Ain't No Dude Without a Task Before Him - Over on AintNoBadDude, Brian Linse wrote:

After reading the memo from FBI agent Rowley, it is impossible to imagine that the American people will continue to have any faith in the agencies that are tasked with protecting us from terrorism. The truly upsetting thing, however, is that President Bush still does seem to have faith in them.

Brian, Dude! The next step is to realize that "the agencies that are tasked with protecting us from terrorism" are not, fundamentally, different in character and competence from the agencies charged with protecting us from risk, destitution and bad hair days, - to wit, the organs of the Welfare State.

I don't bring this up merely to sound like Perry de Havilland. (I just can't help sounding like Perry de Havilland.) I bring it up because it's past time that intelligent folks like you began the hard and, I daresay crucial, work of imagining what a non-statist liberalism would look like.

Try Try Again - Reason recently ran a parody of NRO's The Corner that wasn't, um, funny. This one is. (Via Electrolite.)

Busy as a Bee - It's a canard to argue that people like Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz are nothing but Israeli stooges. No, Paul Wolfowitz wants to run the whole darn world:

In a subtle change of wording U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz on Wednesday stated unambiguously Washington's position on the issue of Taiwan independence.

Briefing reporters in Washington ahead of his attendance in Singapore at an Asian security conference sponsored by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), Wolfowitz stated "we're opposed to Taiwan independence."

You expect Republicans to kibitz on matters Asian, of course, especially as they touch on the Chinese. But you sure don't expect them to punk slap Taiwan. Before Osama elbowed his way to the front of the line, China was the preferred rivalry the National Greatness types hoped to gin up into the organizing principle of US policy. So what happened? Oh:

Speculation has emerged among conservative commentators that during Hu's visit the Bush administration sought and gained Beijing's cooperation in the next phase of the U.S.-led war on terror ¡X namely military action in Iraq. In return, there have been suggestions that Washington may have agreed not to irritate Beijing over Taiwan, leading to the current toned-down rhetoric and weak U.S. support for the island in its recent World Health Organization (WHO) bid.

With respect to Iraq, Wolfowitz stated that while no decision had yet been made about possible military action, the United States was firmly committed to tackling the menace posed by countries that sponsor terrorism and seek to acquire weapons of mass destruction. "As he (President Bush) said in the State of the Union message, that's not something we can continue living with forever," said Wolfowitz.

For his part, Hu was said to have returned home satisfied with U.S. support for Beijing's "one China" policy and assurances of not supporting Taiwan independence. Hu was also able to secure the pledge of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that Washington and Beijing would work toward renewed military-to-military exchanges that were curtailed following the EP-3 incident over Hainan Island in April 2001.

Democrats grumble that George W. Bush "wasn't really elected." But it's worse than that. In a weird way, the US seems like it's being run by Saddam Hussein. The extent to which this Mesopotamian pissant, at best a regional headache, has come to dominate our national life is nothing short of dumbfounding. Did I miss some abdication ceremony?

More NBA - The irony is that while the NBA's unfathomable refereeing is the worst thing about the sport, its unfathomable salary cap is probably the best. Nobody understands how it works - I doubt there are a dozen journalists in the country that could really explain it; heck, I suspect a minority of most team administrators could tell you how it works. I figure there's a two-man shop in the league office that does the whole thing in an Excel sheet with incomprehensible links "to another workbook. Do you want to update those links now?" One of them will produce pie charts on request. Sure hope they don't root for any specific team!

But however it works, the NBA has reached the Holy Grail of professional salary structures: The players get paid; the owners cap expenses; the rosters hit what I would argue is the "sweet spot" of stability. Trades are few, but they happen. (Both Sacramento and New Jersey owe a lot of their success this season to a single smart trade apiece - for Mike Bibby in Sacramento's case and, for New Jersey, Jason Kidd.) Players retire, players get drafted, occasionally they get cut. A handful switch teams during free agency. However, rosters seem to turn over less each season than they do in the NFL or MLB. While the occasional team attempts to completely rebuild, you don't see the ubiquitous roster overhauls that characterize the NFL offseason for almost every team in that league.

Basketball has cleverly structured their cap so that a free agent can almost always make significantly more money re-signing with his current team than switching. For that reason and that reason alone, Chris Webber stayed in Sacramento. For that reason and that reason alone, the Kings, if they advance to the finals Sunday, will do it the old-fashioned way - by having worked to become incrementally better than the incumbent champions over time. You don't get that in football any more. Instead you get a random reshuffling of the talent level and a sui generis season every year.

I'll take basketball's talent management system over football's any day. If only the sport's other problems - a pointless grind of a regular season; officiating seemingly intended to inspire paranoia - didn't largely blow the deal.

Advantage: Random Reminiscences? - Mike "Epoch" Sullivan has a game-oriented weblog called "Random Reminiscences" rather than "I Can't Be Bothered to Provide Item-Specific Permalinks." In that weblog he claims to have hated Netscape 4 longer than Unqualified Offerings has! Ah but do you hate it as much, Mike? That is the question. Does Mike have anything to say that matches "It's the 8-track of browsers" for pith and vinegar? Call UO Eve Tushnet, but this suggests a contest: Submit your own brief bit of vituperation against Netscape 4.x. Unqualified Offerings will print the best here, guaranteeing the winner fame, fortune and honor. It says so here.

More Hard Thoughts About Iraq - Selenously psuedonymous Diana Moon disdains Arabs and the diplomats who love them. But she says an arab-loving diplomat offers the most insight into the dynamics of US Iraq policy.

The Trial - Over on Ideas, Etc., Kevin Holtsberry complains about the officiating in (what is now) last night's Lakers-Kings game. Hey, he's right! Aside from an evident bias toward the Lakers, it's hard to see any logic behind the way the game was called. (The more mild-mannered may prefer to call it a bias toward the home team.) NBA officiating is so bizarre, when not downright suspicious, that I just can't enjoy the sport the way I'd like to. I've watched less of the playoffs this year than any year in the last five. It wears on one. (No, of course I don't watch regular season NBA games. Do I look immortal? Life is precious.)

It occurs to me that in its sheer unfathomability, NBA officiating perfectly matches NBA financial rules. To pull a Paglia (quote myself):

Basketball's cap is so complex that no one even tries to explain it - you find any number of football articles explaining, at least on summary level, the effect of this player's bonus acceleration or that player's roster incentive on the team's cap number. No basketball article says more than "salary cap restrictions prevent/require Team X from [blank]."

The question becomes, is there any aspect of the sport that is intelligible. It's not the tattoos...

Anyway, Kings win on Sunday, as Kevin says. In Sacramento, some of the calls and non-calls will go the other way. Oh, and congrat's to Ken Goldstein's beloved Nets.

Small Emergency Backup Blog - In all the excitement, Unqualified Offerings has gotten locked out of its own blog. Since posting a brief item on Tuesday, UO has been unable to log in to Movable Type with the same login that has worked for months now. (Recall that UO has other blogs.) Weird. Top minds are working on the problem. In the meantime, you get the old look because this is the old tool - this site had not deleted its blogger account yet, so what the heck. It's retro. It's the blog equivalent of a throwback uniform. What doesn't appear on the main page are the MT-published posts from Monday-Thursday. However, they're available on the new May archives page.

UPDATE: Thanks, as usual, to Kathy Kinsley, Unqualified Offerings has successfully recovered its password and resecured its site. We return you to your regularly-scheduled blog.

None Dare Call It Quagmire - Well, except for Charles Dodgson, who has noticed that the war in Afghanistan and, increasingly, Pakistan, refuses to be finished already.

Meanwhile Bruce Baugh has been asking himself a couple of hard questions about Iraq.

Reading Around II - Istanblog says the real pre-9/11 mistakes continue to this day:

Why is the Bush administration so fixated on these three countries? Granted, these are not warm and cuddly places. But none has directly attacked the US - sure, we've tangled with them in neighboring countries, the Iranians did nasty stuff to Americans in their country during their revolution. But we are facing a group, and a political-religious movement, which has bombed two embassies, attacked a navy ship, killed 3,000 people in New York city and successfully attacked the Pentagon. Their sponsors are still the dominant political and social force in Saudi Arabia, and are allowed to roam in nuclear-armed Pakistan.

The Bush administration's fixation on the Axis of Evil Rogue Nations appears to have distracted the FBI and CIA from al-Qaeda prior to 9/11. Will this fixation hurt us again?

Gee, do ya think?

Reading Around - It's this site's gaming night, so posting today will be light to nonexistent. Fortunately, there is an embarrassment of reading riches over at Eve-Tushnet.com. Eve has a couple of thoughtful items taking off from Virginia Postrel's recent article on name fashions. She offers a thorough demolition of Wendell Berry, who deserves it for, if nothing else, a particularly interminable poem about, among other things, killing your own chickens, that ran in the Hudson Review in the mid-90s. How the farm bill hurts the world's foreign poor, and more besides.

Hello, Loyal Readers! Actually, I'm kidding about that part. Most of you are on vacation! What's a week at the beach compared to reading "US News and Mary Jane" as soon as it comes out, huh?

Don't answer that.

Anyway, Unqualified Offerings has not been posting sparsely since the holiday because it was off having fun. No, Unqualified Offerings was busy intensifying its hatred of Netscape 4.x. The Movable Type-driven revision to the the weblog that you see currently took about two hours to set up for Internet Explorer, Netscape 6.x and Opera 6.

It's taken about four days to make the thing work in Netscape 4, aka the Browser From Hell.

Why do we do it? Because we love you, even though we hate your browser.

Who are we?

Now it can be revealed, arguably loyal reader: This site comes to you thanks to the strenuous efforts of a bellicose woman and a peaceful man. Dave Saia made a personal, on-site visit to Unqualified Headquarters to help UO upgrade highclearing.com's Movable Type installation from 1.4 to 2.11. He also pitched in on the Netscape 4 problem too - generating a script we ended up not using for now and giving Unqualified Offerings some insight into issues involving nested tags.

The heroine of the conversion is Webmistress Kathy Kinsley, of On the Third Hand fame. It is as if Kathy set out to single-handedly refute Andrew Sullivan's contention that there's no such thing as the blogging community.

Kathy brought a hacker-level understanding of Movable Type, a professional's insight into the ins and outs of the Browser From Hell, and a geek's refusal to admit defeat. In the end, she helped Unqualified Offerings reach its goal of a readably ugly viewing experience for NS4 users, along the way battling rogue columns and disappearing text. She didn't even demand that Unqualified Offerings support invading Iraq for a day or anything like that. The previous test messages - which this site has voted to retain - are addressed to her.

A NOTE TO READERS WHO USE NETSCAPE 4: Stop that. NS4 is a bridge to the 20th century. It's the 8-track player of browsers. They spent an entire dot-release adding a Shop button while web standards passed them by. There are plenty of good, modern browser options out there. Hate Microsoft? No problem. Don't use Windows? No problem. Love Sun and AOL? No problem. Heck, my NS6 download was half the size of my NS4.7 download this weekend.

This site is sorry for sounding cranky. It should sound more polite, like Patrick Nielsen Hayden does in his NS4-only view of Electrolite.

This site will look much better in a browser that supports web standards, but its raw text is accessible to any browser or Internet device. If you're using Netscape 4.x, please consider using almost any other modern browser. Recent versions of Internet Explorer (for both Windows and the Macintosh), of Mozilla and its several variants, of Opera, and for that matter Netscape 6.x should work fine. A bas le Netscape 4!

UO should try "please" too. Anyone who reads this site is doing it a kindness, however they choose to read it. But hey, you might miss something. Frex, you lose text at the right side of Kevin Holtsberry's blog. Moira Breen's content block gets munged in minor ways and her sidebar gets totally hosed in NS4 - and you don't want to miss out on Moira Breen. And if you use NS4, you have no idea what I was talking about a few days ago when I was burbling over the snazzy new look of Instapundit.com. More Than Zero Sum? Less than meets the eye in NS4. You have no idea how much more pleasant a layout it is in, well, a real browser. Ones and Zeros' design survives better, but you get the same "ransom note effect" through NS4 that you now get here.

Most of all, think of the Unqualified Offerings experience itself. This site is ugly in Netscape 4. In modern browsers it rises to the level of undistinguished. Don't you want that for yourself? Your family?

Tests Are Back - Okay, so as soon as you add in a second quote you're back to a ransom-note effect in NS4. Somehow it's losing the DIV style info and falling back to the default para style. Since the P tag goes undefined so far in the site's CSS, that means we're in readably-ugly land. Also, it took me barely not quite this long to realize why you couldn't do a P-class called quote instead of SPAN or some such: You couldn't do a multipara block with a p-class. You'd have to use it around every paragraph of the quoted text. (I know this is what you recommend anyway, Kathy, but I'm not giving up so easily!)

Readably ugly but complete is certainly good enough for NS4 users, IMHO.

Test 3 - This next message is for testing autogenerated code with multiple text blocks:

First and most importantly: Thank you.

Second and less importantly: I think the NS4 version is fine and there's no reason to go to a separate style sheet. It doesn't sound like stripping all the styles out solves the nested tags "problem" anyway.

Third: On the nested tags. I learned to use in-line blockquote and list tags because otherwise Blogger overspaced before and after the block. I see now how that causes the quote tags to fall inside a single set of paragraph tags. Here's a question: Would it be possible to get around the problem by

1) Hitting two carriage returns before and after quote-blocks so MT creates the para tags.

2) Reformatting the before spacing and after spacing of BLOCKQUOTE inside the style sheet, so you don't get the excessive gaps.

My problem with turning off para-tag generation and such approaches is that the whole reason for using a CMS is to make it tons easier to concentrate on writing rather than coding. It seems like dropping back to what amounts to tagging everything manually is an admission of defeat somehow.

What I particularly want to see are what tags are generated inside the blockquote tags.

Hm! I just tried something new within MT that almost eliminates overlapping tags entirely - stick the open-block tag on inline with the introductory message text. Then double space. That closes one para and opens a new one. At the end of the quoted text another double-carriage return, then put the close-block tag in-line with the next message body paragraph. You get an overlap there too. What you don't get is text swallowed up.

3) Make functionally new tag using the code module function of MT? Essentially it's

<$q$> = </p><blockquote><p>
</$q$>=</p?></blockquote><p> and use inline like always.

Or define a new span class, e.g. "quote", with appropriate padding/margins/what-have-you. Then you have

<$q$> = </p><span class="quote"><p>
</$q$>=</p?></span><p> and use inline like always.

Or cut out the middleman and make it a p-class:

<$q$> = </p><p class="quote">
</$q$>=</p?></p> and use inline like always.

I was wondering if it gets worse with two blocks. I'm about to find out.

Test2 - Also what it says.

Ce N'est Pas Un Blog (Encore) but it's getting damned close, thanks to hard work by philanthropists to be revealed shortly.

What you should be seeing is:

• A white page background.


• A brighter title color than the blogger-created page.


• Two light green columns - a left column with link info etc. and a right column with the actual blog entries.


• For the time being, link and author info appear below posts rather than above.


• Movable Type defaults to Verdana rather than Arial. I've chosen not to fight this.

It's been tested in IE 5.5 and 6, NS 6.2, Opera 6 and (ick!) NS 4/7, all for Windows. The truest renditions are in NS and IE6. The logo/description relation is a little off in Opera, and NS4 is missing various borders and formatting - you know, boldface and italics and such. We like to think that the code comes across more or less well in browsers on other operating systems. I believe we'll be cutting over the main blog to Movable Type by this evening.

Test - Like it says

US News and Mary Jane - In which two threads become one.

Today I made the connection between the US News story about teen sex and - Mary Jane Watson, love of Peter Parker's life. (For the purpose of this item, we are sticking to the continuity of the Spiderman movie, not the comics.)

My thesis is that the now-famous girls in the beginning of the magazine article are Mary Jane, that she gives us another way to understand them and they give us another way to understand her. I comes down to this: worry less.

Among the things Spiderman is is a coming-of-age movie. But not just Peter Parker's coming of age: it's also about the maturation of Mary Jane Watson. (There is a structural sexism to the movie that undermines its Mary Jane thread somewhat, but that's best dealt with in a separate post.) The movie is so good at "Peter and MJ Grow Up" that it more than compensates for being less good at "The Green Goblin: Spiderman's Twisted Father Figure."

Mary Jane's very first act in the movie is an unforced decency, prevailing on the school bus driver to stop for Peter. The deed establishes an essential goodness as the baseline of her character. Her very next act is blameworthy: When Peter boards the bus, she ignores him as pointedly as any of the other kids do. She sticks her neck out, then draws it quickly back in. She will do more on Peter's behalf than any other member of the in-crowd. What she won't do is leave the in crowd.

MJ is shallow. She squeals with unfeigned delight over her boyfriend's new car. Her boyfriend is the school's top jock. The movie is rated PG, so sex will not be openly discussed, particularly not teen sex, but you can easily imagine her at that table with the reporter, talking about The Deed. In fact, there she is:

"I was just having that exact conversation with my boyfriend. Once you have sex, every time you hook up, you have sex," adds Lara, who also wonders whether "it's normal, the way he talks to me. He does have a temper and stuff."

That is the part of the Mary-Jane-and-Flash-Thompson story they keep offscreen. But there she is at graduation, stuffing Flash's ring into his big mitt and telling him she never wants to see him again.

We grow in fits and starts. (Unqualified Offerings sure hopes it's not just him...) Her low point, her moment of greatest moral danger, comes a few scenes later - not when she turns out to be working as a waitress, but when she tries to lie about it. You know she's turned the corner the next time she and Peter meet. MJ is coming out of an audition, and tells Peter straight out that she not only didn't get the part, she didn't come close. Thereafter she starts to set higher standards for herself and those around her, rebuking boyfriend Harry for insufficient loyalty and becoming, for all her gushing infatuation with Spiderman, more soberly choosy about what she expects from men: devotion, humor, respect.

It is sort of the sexist part that MJ's coming-of-age story focuses largely on her changing taste in men. And yet, swapping shallow standards for romantic interests for deeper, steadier ones is part of growing up for both sexes. You can make a case that Mary Jane travels further down this road than Peter Parker does: one suspects that Peter so loves his idea of Mary Jane Watson that he hardly knows what to do with the real woman when she finally becomes available. Since Mary Jane is a supporting character in the story of a male protagonist, the parts of her story that most relate to his are the ones that will get told. But the screenplay packs enough else in - acting, her relationship with Peter's Aunt May - to suggest the non-romantic dimensions of her growth.

Non-romantic - nonsexual - dimensions of the US News interview subjects are just what the magazine is not going to give us. Thankfully, we have the movies. Girls grow up. They figure stuff out. "They were no longer little girls. They were little women," as a book once ended. The girls in the article aren't "played out." They're just beginning to figure out the game.