A Pack, a Herd, a Flotilla - Parallels - Do not miss Glenn Reynolds' Tech Central Station column, "American Dunkirk." Not just because I get a brief mention either. It's a moving story of self-organized community response in the immediate aftermath of the September, 2001 massacres in lower Manhattan. Excerpt:

"Day Four, when federal authorities took over." There's a lesson in that phrase, isn't there? This wasn't just an evacuation: it was a whole alternative logistic system, improvised on the fly by people who didn't work for the government. Fuel, water, and food were brought in; when there were problems moving big pieces of steel at the site, the boats brought structural ironworkers from New Jersey along with boots, oxygen and acetylene cylinders, and whatever else was needed. This effort got some coverage at the time, but has largely been forgotten in the aftermath, since ad hoc groups don't have PR agents, or even a motive, to keep their deeds in the public eye. Still, it was one of the most amazing feats of human self-organization ever, and it deserves more attention than it got.

Woman Moving On - I'm sad to confirm that selenously pseudonymous Diana Moon of Letter from Gotham is giving up her weblog. This one hurts. Diana and I had serious disagreements over all kinds of issues - Israel, Iraq, you name it - but it was nice having company, as she put it, "off the rez." Diana regularly committed the sin of being interesting, which led to a fair amount of carping from those who would never dream of so sinning, whether on her left or to her right. Along with the quiet disappearance of Istanblog and the retirements of Andy Kashdan and Ginger Stampley, my little corner of the blogosphere just feels lonelier.

Diana says she'll be pulling her archives soon, so get your favorite Gotham items before that happens.

Women on the Move - Avedon Carol celebrated the first anniversary of the Sideshow this week.

Speaking of anniversaries (aka "blirgdays"), Happy First to Moira Breen of Inappropriate Response!

"Live at the WTC" is dead. Long live Assymetrical Information. Megan McArdle, aka Jane Galt, has changed her blog's name and focus. Why? She got a job! Megan will soon be saying "Nice doggie" while the United States government looks for rocks. Consequently, she can't discuss foreign affairs any more. The new blog focus, economics, plays to her strengths and guarantees you at least one weblog where you can be sure Iraq policy will not be discussed. Unqualified Offerings officially approves of her new design, too.

On the Third Hand adds one more hand, as MommaBear joins Kathy Kinsley's staff (which previously comprised...Kathy Kinsley).

Off the Port Bow the Pontificator considers the neolibertarian phenomenon from a liberal perspective, then tries to adduce a new paradigm taking shape among left-leaning blogs. It's missing the sort of "in their own words" references that would establish this paradigm as extending beyond, well, the Pontificator himself, but it's an interesting start on the problem, and hopefully he'll revisit the issue in subsequent writing.

The Jordan Roles, Redux - Don't look now, sportsfans, but the whole Washington Wizards thing is...working! Last February, Unqualified Offerings argued that Michael Jordan had not been given his due as an executive - that he had done as much as could have been hoped in the fourteen months he'd had control of the team. A few more months and Jordan looks better yet. With the cap room he managed to clear in his first year, he was finally able to swing a trade for a marquee player, Jerry Stackhouse, who is the number 8 scorer in the league as of this morning's papers. Last year's problem child, high-school draftee Kwame Brown is starting, and playing pretty effectively, in Year Two, averaging just under 10 points, 9 rebounds and two blocks per game, playing just a shade under 30 minutes. That's excellent progress for a straight-from-high-school player, and astonishing considering where Brown's game and head were at just last spring.

Jordan saw how Tyronn Lue badgered Allen Iverson in the 2001 NBA Finals when he was with the Lakers and snapped him up before last season. Lue is an effective, high-energy reserve who had 18 points in last night's win over Utah.

Jordan's other find was...himself, which is also working out well this year. First off, you've got to admire his self-possession and self-knowledge, considering that you have here the greatest basketball player of all time recognizing that his proper function now is coming off the bench. And it's working! 16 PPG in 28 minutes per game, and a lot of those minutes in the fourth quarter, which is where you most want Michael Jordan anyway.

A winning record after nine games and this team is still learning how to play together (five new starters). And since Jordan is a reserve, there's no reason to think they'll collapse next year when he's no longer playing even as a reserve.

He's done it folks. Cleaned house, brought in genuine youth and talent, taught the kids how to win games. It's not that the team has no holes - a killer three-point shot is a priority - but it's already fun and good. Unqualified Offerings would never make the mistake of actually watching a regular-season NBA game, but they make good radio fare when driving, and the Wizards have made for some pleasant drives this fall.

The Clues Return to Neolibertariana - Natalie Solent on the Information Assessment Office:

I'd add that once a government has such power it is damn near inevitable that they will kill more than the terrorists would. I'm not making light of the terrorist threat, just giving the correct weight to the overmighty state threat. They've killed tens of millions so far.

Exactly.

Wells Now - Kevin Maroney writes about Saddam, Kuwait, Iraq, oil fields, then, and now:

The US and its allies did, indeed, get the Kuwait fires extinguished and the oil fields reopened pretty quickly, but the evidence is that the fires were staged hastily. If Saddam is smart and ruthless and willing to admit that he's going to lose control of Iraq, he can do a better job of sabotaging the fields, up to and including booby traps and radioactive contamination.

Perhaps Saddam is willing to admit that he's about to lose control of Iraq if you but this London Times story about his arranging an exile in Libya for his relatives and hangers-on. Or perhaps the London Times is passing on planted stories intended to undermine Saddam's standing with his underlings.

Note: This site has no trifecta, but it is in receipt of a twofer - an e-mail from a concerned reader with the subject line "nyquil and iraq":

Yeah, it was relatively quickly now that I recall. Red is still alive? Was a hero when I was a kid.

Still, I wonder if Saddam might not have more in mind....but I have no knowledge of oil stiff beyond, iit's sticky and burns.

Jim -- I got it! Let's give Bush-Cheney, Saddam, bin-Laden, Arafat, and Sharon all NyQuil! End of regional war!

Big problem: have to catch bin Laden to give him NyQuil...

Revolution in Economic Thinking from, of all places, the US Congress:

Both the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate pushed through legislation early Friday morning allowing copyright owners to offer webcasters a percentage-of-revenues royalty rate, essentially allowing the parties to mutually agree to override the controversial flat per-song rate set by the Library of Congress (LOC) in June. Small webcasters hailed the legislation as a "stunning victory."

At least we're getting something out of this Congress. What's the stunning concept behind the law?

Instead, the legislation grants copyright holders and webcasters the right to enter into a voluntary agreement "without fear of liability for deviating from the fees and terms" the LOC's rate ruling.

Letting private parties negotiate mutually acceptable business agreements. What a concept! Think it'll catch on?

Link via the Elvis Costello Mailing List.

A Fanboy's Notes: Life Imitates Art Dept. - Paging Jakita Wagner!

Though TransOrbital isn't laying down stakes, it's worth noting that the mission was spun off from the Artemis Project, a commercial venture to establish a lunar colony. Artemis has also founded a science fiction magazine and the nonprofit Moon Society.

So says the Village Voice (link via Amygdala). We can only trust that those noted pinkos in Planetary get the Village Voice.

Religion of Peace Item - From this morning's New York Times:

Mr. Osbourne, who lived above the restaurant, said he felt pity for the two, who appeared disheveled and seemed to have little money. He fed them and gave them clothing and his bed. He said the two were obsessed by two things: buying a cheap car and sticking to a strict health food regimen, which included a variety of nutritional supplements.

Their guide, which they carried with them at all times, he said, was a book, "The Tao of Health, Sex and Longevity," by Daniel P. Reid. The book's jacket describes it as an introduction to Taoist philosophy for Westerners, with information on diet and nutrition, breathing, "sex therapy" and herbal aphrodisiacs.

Free Material, aka reader mail, on Afghan wargame design! From your Talking Dog:

So- the Afghan war games? You're obviously correct strategically: we put in ground troops solely to hold up semifore flags to tell the stealth B-2's where to drop their bombs (they were BIG FLAGS, of course, as the pilots were tired from flying all night from Missouri), and otherwise, either outsourced ground troop activity to the Northern Alliance's branch of Kelly Girls (I believe, it was called "Khalid's Guys"; for all your minesweeping and cave clearing needs-- dial Kabul3- GUYS ), or pretended we didn''t need them at all (and then declared victory). With the MBA President, with his CEO cabinet-- outsourcing became the featured trend (saves on those military pensions, those funerals, those health care costs...)

Unfortunately, this activity suffered the fate of many outsourced government functions, be it private prisons (higher escape rate, lots and lots of civil rights complaints) or schools (the Edison project, comes to mind), or the $500 hammers. Its not a panacea. In fact, there are some things (national... defense...) that are just, well, not real good candidates for outsourcing at all! It didn't work. The Afghan allies, having achieved THEIR goals (warlordism makes a triumphant comeback) really didn't feel like getting killed to achieve ours (capturing Osama and Omar).

Hence, the campaign was mostly a failure. Sorry to break that to everyone, but Osama's and Omar's continued presence among the living means that the MISSION was MOSTLY a FAILURE. Forgetting that Al Qaeda cells are still there-- we not only didn't kill the body-- we didn't kill the head. A complete failure? By no means: the Taliban are gone, and Al Qaeda is substantially disrupted. But the Afghan campaign cannot be construed as an unqualified success-- until OBL no longer breathes.

You know, I'm reminded that every time the government tries to save a few bucks with this "privatization" thing, it often screws it up. That's going to happen a lot-- its the nature of the low-bid concept, be it in Kansas or Kandahar. The issue isn't really this "third way" crap-- we can do everything government does- but better. The issue is should the government be in this business at all. In national defense, it kinda has to be in that business, I'm afraid. The most hard-core non-anarchist libertarian would say if you had to name ONE core function of the government, it would be protecting the domestic population from foreign threats. Well? How're we doin'?

I was troubled immediately by Dick Cheney's statement-- before a single man or bullet was deployed- that this engagement would be the first time we encountered more civilian deaths than military ones in an action. Not that I WANT our military people to die (my God, no!)-- but how could he POSSIBLY know that in advance, unless he knew that we were going to deploy fewer troops than 9-11 casualties? Of course, this was the case for quite a while, until it became apparent we couldn''t get the job done entirely on an outsourced basis, and had to increase deployment.

So, at a time when the domestic polity would have endured a draft, massive rationing, a tax increase, and whatever else was necessary to destroy the threat, the MBA President and the CEO cabinet, in "alliance" with every other major country on earth, decided to send over an aerial demonstration team and hire some local temps to take out a guy who lived in caves and traveled on horses-- and it seems that so far, he won.

Unqualified Offerings can't hang with all the liberal talk, and it thinks there was value in scattering Al Qaeda at our initiative rather than there's. But even if the recent tapes are fakes and Bin Laden survives only in legend, so long as we can't prove the bastard is dead or captured, it's one for their side.

Kevin Maroney, whose sig, after all, reads "Games are my entire waking life," offers an in-depth consideration of the Afghan war as a wargame:

I think that any reasonable designer of the "US-Afghan War of 2001" wargame--call it "The Game of Operation Enduring Freedom"--would *have* to call the outcome at least a Marginal Victory *for al Qaeda*. Look at what the game would be. Once the war began, it was obvious that the US would drive the Taliban and al Qaeda from their positions of overt power; any well-designed wargame balances the victory conditions so that the goal of each player is to get as far from the *predictable* outcome as possible. A game about the Soviet invasion of Germany in 1945 starts from the assumption that Berlin will fall; victory depends on how quickly it falls and how much damage the Soviets take in the process.

Once the attack began, the Taliban were screwed. The wargame goal of the T/aQ player would be to get as many weapons, soliders, and especially leaders into hiding in or out of the country, and all the evidence is that they did a lot.

There is a larger game--call it The Game of The War on Terrorism--in which the US attacking Afghanistan is a negative development for the Insane Terrorist Idealist player, but in the smaller Game of Operation Enduring Freedom, al Qaeda won.

Readers love NyQuil! Someone should start a NyQuil blog - they'll shoot right to the top of the ecosystem ladder. Bill Dowling writes

My understanding of NyQuil (from my stoner friend/Computer Science major in college) is that while one dose of NyQuil will knock you out quicker than Tyson in his heyday, several doses of NyQuil will actually wake you up and make you think that there must be something illegal in the Q.

Unqualified Offerings must, however, ask readers to prune their e-mails of obvious redundancies like "stoner friend/Computer Science major." Mary Kay, who says her own vice is caffiene, writes

I'd have thought everyone realized that the best thing about NyQuil was that it put you to sleep no matter how bad your cold, and sleep is more effective than most remedies in dealing with viruses.

Turning to the subject of Iraq wargames, an anonymous reader writes:

I've seen no discussion of what i think is Saddam's final realistic option, requiring no fantastic WMD theories:

Burn his own oil fields as he did in Kuwait. He truly believes the USA is attacking him for oil and his end is near, he could have the specially loyal henchpeople (family loyalists who know if he goes they go) ready to fire them and.or otherwise destroy them. I am not up on the technicals of oil fields (are there possibilities of blocking access to undereground fields) but it seems he could poison the environment and prevent use of the fields for a while. And I dont think that's been factored in to any public estimate of risk.

This seems possible, but didn't the US, Kuwait and Red Adair succeed in getting Kuwait's wells back on line faster than most people expected?

Steve from new blog Tough Times e-mails to say he takes issue with UO's A Pack, Not a TV Show on his own site. His most interesting argument is that "the situation would be markedly different than the events of 09/11/01 - instead of reactionary, actions taken would be presumptive. Reaction to something that has happened, as opposed to action on something that may happen, are two different phenomena." I tend to think he's put so much energy into detailing the downside of the threat becoming public that he has scanted the downside of it remaining secret, but his piece is well worth reading.

More in Sorrow than in Anger Post - Neolibertarians and civil liberties-minded conservatives are aghast today at the Information Awareness Office, headed by killer clown John "Convictions Overturned on Appeal" Poindexter. First, and it gives this site no pleasure to say this, Advantage: Unqualified Offerings. UO brought the Poindexter story to the blogosphere last July, in Annals of Upward Failure and The Poindexter Beat.

Unqualified Offerings tried to tell you.

The other thing that's alarming the otherwise pro-war folks mentioned in the first paragraph is the swift passage of the Homeland Security bill. Glenn Reynolds has been in the forefront of hoping this monster would die of gridlock, but he's had company from many like-minded fellows. (On this issue, UO definitely counts as a like-minded fellow.)

Really, guys, what did you expect? Bush proposed it, Bush campaigned for it, Bush insisted the day after the election that the newly Republican congress pass the thing as submitted, and here it is. You mostly cheered the end of the gridlock that was all that kept this turkey in the freezer. Now we get the HSD and the IAO and, as William Safire puts it

Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend — all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as "a virtual, centralized grand database."

To this computerized dossier on your private life from commercial sources, add every piece of information that government has about you — passport application, driver's license and bridge toll records, judicial and divorce records, complaints from nosy neighbors to the F.B.I., your lifetime paper trail plus the latest hidden camera surveillance — and you have the supersnoop's dream: a "Total Information Awareness" about every U.S. citizen.

You don't like it, my neo friends, and that's to your credit, but in your small way you helped to bring it about. You did this by imagining that the likes of Robert Fisk were a bigger danger to you than John Poindexter. You did it by imagining that somehow the part you liked about the Bush administration - war on your target of choice - was separate and distinct from the part you didn't like - HSD, IAO, the brute-force linkage of the War on Drugs to the War on Terror, USA-PATRIOT. You put more energy into refuting "idiotarian" claims that our liberties had already been taken away than into fighting the people who were, right out in front of god and everybody, working to take them away in earnest. You imagined that war and repression somehow don't go together, even that war could function to inoculate against repression. You forgot or never saw a very important adage of Teresa Nielsen Hayden's:

Just because you're on their side doesn't mean they're on your side.

If you imagine yourselves as part of some coalition, ask yourself what you're getting for your trouble. You lost HSD. You lost USA-PATRIOT. You get IAO. An independent 9/11 commission? Gone. A lot of you favor liberal rules on therapeutic cloning. Think you'll get that from this Congress? Is there anything whatsoever that neolibertarians favor that the rest of the Republican coalition does not where you have gotten or expect to get your way? Any case where the Administration said "We've got to give the libertarians this?" Or where you can imagine them saying it? Remember, the war doesn't count. The neocons want it and the Christian Coalition wants it. They matter. Ditto for the tax cut. I'm talking about something that neolibertarians hold dear that neocons and/or the Christian Right oppose, where the will of the neolibertarians prevails.

I'm here every day. You can get back to me.

A proposition: Neolibertarians are to the Republican Party what African-Americans are to the Democratic Party - taken for granted because they have nowhere else to go.

We really weren't kidding, guys. War is the health of the state. It's time to stop imagining that this government will give you a generation-long war and occupation of however many countries without piling up the internal security measures, time to stop pretending that you have a box over here marked Good! that contains Don and Condi and a box over here marked Bad! that contains Ashcroft and Ridge and Mineta and that you get to pick one and not the other.

It's like I've been saying.

The Q Is E-Mailing Me - NyQuil mail: RGB Mike Jacobs writes

I misquote a comedian whose name I don't know...

"In the commercials, they show a guy taking it sitting in bed. For a good reason, if you take it in the kitchen, you ain't making it back to bed."

"Nyquil, the sniffling, sneezing, coughing, what the hell am i doing on the kitchen floor medicine."

Meanwhile, for once unclear-on-the-concept Kevin Maroney advises

Nyquil causes drowsiness because it has doxylamine succinate in it. Doxylamine is a powerful antihistimine, and is the main cause of drowsiness in Nyquil. In fact, it's in Nyquil precisely *to* cause drowsiness; it's better known as a "sleeping pill". There are many cold medicines which don't contain doxylamine, including Dayquil, which is Nyquil without the knockout drops. I take my local drug store's Dayquil knockoff when I have my annual cold and do pretty well by it.

But Kevin - Unqualified Offerings likes the knockout drops! Sadly, UO changed its mind about drug prohibition well after it was too old to benefit personally. And it doesn't drink alcohol either. The occasional, sanctioned shot of NyQuil is all it's got.

Tonight: Reader mail on Afghanistan: The Wargame.

So What Went Wrong?

WASHINGTON –– U.S. counterterrorism officials believe a new audiotape attributed to Osama bin Laden is probably authentic and are treating it as evidence the long-absent terrorist leader is still alive, a U.S. official familiar with the tape said Wednesday.

From today's Washington Post.

Remember that famous passage from Heinlein's Starship Troopers?

We are the boys who go to a particular place, at H-hour, occupy a designated terrain, stand on it, dig the enemy out of their holes, force them then and there to surrender or die.

Heinlein's point was that no matter how fancy the technology got, you were still going to need grunts to do the grunt work.

We tried to skip that part. We invented cavebusting bombs. They were excellent, so far as we know, at busting caves. At telling who, if anyone, was in the cave in the first place, not so good. We tried hiring out the grunt work. At doing things they wanted to do anyway, like exploiting breakthroughs our airpower punched into Taliban lines, the Northern Alliance was fine. At doing things we wanted them to do, like find certain people and capture or kill them, they weren't as effective. We fought the Afghan War against Al Qaeda in such a way that we couldn't even know whether we won or not, if winning is defined as the certain destruction of Al Qaeda's leadership and ability to wage terror against us. We did it for some serious reasons - fear of US military casualties, fear of Afghan civilian casualties, fear of public opinion in South Asia, the Middle East and the US, fear of (oh yes!) quagmire.

But when all is said and done, we did it in a manner that meant, in important ways, we couldn't win. At least not decisively. The wargame designers might end up classing the result we obtained as a Marginal Victory. Think of it as Clauswitz in action. "Hyperpower" or no, we fought for political goals under political constraints. Our leaders may well have, under pressure of those constraints, fought the war the best way they possibly could. If so, then those of us who favored going to War in Afghanistan have that much less complaint to make against those who believed the Afghan War was a bad idea.

Q: Can You Make This Stuff Up? - A: No, you can't make this stuff up.

7-foot-7 Manute Bol Tries Hockey

While You Were Out (Cold) - "you" being "Unqualified Offerings" - life continued on. Apparently

1. The 13-year-old boy that John Lee Malvo, by his own testimony, shot outside Tasker Middle School in Bowie last month, has come home from the hospital, according to this Washington Post story. Yay! At what lasting cost?

Physically, they're still in what his mother calls "the research and discovery stage. He has to sit up a certain way or he has trouble breathing. There's pain from the broken rib. And he still has pancreatitis; we don't know yet if he's going to be insulin-dependent."
...
Counting the eight holes in his body where various tubes once invaded, eyeing the two surgical scars, from sternum to navel and crosswise from midsection to his left side, he began singing a lyric from a favorite Christian pop band, Plus One: "I was a mess. . . ."
...
Fear is also a factor. The boy himself was convinced, irrationally, that the killers had targeted him specifically. "Did they see my face?" he whispered after doctors removed the tubes forcing air into his lungs.

"He told me he was worried that they would 'come back and finish the job,' " says Lisa Brown, 36, a tall, elegant single mother of three.

Note that during last summer's "weapons of some destruction" disputes among this website, Amygdala, Newsrack, Electrolite and Flit, much was made by some parties of the lasting debilities afflicting many chemical attack survivors. But anyone who knows even as little about gunshot/high-explosive wounds as Unqualified Offerings does is aware that they too can result in pretty miserable chronic conditions.

The article's account of the Brown family's story of the shooting incident itself and the aftermath is vivid and heartbreaking.

2. A "Third Man" arrested. Per the Post

A New Jersey man who spent time with John Allen Muhammad on the Caribbean island of Antigua has been arrested in New York by federal authorities investigating connections between the two men.

Peter John Gianquinto Jr., 53, was detained last week as he left his doctor's office in New York on charges of making false statements when he applied for a passport. Court documents indicate that federal agents quickly focused on Gianquinto in the days after Muhammad, 41, and John Lee Malvo, 17, were arrested, and he is now part of the broader inquiry into the sniper suspects.

Newsday also has a story. Gianquinto knew John Muhammad on Antigua and apparently left the Island shortly before Muhammad did. He has numerous bunco convictions and appears to have been running scams with Muhammad in the Antilles. He's also apparently been on a downward spiral financially, and given to spouting some of the same lines of patter as Muhammad - frex, claiming to be big in the music business. No picture, but bits in both articles indicate that Gianquinto is white. There's the Italian name of course, and a Newsday description of him as a "bleached blonde." An acquaintance in the Post article also talks about his "tan." Now Unqualified Offerings knows perfectly well that there are black people who tan and even burn, but the witness describes Gianquinto as working at his tan, which is a pretty white thing to do.

UO will boldly declare Gianquinto white until proven otherwise. Why this matters at all is that it undercuts any image of Muhammad and Malvo as rabid black nationalists. We get further from anything like a political motive for what turned out to be a cross-state spree all the time.

3. My buddy Dave Allan tipped me to this takedown of PBS's The American Experience from 2Blowards. It's a pretty good piece, and accords with my reaction to the network's Great War docuseries of a few years ago. The creators seemed so keen to assure us how much they hated war that they utterly falsified the experience and importance of the War. Because the essential truth of WWI was that, for every Hemingway or Graves who saw it as the atrocious collapse of a corrupt order, there were other soldiers who had the time of their lives. There were, that is, soldiers who grew too fond of it even though it was hell. You know the most famous of them, Adolph Hitler.

But Hitler couldn't have done what he did without an entire movement of men behind him who had loved the order and cameraderie of barracks life and wished to bring the same ethos to society as a whole. Veteran-led movements to militarize the homefront along Marxist or anti-Marxist lines afflicted every country in postwar Europe. (Ironically, the more overseas colonies you had, like the Brits, the less you suffered, because you had some place to send your at-loose-ends veterans. And the colonies, we have seen, were very very grateful for it.) The hardest thing about wars is ending them. As we have seen and will see again.

Sick and, by longstanding Unqualified Offerings tradition, that means a link to Dennis Leary's NyQuil rant. Scroll down to section 2, "Drugs." Just, as it were, a taste:

It says on the back of the NyQuil box, on the back of the box it says, "May cause drowsiness." It should say, "Don't make any fucking plans!

Unqualified Offerings has no plans. But it is currently between doses, so it can hold itself upright for typing.

Neolibertarianism in its Own Words - Before one goes putting one's own construction on people, it's worth asking how they see themselves. In the case of neolibertarianism, we have a couple of handy manifestos to consult. First, the header of the Neolibertarian News Portal weblog:

In general my views are very hawkish abroad and libertarian at home. Milton Friedman is my role model on domestic policy, Ronald Reagan on foreign policy.
By category:
Domestic Policy
In accordance with the Constitution, I favor protecting the rights of criminal defendants even if it means guilty people are freed by mistake.
People apprehended on our soil are entitled to the protections of habeus corpus, as prescribed by law, regardless of citizenship status.
I favor ending the War On Drugs™, especially marijuana and similar drugs, and focusing on treatment. Treat drugs like alcohol; if a person uses them in a manner that endangers public safety punish the person accordingly.
I favor undoing the damage done to the 4th and 5th amendments by the War On Drugs™.
I favor smaller government at all levels with the exception of defense and law enforcement, in which I favor spending more, not less.
I favor a full-blown voucher system in education where the money spent on education is divided among prospective pupils in the form of a voucher and parents choose their child's school.
I favor deregulation of commerce.
I favor reducing trade barriers, even unilaterally.
I favor increased legal immigration and refugee status for people escaping from communism, anarchy or any other form of tyranny.
Foreign Policy:
On terrorists I say kill the bastards at the source. Don't wait for them to come to us because it will, as a practical matter, mean curtailing liberties at home.
When we deem it necessary to go to war, as with Iraq, we should use it as an opportunity to provide freedom to the conquered country, which means nation building.
I generally dislike multilateral institutions such as the UN and the ICC. I favor coalitions of the willing and a multilateral institution that embodies that is fine with me.

Less systematically, but with more pith, there is this statement from VodkaPundit proprietor Stephen Green. An excerpt:

I’m a Falwell-tweaking, gay-marriage supporting, drug legalizing, pro-abortion, pro-immigration, anti-trade barrier, wary-of-organized-religion kind of conservative. Hardly a conservative at all, but I digress.

Let's Play Charades - You can't say Saddam Hussein doesn't have a sense of theater.

Oh the Irony Dept. - From Sunday's Washington Post:

Sources said that Malvo described himself and his partner as behaving like soldiers: One would be a lookout and communicate with the other on two-way radios.

If conditions, like traffic, were not right, they would not shoot, Malvo told investigators. They deliberately hopped from jurisdiction to jurisdiction to create confusion, and they watched the news coverage of their crimes, the sources said.

Emphasis, Unqualified Offerings. From today's Washington Post:

When Malvo and Muhammad were transferred to Virginia, they were effectively left without lawyers, because the lawyers who represented them against the federal charges in Maryland had not been appointed to defend them in Virginia.

That created an opportunity for investigators to seek to question Muhammad and Malvo on Thursday night and into Friday, before they appeared Friday in Virginia courtrooms and had attorneys appointed for them.

Emphasis, Unqualified Offerings.

Interesting passage from Monday's paper:

That source said officials theorize that Malvo likely pulled the trigger in most of the shootings that came from the 1990 Chevrolet Caprice in which the pair was arrested. The Caprice was modified to allow someone to shoot from the trunk and a hole had been bored in the back, investigators have said.

Sources said there have been no witnesses so far who saw a shot coming from the trunk, and no witnesses have reported seeing anyone with a rifle.

The source said that the trunk is probably too small for Muhammad to have shot from but added that investigators don't think any of the shots could have been fired through the hole in the back of the car. More likely, the source said, one of the suspects knelt in the trunk with the lid raised, fired a shot and then pulled the trunk closed.

"It's just a theory at this point, but it would have been very difficult for Muhammad to have been in the trunk and firing shots," the source said. "Instead, he was probably at the wheel or spotting."

Here's an idle question: Will there turn out to be much less to the whole "gun port" modification than we were initially led to believe? It's a poor gun port you can't shoot through, isn't it? Will the "gun port" turn out to have been a just a missing or damaged trunk lock mechanism?

Other business: This Washington Times story suggests that a Supreme Court ruling from just last year may also authorize prosecutors to use Malvo's Friday confessions.

My Heart Cries for You Dept.: In the Post, Malvo's court-appointed guardian is quoted as follows:

Todd G. Petit, a Fairfax lawyer who was appointed Malvo's guardian last week, met with Malvo yesterday and said his client "obviously is concerned. He's trying to be optimistic. But this is a very difficult position for a 17-year-old boy to be in."

This may be one reason why so many 17-year-old boys decline to undertake cross-state killing sprees. It's just not worth the trouble.

A Fanboy's Notes - Finally, with the feature-length Cartoon Theater presentation, Justice Leage: The Savage Time, the animated series comes as close to offering the perfect superhero story as we can probably hope, given the medium.

Plot precis: Six Justice Leaguers are in space when Something Happens and their ship gets zapped. They return to a very different world, where Germany somehow won World War II, pictures of an unknown "Leader" are everywhere, and an alternate version of the seventh Leaguer - Batman, of course - leads a small underground resistance. Alterna-Batman helps the other six go back in time to just after the D-Day invasion ("The beginning of the end") to try to set history right again.

Yes, huge Nazi war machines. Yes, superheroes knocking Messerschmidts out of the sky. Yes, Blackhawk. Yes, Seargeant Rock. Yes - Steve Trevor!

Amazingly, the Steve Trevor-Wonder Woman storyline is a highlight of the show, not bad since Trevor can make a fair claim to being one of the dullest supporting characters in the history of superhero comics and, for much of her history, Wonder Woman has been among the dullest of superheroes. Here everything works. WW comes across Trevor as he is escaping from behind enemy lines with a "top-secret communicator" and saves his life. She is astonished by his courage, by his willingness to stand against evil without the superpowers she herself possesses. He is astounded by those very superpowers - plus the stark sexual dimorphism common to the Timm/Fogel canon. Trevor indeed puts G-Rated moves on Wonder Woman, and she reciprocates in a G-Rated way. It actually works. And when they meet again, sixty years later, it's genuinely affecting.

The Easy Company arc features Jon Stewart/Green Lantern, whose power ring gives out soon after getting separated from the rest of the League at Caen. Determined to fight on, he just so happens to come across Sergeant Rock and his helpers - yes - behind enemy lines. There's pleasure and disappointment in this subplot. There's some nice, understated animation of Stewart/GL's obvious discomfort when the soldiers hand him a rifle, and when he decides, without saying anything, to bear and wield it. The show somewhat finesses that whole people die in wartime thing in a way a Japanese cartoon might not - there are exploding planes and shells, and things that crash in such a way that Nothing could have survived that! But there are also a soldiers on both sides who pull up wounded when they obviously should have died. When Stewart shoots a sniper in a tree, he its the enemy's hand, separating him from the rifle and causing him to fall, but not clearly killing him.

The other there where the show doesn't go is race. Sergeant Rock's army was a segregated one, but nobody says boo about Stewart/GL's melanin content. One private rides him constantly, but the official reason is that Stewart is useless without his "fancy powers" (which the soldier never had occasion to see in the first place).

JL: The Savage Time is surprisingly good at vivifying nobility and courage and sacrifice, all the virtues that even superhero comics made a decades-long project of deconstructing. WWII is a great subject for that, of course. Nostalgia for its role in midwifing so much "Greatest Generation" grandeur surely drives more "national greatness" visions than Caucasian pipelines or the Peril of Israel. You feel Stewart's bravery when, powerless, he faces Vandal Savage at the climax.

And yes, someone does twist a cannon barrel around so it explodes when fired.

Plugs - Did Unqualified Offerings realize that loyal reader Eric Mauro is a superb cartoonist and animator whose site, Qhead.com, features superb Mr. Questionhead Flash animations and funny pencil cartoons like today's?

No it did not.

Did Unqualified Offerings quite catch on that useful sniper tipster RonK of Seattle was also the proprietor of the well-regarded liberal blog, the Cogent Provocateur?

No, it did not.

Why not? Because these men are modest, and never really mentioned it in their e-mails. Unqualified Offerings had to pick the info up from the streets. Okay, not the streets exactly.

UO is pretty sure it even favorably cited a major CP consideration of Iraq policy over the summer, too. Anyway, go to those sites and have fun.

You Can Read It in the Sunday Papers - Two important columns in the November 3 edition of the Post.

(What? It's not like I named this weblog "Insta" anything.)

The one that's important in an unwitting way is by Robert Kagan, who spends his monthly allotment of column-inches whingeing about France. It has some nice passages:

If you want to see a country punching far above its weight class these days, look at France. The French don't have a lot of power, but they certainly know how to make the most of what little they do have. At the Security Council, France wields a veto, thanks to Franklin Roosevelt (and FDR didn't even like the French). That lets France's diplomats go toe-to-toe with the American behemoth, to the cheers of a proud French electorate and a grateful European public.

And

On European Union budget matters, in relations with NATO, on all kinds of issues ranging from economics to geopolitics, Chirac and his government seem these days to have testosterone pumping through their veins. And it's no secret why. Chirac was a dead politician walking just a year ago. His victory over right-wing villain Jean-Marie Le Pen this summer, and the end of cohabitation with the imploded Socialists, put the steam back in Chirac's stride. Now he's giving both Europeans and Americans a refresher course on what Gaullism really means.

And

Who would ever want to wake from such a dream? The real world of terrorists, tyrannical aggressors and weapons of mass destruction is a much less accommodating world for France than the legalistic, one-country, one-vote world of the Security Council or the postmodern paradise of the European Union. If the United States ever does invade Iraq, the French must either stand by helplessly or take their place by America's side, and that is not nearly as enjoyable. It's more fun to play Don Quixote, tilting at American windmills. And who knows? If France can prolong the game for a few more months, as Powell suggests, Bush's chance to remove Saddam Hussein will have passed and the Iraqi leader will be safe again. What a triumph that will be for France's vision of a just international order. And then only the American people and all of Iraq's many neighbors will have to stay awake, waiting for the next catastrophe to strike.

Here is what Kagan is saying without realizing it. That pesky Jacques Chirac is a National Greatness Conservative. Alas, his darn nation doesn't happen to be our darn nation. Well, as David Brooks once said, "We are all neoconservatives now."

This is the real problem with neocons: everybody has them. (Airstrip One pipes up to say: except Great Britain.) And unlike both transnational progressives and traditionalist-minded paleocons, your national greatness types from different countries can't really coexist for long, since they tend to see national greatness as a zero sum game and since they come, as we mentioned, from different countries. (Tranzis not only can live with foreign tranzis, the ache to do so. And since those conservatives who do the leave us alone stuff abroad too needn't come into conflict, they also do okay with each other.)

The other problem with "national greatness conservatives" is they make downpayments on their dreams now for which you pay and pay afterwards. Consider this undesignated companion piece to Kagan's on the same page by Anna Politkovskaya, about her mid-siege interview with a Moscow theater hostage-taker named Abubakar. Abubakar turns out to be a nasty and implacable piece of work:

-- What did you come to Moscow for?

-- To show you what we feel like during mop-up operations, when federals take us hostage, beat us up, humiliate, kill. We want you to go through it and understand how you have hurt us.

-- But let the children go.

-- Children? You take our 12-year-old children away. We are going to keep yours. To make you understand what it feels like.

For what he thinks of as his own nation, Abubakar is willing to do great evil. Don't worry, "moral equivalence" phobes, my point is not that Robert Kagan could be Abubakar if their positions were switched. My point is this: during the siege and after the (cough cough) rescue, I read various people referring to Lermontov's writings on the savagery of the Chechens. That was in 1832, when Lermontov wrote. It must have seemed like a real bright idea for Russia to take over that part of the Caucasus, and to fight so fiercely at various times to hold it, and no end to the fighting in sight, either.

Split-Screen Republicanism Watch

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

From this morning's Washington Post, below the fold, naturally:

GOP Revises Agenda Of Extensive Tax Cuts
Leaders Pursue More Modest Proposals

After talking expansively about an aggressive new round of tax cuts, Republican leaders are ratcheting back expectations and hoping to press forward next year with a modest tax agenda that is probably more symbolic than substantive, GOP congressional sources say.

The tax cut strategy will be two-fold. One portion will consist of a largely political push to make last year's 10-year, $1.35 trillion tax cut permanent after 2010. The other will be a stimulus package tied to economic recovery that could include an immediate increase of the child tax credit, a rise in contribution limits for retirement savings accounts and an expansion of tax breaks for business investment.

Whee. So what's up? Unqualified Offerings thought Republicans were savage tax slashers (UO being a regular reader of Max Sawicky's blog and all). Oh:

Even before they assume control of the new Senate and House, Republicans in the White House and Congress are beginning to confront the limits of their power. Tax cuts are still high on the GOP's agenda, but they are competing with demands for higher military and homeland security spending and a politically popular prescription drug benefit for the elderly.

Maybe Baghdad will get a tax cut?

Superb Unintentional Veterans Day Tribute by Patrick Nielsen Hayden on Electrolite. Many today have saluted the veterans of our armed forces for their courage and devotion, and they have been right to do so.

Patrick salutes them for their brains. Also their wisdom, nuance and wide-ranging experience. Not to be missed.

UPDATE: Forgot to explain the "unintentional" part. Patrick says in the comments to the post that he had forgotten about the holiday until he came out of the subway this morning and saw the parade. So the only reason he was praising the military is because he meant it.

Midday Murder Update- The Boston Globe runs the first interview with Nathaniel Osbourne that Unqualified Offerings has seen. (Note: The Globe is reprinting a Washington Post story.) Osbourne was the man who co-purchased the "death machine" Caprice with John Muhammad on September 10. Osbourne says that Muhammad and Malvo arrived looking destitute and that he fed them and gave them each a shirt. He tells the Globe that he knew Muhammad through Osbourne's brother, whom Muhammad met on Antigua. Previous reports have reported that Osbourne agreed to co-purchase the car as a favor because he had insurance and Muhammad did not. Osbourne also reports that Muhammad and Malvo arrived in Trenton by bus. They wanted a car to continue their travels.

The Barbados Advocate publishes an editorial that wanders eventually to an endorsement of life without parole rather than death for the killers. (This citation provided as a service to those Unqualified Offerings readers who like to know where the Barbados Advocate stands on an issue before making up their own minds.) The editorialist, Derek Gale, also sounds a bit...skeptical of the Antigua commission's assertion that John Muhammad ran immigration and emigration scams for a year with the aid of no more than "negligence" on the part of Antigua officialdom.

Lee Malvo's attorneys decried his Friday interrogation, as expected. Note: That doesn't mean they are wrong to do so. Followers of the famous "Egyptian Radio" case of last winter will recall that high-pressure interrogations can induce people to say all sorts of useless things. Especially at stake, given the vagaries of death penalty law, is who pulled the trigger for which shooting. This would seem to be just the sort of thing where you couldn't necessarily trust the answer you got under questioning without checking it against other available evidence.

It doesn't so far sound like prosecutors have decided to "get" one of the pair at the possible expense of the other. There's been no whisper of, say, making a deal with Malvo's attorneys that would save his life in return for testimony that would execute Muhammad. Prosecutors seem to want very badly to secure the death penalty for both men.

Declaration of Independence - One of those occasional intrablogger contretemps has broken out. As always, when such a thing happens, someone ends up writing a response to the quarrel that is so good its importance transcends the specifics of the quarrel. In this case it is Diana Moon of Letter from Gotham. Her meditation on "The War of the Warbloggers" is chock full of sobriety and moral acuity. For instance:

WITH FRIENDS LIKE THIS. I looked at this blogger's site and, despite the fact that his blog boasts, "I'm a Friend to Israel," I noticed (in fact, was almost relieved) that he does not link to any actual Israelis. It so happens that a real Israeli does have a blog, easily readable, easily linkable. He's no bleeding-heart leftist, but he has posted several times responses to the odious chants for expelling the Palestinians that emanate from the right both here and in Israel. Guess what: he's not going to do it. Now, he's the one who puts on the uniform every year, does reserve duty, carries the gun and does in real life what the "Warbloggers" do with the keyboard. And he's not gonna do it. Does that tell you something?(3)

Regarding Gaza, when Gil first started his blog, he was part of a unit that was...about to go into Gaza. The "military adventure" was called off. I detected in his blog-voice a distinct tone of relief. Geez, what's wrong with this guy, that he doesn't want to enact in real life the fantasies of some silly American warblogger?

Man, with friends like that...they remind me of Scott Fitzgerald's description of Tom and Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy--they smashed things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made….”.

Once his like get bored with Israel, they'll go onto something else, leaving the Gils and the Imshins and the Civaxes to pick up the pieces. Some friend.

There's lots lots more, all of it excellent. What I think Diana is writing about beyond questions of blogosphere etiquette is the question of mania, of hysteria, a question this site has also been working through over the last couple of months. Diana is far more hawkish than I am, but in a much less creepy way than the people she discusses.

Acting Like Grownups - Let's extend the themes of the fantasia immediately below this to foreign policy for a minute. A popular notion out there is that the United States has become, reluctantly, "the designated driver of the planet":

If you want put it in perspective, it's like we're the guy who ended up being the designated driver for the planet. Sure we'd love to sit back and drink ourselves into a stupor with the rest of the globe but we're responsible for getting as many people home safe and sound as possible. Every so often while we're sitting around wishing we could kill a few beers like the rest of the planet, a sloppy drunk, drooling, Europe comes over to where we're sitting. Then they take another swig of Vodka straight out of the bottle and tell us not to worry about a thing because they'll drive everyone home in their 'international law' van. But we know if we go ahead and drink up that we'll just get a call at 4 am asking us to bring our tow truck and the 'jaws of life' to clean up the bloody mess on dead man's curve. That's the burden of being an American.

Leave aside the question of just how reluctantly successive US administrations took up this "burden." (John Hawkins and David Frum would find considerable disagreement on this score. Let's consider only the structural question: What does the knowledge that there is a designated driver encourage?

That's right: irresponsible behavior. The whole point of designating an official sober person is to give everyone else license to get shit-faced and obnoxious. By taking on the role of official grownup, with whatever faux-reluctance, we guarantee that we'll always have plenty of parenting to do, because we put the rest of the world in the role of official makers of trouble with no responsibility for same. Like Superman's, ours becomes a never-ending battle. If we were really reluctant about this, we'd be giving some serious thought to how we honorably get out of that job.

A Pack, Not a TV Show - Unqualified Offerings understands that the plot of this season's well-regarded series, 24, is that terrorists have hidden a nuclear weapon in Los Angeles set to detonate within a day (or a dirty bomb, or whatever), and CIA officer Jack has to find it. The complication is that they have to keep the threat secret to forestall "panic."

Well now, to flog a familiar theme, Unqualified Offerings dreams of a different series. In this one

The Government learns of a nuclear threat. The President puts Jack on the case, enjoining him to secrecy because of the possibility of panic.

During his investigation, Jack is forced to take a local LA reporter into his confidence. The reporter abominates the secrecy. Lives are at stake! If Jack doesn't succeed, at least they can save some people. And some people Jack doesn't know may have important clues.

The philosophical dispute takes up an entire hour of this real-time series. Jack explains that most people are weak in a world of predators, that it's the job of people like Jack, and by implication, the reporter, to protect them. He takes his responsibility very seriously and swears he will do his damnedest to find the bomb and save the reporter's beloved city. The reporter argues that people are far more self-possessed than Jack and his masters give them credit for. When not deliberately infantilized, they are capable of acting with a nobility approaching grandeur. One ten-minute act is entirely taken up with a discussion of the Titanic, with Jack making much of the squalid refusal of the Duff Gordons to allow the crew of their lifeboat to rescue any of the drowning from the water. The reporter then tells the stories of several crewmen and passengers who acted to save others even at the risk or expense of their own lives. People are weak and strong in different measures, he concludes, but strong enough.

They part, Jack knowing what will come next. He continues with his investigation. The reporter publishes the news of the threat on his internet site. Official Washington explodes with apoplexy. Jack's boss demands an explanation for why he didn't stop the reporter "using all means at your disposal." Jack hangs up on him. The government scrambles to declare martial law, but it is too late.

In a spontaneous and ragged, but increasingly coherent, effort, the people of Los Angeles act to save themselves and each other as best they can, in an effort strongly reminiscent of the action of New Yorkers during the massacres at the World Trade Center in September 2001. (The producer tells Entertainment Weekly that the entire sequence was conceived, in fact, as a tribute to those ordinary people who rose to that occasion.) While the President and the feckless Governor attempt to rush the National Guard to the scene to set up roadblocks, the program shows us stunning vignettes of Angelenos "adaptive and effective" response to the terror, lighting now in Watts, now in South Central, now in West Hollywood. There is a touching segment in which a young couple conclude that they themselves have no chance of getting out of the city. They walk, hand in hand, to their favorite bookstore, where the manager and one cafe barrista have come to a similar conclusion.

That episode ends with the manager, the waiter and the couple sharing espressos. The woman insists on paying, and tipping too.

Since it's a realtime show, the evacuation, and the official apoplexy, stretches out over several episodes. Two shows before the end of the season, there is a confrontation at a hastily-constructed roadblock between a local rescue organizer and the nervous commander of one of the few guard detachments to arrive on the scene in time. Persuaded, the commander orders his men to help direct traffic out of town.

And on a parallel track, the reporter gets a tip from someone who noticed neighbors acting strangely. It made no sense at the time, but now that the tipster knows about the whole nuclear weapon thing, it seems obviously related. The reporter does enough digging to convince himself the tip is solid and contacts Jack.

The tip is as solid as it gets, but precious hours were lost to secrecy. Jack just misses arriving in time. You can see the hurt on his face just before the explosion. In the cafe, the couple glance at their watches, shake the hands of the employees, and kiss. At the former roadblock, the national guard commander turns to look away from the city, down the road along which so many have escaped with his help. The sky grows white behind him and he is lost to the glare.

The reporter uploads something from his computer, says, into his cell phone, "The important thing is that you got out. Yes, I - " and the scene cuts midsentence like the end of James Blish's classic novelet, "We All Die Naked."

In Washington, a clusterfuck of ass-covering and recrimination. The feds pick up a woman we learn is the reporter's wife, the unheard party to his final phone call, for questioning. She finds herself face to face with Jack's boss.

"What did you expect?" she demands. "We were as good, as dutiful, as mature, as you allowed us to be. Better, since you wouldn't have given us the chance. Tens of thousands are alive despite you. Tens of thousands more might have lived.

"You think we don't know it's a dangerous world? You think we drive past graveyards and tell ourselves it has nothing to do with us? And you know what makes me angrier than anything? You really want to do the best job you can. But the job you want is bigger than you have any right to. Us. You think of us as your job. It's too much for you. And damn you but you won't give it up.

"You love your work. Ask yourself if your work loves you."

After what happens to Jack, planning for the third season is a bit of a struggle.

Self-Involved Blogger Post About Blogging Stuff - I have conceived a candidate addtion to the blogosphere glossary that Samizdata maintains:

Traffic Gollum - One who lives for readership statistics. (My precious!)

That's it. Got nothing else to say on the subject.