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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Me, I believe it would have been even worse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To me the more interesting question is whether author Virginia Lee Burton is a dynamist or a stasist, because I discovered that the more time I spent thinking about Mike Mulligan the book, the more I realized that Burton treats the very question Postrel poses with great sophistication - were her book longer and lacking pictures, we'd call her a novelist of ideas. There is a very real parallel between Mike Mulligan's story and that of John Henry, the Steeldrivin' Man. Both tell the story of a brave man's last-ditch struggle against the technology succeeding him. There is also a very real irony that Burton can't have missed: Mike Mulligan's steam shovel, Mary Anne, is the technology that succeeded John Henry. There were no steam shovels in Eden, nor in Arcadia. In the early part of the book, Burton leaves no doubt that the newfangled steam shovels really are more productive. Mike has a very personal loyalty to a specific machine, Mary Anne. (Again, for non-reciters of children's books Mary Anne is not a talking steam shovel and is only lightly anthropomorphized.) But in a divergence from John Henry, he does not try to outdo the newfangled diesel shovels at their own game; rather, he lights out for the territory, looking for an economic niche in which he and Mary Anne still provide value. Burton's sly-est dynamist maneuver is the story's famous ending. Mike indeed manages to dig the cellar for the new town hall in a day, through skill, courage and endurance. But in the fury of his effort to meet the deadline, he forgets to make a ramp for Mary Anne to climb out of the job site. Mary Anne is trapped. So like John Henry, Mary Anne finds herself in a "dead end." But here again, there are significant divergences.

The less important one is the one I've recognized for some time. Even trapped in the hole, Mary Anne still finds a purpose. She becomes the furnace for the new town hall. The way the world assimilates Mary Anne's enduring value - her furnace and sturdy construction - into the post-steamshovel world parallels the fate of The Little House, as I remember it. The more important divergence hit me just now. John Henry dies. Mike Mulligan does not. Mary Anne is trapped in the pit, but Mike can and does climb free. Mary Anne is not a "person." The condition of the human being, aka the human condition, improves from the earlier story to the later. Why is this important? Because that is the whole reason for technological progress, to make life nicer, richer, gentler and, especially, longer. Because Mike was already the beneficiary of "progress," Mike meets a gentler fate than his forebear.

Of course, on the downside, he becomes a public employee!

More Fun With John Walker - Do hip kids today still sport "Join the army, travel to exotic places, meet interesting people and kill them" t-shirts? I ask because of this passage from a San Francisco Chronicle column:

Beyond just religious tolerance, young people here are taught from an early age to accept other cultures and peoples. Young people are also encouraged to travel abroad, often through official school programs. More importantly, many parents can afford to underwrite these international odysseys.

Which would, in John Walker's case, amount to "Join al Qaeda, travel to interesting places, meet interesting people and kill US." Or whoever al Qaeda felt needed killing, anyway.

Credit where credit is due: Best [Neocon-Approved Items] of the Web has sport with the same column today, saying, "Columnist Louis Freedberg describes the 20-year-old traitor as "a product of Bay Area culture"--which of course he is, but Freedberg thinks that's a good thing."

Public Service Announcement - Ginger Stampley has a link to a Slate article that actually tracks the origin of the "4000 Jews" canard. In a transparent bit of logrolling, Unqualified Offerings will require its reader to go to Ginger's site to get the link.

Robert Frost Award - Our greatest libertarian poet famously said, "A liberal is a fellow who is so broad-minded he won't take his own side in a quarrel." The connection between Frost's adage and the already-famous, dare we say classic? Robert Fisk article in which the author sympathizes with an Afghan mob that nearly beat him to death is left as an exercise for the reader.

You Say al Qaeda, I Say... - It's probably grammatical enough to say, as some media organs increasingly do, "Qaeda" rather than "al Qaeda," but it bugs me for some reason. Just had to get that off my chest.

The Spoor of the Spores - According to an MSNBC.com report "According to intelligence sources, U.S. operatives in Afghanistan have collected information that one or more Russian scientists were working inside Afghanistan with Qaeda operatives. One well-placed source told NEWSWEEK that evidence from the scene indicates that the renegade Russians were helping Al Qaeda to develop anthrax, and that spores of the deadly disease may actually have been stockpiled by the terrorist group." It might be true. (As they say everywhere but Pakistan apparently, Don't believe what you read in the papers.) And if it's true, it's at least a circumstantial link between al Qaeda and the US anthrax attacks. Not a slam dunk link - if you want to get into germ warfare at all, you get into anthrax, and there may be lots of your less savory NGOs interested in getting into germ warfare - but a link.

What it's not is a link between the US anthrax attacks and Iraq. Because if al Qaeda could hire their own renegade Russians to work inside Afghanistan, not only is there no evidence for Iraqi involvement, there isn't even any need for it. Iraq hawks have been softpedalling claims of Iraqi involvement in the airplane and anthrax attacks lately. They've been following the government's lead and talking about Iraqi "potential" and "resolve." And the usual anonymous sources are indicating that Iraq is not the next target. Working on a "Shitholes First" plan, the talk is of hitting camps in Somalia, Sudan and maybe Yemen. (Travel advisory: Don't camp in these places.) Meantime the Administration is pushing for a reintroduction of "UN inspectors" into Iraq. Eerie Prescience Bid: the idea is likely to get the inspectors in, then claim that Saddam is not cooperating with the inspection regime, building the complaints into a casus belli.

There's Your Trouble - In a generally moving Washington Post Magazine story about an Afghan-American victim of the World Trade Center massacres in New York, a Pakistani cousin of the dead man tells the reporter, "I'm not sure [Osama bin Laden] is the one, in my heart, because we were always told in the newspapers that he is a true Muslim." Is this the explanation for Pakistan's sorrowful 50-plus year history, the people who live there believe what they read in the newspapers?

Even Without Andrew Sullivan you can keep up with the latest pronouncements of the Iraqi Communist Party by bookmarking their official website. The website is commie-ugly, and, in the absence of wholesome profit motive, has two German articles on the english-language version of the site. One of the nice things about the last ten years has been the comparative lack of communist prose stylings to read, but if you're feeling nostalgic for jargon and clumsy syntax, try "NO to the War Option." Now for the good news: There is a button bearing the caption "Learn more about ICP." If you don't click it, nothing happens.

Communications Strategies for the Twenty-First Century - Taking off from an offhand remark in a piece of crank e-mail, Michael "No Need to Put my Anchors at the TOPS of Posts!" Croft has published a useful analysis of options for sowing your wild memes. Very worthwhile.

So This Is What It's Come To - Andrew Sullivan passes on the following story, with an admission that it is, in journalistic terms, unconfirmed:

Not sure whether this story is checkable, but opposition groups in Iraq claim that Saddam is now gassing his political prisoners in specially built gas chambers. Any further confirmation of this story is welcome. Here’s the link from the Kuwaiti Times.

And if you follow that link? You find that the "opposition groups" is (not are) - the Iraqi Communist Party.

Communist parties used to lie about stuff involving their enemies, didn't they? When did they stop doing that?

And...? David Ignatius writes today in his Post column that

My own sense is that the best hope for stabilizing this conflict lies in practical changes that convince ordinary Israelis and Palestinians that their lives are getting better. I wouldn't make "peace" the goal -- that's too hopeful for now -- but simply "stability." A more stable situation, for starters, would be one in which parents felt their children were safe...This time the United States should insist that the parties do something real, on the ground -- now -- to address the problems that drive people crazy in their daily lives. President Bush should assemble a coalition for peace, as determined as the coalition for war that has triumphed in Afghanistan, to reassure both sides as they take steps to end the violence and restore stability.

Minor problem: Ignatius gives no hint whatsoever what specific "real, on the ground" things the parties, a coalition, or the gods themselves could do.

Megalomania Watch - In a fit of hubris, Unqualified Offerings has added a "best of" section to the left. It did this because it optimistically believes its readership has grown from the original three people, not including the author, past the "high one-figure" plateau into the stratosphere of "upwards of a dozen." UO has simply unearthed some items it is content to be judged by.