Music Notes - Having still not moved most of its applications from the old computer, Unqualified Offerings has used music, both streaming and downloaded, to remind itself what a pleasingly fast machine it now owns. To that end, UO has discovered a nice college radio station, KEXP, from Seattle.

Also, you can get two preview MP3s from the forthcoming Elvis Costello album, When I Was Cruel, from a major fan site. They are pretty legit, having been released through rollingstone.com. "45" is especially good, though I'll admit to a moderate preference for the early acoustic versions available on fan-produced bootlegs. I'm not completely sold on "Take Off Your Head (It's a Doll Revolution)" yet.

Update: KEXP is playing Robbie Fulks right now!

Disadvantage: Unqualified Offerings! - Andrew Hofer invents a new badge of shame in his "Rapid Droppings" sidebar and pins it on John Feinstein:

The first observation of Ad Axisem in the WSJ:John Feinstein - "Axel of Evil"
...

Yup. Fixed skating. That's a lot like sponsoring terrorism and developing "WMD's".

But Unqualified Offerings was there first!

Let This Cup Pass From My Lips - Andrew Sullivan writes today that

What that event did was end isolationism. What it proved is that a reluctance to get involved in the world wasn't merely a moral or strategic choice of whether to intervene in other countries - i.e. Bosnia, Haiti, Somalia, Rwanda. It was a matter of necessity to prevent an attack on America itself.

In the few years before the massacres of September 11, 2001, American neo-isolationists from Cato to Chronicles, and likely quite a number of pinkos too, argued that American foreign policy, especially in the Middle East, threatened to inspire massive terroristic violence against the United States. The least one can say is that massive terroristic violence against the United States by Middle Eastern terrorists doesn't falsify their claims.

Sullivan concludes that

the empire so feared by people like Gore Vidal is no longer a theory. It is a reality. This preponderance of real global power is literally unique in the history of the world. And the one thing holding it back - America's ambivalence and isolationism - is lying in the rubble of the World Trade Center. The further you get from America, the clearer this is. And we have only begun to think through the full consequences.

Now he tells us.

What a Relief - Unqualified Offerings worried when the fine Balloon Juice blog announced a redesign. (It used to use the same pleasing template as Jason Soon's excellent Catallaxy Files.) However, while this site retains its firm belief that three colors are enough for anyone, it has to appreciate that Balloon Juice has stuck with appropriately narrow, readable columns. Next up: Balloon Juice redesigns the Airstrip One site.

Triple-Axel of Evil - Hey, let's start saying that the figure-skating scandal could be the International Skating Weasels' Enron! They Say that even the referee alleged that the judges were up to funny stuff. The theory is that the French judge lined up with the, uh, Unified Team judges as part of a deal to get UT votes for a gold for a French ice dancing pair later.

Fitting punishment: Let it happen, but require the French to make a solemn public declaration that they take ice dancing seriously.

(In transition from old computer to new. New computer works - just haven't moved everything over yet. So posting pace remains light for the next few days.)

Tech Notes - Fast computers are really fast.

Ghetto Rising - Cutesy remarks below consigned the "science fiction ghetto" to the dustbin of history, and indeed, Unqualified Offerings believes that Tom Disch is largely right: sf now rules the culture. However, prejudice has persisted in dinosaur communities like independent literary bookstores and...the Motion Picture Academy. Seems that whenever I see a fantasy/sf pic bragging that it has been nominated for umpty-ump awards, or one them, it's all for technical awards like special effects, cinematography, best key grip, best fluffer etc. But Lord of the Rings has been nominated for some heavy-hitter awards too - Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor along with the usual cinematography, makeup, musical score, effects suspects.

Free at last, free at last and all that. (Be advised that the Academy Awards are still a racket and you still should not care.)

Split-Screen Republicanism Watch
We do the national greatness stuff abroad and the leave us alone stuff at home.
Andrew Sullivan

Many war-related bits in Best [Neocon-Approved Items] of the Web today. Almost no non-war-related items. Come to think of it, that's the case most days. Pretty soon we'll have to start calling it Picture-in-Picture Republicanism.

Those Who Do Not Learn From History Are Pretty Funny - PendingPundit (aka Air Force Virginia) sends the following report from the Huntington College region of Montgomery, Alabama.

Old Cloverdale is swarming with alterna-kids who are flirting with Marxism on an allowance. Anyway, while at a booth at one of our favorite local restaurant, we found ourselves unable to ignore the strident tones of the hipster at the booth behind ours; let's call him Boho Joe. After spouting a tedious laundry list of all of the BMWs, beach houses and boats that his dad had bought recently, Boho Joe decided to educate his two friends at the table about the Enron "scandal". After proclaiming that 218 members of Congress had accepted contributions of $10K or more from Enron, he announced, and this is a direct quote, "Enron is going to be the Republican's Watergate!"

Au Revoir - A wonderful thing happened this weekend at Unqualified Headquarters - Offering Boy's computer died. It was a hand-me-down from Mommy and Daddy and has commenced the most godawful grinding sound when attempting a POST. (That's Power On Self Test for you post-blog-era babies.) Offering Boy has lots of educational software and really does benefit by having a machine. More importantly, Mr. and Mrs. Offering benefit by not having to share their computer with him.

But it would be overindulgent to buy a brand new computer for a five-year old, wouldn't it.

Hence, UO prepares to sign off so it can set up its new 1.7G P4, with 256MB of Rambus memory, a 40GB hard drive, GeForce2 video card and, oh yes, a 24x10x40 CD-RW. I sense a new entry in the Joys of Capitalism series coming soon. (Unqualified Offerings reluctantly decided that the vile licensing of Windows XP was a lesser evil than the instability of the aging kernel in Windows 98. Ask it again if its mp3's start disappearing.) This site will return once the new machine can reach the net.

Unqualified Offerings - Weekly Standard Parody Edition - Got a nice note from Gary Farber of the Amygdala blog. Having kind words from him and Patrick Nielsen Hayden too makes me feel that I've finally broken out of the libertarian ghetto and into the science fiction ghetto. (Anyone else old enough to remember when there was a science fiction ghetto?) Gary makes an extremely relevant correction to the historical record that Thomas Nephew, Charles Johnson and I managed to mangle. (Note: It is not my intention to spite either Newsrack [Nephew] or Little Green Footballs [Johnson] for links. From Farber's item you can find all relevant documents.) Gary's piece also has several good links to articles on settlements and the "peace" "process" from - gasp! - non-blog sites. You won't get anything like that here tonight!

I got Movable Type successfully installed last week and have started a couple of blogs focused on role-playing game campaigns I am in, partly to get a feel for the program. When I feel good and ready, I'll start the (gasp) conversion.

The bad timing award for the month goes to blog addict Justin Raimondo, who referred to "Reason – which is, itself, formerly a libertarian magazine, and is now just another magazine," and has previously written that Reason now stands for the principle that empire is okay so long as we all have drugs. As he was writing these things, the March issue, with a fiercely anti-interventionist cartoon by Peter Bagge and an article about the difference between prudence and hysteria by Jesse Walker, was in the mail. (I'm leaving aside his ill-mannered and, to my mind, off-base comments about Virginia Postrel and Andrew Hofer because I try to leave aside everyone's ill-mannered comments, with the exception of my own. But Justin is not going to wrest this site's "Dove of the Year" award from Alan Bock like that...)

Now speaking of Andrew Hofer and game theory, I've been thinking of other possible instances of his "threat power" thesis. Many bloggers have cited the following report since December:

In a speech to mark Iran's "Jerusalem Day" on December 14, former President Hashemi Rafsanjani said the establishment of Israel was "the most hideous historic occurrence in history," and the Islamic world "will vomit her out from its midst," according to Peres's letter.

Rafsanjani told a crowd at the stadium in Teheran University that the day is approaching in which the Islamic world will possess atomic weapons.

"On that day, the strategy of the West will hit a dead end, since a single atomic bomb has the power to completely destroy Israel, while an Israeli counterstrike can only cause partial damage to the Islamic world," he said.

Now there are a number of ways of looking at this nasty little utterance. One popular one is to take it straight, as Andrew Sullivan does. My own reaction was that it was the gasbagging of an out-of-work pol, likely having more to do with scoring rhetorical points in some domestic political contest than any imminent operation. But it could be an application of game theory, with at least part of the Iranian government trying to maximize their threat power. The attempt may well come back and bite them in the ass. Dangerous stuff, game theory.