Back in the Saddle - Gary Farber has apparently gotten tired of unpacking boxes at his new place. (He just moved within the last week or so, so there is no chance that he has finished unpacking boxes.) He's returned to lighting up the Amygdala board with item after juicy item, and there isn't a single one of them that you don't need to read. So get thee hence!
Gender Gap If you are
a) a father; and
b) a crass materialist
Unqualified Offerings has some very good news to pass along. Per-household spending for Father's Day has jumped in one year from around $52 to around $95 (projected for this year). That's within two bucks of Mother's Day spending for the first time ever. And since we're not into, like, flowers and shit, presumably we'll get some swag that lasts out of this deal.
Mind you, the top item on this site's wish list blows the lid right off the average.
Cut the Cord - Just deleted the Old Blog on Blogger. We are flying without a net now.
On the Move in the blogosphere:
Grasshoppa has its own domain now. Plus a clean, readable design. (Same one he had on Blogspot actually.)
John Cole of Balloon Juice is back at the keyboard and on the prowl. Unqualified Offerings is grumpy that he didn't acknowledge this site as one of the many that has redesigned recently, but maybe he's a Netscape 4 user or something. John also has a startling revelation: He was "Sgt. Stryker's" pseudonymous sidekick, Sgt. Schultz. Note that, at press time, he had not confessed to also being Stephanie Dupont.
Speaking of the artist formerly known as Sgt. Stryker, his site sports a major redesign too.
Meanwhile, Ideas Etc. is breeding blogs. He's adding separate weblogs for football and books, while contrariwise folding his blog-review endeavor into his main page. A threatened beer blog was killed in the crib.
Kevin also recently celebrated a birthday. Unqualified Offerings wishes him many more, plus the wisdom to reset the text color of his main blog to a nice, readable black from the default MovableType grey.
The delightful and expert Kathy Kinsley also recently celebrated a birthday. There's been a lot of loose hype lately about Sekimori-designed-and-coded weblogs. But Unqualified Offerings would not trade web gurus with anyone.
Mail Call I - Kevin Maroney writes anent code names, Mohammed Atta, Johnelle Bryant and the competence of our sworn foemen.
Indeed!A recent New York Review of Books article on code names for military
operations pointed out that British Intelligence figured out the nature of Operation Seelowe (Sealion) from its name. The Soviets probably figured out Barbarossa from its name, too. It's like bad guys all have read the "How to Be an Incompetent Supervillain" handbook.Further, you say "It suggests that al Qaeda's best and brightest are neither particularly bright nor all that terrific." I have for months been referring to al Qaeda as "hiring people who can't blow off their feet if you put explosives in their shoes". Praise Allah, the merciful and compassionate, for that.
Re the contention of Unqualified Offerings that a professional covert outfit will not give away its intentions by choosing a meaningful code name, I suspect cases like Barbarossa and Sea Lion were what inspired that postwar rule in the first place.
As to the competence of al Qaeda's available humanoid resources, UO is pretty much with Kevin. This site had a long and fruitful conversation about things terroristic with Toiler last night, and some thoughts are still bubbling around. However, for the time being Unqualified Offerings believes that Johnelle Bryant's account of her meetings with Mohammad Atta is bushwa. Unqualified Offerings is not saying that this is a calculated official deceit like, well, John Ashcroft's claim to have prevented a dirty-bomb attack. But it wonders if Bryant isn't like those people who call the police to confess to high-profile murder cases because they want to be helpful and they feel bad about the whole thing.
Sure, Atta likely did meet Bryant in her office. But don't bet on her recollection of the details.
Toiler, by the by, says that the "China theory" is not in his estimate the most probable theory of al Qaeda behavior.
New Frontiers in Desperation among online advertisers. Today, a popup ad scooted away from UO's mouse pointer when it went to close the ad. So this site had to make an extra effort to track it down and kill it. Now that pisses Unqualified Offerings off.
Wilderness of Mirrors - Czech ambassador to the UN Hynek Kmonicek is adamant that Mohammed Atta met Iraqi diplomat/creep Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani in April 2001, according to the Prague Post:
Unqualified Offerings has a soft spot for Czech diplomats and admits to being less convinced the meeting didn't take place than it has been. Mind you, the Czech Republic is not just a NATO member, but one of the most pro-American countries in the EU, so they have a natural desire to say "helpful" things. And there's the point-of-pride angle: if you were Czech intelligence and you did get a little overenthusiastic last fall, you'd have a tendency to stubbornly dig your heels in."At the time [of the meeting] I was in Prague," he said. "It's not like they [the Czech government] sent me a cable saying, 'Say this because you are our ambassador.' It's not like that. I was the person who had to [expel] al-Ani."
As to establishing the meeting, the Czechs could produce their actual evidence - surveillance logs, eavesdropping transcripts and the like. And none of that "sources and methods" crap either. "We follow suspicious foreign diplomats around in multiple cars and train directional microphones on them. Oh, and we tap their phones if possible. Surprise!"
Of course, if it turns out the meeting took place, that doesn't in itself demonstrate Iraqi involvement in 9/11. If you were al-Qaeda, you might arrange to have Atta meet someone from Iraqi intelligence so that it would be discovered. bin Laden denied involvement in the September massacres after the fact. The operation clearly sought at least plausible deniability for al-Qaeda. Laying a trail to another plausible suspect would be a good way to do that.
On the other hand.
That kind of thing can cut both ways. Let's say you were Iraq and you were behind the attacks in Washington and New York. You'd want to lay a trail to another plausible suspect yourself. Like al-Qaeda. al-Qaeda is a pretty loose-knit group, so you can appropriate a few of their human resources to your own purposes. Then you have one of your agents all but tell a US official, "I am an evil agent of Osama bin Laden. That's O-S-A-M-A..." when in fact you are an evil agent of Iraq.
It's a tricky business. Faced with the uncertainties, the average hawk will adopt a Kill 'em all and let god sort them out approach. Innocent as he may be of involvement in the September massacres, Saddam Hussein doesn't belong to the class of fuzzy, big-eyed things.
Unqualified Offerings remains convinced that "you might've" or "you might" are crummy reasons for a republic to go to war, though. That hasn't changed.
Online Quizzes: For Good - Or Evil - Ginger links to two of those online quizzes that have become so popular lately, the ones that are the geek equivalent of the "How Passionate Are You?" self-tests that run in the likes of Redbook and Good Housekeeping. (Conspiracy theorists note: The items originally appeared in What She Really Thinks but have been moved to Ginger's gaming blog. Hm!)
The two tests make an excellent compare and contrast. "Which Superhero Are You" is like all too many of the profusion of self-tests now: Too damn obvious and concomitantly unimaginative. Here are the first two questions from it:
Too put it simply, if it's not crushingly obvious how 1,2,3 and 4 map to a handful of specific superheroes then you aren't the sort of person who would bother to take the test in the first place. PLUS since you know in advance of the scoring which answer maps to which hero, you can aim for the hero you want. You might as well just make like Michael Keaton and say "I'm Batman!" as bother to answer the questions you know will declare you as such. Also, the questions are not stated in ways that map plausibly to the test-taker's own life. Compare an alternate number 2: If I had a superpower I would regard it as: a) a treasured gift; b) a real hoot; c) a burden; d) all of the above. Or you could weight the options, as I've seen in some of the better tests out there.1. If you possessed a super power, what would it be?
Virtual invulnerability, X-ray vision and the ability to fly like an eagle
Catlike agility, a sixth sense and a certain stickability where walls are concerned
A set jaw, pointy ears and a terrible singleness of purpose. What more does one need?
Freakish strength, a brain the size of a pea and the temper of a crazed and goaded hippo
2. You regard your special power as...
A great responsibility to be used solely for the benefit of humankind
An annoying imposition that plays havoc with your love life
As good an excuse as any to rampage through town as a leather-clad vigilante
A hellish curse. Voodoo monsterism. The ruin of countless shirts and trousers
Of course, designing tests to do that would be hard. Putting together Which Superhero Are You is easy. The Which Superhero Are You? test deprives the taker of the chance of personal discovery and wastes one's time.
Now compare the superior What's Your Superpower? The first two questions:
The first thing you can say about What's Your Superpower is that you can't tell where any given question is going. The second thing is that it is a genuine self-test. You're not choosing among the well-known schticks of four obvious heroes. You can meaningfully answer the questions as yourself. In fact, you might as well. Note also that in the first test, option a) maps to the same result for each question, as do options b, c, and d. A is always the "Superman answer," B is always the "Spiderman answer" etc. In the Superpower test, it's by no means clear that "I don't joke" (fourth option of question 1) and "Candy" (fourth option of question two) have anything whatsoever to do with each other. It seems more likely that they do not. In fact, different questions in the Superpower test have different numbers of choices, from as many as six to as few as two.1. How would you describe your sense of humor?
I'm usually considered to be pretty funny. I'm the first to crack a joke
I'm not much of a joker, but can have a good laugh now and then.
I like physical humor, and love a good prank.
I don't joke.
I don't laugh much, it's just the way that I am.
2. Which food do you like best?Red Meat
Fish
Vegetables
Candy
Doesn't matter - as long as there's LOTS
The arguable weakness of this second, better test is that the connection between "your super power" and your answers doesn't necessarily strike the test-taker as inevitable. But Unqualified Offerings can't gainsay
 |  |
All the great heroes can fly. And thats what I am, a great hero. I am well rounded. I have a good sense of right and wrong. I seek to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people, but my friends always come first, especially if it's a romantic interest. Despite my amazing gifts, I prefer a quiet position away from the limelight, maybe among the clouds. |
(Note: If you're a Netscape 4 user, you're missing some text inside the lower-right box of the table above. Nothing urgent, but may Unqualified Offerings remind you that there are better, newer browsers out there.)
UPDATE: Ginger e-mails to say Unqualified Offerings is getting old and weak-minded, though that's not how she puts it. "I don't publish online quiz results anywhere except on my gaming blog," she writes, "and since WSRT and TFD aren't even on the same MT installation, it's hard to post to one when I mean to post to the other." Next she'll be claiming that a half-educated street punk with a frequent flyer card is not the sort of person you'd ask to acquire radioactive material for you.
A Bridge to the 21st Century - Unqualified Offerings now pings weblogs.com when it updates. That's supposed to enable regular readers to be alerted when there's new material here. It's all very technical and scientific, but Ginger Stampley seems to understand it.
Useful Contact Info - Much as been written about the unaccountably nameless parents who had a lawyer threaten to sue a teacher in Arizona for flunking their daughter. (See Joanne Jacobs and the Arizona Republic story she cites.) Now Natalie Solent has dug up contact information for the high school, the school district and - oh yes! - the lawyer. With long distance rates lower than ever, you might find them worth using:
Sunrise Mountain High School 623-487-5125
Peoria AZ Unified School District 623 486-6000
Attorney Stan F. Massad 623-487-8100
People at those numbers should be able to answer any questions you may have about why they do the things they do.
Spot the Traitor - No, it's not Unqualified Offerings adjunct fellow Kevin Maroney writing to another blogger. UO keeps a big tent, with big flapping flaps or whatever. Yes, it's Jose "Al Muhajir" Padilla. But in this fine and savage item, Avedon Carol's suspect list is considerably longer than that.
Read the whole thing. Note that fast-becoming-a-usual-suspect Michael Kelly plays a minor villain, which has become something of a trend. Developing...The Soviet Union had to pay Robert Hanssen a million bucks to spy on us for them. But even he didn't give away American secrets on television.
Coming Attractions - Got good e-mails about spectrum, codenames and Johnelle Bryant; plus vague plans to respond to Brendan O'Neill's "Do you or don't you support the war and why" challenge; a mainstream Republican critique of lewrockwell.com; some thoughts on Jason Soon, Abraham Lincoln and the Know-Nothings; plus thoughts on Eve Tushnet's major piece on the Middle East and more. Of course, I'll also be working late tonight, so we'll just have to see how everything shakes out.
In other news, Natalie Solent is back, and she's been drinking.
Our Long Virtual Nightmare Is Over - More or less. Regular readers of What She Really Thinks know that this site suffered a MovableType database meltdown. The ultimate solution involved reimporting all entries. That means that the site hasn't lost any items (not even the ones it would have profited by losing...) but I suspect any previous item-specific links are now broken. So apologies to those who have recently linked to individual posts here.
Bloggage resumes on the other side of a good night's sleep.
Et Tu? - Now it's Andrew Sullivan, of no-item-specific-links-that-work.com, who claims to have "Gone Fishing?" Does anyone really believe him? Remember, blogfans, only trust political diarists who really go fishing when they say they are.
This Will Go Down UP on Your Permanent Record - For a dozen years, Unqualified Offerings took job applications from graduates of the DC public school system. It got real angry doing this, seeing the misspellings of ordinary words, the poor grammar, the pitiful inability to follow directions. As far as UO was concerned, at the very least the administrators of the school system were good prospects for a civil fraud case, and there were days it believed that the criminal fraud provisions should apply. I'm not talking about fraud perpretrated against me, the employer. I mean the fraud perpetrated against their former students. These young people were being given diplomas, a claim that they had received an education.
Yes, the experience had a lot to do with my eventual turn towards libertarianism, and no, I don't believe it was a matter of money - per capita DC schools funding is among the highest in the nation.
Today's Post contains a story about something very close to actual fraud in the DC public schools. At Wilson High School, one of the top public schools in the city, a teacher discovered that administrators were raising student grades after teachers submitted them, without consulting the teachers. This is not just iffy-sounding, it's a violation of the city's contract with the teachers' union.
Two of the changed grades are bizarre.Of the 250 to 300 cases that he reviewed, Martel said, he found 29 Wilson grades that appeared to have been improperly inflated. In 11 of those cases, teachers confirmed to a reporter that the grades they awarded were later boosted without their knowledge. In the other 18 cases, the teachers involved either did not return phone calls or could not be located.
There may be more funny business too, including students getting credit for courses they didn't take and transfer students having grades from their old schools retroactively raised when they transfer to a new one. As they say, developing...Wilson teacher Damian Kreske said two of his students' grades were changed in a zoology class. He said the first student came to class for only three weeks of the semester and the second student "disappeared from class the second half of the semester and never returned."
He said he gave the first student an F, which was later changed to a D, allowing the student to graduate last year. He gave the second student an I for "Incomplete," which is supposed to become an F if the student fails to finish the work. But the grade was changed to a C. That student is to graduate this year.
Whadda We Want? MINDFUL Violence! - We being US sportsfans! (Eve, you're excused from this item.) WashPost Metro columnist Marc Fisher says the reason soccer will never catch on in the states is its lack of - intellectual appeal.
Cf. Oh yes! Unqualified Offerings on the intellectual virtues of American football, from January.During four years I spent in Germany, a bona fide soccer country, I covered the game and the fan riots that mark both victory and defeat (either outcome is an excuse for car burnings and rending of garments).
That soccer inspires deep emotion cannot be denied. But there turne out to be little tie between that passion and the deep analysis of strategy that is commonplace in American sports...
Which is not to say our sports are gentle. We like 'em plenty rough, too. But our sports do not celebrate futility as soccer does. Our sports include action on a fairly regular basis. And our sports reward rigorous study.
What about the dream of soccer promoters that all those little kids who now play the sport will grow up to be eager spectators? Fisher does not believe, Wendy:
Sadly, Unqualified Offerings cannot provide you with a link to the entire article at this time. It can not presently be found on the Post's website. (Yes, this site typed the quoted material for you, its loyal readers, by hand. (Perhaps it appears there secretly, as part of a message to internet-using terrorists.) Here's the Post's Marc Fisher index page, where a link should appear in due course. Unless Big Soccer gets to them...Don't hold your breath. Soccer appeals to little kids and their parents because it's easy and safe; kids run around for an hour and go eat cookies. It's the perfect game for a generation of parents who;ve never met a safety device they didn't immediately declare a necessity. No one gets hit by a pitched ball, pops a knee on a bad pivot or breaks a bone in a tackle.
Radio Radio - Matt Welch links to a Kate Sullivan interview with music-industry weasel Mel Karmazin of Viacom.
Mr. Viacom is evil, evil! But I can't endorse her conglomeration is the fault of deregulation thesis:
On a minor level, the odious rules against microbroadcasters are themselves regulations, enforced at the behest of large commercial stations and those weasels at PBS. On a major level, I can't shake the suspicion that the government's original declaration from the 20s that spectrum was a scarce resource created facts rather than reflecting them. Consider how much more efficient everything imaginable has gotten since the 20s - engines, computing devices, and yes, antennae - and ask yourself how come we still "need" .4MHz to either side of every FM station?The reason four companies control radio is because of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. For most of radio's history a company was allowed to own only two radio stations in any given "market" (one each of Am/FM), and a total of 7 stations nationwide. These laws were written to ensure diversity of ownership and broadcasting, and to protect little-guy broadcasters from the Blob.
Back when radio was invented, you see, people had this goofy concept that the airwaves were a public resource, like national forests.
The '96 Telecom Act made it possible to own eight stations in one market and an unlimited number nationwide. Overnight, radio became the playground of the fabulously wealthy, and Mom & Pop radio station owners couldn't compete against the much deeper pockets of these mega-corporations.
I suspect that, with a sound system of property rights in wavelength, including real ownership with resale rights, there would have been an incentive to push technologies that would enable spectrum owners to subdivide and sell off their "territory," leading to MORE diversity with less regulation than we STILL have, Telecommunications Act of 1996 notwithstanding.
Incest is Best - Brendan O'Neill thinks that "There is far too much blog-on-blog linking and blog-v-blog debating, and not enough interaction with the outside world wide web." Unqualified Offerings has added him to its links list just to spite him! No, actually it has done this because a) it's been meaning to for some time; and b) his site is indispensible.
Remedial Reading Watch - Glenn Reynolds is either the least sincere man in the blogosphere or, well, he has reading problems sometimes. Check out this item from this morning:
Reynolds goes on to offer the charming advice, "Just kill him. I'm with Den Beste on this, I think. He's outlived any usefulness he might have -- except perhaps as a warning to whoever comes next about what happens if you make what even seem to be nuclear threats."IS ARAFAT MAKING A NUCLEAR THREAT HERE? That depends on what you mean by "disastrous explosion."
This is what we might call the "airport security school" of foreign relations. It's akin to strip-searching someone because you overhear them saying "You da bomb!" in the baggage check line. Any fair - no, any competent reading of the article Reynolds links to reveals Arafat to be speaking metaphorically, and somewhat grandiosely. He is saying there will be an explosion of violence - war, riots, terrorism, what-have-you - if Israel doesn't withdraw from PA-administered territories.
Arafat may be right about this or he may be wrong. He is certainly making a thinly-veiled threat of more war in the region. But any inference of a "nuclear threat" comes so far out of left field you couldn't see the game from there, let alone meaningfully comment on it.
It's Not About the Occupation Dept. - According to Agence France-Presse, relaying a report by Israeli public television, Israel has build fifty new settler outposts in the occupied territories since Ariel Sharon's election in February 2001.
In March, Israel's left-wing Peace Now movement said there were 34 new settlements composed of 250 buildings that had been constructed in the occupied territories since February 2001.
The group conducted an aerial survey showing that most of the new sites were between 700 and 2000 meters (yards) from existing settlements.
A study published by the human rights organization B'Tselem in May said settlers control nearly 42 percent of the occupied West Bank through a strategic placement of communities and buffer zones.
The study was based on unpublished documents collected from Israeli municipal officials since September 2001.
Sharon has consistently ruled out negotiating on settlements with the Palestinians, despite objections from the Labour party, his main partner in Israel's unity government.
Some 200,000 settlers live in nearly 150 settlements across the West Bank and Gaza.
A freeze to settlement building was highlighted by the May 2001 Mitchell Committee report as one of the main confidence-building measures needed to revive political negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians.
Second Genesis - Some are impressed, some scandalized that four political aides concocted the sweeping "homeland security" reorganization in ten days. Get Donkey is scandalized because he says that's not the way it happened at all. The link is to just one of a series of GD items identifying the reorg as the Hart-Rudman Commission report with the serial number filed off. Scroll up and down for the others.
Further Reading - RGB* Greg Pearson sends this link to a Stimson Center report, "Ataxia: The Chemical and Biological Terrorism Threat and the US Response," by Amy Smithson. I've only begun reading it, but it's fascinating. Too soon to tell if she concludes that this site is all wet in its comparatively optimistic view of so-called WMDs. If that turns out to be the case, well, whoever said the life of the mindTM was without risk? I can always denounce her on the basis of her appearance, if necessary. Once I find out what she looks like.
*"RGB" - Official Unqualified Offerings abbreviation for "Reader and Gaming Buddy."
80s Revival Watch - "Nerve gas found at Uzbek base" according to the Associated Press. No one has been injured and there's no evidence that the base has suffered a recent attack. Rather,
The base at Karshi Khanabad is being used as a staging area for the US war in Afghanistan now, and was likely used for the same purpose by the USSR in the old days. In those same old days, one of the big controversies was whether the Soviets were using chemical weapons in Afghanistan. The Uzbek find would be at least circumstantial evidence that they did.The traces are suspected to have come from chemical weapons once stored by the Soviet Union at the base, King said. The contamination was thought to be “left over from a much earlier time,” he said. Uzbekistan became independent when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
Fun Fact: If you Google 'Afghanistan USSR "chemical weapons" ' the second result is the site of a UFO "researcher" with a radio show. He has a biowarfare page that references "Ken Alibek, a former deputy director of the top secret Soviet-era biowarfare program, who defected to the West." "Ken Alibek" would seem to also be Kanatjan Alibekov, referenced in "Weapons of Some Destruction" below. Small world. Or, if you're a UFO researcher, cosmos.