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

Least Dispensible Weblog - Instapundit

Hawk of the Year - Christopher Hitchens

Dove of the Year - Alan Bock

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

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

Best Non-Libertarian in a Libertarian Role - Mickey Kaus

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

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

Best Libertarians in a Libertarian Role - Samizdata

Least Annoying Liberal - Ginger Stampley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Special Achievement Award - Blogger.com

Spouse of the Year - Mrs. Offering

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why I'm Not a Conservative Either - In his famous postscript to The Constitution of Liberty, F.A. Hayek explained why, despite his anti-socialism and anti-statism, he had to disclaim the label "conservative." There are still as many reasons for libertarians to reject the label as ever. Consider first, Best [Neocon-Approved Items] of the Web yesterday on the latest draft guidelines for those military tribunals:

The Defense Department has issued draft procedures for the military commissions that will try noncitizens suspected of terrorism, and it appears civil libertarians were crying wolf. Under the draft procedures, the Washington Post reports, suspects "would be presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, could be sentenced to death only by a unanimous vote of the commissions' members and would have the right to an appeal."

That's a nice touch, that "it appears civil libertarians were crying wolf." Actually, the President is stressing that the draft procedures are preliminary, so they could get, from the perspective of civil libertarians, worse rather than better. What's more, the draft procedures are clearly more, um, liberal than the President's original guidelines. How did that happen?

A key step in the development of the commissions appears to have been Rumsfeld's decision to ask for advice not only from the White House, the Pentagon and Ashcroft's Justice Department, but also from a select group of centrist senior lawyers who have served in top positions in both Democratic and Republican administrations -- and who, in several cases, are trusted friends of the defense secretary.

Now here is Christopher Hitchens on the tribunal plans as they stood a month ago:

As an immigrant with a green card, I find that my American wife and American children will not insure me against a secret arrest, against undisclosed evidence, against a verdict with no appeal, or against my execution in a secret ceremony. (As the New Yorker puts it this week, the above procedure is so secret that it may, in theory, already have occurred.)

Now here's the thing: Suppose it came to light that this had happened already, and that, in an FBI-style foul-up, they got the wrong guy. Does anyone have any doubt that, so long as a Republican is in the White House, Best N-AI of the Web would either ignore it or, if they couldn't, justify it any way they could?

Wilderness of Mirrors - The New Adventures - Unqualified Offerings wishes to stress that it remains agnostic about the "China Did It" hypothesis of the man it shall call "Toiler." But one hallmark of a worthwhile hypothesis is that it opens further avenues of research. Try this one:

Let's say China has penetrated al Qaeda and used it as an instrument of Chinese policy. The following questions arise: How long has this been going on? and, um, What did the Presidents know and when did they know it?

August 1998 - al Qaeda bombs two US embassies in Africa.
May 1999 - US bombs Chinese Embassy in Belgrade.

Note that the Observer reported quite a different motivation back in late 1999; though the explanation their investigations turned up - the Chinese were covertly retransmitting signals for the paramilitary Serbian Tigers in Kosovo - actually supports Toiler's belief that China wants to tie the US down in interventions around the globe.

Lifeboat Games, a Preamble - Thanks to the energetic and interesting Slotman's "Insolvent Republic of Blogistan," I found this excellent Guardian piece by Christopher Hitchens. It shows that Hitchens is good for a lot more than just Chomsky-bashing, and just how libertarian his instincts have become. Hitchens tells of getting two phone calls at the beginning of November from insiders warning him to get out of town, right away, as there was a tactical nuke headed for DC:

Officially, nobody now remembers this night of the weak knees. It rated a brief and embarrassed mention in Hugh Sidey's Time column, and that was it. But I shall not forget how some of those in supposed authority decided that the end had come, and made it a point to keep it to themselves and their immediate friends, perhaps to stop the crowding of the roads. That's how it will be on the day of Armageddon, and that's why the citizen should always plan to outlive the state, rather than the other way round.

Wilderness of Mirrors - The Final Chapter(?) - Maybe Unqualified Offerings has not thought far enough outside the famous "box." It just got off the phone with an old friend who toils in the national security bureaucracy. This fellow began by asking himself qui bono. Qui bono is what has bedeviled the "Saudi Arabia did it" theory. This site has repeatedly maintained two things as true: 1) There is no "oil weapon" because the Saudis need our money; 2) The September massacres and the anthrax attacks constitute economic warfare. It just makes no sense for a country that needs our money to attack our economy. Add a third problem: The basic principle of black ops is to avoid using your own nationals. There were just way too many Saudis involved in 9/11 for any putative Saudi planner to feel comfortable.

The same objections do not apply, in my friend's entirely unofficial opinion, to the Chinese.

China certainly has a motive. They are a geopolitical rival, they want to be the preeminent power in Asia, they know the US wants to keep that from happening and that an influential sector of the policy elite wants to make opposing China the centerpiece of US defense and foreign policy doctrine. They were pretty pissed off about the Belgrade Embassy too.

China has large, active intelligence services, both domestic and foreign. It has a low-level muslim insurgency in Xinjiang-Uigher. Chinese nationals have trained with al Qaeda. That means there have been opportunities for a good intelligence service to flip Chinese muslim activists and get a line into bin Laden's organization. The Chinese have decent relations with muslim governments because of a consistent anti-Israel and anti-India record. They have great relations with the Pakistanis, and the Pakistanis, and now your ISI-Taliban-al Qaeda connection comes into play.

What's more, says our toiler, he attended one of those talks such people attend by a certified China expert, who said that China's grand strategy vis a vis the US is, ideally, to tie America up by provoking it into intervening all over the place - "imperial overstretch" in other words. Unqualified Offerings immediately asked, waggishly, if the Chinese were funding The Weekly Standard too - then it remembered.

UPDATE: Early editions of this item omitted the crucial word "not" from the first sentence. Oops!

Attention-Getting Mechanism Post - Guns.

Two Great Pieces on Libertarian Samizdata Today - Both by Perry deHavilland. The first, "Triumph and Realism," argues against the temptation to irrational euphoria in the wake of US military and political success in Afghanistan so far:

Yes, that is quite true and in fact much of Hanson's article is spot on. However I do worry that in the wave of understandable euphoria following the destruction of the Taliban and the scattering of Al Qaeda, that an air of unrealistic expectation and ill conceived adventurism may replace the air of unrealistic pessimism so beloved of the dismal and irrational Buellers and Fisks.

I had no idea Ferris Bueller was an unrealistic pessimist, but never mind. The other piece is a take-no-prisoners response to blogger Brian Linse on gun control, gun shows and gun registration. To Linse's complaint about "endless polarizing rhetorical posts," deHavilland replies "You seem to be demanding that Glenn and Walter argue the issue by first accepting your underpinning axioms (i.e. not 'polarizing' th debate)..."

Libertarian Samizdata announces its purpose as "Developing the libertarian meta-context for the future." That is to say, not first accepting the underpinning axioms of statists before joining the political fray. It is a truism of Washington journalism that conservative politicians get validated as "constructive" by accepting the overall framework of a liberal policy proposal and just adding a trim here and a tuck there. Contrariwise, ideologues "merely" oppose liberal proposals, "without offering an alternative program." If you think there shouldn't be a program, well, you're just out of luck. Samizdata seems to realize that that dynamic is the first thing libertarians need to change.

It Out-Libertarians Libertarians. Pray You Seek It Out - Mickey Kaus is on an absolute roll the last couple of days. In addition to his righteous pasting of David Broder, he has an excellent critique of a Post article on welfare caseloads in Wisconsin and a minor, but important, cavil about an otherwise good piece by Kevin J Hasson in today's - Post. Okay, there's a pattern here. But to those of us who live with the Post, it's an appealing one.

Latest From Washington Post Unintentional Humor Pages - "Paramilitary's Rise Unintended Outcome Of U.S. Assistance" reads the dumbfounding subhead of a lengthy article in today's Washington Post. Apparently all that Plan Colombia money - ahem, Andean Initiative money for the War on - you know, has led to the Colombian Army building up right-wing paramilitary groups as a bulwark against left-wing FARC guerrillas. Whoah! And here's the stunner:

The shifting balance has even allowed the paramilitary forces to take over some coca areas once dominated by the guerrillas. Drug profits are helping them pay troop salaries, buy arms and recruit members from the growing pool of unemployed Colombians.

Are you stunned yet? Let's take the Post at its word that these are "unintended" consequences of Plan Initiative. If they were unanticipated consequences for anyone, those people had no business making drug or foreign policy in the first - oh. Right.

Thinking Like a Terrorist - Unqualified Offerings will attempt to get all paranoid for a bit in hopes of understanding certain Current Events, including the Shoebomber, the newest bin Laden tape and, oh yeah, the prospects for nuclear war in South Asia. Specifically, UO will attempt to make everything fit into a plausible grand strategy for UBL. It will also give some thought to where bin Laden might be.

This last first. In some of your better spy novels, the following happens: Intelligence officer recruits charismatic agent who does him and his agency much good. Officer and agent bond in their weird, codependent, ambiguously homoerotic way. Priorities change for the officer's country, and the agent is now not just expendable but counterproductive in the eyes of the officer's superiors. They decide to sacrifice him by betraying him to his enemies. The officer, disgusted, launches himself into the desperate project of saving his agent from the wolves. It usually doesn't work.

But sometimes it might. Unqualified Offerings is absolutely convinced that Osama bin Laden was an asset of Saudi Intelligence, also Pakistan's ISI, and likely remains one. That doesn't mean that either group, or either country, had foreknowledge of the September massacres, though you can bet they weren't as broken up about it as we were. In the suddenly changed autumn winds, official Pakistani policy on al Qaeda and the Taliban blew suddenly in reverse - Saudi policy too, if more equivocally. But in the previous years, there will have been influential people - excuse me, men - in the intelligence agencies of both countries who came to like and admire the man, and probably to believe what he believed. Their personal feelings will not have proven so nimble as Pervez Musharraf's statesmanship.

Would they like him enough to spring him, whether from Mazar-i-Sharif during the "Don't Ask Don't Tell" airlift of ISI officers that the US allowed the Pakistani military to undertake, or from the cave country of Tora Bora across the border into Pakistan, Kashmir and beyond? Maybe. Would Saudi and ISI intelligence officers, working together, have the wherewithal to pull such a thing off? Don't doubt it.

So bin Laden gets out alive. Doesn't mean he's not dead. If he's dead, that doesn't mean that The Plan isn't still in operation either. So what's the plan?

The plan is what it always was: Drive the Jew-Crusaders out of the Middle East and ignite Holy War between dar-el-Islam and dar-el-Jihad. The Plan was never to preserve Taliban rule in Afghanistan. The means are terrorism as both intimidation and economic warfare against the US and inspiration to the militant Ummah. In the early going things have just not gone al Qaeda's way. Attacking the US itself totally blew the intimidation factor. Yes, after terrorists killed American troops in Lebanon in 1983 and Somalia in 1993, the US pulled back. They pulled the troops back to safety. By attacking US soil itself, what al Qaeda accomplished was to destroy the notion of America as safe haven. A safe haven is what you pull back to. If terrorists kill thousands in America we're going to pull our Saudi troops back to - America? To keep them safe??

So that part didn't work. And the psychic contribution of the Flight 93 passengers' to American morale in the dark, early days shouldn't be scanted. Nor did al Qaeda get the generalized anti-muslim pogrom within the US they surely expected and hoped for. Unqualified Offerings is not in favor of detaining hundreds of people without even releasing their names. Nor is UO wild about sneaking torture in the back door by putting detainees in places where you know their fellow (native-born) prisoners will beat them up for you. But even at that, holding hundreds of people on legitimate (if minor) charges in disingenuously bad conditions is a far cry from torching the mosques of America and clapping everyone with a prayer cap or a hijab shawl into camps. There simply wasn't a high enough atrocity level for the militant muslim press to trumpet.

So that part didn't work either. Part of the credit goes to the Bush administration for its early and often warnings against taking out America's frustrations on random Arabs and Muslims. Most of the credit surely goes to the citizens of the United States for just not being assholes like that. Abroad, military resolve and effective diplomacy got the country just enough useful allies within the Muslim world to a) enable America to prosecute the war at all, and b) to avoid a clean lineup of Islamic States versus Infidel States. In particular, the US got the cooperation of the Central Asian Republics, Russia's acquiescence in same, and most of all, managed to split the unsplittable differences between India and Pakistan for three whole months.

In every case, things went more poorly than al Qaeda might have hoped because both the American people and the US administration were better, smarter and more skillful than bin Laden and his strategists believed. They suffered the further handicap of not themselves being as appealing as they kept telling each other they were, either. Afghanistan hated al Qaeda as much as they hated any colonialists. There were plenty of anti-Taliban Afghan muslims ready to carry American water against the arabs and their local clients. And "The Street" found it had places to go, people to see and things to do.

So al Qaeda's problem - and here "al Qaeda" means everyone on bin Laden's side, including possible allies in the ISI, Saudi Intelligence and Arabian royal and clerical circles - is that it still wants the same things, and certain concrete facts impede: American military success, the resolve of the American electorate and political class, the successful diplomacy of the President and that favorite whipping boy of the ultrahawks, Colin Powell. Anthrax, if it was an al Qaeda attack, fizzled. No massacres in malls on Halloween, no truck bombs on bridges. Folks here starting to feel pretty good again. The Europeans starting to drift, compliantly, in the US wake. India grumbled that the US seemed to take terrorism in New York very seriously indeed and terrorism in Kashmir not very seriously at all, which had the disadvantage of being true. Pakistan grumbled that by supporting the US they enabled us to replace their clients in Afghanistan with India's, which had the disadvantage of being true. But we made them like it, or at least act like they did.

So suddenly there's a ham-handed attack by Islamic terrorists in India and a ham-handed bombing attempt by a European Islamic terrorist over the Atlantic, and the rumor that bin Laden is in Pakistani Kashmir or in Pakistan proper. The Indians have wheeled their nukes up to the border, the Pakistanis have mobilized their troops and, this very evening, Pakistanis and Indians are killing each other in earnest. None of this, from al Qaeda's perspective, is a bad thing. The India-Pakistan rift is the fault line in the US coalition. (Unqualified Offerings realizes it is sounding "Stratfor-certain," and apologizes.) al Qaeda must see two good things that could come out of this: The US tries to clamp down on India's response to the terror attacks for the sake of keeping Pakistan sweet, in which case we look like hypocrites. Or the US acquiesces in India doing what we ourselves have done, in which case, the US is betraying a muslim ally to another infidel nation.

I think al Qaeda would really prefer the latter. They must love, and may be doing their best to inspire, the rumors that bin Laden is in Pakistan. al Qaeda doesn't, with the possible exception of some of its ISI friends, care about Pakistan as such. Any given muslim state is expendable, especially a non-Arab one. More than anything, it would like the US to "turn on" Pakistan, not just backing India in what might yet end up a nuclear war but forcing US soldiers into the country on the "pretext" that Pakistan is harboring Osama bin Laden. If the plan before September was to provoke a US response, bring down the Musharraf government and, if possible, make off with one or more Pakistani nukes in the confusion, the plan has not yet failed. The administration is going to have to be better, smarter and more skillful yet over the next several days and weeks.

What Do Women Want? - Affordable, professional cosmetics. Clothes that fit. And cost-effective broadband. Ginger Stampley, who has always been linked at the left and will always have the top spot on the Unqualified Offerings link list, has been turning out great post after great post about the economics of practical womanhood. The latest is called, "Economics of Lipstick, Redux." As a Penile-American, I'm finding the whole series fascinating. Ginger applies lucid economic thinking to such Vaginated-American concerns as where is really the cheapest place to buy makeup and why it makes sense that the Gap is having financial problems. She neither aggrandizes nor trivializes these matters. It's the kind of political economy that, before blogs, only Virginia Postrel took seriously - I still remember a classic Postrel piece on the rise of nail salons in Reason a few years ago. Otherwise, the only people writing about such topics were fashion magazines or the sorts of feminists who consider it genocide that a woman can't walk around with twigs sticking out of her hair.

No doubt the Davids Broder and Brooks consider intellectual musings on practical fashion to be frivolous if not decadent. But a signal service of Ginger's recent pieces is that they offer an important corrective to caricatures of economics and even "the market." "The market" is not about reducing all human values to monetary values. (Nor is libertarianism about valuing "getting and spending" over "love and friendship," despite what Chronicles editor Thomas Fleming imagines.) Economics is simply about understanding how people pursue their ends, and the market is the place those ends can be effectively pursued, whether getting, spending, love, friendship or "an out-of-production eye pencil."

One More Thing - Unqualified Offerings has ranted against the notion some have advanced that the September massacres and the Autumn War have somehow redeemed America from frivolity and decadence. On that subject, Kausfiles' takedown of today's David Broder column is a signal service. Kausfiles does not do anchors, so look for the only 12/26 item.

I Remember You - Here is a courtroom sketch of shoe-bomber Richard Reid. He hasn't aged a bit, has he?

Like Olden Times - Unqualified Offerings is caught up in the Blogger outage, though it refuses to give the reasons for that outage the satisfaction of detailing the problem. This item comes to you the old-fashioned way - manual coding into a text editor. (Textpad, of course!) Since it's Mrs. Offering that has gotten the Society for Creative Anachronism bug, and not her husband, UO will not overdo the primitive bit. But there's a terrific article on the Army's Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, Louisiana, in today's Washington Post. Well no wonder it's good, he said, looking at the byline finally - it's by Richard Leiby, a longtime Post staffer who has done excellent reporting on everything from Waco to Elvis Costello. At the JRTC, specially-trained "bad guy troops" make a specialty of humiliating "good guy troops" cycled in from other bases, with the help of locals who play civilians-on-the-battlefield. Leiby is even too classy to allude to the movie "Southern Comfort." (An illogical Fareed Zakaria column on the op-ed page is not yet available on the web, apparently, so we must pass it by.)

Slate's Tuesday Morning Quarterback spends the first part of this week's column ranting against one of Unqualified Offerings' favorite targets, corporate welfare in the form of taxpayer-financed sports stadia. But it gets better! There is a tedious passage of antisuburban twaddle late in the article in which TMQ refers the reader to "a telling article on this subject [by Roberta Brandes Gratz] for the journal of the Michigan Land Use Institute , an important land-preservation organization; read her here. But in an act of mercy appropriate to the season, he doesn't actually include the link info on the word "here."

God bless us everyone! Especially Ev at Blogger, who has been working hard all day.

UPDATE: Blogger is back! This post and the next two, originally entered manually, have been republished through Blogger for the sake of accurate indexing. Also celebrated by adding an extra paragraph break...

Christmas Suggestion - If you use Morpheus or Gnutella or one of the Napster successors and are still in the Christmas spirit, search for these wonderful live tracks:

• Buddy and Julie Miller - "Away in a Manger"
  
• T-Bone Burnett - "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen"
  

Red Meat - I'm not a paleoconservative, nor do I play one on the web. I read some paleoconservative organs, though, even paleoconservative organs that imagine that they are libertarian. There's no way that 21st century libertarians can unreservedly ally themselves with the paleos, but then, libertarians can't unreservedly ally themselves with neoconservatives, so-called civil libertarians, the business roundtable, leftist drug war opponents, or those gun- and abortion-rights supporters for whom their single issue is the single "choice" they trust their fellow citizens to make.

The flagship paleo journal is Chronicles. I found the Christmas issue, "And the Word Was Made Flesh," especially valuable. Chronicles represents not just the Christian Right but the Catholic Right, and I came away from the current issue understanding Catholicism, and the more "Catholic" protestant sects, maybe for the first time. I was reared in that protestant denomination known to anatomists of faith as "the closest church," and have not been a believing Christian since high school, so my catechism was haphazard.

More than one article stresses the significance of the physicality of the Incarnation. (Note: In the scramble to ready Unqualified Headquarters for its Christmas dinner guests, my copy of the current Chronicles has gone missing. Nor does Chronicles make its current issue contents available on the web. So I have no links or lengthy quotes.) Contrasting the presentations of Jesus in the Gospels and the Koran, in which Jesus is a paragon of asceticism, the author avers that "No sane host would invite the Muslim Jesus to the wedding feast at Cana." Elsewhere, an author argues that the Gospel story itself rebukes the Puritan impulse - by taking on human flesh and allowing Himself to be "born under the Law to redeem those born under the Law," God's message to humanity was that the physical world matters, and that salvation must be worked out in the physical world. "Incarnation" includes the root carn- - "flesh" - but we see the word even more clearly in later romance languages: meat. God became meat as we are meat.

What I finally understood after reading the magazine was the logic of Catholicism. In the Protestant tradition, the Catholic belief that the Sacraments are necessary to salvation is unfathomable. Protestants believe in the unmediated experience of God. But if you read the meaning of the Gospel as God's affirmation of the physical world and physical works as the theater of salvation, then it's plausible that it is necessary to Do Certain Things in certain ways - the world is for believers to do those things. And the Catholic insistence on the necessity of mediating institutions makes sense too. Perhaps Protestants see the Divine Christ among us as a sign of the direct experience of God and Catholics see the Human and Divine Christ as the Glory of God Shuttered, betokening the need for a Human-staffed, Divinely-guided Church to interced with Christ as Christ interceded with God.

Years ago, I worked with a gay former priest, former because of John Paul II's edicts against gay clergy. He was one of the most interesting men I ever met (my coworker, not the Pope), and we talked frequently about religion. A spectator sport to me, it meant much more to him. He remained committed to the Catholic Church that refused his services, because, he said, the Catholic tradition best met the needs of intellectual rigor and Christian belief. I couldn't for the life of me figure out how he meant that. Now, thanks to a magazine that abhors gay clergy every bit as much as the Pope, I think I almost might. As a bonus, it gives me another angle to consider the Catholic SF novelist Gene Wolfe, especially his classic, The Book of the New Sun.

Oddly, almost every Chronicles reader I know is a gay poet. They've all been Chronicles contributors at some point, too. (Unqualified Offerings published a handful of poems in the magazine many years ago, but never mastered the gay trick of being sexually attracted to men.)

Government Turkey? - Unqualified Offerings learned to cook turkey in self defense: its grandmother believed that the bird was not done unless you could braid rope from it. So UO has dressed many, many turkeys for holiday dinners over the years. This year's bird, from the ever-reliable Shady Brook Farms, seemed odd. No, it smelled fine. But there was almost no skin flap by the neck aperture, and a considerably smaller, well, butt plug by the opening of the chest cavity. These are important items because, while one doesn't eat them, they are what seals in stuffing. Then Unqualified Offerings was struck - a couple of years ago, government busybodies opined that people shouldn't cook stuffing inside the bird any more because someone, somewhere might get sick, maybe. The idea was that the center of the bird won't get hot enough and the blood that drips into the stuffing will not cook all the way and WE'LL ALL DIE!!!

Not being a government employee, it took Unqualified Offerings about five seconds to wonder why, if this is really a problem, government busybodies didn't simply suggest running a metal skewer or two into the heart of the cavity to conduct the needed heat there. (UO probably had this thought while plunging The Official 1.6 Gallon Toilet of the Nanny State in Unqualifed Headquarters.)

Anyway, it occurred to Unqualified Offerings that perhaps Shady Brook Farms had begun trimming its end flaps to make it harder to stuff turkeys. However, there is no evidence of this on their website. They have a FAQ, which advises, perhaps a bit grandiosely, "As you go from aisle to aisle collecting your groceries, be sure that the turkey is the last item placed in the shopping cart, just prior to checkout." But they inveigh not against stuffing the bird. They do have a link to the National Turkey Federation, which advises, once the thigh temperature reaches 180 degrees F,

Move the thermometer to the center of the stuffing. Once the stuffing has reached 160 to 165 degrees F., the turkey should be removed from the oven and allowed to “rest” for 20 minutes. This makes carving easier and allows stuffing temperature to continue to rise to at least 165 degrees F.

you and your family can continue the tradition of preparing a delicious stuffed turkey without sacrificing quality or safety.

I Heard Him Exclaim - Merry Christmas to you and yours from Unqualified Offerings, Mrs. Offering, Offering Boy, the Littlest Offering, Unqualified Dog and The Cat Who Won't Go Away!

Thought for the Day - In the early 90s I hired a nice, somewhat whacked-out guy to work in the bookstore I was running. He was a guitarist, a deadhead and had served in the army in Central America. In the interviewer he remarked casually that "I've been in combat. I've been under fire." I didn't bother saying You weren't supposed to be! I put it down to exaggeration and moved on. A few years later, it came out that US troops had done a lot more in the way of fighting in Central America than the Reagan Administration swore they had done. Last night my neighbor, a man who has won awards from the National Association of Black Journalists, alluded with cynical amusement to having, as a marine, been in on what he called "the military side of our diplomacy" in Central America.

So. Question One: What are the two segments of the population most prone to political conspiracy theories? Urban blacks and rural whites. Question Two: What are the two segments of the population that disproportionately comprise the armed forces? Hm. We get to reuse our answer to the first question.

A Fanboy's Notes - Read today issue one of Frank Miller and Lynn Varley's The Dark Knight Strikes Again, sequel to the landmark The Dark Knight Returns. Dark Knight Returns was unprecedented in a way that DK2, as Dark Knight Strikes Again is styled, probably can't be. In fact, I can't find a single innovative feature of DK2. Its pleasuredrome dystopia is off the shelf - reminiscent of Howard Chaykin's American Flagg, to stick to comic book precursors. After DC's Kingdom Come and Marvel's Earth X, this is just another story of aging superheroes fighting over whether and how to save the world. I would argue, in certain moods, that Miller was the first good comic book writer (there had been great storytellers for decades), so its a shame that on one page the words he puts in Superman's mouth give the game away - the passage all but screams, "I - AM - RATIONALIZING!" There are no philosophical complications. Earth has the dystopia it has because it is secretly ruled by a couple of famous supervillains whom Unqualified Offerings will refrain from naming. It's not too hard to pick a side to root for.

But it moves! Carrie Kelly, who has traded her Robin costume for a Catwoman suit between the end of Returns and the beginning of DK2, remains a ton of fun, accidentally swallowing the Atom and having to puke him back up, redoing the Flash's costume because she considers it unfashionable and riding herd on the Batboys that Bruce Wayne began training at the end of Dark Knight Returns.

DK2 will be three parts and I'll buy the next two. Just don't go into it expecting a revelation.

Sucks To Be You Dept. - Fuzzy, big-eyed "Taliban" soldiers are having a hard time in captivity, according to an Associated Press article that MSNBC.com has titled "Afghan prisoners cold, hungry, sick." There are 3,000 prisoners crammed into a prison built for 200. As it happens, the only prisoners quoted are Pakistanis, and on the evidence of the article, the bulk of the prisoners, if not all of them, are foreign adventurers. The Red Cross is quite restrained in its criticism:

“The reality is there are over 3,000 prisoners there, and the authorities are swamped,” said Simon Brooks, head of the ICRC in northern Afghanistan.

Saeed, a 24-year-old Pakistani, said he joined the Taliban only three months before he was wounded and captured in Kunduz. He was desperate to get back home and waiting for contact from Pakistani officials. Pakistan has said it wants confirmation of prisoners’ nationalities before deciding what to do with its citizens.
“Pakistan is our country. They should help us,” Saeed said.

Because You Didn't Demand It! Mary McGrory, sometimes called "the Ellen Goodman of the south," writes today on young John Walker in her (unacountably) weekly Washington Post column. Perhaps one should call her the Dadaist Ellen Goodman instead, since much of today's column defies not just common sense but simple comprehensibility. Consider the beginning:

An unbidden guest may turn up at many Christmas dinner tables this year -- a most unnerving, even haunting presence. John Walker, the 20-year-old American Taliban, causes consternation and rage among his countrymen, but he's the only individual on the cheerless acreage of Afghanistan they can relate to.

Huh? Let's grant the arguable premise that Walker is an individual in the first place, and not an unmoored id flitting blindly after some dimly perceived, Ultimate superego. What does McGrory mean by her claim that Walker is the only one in Afghanistan that "his countrymen" can relate to? She doesn't say. Is the assertion so clear to those with less antipathy toward McGrory's class than Unqualified Offerings has that it needs no explanation? If one attends the same dinner parties McGrory does, or at least does not despise the very idea of them, is it self-evident that his countrymen "relate to" Walker better than they do to the late Mike Spann, or the special forces guys, or the freed missionaries, or, to go native for a moment, all those Afghans happily getting fashion makeovers now that the grip of foreign agitators like John Walker has been lifted from their necks? (Christ, I feel like Russ Smith contemplating a Maureen Dowd column all of a sudden...)

Perhaps if you are a member, like McGrory, of what the conservatives call the world's first dissident ruling class, a child of the bicoastal elite who goes all the way to outright war against the US actually constitutes "a most unnerving, even haunting presence." I suspect that for most Americans, however, Walker simply constitutes an asshole. The world is full of them and their principle product, and there's nothing especially "haunting" (not to say odiferous) about it.

But wait! There's more!

Some have pointed to Marin County as the villain of the piece, even though Walker's early childhood was set in the heart of suburbia, Silver Spring, Md.

As a piece of willful obtuseness, this is hard to beat. I figured out some time ago that Walker grew up within blocks of Unqualified Headquarters, an unpretentious neighborhood indeed. But only someone from Cleveland Park or Georgetown could imagine that Silver Spring is "the heart of suburbia." Official Washington pulls on the place like a gravity well. In the households of the Lindhs and their ilk, ambition is not about climbing the corporate ladder, but achieving prominence in in the world of subcommittees, foundations, think tanks, lobbying firms, approved media and the federal bureaucracy - becoming, that is to say, more like Mary McGrory. (Then you move to Bethesda, Potomac or, if you really hit the jackpot, Georgetown.) You could say that to the extent that the Silver Spring of Walker's formative years had ambition, it aspired to the condition of Marin County. There is plenty of Unofficial Washington to be found here - auto mechanics, restaurant owners and workers, family doctors, immigrant construction workers, insurance agents. But that was not the Lindh family's Silver Spring.

Pause to grudgingly acknowledge the clear-eyed part of McGrory's peroration, on Walker in Afghanistan:

Familiarity did not breed the contempt that was called for. Did he not know what was going on? Kevin Sullivan of The Washington Post hardly had his feet on the ground in Kabul when he quickly documented the reports of weekly orgies of execution and dismemberment in the soccer stadium. It was official Taliban policy.

Walker could not have missed the street police beatings of women who showed a flash of ankle when their burqas slipped. Did the onetime hip-hop fan not miss music? Perhaps not. He had no problem with Sept. 11.

And that's enough of that! Let's cut to the end:

Our treatment of Walker will tell a great deal about us, revealing whether we are a great nation that treats its wayward children sternly but with humanity. We can't make a martyr of John Walker -- or a spectacle. We should show him just who he is -- and who we are, too. What we need now, most urgently, is more information.

And now McGrory sounds like "the white Alice Walker!" who wanted us to punish Osama bin Laden with love. Question: If we already know that we must treat Walker "sternly but with humanity" and all that, then why do we need more information, "urgently" or otherwise?

A Frank, Constructive Dialogue - Thomas Nephew over on the excellent Newsrack blog takes another whack at the Saudi question, complicating his analysis with actual history. Unqualified Offerings reads Newsrack and so should you.

Be of Good Cheer - Natalija Radic posts a deeply moving rebuttal to Maureen Dowd's cavils about the new Prada store opening "not far from Ground Zero" over on Libertarian Samizdata:

People in Sarajevo would have to dash across roads to go to the markets, risking death from Cetnik snipers and artillery fire on a daily basis. But if you ever go back and look at the videos, look very carefully at the people. You will see women with clean hair, lipstick and makeup. Men wearing pressed jackets and even ties. People determined to retain their humanity as well as just survive another day.

I think Maureen Dowd does not understand, at least not yet, that if the monsters can make you live in their world of poverty and sorrow, then they have truly beaten you. That is why when I realised that Benetton was about to open a shop in Sarajevo in 1995, I wept because I realised that the nightmare was almost over at last. So Maureen, take it from me that there is nothing noble about 'sweat suits and old clothes already in the closet'. Listen to me and go to that place in New York, only a few blocks from the World Trade Centre that those evil people destroyed. Wander through the wonderful opulence of Prada's shop and gaze at the exquisite Italian style, treat yourself to a nice little black dress: then look around again and realise that you have won and they have lost.

We Are Devo -In response to an item on Libertarian Samizdata, Ginger Stampley muses on Argentina, Afghanistan and debt relief:

And then it occurs to me to ask another couple of questions: what if the loans to the developing countries are doomed anyway, as part of the "rollout costs" for infrastructure there?

The problem here is the notion that Argentina is a developing country. The opposite has been true for going on a century now. Argentina has "undeveloped", just say "devolved." A hundred years ago, Argentina was one of the richest countries in the world. It achieved independence barely three decades after the United States, it was industrialized, educated, cosmopolitan, blessed with a temperate climate and adequate resources. By the time of the Falklands War the odious junta was complaining that it was a poor third-world country being picked on by a rich first-world one. To the extent that that was true it was because folks like the junta had worked hard to make it that way. Argentina fell for every stupid ideological fad of the 20th century. It developed large and sometimes violent communist movements. In Peron it raised up the purest example of actual fascism outside of Europe. It gave in to the same temptation to Bonapartism that the rest of South America did. It served, to the sorrow of its people, as a veritable laboratory on the question of just what causes national poverty: "neocolonialism" or bad domestic politics. Bad domestic politics was decisively enough to drive Argentina from rich democracy to poor tyranny. And the journey left a legacy of political infantilism that has bedeviled the country's fitful attempts to climb back out, right up to the last week.

Revoltin' Development Dept. - I thought popunders were bad. In the last couple of weeks, Big Media sites have come up with something worse, though I'm not sure what they're called. These ads are persistent layers that are part of the webpage you want to read, and cover the content for a period of time. Some are animated, some are not. All of them are based on the principle of preventing you from doing what you want to do on the web for a period of time. (An awful lot of them lack a "close this ad" option.) Which is to say, they are less like print ads and more like radio/TV commercials.

Memo to advertisers: The first principle of sales is that people buy a product because it makes them feel good to do so. You are not making me feel good with this trick.

Obviously, web advertising is getting increasingly desperate. With popunders, the delusion was that if they can just force you to interact with the damned thing they have surely scored a victory for their clients. With - let's just call them commercials, because that's what these wait-until-it's-over persistent ads are - the idea seems to be that your endurance will wear down. Perhaps as obviously, all this is a symptom of the terminal problems with the ad-based web model. Ginger Stampley has been writing a lot lately about what she calls the end of the web free lunch.

I would argue that the web was never "free." The defining feature of the web, though, going clear back to the days of pure gift culture, is that producers have to pay for content. Consumers won't. (As always, except for pornography. And the truth is, if you're paying for pornography on the net you're just not looking hard enough.) Right now, there are two intersecting problems: the developers of broadband infrastructure can't make money at their initial prices, so costs of accessing or offering bandwidth-intensive content are increasing rather than decreasing; and a particular "producer pays" model, profiting for content provision by selling advertising, just ain't working.

You can lump most web content into gift culture, self-advertisement, outright vending or commercial media. Gift culture and self-advertisement blur into each other, as Ginger points out: Virginia Postrel and Joanne Jacobs want you to buy their books, so they undertake the cost of providing browsers with fresh, regular access to their thoughts. (This has always been true. I damn near made a particular gift culture project of my own pay off a couple of years ago, and only wish my timing had been better.) Self-advertisement and vending blur into each other too. Both amazon.com and the official Buddy and Julie Miller site want to sell you things, and both types of sites often offer goodies.

It's commercial media that takes it in the shorts from both broadband costs and the failure of the advertising model. This has its satisfactions. The class of fuzzy, bigeyed things does not include AOL Time Warner. But while Big Media has a lot to answer for - its goal has long been to make the web as much like television as possible - even it has managed to provide great social good. Having the contents of uncounted domestic and foreign newspapers and magazines a click away has been a great boon. As Virginia Postrel insisted, it has been the indispensible foundation of the blogging world. In warblogger Ken Layne's words, it means "we can factcheck your ass."

The gift culture web and the self-advertisement web and the direct-vending web are going to survive in relatively familiar form. How the commercial media web as we've come to know it is going to make it I have no idea. But I doubt that more annoying advertising techniques are the answer.

What's So Funny - Apparently, the British Association for the Advancement of Science has held a poll to determine, once and for all, the world's funniest joke. It's not bad. The LA Times has a more detailed report that includes several of the runner's-up. It also includes the top vote-getters by nationality. (Canada's is especially lame.) Since the media really does suck, neither the LA Times nor MSN tell readers even such basic information as what percentage of the vote the top joke got. The official site has that info (47%), and the "worst joke" winner too. (You've seen it before.) Other than that, it has little more detail than the LA Times story. All that is on the site is the press release that essentially is the LA Times story.

The British Association characterizes the poll as a "science experiment," but if that's true, how did they get the wrong winner. The following is the funniest joke ever:

A: Ask me "What is the secret of humor?"

B: Okay, what is th -

A: Timing!

A Modest Proposal - Should we make war on Saudi Arabia, as Ken Layne urges, or pull our troops out of what the French Ambassador to London might call "their shitty big country," as neo-isolationists have urged for years now? This morning it hit me. The President could present the case for war to the US Congress! In their capacity as the People's representatives they could decide whether the offenses rise to the level of casus belli! We could do the same sort of thing with the question of war on Iraq! In fact, why not, as a check on untrammelled executive power, say that from this day forward the power to declare war will reside exclusively with the legislative branch?

It just seems like the responsibility for deciding to attack other countries is an awful lot for one guy, somehow.

21st Century Netiquette - An exchange anent the previous exchange.

Jim: Who quotes whom on whose blog?
Ginger: You quote me, 'cos you're the warblogger. I have more to write about gun control and Argentina (2 separate posts, though) before Sunday morning, I hope.

Saudi Dearies - Years ago, I read a Pete Hammill piece in the Village Voice about a mob hit, in which he noted that all the locals had "dearies," as in, "My dearie is that his lieutenants decided it was time for the old man to go." In response to this site's most recent musings about the precise relationship among official Saudi Arabia, al Qaeda and the September massacres, Ginger Stampley writes

A hypothesis that has occurred to me about "official Saudi sanction" for
al-Qaeda is that one or more of the Saudi princes is supporting bin Laden
in the hopes that he'll get the throne when bin Laden deposes the current
Saudi regime.

Bin Laden would almost certainly be playing this ambitious prince for a
fool, but it would make sense of some of the insensible elements, wouldn't it?

Ginger makes an excellent point. Mrs. Offering, who grew up in the Aramco complex at Dharahn, would tell you that to speak of "the Saudi government" at all is to exaggerate.

I still think bin Laden makes an awfully convenient sworn enemy, seeing as how the one thing he doesn't seem to do is attack Saudi royal interests. bin Laden could be "the loyal opposition" and thesaudigovernment not have been in on 9/11 ahead of time. One's intelligence assets do wacky things sometimes. But if they're your intelligence assets, you may want to save their butts. Shame about all the dead Jew-Crusaders, but dammit, he's still the loyal opposition! Where would we find another half so suitable?

The Age of Reason - Check out MuslimPundit.

Sample Question - Once, Unqualified Offerings passed an evening in a whorehouse. Bachelor party, get the groom drunk, negotiate and yada yada yada. This was just about 20 years ago. The establishment was officially a photography studio in outer suburban Maryland. For all I know, they actually did family portraits during the day. It's essential to the story that, hard as it may be to believe, I wasn't inhaled. This was not out of moral scruples. Partly it was an image thing: as a social late bloomer I probably found "paying for it" more shameful than more sexually successful men that age. Also, having paid my share for the groom I was out of money. So what you had was a handful of awkaward young men, most of whom had met (I kid you not) through a college science fiction club, hanging around what looked like a lower-middle class living room with a handful of scantily-clad young women in front of a late-night TV movie. Occasionally, one of the women would half-heartedly solicit business by urging us, generically, "Let's go!" or "Let's party!" but not to the point of looking away from the TV while doing so.

I did fall into desultory conversation with one worker in a leopard-print sheath, and the topic turned, briefly, to the groom. "He'll be back," she said, with more amusement than malice. "That's just how men are." What I was thinking right then, taking in my surroundings, was "What's your database, lady?"

Why do I bring this up? I suspect self-parody. But the "What's your database" question just occurred to me while viewing the results of the latest Arab News poll on the question "Do you think the Osama video was doctored or faked?" Results when I voted (I voted No) were 2-1 in favor of the tape's authenticity.

So who votes in the Arab News polls? Back in early November, the site polled its readers on who they thought was behind the anthrax attacks. Only a quarter of all respondents chose "right-wing Israelies." That seemed like a gratifyingly small number given what we've read about Arab opinion, and 33% pro-fake on the tape seems gratifyingly small too. Are Americans and other non-Arab respondents skewing the results because it's an english language, internationally-available site? Probably. Too bad, too.

Almost But Not Quite - As many warbloggers have pointed out today, major news organizations have done their own translations of the bin Laden dinner party video and found things the US government left out of its official transcript. They come tantalizingly close to moving early paranoid theorizing on this very website into the eerily prescient category, but not quite:

Bin Laden's visitor, Khalid al Harbi, a Saudi dissident, claims that he was smuggled into Afghanistan by a member of Saudi Arabia's religious police.

says abcnews.com. This is still not quite smoking gun-level evidence that bin Laden is a Saudi operative rather than the Saudi rebel he claims to be, alas. Maybe the religious policeman is a traitor to the crown, or maybe the religious policeman was operating under official sanction or maybe the religious policeman was operating under official sanction while imagining that he was a traitor to the crown. The "Wilderness of Mirrors" is like that.

The newly translated tape segments are enough, in combination with other evidence, for blogger Ken Layne already:

Folks, Saudi Arabia attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. It doesn't matter whether the command came from that bloated hog King Fahd or the fanatic religious leadership he can't control. What is obvious to everyone except the Bush Administration is that our ally, Saudi Arabia, harbored, supported and created the terrorists who launched a war against the United States 100 days ago.

Forget Iran and Iraq and Somalia for now. It is time to attack and occupy Saudi Arabia, put its leaders and "clerics" on trial in military tribunals, and destroy the bin Laden terrorist network where it lives: Saudi Arabia.

This is an expansion of the war that Unqualified Offerings could almost get behind. The Saudi ruling family is at the very least an accessory after the fact. If better evidence turns up that they were more than that, yeah, bomb them back to the, uh, sand age. The Saudis have been walking right up to what we might call "The Taliban Line." We never found evidence that the native-Afghan clerics themselves were in on the planning and execution of the September massacres, but they compounded their original sin of giving our attackers a base of operations by attempting to shield them from retribution. You could make a case that the Saudi government's stonewalling on freezing al Qaeda assets and providing information on the Saudi-national hijackers since 9/11 puts them in "against us" rather than "with us" territory. At the very least, we have grounds to declare ourselves disappointed, close our bases in a huff and turn off the arms spigot.

But then, we should have done those things years ago. Why haven't we? There seem to be interlocking reasons, none of which make sense on their own. Supposedly, we're protecting Saudi Arabia from Iraq. There's nothing about the Saudi government that merits protecting, and that has been true for years. They were worth keeping around during the cold war. Since then? Phooey. They are tyrants, their laws are viciously misogynist and they require that the US continually demean itself to "protect" them - no crucifixes on Christian soldiers, no female soldiers driving, no cooperation in investigating the Khobar Towers bombing. You know the litany. Forget "we need the oil." They need our money. The chief complaint of our enemy, Iraq, is that we won't let it sell oil! Saddam Hussein hates our guts and he'd sell us oil if we let him. I realize that we just had eight years of the Clinton administration, and there may well have been no one around who understood the law of supply and demand, but one would like to think the "free market" Republican administrations bookending Bubba had a clue about it.

The Bush family seems to really like the Saud family. So there's sentiment. Otherwise, it's hard not to conclude that the government values Saudi bases not as a means to defend Saudi Arabia, but as a platform for projecting power into Iraq.

If that's how the Saudis see it, then one of the biggest difficulties with the Saudi Arabia Attacked the US hypothesis goes away. With all the circumstantial evidence tying bin Laden into the Saudi power structure, the question remains: Why? That is, what would the House of Saud hope to gain by launching a covert attack on the United States? They hate us? I'm sure they do. But why this particular mode of acting on that hate? Why not just say Get your stinking Jew-Crusader troops out of our kingdom, please? (Prince Bandar can help with the wording.) Among the possible answers, one must include It's just too straightforward for the Saudi Royal Family. But the other biggie would be that they didn't think we would go, that the forward anti-Iraq platform was so important to us that we would fight to keep it.

I'm just not sure yet. I still don't quite see that 9/11 can be seen as the sensible expression of even a hostile official Saudi policy. It's worth noting that if the US government will lie to keep up the peace with an Arab government they like (Saudi Arabia), they'll lie to push us toward war with an Arab government they don't like (Iraq). The other thing worth noting about the two countries is that, if the Saudi government does want to drive American bases out of their country, they must believe that they have an understanding with Saddam Hussein that will hold.

Babushka Nation - There's an article in the small but growing genre of FBI visitation accounts on the SFGate.com site, to which I found a link from the firebreathing paleocon lewrockwell.com. A man named Barry Reingold had been making it his business to criticize the president, the war and "the ruling class" to the folks at his health club. There's something incredibly Bay Area about that. When the FBI came calling they specifically asked him about his membership in the health club.

"And then they said someone in the gym had reported that I had been talking about terrorism and Sept. 11, oil profits, capitalism and Afghanistan," Reingold said. "And I said, 'Oh, really.'"

The FBI helpfully informed Mr. Reingold that "you have the right to freedom of speech," though you'd think that's the sort of information that voicemail would suffice for, and Mr. Reingold informed the FBI that he knew that, was not interested in the fact that they had to write a report and that he was done with the conversation. He shut his door and the FBI went away.

The purpose of repeating the story is not to cry that Night Has Fallen (it hasn't) or to suggest that Reingold must be something of a jerk to pester the folks at his health club like that. (He probably is, but I like the way he handled the FBI.) The purpose of repeating the story is to suggest a little bit about How Night Does Fall when it gets around to falling and just what the scope of the darkness can be. The problem here is less the FBI than the patrons at the health club. Not just the US but the world is full of busybodies, sneaks and jerks, one of which you have to be to call in the feds on some random crank whose views you don't cotton to. Actual tyrannies depend on just such people - the block warden in Sandinista Nicaragua, the babushka on each floor of the Soviet hotel, the jealous business competitor in Phoenix-era South Vietnam, the nation of informers that was East Germany.

Many years ago I recall an article (almost certainly in the Washington Post) on reconstruction attempts in Uganda after the fall of Idi Amin. The task was the more enormous for the complicity of so much of Uganda's population in Amin's repression. Don't like your neighbor? Your ex-boyfriend? Your employer? In a land of real midnight knocks on the door you have an easy way to get rid of them. It happened a lot in Uganda, despite, indeed because of, everyone knowing the certain fate of the people they accused.

In Reingold's case, the FBI seem to havemore commitment to his rights than at least one person at his health club did. In a relatively free society at peace, these sorts of people have to satisfy themselves driving 55 in the left lane of the Interstate or reporting their neighbors to the county for not having their pet licenses current. As society gets less free and/or less peaceful, they get more bothersome. At some point they become an actual menace. It's another reason to keep wars and security measures both as short and as focused as possible.

Speaking of Alan Bock - Much of his column this week would bug the crap out of your more zealous warbloggers. For instance, "Therefore, I operate on the assumption that the main purpose of the current conflict (I still dislike calling it a war despite the de facto truth so long as Congress doesn't have the gumption to do the constitutional thing and declare war) is to expand and perpetuate the power of the permanent government, the ruling class, the people who think ordinary human beings are an unruly lot that need a whole lot of supervision and imposed discipline – and they're just the folks to handle the job." But anent your more zealous warbloggers, this passage is of interest:

Bush administration officials are said to have been annoyed at criticism from the Standard and New Republic crowds that they weren't being aggressive or decisive enough in the early stages of the Afghan conflict, waging only a sissy bombing war. Serendipitously enough, harsh editorials and articles from both magazines hit print the day Mazar-e-Sharif fell to the Northern Alliance and the Taliban (apparently) began to come apart.

Over the last couple of weeks, various me-zines have had great sport exhuming defeatist predictions from left wing doves. But the defeatist predictions of neocon hawks have been allowed to rest quietly, e.g. the famous twin columns o' doom that Charles Krauthammer and William Kristol published in the Washington Post on October 30th. (Krauthammer's column began, "The war is not going well." Couldn't find a link to Kristol's, alas, but I distinctly recall that he used the 'q' word.)

So do I believe that crap about how the war's purpose is "to expand...the power of the ruling class?" Answer: Ask me in two years; or say: by their fruits ye shall know them. Unqualified Offerings has been clear that the war that we have been fighting, against the men and organizations that attacked the United States and the government that provided their platform, is justified and prudent. I'm all for tour stops in the other shitholes where al Qaeda hangs out, so long as the focus remains on destroying our actual attackers. There is a cadre of neoconservatives and neoliberals who want to recklessly expand the enemies list, fight wars for allegedly prophylactic reasons, and make it the country's open-ended mission to remake other countries to our liking. Some of them even frankly acknowledge that this is imperialism, they just argue that imperialism is a good thing. And too many of them plainly consider war a tonic for what (they think) ails the culture. Out with "decadence" and in with "national greatness."

If we destroy our attackers and come home, Bock is wrong, or anyway, those about whom Bock is right did not prevail. (I don't doubt that Bock is right about some of them.) If we refuse to admit to victory, if we keep hopping from country to country, if the language of the indictments against our successive targets grows ever more vague, if every political season brings some new domestic security measure without which the country can't survive, then Bock is right.

What a Wonderful World This Would Be - Meant to recommend Alan Bock's column of last week, in which he muses on the prospects for "nation-building" in Afghanistan and, by extension, elsewhere. His modest proposal: the federal model, a la Switzerland today and the US in earlier times. However, he writes:

The main reason such a scenario is unlikely, however – unless the Afghans figure it out for themselves and kick the international observers out – is that the kind of people likely to be involved in peacekeeping or nation-building efforts on a professional basis find the idea of decentralism and localism not just somewhat backward and old-fashioned – a model we have moved beyond – but almost literally incomprehensible. Those who have moved into positions of authority in nation-states and international organizations are almost all relentless centralizers who believe that the key to civilized life is the kind of large-scale bureaucratic institutions they happen to inhabit.

I think it is safe to say, for example, that the average Eurocrat doesn't see himself as I see him – as part of a parasitic growth on a society that developed enough prosperity through centuries of relatively decentralized political rule enhanced by relatively free trade that it could tolerate some parasites without dying. They don't see large central bureaucracies as a luxury good always threatening to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Instead, they see the institutions they control as the real drivers and engines of prosperity and civilized behavior. Almost every institution of higher education in putatively civilized countries reinforces this misconception.

Rational Altruism Watch - The indispensible Instapundit.com recently inaugurated a campaign to help blogger.com pay its bandwidth bills. Many bloggers keep their sites as third-level domains of Blogger's blogspot.com. blogspot will host a site for free, with a banner ad on the top of your page, or for $12/year with no ad. $12/year is damned cheap for hosting - all you do is click a little link in the banner that reads "Get rid of this ad" and it's off to Paypal. Instapundit reader Ken Booth suggested

It might be worth mentioning to your readers that it's not necessary to be a Blogger user to help. Simply clicking on "get rid of this ad" on a Blog*spot site will bring anyone to the payment form.

Even if you host elsewhere than blogspot, as I do and those Houston bloggers do, if you take advantage of the convenience of Blogger you have an interest in Blogger's financial viability. I just played Secret Santa to a blogspot blog that was kind enough to cite an Offering of last week. (Even though the fellow is a...liberal.) If you find yourself reading a blogspot blog that you like, and you see a banner ad, hey, pay the twelve bucks. It's Christmas.

Killer Bs - A couple of excellent posts on Ginger Stampley's site about broadband, bandwidth bills, blogging and bankruptcy. The second one is here. Scroll down to get the other. She makes two essential points, the first for her fellow bloggers:

But I am ready for the day blog charity goes away, whether it's over bandwidth and server costs or something else. Are you?

The second is more in the line of a bid for eerie prescience:

This is at least part of what killed the Enron-Blockbuster broadband deal, and one of the reasons why Enron's broadband division tanked so hard. Broadband is still in its rollout phase, and it will take some time until the cost of the rollout is amortized, either directly or indirectly through barnkruptcies.

A few weeks ago, Ginger was musing on the possibility that broadband will be like the railroads, and that the companies that actually build the infrastructure will not outlast the effort. It will be successors to the original firms and investors that actually make money on the deal. That saddens my Inner Telecom Employee because it means I end up having to look for work. But my inner political economist is not unduly bothered. Even if all the original investments crap out, they will have resulted in a robust communication network, which is a great social good.

But Try Telling That to an Angry Mob - Fun fact: an MSN auto search on the string "Robert Fisk angry mob" brings up "about 467" entries. (It's the header that says "about" - what, it doesn't know?) A search just on "angry mob" as a phrasal unit finds "about 12,458." However, "happy mob" comes up only 83 times, and "pensive mob" not at all. Obvious conclusion? Federal subsidies for pensive mob formation!

There's Good and Bad in Everyone Department - Cartoonist/Writer Ted Rall has become the official mascot of the Idiot Pinkos Lodge lately, and not without reason! But I've read two of his pieces of on-the-scene recording from Afghanistan, and they are good, vivid accounts journalism. And as this piece shows, he's smarter than Robert Fisk, or at least more careful.

What's In a Name? Ms. Postrel noted that the domain is highclearing.com and the name of the blog is "Unqualified Offerings." She asked why the domain wasn't unqualifiedofferings.com or the name of the blog, "High Clearing," so things would match up, and furthermore, what is a High Clearing anyway. Answers:

If you start saying "high clearing" as an anglo saxon sometime before the turn of the first millenium and keep saying it long enough, it ends up sounding like "Henley" ("heah leah," is more or less the romanized spelling, as I recall it.) Until very recent times, any name once meant something intelligible somewhere. If they tell you "It's a place name," as often happens with the name "Henley," all they're doing is begging a follow-up question, which is, How did the place get that name? (The best site I ever found on the web for such inquiries was Arrow Publishing's "What's in a Name?" site. It's gone, and my attempt to bring it up as a Google cache page failed. Sorry.) A couple of years ago I decided to register a domain for the sake of a permanent e-mail address. "henley.com" was taken. Cool options like tlon.org were taken. "highclearing.com" was not. "supplanter@highclearing.com" is just jim@henley.com after a trip to the reference section.

I had no blog or even the thought of one, nor even a personal homepage. The domain has housed only hobby sites (for various roleplaying games) in subfolders until October. When the blog bug bit, thanks especially to the example of instapundit.com, whose reward for the inspiration has been a steady stream of snarky items here, I finally had a use for the root domain. "High Clearing" sounded a bit, well, lofty for a blog name, not to mention obscure. And people might think I had "Catskill Eagle complex" or something. I chose Unqualified Offerings for the value of the pun on "unqualified." Unlike my betters - Postrel, Kaus, Sullivan, Reynolds - I didn't go to the bother of actually building a solid body of work before beginning to mouth off on the internet.

At some point when the Offering family is flush I may buy a more appropriate domain name and point it here. That way all preexisting links continue to work. For now, here we are.

Burtonville - Virginia Postrel got lots of good mail about Virginia Lee Burton's books and posted it here. Very much worth your time.

Who Am I? What Am I Doing Here? It was the irony that drew me in. Roaming the Montgomery County Fairgrounds that August (it must have been 1994), I spotted the odd conjunction and laughed out loud - side by side, the booths for the US Postal Service and the Libertarian Party. I felt sort of libertarian before that moment, though I had been an enthusiastic "New Democrat" only two years before. I'd been reading the New Republic for ten years and even sold them a single, entirely inconsequential article. (Which they edited the shit out of; talk about your house style!) I was big on Mickey Kaus's workfare ideas. Now, I had started reading Reason at some point. (For that matter, I read The New Criterion. Until they ran Bruce Bawer out it was a must-read.) And the truth was, the bloom was off my New Democratic rose. The Clinton administration's cabinet and sub-cabinet (yes, I followed that stuff) had too many paleoliberals in it for a TNR type to feel altogether comfortable. It seemed like there just weren't enough neoliberals to fill the ranks of a Democratic administration. There was Waco and, even less conscionably, the administration's apologetics for Waco. (To their credit, those statists at TNR denounced the government's conduct at Mount Carmel early and often.) The health plan was a spectacularly misguided congeries of perverse incentives, another S&L crisis waiting to happen. As for my flirtation with Kausism, life happened. I spent some years managing a bookstore in the District of Columbia and realized that DC constituted a laboratory experiment in the value of makework municipal jobs - the DC civil service has traditionally been less a means of administering government programs than a government program in itself.

In after years, I would jokingly refer to myself as a "Clinton libertarian." In August 1994, I had either not completed my "conversion" or not realized that I had when I struck up a conversation with the fellows in the booth. They were, of course, geeky white men anxious enough around other people to make many other people uncomfortable. Not unlike myself when you come right down to it. They of course had me take "The World's Shortest Political Quiz," which I would in after years learn to call a push poll. But that encounter marked the dividing line between my life as a proto-libertarian and a libertarian proper. I cast my first LP votes in 1996 and have done so since whenever I had the chance. During my years as an at-home dad, I even took a turn in the booth each summer, pushing the Quiz on other people (the dicey question was always the one about farm subsidies - this was an agricultural fair, after all), offering stickers to the kids, trying to have a rational discussion with the occasional Randite pulling duty on my shift. ("Reality exists, and we haven't got a clue.")

Being a libertarian in Montgomery County, Maryland is like being a rabbi in Iraq. Montgomery County's idea of a Republican is Connie Morella, who loves federal spending fine, and federal spending on federal employees better yet. And while Republicans are not Democrats, they are by no means, most of them, libertarians.

Virginia Postrel wrote, anent the LP's thirtieth anniversary press release, "As a small-l libertarian who occasionally votes Libertarian, I'd rather the party just go away. As satisfying as it may be to cast a protest vote, they're bad for the cause." It's hard to gainsay her. The recent two-time Presidential nominee has mired the Party in scandal. The scandal distracts from his real accomplishment, which is to drive the LP's presidential vote total down into Howard Phillips territory. The Party continues to distribute pamphlets that time has falsified: "America's New Party" (not anymore guys); "America's Largest Third Party" (um, you mean, third-largest third party); "The Libertarian Party is the only party founded on principle" (nonsense - the Democrats have a principle: "You need us to save you from your own worst instincts"; the Greens have a principle: "Die, human scum!"; just because a party doesn't want to say their principle aloud doesn't mean they don't have one, and having a principle is not in itself praiseworthy, though they have trouble agreeing in Marin County). As Postrel points out, its desperate preemptive embrace of any celebrity who even flirts with the l-word is embarrassing, even Clintonian. Our local party had its own problems. The County party put all its energy into state ballot-access petitions. We had national pamphlets whose level of discourse made Jack Chick seem like CS Lewis in comparison. We had nothing specific to Montgomery County. Other than ballot access petitions, we had nothing specific to Maryland either.

I remember, the winter Governor Parris Glendenning - motto: "Why do you think we call it the Free State of Maryland?" - announced his brilliant plan to give millionaire Art Modell free use of a big expensive stadium that the Governor, the Stadium Authority, and those nice construction magnates with all the campaign contribution money would build in Baltimore. Montgomery County hated the idea - it was money that could be spent on "the children" was what they said aloud, and it was more Montgomery County tax money flowing to Baltimore was what they kept to themselves. We ought to make noise against this stadium deal, I suggested to a local candidate while pulling a primary pollwatch shift. That would be a waste of time, he responded: Everybody in Montgomery County is against the stadium, even the Democrats.

Well then! We wouldn't want to be on the popular side of an issue and risk picking up supporters! Or taking the opportunity to make what the Democrats couldn't, a principled case against such boondoggles. (Once you accept that government has a limitless portfolio to make people happy, as contemporary liberals do, everything else is just haggling over details.) The Libertarian Party sucks on the national level and sucks on the local level too. Heck, I suck too. It's not like I threw myself into forging the local LP into the sword of freedom or anything. I did some shifts at the booth, read my magazines, and voted. Heck, I never even formally joined the Party. (Wasn't going to sign "the Pledge.") Ten years ago, Alan Ehrenhalt argued that liberals have an innate advantage over conservatives in the political sphere because, since liberals really believe in government, government tends to draw the most talented liberals. Since conservatives don't believe in government, the most talented conservatives tend to go into business. Ehrenhalt claimed that the talent gap explained why Americans, on balance, elected politicians more liberal than themselves. You only have to watch the House Republican leadership attempt to parry the Democratic spin of the day to realize Ehrenhalt was absolutely right. What is true for conservatives is vastly more true for libertarians.

And yet. I can't quite join Postrel in wishing the LP would just go away, if "go away" means, leave so libertarians can work with and within the two major parties. A belief in the rightness and necessity of the expansive State is all that unites the disparate factions of the Democratic Party; it's what unites Al Sharpton and Martin Peretz. The Republican Party is crueler: Republicans mouth "small government" arguments against programs they don't like, as if arguing from principle, then turn around and argue for government action to secure their own ends, whether "moral renewal" or "national greatness." It's hard to argue that Ehrenhalt's ambition principle doesn't apply even within the Republican Party itself, which bodes ill for any libertarian "revolution from within." Postrel herself argued convincingly in 1996 that there was no good reason for a libertarian to prefer Dole over Clinton. She convinced me, anyway.

On the other hand, if Postrel means that libertarians should set up shop in the market of ideas outside any formal party structure, I'm more inclined to agree with her. I vote LP because I don't want to waste my vote on parties that are guaranteed not to move the country in the direction I'd like to go - those would be the Republican and Democratic Parties - but I increasingly sympathize with the bumper sticker that says, "Don't vote. You'll only encourage them." More importantly, voting is something the citizen does at most once a year. The rest of the year has to be proportionately more important to one's life, even to one's political life, than election day. Let a hundred flowers blog!

Stasism and Dynamism, a Parable - My mother developed postoperative diabetes some years ago, which meant the doctors wanted to know a lot about family medical history, which meant mom quizzing my grandmother, who was alive then, at great length. One afternoon my grandmother's frustration got the better of her. We were in the car, discussing all of this, and she said, "Jim, how would I know what people in our family had what? Back then people didn't take all these tests for things. They just died."

She didn't say it like it was a good thing.

The Blog Ate My Homework - Yesterday was, unless I misremember, the first day Unqualified Offerings has gone without an update since its inception. Blogger was down from midafternoon on, which was a drag, since, among other things, I promised Virginia Postrel days ago that I would investigate the matter of Virginia Lee Burton's The Little House, among other things. Actually, some of the ideas kicking around Unqualified Offering HQ amount to a Virginia Postrel Tribute Blog - albeit a "libertarian-style" tribute involving a certain amount of disagreement. I owe the woman for being the first person who doesn't actually know me personally to link to this site. Oh, and there's the matter of the huge intellectual debt too, but never mind.

Having bought and reread The Little House for the first time in about 15 years, I've hit a snag: the book is just not as good as Mike Mulligan. The problem is protagonism, or the lack thereof. Unlike Mike, the Little House striveth not. It just sits there. I mean hey, it's a house, right? Burton endows it with consciousness and a certain limited intellect, but not with legs or wheels. Things don't even exactly happen to the Little House for much of the book so much as things happen around it. In the beginning, its builder utters an oath. ("This little house shall never be sold for gold or silver and she will live to see our great-great-grandchildren's great-great-grandchildren living in her.") In the end, his great-great-granddaughter chances upon the house and effects the famous rescue.

At the very least, The Little House feels more static than Mike Mulligan, and it feels less slyly dynamist too. Was it the War or just three more years of life that led her to produce a more purely nostalgic book than Mike. It's tempting for a dynamist-symp like me to conclude that the book is less dynamic because it is less dynamist. But that would be unwarranted. The stasist John Henry legend has protagonism and tragic greatness in spades.

The art is great, Bonnard as a precocious nine-year-old. (A thumbnail bio of Burton says she always drew her books before she wrote them.) And flipping through the book tonight I see hints of elements complicating the apparently unalloyed pastoralism. I should probably reset my mind, accept that Little House is eclogue rather than epic, and come back to it another time. I should probably read it to Offering Boy a few dozen times first also.

Worth noting since the whole dynamist.com investigation into Burtoniana began with a feminist complaint about gender roles in Mike Mulligan: The passive, four-walled title character of The Little House is a she. But then, her rescuer, the builder's great-granddaughter, is a she too.

A Bid for Eerie Prescience by International News (Pakistan) columnist Kamran Shafi, in his column dated December 8. (And what a self-involved American Unqualified Offerings is - the Afghan War winds down a little and suddenly it goes two weeks at a time without checking up on the Pakistani press!):

And, King Zahir Shah was absolutely right when he suggested the name of Abdul Sattar Seerat, an Uzbek, as the caretaker leader of Afghanistan. What clout will Hamid Karzai have, when the ministries of Defence, Interior and Foreign Affairs are with the Northern Alliance? Specially when 'Field Marshal' Rashid Dostum (who likes to make mincemeat of his enemies by tying them to tank tracks and then driving the tank around town) is in an almighty sulk already? If the Americans do not put in a well-armed and powerful peacekeeping force immediately, this Bonn dispensation will fall flat on its face inside of two months.

Unqualified Offerings is a big Kamran Shafi fan, even though he is a, a, well... a statist. Maybe he'll be the first outsider to adopt UO's "The Northern Opponents" tagline.

Signs and Portents - Unqualified Offerings is having its first-ever blogger.com hiccups. Lost one post tonight that was basically a shoutout to the privacy-obsessed "Charles Dodgson" of the Through the Looking Glass blog - thanking him for citing a recent UO rant about many issues surrounding the matter of John Walker, quoting a fine Looking Glass item pointing out that another malign effect of the Patriot Act is to drown law enforcement in more information than it can usefully analyze when it didn't have the resources or wit to follow up on the information available to it under previous law, and gently chiding him for declaring Patrick Buchanan's recent article that "blames America for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor" as self-evidently absurd, when it is not, depending on how you define "blame" and "America." (If "America" != "The Roosevelt Administration" then Buchanan doesn't even blame it.)

Unqualified Offerings lacks the resolve to reconstitute the eaten post, so: Welcome, Charles Dodgson! Read Through the Looking Glass! and Bad Blogger, no biscuit!

William Repsher Finds a 9/11 Song He Likes - The NYPress.com writer has savaged Dan Bern's and Neil Young's 9/11 songs, with considerable justice in the former case and less, I think, in the latter. Now he points up, and praises, "The Gates of Hell," by Seanchai and the Unity Squad. The bandleader is Chris Byrne, ex of the band Black 47 and the NYPD. This archive has both Repsher's Seanchai and Young pieces, while his Dan Bern attack is here.

"Gates of Hell," which mostly narrates a policeman's funeral, is strongly celtic-flavored. I like it somewhat less than Repsher does, and I like Young somewhat more than he. FWIW...

The Healing Process - Unqualified Offerings opposes, somewhat abashedly, the death penalty, largely on the grounds that it's one more government program and it works about as well as you'd expect. It's noteworthy too that, whenever some truly heinous crime happens, you hear people say things like "Hanging's too good for him."

If ever there was a him for whom hanging is too good, it's got to be Osama bin Laden. According to the latest refresh of CNN.com, we still haven't captured him yet. The question is, what to do with him if the US takes him alive. It should be something proportional to the offense, it should offer that much-desired condition, "closure," and if possible it should "unite us rather than divide us," in the words of Dubya's predecessor. Here is my humble proposal:

Gauntlet Across America. Like Hands Across America, but without the embarrassing gaps in the lines.

Take the Truth Where You Find It Dept. - The leftie San Francisco Bay Guardian reminds its readers that it didn't start with Ashcroft:

As we snoozed through the Clinton era, our lovable, sax-playing president was busy deep-sixing legal protections – often in the name of combating terrorism. He presided over a massive expansion of federal phone-tapping powers. Signing the 1996 Counter-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, our buddy Bill laid the groundwork for Ashcroft's schemes, eviscerating habeas corpus, one of the cornerstones of our judicial system, curtailing due process for immigrants, and creating special courts to try terrorists with secret evidence. Sound familiar? And under Clinton, reinvigorated Red Squads apparently spied on the anticorporate protesters who rocked the Seattle WTO conference.

Author A.C. Thompson thoroughly documents how "working for the clampdown," to quote a famous band of the 80s, has been a thoroughly bipartisan enterprise. I disagree only mildly with his concluding claim:

And it would've been just the same with Al Gore at the wheel.

Me, I believe it would have been even worse.

Best From This Week's Onion is one of the "Man on the Street" items, on violence in the middle east, by "Allison Flowers
Graduate Student":

"Hey, if I were denied a heavily disputed piece of land, I'd blow up innocent civilians with a crude bomb strapped around my midsection, too. No, wait, I wouldn't. That's fucking insane."

Headline of the Day is from MSNBC.com, "Bin Laden cave reported captured" Haven't read far enough to determine if the cave was trying to cross over the Pakistani border in disguise yet.

Help! I'm Trapped in Telecom Hell! - Spent the evening trying to make our enterprise billing system produce, you know, bills. Turns out the vendor reps who installed new software on our new servers earlier this week missed installing an essential DLL file. The days of after-hours support are over for this kind of vendor, so I get to go home, but lost a perfectly good blogging, gaming, actually seeing my family evening in the course of events. To bad too, since Offering Boy insisted over the phone tonight that he "already knows how to dribble a basketball," which is a lie, and the Washington Post's article on Red Thomas and his famous e-mail is perfect fodder for a The Media Really Does Suck piece. The thing almost writes itself, but only almost. To those who popped over from Virginia Postrel's site, a) Thank you, and b) Unqualified Offerings is not one of those lackadaisical bloggers normally. It has managed to offer fresh - well, new - content daily since its inception in late October. The management invites everyone to check out the archives, and come back soon. Visit the fine sites linked to the left. This weekend, the awaited-for-maybe-a-couple-of-days-or-so take on Virginia Lee Burton's The Little House.

Libertarian Tips for Living! - Since many people consider telemarketers a scourge of the "free market," any libertarian program that wants to gain acceptance has to offer a voluntary, non-regulatory solution to them. (The Second Amendment presents tantalizing possibilities, but let's face it, you don't really know where to find these people, and apparently many of them are already in prison, and thus heavily guarded.)

For Offering Boy's first three years, Unqualified Offerings was that bete noire of Norman Podhoretz, an at-home dad, and had many, many occasions to consider the telemarketing problem. Slamming the phone down can't be but a momentary annoyance for them, and many are hooked to autodialers anyway, so it's just on to the next victim. (People assume autodialers feed a steady stream of prospects to the operator, but in UP's experience they are actually programmed to ring just after a balky child has finally fallen asleep for his afternoon nap.) Mrs. Offering prefers the dignified "Please take us off your list, goodbye," but there's no revenge value in that approach. You have to annoy them. There are the occasional unique opportunities: One man called from a fencing company saying, "We're offering people free literature today." "Excellent!" I responded. "I've been trying to find a copy of Jorge Luis Borges' Book of Imaginary Beings!" But such setups are rare.

What I settled on: As soon as you have identified the call as a telemarketer, interrupt their pitch, politely. Say, "I'm sorry, can you excuse me just a minute?" I've never had anyone say no. Set the phone down, leaving the line open, and go back to doing what you were doing.

You now have two options. After a minute or two, the operator realizes you aren't coming back and hangs up. You have annoyed them and wasted their time. That is, you have repaid them in their very own coin. Some (in this very household!) already consider this an excessive and petty reaction. But you can make it even moreso! If you're feeling particularly vindictive, and you time it right, you can pick the phone up again before the telemarketer hangs up.

"Hello?" you say. The telemarketer relaunches the script. Now:

"I'm sorry. Can you hang on one more minute?"

The dedicated practitioner can get at least two restarts out of the proper victim. And if just ten percent of the US did this, what a wonderful country this would be.

Mike Mulligan and the Future - Virginia Postrel brings up Mike Mulligan on her site today, inspired by an article in which a feminist critic complains about gender roles straight out of "the 50s." The book was written in 1939. The author must have figured, assuming she knows history goes back that far, that Eleanor Roosevelt would never have permitted such a book to be published. Anyway, Postrel poses an Exercise for her Readers: Is Mike Mulligan, in Postrelian terms, a dynamist or a stasist?

I am down with Postrel's stasist/dynamist dichotomy, and even agree with her that it is tantamount to a life/death dichotomy. And my remarks on Clintonism vs. Compassionate Conservatism owe a great deal to her concept of the "lethal center." That understates, they are little more than a restatement of her original conception.

Back to Mike Mulligan. The Offering Household's relation to her work is by no means theoretical. The Elder Offerings have read Mike - aloud - dozens of times in the last year or so. We have not done The Little House yet, but it is of a piece with Mike Mulligan.

I have no trouble classing Mike as a stasist, at least for most of the book. But in the end (for the benefit of our many loyal reader who has NOT recently been reading Mike out loud dozens of times), Mike and the steam shovel both assimilate into the, ahem, new order. They even get to stay together, in somewhat changed circumstances.

To me the more interesting question is whether author Virginia Lee Burton is a dynamist or a stasist, because I discovered that the more time I spent thinking about Mike Mulligan the book, the more I realized that Burton treats the very question Postrel poses with great sophistication - were her book longer and lacking pictures, we'd call her a novelist of ideas. There is a very real par