Commonplace Book

"Silence!" cries Freydag. "I did not call thee in for a consultation!"
"They are my innards! I will not have them misread by a poseur!"

- Roger Zelazny, Creatures of Light and Darkness

Cavil - In retrospect, the preceding item seems rather...sweeping. I'm not saying that enemies and neutrals are an unalloyed good. I am saying that the "with us or against us" approach is not always wise.

You're Either With Us or You Have Your Uses Anyway - Gary Farber, with much trepidation and that's what it calls for, went and invoked the 1930s the other day, as an analogy to the Present Moment. Appeasement versus Resolution and all that. Unqualified Offerings suggests the 40s as an alternative. There was, as they say, a war on, pitting some better guys (US, UK) and some worse guys (USSR) against some really bad guys.

There were also the tweeners - Turkey, Switzerland, Spain, the unoccupied Scandinavian nations, Ireland, Argentina and the like. Some leaned in one direction; some leaned in another. Pressed by Hitler to declare war on Russia, the traditional autocrat Franco instead encouraged the fascist members of his coalition - the Blue Shirts - to serve on the Eastern Front as volunteers. This kept Hitler sweet while getting the Blue Shirts, potential rivals, out of the country. If Unqualified Offerings recalls correctly, many, many of them met their deaths in the Stalingrad campaign, and UO imagines that Franco had no trouble mastering his grief.

Was it "wobbly" of the US and Britain not to declare war on Spain, on the grounds that "If you're not with us you're against us?" Sweden? Switzerland?

No. Neutrals and even hostile nonbelligerents have their uses. They are not your friends, but they may be your tools - that is, they can be useful. Need to open a back channel with your adversary, arrange a prisoner swap, move money to a resistance, infiltrate agents, exfiltrate defectors, steal a weapon? Swipe a code book?

Perhaps most importantly, do you need a reality check on your own propaganda? For all these things, you need countries that are neither with you nor against you.

Which brings us to truculent Egypt and its use to its nominal peace partner, Israel. Egypt, rhetorically, is not "with us." Egypt is "with the terrorists," to the extent the terrorists are Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade. For precisely that reason, Egypt was very, very useful to Israel this week on the matter of The Question of Jenin. Massacre or slugfest? Wanton slaughter of civilians or the carnage of war. Thanks to the much-cited al-Ahram interview with "Omar the Engineer," Islamic Jihad bomb-maker, we know that resistance by Palestinian ultras was fierce and that Israeli claims about the ubiquity of booby-traps are at least plausible:

"Of all the fighters in the West Bank we were the best prepared," he says. "We started working on our plan: to trap the invading soldiers and blow them up from the moment the Israeli tanks pulled out of Jenin last month."

Omar and other "engineers" made hundreds of explosive devices and carefully chose their locations.

"We had more than 50 houses booby-trapped around the camp. We chose old and empty buildings and the houses of men who were wanted by Israel because we knew the soldiers would search for them," he said.

"We cut off lengths of mains water pipes and packed them with explosives and nails. Then we placed them about four metres apart throughout the houses -- in cupboards, under sinks, in sofas."

The fighters hoped to disable the Israeli army's tanks with much more powerful bombs placed inside rubbish bins on the street. More explosives were hidden inside the cars of Jenin's most wanted men.

Connected by wires, the bombs were set off remotely, triggered by the current from a car battery.

According to Omar, everyone in the camp, including the children, knew where the explosives were located so that there was no danger of civilians being injured. It was the one weakness in the plan.

"We were betrayed by the spies among us," he says. The wires to more than a third of the bombs were cut by soldiers accompanied by collaborators. "If it hadn't been for the spies, the soldiers would never have been able to enter the camp. Once they penetrated the camp, it was much harder to defend."

And what about the explosion and ambush last Tuesday which killed 13 soldiers?

"They were lured there," he says. "We all stopped shooting and the women went out to tell the soldiers that we had run out of bullets and were leaving." The women alerted the fighters as the soldiers reached the booby- trapped area.

"When the senior officers realised what had happened, they shouted through megaphones that they wanted an immediate cease-fire. We let them approach to retrieve the men and then opened fire.

Booby traps, ambushes, fake cease fires, the complicity of nominal noncombatants in the defense plan. It's all there. But the statements have a lot more evidentiary value out of Omar's mouth, in an Arab paper, than it does out of the mouth of an IDF spokesperson. Not that the IDF is more likely to lie than Islamic Jihad - rather, the al-Ahram story constitutes an "argument against interest," to the extent that the interest of the Palestinians is to paint the Battle of Jenin as a festival of war crimes. Arguments against interest are always powerful.

A notion Unqualified Offerings has been toying with is that empire - and don't kid yourselves, that's what a program of changing "six or seven" governments is, and what a "serious occupation" of the West Bank and Gaza would be - suffers from the same fatal weakness that Hayek saw in the central planning of economies: it destroys information the information the system needs to work in the first place. Restated, the claim is merely that socialism and empire both destroy truth. Perhaps that is not so shocking. Happily, an important truth about the current war in the Levant has survived.

Hot or Not Setting the Terms of the Debate? - Instapundit links to another of those survey/test things. At least in this one, you're not rating yourself, you're judging others! It's called Public Intellectual or Not? and it's based on Hot or Not, which Unqualified Offerings never visited, and Richard Posner's The Public Intellectuals, which Unqualified Offerings hasn't read. Nevertheless, this site thinks it gets the joke. The survey shows you pictures of people and you rate them on a zero-to-ten scale where zero is "Cheap Hack" and ten is "Modern Solomon." The picture sequence seems semi-random, and it seems to make no effort to keep you from voting more than once per person - repeats are common. UO knocked Virginia Postrel down to a 9 because of the whole interventionism thing, gave a 10 to Milton Friedman and favored William Bennett with the lowest possible rating - every time he came up.

Unqualified Offerings will keep voting until it gets a chance to rate Justin Slotman.

Marshall Marshall Marshall! - Plan, that is. These days, the "modest" are suggesting one for Afghanistan, while the more ambitious want one for the Palestinians or the entire (suitably conquered and occupied) Arab world east of the Med, with Persia as an addendum. Jesse Walker in Reason yesterday wonders if the original Marshall Plan was all that History claims:

As for the actual Marshall Plan, its effects are somewhat overstated. The economist Tyler Cowen has noted that the European countries that received the most Marshall Plan aid after World War II suffered the slowest growth over the next eight years, while those who got the least aid grew the fastest. (Cowen's article is summarized here.) At best, the plan tided people over with humanitarian aid before their pre-war institutions--the kind that are absent in Afghanistan--could reassert themselves. At worst, it was little more than a Cold War propaganda ploy.

Unoffered Qualifications - Unqualified Offerings has been at the office since 9 this morning and is just leaving. So not much action on this site tonight. Sorry.

Those Who Will Not Learn From History won't care about this fascinating item from Wednesday's Washington Post Food section: "Who Was General Tso And Why Are We Eating His Chicken?" But Unqualified Offerings found it worthwhile. You learn about the actual General Tso, in some ways the William Tecumseh Sherman of China. But what about the chicken? A couple of theories are offered that would make the dish considerably younger than its namesake:

The details of Tso's life are easy to document. But how the chicken got named for him is another matter. In "Chinese Kitchen" (Morrow, 1999), author Eileen Yin-Fei Lo says that dish is a Hunan classic called "chung ton gai," or "ancestor meeting place chicken."

But to others, General Tso's chicken recipe may be no more ancient than 1972, and may have more in common with Manhattan than with mainland China.

Read the whole thing. The article also points to "The Definitive General Tso's Chicken Page."

Deterrence - It's Not Just For Superpowers Any More - Those soft-headed peaceniks in the Israeli Defense Force say "Tension has eased on northern border" (Ha'aretz):

Head of IDF Intelligence Brigadier General Aharon Ze'evi said Tuesday that tensions have eased on Israel's northern border. According to Ze'evi, the Hezbollah has understood "that this is not the time for escalation on the northern border. We see this because the alertness and readiness of Hezbollah militants has gone down."

1) Best [Neocon-Approved Items] of the Web attributes this, in an uncharacteristically charitable gesture, to Colin Powell's visit to Lebanon and Syria. But as Unqualified Offerings has been reporting (and reporting), the parties to the "Northern Front" dispute were were already ratcheting down on their own.

2) Isn't there a "wobbly watch" item here for some enterprising Likudnik pundit? Did you notice that the head of Israeli military intelligence calls them "Hezbollah militants" rather than "Hezbollah terrorists?" Is he a stringer for Reuters or something?

When Peaceniks Collide - Libertarian isolationist Alan Bock of Antiwar.com relates his meeting with - Robert Fisk!

Mr. Fisk writes for the Independent newspaper in London, which strikes me as a bit more left-wing in policy than the Orange County Register, for which I write. He has been an outspoken critic of Israeli policies, more so than I am. I didn't know whether he would strike me as an ideologue.

He turned out to be much more reporter than ideologue and utterly charming and delightful.

Hey, maybe a lot more of us are easier to take in person, as opposed to in print, than we realize! The following comes near the end:

While being quite critical, as we expected, of Israel, Mr. Fisk made sure to point out that it has taken two sides to create a volatile standoff. He suggested that "in the Muslim world there is little self-criticism, no self-questioning, a tendency to fall back on myths." There has never been a Muslim equivalent of the Renaissance, a period of respectful questioning and refinement of religious and cultural traditions.

He still runs into Arabs who believe the Mossad pulled off the World Trade Center attacks and don't want to be confused with facts. In fact, throughout the Muslim world, he says, it's very difficult to have serious and respectful disagreements.

Sobering but fascinating, our conversation left us with little hope that America will be able to pull a peace rabbit out of a hat any time soon.

Worth reading in its entirety, but I would say that of Bock's articles most weeks.

Our Long Casa Cortlandt Nightmare Is Over - What She Really Thinks and Ones and Zeros are back up.

You've (Not) Got Mail - Still no response from Rafiq Hariri, Prime Minister of Lebanon to Unqualified Offerings' first-ever interview question. It's busy work, being Prime Minister of Lebanon.

Just, Lasting Middle East Peace Imminent - How does Unqualified Offerings know? Because what Unqualified Offerings wants, Unqualified Offerings gets! Viz. Tom Toles has been hired by the Post, just like Unqualified Offerings wanted.

The Death of Slate is nigh. Gregg Easterbrook has taken Tuesday Morning Quarterback to espn.com. The first installment in the column's new home went up today, in honor of this weekend's NFL draft. Easterbrook:

It's NFL draft week, and that means there are more mock drafts in circulation than Middle East peace plans. Of course, every single mock draft everywhere will be completely worthless in a couple of days -- hmm, again like Middle East peace plans. But Tuesday Morning Quarterback wonders, why don't mock drafts actually mock the draft? Here's one that does...

You can't beat this for a contributor's note: "Gregg Easterbrook is a senior editor of New Republic, a contributing editor of The Atlantic Monthly and a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. He is believed to be the first Brookings scholar ever to write a pro football column."

Cyberspace Held Hostage - Day 2 - What She Really Thinks is still frozen. (You can still read current items and archives.) Ginger's gaming blog, Turn of a Friendly Die has a blank current message area, but if you scroll to the bottom, there are archives. And guy-pal/husband Michael Croft's Ones and Zeros is in the same frozen state as Ginger's main blog. Developing...

Resource Renewal - Mickey Kaus, who talks like he gets the weblogging thing but still doesn't have item-specific permalinks alerts the world to the latest John McCain media bubble - the wish-cum-prediction among some reporters that McCain switch parties and run against Dubya in 2004 as a Democrat. Unqualified Offerings is cool with this so long as it keeps McCain prominent in the news, for the country's sake: people who don't have the time to follow politics can do pretty well by just finding where John McCain stands on an issue and taking the opposite position. One day, this site would like to stop following politics and get back to writing poems, so UO needs John McCain.

Rubber-Necking - Perry de Havilland pointed me to a superb piece of Middle East analysis on Flit. While I don't accept his prescriptions (essentially he advocates what I've called the Postrel Plan, after the proposal in Steven Postrel's e-mail), his analysis of the dynamics of the US war on terror, Israel's war with Palestine, America's relations with Israel. and even the blogosphere are close to unassailable:

The force is irresistable. The object is not immovable. At some time in the future, sooner, or later, Israel will withdraw its settlements from the majority of the West Bank, and behind some kind of security wall, maybe on the green line, maybe a kilometre or two to the east of it. When that happens, many Arabs will see this as a victory, and immediately start planning Israel's final destruction... no doubt. But it will still happen. All that Israel can do is choose the manner and time of their leaving. This has nothing to do with world pressure... just the conditions on the ground. The majority of the settlements are unsustainable. The majority of the West Bank will be surrendered to a hostile enemy. And Israel will be 8 miles away from destruction again. Such are the injustices of ground and demographics.

One suspects Sharon cannot do this. Nor can his likely successor, Netanyahu. They owe the settlers too much, and fear the results. It could be 20 years before the circumstances are right for the evacuation and Israel can finally withdraw behind its last defence line... in the meantime the killing will continue, maybe more at times, maybe less. For all his efforts, Richard the Lionhearted only postponed the inevitable... bought the Crusader kingdoms a few more years. He had to have seen the writing was on the wall, as did all his knights, just as easily as Sharon can.

What happens after that, I may not live to see. I hope I won't, actually, for I fear the worst for the Israelis. But that's a long way off. As to the immediate concern, Bush's war on terrorism... hey, it ended in Afghanistan. If there was any likelihood of a second round, it's been utterly scotched now. Arafat will die peacefully, in bed. So, more than likely, will Saddam Hussein. The Americans will continue to hunt down Al Qaeda members wherever they hole up for a year or more, and help rebuild a somewhat better life for the Afghans. But the moral clarity we all thought we had six months ago is gone: we're all getting increasingly shrill as we realize it. Another terrorist strike will lead to forceful Western reprisals, of course. But there will be no pre-emptive wars fought against those who harbour terrorists: democracies have never been very good at pre-emptive attacks anyway, as anyone who remembers the Suez or October Crises well knows: we've been kidding ourselves to think we were different. The "war against terrorism" will never be declared to be won (that would lead to the release of all those extrajudicially-held Cuban prisoners, among other things), or over... it will just drag on, like the British wars of Empire or the Cold War did. That's the world I shall grow old in: I'm fairly certain of it now. Hopefully my children will live to see one better.

I think he's too pessimistic about Israel's post-partition future. Israel will still have much the largest military in the Middle East, plus all those, ahem, weapons of mass destruction. But his point about the decision curve strikes me as shrewd.

Yeah, it's a week old. I don't get out much.

Tony Adragna has a long article on the Middle East today, after a weekend's absence.

A Libertarian Does His Taxes IV

The Bush administration is poised to complete the biggest increase in government spending since the 1960s' "Great Society," the result of conducting the war on terrorism while substantially boosting the education and transportation budgets, according to a detailed analysis of government spending patterns.

Spending on government programs will increase by 22 percent from 1999 to 2003 in inflation-adjusted dollars, according to the analysis by The Washington Post and vetted by budget experts in both parties.
Glenn Kessler, The Washington Post

"We do the national greatness stuff abroad and the leave-us-alone stuff at home. Sign me up."
Andrew Sullivan

A Libertarian Does His Taxes III

You're already reaping the benefits of the 2001 tax law changes - your child tax credit is based on a rate of $600 per dependent, up from $500 under the rules before the 2001 legislation. Consider yourself lucky, because this increase is one of the few tax relief provisions actually available in 2001.
Tax Law Assistant, TaxCut 2001 Deluxe Edition

A Libertarian Avoids Doing His Taxes I - Now it's Ginger Stampley who has fallen foul of technical difficulties. She is working directly with the MT people to try to save her archives from some hellish technical snafu. At risk, every permalink to every What She Really Thinks article ever posted. Developing...

A Libertarian Does His Taxes II

The fact that the IRS allows you to deduct money you paid a CPA to do your taxes is a tacit admission of guilt.
Eve Tushnet

A Libertarian Does His Taxes I

The 2001 tax law changes ushered in several provisions intended to make a dent in the "marriage penalty" - the extra tax burden faced by two-income families over what the couple would owe if unmarried.

In 2001 itself, relief is limited to putting married filers on equal footing with singles in the new 10% tax bracket for the last half of the year.

In 2005 you and your spouse will begin to see further relief in the form of a wider 15% rate bracket and a large standard deduction.
Tax Law Assistant, TaxCut 2001 Deluxe Edition

Well, Come to papa, 2005! Unqualified Offerings says. Oh. They said "begin to see" in 2005. Boy.

It's Always Darkest Before the Long Twilight Struggle - The Middle East is rushing headlong toward a catastrophic regional war which risks leaving several countries devastated by weapons of mass destruction. Or not. I'm beginning to think that those same weapons of mass destruction are casting the region's actors - the national actors at least - into some very familiar roles. Middle East: Meet MAD; MAD: Meet the Middle East. The Shebaa Farms situation discussed below may prefigure the future of relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors (and more distant muslim kibitzers). There's now enough Nasty Stuff in the arsenals of both sides that neither dares try to achieve its maximum aims by force of arms.

Maybe. I think so. The contours of the current international struggle - proxies yes; low-level sniping yes; direct conflict among the major actors, no - looks awfully familar to anyone over the age of about 35. This theory rests on the axiom that the leaders of both Israel and the Arab and Persian states are rational actors more interested in their own personal, political and national survival than in their own martyrdom. (Other people's martyrdom, clearly, is okay.) My readers inclined toward the views of antiwar.com will doubt that this is true of Bibi and Arik. My readers inclined toward the views of Commentary will reject the axiom for Iraq, Iran and Syria.

By their fruits ye shall know them, I say. The only proof one ever has that MAD is working is negative, and necessarily provisional: The actors haven't destroyed themselves. You also have to look at what they do and don't do by way of attaining their political aims. (Shell Shebaa Farms, but not Haifa. Bomb Hezbollah, but not the Syrian Army.)

From the perspective of a friend of Israel, there is an obvious upside here: by freezing something like the present situation in place, it pretty well guarantees Israel's survival against the major threat to its existence, classically understood - conquest by its neighbors. There is a downside: MAD does little good for either the Palestinians or Israel's relations with them. The Palestinian's clearly don't feel they have a stake in the status quo, and Israel and Palestine are too enmeshed geographically for Israel's nukes to do it any good.

Most of the leaders of most of Israel's Arab enemies are not good men. But for precisely that reason, they love power and privilege, and they've afforded themselves quite a lot of both. The leaders of the Soviet Union were not good men either, but they saw reason. This model of Arab and Iranian dictators and monarchs as rational actors meets a lot of resistance among hawks in and outside the blogosphere. But the "SANE tyrant" looks like it better fits the facts than the " CRAZED tyrant" model. And it has some important implications for US and Israeli policy:

1) MAD works only among stakeholders. (I believe there may have been a movie about this recently.) An actor has to feel he has something crucial to lose by flouting deterrence. So policies that give an adversary "no way out" are foolishly dangerous. (Yes, that would be our current policy toward Iraq.)

2) Among Israel's enemies, the Palestinians are the ones who clearly don't count as stakeholders in the current situation. They're also the ones without any NBC capability whatsoever, so maybe the more hardbitten don't care. But until the Palestinians have a status quo they'd regret losing, they have a strong incentive to try to destabilize rather than stabilize the situation.

3) Long twilight struggles are not "passive" situations. There will be probes, gambits and research programs. The subsidiary goal remains to win. The trick is to keep it so that the main goal is not to lose.

Psst! - This site turns out to be your number 19 source for "pretty egyptian models" according to Google. Unqualified Offerings will be working tirelessly to improve that ranking.

Walking On Broken Glass - The Scotsman reports that British peacekeepers came under fire Friday night. What can be learned of the attackers is unsettling:

Six of the detained men turned out to be members of the Afghan police service and the seventh was a serving member of newly-constituted Afghan army. Five were in police uniform and one in combats when captured.

On the same day, this:

the Afghan interim government said there had been fierce fighting involving forces loyal to an Islamic fundamentalist warlord who has been urging Afghans to begin a holy war or Jihad against Western troops in the country.

Unqualified Offerings is not sure if it's The Scotsman or the Afghan interim government that is being curiously uninformative here. Presumably "fighting" involves at least two sides, only one of which is identified in the article. Was the other side "the Afghan interim government?" Forces loyal to a warlord who hasn't been urging jihad against Western troops? Western troops? Or Martian tripods?

Delays mean not all the 1700 Royal Marines from 45 Commando, based in Arbroath, have arrived yet at the Bagram air base, north of Kabul, which is headquarters to the US-led coalition troops in the country.

"Delays" presumably refers to Pakistan's refusal of transit rights reported on this site last month.

An Afghan government intelligence officer, working alongside the coalition forces, said his men have been monitoring scores of radio transmissions from al-Qaeda fighters across the border in Pakistan, indicating they are operating as small detachments.

The Afghan interim government has no natural fellow-feeling for the government of Pakistan, given the whole, you know, Taliban thing. So the intelligence officer might have a motive to lie to the press about this. On the other hand, the Afghan government is a creature of the Brits and Americans and it's pretty clear the last thing they want to do is take the war in Pakistan's direction. Pakistan is a hard country to police too, though even harder if you're not motivated to police it.

Last Thursday the government announced it had seized a large number of weapons, including rocket-propelled grenades they said were destined for Hekmatyar’s forces. On Friday fierce fighting broke out between Hekmatyar’s fighters and a rival group west of Kabul. The government said at least six people died in the fighting.

A spokesman for the Afghan defence ministry, Mirjan said: "The people responsible for these incidents are against the peace process and implementation of stability here."

He said the incidents aimed to disrupt preparations for a traditional Afghan conference of politicians, tribal and religious leaders and representatives of different ethnic groups that is scheduled for June and which the international community as well as the Afghan government hope will pave the way for democratic elections and a stable future.

And a cure for cancer, effective, fun weight loss regimens and an end to bad dreams. (Link via Antiwar.com.)

Cloning - I'm for it.

That's my only line!

Death of Irony Reports Premature, Experts Say - The Post Outlook section does a Q&A this week with Rafiq "I'm Prime Minister of Lebanon and I have Bashar Assad's permission to say so" Hariri. Highlights...

Some people say that Syria controls your country. Your response?
They don't control, they help.

...

Do you want those Palestinians [exiled in Lebanon] to return to Israel or to a Palestinian state?
It is not our decision where they go, but we don't want to keep them in Lebanon.

...

Isn't 100 percent of your tax revenue going to pay the interest on the debt?
Yes, because our taxes are very low.

...

Israel did withdraw 100 percent according to the U.N. secretary general.
Lebanon has a disagreement with the U.N. on this. The U.N. says that Israel complied with [Security Council] Resolution 425 and that Lebanon has no right to claim Shebaa Farms. But we say Shebaa Farms is Lebanese. . . .

Either because the Washington Post is a merciful media god or because The Media Really Does Suck, the paper forebears to ask the obvious question, so UO will ask for it:

The UN and Israel say that Shebaa Farms is part of Syria, specifically the Golan Heights territory that Israel has occupied since 1967. You say the Shebaa Farms land belongs to Lebanon. If everyone in the Middle East drops acid and Israel withdraws from the Golan as envisioned in the Abdullah/Friedman Plan, will you press Lebanon's claim to Shebaa Farms against Syria? How?

Actually, Unqualified Offerings has decided to really ask. (And they say bloggers don't do real reporting.) Official version of The Question:

Dear Mr. Hariri: I read your Q&A in the Washington Post with interest. I echo the sentiment of your official statement in favor of a serious peace in the region.

As the Post left an interesting question unasked, I hope you might do me the favor of answering it: The UN and Israel say that Shebaa Farms is part of the Golan Heights territory that Israel has occupied since 1967. The Abdullah Plan calls for Israel to withdraw from all territories occupied in that war. In the event that this withdrawal takes place, do you envision pressing your claim to Shebaa Farms with Syria? And, in your expert political opinion, would you anticipate HEZBOLLAH pressing that claim?

I thank you for your time and attention and look forward to your reply.

And if you too, Loyal Reader, have a question for the Prime Minister of Lebanon, just click here and ask. Hey, it's the information age. And there's a checkbox you can click if you want to grant the PM permission to make your message public. (Oh come on. Like you need to ask.)

Lies, Damn Lies and Richard Morin - The Post's "[Alleged] Unconventional Wisdom" offers a frustratingly tantalizing item today, buried between a piece agitprop for food fascism and an unsurprising "secret shopper" report. The middle item would like to establish statistically what many of us have suspected to be true: the internet and file-swapping may be bad for blockbuster music, but it's good for fringe acts.

These researchers analyzed weekly album sales as reported on the Billboard 200. They found that the number of different artists that appeared each year on the charts increased by 31.5 percent between 1991 and 2000, suggesting to them that more new artists are hitting the charts, at the expense of established musical acts, they claimed in a research paper on their findings.

The biggest rate of change occurred from 1998 to 2000, when there was a 10 percent increase in the number of fresh faces making the Billboard 200, they found. In 1999 alone, about one in every four artists with an album on the charts was a performer who had not appeared in the previous eight years.

You've already spotted the post hoc ergo propter hoc problem. There's one more difficulty: the problematic relationship between new acts and actual diversity or, god forbid, quality. A "fresh face" might be nothing more than the latest boy-band or nymphet fabricated by the same starmaker machinery that created the "pop music superstars" the new acts displace. If "Established Musical Act" = Steve Earle, and "Fresh Faces" = Christina Aguilera, there is no net loss to the conglomerate model.

A separate survey by the same team sounds more promising:

They also tracked Internet usage and -- in a separate survey -- the buying habits of college students. They found that downloading or "sampling" songs from the Internet (it's called "piracy" by its critics) encourages people to go out and buy CDs of lesser-known groups. At the same time, cyber-swiping from established stars may have hurt their sales or had no positive effect, reported Bhattacharjee, his colleague Ram Gopal of the University of Connecticut and Lawrence Sanders of SUNY at Buffalo.

Unfortunately, Unqualified Offerings can not find a link to the study itself on the web, and Morin's reporting on it inspires no confidence.

The Right Way and the Wrong Way to "Wobble" - Compare Egyptian immigrant journalist Mona Eltahawy with senescent house liberal hack Mary McGrory from today's Washington Post editorial page.

Just a Little Further Down and You'll Find It - Ginger Stampley responds to UO's "RPG suicide" item on her gaming blog.

Slackwatch - The Untold Story - NO, UNQUALIFIED OFFERINGS HAS NOT DONE ITS TAXES YET! WHY DO YOU ASK??

Slackwatch Continued - Electrolite signs back on with several fine items, including one that will probably make most readers of this site laugh until they cry, or cry until they laugh.

Slackwatch - A number of previously AWOL bloggers have begun to check in with us, their loyal readers:

Amygdala - So much stuff it reminds Unqualified Offerings that UO sometimes thinks of Gary Farber as "the liberal Instapundit."

Justin Slotman has a piece that fans of women's pro soccer everywhere will love, so try to find those people and tell them, please.

Airstrip One - There will always be an England, but why on earth should it have to be in the South Atlantic if we don't want it to be? and more.

The Iluminated Donkey, with bravura diegesis, offers a triply-nested letter about the Mayfly Coup in Venezuela. Or NOT-a-Coup, according to the letter.

Also, while Libertarian Samizdata worked yesterday and is not properly part of the Slackwatch report, this afternoon Perry de Havilland offers an excellent item in his series on Britain's developing Panoptikon State, and David Carr charts the dire future history of the International Criminal Court, in an essay that will surely make libertarian isolationists of us all - maybe even David Carr.

A Kinder Gentler Machine-Gun Hand - They don't make military coups like they used to. Hugo Chavez returns to the Venezuelan Presidency.

Fun fact: Chavez himself led a coup attempt in 1992, when he was a paratrooper. It didn't work either.

Libertarian Fratricide Watch Continued - Joseph Stromberg responds to Brink Lindsey, among others. His tone and style are a little shirty, but no more so than anyone else's in this debate.

Libertarian Fratricide Watch - Outside perspectives: Conservative Kevin Holtsberry, in "Tone and Style Matter," objects to the rhetorical tone of much anti-interventionist libertarian writing, specifically Justin Raimondo and the LewRockwell.com stable. It's not that I disagree, but I think he's kidding himself if he imagines that the "anti-idiotarian" circle can't match the LR.com crowd for "snide comments and personal insults to make a point."

My own objection to the Rockwell group goes beyond their inclination to demonize otherwise-libertarian thinkers with what I consider to be mistaken views on foreign policy. Rockwell made a conscious, strategic decision that for practical political purposes, libertarians could best realize our goals of smaller government and (George) Washingtonian foreign policy through a fusion with the Christian Right. I don't doubt that there are votes and activists to be had among the trads, and I don't scorn them, with certain important qualifications.

Broadly speaking, I have no problem joining with trads to remove government barriers preventing they themselves from living what they consider godly lives - frex, clearing many of the spiteful barriers thrown in the way of homeschoolers. I have a very big problem with helping trads erect government barriers that would prevent the rest of us living our chosen lives; e.g. wearing rubbers; getting divorced; sporting with partners who have the same kind of genitalia we do; listening to records with dirty words in the title. That is, I am okay with letting Rockford be Rockford, but only if the trads will let San Francisco be San Francisco.

But the LR desire for fusion with the trads seems so complete that trad sensibilities end up exerting veto power over libertarian sensibilities. Hence, all the LR links to pro-Creationist articles; all the Karen de Coster-type articles attacking "non-traditional" men and non-traditional women; the inclusion of fetal protection in the "libertarian" program when one issue libertarianism absolutely doesn't solve is abortion; the automatic allegiance to the Confederacy; all presented as "libertarian," when they are properly paleoconservative. As I've said before, I like paleoconservatives; I just don't agree with them on everything. But either rockwell.com's embrace of the trads is sincere, in which case they are trads and not libertarians, or it's every bit as cynical as the lip service the Straussian neocons pay to the same folks.

Back to Antiwar.com for a minute, one of the odd tics among warbloggers is to conflate the site as a whole with Justin Raimondo's column specifically. I think this is because of the laziness of the self-professed "anti-idiotarian" community. As Kevin points out, Justin often obliges his critics by giving them an excuse to focus on his tone and style rather than his substance. (Glenn Reynolds says he has ignored the arguments of anti-interventionist libertarians because "the antiwar Left actually affects the debate, while the antiwar libertarians really don't." Forgive me for thinking the real reason is that the anti-war left is just a lot easier to refute.)

Soon I Shall Rule - The World! - Unqualified Offerings does not take weekends off. Compare:

A Libertarian Reads the Paper - Dark
Airstrip One - Dark
Amygdala - Dark
Andrew Sullivan - Dark
Balloon Juice - Dark
Electrolite - Dark
Eve Tushnet - Dark
Insolvent Republic of Blogistan - Dark
Kausfiles - Dark
Letter From Gotham - Dark
Quasi-Pundit - Dark
The Illuminated Donkey - Dark
Through the Looking Glass - Dark
Unqualified Offerings - Bloggin'!

(Props also to Ginger Stampley, Virginia Postrel, Natalie Solent and Libertarian Samizdata, who clearly have their priorities in order. And our thoughts are with Catallaxy Files in their time of technical difficulties.)

Joys of Capitalism: Quasi-Marxist Caucus - From this morning's New York Daily News profile of Elvis Costello:

Unsurprisingly, Costello considers himself something of a singles obsessive, not to mention a record junkie. "It's my one extravagance. I'm not much of a fashion plate. I don't care what shoes I wear. But I love to buy records. I much prefer that to getting them for free. Queueing up [in a store] is part of it."

Link via the Elvis Costello Mailing List.