Two Writers, One Column - Alan Bock has a column on Bush's State of the Union address and so does William Kristol. In some ways, they might almost be the same column, as they both interpret the speech in a substantially similar way. Only difference is that Bock is appalled while Kristol fairly quivers with joy.

What She Really Thinks about the Saudis, the Rockefellers, Justin Raimondo's column and more. Ginger Stampley on crony capitalism and foreign policy.

Wouldn't That Be a Wonderful World Dept. - A nice fellow from avant-go.com writes in regard to the recent spider infestation

thousands of handheld users may be subscribing to your site through us

Market Solutions to Market Problems Dept. - After Unqualified Offerings complained about MSN search behavior, Air Force Virginia (aka PendingPundit!) comes through again with practical suggestions:

After reading "Something Else Sucks Too" I wondered if you knew about the Google toolbar for Internet Exploiter.
http://toolbar.google.com/

I did not know about the Google toolbar. Sounds pretty cool. She then goes on to evangelize, briefly, for Mozilla. Here, an admission of bias. Though you'd never guess it from this page, Unqualified Offerings has done enough web design to despize Netscape 4.x, which was too busy adding "Shop" buttons to the toolbar to bother complying with HTML 4.0 and CSS2, at a time when Internet Explorer offered pretty complete compliance with both. During the time it was designing the Amberway II site, an IE browser monopoly just could not arrive fast enough for Unqualified Offerings' liking.

It is just barely possible that others may feel differently.

Let's You And Him - Oh - After weeks of covering the Justin Raimondo beat, suddenly Unqualified Offerings discovers that it is the Justin Raimondo beat. See "Crony Capitalism and War" if you're not a regular antiwar.com reader. No time for a response today (it was Unqualified Offerings' gaming night), but see the archives for the piece Raimondo references, "Aim at the Target, Please." Consider reading "The Vodalus Approach too, if you are of a mind.

Priorities in Order - I loved Glenn Reynolds piece tonight about missing the State of the Union address to read a Harry Potter book to his daughter:

Patrick Ruffini says it was strong and appropriately war-focused; the New York Times quickie is less sympathetic, but basically says the same thing. I'll read the transcript and check the highlights later -- but we get SOU addresses every year, while very soon my daughter will be reading those books all by herself.

For the record, tonight was my poetry night, so I missed it too, but I never watch them. There's always something more worthwhile.

Something Else Sucks Too - Unqualified Offerings is sometimes too lazy to Google, and contents itself with typing "go [keywords]" in Internet Explorer's File-->Open... dialog. You get internet casino popunders doing that but, it's fast. But their feature that sometimes takes you right to the "obvious" page is a very mixed blessing. Sure, if I type "go espn" I'm happy to go to - ESPN. But I just typed

go "Exile on Main Street"

and was taken straight to the webpage of a record store in Vermont, with no choice in the matter. Hurm.

The General Decline in Standards - More was baleful about the AFC playoffs Sunday than the Steelers' special teams play and run-blocking. Unqualified Offerings loves and respects Sheryl Crow. She is, like most celebrities, a political idiot, especially in interviews. Put a guitar in her hand, though, and she's one of the best social critics going, and Globe Sessions was the best Rolling Stones album since Exile on Main Street.

[Oh wait! I can't finish this item right now! I was searching in another browser window for a good Sheryl Crow link and a popunder ad appeared for an online casino so of course I'm going to click it right away. Back later!]

[Later.]

Oh by the way: The official Sheryl Crow site sucks. But Unqualified Offerings is rapidly losing the thread here. UO loves Sheryl Crow. Indeed, maybe only Offering Boy loves her more. UO hates lip-synching halftime extravaganzas. So it really hurts that she was obviously lip-synching the new song she premiered at halftime.

Advantage: Unqualified Offerings! - From the much-cited WaPo article on alienation in hyperstatist Arab countries, published Friday:

Similar woes afflict millions of young people in the Middle East and North Africa, where unemployment averages 15 percent -- in Algeria, it is close to 30 percent -- and is particularly prevalent among the relatively well-educated. Their plight was a matter of no great interest in the West before Sept. 11, but it is stirring anxiety now, especially since some of the men identified as carrying out the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were educated -- notably their apparent ringleader Mohamed Atta, a 33-year-old Egyptian with an engineering degree.

Economic questions about the Middle East and North Africa suddenly loom large: Why has the region reaped such paltry rewards from globalization? And why aren't the United States, its rich allies and international lenders doing more to help these countries succeed economically?

Egypt's experience illustrates some of the answers. As in most other Arab countries (Lebanon being an exception), an authoritarian regime has for decades maintained a heavily state-managed economy that discouraged private investment, entrepreneurship and dynamism of the sort that has powered growth in other developing countries.

From Unqualified Offerings, published Friday two months ago:

Can [Courtland] Milloy name any evidence whatsoever that education prevents war? Education is a fine thing, but we have a lot of it in the US, and Milloy clearly thinks we're too warlike for our own good. bin Laden went to Oxford, his top lieutenant is a doctor, pre-Desert Storm Iraq may have been the most "educated" country in the Arab world - after Lebanon, and boy did all that education do them a lot of good. Germany, my ninth grade english teacher thrilled to repeat every few days, had the highest number of PhDs in the world before World War II. Now educate 125 million children and leave them locked in the sort of statist kleptocracies that can't productively use and reward their minds, and the resulting alienation will give you all the wars you can handle. Viz. Mohamed Atta.

The Moral? Read Unqualified Offerings every day, of course...

Dubious Sources - Scott Ritter doesn't think much of the Iraqi National Congress as a source, based on his experiences on the UN inspection team in the 90s:

For example, there was the "engineer" who allegedly worked on Saddam Hussein's palaces who spoke of a network of underground tunnels where crates of documents were allegedly hidden during inspections. Inspectors did find a drainage tunnel. However, despite the fact that no documents were discovered, Chalabi took the tunnel's existence as confirmation that documents also existed, and spoke as if they were an established fact.

It's not that Ritter's reading of Iraq is more authoritative than the Wolfowitz-Perle-Woolsey triad he sideswipes in his column. But it isn't less so. And he notes,

At this very moment, US intelligence personnel are poring over documents, uncovering the depth of the anti-American plotting of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network.
Al Qaeda prisoners are being interrogated in an effort to unlock past secrets and interdict future threats to the United States and the world. As this investigation proceeds, the web of terrorist networks forged by Mr. bin Laden in his struggle against the West is becoming clear.

Some of the exposed links are not surprising - including Iran, Somalia, Sudan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. Notably absent is Iraq. Given the spate of post-Sept. 11 media reports linking Iraq with bin Laden, one would expect a flood of evidence coming from Afghanistan confirming such a relationship.

Of course, Ritter is fighting the last war here. Iraq hawks have never changed their goal - war with Iraq - but they have changed their reasons. It's no longer because of what he did but for the sake of what he might do, they say.

Huzzah! - Best bit from Doug Casey's current WorldNetDaily column:

Once airport security is federalized, the airports will resemble the local DMV, with employees who are overpaid, sloppy, slow, hostile, dimwitted and impossible to fire. But, to look at the bright side, at least they'll be armed.

The House of Whom? - A reader writes (it's Mrs. Offering, actually)

I haven't read Justin Raimondo's piece about the Rockefellers and Saudi Aramco, but you are aware that Aramco is the company Dad worked for; and it's now _Saudi_ Aramco because the Saudi gov't bought out the American shareholders in the mid-70s. Which is not to say that the Rockefellers couldn't own a piece of Aramco, but since the entire idea behind the original treaty was for the government eventually to exploit the country's natural resource (starting in 1975, I think it was), not outsiders, it does beg questions about the state of the House of Saud's finances if the Rockefellers are heavily involved. Or is Raimondo saying that the House of Saud is really Jay Rockefeller in a kafiyah and thobe? I guess I should read the article.

Unqualified Offerings was indeed wondering about just that Saudi Aramco thing when first reading Raimondo's column, but it was ancillary to the main point.

Hm. Saudi Aramco is owned by "the Saudi government," which is to say, lots of little princes. Abdallah announces in 1998 that he wants to open it up to competition, which is to say, make things rough for hundreds of trust fund babies in the kingdom. Someone might have to earn a living! Might some of those princes decide to play footsie with, oh, al Qaeda?

(Answer: Beats me.)

Blotto is not dead! The folks who gave you "I Wanna Be a Lifeguard" and "My Baby's the Star of a Driver's Ed Movie" have, as don't we all, a website.

But that's not what I wanted to talk about.

I want to talk about something that is blotto, at least in the wasteland that is "alternative" radio: "girl singers." (viz. Blotto, "We Are the Nowtones.") Post-grunge "alternative" rock is all nu-metal and rap-metal, and it eventually came to me that I never, ever hear female artists any more on the local, self-described, modern rock station. (The sole exception: poseur Gwen Stefani's duet with Moby on "South Side," admittedly the most compelling radio song all last year.) They just can't scream loud enough, I guess. I can't recall such a complete absence of women from the rock airwaves in my life.

Delicious Turn of Phrase Award goes today to Natalie Solent, of the cleverly-titled Natalie Solent blog, about Aboriginal-Australian websites linked by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation:

...there was nothing I would confidently describe as crappy about the actual aboriginal material, although much of it had the laboured, wheezy tone of a culture being muffled by subsidy.

The Plot Thickens - 27 users supposedly logged into the website right now and every single one of them with a third-level address from avantgo.com. Every single one of them showing dynamist.com/scene.html as a referrer. Which would suggest that Virginia Postrel's and my sudden popularity is among robots only, or that dynamist.com is suffering a denial of service attack and I'm getting spillover. Problem with the robot theory: I've never seen that many spiders from the same company at once, even a net company like avant-go. Problem with the denial-of-service theory: It ain't working - at least, I can open the Scene page with no trouble. Third theory: Someone is actually attacking avantgo.com. But I can open their page fine too.

Hm. Is it the Saudis, or the Chinese? (Dun Dun DAH!)

Who Is Everyone? - This site has been proud to be on Virginia Postrel's link list since around Christmas. It gets a nice bunch of referrals from there every week. Now and then VP finds some specific item worth mentioning and Unqualified Offerings sees a gratifying spike in visits. But today is something else again. UO is getting an order of magnitude more referrals from dynamist.com than it ever has in one day, all from the link - there are no new citations directing people here; the proprietess even mentioned yesterday that she is out of town.

Conclusion: Virginia's own site has been mentioned somewhere Big and is itself getting a huge spike in visitors, a fraction of whom go link-hopping and end up here. I'd be grateful if any new visitor here who came from The Scene would tell me what's going on by e-mailing to the address on the top left of the page.

Deterring Iraq - During what came to be known as "The Raimondo Dogpile" last week, Moira Breen asked for clarification of the views of various warbloggers in light of some things I wrote. I would argue that the responses she did and didn't get , when added to what the the bloggers in question have written since then about Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran and other countries among the usual suspects, support my essential claim that "The cheerleader blogs...have completely accomodated themselves to the aims of the 'National Greatness' conservatives" in prosecuting the war. (The single, major amendment my original piece requires is removing all references to Matt Welch, who did not fit my argument and was not mentioned in Justin Raimondo's original piece.) Specifically, the self-described anti-idiotarians continue to call for prophylactic war on Iraq, and have agreed with neocon, neoimperial pundits that it is up to us, not the government of Saudi Arabia, whether we remove the troops "defending" it.

Be that as it may. Perry de Havilland (naturally) troubled to make a rigorous argument for the merits of going to war with Iraq specifically (scroll down for comment):

The trouble with applying 'nucelar deterrent theory' to Saddam Hussein is that he is not playing by the same rules. Do you really think he cares as much about the death of 1 million Iraqis as much as the USA would care about the death of 10,000 Americans? Threaten him with nuclear destruction and he might reply by trying to take out a US carrier in the Gulf with a tactical nuke, which is not beyond the pale of technical reality once we has usuable warheads... and if left to his own devises long enough he clearly will have nukes. It is only 1940's technology for goodness sake.

I agree with Perry that Saddam lacks the tender concern for Iraqi citizens that Dubya has for American ones or Tony Blair has for his own loyal subjects. I don't agree that Saddam can't be deterred from using weapons of mass destruction.

Let us stipulate first of all that Saddam is a rat bastard, and that that understates his vileness. The general issue of whether it is the United States' business to remove rat bastards from power for the sake of improving the world is left for another time. (It's not hard to figure out where this site stands on the issue.) The specific question Perry raises is, If rat bastard Saddam Hussein has nukes or chemical weapons, can the United States deter him from using them against it. My answer is, first, yes, and second, we already have.

We are reminded that Saddam "used chemical weapons against his own people" (the Kurds) and also against the Iranians during the Iran-Iraq war. What Saddam has never done is use WMDs against a target that can respond in kind. The Iraq hawks remind us now and then that the UN inspectors found functioning chemical arms in stock after the Gulf War. Saddam could have used them but did not. It's not hard to see why: The US said that if he did, we would respond with nukes.

So there's a record of Saddam actually being deterred. Why does it work, if he doesn't worry much about the deaths of millions of Iraqis? Because hostage-population "nuclear deterrent theory" isn't the only deterrence model out there - indeed, nuclear deterrent theory always went beyond population destruction anyway. Back in that college I discuss a couple of posts below, in a course called "Determinants of Strategic Nuclear Forces" taught by William Kaufmann, we spent quite a lot of time on counter-force deterrence models; that is, structuring a nuclear force posture that would ensure that the Soviet Army and government could not function in the aftermath of a nuclear exchange. You can't rule the world if you can't get to it or talk to it.

This kind of deterrence is very much alive, indeed, the unhappy fate of Mullah Omar makes it more plausible than ever. For better or for worse, since at least the Panama invasion of 1989, the US has had a policy of not scrupling to target hostile national leaders personally. One of two competing explanations of our glorious victory on behalf of the al-Qaeda affiliated KLA in 1999 is that Milosevic capitulated when NATO air forces started targeting him specifically. (The other explanation is the "Northern Alliance" model: local allied ground troops - the KLA - draw enemy forces into convenient bombing targets and then rapidly exploit.) Saddam may not care about Generic Iraqi Citizens, but he seems to care very much about himself, his family and the Republican Guard.

(Why do I say "for better or for worse?" Because at some point, a hostile leader will decide that two can play that game, and start attacking American leaders directly. Then the fear factor kicks in, and you really don't want to see the version of the PATRIOT act that comes out of that...)

"Deterrence" != "Killing massive numbers of civilians"
"Deterrence" = "Demonstrating the ability and will to rob a potential enemy of what they care about more than harming you"

The beautiful thing about the Don't Tread On Me War is that is has removed all doubt about our will - we will absolutely destroy a government that attacks the United States, shelters our attackers or is the creature of our attackers. As for ability, we didn't even have to go to the nuke bag to do it.

Notes From The Green Building - Ginger Stampley has a good item on college students, college administrations, responsibility and suicide, informed by her perspective as a Rice alumna. What she says about Rice is true about MIT, where student Elizabeth Shinn committed suicide. (Her parents are suing MIT for not stopping the girl.

There was underground black humor -- part of the campus lore -- about the high number of suicides due to academic pressure. We knew the risks."

It sounds to me as if Elizabeth Shin's parents didn't

During my time at MIT, Building 54 (aka the Green Building) was the exit of choice for students who wanted to leave without going back home. I think MIT had the highest suicide rate of any US university back then, and seems to have kept up since. While news of suicides was kept out of The Tech, the official school paper, the unofficial right/libertarian paper reported them. (It's been a long time! I can't remember what it was called...)

MIT was the suicide capital of academe and has remained so, and it's hard to believe that anyone connected with the school wouldn't know that. It's even hard to believe anyone wouldn't hear about it in advance - it's information that student guides slipped in on campus visits and that guidance counselors have always known.

Umpty-Ump Is a Trend - Thomas Nephew cites a Guardian story about yet another al-Qaeda prisoner revolt, this time in Pakistan. That lengthens a list that already includes another prisoner riot in Pakistan, plus the famous Mazar e Sharif revolt. Think international scolds will shut up about the big bad US treating the Guantanamo prisoners as if they were, you know, dangerous?

Me neither.

Lame Excuses Department - Unqualified Offerings is actually just leaving the office, and will be back tomorrow. There are a couple of longer pieces brewing, on deterring Iraq for one, and more on "Libertarianism and My Sister," in response to some e-mail comments by Eve Tushnett. (Note to Eve: I'm not sure it's really a blog if you go two and a half weeks without updating...) But Offering Boy has a basketball game tomorrow and there's football on Sunday, so, well, we'll just see.

Not So Fast Mr. Offering - Reader Ronnie Carpio thinks I'm too hard on the radiophrenologists, and commends this New Scientist item about a study done at the University of Pennsylvania. If nothing else, it's pretty cool when scientists quote Saint Augustine. ("Deception is the denial of truth.") Both researcher and journalist are commendably cautious, especially in comparison to the NYT Magazine piece that set Unqualified Offerings off the other day.

However, more work is necessary before fMRI lie detection could be used for legal purposes, he says.

"Our study shows only an average difference in brain activity between lying and telling the truth in a group of young and healthy English-speaking people. In order to determine whether fMRI can be used to detect deception in any individual, much larger groups of different ages, cultures and socio-economic status should be studied."

Ronnie opines, regarding the ethics of actual functioning radiophrenological devices, "[the] model of search and seizure is a good one, and I suppose that's how it should be handled: a suspect can be scanned only if the police get a warrant, and then only with his lawyer present, and then with expert witnesses to instruct the jury on the scientific limitations of the test."

So that's Ronnie and Unqualified Offerings both, which ought to settle the issue before it even comes up.

A Cold Day in Hell - Unqualified Offerings agrees with a Charles Krauthammer column...

Just a Link - I rarely just link to items on major me-zines for go-read-this purposes, because it strikes me as pointless. For instance, I pretty much agree with everything Virginia Postrel and Instapundit have to say about Leon Kass, but I'd be delusive to imagine that anyone not named Offering reads this site and does not read the other two. So why tell you to go read what you already read anyway? As a result, the only time Certain Opinionators get mentioned around here is when I feel I have a minor value add to something they've said or if I think they're wrong. But since this site gets a lot of libertarian readers and it's at least conceivable that some libertarians don't read Mickey Kaus, which is a mistake on their part, but there you go. Anyway, his analysis of the historical problems with the film version of Black Hawk Down is intelligent and timely. Make sure to read it.

All-Star Madness - Justin Slotman links to an ESPN column suggesting HORSE join or replace NBA All-Star Weekend festivities like the dunk contest, the 3-point shooting contest and the scamming chicks contest. As Justin says, that would rule. But I think there's a better idea out there, propounded by local DC sports radio personality Steve Czaban. (Czaban gets national exposure as Jim Rome's backup.) Tell me if this wouldn't be cooler even than HORSE:

Nobody cares about East versus West. So just select two dozen All-Stars with a position distribution adequate to fill two teams. From here, every step is televised live on All Star Night.

1. The two top vote-getters each become captain of one team.
   
2. Captains take turn picking players for their squads, like at a playground.
   
3. Game is played Shirts versus Skins. Coaches optional.
   

A Syllogism in Quotes - Moira Breen of Inappropriate Response quite reasonably asked for answers to questions raised in her mind by "An Open Letter to Perry de Havilland." While official responses to her questions were sparse, unofficial responses are suggestive...

"The cheerleader blogs...have completely accomodated themselves to the aims of the "National Greatness" conservatives." - Unqualified Offerings

"Good read, but I don't know that it's true that the members of the Official Constellation of warbloggers (I'm not sure of the exact list, but gather he's including Reynolds, Den Beste, Welch, Layne, and Johnson) "have completely accomodated themselves to the aims of the 'National Greatness' conservatives". - Inappropriate Response

"Michael Kelly has a good column about seeing it through and rebuilding Afghanistan, while this report makes clear that the last thing the mullahs running Iran want is a free, prosperous, country next door. Reason enough to do it, and to drop a daisy-cutter or two on their pawns in Afghanistan, if necessary." - Instapundit.Com

"Like other empire-nations before it, America is rich enough to support a great foreign legion (of soldiers, governors, aid-givers, spies) who slog and grind professionally. The sacrifices required by the rest of us are, most of the time, at a minimum." - Michael Kelly

Like I Was Saying - Air Force Virginia, who is actually a contractor, she tells me, so Unqualified Offerings feels comfortable mentioning that her last name is "Warren," writes anent the brain-scanning machines:

It doesn't have to *work*, silly. Look at the widespread use of polygraph tests.

Which is true. It just needs to assure money and status gains for its developers and practitioners. Of course, Unqualified Offerings already said, "we might well get thought police who suck at what they do," which is not far off AFV's point.

But there's more to say, and wonder. First, UO suggests the term "radiophrenological devices" for the sorts of machines described in the NYT Mag article referenced in the "Will This Do?" item below. Second, Charles Moulton Marston, inventor of the polygraph, also created Wonder Woman. Will any of the radiophrenologists create a classic, fitfully popular comic book character? Third, AFV assures the world that she is going to start a blog of her own, and judging by the writing I've seen, it will be a good one. Your best bloggers, Unqualified Offerings says in a spirit of Olympian detachment, are libertarian Elvis Costello fans. Watch this space for an inaugural link announcement. Or, even better, monitor her brain waves until you detect the precise pattern found in those about to start a weblog, which is what Unqualified Offerings intends to do.

What About the Little Guy - The up-and-coming "Balloon Juice" blog comments on an entertainment news story as follows:

EMI pays 28 million to Mariah Carey so she WILL NOT sing for them.

I think they got screwed. I will not sing for them for significantly less.

Oh, he thinks this is cute, this John Cole does. I find the story frightening. How are the rest of us going to be able to afford to pay Mariah Carey not to sing to US??

Aim at the Target, Please - During the 90s, in the aftermath of Waco, Ruby Ridge and Okahoma City, one ran into fellow "antigovernment extremists" who devoted enormous energy to UN road signs and flame throwers in Central Texas and whether David Koresh was some intelligence agency's asset who has passed his smell date. I thought then and still do that if I were Big Government, I'd far rather people spend their time thinking about that sort of thing than about no-knock raids, administrative law courts and civil asset forfeiture, let alone the hundreds of government agencies with SWAT teams. If one has to have enemies, and the despised Professor Foucault insisted that one does, best to have enemies that will obligingly punch at shadows.

So why does Justin Raimondo spend an entire column running on about how "the Rockefellers" - the Rockefellers! - are behind what he calls "a furious post-9/11 anti-Saudi propaganda campaign that has gone into overdrive in recent weeks?" When right wingers start with the Rockefeller talk, everyone else heads for the exits. At best it's irrelevant. I neither know nor care whether "the Rockefellers" want to bring down the House of Saud and replace it with someone more congenial. Aramco is a large corporation as prone to rent-seeking as any other, so I don't reject the possibility out of hand. But so what? That "the Rockefellers" might want to topple the House of Saud means no more regarding the merits of the policy than that Charles Johnson and Glenn Reynolds do. It's either wrongheaded and wrong for the US to go to war to topple the present Royal Family or it isn't, regardless of who pays off whom.

Going down the Rockefeller path causes Raimondo to make some very dubious claims:

Speaking through Jeff Jacoby – in an act of ventriloquism that no doubt had the dummy-columnist's full cooperation – the Aramco-Rockefeller consortium delivered this "ultimatum" to their former business partners...

There is a factual claim here, a serious one, and it comes with out evidence. The claim is that Jacoby is not just a neo-imperialist crank but an agent of a particular corporate interest. Unless Raimondo has evidence of Jacoby being rented, Krugmanlike, for the duration of an article, it's not just bogus, but scurrilous. Then there's the lax timing of the Rockefeller assault. Raimondo identifies the turning point as a meeting of Abdallah and various oil executives on September 23 - 1998.

Virtually overnight it is discovered by all sorts of instant "experts" that Wahabism, the official state religion of our longstanding ally, is the equivalent of Nazism if not outright devil-worship. That this sudden awakening to the alleged "Saudi threat" occurred in tandem with the Rockefeller's acrimonious (and costly) break with the House of Saud is, of course, the purest coincidence.

Every supposedly baleful, Rockefeller-inspired maneuver Raimondo cites, from Martha McSally to Andrew Sullivan's "sudden" outrage over Saudi persecution of gays to the general outbreak of anti-Wahabism among pundits, happened three years after Raimondo's Big Meeting. If that's "tandem" it's tandem like a Dr. Seuss bicycle that extends across several pages from front seat to back seat. Strangely, all of these baleful events happened, by purest coincidence, within three months of a bunch of Saudi hijackers (and friends) killing 3500 people at the behest of a rich Saudi guy - three months of diffidence from the investigative organs of what Raimondo calls the US' "most loyal Arab ally." There's tandem and then there's tandem, it appears.

Then there's the muddiness of motive. According to the sources Raimondo references, present at the meeting were "The four American oil giants Mobil Corp, Exxon Corp, Texaco Inc. and Chevron Corp. (which established the Arabian American Oil Co now known as Saudi Aramco, in the 1930s) the other three were Atlantic Richfield Co., Conoco Inc. and Phillips Petroleum Co." Which seems to be the Aramco contingent, aka The Rockefellers, versus the outsiders. Surely the outsiders could buy their own pundits and government officials, couldn't they? Why do only The Rockefellers do that? (Hm, since Unqualified Offerings has steadily argued for a US pullout from Saudi Arabia but against a US conquest of same - in the absence of evidence that Saudi intelligence actually carried out the September massacres - wouldn't it be a prime candidate for Conoco money? Are they willing to use PayPal?)

This strikes UO as the problem with almost every "Big Oil" explanation of political developments. Big Oil really is big, and it has its fuligin fingers in lots of pies. So almost anything that happens can be seen to benefit some oil company or other. Enron, we have learned, though not from Charles Dodgson's blog, lobbied hard for the Kyoto treaty.

Raimondo wastes a column with a weak argument that would be pointless if proven. Something tells me this is happening just the way Jimmy Carter planned it...

Beyond Palm Beach - This site has not had much occasion to praise George Will during its existence and expects that such occasions will remain rare. But Will has a good piece today about Democratic Party polling shenanigans in Missouri last November.

Will This Do? - Reader Ronald Carpio writes with a link to a New York Times Magazine item about developments in forensic brain-scanning technology, and asks, "But what do you think about (assuming they can be made to work) brain-scanning "truth machines" [like the ones discussed in the article]. Are such devices still coercive?"

First off, it's very nice to be asked. This blogging thing sure beats haranguing subway riders while not wearing pants, just as Unqualified Offerings' probation officer promised it would.

There appear to be two issues here - principle and praxis. On the praxis side, having read the article and having done some reading on memory and consciousness over the years (Unqualified Offerings is a Searlite, if you're wondering), the various probe initiatives discussed in the Times article strike me as, in all likelihood, crocks. It looks like it would take Elizabeth Loftus maybe fifteen minutes to shoot holes in every wonder machine discussed. And it's worth noting that the article seems to get all its information from parties with a financial interest in at least the appearance of the viability of the various scanning devices.

The civil liberties implications of that prospect are unnerving to many: thoughts are not crimes. But after the Sept. 11 attacks, the F.B.I. and C.I.A. are taking a closer look at brain mapping. And the Department of Defense is helping finance Norseen’s research. If such efforts succeed, we might soon see the arrival of genuine thought police.

The CIA "wasted" decades of time and money on psychic research. (Who is Unqualified Offerings to say "wasted?" That pipe dream kept people in cushy jobs for years and years.) Local school districts and law enforcement agencies went gaga over the infamous Quadro Tracker in less nervous times. As Instapundit has noted time and time again since the fall, while the American people have not panicked unduly over terrorism, sectors of the American government have been downright hysterical. That's a very warm market for half-baked schemes. And of course, actual efficacy is not a prerequisite for getting thought police - we might well get thought police who suck at what they do.

As to the principle of the thing, let's imagine what I don't believe can exist: a nondestructive "truth machine" that can copy accurate memories like a computer can copy a file to a floppy. When you copy a file to a floppy, the contents of the hard drive remain the same, and the computer remains the same computer. You haven't destroyed any of its function to do so. That distinguishes an analogous "truth machine" from torture, and from hypothetical brainwashing machines and the like. Now the principle is What justifies search and seizure? and that's how I would want to approach it.

Destroy or Disprove - One more thought on torture and self-ownership. One runs into the argument that the ability of the torturer or brainwasher to break the will of a victim proves that free will and consciousness are illusions in the first place. It proves no such thing, any more than putting sugar in someone's gas tank proves that internal combustion is an illusion.

Clever Hans and Doctor Jeste - The torture piece has generated some reactions that deserve amplification. The Illuminated Donkey avers,

I have to admit I'm a bit unclear about Henley's argument. His leading point seems to be that the track record of government terrorist investigations simply doesn’t warrant entrusting the authorities with that sort of power, with the Higazy case being the current example (though it appears that coercive interrogative methods approaching torture were used to elicit some sort of confession).

I’m not really sure how he moves from that point to the doomsday scenario he describes, however. His argument seems to be that if we take the step of allowing torture in order to prevent potential attacks, there will still be situations (imagine a worst-case Higazy scenario) where this leads us to make wrong choices, hypothesizing a case where a torture-induced false confession leads agents down a blind alley with disastrous consequences. But even if this were the case, it’s not as if investigation is the zero-sum game he describes, where we have to throw all of our resources at one location. Some of his statements indicate that he has a moral position against using torture, while others indicate that his take is a more practical one.

I do have a moral position against using torture. In fact, the mere notion that an American feels the need to convince other Americans not to torture makes me so mad I could just fucking spit. I abominate torture because of all that self-ownership stuff. Torture is the violent attempt to destroy another's self-possession; it attempts to make an animal of a person and to own that animal. That is vile.

Not that everyone necessarily cares! Viz. Alan Dershowitz and his "torture warrant" enthusiasm, which only shows how "the rule of law" has come to mean "rule by lawyers" - so long as the professional apparatus in which Alan Dershowitz has status, power and a whole lot of money controls the torture action, what could be wrong with that?

See? I'm spitting, just like I warned everyone. Let me try again.

The primary argument in favor of an official resort to torture is utilitarian, and Americans are a practical people. So any hope of opposing torture means meeting utilitarian arguments with utilitarian objections. The utilitarian argument for is that the magnitude of possible harm from terrorist attacks are so great that to forego torture might mean a nuke destroying a city or a plague annhilating the country - sometimes called the "ticking bomb" scenario. My utilitarian counter-argument was paraphrased aptly by a reader I'll call Air Force Virginia, just in case it's not okay for active-duty military personnel to go around being quoted on websites: "See, I thought it was obvious--after all, torture doesn't *work* if your goal is to get accurate information. It only works if your goal is to get your victim to say a particular thing, and you must of course tell him what you want to hear so he can say it."

Pause to clarify a couple of things:

1) I am mad. I am not mad at the Donkey. The Donk merely offers an opportunity to clarify arguments that might have been drafted better in the first place, something of a trend here lately. (See "Wilderness of Carters" below.) The Donk, when you can keep him off basketball, is on the side of the blogging angels.

2) I don't argue that torture will never give you accurate information, and I doubt AF Virginia would either. I do argue that it goes awry in the "tell them what they want to hear" way often enough to render it useless for the purposes of the argument actually advanced - that is, the "ticking bomb." Hence our title: Over the years there have been experimenters who believed they had taught apes to use sign language or dolphins to squeak recognizable english. "Clever Hans" was a horse in 1900s Berlin who could do math. A nice capsule of the case appears on a website whose author abjures quoting without permission. But it's short. Anyone who does not know the case should read it.

Hans could not do math. But he could interpret cues of which his testers were unaware, so if his testers knew the answer to a problem, Hans could pick that answer. It made them happy, and that he could do. Once someone thought to use testers who didn't know the answers to the problems, Hans, well, Hans' mathematical abilities regressed to the equine mean. So Koko the Gorilla, so Alpha and Beta in Day of the Dolphin.

It should be pretty clear what happens if the animal is keying on the tester's cues and the tester "knows" the wrong answer to the problem: the animal chooses the tester's preferred, wrong answer.

Torture makes animals of human beings. It reduces them to hindbrains attached to way too many nerves. "Successful" torture leaves a "client" whose only concern is to stop the torture, and the only way to do that is to satisfy the torturer. There is no guarantee whatsoever that a truthful answer satisfies the torturer even if the victim has a truthful answer to give. But you can bet that confirming a preexisting hunch will, and you can bet that the victim has a desperate incentive to figure out from verbal and nonverbal clues what you think he should be telling you.

Which just restates at much greater length what I said telegraphically the first time. The new business is very serious, The Donkey's argument that "it’s not as if investigation is the zero-sum game he describes, where we have to throw all of our resources at one location." I argue that while an investigation is not a zero-sum game, it is a game of diminishing returns - there are finite resources and they can be wasted. Even the largest investigation has finite resources to bring to bear and finite egos directing it. Most of all, in the "ticking bomb" scenario, it has finite time to accomplish its goal. Clara Thomas Boggs wrote, anent wrongful convictions,

To me, it is very clear that a wrongful conviction begins at the scene of the crime, then after the first errors are made, all other decisions are made to protect the initial one. This is where I would begin making things right -- at the investigative level.

Note that Boggs does not say that the errors have to be willful or malicious, nor even that the "protection" needs to be. Once investigators have a theory (this "grad student" and his radio are connected to the attack on the trade center, e.g.), they will tend to evaluate evidence on the basis of how well it fits the theory. This can become, in paranoid enough hands, positively rococo. Viz. the history of CIA Counterintelligence Chief James Jesus Angleton and "the prophet Golitsyn," detailed in Unqualified Offerings touchstone text Wilderness of Mirrors, by David Martin.

And that is how I "move to the doomsday scenario." The torture enthusiasts are trying to sell us torture on the basis of doomsday scenarios - the "ticking bomb." We shouldn't buy, for the reasons set forth above.

Civilian Virginia (Postrel) weighed in on the issue too the other day. She agrees that torture should never be legitmized as a legal investigative technigue. I worry that her proviso, "If circumstances are so compelling that such cruel and corrupting practices seem justified, the torturers should face the possibility of punishment" may create some dire incentive problems. If the possible punishments are slaps on the wrist, you get a fair amount of torture. If the punishments are draconian, you get a fair amount of coverups. And if the unofficial direction from on-high is to torture regardless of the risk of punishment, you get cynicism in the ranks. But I take her point, I think, that for all this theorizing, real investigators may find themselves with an honest-to-god ticking bomb scenario on their hands and an obviously guilty party in front of them with testicles just waiting to be squeezed. Who can say we wouldn't squeeze them ourselves in that case?

You Are Here - Best [Neocon-Approved Items] of the Web outdoes itself today. Discussing an article about the Mogadishu premiere of Black Hawk Down, geographically-challenged writer James Taranto avers

Yesterday we noted that Somali-American leaders are calling for a boycott of "Black Hawk Down" on the grounds that it depicts Somalis as "savages." CNN reports that a bootleg copy of the movie was screened in the Somali capital of Mogadishu, and the Somalis in the audience acted like, well, savages:

Audience members seemed to take delight in scenes of U.S. defeat. Each time an American chopper went down in the film, the audience cheered. Every time an American serviceman was killed, the audience cheered some more.

Unqualified Offerings has long felt that the conservatives are actually right about the lax standards of US schools. Apparently those schools passed James Taranto through without getting across the fact that Somalia is not part of the United States. Give American audiences a movie in which American and Somali fighters try to kill each other and they'll cheer the Americans. Give Somali audiences the same movie and they'll do the reverse. Give Peruvian audiences a movie in which Peruvian and Ecuadoran fighters try to kill each other and - wait! See if you can answer that one yourself.

The Dead Hand of the Past - This depressing technical note out of blog-heavy Casa Cortlandt, world headquarters of Ones and Zeros, Turn of a Friendly Die and What She Really Thinks:

Ones and Zeros basic template converted from DIVs to Tables. That should clear up some problems.

As Laura Dern's character whimpered in Blue Velvet, "Where's my dream??"

Attack in India - Gunmen have shot up the street outside a USIA building in Calcutta. That makes it too soon to discard this Unqualified Offerings theory.

Wilderness of Carters - Instapundit.Com references this site's recent item about Jimmy Carter's decision, according to Robert Gates and Zbigniew Brzezinski, to fund the Afghan resistance before the 1979 invasion. In the course of doing so he makes some remarks that could be construed as gently satirizing the piece's conclusion that Jimmy Carter destroyed the Soviet Union.

Now, the first thing to point out is that Unqualified Offerings has no standing to complain if the Viceroy of Araby gets a little fresh with it. And the man has a point, the end of that piece kind of got away from Unqualified Offerings. It wasn't so much trying to say "Jimmy Carter destroyed the Soviet Union" as Jimmy Carter has secretly been the Supreme Ruler of Earth since 1980 and that if you watch the occasional local TV news footage of Carter doing the Habitat for Humanity bit, you will notice that people who approach him seemingly to deliver a tool or confer about some architectural issue and then scurry away are actually members of the Trilateral Commission.

No, that wasn't it...

Yeah. The proper focus of that piece was less that Carter should be credited with visionary genius than that Carter's character needs to be reconsidered. As one reader wrote, Our Vietnam cost us 50,000 lives and the Vietnamese an order of magnitude more. Carter's willingness to "give the Soviet Union a Vietnam of its own" meant a conscious willingness to see that much harm inflicted on the USSR and Afghanistan. The decision actually looks colder and more calculating as your estimation of Carter's foresight decreases. Consider: Reagan really believed, correctly, that he could bleed the Soviet Army and Treasury dry and win the whole thing once and for all. So a Reagan decision to give the Soviet Union a Vietnam of its own is a gamble taken in the hope of an ultimate payoff. To the extent that Carter didn't believe Afghanistan would "leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history," all the decision promised was some notches for our side in an endless game of counting coup. That's cold.

Years ago in an interview, Elvis Costello said, anent John Major's image, something to the effect of You don't get to be Prime Minister by being a doofus, you get to be Prime Minister by being a son of a bitch. Jimmy Carter turns out to prove that rule after all.

Nevermore - By the hammer of Grapthar, Unqualified Offerings' tax dollars are avenged! It's a twofer when its beloved Steelers win and the despised Baltimore Corporate Welfare Queens lose. Then there was the sheer comedy value of LB/accessory Ray Lewis' fashion crime at the postgame press conference. Leather do-rag and a tent-sized overcoat made from what appears to be the pelt of the rare Silver-Tipped Yeti. He may have beaten that murder rap, but there's hope that they'll get him on an Endangered Species Act charge.

(Yeah yeah, Unqualified Offerings knows: The Steelers sucked Heinz Field from the public teat too. Start an Unqualified Pennsylvania Offerings site and give them hell for it if it bothers you - and it should. Note: UO tried, it really did. But it couldn't find a photo of Ray Lewis in his postgame outfit to link to.)

Pointer - If you're following the link from Justin Raimondo's column in Antiwar.com today, the items you are looking for are here and, especially, here. Some of the items in the grandiosely-titled "Best of Unqualified Offerings" section at left may also interest you.

UPDATE: Doh! Link tags on the first "here" didn't actually enclose any clickable text all day. Just fixed it.

The Shadow of the Torturer - The Illuminated Donkey feels that the official story of the Egyptian Radio is pretty close to the actual story. The truth is, we have no firm basis to believe otherwise. Here are the outlines of the official story then:

1. A foreign-born grad student, son of a diplomat, evacuates his hotel on September 11 in the face of attacks that have left the hotel closed to this very day.
   
2. In October, a hotel employee tells the FBI, mistakenly, that he found an aviation transceiver in the grad student's room safe.
   
3. In December, the FBI throws the grad student into solitary confinement, because he just won't cooperate with investigators - that is, he won't admit that the radio is his or what he was doing with it.
   

   [His lawyer] said his client wept as agents threatened to involve his family in the investigation.

   ``They certainly used the skills in trying to break someone, trying to crack the nut,'' Dunn said angrily.

   
   
4. On January 11, prosecutors formally indict the student for lying to investigators, successfully arguing that he is too dangerous to release on bail.
   
5. When the radio's rightful owner comes to reclaim it, the FBI goes back to the hotel employee, who changes his recollection.
   
6. The student is freed.
   

Even if the above is not true, it could be. So let's consider the case where it is. And let's consider how the case plays out in a scenario where Alan Dershowitz has been heeded and government investigators have official sanction to torture terrorism suspects. Let's make military tribunals available too.

The arguments for torture and military tribunals are that terrorists don't deserve the protections afforded in ordinary criminal cases, because terrorists aren't ordinary criminals. Torturing information out of a terrorist might, we are told, save literally millions of lives if it enables the government to foil a biological attack, or tens of thousands of lives if it stops a nuke. And letting a terrorist off because of technicalities in civil proceedings means justice denied and danger ahead.

These arguments assume that government investigators know what they are doing.

The record of, for instance, the Moussaoui case does not support the claim. Nor, it would seem, does the Higazy case. The right question is not, Are terrorists ordinary criminals? They question is, Are terrorist suspects terrorists? Clearly, the answer will be Yes sometimes and No some other times. Note that this is exactly congruent to the question of whether criminal suspects are criminals. Investigations and fair trials are the best ways we've come up with for determining acceptable answers.

What appears to be an unreliable witness report established in investigators minds the conviction that Abdallah Higazy, from a suspicious country in a suspicious place, owned a suspicious device. His repeated denials did not shake that conviction; they strengthened it. Absent from the reports on the Higazy case is any suggestion that Higazy's denials inspired investigators to go back to the hotel and pursue whether its staff really knew what it was talking about. Instead, his denials represented a problem of cooperation to be overcome:

While Mr. Higazy admitted to no ill will, his lawyer said that during one interview session with F.B.I. agents, Mr. Higazy was subjected to "unrelenting pressure," under which he may have made confused or false statements about the radio. In Federal District Court last week, Mr. Himmelfarb said Mr. Higazy had admitted that the radio was his and had told agents three different versions of how he had acquired it.

Mr. Dunn said he had been excluded from that interview, and Mr. Higazy said he was unsure what he told the agents.

It's not hard to see what the next step is in a regime of legal or tacitly-approved torture.

So you don't care? It's a shame if an innocent man gets harmed, but we're not talking burglary cases here, and the harm potential means that we have to switch the relative values we assign to letting an innocent man suffer and a guilty man go free? You're pretty tough-minded about harms you expect will fall on other people! But let's look at the dynamic from your perspective anyway. Suspect denies involvement, because he's not involved, but you don't see it that way. Under normal, acceptably-intimidating pressure, the suspect continues to deny involvement. Time keeps on tickin' tickin' tickin' into the future. He won't crack. Let's torture him! Early on, he still denies involvement. How well-trained he is! If he can maintain his cover story through this level of pressure, he must be one tough operator. Let's ratchet up the pain threshold. Let's, in our frustration, ask increasingly leading questions, to the point that even Koko the gorilla would know what she has to tell us to make us happy. So he tells us, confirming in our minds whatever uselessly-garbled version of some real plot we suspected in the first place. All this while, time has kept on tickin' tickin' tickin'. Pausing only to drop the twitching shell of our suspect in front of a tribunal, we rush headlong down the blind alley our partial understanding and blinkered imaginations conjured in the first place.

And while we race toward Boston, Detroit goes up in a ball of fire.

A mere hypothetical? No less so than the happy-ending version of the "ticking bomb" scenario.

Football Considered as a Helix of Semiprecious Stones - Wow. Just finished watching the Oakland-New England playoff game, and it has that Instant Classic feel to it. How long has it been since I saw an NFL game played on a field covered with snow? More, a field where the snow buries even the tips of the grass? At least a decade, if not two. I have vague memories of such games happening all the time when I was a lad. Nowadays, a greater proportion of teams are in the south and west and an awful lot of northern teams play indoors. You see games with falling, even driving snow, sure. But the NFL has become obsessive about field care (outside of Philadelphia), which means tarps, plows and underground heating coils on one side and merest nature on the other. The NFL wants flash and dash and the NFL gets what it wants, and that means the best possible field conditions.

So this was a throwback game - to a point. I don't think any 70s team in such conditions would have passed as much as Oakland and especially New England did. They'd have ground out 60 run plays a side for four quarters and hoped the other guy fumbled.

A lot of the change is technological. Better shoes with more cleat choices. Goretex undies. And better athletes. That's technological change too: The body of a professional athlete is worth millions of dollars over even a merely decent career, so many more millions go into that body's production and maintenance. I'm not talking steroids either. I'm talking nutrition science, sports medicine and training regimens built on the most sophisticated physiological understanding available. Time was, football players had jobs in the offseason. They couldn't afford not to. Heck, time was, football players smoked. Now, not only they but their teams can't afford for them to work at anythingbut attend to the care and feeding of their own prowess. O you geeks who hate jocks, you made the modern jock.

Who Was That? - Robert Gates wrote and Zbigniew Brzezinski has confirmed that the United States began aid to the anticommunist (and muslim fundamentalist) Afghan resistance in mid-1979, before the Soviet invasion and coup. Brzezinski says he told President Jimmy Carter that he thought the aid would bring about an intervention by the Soviets, that it was, as he wrote Carter when it finally happened, "the opportunity to give the USSR its war of Vietnam." So Brzezinski told Le Nouvel Observatour, whose website combines unreadable design with some kind of foreign dialect, so read the translation here.

Lefties and some anti-interventionist righties have pointed to the Brzezinski interview as proving the original sin that led to the September massacres. Unqualified Offerings felt and still feels that mujahedin aid was so much sauce for the gander. But between the "Brzezinski is a glory hog" stories and the "Brzezinski was such a meanie to the poor Soviets" diatribes, someone is being left out.

Jimmy Carter. If the stories of Brzezinski and Gates are correct, Carter authorized aid to the Afghan resistance in the summer of 1979 on the basis of arguments that it would draw Soviet soldiers into a bloody, debilitating trap. Jimmy Carter made the decision to "give the USSR its war of Vietnam" - that is, a decade and more of death, dissension and defeat. This was the President praised or damned for the "inordinate fear of communism" speech and SALT II, for whom the "killer rabbit" incident symbolized the haplessness and ineffectuality that Republicans charged gave us the Iranian Hostage Crisis. In the Republican history of the United States, Jimmy Carter gave us malaise and weakness because he thought the United States could go through the world being nice. At the same time, Carter's defenders, from Miller Williams on the left to Thomas Fleming on the right have praised Carter on the grounds that He Kept Us Out of War.

Don't the Afghan resistance revelations mean we have to completely revise our image of Carter as President? Say what you will about the morality and sense of the decision to aid the Afghan resistance: there was nothing of niceness in it. You had to be, and Unqualified Offerings means this in the nicest possible way, a real son of a bitch to make that call. Carter signed the order to aid the Afghan resistance a month after signing the never-ratified SALT II. Indeed, the Soviet invasion that his decision precipitated essentially killed SALT II. (He also, it should be said, baited the soft trap of Helsinki. Critics accused his administration of ratifying the Soviet Empire, when what he actually did was give Warsaw Pact dissidents a place to stand, leaving it to them to provide the levers.)

One other character trait of Carter's comes through the revised history too: an extraordinary self-possession. While he largely lost the 1980 election on Iran and stagflation, there was quite a lot of Who Lost Afghanistan? and "soft on communism" in the mix too. How tempted was Carter to shout, "Soft on Communism? Lost Afghanistan? Do you know what I just did???"

He destroyed the Soviet Union. And he never said a word.

You Can't Tell the Players... - Scathing and frequently hilarious critique of Noam Chomsky by - Justin Raimondo.

Cooking with Unqualified Offerings - More playoffs this weekend, including tomorrow's Good vs. Evil matchup in which the Pittsburgh Steelers defend all that is beautiful, true and good from the Baltimore Ravens. Naturally, a man's thoughts turn to snacks.

For the diet conscious, Unqualified Offerings recommends the snack system of its sister - Baked Lays potato chips dipped in salsa. Far better than Lays' baked tortilla chips and salsa, actually.

But this piece deals with an example of market failure so dire that one can hardly believe Paul Krugman hasn't addressed it yet: commercial chex mix. UO grew up eating its mommy's chex mix, and was dumbfounded when General Mills brought out the bagged stuff and it had - no nuts. This probably has to do with the sudden development of lethal peanut allergies in every third American child just around the time of the first Clinton inaugural. (Accident? Coincidence? Conspiracy???) General Mills now also markets a "peanut lovers" bag, but there are still two major problems:

1. "Traditional" chex mix is peanut chex mix!
2. So-called Peanut Lovers Chex Mix doesn't actually have many peanuts in it.

The first problem can only be solved by radical campaign finance reform: A search of opensecrets.org reveals that General Mills made a single $2500 donation to the NRCC in March 2000. No doubt this largesse has allowed them to flout product labelling regulations the way they have.

The second problem is clearly regulatory failure too - the country needs a caring federal government to fight for the peanut-loving little guy by setting minimum peanut content rules for supposed peanut products. Until that happy day, however, Unqualified Offerings provides its readers the following recipe:

Ingredients:
One bag Traditional Chex Mix
One can spanish peanuts

Preparation:
Open the bag of chex mix.
Open the can of peanuts.
Pour peanuts into chex mix bag.
Hold bag closed at top and shake.

Serving Suggestion:
Crunch vigorously (and loudly) during Summerall and Madden's frequent senior moments.

Sorry, I Forgot to Care about the "plight of the Palestinians" again. It is true, as Scott McConnell notes, that "from the time of [Israel's] very founding, there have been important Israelis (and not only in the Likud Party) who aspired to expand Israel to what they called its 'natural borders,' who wished to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians whose lands they coveted." And it is true that "during the Oslo peace process, which was supposed to lead to the creation of a Palestinian state, the Israelis increased the number of settlements, and all the access roads and checkpoints which go with them, by roughly one-third," and that the supposedly magnanimous Barak plan would have made a mockery of the territorial integrity of Palestine by leaving settlements, checkpoints and Jewish-only roads intact.

So the Palestinians attack a kid's party.

Now if I were a good anti-idiotaran, I would believe that "There's no longer any such thing as a 'civilian.' This idea is actually a quite modern one, and it is now obsolete." Presumably massacring bat mitzvah-goers would not bother me. Maybe my parents shouldn't have let me watch the unsporting parts of the Munich Olympics when I was twelve. Too late now.

Its apologists call terrorism the weapon of the weak. Give the Palestinians F-16s, they say, and they'll happily drop as many bombs as any rich nation, and who can doubt that they would? Weak combatants must use the weapons at hand against targets they can reach. Okay. Let's give them that much. The range of available targets in a highly militarized country like Israel is large - soldiers on patrol, soldiers in trucks, checkpoints, barracks, depots. Respect the division of labor - some people take/are assigned the job of killing and dying for their countrymen. Heck, assassinate government officials if you're determined to have a guerrilla campaign. All of these things are possible with stealth, guile and small arms. They might even be effective, weakening the resolve of the ordinary soldier and the decision-maker class alike.

But no, it's kids' parties.

In Tulkarem, about a dozen Al Aqsa Brigades militants marched through the streets after the attack, shooting into the air in celebration.

No doubt the air itself deserved its punishment.

Wilderness of Radios - Ken Goldstein runs a blog called The Illuminated Donkey, which reminded Unqualified Offerings of the Democratic Party somehow, so it shied away. In fact, Goldstein's chief crime is participating with Justin Slotman in an act of sports woofing so heinous that UO, cross-eyed with rage, mistakenly asked Andy Kashdan to fuck off and die in private correspondence because it lost track of just which fine blog contained the offending item. Unqualified Offerings will travel next month to Africa to apologize to Andy Kashdan.

Goldstein's blog is actually quite good! He's been following the Case of the Non-Missing Radio as closely as anyone, critiquing today's AP report on his site, and sending a link to the far less confused New York Post version of the story by e-mail. Goldstein (presumably no relation to the pseudonymous Emmanuel Goldstein, unless you can be pseudonymously related) muses:

A private pilot staying one floor below Higazy, who had no knowledge of either the case or Higazy, inquired about his missing aviation radio, at which point investigators questioned the hotel employee who had originally discovered the radio. According to the Times, "On Wednesday morning, the case fell apart completely. Agents reinterviewed the hotel employee and he said he recalled finding the radio on a table in Mr. Higazy's room, not in the safe."

So this case might be a simple mistake, an investigative screwup, a plant by an attention-seeking hotel employee, or something else entirely. I'm guessing that the FBI isn't finished talking to that hotel employee.

This site would be untrue to itself if it forebore baseless speculation about this kind of thing. You have a well-connected (diplomat dad) Egyptian air corps veteran who, at 30, is just getting ready to start graduate school. He tells the media he wants to get his Master's because master's degree in computers "makes me a big shot [back home in Egypt],'' but he's enough of a big shot already that when his student lodging falls through he stays in a Hilton for almost three weeks before buildings fall on it. (Rooms are not currently available at the Millenium Hilton, but other NYC Hilton's seem to be in the $150-and-up range.

Or: Let's face it: it could all be just like they say. All sorts of people pass through New York. Coincidences happen.

Note: You can see some nice pictures of different styles of aviation transceivers on the official Icom America site. Not all of them look like the sort of thing a random hotel worker would identify as an aviation transceiver.

Blatant Meme Insertion Attempt - Instapundit, Viceroy of Araby.

Does This Fit? - Matt Welch writes, more politely than Unqualified Offerings necessarily deserves, to say he likes being called a "muscular liberal," but points out that many of its criticisms of uberhawk blogdom do not apply to him:

I've never supported war against Iraq, and in fact have spent some energy trying to figure out the whole sanctions mess. Nor did I ever assert an Iraq connection to 9-11, which seemed strained from Day One. Nor have I actually supported bringing the war anywhere else, though I guess I'm very tentatively in favor of the theory of sending small squads to troublespots like Somalia or The Philippines (I haven't really thought about it, to tell you the truth). My neocon linking has been limited, I believe, to a bit of Mark Steyn here and there, Victor Davis Hanson once, and Andrew Sullivan quite a few times -- I'm not fond of NRO & the like, and I will soon unsubscribe from the OpinionJournal newsletter, for reasons of allergy to partisanship. I'm actually not so interested in the "cultivation of national resolve" for its own sake, though I've found it appropriate in the Afghan War, and in the aggressive puncturing of long-nurtured bullshit arguments & beliefs on all points of the political spectrum. My recent Big Idea, clumsily elucidated here, is for the U.S. to take every opportunity to transfer responsibility worldwide to individual countries and regions, and thus begin to reduce the Empire (while forcing political & military maturity upon other countries). If we make the Empire as virtuous as possible, while reducing it wherever opportunity strikes, we will reduce our Scapegoat Risk, avoid some corrupting temptations of power, and have money to do other stuff.

However, this still leaves unrefuted Unqualified Offerings' claim that Welch, um, has a blog.

I apologize to Matt Welch: I mischaracterized his views. (And I invite him to join Unqualified Offerings in spreading the "Best [Neocon-Approved Items] of the Web" meme...)

There's a Reason for That - Over at Airstrip One, Emmanuel Goldstein regrets that "Justin Raimondo goes on about warblogs. Doesn't mention that one of his columnists actually runs a web log. Oh well." But surely he knows his own editor. Giving his writer pub would complicate his typically manichean picture - it would mean acknowledging that there are bloggers out there - and more than one - that are not reflexively interventionist and unstintingly enthusiastic for the widest possible war. It's the kind of thing that makes Raimondo easier to dismiss than he should wish to be.

An Open Letter to Perry de Havilland - Hi Perry: Thank you for your note about my brief mention of the Justin Raimondo versus the Warbloggers affair. Of all the blog responses to Raimondo's essay, yours most struck me, which makes sense, given what you have noted as our incipient mutual admiration society. I have some issues with what you wrote though, detailed at tedious length hereafter. It amounts to a qualified defense of Raimondo. (No other kind is possible.) I've been reading Raimondo and Antiwar.com for much of its existence, so what follows is not just based on a handful of Google results since Wednesday morning.

What Samizdata Illuminatus calls "dogpiling" is the word! However, you folks seem to be giving the uberhawk blogs themselves a pass so far, which I'm not inclined to do. And I would have thought that Samizdata of all places would understand the frustrations that send Raimondo "Over the Top" (in Natalie Solent's apt formulation) in the first place - he has "metacontext" issues too. You and I both know how purely infuriating it is to have to clear statist brush every morning before starting to build the house of your argument, knowing that it will just be reseeded overnight. Some libertarians manage to remain pleasant through all of it - Virginia Postrel and Stephen Cox come to mind - while others take to filling their rhetorical chainsaws with the fuel of bitterness. If you caught Raimondo in a reflective moment (assuming he has them...), I suspect he would tell you that an imperialist metacontext drives him absolutely batshit.

Now, there are real criticisms to make against the Rothbardian anti-interventionists and you hit them: a tendency to give Other People's Collectivism a free pass, an automatic disbelief of any (home) government claim that becomes reflexive and unthinking rather than critical, and an impulse to dismiss all dangers short of outright conquest as insufficient to justify a military response. To all of those, add a weakness for character assassination in place of, well, reason.

There's been an awful lot of "So's your your old man" in the blog community's response to Raimondo's screed. (Natalie Solent actually points out, politely, some of the blind alleys down which the bloggers have wandered. ) Yours was something of an exception. Solent is right that Raimondo is "OTT." The question is, Over the Top of what. My answer is: over the top of a position of considerable salience. The bulwarks of that position would be

o A "warblog" groupthink as claustrophobic as that of any faculty lounge, in which a particular community makes a sport of coming up with new countries to attack and more colorful denunciations of soft targets than their fellows. ("Here are links to eighteen new dismissals of Stephanie Salter!") This group comprises most of the self-described anti-idiotarians. (Alas, I was mulling the outlines of an anti-"anti-idiotarian" - the term - piece when Raimondo preempted the effort.)

Am I too hard on these people? Perry, let's consider whether some recent blog action fits into your "aggressive defender" paradigm. Warbloggers have noted, as an example of Saudi perfidy, reports that the Kingdom is making attempts to reach a diplomatic accomodation with Iraq. This is added to the list of reasons why "we" should toss the bums out and "secure"....(do we say "their" or "our"?) oil reserves. But wait! Supposedly, our only purpose for having troops in Saudi Arabia is to defend the Kingdom from being attacked by Saddam Hussein. An accomodation theoretically means the kingdom is safer and we can free ourselves of that burden. Now add in a Reynolds piece from yesterday about how we should not only refuse to accomodate the Kingdom's pathetic misogyny: "Another reader suggests that we should rub the Saudis' noses in this, making armed women soldiers as visible as possible, having them man check points that Saudi drivers (all men, of course) must pass through, letting their long hair escape from their helmets, etc." Reynolds offers no disapproval. Perry, this is the mindset of an occupier, not a defender. Put these two together and you've demolished the pretext that the US is in Saudi Arabia as part of a defensive alliance - if you think this way, the US is in Saudi Arabia because it is a platform for attacking Iraq, whether Iraq particularly wants to attack the Saudis or the Saudis particularly want to attack Iraq or not.

We are compadres and familiar with each other's writing, so I will skip linking to my own pieces criticizing the Saudis, and for that matter, criticizing Raimondo's impulsive defenses of them. Lost between Raimondo's apologias and Charles Johnson's incitements is the idea that we might just tell the Saudis to fuck off and fend for themselves. If the sand around their precious holy places is so sacrosanct, may they have much joy in it.

The cheerleader blogs, whether libertarian sympathizers like Reynolds and den Beste or muscular liberals like Layne, have completely accomodated themselves to the aims of the "National Greatness" conservatives. These folks have long since given up the pretext that Iraq was actually behind the attacks on the United States. The National Greatness types want war on Iraq for reasons of supposed prophylaxis and for the cultivation of national (that would be collectivist, my libertarian friend) resolve. Note that the cheerleaders seized on every hint of an Iraqi connection in October, usually by citing items in the neocon press. When the utter lack of evidence for Iraqi involvement became overwhelming, they switched reasons for attacking Iraq, but none of them ever acknowledged that they had been too credulous in their earlier assumptions, nor did any of them notably reflect that maybe there was a larger lesson to be drawn about the reliability of their neocon confreres. (Neoconfreres?)

I've got to tell you, Perry, I get infuriated too. What we have is, on one side, Rothbardians arguing that prophylactic war is incompatible with limited government. On the other, self-described "anti-idiotarians" who claim to believe that it is. The identity of the actual idiots here is less clear to me than it is to some others. When you factor in the Rothbardians' least tenable thesis - that "aggressive defense" can never be anything but a smokescreen for imperialism - neither side seems to brim with promise.

o The absolute dysfunction of "split screen" Republicanism - the Sullivan/Barone "We do the National Greatness Stuff abroad and the leave us alone stuff at home." Recent Sullivan pieces complained how Bush was devoting too much rhetorical energy to tax cuts and fiscal prudence when he needed to, er, focus like a laser beam on what is, for Sullivan, a practically limitless war. You know and I know that the Parties of Way WAY Bigger Government (our Democrats and your Labour) can only be held off by expenditure of furious political and rhetorical energy. Bush is the only effective communicator the Republican Party has - its congressional leadership comes straight from the Island of Misfit Toys. To the extent that he remains "above the fray," the fray goes to the ultrastatists. And every expansion of the target list is an additional assault on the budget. Toppling the remaining Ayatollahs in Iran is a fiscal luxury item.

Can you name a "warblogger" in the Official Constellation who has demurred at any of the proposed interventions on the table? This gets to both the groupthink issue and the utter abandonment of small-r republican prudence.

I happen to consider myself an "aggressive defender" in your scheme. I fully support a Don't Tread on Me war against al-Qaeda and its auxiliaries (like the Taliban). I increasingly worry that that is not the war we are fighting, and I am certain that that's not the war the cheerleader blogs want to fight. One odd thing is that, while Raimondo now describes himself as having "opposed this war," he was the very one who coined "Kill the Bastards - and Get Out" as a motto. I still support that war, though I feel a little guilty that it appears that one of the ways we would get it is leaving your countrymen behind to deal with the truck bombs and snipers. I would respectfully suggest that the prospect is worth at least as much of your energy as Justin Raimondo is.

Best,

Jim

UPDATE: I have edited out a reference to Matt Welch from this piece, after an e-mail convinced me I was wrong to include him. The original text read "muscular liberals like Layne and Welch..." I stand by the rest of what I wrote.

Let's Try That Again - Virginia Postrel informs me that the Postrel-linking method discussed below does not work in her browser and therefore may not work in others, either. For maximum compatibility, open the source, find the achor name then build the URL as follows:

"http://www.dynamist.com/scene.html#[anchorname]"

Wilderness of...Fires - Per a report in the Hindustan Times, an office fire yesterday nearly gutted an office building in Islamabad that "housed offices of 21 ministries, government departments, including offices of the Interior Ministry and the main offices of Pakistan's Intelligence Bureau." Authorities are saying short-circuit but "they did not rule out other causes." The article references unsourced speculation that Interior Ministry records on recently-banned militant Islamist groups were destroyed in the fire. Not to worry, says a Pakistani government spokesman: "only some old records of the Interior Ministry were lost. He said there had been no confidential records of religious and Jehadi organisations or of the Taliban in the building."

He might even be telling the truth. (link via Antiwar.Com, if anyone's heard of them...)

No Comprende It's a Riddle - The strange case of the "Egyptian radio" gets a little stranger, though not, apparently, to the Associated Press's way of thinking. In a baffling litte item in today's papers, we are told

Charges have been dropped against the Egyptian graduate student accused of lying to federal investigators about an aviation radio found in his hotel room near the World Trade Center, a U.S. attorney's office spokesman said Wednesday.

Another hotel guest came forward after Abdallah Higazy was charged this week and told officials the radio belonged to him, said Marvin Smilon, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.

Prosecutors had accused Higazy, the son of an Egyptian diplomat, of interfering with the investigation into the Sept. 11 attack, which demolished the trade center towers and killed about 2,900 people.

Higazy had insisted in two rounds of FBI interviews that he knew nothing of the hand-held radio found in a safe in his room along with his Egyptian passport, a copy of the Quran and a gold medallion, prosecutors had said.

Unqualified Offerings finds itself with a couple of questions after reading this item:

1) So an aviation radio really was present in this New York hotel-room safe at the time of the attacks, correct? That part of the original story doesn't seem to have changed.
2) Who was this other hotel guest who claimed the radio? What nationality? What connections to anyone's government?
3) How did he get the radio into Higazy's room safe?
4) Have "prosecutors" asked the man these questions? Where is he now?
5) Did AP ask the prosecutors the above things? (If not, why not?)
6) Did they answer?
7) Isn't that part of the story too, if they did or didn't?

Let's You And Him Fight - Unqualified Offerings has alternately praised and kicked around Justin Raimondo and Instapundit for most of its history. Now they have decided to cut out the middleman, with Raimondo attacking - intemperately as always - the warbloggers and Instapundit deflecting - glibly as so often - Raimondo's actual arguments. Reynolds somewhat more directly addresses Rothbardian right wing interventionism in a general way in Updates added to the original post in later hours. It would be nice if Raimondo similarly modulated his warblog complaints, though modulation is not what he is into.

In a way, Raimondo makes it too easy for his critics. He tends to add that extra half twist of outrage that vitiates the nub of his arguments. But his targets in this case, the self-identified Anti-Idiotarians, don't cover themselves in glory by seizing on that escape hatch. I see a lot more enthusiasm for gang-stomping Barbara Kingsolver one more time than for responding to less dismissible doves like Alan Bock and Scott McConnell on the right and Robert Wright on the left. A couple of weeks ago, Reynolds averred that he didn't attack the likes of Wright precisely because he recognized that Wright's arguments against the war were different in character and sophistication from Stephanie Salter's. Which is all well and good. But what he hasn't done - and as an Instapundit junkie, Unqualified Offerings would have seen it - is make any effort to refute Wright's better class of war policy criticism.

Raimondo, for his part, falls way too often into the trap of defending whatever the Uberhawks criticise, no matter how appalling it actually is. He just can't get over how mean people are about Saudi Arabia. Justin, dude! You're missing a "Let's declare victory and get out!" opportunity! Don't say "The Saudis are misunderstood targets of a smear campaign." The Saudis are conniving rat bastards. Say, "The neocons have finally admitted that the Saudi princelings we've spent so much ammo, treasure and dignity defending are conniving rat bastards. So let's pull out of their Shitty Big Country and let them drown in their sands of their own corruption. As a bonus, it leaves the bin-Laden brigade one less excuse to bamboozle alienated dipshits into slaughtering themselves and us." It practically writes itself!

(Unqualified Offerings' cunning plan in all of this is for the A-list pundits to kill each other off, leaving us Bs and Cs to rule the ruins!)

Marty We Wish We Hardly Knew Ye - Frequently-insightful liberal* sports columnist Tom Boswell of the Post is unaccountably impressed with now-departed Redskin coach Marty Schottenheimer's being impressed with himself.

"In this business, there are two roads," Schottenheimer said after being fired as the Redskins' coach despite winning eight of his last 11 games in his first year. "The only one I know is the high road."

So, he proceeded to take it.

Uh, Tom - Unqualified Offerings' mother taught it that the actual high road is marked so well that people should know you are on it without your telling them. In fact, if you find yourself telling people about how you're taking the high road, or that, ye gods! it's the only road you know, you probably ain't anywhere near it. This was the most appalling thing about Schottenheimer's tenure, really: the man just couldn't shut up about his virtues. Let him do it somewhere else.

*In keeping with recent AndrewSullivan.com practice, Unqualified Offerings wants to label everybody. And in Boswell's case, the shoe fits.

Libertarianism and my Sister, Continued - I appreciate the e-mails about "The Citizen or the Police," below. A couple of them made me realize some gaps need filling:

1) On sisters and abortion arrests, I left one out: Would you agree that your sister should be jailed for performing an abortion?

I mean, if she were a doctor...

2) Someone pointed out that almost the exact same piece could be called "Why I Am Not a Conservative." This is entirely true. Needless to say, I'm okay with that.

Be the Second on Your Block - That's right, fellow bloggers! You too can link to specific Virginia Postrel items just like Unqualified Offerings does, such as this one with the latest news from the Dallas fake drug scandal. Even though there are no visible anchor links when viewing the page, if you choose View Source, you'll find a secret anchor tag before each item. Your link becomes "http://www.vpostrel.com#[anchorname]."

The Citizen or the Police - Or, Why I Am Not a Liberal.

Many years ago I spent an evening chatting up the night clerk at the desk of a motel on the edge of Harper's Ferry, West Virginia. She was a married, born-again Christian mother, we neither of us had anything else to do that evening and it was pleasant to talk. It was she who brought up abortion, almost as if merely mentioning the subject did not risk comity. I take pro-lifers seriously even though I am not one. If you accept that a fetus has the status of a person, and there are reasons of both faith and prudence to do so, then opposing abortion becomes a necessity. That I don't come down on that side myself does not make it absurd that others do.

But this item isn't about abortion, it's about guns. Really, all political arguments are about guns, which is why Harper's Ferry is a good place to have one. For five years it was our Beirut, changing hands dozens of times between Fort Sumter and Appomattox. The town proper occupies a spit of lowland and a hillside in the fork that the Potomac makes with the Shenandoah - a spit and a hillside lower than the ridge across the river, which is a bad thing during years when people are cannon-oriented. Whenever the Confederates took the town, the Union pounded it from the Maryland hill; when the Union took the town, the Confederates pounded it from the West Virginia hill, though you can bet they didn't think of it as "West Virginia."

Nor did the locals lack rooting interests of their own. The townsfolk and country people thereabouts bitterly - and lethally - divided between pro-Union and pro-Confederate sympathies. There were spies, saboteurs, partisans, guerrillas. Terrorists, to come down to it. Let your gaze wander from the carefully focused historical spotlight, beyond the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac, the almost-nobility of Chickamauga and brutal-but-straightforward Vicksburg, and you notice places - Missouri, Kentucky, the Shenandoah - where our civil war looks a lot like everyone else's: terror, fire, reprisal, hanging, burning, bushwhacking and the discarding of those sentimental categories, bystander and prisoner.

But I was talking about abortion. (I know, I said I was talking about guns. Trust me, I am still talking about guns.) That evening in Harper's Ferry, I explained to the night clerk that, Yes, I could see why someone would be against abortion. But didn't she hear what Dan Quayle had said in response to the ambush question about his daughter during the recent debate? I wasn't wild about abortion either; but I wouldn't agree that my sister should go to jail for trying to have one, nor with jailing the doctor who performed the abortion my sister chose. And if I wasn't willing to subject my own sister to that, why should I be able to subject other people's sisters to that?

There are all kinds of libertarians, which sort of sucks, since maybe if there were fewer we'd amount to something politically. There are anarcho-capitalists, who believe that the market can and should provide all goods including defense; Constitutionalists, who believe that the federal government must contract to fit the enumerated powers as understood before FDR browbeat the Supreme Court into agreeing that Sure, it was up to the federal government whether a man could grow his own wheat to feed his own livestock; minarchists, who support the so-called Night Watchman State, that provides for the common defense and protects against violent crime and fraud and is otherwise nowhere to be found; "pragmatic libertarians" who, when not winning oxymoron contests, argue for maximizing liberty on the grounds that experience shows that freedom makes people happier, more efficient and less quarrelsome; "principled libertarians" who argue for maximizing liberty because rights come from Our Creator or are deducible from elementary postulates of self-ownership. I am a "my sister" libertarian.

Nobody worth performing the Heimlich Maneuver on is going to tell the police they saw their sister smoking pot. Am I okay with my sister going to jail if she sells some pills or her favors? Do I think my sister or brother should be dragged into court if she drains her field or he hires too many people of the wrong color? No. So I have no business supporting a regime that subjects other people's siblings to those things. Would I have to agree that if my sister drowned my niece, or my brother defrauded credit card companies or my mother burned down her building for the insurance, that they should be subject to arrest and imprisonment. Yes, I'm afraid. And a note to you smartypants readers: Not all of the examples in this item have been hypotheticals. So I really do mean it.

Which brings us back to guns - not the guns that citizens might or might not own, but the ones the State most definitely does. Behind every law is a weapon. That goes for all the nice regulatory laws too. Sure, it's only "civil proceedings," but try telling them to tie a tail and a string to their civil proceedings and run into a headwind and its the sherrifs and marshalls who come round to uphold "the majesty of the law." Which ends up in the same place the criminal law does - jail or, if you take the armed fugitive route, death. "Contempt of Court" - dissing da judge - is the thing that judges will lock you up for indefinitely, and on their own say-so, and try checking and balancing that if you don't like it. They don't ask you to go politely, either. It's sherrifs and marshalls time again. For the system to survive, resistance must prove futile. Even the most "innocuous" law has, potentially, the entire weight of the State and the State's monopoly on the legitimate use of violence behind it. I can bitch about the Ravens' stadium deal, but watch what happens if I keep my share in protest and get stubborn.

Frost wrote, "...Before I'd build a wall / I'd ask who I was walling in or out." Before I'd pass a law, I'd ask who might get shot. My purpose is not to argue that "we" can afford an optional system of laws or courts that one can opt out of if one chooses. After all, Frost would and did build walls if he got the right answer to those questions, and I would pass laws if I got the right answer to mine. My purpose is to note the stakes.

Brian Linse kindly observed that he wished I would address some issues I originally left aside when I waded into the Interblog Gun Wars. That is sort of what I am doing in this item. The liberals in the colloquy, Ginger Stampley, Charles Dodgson and Brian, were all good about noting the sorts of police abuses that the libertarians in the argument imagined an armed citizenry could successfully defend against. Charles has made a minor specialty of pointing out police and FBI abuses. The big story in Dallas, Virginia Postrel notes, is "cases involved alleged drug buys during which narcotics officers could not see or hear their paid informant conducting the transactions" and the drugs seized turned out to be crushed wallboard. The police power is a necessary power, but boy is it dangerous.

This is the core problem with contemporary liberalism: liberals can be very good at noting the dangers of police power (though they used, present company excepted, to be a lot better at it); but the liberal program of strengthening the regulatory state amounts to turning more and more of life into police business. Here in Montgomery County, Maryland, we have a County Executive, Doug Duncan, whose enthusiasm for undercover operations seems boundless. Teen smoking? Undercover operations to catch insufficiently zealous store owners. Minority Hiring? Undercover operations to "catch" local businesses not hiring...undercover officers. When there was a brouhaha recently about dog barking I fully expected Doug Duncan to dress cops up in cat suits and troll for trouble. Waco started as a tax case. Show me a law and I'll show you a district attorney who wants to be governor.

"I never saw any of them again," Philip Marlowe says at the end of The Long Goodbye. "Except the police. No way has yet been found to say goodbye to them."

But ways must be found to say, "Some other time." Because that's my sister you're talking about.

The Scandal Shifts - Unqualified Offerings has previously stated, based on news reports, that sworn Jew-Crusader foe John "Dick" Walker grew up within blocks of Unqualified Headquarters in Silver Spring, MD. But today, Best [Neocon-Approved Items] of the Web cites a Washington Post story that locates the Walker-Lindh family's Maryland years in nuclear-free (by law) Takoma Park. Which means the question becomes, What did Thomas Nephew know, and when did he know it?

(Historical Note: On 10/23/01, I wrote to Ginger Stampley, "The blog is up and running. Get yours started and I'll post a link to it. Perhaps one day we can have our own self-referential circle of a handful of sites" like, um, other bloggers out there. Mission accomplished!)

Problems in Early Childhood Education as seen in this abortive attempt at explaining corporate welfare to a five-year old:

Offering Boy: I want the Ravens to win.

Unqualified Offerings: The Ravens are bad, son.

Offering Boy: Why are they bad?

Unqualified Offerings: The Ravens stole Mommy and Daddy's money.

Mrs. Offering (from upstairs): No they didn't!

Unqualified Offerings: Hey!

This Is Sports Center With the Manichees - The NFL's wild card weekend ends with Evil winning three of four games (Eagles-Bucs, Jets-Raiders, Ravens-Dolphins). The fourth (Packers-Niners) was won by Tragically Misguided.

In other sports news, Tom Disch also won this weekend: ABC's promotional intros to the two Saturday games were based on a Lord of the Rings theme, and rather cleverly. Time was, football was about beating up Tolkein fans, not coopting their enthusiasms.

After Blogger - Good jeremiad by Photodude about the need for the blogitocracy to not only be prepared to move off Blogger and especially Blogspot but to actually start doing so. This point especially struck me:

A real curmudgeon might even add that some of you very high traffic individuals contribute greatly to the excess demand placed on the BlogSpot/Blogger servers. Whether you paid your $12 to get rid of an ad or not.

Unqualified Offerings is currently trying to decide between Movable Type and Greymatter for content management. (It has never used Blogspot.) It already, during the Blogger hack, resorted to Textpad and WS_FTP for an evening - not fun. Photodude warns that setup can be complicated. It gives Unqualified Offerings pause that those Houston bloggers did a first, test installation of Movable Type two weeks ago and still haven't cut over their production blogs, and they own even more technical savvy than they do roleplaying games.

A Question of Principles - Toward the end of last year, Unqualified Offerings falsified - somewhat snarkily - the Libertarian Party's claim to be the only US political party founded on a principle. It did this by identifying the principles underlying the Democratic and Green Parties. ("You need us to protect you from your own worst instincts" and "Die, Human Scum!" respectively. But it did not identify a core principle behind the GOP - because it isn't sure there is one. This, then, is a challenge Unqualified Offerings throws out to its Republican readers. (It knows you're out there, Eve Tushnet. Can the Republican Party be said to uphold an articulable principle, and what is it? Unqualified Offerings tends to think Joseph Stromberg has it right when he argues that

When Newt strode history's stage a few years back, he spent much time praising FDR...Conservatism suddenly stood revealed as the conservation of whatever the social democrats had put in place twenty or thirty years earlier, combined with even greater military spending than the social democrats might want.

but it wonders if "Not so fast" is a principle or just an impulse.

You Can Get Anything That You Want - Wide-column guy Emmanuel Goldstein of Airstrip One notes with...amusement is probably the closest word, that his site comes up as result 3 if you search Lycos for the single word "antiamerican." But it was result 4 that Unqualified Offerings got the biggest chuckle out of:

Need Info About Antiamerican demonstrations ? Call Find11(TM)! - Comprehensive guide to golf course living and the country club lifestyle. More than 50 Featured Communities, a database of 400+ communities and a free newsletter...

This Is Sports Center with Unqualified Offerings - Along with messing with Movable Type and the new issue of Liberty, Unqualified Offerings must sacrifice posting time this weekend to - the NFL playoffs! In advance of that, I offer a brief apologia for football. (Note to our overseas readers: I don't mean that game with the round ball, the nets and the spectator riots.)

George Will probably takes the prize for the wittiest denunciation of football: It "combines two of the most disagreeable features of American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings." Will is a baseball man, as is an absurd number of intellectuals and literary people. I have hung out with many literary people in my time, mostly poets, and I've only ever met two writers who would qualify as football fans, the poet R.S. Gwynn and the literary polymath George Garrett. (Note: If anyone wants to start checking up these anecdotes, I guarantee that Garrett will remember neither meeting me nor that I exist at all. But I've heard him speak enthusiastically of the game.)

It's odd that baseball gets the intellectual cachet, since football is a far more intellectually-challenging game. Offensive and defensive playbooks are famously complicated, and their intricacy and depth goes beyond the sheer volume of material to be memorized. Behind an offensive system is a set of principles given concrete expression in a precise vocabulary, combined and recombined into individual plays and entire game plans. Dip into Brian Billick's Developing an Offensive Game Plan or Carroll et al's indispensible The Hidden Game of Football if you don't believe me.

To Will's jibe, I would say, Yes, football is violent. That's part of its value. Violence remains a salient feature of our world, as we have lately been reminded. Football is a way of channeling violence into something that, if the Washington Redskins aren't playing, has a fair chance of becoming beautiful and a better chance of being instructive. (Just tonight football instructed Jet fans that throwing short of the goal line when time is running out and your team is behind can cause heightened levels of anxiety and frustration.) As for the committee meetings (huddles), on one level they are just the temporal capital that funds those complex and beautiful playbooks.

On another level, they contribute to football's distinctive rhythm. In certain moods I would argue that the rhythm of football is why the NFL remains more popular in the US than soccer, hockey or basketball, none of which feature, as their partisans never tire of claiming, rest periods after every significant chunk of action. But that's football's characteristic greatness: the recurring cycle of pause, anticipation, action, resolution, pause. The teams huddle up. They break the huddle and come to the line. Suspense: will the offense run or pass, and how? Will the defense blita, lay off, press receivers, play zones? Is that motion man tipping off the direction of the play, or is he a decoy? Will some great physical effort vitiate an otherwise superb tactic? There is the snap, a period of action that resolves the suspense. And then the pause. During the pause, audience and announcers have time to reflect on what just happened, to discuss it, to watch the play again on instant replay, to consider how what just happened has changed the balance of forces in the game as a whole - if it has. And that brings the cycle ar