's beloved sister and her nearly-as-beloved husband went to see Tim McGraw. Hey, it's a big ol' world! When this site's sister afterward declared that the laser light show was the best part of the concert, UO declared that a supposed country act having a laser light show was just wrong. Its sister consdered this very judgmental.

The Heart of Rock&Roll is Still Bleatin' (Sic) - Anent the Clear Channel starpimping item below, Chad Orzel writes

Presumably, $100K gets you the News, as well...

I'm not sure whether to be more or less boggled by this, having seen the Huey Lewis and the News episode of "Behind the Music" in a hotel, once. It may have been the lamest "Behind the Music" show ever-- nobody got kicked out of the band, nobody died of a drug overdose, they made a pile of money, and when their popularity waned in the late 80's, they handled it gracefully. They're all still friends, record occasionally, and play a few shows a year. Apparently for a hundred grand a pop.

If you're going to do the flash-in-the-pan pop stardom thing, that's the way to do it. But it's hardly compelling television...

Unqualified Offerings remembers a Rolling Stone profile of the News from the 1980s which found the group at - a golf course. Now, Unqualified Offerings has played golf in its life, and may play again sometime. And it believes in real diversity, which surely includes golfing rockers. At least in the 1980s, a rocker letting on he played golf took a serious cred hit. Which means that UO liked that about Lewis and his band way more than any of their music.

Chad's personal list of "perfect albums" is available on Uncertain Principles. Clearly UO is not the only one determined to be your unofficial substitute The Minor Fall, The Major Lift this week.

Meanwhile, Charles Dodgson thinks the Clear Channel price list betokens good economic news.

Quit Holding Out and Draw Another Breath - Joe Strummer just turned 50 today. You can sign his birthday card here. (Must...fight...cognitive...dissonance!) From Midnight-3AM you can join DJ John O's celebration on his Salvage&Recovery Radio show on WUSB, which still has a RealAudio feed, despite all the RIAA's machinations.

NOTE: Unqualified Offerings suspects the birthday card link will decay to the regular index page of strummernews.com within days, if not sooner. So if you come upon this in the archives, no promises.

(Link via the Elvis Costello Mailing List.)

Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others - In a demonstration of the sort of thing that is actually controversial on the left, Brendan O'Neill declares

This is the deal, folks (and I can't believe I have to say this): humans are superior to animals.

in response to cranky e-mails about his recent piece, "Of Frogs and Iraqis." (It turns out that that stuff about how, if you put an Iraqi in a pot of water and heat it to boiling slowly, he won't jump out, is a myth.)

Party Planner - ClearChannel may be evil, but they can take care of the music program for your next party. You can get anyone from Joan Baez to Jars of Clay - for a price. Not the records; the people. Do your shopping here. Unqualified Offerings awards its coveted Best Buy designation to BR5-49 ($7500). The What the Fuck Would Possess Anyone to Do THAT prize goes to

Huey Lewis $100K

Not a misprint. Not a hoax. Not an imaginary tale.

Apparently Yankees Manager Joe Torre will perform for $12.5K, but the price list doesn't say if that's with a band or solo.

It also offers

Natalie Merchant $35K

Well, I could certainly use $35K, but I'm not sure I'm willing to go through that.

Some readers may be comforted to know just how much money certain geezer acts can still command. Steve Miller will set you back $100K. Tracy Chapman will cost you twice that. That's 6 times what Ani deFranco commands ($35K), not that either one of them would dream of comparing themselves on those terms. Oh no! But Kansas is only $20K. Try not to have that much lying around, just in case.

(Link via Gene Healy, who likes me!)

It Takes a Gaming Blog - Mike "Epoch" Sullivan of Random Ruminations offers a theory about Saturday's item, Head's I Win, Tails You Lose, about the recently-concluded Millenium Challenge 2002 combined-force wargames. In that post, Unqualified Offerings noted that "Red Team" commander Paul Van Riper told colleagues he quit the exercise because he decided the rules were rigged to ensure a Blue victory.

Epoch wonders if there isn't another explanation. His letter is so intriguing that UO will reproduce it in full.:

As I was reading your post and the linked material, one thing which occurred to me as the possible source of the contention was whether or not Ret. General Van Riper was acting "in character."

As a gamer, you are, of course, very familiar with the concept that forces, PC or NPC, may well use non-optimal tactics in any given roleplayed conflict, because the characters (but not necessarily the players) are either lacking a crucial bit of knowledge or do not have the intellectual capacity or time to figure out the optimal tactics. And I'm sure you're also familiar with the style of play (call it low-Exploration gamism, to harken back to Ron Edwards' old lingo) in which the players use their knowledge of the Monster Manual or other sources of information about their opponents, despite the lack of in-character justification for using that knowledge. Now, I don't mean to trivialize the gravity of these games which, after all, are not escapism or art, but practice for the deadly serious business of killing other humans. Nor would I suggest that we should assume that enemy states are the functional equivalents of D&D
goblins -- disorganized and stupid. Still, the in-character/out-of-character distinction would seem to be relevent.

The question on my mind (which may or may not relate to the Millennium Challenge games) is what methodology the armed forces uses for what are essentially large-scale roleplaying games, and what methodology they SHOULD use.

I propose that, for the kinds of aggressive wars far from U.S. territory that we're considering here, where annexation of US soil is not really in the range of possibility, the goal should be achieval of the stated goals quickly and with minimum loss of life -- particularly the lives of our own forces, but also of foreign civilians. But that doesn't really tell us which methodology is better for that basic philosophy. It would initially seem that we should play the foreign forces as if they had the "book open" -- with functional knowledge of the US capabilities, if not our specific tactics. That's something of a worst-case scenario, where the enemy is being played as highly intelligent and perhaps unreasonably knowledgeable, and it would seem at first glance to offer our forces the most protection to assume such a formidable opponent. On the other hand, playing a conservative case on our side might cause us to dismiss tactics which would, realistically, be highly effective at bringing a conflict to an end.

I don't, in the end, have an answer, except that it might be best to try it both ways. Nor, of course, am I even addressing the larger question of when, if ever, it is appropriate for the US to engage in such aggressive, off-shore actions. But it is interesting to speculate as to whether the Pentagon is wrestling with the same kinds of issues, on a large scale, as we do when crafting combat encounters for our games, and whether they might be able to put to use some of the theories which I know you, among others, have thought a great deal about.

Hey, it could be true. Maybe Riper was just playing out of character, in which case he doubtless forfeited the role-playing bonus too.

Note: Mike's blog is down as of Monday night because of technical problems at Williams College. But it will be back.

UPDATE: Mike also writes

How terrifying would you find it if I told you that Unqualified Offerings was my major source of political news?

Unqualified Offerings doesn't find that terrifying at all. But its other readers may...

The Bazaar is Open - Mike also notes that Abu Nidal is dead in Baghdad, a possible suicide, if suicides involving what are apparently many, many bullet holes is possible. UO's thesis: This is Saddam's way of saying we can all still be friends. Well, everyone but Abu Nidal anyway.

UPDATE: Also from Mike: He points out that a legend has grown that Oliver North once testified before Congress on the danger posed by - Osama bin Laden. In fact, North testified about the menace of Abu Nidal. If Unqualified Offerings recollects rightly, North claimed that he was on Abu Nidal's hit list, which was why he bought his wife nylons on his government credit card. Or something.

Reprove It All Night - Reader/Gaming Buddy Mike Jacobs reports that Bruce Springsteen and Jon Bon Jovi are suing RPM's bar in Pittsburgh for playing their songs without paying the ASCAP royalty fee. From the Washington Post story:

The lawsuit, filed Friday by the ASCAP on behalf of Springsteen, Bon Jovi and Universal-Polygram International Publishing Inc., says RPM's in Bridgeville is not allowed to play music by ASCAP members without paying an annual $2,818 fee.

Unqualified Offerings doesn't have a huge problem with this. $2818 for an entire year of ASCAP replay rights doesn't seem exactly predatory. It has a bigger problem with playing Bon Jovi in the first place.

A Fanboy's Notes - Finally an answer to the question, "War, What Is It Good For?"

Sometimes when I get tired of the War, I think: at least all of my enemies are stuck doing this too.

—from the memoirs of Alice Mendel, Lady of the Thunder

—R. Sean Borgstrom, The Game of Powers: The Live-Action Supplement for Nobilis

Bossblog Bits - Chad Orzel of Uncertain Principles weighs in on The Rising in general and "Mary's Place" in particular. He finds another allusion in "Mary," to the Temptations classic, "I Wish It Would Rain." Recommended.

(Needless to say, the Temptations have a website now.)

David Lifton, on the Elvis Costello Mailing List suggested that the "Turn it up" refrain at the end of "Mary" alludes to "Caravan" by Van Morrison. Maybe so. You can decide for yourself by downloading this free liquid-music file of the song from Amazon.com. It's Van performing with the Band from The Last Waltz boxed set. UO was more inclined to think Springsteen was evoking numbers like "Shout," but so what? What's important is that you can get a free download of Van Morrison and the Band.

UPDATE: Added a named credit for David Lifton, with his permission. Early versions of this post read "A reader on the Elvis Costello Mailing List..."

How Bad It Really Is - Charles Dodgson has savage fun with Richard Perle's desperate attempt to get the Republican Party's burgeoning army of Iraq dissenters back into line, as well he should, but it seems to Unqualified Offerings that he misses an important aspect of the scuffle. Perle said

The failure to take on Saddam after what the president said would produce such a collapse in confidence in the president that it would set back the war on terrorism.

Here's the thing. Perle is not altogether wrong about the effect of demurring on the President's credibility. What's more, he knows perfectly well that this is the sort of argument that hits conservatives in their weak spot. To be right wing is to set an enormous store by "resolve" and "credibility" and "strength." Unqualified Offerings is not itself immune to concerns about "vacillation" and "appearing weak." So it's a strong tactical move for Perle to bring it up.

But. Because the targets of Perle's appeal are strong conservatives, and security-minded folks, you can be darn sure that Perle's concern occurred to them before Perle spoke. They already, because that's the sort of people they are, had to think, "But if we back out now, the President risks looking like a fool." And then they went public anyway.

That's the true measure of how bad an idea they think invading Iraq is.

How About Never? Is Never Good for You?

Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres says Israel is not trying to pressure the Bush administration to speed up a military strike against Iraq's Saddam Hussein and the timing of such an assault is solely a U.S. decision.

from FoxNews.com, Israel: We're Not Pushing for Early Strike

Heads I Win, Tails You Lose - The commander of the "Red" team in the just-completed Millennium Challenge 2002 wargames, widely taken to "validate new war-fighting concepts" that the US might, might use to invade one or more countries in the Persian Gulf region, says that the Pentagon...cheated.

Paul Van Riper, who headed the Marine Corps Combat Development Command when he retired in 1997 as a three-star general, said he became so frustrated with undue constraints on his command of "enemy" forces that he quit the role midway through Millennium Challenge 2002, which ended Aug. 15.

His complaints were reported Friday by the Army Times, a private newspaper that covers Army issues. The Times obtained a copy of an e-mail Van Riper sent to colleagues explaining why he had quit.

(From yesterday's Washington Post article, "Ex-General Says Wargames Were Rigged" by Robert Burns.) A spokesman for the Joint Forces Command said there is "no record" of Riper having quit. You'd think someone might remember one way or the other, but UO supposes it doesn't do to inquire too closely about these things.

Van Riper said exercise officials denied him the opportunity to use his own tactics and ideas against the Blue, or friendly, forces, and on several occasions the Red forces were directed not to use certain weapons against Blue.

Robert Oakley, a retired ambassador who played the role of civilian leader of the Red force, told the Times that Van Riper was outthinking the Blue force. He said, for example, that in the computer simulations, Van Riper used motorcycle messengers to transmit orders, negating the Blue forces' high-tech eavesdropping capabilities. When the Blue naval forces sailed into the Persian Gulf early in the experiment, Van Riper's forces surrounded the ships with small boats and planes.

Much of the Blue force's ships ended up at the bottom of the ocean. Oakley said Joint Forces Command officials had to stop the exercise and "refloat" the fleet in order to continue.

Not to worry, though:

Vice Adm. Marty Mayer, the deputy commander of Joint Forces Command, defended the exercise.

"I want to disabuse anybody of any notion that somehow the books were cooked," Mayer told the Times. He said, however, that "certain things are scripted" in any large war game. "You have to execute in a certain way or you'll never be able to bring it all together," he said.

Mayer said that in some parts of the exercise Van Riper was constrained "in order to facilitate the conduct of the experiment."

Mayer said that similar scripts would be sent to Saddam Hussein and Ali Khameni "to facilitate the conduct of the war."

They Said It - Also from Radley Balko, who thinks Steven J. Hatfill has been getting the shaft

This fall will mark one year since the first Anthrax letter was mailed. The FBI investigation would probably have yielded more results if it had been conducted by the Washington Metro Police Department's "Lost Intern Division."

And Julian Sanchez on the response of a New Yorker to Mayor Bloomfield's proposed smoking ban for bars ("I'd actually be all for it, which is odd since I am a smoker myself. I think it might make me smoke less."):

Of course, even though not everyone needs help smoking less, he might feel singled out if we just banned his smoking in bars. So he's "all for" limiting the freedom of every other smoker and bar owner in the city -- because otherwise Mr. Iron Will here might have to exercise some modicum of discipline in order to smoke at his desired level.

I'm reminded here of David Hume's claim that it's "not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger." Seems like lots of folks have taken that to heart: if a regulation makes things marginally more convenient for me, I can ignore the burden it places on others. So-- why is it libertarians who get tagged as selfish, again?

Gene Healy on Rumsfeld, McNamara and knowing better:

Iraq is not Vietnam, and Rumsfeld--a man for whom I have a great deal of respect (among other things he worked with Milton Friedman in the 70s to end the draft)--is assuredly not McNamara. But some of the Beltway hawks, in their casualness about war and their assumption that the world is their chessboard--evoke in me the same sort of contempt the Times editorialist felt for the former Defense Secretary.

Vexation About Representation - There's a lot of talk in the blogosphere now about the question of statehood for the District of Columbia. This Radley Balko response to a comment from a reader (there are those comment things again...) strikes Unqualified Offerings as superb. Balko, like UO, opposes statehood but believes that district residents should therefore be exempt from all federal taxes. Here's just a bit of his post:

I'm simply saying that if you're going to deny D.C.'s residents a voice in Congress (and I've written that on the whole I think that's a good idea), then you can't hit them up for taxes. This country was founded on the principle that unrepresentative taxation is a violation of our liberty. Why does that principle suddenly change simply because those without representation will vote for Democrats, are largely poor and black, and find themselves living in the District?

He has a lot more on other issues touching the question of statehood. Unqualified Offerings inserts only a single cavil: "Taxation Without Representation" is actually the District Government's ideal. For decades they've agitated Congress for the right to levy a "commuter tax" on Maryland and Virginia residents who work in DC. Needless to say, those commuters couldn't vote District politicians out of office, which is surely the appeal.

(Link via Eve Tushnet.)

The New Jerusalem - You can hear five tracks from Steve Earle's much-discussed forthcoming CD, Jerusalem, here, including - yes- "John Walker's Blues." (Note: Link will open a Flash 5 player and immediately commence the first song.) Unqualified Offerings doesn't want to, ahem, overemphasize the lyrics. It likes most of the tunes pretty well. "Ashes to Ashes" sounds like the Butthole Surfers playing campfire songs. "Conspiracy Theory" marries the bass line from "Oh Pretty Woman" and a shimmering girl-singer chorus to the Christic Institute Hymnbook scored for muted feedback and fat drums. Note: Unqualified Offerings means that in a good way!

And "John Walker's Blues?" Imagine a Bill&Ted-era Keanu Reeves after a month on light rations and insufficient water, trying to explain what the hell he thought he was doing while REM plays in the background. Clearly meant to capture Walker's mindset during the shellshocked days of Mazar e Sharif, the song does not strike Unqualified Offerings as likely to inspire a generation of copycats. "Walker" comes across as half-crazed and clueless; the arabic chorus at the end sounds hallucinatory. Likely this was Earle's intent, though he may contradict UO when he appears on the Today show Monday (August 19).

"I Remember You" is the actual trademark alt-country track in the sample. You can tell because Emmylou Harris duets. This one could easily have appeared on El Corazan or I Feel Alright, though UO is, for the time being, inclined to class it a rung below "You're Still Standing There" (with Lucinda Williams) and the landmark "Love Is Never Equal" that Earle did with Jill Sobule (hear sample).

"Jerusalem" sounds like...well, it sounds like a Steve Earle song. Rather Byrds-like on the instruments, ragged but right on the vocals. Those fearing or hoping for a paean to suicide bombing will find their expectations thwarted. There's not much in the way of political content at all, really. It's basically a rewrite of "What's So Funny 'Bout Peace, Love and Understanding."

There are six tracks we can't hear. The most programmatically political appears to be "Amerika V. 6.0," but even it harks back, lyrically at least, to "Snake Oil" from the Copperhead Road album. There is what looks to be a damn good song from the perspective of a prisoner ("The Truth"), a song from the perspective of a minor drug smuggler that could go either way, depending on the music ("What's a Simple Man to Do"), and a few tunes that appear to be more existential than political.

We fall into the trap, sometimes, of figuring that controversial art has to go either onto the Masterpiece shelf or into the Failure bucket. But what if it's really just - pretty good?

(Link via Micah Holmquist.)