What She Really Wishes - Ginger Stampley thinks that Dubya has made a dynastic slipup by stating the conditions under which Congress will raise taxes on his watch:

Dubya has generally been pretty good at avoiding his father's mistakes in his own presidency. So how on earth did he let "over my dead body" slip out? That's going to bite him in the ass sooner or later.

I think Ginger's Inner Liberal is confusing her here. Leave aside the economic merits of Bush Senior's budget deal in 1990. "Read my lips" was political death for Aitch-Dubya not because he said it in the first place but because a) he went back on his word; and b) he seems to have never meant it in the first place. (Sure wish I could remember the early-90s book by a couple of, I think, Time journalists, that reported that even during the pre-inauguration transition Bush was asking John Sununu when Sununu thought it would be safe to renege on the pledge. I thought it was called "Running in Place," but I'm having no luck at either Amazon or the Library of Congress with that title.)

A couple of implications follow: 1) If Dubya doesn't allow taxes to be raised, meaning he vetoes anything with a tax increase or keeps it from even getting that far, he doesn't pay the same political price his father did; 2) In the case of 1, the very contrast with his father further redounds to his benefit politically; 3) Since Dubya is clearly a keen student of his father's political missteps, he must understand the stakes, and he fully intends to reap benefits 1 and 2. What's more, since nobody less addled than Paul Krugman or disingenuous than Tom Daschle thinks raising taxes during a recession is a good idea, Bush the Younger seems to stand a good chance of collecting on this particular political bet. From here, and remember, Unqualified Offerings is not a Republican nor expects to become one, it loooks like a pretty shrewd maneuver.

Coda on the Culture of Liberty - The distinction about the origin of rights and their relation to the Constitution produces further insights - philosophical justification for despising Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA" to go with the musical justification. Greenwood sings

I'm proud to be an American where at least I know I'm free and I won't forget the men who died who gave that right to me

[Pause while Unqualified Offerings heartily apologizes for lodging this song like a kernel of corn in the teeth of your mind.]

Off the subject for a minute, is it just me or does "where at least I know I'm free" seem pretty lame as an appreciation of freedom? "Yeah, my body may be riddled with macroscopic parasites, but at least I know I'm free..." Whee!

Back on topic: The men who died didn't give you any rights whatsoever. You had them in the first place. The men who died arguably preserved those rights, but they didn't give you jack, rightswise, any more than the Constitution did or the government does.

Lord of the Rings - Yeah it was good. Really good. The pow-wow in Rivendell was a little too "Vulcan High Council" for my tastes, in staging, scripting and performance, but other notes rang much truer. Despite being a gamer, a (lapsed) comic book reader and a longtime SF fan, I have never been a Tolkein fanatic - I read The Hobbit and the trilogy in college (yes, under the influence of D&D) and liked it, but I've never been able to reread Tolkein with pleasure; that is, I've never been able to get very far. Get me in a cantankerous mood and I'd argue that Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword is a more vital reimagining of Northern saga. Recently I decided that the problem is that I've tried to start each time with The Hobbit, which everyone agrees is a lesser and more juvenile work. The movie confirmed for me that I really should stick to the trilogy itself next time.

What I thought was crucially good: The movie did an excellent job of conveying pain and discomfort, particularly Frodo's, but also the job Sean Bean did in Boromir's last battle. That's important, because we must feel the enormity of the sacrifice that Frodo willingly if reluctantly makes, and we must feel its wilfullness and its reluctance. "Let this cup pass from my lips" and all that. The movie successfully portrays the Shire as the ultimate in, to borrow an A.A. Milne word, "hummy," then ruthlessly strips its comforts from the protagonist. Strider/Aragorn came across as wonderfully seedy and tough in his introduction scene. Minor but important pleasures: the bravery and determination of Arwen; the perfect realization of Gandalf and the Balrog on the bridge. One audience member did make the asinine remark early on - oh it was me - to a companion that "Just imagine what Chris Farley could have done with the role of Sam Gamgee!" but that was unworthy of the film.

The movie gets four thumbs up. (Four of us saw the movie.) And the Spiderman preview kicked ass too. If I didn't have to keep this blog going I'd take a nap until May 3.

(Even though Tolkein has moved back up My List, do read The Broken Sword.)

Into the Fire - Unqualified Offerings has been following the Interblog Gun Wars with interest, and will venture a few comments. Why? Because I am a traffic whore. The sides are roughly the Samizdatists on one side and a coalition of Ginger Stampley and Charles Dodgson on the other. (The IGW actually started with a skirmish between Brian Linse and Instapundit.com, but, according to a carefully calculated Chinese Plan, spread beyond its original boundaries.)

I think Ginger and Charles have acquitted themselves pretty well. Ginger is no enthusiast for gun control and both liberals have renounced Clintonian apologetics for government malfeasance at Waco and Ruby Ridge, among other places. So they avoid setting my teeth on edge, which is nice for me and my teeth. What follows is a summary of the various arguments, per my understanding of them, and some comments on same:

Perry wittily makes the point that the Constitution is not the source of American rights, but merely an indicator of them. Fair enough, and in keeping with the text of the Constitution itself. The fifth amendment does not say, "the people shall have the right to keep and bear arms," or "the people shall have the right to free speech," it says "the right of the people [to keep and bear arms/to speak freely] shall not be abridged. One cannot overstate the importance of this distinction: The Nigerian journalist has the same right to free speech I do; the Pakistani Christian the same right to freedom of worship; and the English apartment dweller the same right to keep and bear arms. Their rights are abridged by their governments.

The ground weakens under Perry when he cites a US culture of liberty as a more reliable guarantor of American liberties than the US Constitution:

Whilst I distrust the motives of the US state as much as I distrust the British state, I have tremendous faith in the essential underpinnings of American society (more so in fact that British society to be honest).

Perry had previously argued that Britain's lack of a written Constitution and Bill of Rights was not a factor in Britain being, in some ways, less free than the US. (Perry points out many, many unfree aspects of US life, and accurately IMHO, but Britain is the country where gun rights are gone, jury trials are going, the government is encouraging people to inform on those saying arguably racist things in coversation and you can get arrested for acts of avoir dupois. I think it is fair to say that Perry finds Britain less free than the US, though he should feel free to inform me if he holds the mistaken impression that things are otherwise...(!))

But Ginger has a pretty important objection:

I will add this: In England, the rights of trial by jury and even habeas corpus are under attack, not just for foreign terrorist suspects, but for native-born Englishmen and Englishwomen. The Constitution alone, without the good will of Americans, couldn't stop an American government from instituting similar measures. But as with the unconstitutional forfeiture laws, we have a framework and a language for saying that such laws are wrong, how they are wrong, and to a certain extent why they are wrong.

I would rephrase Ginger's point thusly: I believe that Perry is right (still) about a US culture of liberty. But I think that the Constitution is not merely an effect of that culture but a cause as well - it's a feedback loop. One of the reasons a culture of liberty persists is that the Constitution stands as reference point and inspiration. To wit: You learn about the Constitution and the reasons for it in school, and you internalize it. I would argue that the culture of liberty has declined in the US and in Britain, and that one of the reasons it has declined in the US is precisely that the Constitution and the ideas behind it are less taught than they used to be. Since I am a right-winger, I believe that the change in pedagogy is deliberate - that the educational establishment exists to serve the ideals of the Shepherd State, this being, since the educational establishment is part of the Shepherd class, in its self interest, and that the Constitution is uncongenial to the Shepherd ideal.

I would also argue that the culture of liberty is declining less rapidly in the US than in Britain - that is, less rapidly in the country that has a written constitution than the one that doesn't. Correlation is not causation. But it isn't necessarily acausal either.

I want to address the IRA, armed revolt, and Charles Dodgson's argument that the State will always have the big battalions too, but the babysitter is almost here and it's time to go see Lord of the Rings.

The Two-Party System for Beginners - From the excellent weblog, A Libertarian Reads the Newspaper, this simple explanation:

If you really want to clarify things, it's easy. Republicans are for Big Government; Democrats are for Really Big Government. Neither party questions an interventionist foreign policy.

This Just In - Unqualified Offerings regularly searches the Pakistani press for news of urgent import to its audience. Today's stunner comes from The International News:

KATHMANDU: Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf said on Friday that talks with India at the Saarc summit here are possible only if there is a "willingness on both sides".

You know, I think he's right about that...

The Bad Housekeeping Seal of Approval - E.J. Dionne of the Post may be the most disingenuously partisan columnist in America. He has frequently affected an analytical tone, but every word he writes is with an eye toward advantaging the therapeutic managerialists that have taken over the rights to the word "liberal." His few dissents from Democratic Party orthodoxy are all in an authoritarian direction, mostly speaking kindly about attempts by religious conservatives to use state power to resolve cultural conflicts over issues like abortion, obscenity and school prayer in their favor. He is, in short, Mark Shields without the engaging personality.

The proper response of any Republican to praise by E.J. Dionne should be horror, since the only reason E.J. Dionne would ever praise one would be if he thought that that Republican served Democratic Party purposes. Theodore Roosevelt is dead and had no shame anyway, but George W. Bush should worry - Dionne thinks it's just great that Bush has (supposedly) been reading a bio of Teddy over the holidays:

Roosevelt, the man who added record amounts of land to the federal government's holdings, who busted the trusts, who championed campaign finance reform, also meant it when he called himself a radical.

Before he became president, Roosevelt saw his Republican Party as in the hands "not merely of the conservatives, but of the reactionaries; of men who for various reasons . . . distrusted anything that was progressive."

Roosevelt was the early tribune of the managerialists, so it makes sense that a late tribune like Dionne likes him. "Statist" is a libertarian jargon term that Unqualified Offerings has a hard time using without bashful irony quotes around it. But the term fits Dionne perfectly - indeed, no other term in the political lexicon fits him better.

Do you like the flat tax and hate the inheritance tax? Roosevelt disagreed. He advocated "a graduated income tax" and an "inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate."

Critics of the minimum wage might note that TR went a step farther, advocating "a living wage." He proposed setting it at "a standard high enough to make morality possible, to provide for education and recreation, to care for immature members of the family, to maintain the family during periods of sickness, and to permit of reasonable saving for old age."

Nor did states' rights doctrines hold much attraction to Roosevelt. "The betterment which we seek must be accomplished, I believe, mainly through the national government," he said in 1910.

It's not hard to see what a contemporary "liberal" would like about all this. But where is the attraction of TR supposed to be for "conservatives?" Oh:

Conservatives inspired by Ronald Reagan especially like Roosevelt's embrace of an assertive American role in the world. Faced with the challenge of terrorism, Bush no doubt warms to TR's famous declaration: "The American people are slow to wrath, but when their wrath is kindled it burns like a consuming flame."

Roosevelt is the President who famously sent the US fleet around the world and fixed the US on the course of Empire in the wake of McKinley. So instead of republican (small "r") government and laissez-faire, "conservatives" get - war. Whoopee. Libertarians have another jargon term that one can't avoid recalling here: the "welfare-warfare state." Dionne seems to think it's swell. So do the "National Greatness" Republicans at the Project for Conservative Reform and The Weekly Standard. The PCR has a Teddy image in its banner and the Standard has cited him as a model. They are, in other words, right where E.J. Dionne wants them. That ought to worry them, for reasons of sheer self-interest if nothing else. Pathetically, one "National Greatness" site, the Pericles Institute, actually swells with pride at Dionne's approval:

Liberal Democrats such as journalist E.J. Dionne, Jr. have welcomed the emergence of this National Greatness conservatism.

If they're that happy about praise from E.J. Dionne, how much more ecstatic would they be if Ellen Goodman gave them a pat on the head?

For quite another view of TR and his times, try this long memoir-review from 1981 by the much-despised Gore Vidal. (Hey, the uberhawk blogs were never going to link to this site anyway. Might as well make the most of it.)

Look Down - Some people may still be looking for Unqualified Offerings' end-of-year awards. They are here.

Welcome to the Wilderness of Mirrors to Mickey Kaus, who today writes

If you were accused terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui, and you really had been part of the 9/11 al Qaeda plot, but you'd broken down and were blabbing everything to the authorities, would you want to give that impression in open court, making yourself a potential target for your former comrades? Or would you seem defiant and say "In the name of Allah, I do not have anything to plead"? Just a thought. ...

Indeed! Kausfiles is pretty adept at this "interesting ventures in paranoid thinking" stuff. Which makes Unqualified Offerings wonder: Suppose you were a bigtime neoliberal who found yourself feeling increasingly libertarian. And suppose further, you had this tic about referring to yourself in the third person. And suppose you weren't ready to out yourself as "an antigovernment extremist who wants to divide us rather than bring us together." Mightn't you start a whole other site where you could be your funky libertarian self, make up a fancy cover story and set about smashing the state, comfortable that your Slate buddies would never imagine that you were secretly - Unqualified Offerings?

Call and Response - Fitfully blogging Michael Croft of the Ones and Zeroes blog has an "answer song" to "Information Wants To Be $10" below. To Unqualified Offerings' claim that "The market has found a great deal of fat around the waistlines of record company weasels and is squeezing it out," Michael responds

I can't agree. Not because the weasels are not corpulent nor because the facts are incorrect, but because the analysis doesn't go far enough.

Well, he huffed. It was a holiday! But Michael's piece is excellent technoeconomic history by someone who knows the music biz. And, since he's a smart guy, he warns us to beware of rent-seeking weasels in our future:

Keep an eye on the RIAA for the next few years. It'll be interesting to see which of our elected officials they buy to try to protect their outmoded industry. It'll be interesting to see if the creative members of the community get the message that Chris Knab has been spreading that they must Adapt or Die.

I don't know what will come next or how long it will be before we see it, but I am not in favor of propping the labels up. Information was meant to be $10, and most of that should go to the creative types who made it.

Hip Hip!

Final Score Florida 56 Maryland 23 - They've fallen right into our trap...

Florida 49 Maryland 10, End of Third Quarter - The martyrdom operation is a success!

Florida 28 Maryland 10 at the Half - The plan to destroy the Jew-Crusader Gators is very close to bearing fruit!

(Frankly, I think some of those Florida players look older than twelve...)

Pointless Update - Unqualified Offerings is taking much of the evening off to cheer the sacred Terrapins in their jihad against the Jew-Crusader Florida Gators. UO took two summer classes in College Park once, and several CLEPs in later years, so it feels a deep, abiding connection with the school - when it's having a good season.

New Years Resolutions:

Fish more.

Write more about fishing in the blog - heck, it's right there in the description.

Try to give up this faux-breezy third-person schtick. It's just warmed-over Kausfiles anyway.

New Frontiers in Spam? - It has been Unqualified Offerings' sin of pride to check its server stats, and it is starting to see a pattern. One of the stat options is "Referrers," that is, from what web page did someone click on the link to your page. It's fun to click back to new referrers and see what's there. What has happened more than once is that the referrer page has no apparent link to this site - what's more, the referrer page belongs to a company that sells some kind of web service. One site sells software that is supposed to keep spiders (search engine crawlbots) from doing - something or other. There were a couple of others that, Unqualified Offerings being very much in its pre-IPO phase, I didn't bother to remember.

Now here's what I'm wondering: Is this a marketing technique? Do these companies have bots that crawl pages and identify as the firm's homepage precisely so that narcissistic content providers like UO will click back and decide that we must - must have whatever it is those companies offer? It seems likely...

Wilderness of Mirrors, The Continuing Series - Pseudonymously anti-interventionist Brit Emmanuel Goldstein has posted a Stratfor analysis of the Indo-Pak imbrglio to the forum attached to his Airstrip One weblog. Stratfor's thesis amounts to this: The US is playing good cop to India's bad cop in pressuring Musharraf to crack down on anti-Indian terrorists, and that's working. But what the US really wants is to get Musharraf to make the ISI play ball on locating bin Laden - if he can. Washington thus wants the India threat around because it makes Pakistan worry - Pakistan owns some maps and can see that India is right when it claims that it will come out better in a bilateral nuclear exchange. Washington hopes a worried Pakistan is a cooperative Pakistan. The problem is that, as Musharraf meets US/Indian public demands to arrest Kashmiri militants, he leaves the US with no public complaints, since Washington is keeping its demands re the ISI and al Qaeda mum.

Seems to me that there are some corollaries to Stratfor's thesis: 1) If Musharraf makes India happy and India ratchets down its armed threat, the US suddenly has no anvil to its chamois-covered hammer. 2) Perhaps India and the US have an explicit, secret deal that prevents "1)" from cropping up. That is, the US has agreed to help India resolve its Kashmir problem by doing the two-step over Lashkar-i-Taiba and, um, the other guys, and India has agreed to keep the military pressure on until Musharraf makes the ISI hand over or find bin Laden.

Two big problems suggest themselves. First, as Stratfor says, Musharraf may be flat incapable of controlling the ISI. Second, the party most at risk here is the US, by a longshot. Not only can the Pakistanis mess America over on cooperating in the capture of bin Laden, India can mess the US over as well. They may well consider it in their interests to go for (in the words of the famous Far Side cartoon with the two orcas) the whole shmear - a decisive defeat of Pakistan and Musharraf's government be damned.

Historical Note: "Wilderness of Mirrors" has been a running feature for most of the (short, happy) life of Unqualified Offerings. While the phrase is well-known from T.S. Eliot's "Gerontion," it was also the title of a landmark history of American espionage by David C. Martin. The book is a dual biography of CIA officers James Jesus Angleton and William King Harvey. I also highly recommend Portrait of a Cold Warrior, an engaging memoir of CIA officer Joseph B. Smith. (At least, he says his name is Joseph B. Smith...) It is from Smith's book that Unqualified Offerings learned the Black Ops Ideal of avoiding visible involvement by your own nationals in your operation.

Literary Note: Smith's book contains, among its many riches, an extended portrait of the professional life of Paul M.A. Linebarger, known to science fiction fans as Cordwainer Smith. Smith's connected stories explored the universe of the "Underpeople," half-man, half-animal hybrids. Richard Moorman offers this useful summary of Smith's oeuvre:

Many of his Cordwainer Smith stories concern themselves with the impact of an enormous humanistic bureacracy (the Instrumentality of Mankind) and the underground, religious rebellion of the slave-class Underpeople and a parallel to Christianity (the Old Strong Religion of the God Nailed High). Over time the Instrumentality creates a utopia in which everyone lives exactly four hundred years, kept alive by small doses of stroon, an immortality drug exported from Norstrilia (Old North Australia), a heavily-defended planet where staunchly, perversely puritanical Aussie farmers tend enormous, sick sheep who produce the drug. Eventually even the Instrumentality must admit that everyone is dying of boredom under this massively overcontrolled utopian system, and the Rediscovery of Mankind brings new danger and spice to life, but only to a point. Underground, the Holy Insurgency waits for the second coming. (Most of these concepts were cribbed from the "Cordwainer Smith and Christianity" web page.)

Having read Joseph Smith's book, Unqualified Offerings once approached Harlan Ellison, who published a Smith story in his classic Dangerous Visions anthology, at a science fiction convention, and asked, all too archly, "When you published Paul Linebarger/Cordwainer Smith, did you know who he really was?"

Ellison's reply was, roughly, "That he worked for the CIA? Yes."

On the evidence of Smith's book, saying that Linebarger "worked for the CIA" is like saying George Halas "worked for the NFL." Linebarger literally wrote the book on propaganda operations and covert action, particularly in reference to Asia, in the Agency's formative years. (Psychological Warfare, Ayer, 1948 rev 1954.) From Indonesia to the Philippines to Indochina, Southeast Asia was the Cold War with the gloves off. Linebarger's name comes up in the database of the leftist Public Information Research Inc., associated with, among other books, one called Ten Years of Military Terror in Indonesia, by an M. Caldwell. It is suggestive, to say the least, that a man who spent his professional life putting down insurrections spent his literary life fantasizing insurrectionists.

Someone should do a "dual" Linebarger/Smith biography. It could be monumental.

Back From the Brink? - According to The Dawn, "Pakistan welcomes Indian message." A lot of their welcoming is a bit "in your face," though: "The spokesman dispelled the impression that Pakistan had taken action against Lashkar-i-Taiba under pressure. He said being a victim of terrorism itself, Pakistan had always condemned it and extended full cooperation to the international community in its fight against this menace."

The article contains this precious passage:

The spokesman denied reports that those detained after US bombing on Afghanistan were being interrogated by an American agency, saying that Pakistani security agencies were quite capable of interrogating.

Who can doubt it? And that's not all they're capable of doing. According to another article, Pakistan Rangers broke up a peace rally in Lahore with batons and such. The Dawn does not say how big the rally is. Meanwhile a frustratingly scattershot column by Justin Raimondo, includes a link to a Paknews.com story from December 28 reporting that China has begun moving troops along its border with India, "a day after Musharraf, President of Pakistan returned from official tour to China." Paknews.com seems pretty sensationalistic compared to the International News and the Dawn, and I am unable to find a corroborating link, although The Times of India reports that "The Army on Tuesday denied reports that there were any Chinese activities going on along the borders of the North East." Which, even if true, doesn't speak to what might be going on along India's northwestern border with China. The one closest to...Pakistan.

Unqualified Offerings is very bummed that Kamran Shafi, its favorite Pakistani columnist (see link at left) , apparently has the week off.

This Is Sports Center with Beavis and Butthead - Headline yesterday on MSN: "Stanford Coach to Fill Notre Dame Opening."

We Get Letters - A nice note today from Eve Tushnet of the Manhattan Institute, the National Catholic Register and her own site, which she is calling EveTushnet.com. (It's really on Geocities, but hey, we've all had Geocities sites at one time or another, haven't we?) Eve appears to be a non-standard-issue conservative, which is to say, the kind Unqualified Offerings likes best. Even though the blog is new, she has lots of content, having gone to the trouble of posting articles she's written for the Register and the Yale Free Press. A War Drink contest is underway, with a Democratic Party slogans contest coming. (I hope they'll consider my "You need us to protect you from your own worst instincts" suggestion.) She seems to specifically decline to identify as a libertarian, but give her time, folks, she's young. In short, Eve appears to be your typical pro-life, queer-activist Republican. Check it out, if you dare.

Who Sent You - Thanks to site patron saint Virginia Postrel for her kind words about Unqualified Offerings last night, and welcome to everyone who made the trek from her site. As for the remark about "interesting ventures in paranoid thinking," though, no doubt her Chinese masters instructed her to say that...

Unqualified Successes 2001 - Unqualified Offerings has decided to do awards too!

Least Dispensible Weblog - Instapundit

Hawk of the Year - Christopher Hitchens

Dove of the Year - Alan Bock

"Do What You Want with the Girl, But Leave Me Alone" Award - Michael Moore, regretting that al Qaeda didn't target Bush voters.

"Turning Japanese" Award, for Best Case of the Vapors - Andrew Sullivan, for his frantic injunctions to nuke somebody - anybody! - in response to the anthrax attacks.

Best Non-Libertarian in a Libertarian Role - Mickey Kaus

Best Libertarian in a Neoconservative Role - Instapundit, on extending the war

Best Meme Insertion - Virginia Postrel, for starting the "Our Good Friends, The Saudis" phenomenon.

Best Libertarians in a Libertarian Role - Samizdata

Least Annoying Liberal - Ginger Stampley

War is the Health of the State Award, Executive Branch Division - John Ashcroft

War is the Health of the State Award, Legislative Branch Division - Charles Schumer

War is the Health of the State Award, Fourth Estate Division, Broadcast Media - Peter Jennings, for intoning, on the very day of the massacres, that "we" would have to accept less freedom in the future.

War is the Health of the State Award, Fourth Estate Division, Newspaper Punditry - Tie, every mainstream liberal columnist in America.

War is the Health of the State Award, Fourth Estate Division, Political Mags - Bill Moyers in the Nation, for the sheer venom.

Order of Merit, Robber Baron Division - "The Oligarchs Who Control Russian Oil Production"

Order of Scorn, Robber Baron Division - The Oligarchs Who Control the Entertainment Business

Best Unwitting 9/11 Song, Therapeutic Category - "Stuck in a Moment," U2

Best Unwitting 9/11 Song, Prophetic Category - "O Superman," Laurie Anderson

Best Witting 9/11 Song - "Let's Roll," Neil Young

Special Achievement Award - The Onion, Attack on America issue.

Soup of the Year - Campbells Chunky Seasoned Beef Rib Roast with Herbs and Potatoes.

Unintended Consequences Award - Stephanie Salter, Mary McGrory and Ellen Goodman, for weakening otherwise unimpeachable arguments against the burka.

"We Wuz Robbed" Award - For neocons Charles Krauthammer and William Kristol, who, despite their twin forebodings of doom, doom! on Halloween, somehow failed to make the roundups of "defeatist" punditry that uberhawk bloggers compiled after the fall of the Taliban.

Tagline of the Year - "We can fact-check your ass," Ken Layne

Special Achievement Award - Blogger.com

Spouse of the Year - Mrs. Offering

Auld Acquaintance - It is 33-degrees fahrenheit at Unqualified Headquarters. Unqualified Offerings is about to grill t-bones, outside, for New Year's Eve dinner. Fuck 2001!

And after dinner - Unqualified Successes, UO's end-of-year awards. Don't miss it.

Paging John Ashcroft and Charles Schumer - The Wall Street Journal got ahold of an al Qaeda PC and has published a story about the contents. This part is particularly chilling:

Particularly encouraging, the letter in the computer files said, was a home-brew nerve gas made from insecticides and a chemical additive that would help speed up penetration into the skin. The writer said Khabab had supplied a computer disk that gave details of “his product” in a WinZip file, and “my neighbor opened it by God’s will.”

Terrorists are compressing files! And Unqualified Offerings bets that, if someone investigated, they would find that drug dealers compress files too! Clearly, Congress needs to redefine file compression programs as munitions and restrict their export. And every Winzip user needs to be required to submit any passwords for compressed files to the government.

Information Wants To Be $10 - According to Reuters via ZDNet, fuzzy, big-eyed music industry oligarchs are about to permanently lower the price of music CDs to $9.99, "in bid to battle the scourge of online music piracy," per the subhead. "I think to some degree that's got to be attributed to the fact that there's so much music available online," says Tom Adams, president of entertainment industry research and consulting firm Adams Media Research.

Almost as quickly, however, Adams admits, ""I also think (the price cutting) is also as much to do with the fact that the economy is terrible and holiday sales were off overall." Other factors: DVDs are the hot new media item, and DVD purchases have drained money from CD purchases. It seems to Unqualified Offerings that, at the time of their swan song in the mid-80s, new LPs were hitting a $9.99 price point - in mid-80s dollars. So whatever causal factors apply, we may simply be seeing the same "Everything gets better and cheaper over time" trend common to dynamic economies.

If a CD sells for $13, a record company takes in about $8, of which it deducts artist, publishing royalties and manufacturing, promotional and marketing costs.

The artist generally makes between 50 cents and 75 cents per CD, while the record company clears between $3 and $4 per CD. The artist has to pay back advances paid by the record firm, further cutting the artists' royalty, which often dwindles to nothing, according to music industry insiders.

"(We) believe music software CD prices may soon permanently decline to $9.99 given weak sell-through of new artists and continued Internet piracy that appears unstoppable," Peter Caruso, a retail analyst at Merrill Lynch said.

"This should force a shakeout in the music retail business," he added in a research note.

Adams, at Adams Media Research, said the music industry was also not being helped by its slow transition into full subscription online music services.

"I think we are in for a slow transition to a very different model for the audio distribution business where a lot more happens online through legitimate services like those being launched now," said Adams.

"I think that will be a growth business which ends up generating revenues for rights holders and probably to some extent at the expense of CD sales," he added.

Thesis: The market has found a great deal of fat around the waistlines of record company weasels and is squeezing it out.

Piling On - I know plenty of other antigovernment extremist bloggers who want to divide us rather than bring us together, as Bill Clinton might put it, have already cited stories about how the new federal airport security employment guidelines are designed to allow as many of the exact same screeners to stay in their jobs as possible. But the liberal bleating in favor of "federalizing airport security" was so obnoxious that the Democratic Party nose just can't be rubbed in the mess enough.

More Joys of Capitalism - For awhile, improvements in food quality at McDonalds were a hot topic on Instapundit. But somehow the two best things about McDonalds never came up: 1) The sausage and egg biscuit - the breakfast food of the gods; and 2) the straws! McDonald straws are of a significantly wider gauge than most restaurant straws. What that means is that every draw brings a bigger blast of caffeinated goodness than one gets from most other fast food places. (Popeyes uses McDonald-gauge straws. KFC does not.) Years ago, while musing on the anti-capitalist assumptions of contemporary literary culture in general and poetical culture in particular, it occurred to me that it ought to be possible to construct a heroic simile likening some praiseworthy thing to McDonalds straws; one can imagine the construction being beautiful and true - in the abstract. But unless you covered yourself with winking irony, you could never get away with it.

Joys of Capitalism - Soulless corporation Lipton first introduced real decaffeinated tea something over a decade ago. This was not some herbal ersatz "tea," but real orange and black pekoe with the caffeine sucked out. It tasted fine, though it was weaker per bag than caffeinated tea. Since iced tea is what they drink in heaven, and since Unqualified Offerings has no chance of getting to sleep if it consumes a caffeinated beverage after about 2pm, decaf tea was a godsend. Decaf tea has been around long enough to be released in generic brands. Then, within the last year, Lipton introduced their cold brew bags. That simplifies iced tea production greatly - the official drink of Unqualified Offerings can be made with a single pitcher-sized bag in a quart apple-sauce jar (note: consume apple sauce first), plus two tablespoons of sugar. Within six months of the introduction of the cold brew bag, Lipton introduced perhaps the greatest achievement of human civilization to date - the cold brew decaf tea bag.

Has any government on earth done as much for humankind in the last two decades?

Why Samizdata Rocks - All blogdom has been following the Great Debate on gun rights, gun shows and gun registration between Samizdata and its overmatched opponents. Today, Perry de Havilland writes:

In fact the debate is nothing of the kind. As I has said again and again, the Second Amendment is irrelevant. It is nothing more than a useful 200 year old honoured bookmark to remind people of certain things and has no intrinsic relevance to the discussion. If you genuinely think that the right to own weapons comes from the US Constitution, or that it can somehow protect that right from infringement, then I would urge you to take a look at a 1929 painting by the Belgian surrealist, René Magritte, showing a picture of a pipe. In case you cannot speak French, the worlds within the painting translate as "This is not a pipe". When you understand what that means in that context, perhaps you will also understand what the US Constitution actually is and is not.

And just like that, Perry explodes the stereotype that libertarians got no kulchur. Thanks, Man!