UO Watch Watch - Unqualified Offerings can handle being caught in a rhetorical dodge, but it's embarrassing being caught in a rhetorical dodge it didn't know it was taking. In an e-mail headed "UO Watch," reader/gaming buddy Greg Pearson writes anent the anthrax speculation item below to point out that, while all that stuff about "greymail" is very nice, greymail could apply to a pure-domestic or recruited-domestic anthrax suspect. Thus, UO still left its interviewer (also UO) hanging as to its real suspicions.

Greg is right. The hell of it is, this site didn't think of that at the time. It was thinking of greymail purely in the context of a 100% domestic-scenario suspect. So UO thought it was saying that it still favors the domestic scenario, based on what it's read so far.

Is that clear?

Greg also says a couple of other interesting things:

I don't, to be honest, find the fact that he was in Iraq to be very interesting. If you're Iraqi intelligence and you're trying to recruit someone for a covert operation against the U.S., a high security, heavily guarded UN inspection mission doesn't seem to be the ideal recruiting ground.

This gets an eh. If you're Iraqi counterintelligence, you'd bend yourself to finding out everything you could about every UNSCOM inspector - not least because, as we've since learned, the CIA was using UNSCOM personnel to spy on Iraq and probably foment coups against Hussein. That would mean that if there was some pressure point in the life of an UNSCOM scientist that would make him an especially ripe recruiting target, they'd have a chance to find it. (For instance, if you were involved in a biological attack in the third world in your youth...)

But Greg's right. The Iraq-recruits-a-germ-scientist scenario is far-fetched. What's moderately less far-fetched? Greg again:

The fact that he was with UNSCOM, though, does interest me. Since its dissolution, former UNSCOM members (of whom Richard Butler is the most visible) have made something of a career of going on CNN and complaining that nobody (read "congress and the media") takes the threat of bioterrorism seriously.

And then, what do we get? A small, limited bioterrorist attack targeting congress (which holds the federal purse strings) and the media (which dictates the national agenda). Lot's of publicity for bioterrorism, not many people actually get hurt. Just what a nice, patriotic but disillusioned biowarrior might want to see. He has plenty of motive all on his own; why drag Iraq into it?

Greg even sees the problem with his own theory!

Of course, the great flaw in that theory is that it doesn't really leave us with anyone to bomb.

Greg's UNSCOM speculation is not far from some of the musings in the latest Barbara Hatch Rosenberg article, which UO has been meaning to blog for a few days. UO is sort of put off by the fact that Hatch Rosenberg works for the Federation of American Scientists. Bruce Rolston recently caught that organization out in an absurd hyping of the threat of a so-called "dirty bomb." (Read Rolston's piece! It's a textbook example of the political weblog at its best.) However, Hatch Rosenberg's name appears nowhere on the dirty bomb article, she's been following the anthrax case since last fall and appears, on the basis of her article, to be very wired in to the investigation. (Note to Avedon Carol: I take it all back!)

Change of Plans - The Talking Dog mocks this third-tier blog by referring to Unqualified Offerings as a "weblog powerhouse." Hey, from your lips to our stat servers ears, TD! Anyway, TD e-mails to say that if we're bringing Palestine into the Union, that we won't need 53 states.

Actually, if you proposed making the new state of Palestine ALSO part of the USA, we probably wouldn't have to divide Texas: we could count on the Palestinians to vote whichever way the Jews didn't; Karl "Turdblossom" Rove can get that "reach out to Muslims" thing in full gear-- and in '04, Bush would be certain to carry BOTH Michigan AND Palestine-- more than offsetting Joe Lieberman's victories in New York, California, DC, Connecticut and Israel!

Remember, you don't have to flatter the Talking Dog into sending you e-mails. You can get commentary like this on his website every day, with no self-abasement needed.

Big Tent - Another pinko blogger caught linking to right wing isolationists! Check out his one-act play about The War Against Bad Things^TM.

Unqualified Offerings feels obligated to mention that socialism still sucks.

One Down - Warblogger Andrea Harris, who must read this site just to keep her blood pressure up, vociferously disassociates herself from the odious Larry Kudlow, as Unqualified Offerings sort of requested. "Sort of" because Harris also avows "I am not a libertarian -- small "l" or large "L" or any of that" and it was specifically interventionist libertarians with whom UO was concerned.

Next: UO demands that libertarian interventionists disassociate themselves from the odious Michael Ledeen.

We Don't Need No Stinking King - At Unqualified Offerings, our motto is, "Content isn't just king, it's a hermit king." At Anton Sherwood's Sightseeing in Plato's Cave, Content lives all by itself. Unqualified Offerings wishes that Sherwood would condescend to narrow his text columns, but then, Unqualified Offerings wishes a lot of bloggers would condescend to narrow their text columns. But even in wide columns the site is a good read.

I was reading The Spike by Damien Broderick (I'm up to the part about the complexity of controlling zillions of nanomachines) and a fellow passenger asked what it's about. People are paid to summarize books better than I can, so I passed it over so she could read the covers. She asked whether the tone is alarmist (no, but it is cautious) and then said, ``You know, they had that same technology in Atlantis. It's not the first time around.''

Later she asked, ``What technology do you think they used to build the Pyramids?'' ``Ramps and rollers.'' ``And how do you explain the fact that they had electricity?'' (I confess I haven't felt any need to do so.) She told me that an Egyptian archaeologist - not English or German, she emphasized - has found `electrical' wires and what appears to be a lighting filament in Tutankhamn's tomb. Wonders never cease - and it would seem they have no beginning either.

One of his items is a response to an Unqualified Offerings piece:

I would add that it's very handy for `Them' to be able to use the `black helicopter nuts' as symbols of their opposition as a whole. I guess the only way to prevent that is to ensure that the first catchy symbol is a sane one. Protest movements need smart marketing.

A quibble: I thought the meth lab appeared later, when the FBI needed the drug exception to Posse Comitatus so they could borrow military equipment.

Never let it be said that Unqualified Offerings allows unresolved issues to linger for more than weeks at a time! Here's an ABCNews.com report about how the BATF invoked a methamphetamine lab from 1987 - before Koresh took over - to justify Army involvement in 1993. Koresh actually threw the operators of the meth lab out of Mount Carmel when he took over.

The "black helicopters" meme is an ironic one. One thing we can be sure of is that there are helicopters flying missions all over rural America - looking for marijuana plots. "Now the DA's got a chopper in the air," as a great songwriter has it. Most helicopters look black from below, and drug-war choppers will have that same unmarked-but-official look one sees in souped-up Crown Vics.

The War on Drugs has been an increasingly militarized operation by the US government within US territory against American citizens. Add to that paramilitary operations at Waco and Ruby Ridge and the land-use wars of the the so-called Sagebrush Rebellion you never hear about any more. Unqualified Offerings thinks the basis for a lot of antigovernment conspiracy theories in rural America is:

o Our government is us.
o We wouldn't do this kind of stuff to ourselves, would we?
o Therefore, there must be some sinister outside force behind it (the UN, the Elders of Zion, the Trilateral Commission).

A syllogism resting on two faulty postulates guarantees a false conclusion.

The Principal of Uncertain Principles is your Friend - Unqualified Offerings mentioned this new weblog a few days ago. On the evidence of his postings since then, we are already way past flash-in-the pan status. Two meaty pieces weigh in on the gender disparity in undergraduate degrees. There's a substantial item on quantum computing, and a couple pieces on Bush's Middle East the speech and reaction to it in the blogosphere and elsewhere. Quotable bits:

Is it just me, or do most of the warblog crowd make Bush sound like some sort of ineffectual feudal overlord out of a bad fantasy novel? While the King sits in his White Palace and issue proclamations, the scheming Duke of State runs around pursuing his own nefarious plans, and tries to sway the King from the path of righteousness. Meanwhile, the noble Baron of Defense offers steadfast service and bold strategy, and the wise and kind Enchantress of National Security offers wise counsel.

You can almost see Ian McKellan playing Donald Rumsefeld in the inevitable movie. (Well, OK, maybe not.)

Still is this any way to run a country? Maybe American-style government isn't what the Palestinians need after all...

And

This isn't Star Wars where simply knocking off the head of the Evil Empire is enough to make computer-generated peasants and midgets in furry suits dance with joy at the ushering in of a new era of peace and liberty. If Yasser Arafat were to disappear off the face of the Earth tomorrow (in some hypothetical manner which couldn't be blamed on the Mossad), it wouldn't solve the problem.

And

Everybody has a scheme for how to make a quantum computer, given money, time, money, equipment, money, and eye-popping advances in technology. And some money. Everybody also has a list of reasons why all the other schemes won't possibly work, and there've been some ugly fights in the field. To say that most claims in the field of quantum computing need to be taken with a grain of salt is an understatement-- there isn't enough salt in all the seas to supply the metaphor for the necessary degree of skepticism. It's been an entertaining time to be in physics.

Live Free or Die - This is demi-cool. You can sign the Declaration of Independence over the internet via the National Archives Website. (Link via Greeble blog.)

What would make it more than demi-cool?

1) If you could use your own handwriting, as opposed to the three style options they give you.

2) You get to print a copy of the Declaration with your signature among those of the DWEMs. But what would be really cool would be if the Archives kept a database of all the new "signers" and you could see your name among them.

Unqualified Offerings has read that you could not get the Bill of Rights adopted today if it were up to the people who respond to opinion polls. We would have to change our name to the Republic of Yes, But. Maybe. It seems to UO that a list of citizens who affirm our founding documents, starting with the Declaration, might have a tonic effect on our rulers.

Wilderness of M-my-my-my - Reading this interesting Hartford Courant article on Amerithrax non-suspect-oh-perish-the-thought-we-just-sometimes-like-to-cart-truckloads-of-evidence-from-people's-homes Steven J. Hatfill makes Unqualified Offerings realize that the distinction between the "domestic" and "imported" scenarios may not be so neat:

Hatfill later became a member of UNSCOM, the United Nations-sponsored group that went into Iraq after the gulf war to look for that country's biological weapons stockpiles.

Another member of UNSCOM was David Franz, who later became the colonel in charge of the Fort Detrick infectious disease center. Hatfill worked at the center from 1997 to 1999 in the virology department. He has never claimed to have worked with anthrax, but in 1999 he was involved with a CIA-run course on chemical and biological weapons.

Hatfill, Franz and other domestic non-suspects have been in Iraq, which opens up at least the possibility that they were recruited there, or afterward. In an effort to get at the tangle of possibilities, Unqualified Offerings immediately set out to interview itself on the matter.

Q: Are you saying this Hatfill guy did it?
A: No no no. And tell Dr. Hatfill's lawyer that too. I'm just linking to an interesting article.

Q: Does Hatfill seem like a lucky guy to be around?
A: From the Courant story:

In the late 1970s, when Hatfill was in Rhodesia, an anthrax outbreak killed hundreds and sickened thousands of villagers. In 1993, an African news agency reported that a former officer from the white minority army's special forces claimed that the anthrax outbreak that killed 182 and sickened more than 10,000 people between 1978 and 1980 was launched by the army.

All of the fatalities, and all but a handful of those sickened, were black. Other members of the white government's army have denied that the outbreak was a deliberate attack, claiming it was part of a natural pattern of anthrax in the region.

On his college biography and his resume, Hatfill says he worked with the Rhodesian army and a group called the Selous Scouts during the time frame of the anthrax outbreak. The Selous Scouts were an elite unit of the white Rhodesian government's army that specialized in tracking and killing enemy units in the back country.

Q: Is there an important disclaimer that immediately follows the quoted text?
A: Yes.

One former classmate, Mark Hanly, who is now a pathologist in Georgia, said he always doubted Hatfill's military claims.

Q: And does the disclaimer itself have a disclaimer?
A: As it happens, Yes.

Another classmate remembers Hatfill as a military enthusiast.

"He carried a lot of weapons around all the time, RPGs [rocket propelled grenades] and stuff like that. On the weekends he would go with the army and they would do special forces kind of stuff," said David Andrewes, a classmate who now lives in Massachusetts.

Q: Rhodesia, hunh. Weird. I wonder if there's any other Rhodesia angle to the anthrax story.
A: Does this count? The Courant says

Not far from the medical school in the nation's capital, Harare, is the upper-middle-class suburb of Greendale. The anthrax-laced letters to Daschle and Leahy each contained the same fictitious return address: 4th Grade, Greendale School, Franklin Park, N.J. There is no Greendale School in New Jersey. But there is a grade school by that name in the Harare suburb.

Q: Golly. Anyway, you point out that Hatfill spent time in Iraq and other "domestic" suspects may have too. Are you changing your "Iraq had nothing to do with this" story?
A: I never had an "Iraq had nothing to do with this" story. I had a "On the basis of what we know, an Iraqi connection is far from proven" story.

Q: If Iraq recruited an American scientist to start mailing anthrax around, does that make an Iraqi connection to 9/11 more likely?
A: Yes indeed. IF.

Q: And?
A: Again. Still not proven. Hatfill may be innocent. I, ahem, presume that he is. The fact that a domestic anthrax attacker was in Iraq is the beginning of suspicion, not the end of proof. There has to have been a limited pool of talent qualified to undertake the UNSCOM mission. That pool is going to substantially overlap with the limited pool of talent capable of producing and disseminating weaponized anthrax.

Q: Could there be a political angle here?
A: Yes. As the Courant says, "Steven J. Hatfill is either a pawn in an FBI attempt to recharge its stalled anthrax investigation, or a potential suspect who holds critical clues to solving the case that has bedeviled the agency for the past nine months." One obvious "pawn" scenario is that the government has decided on war with Iraq and needs to gin up enthusiasm. Since Hatfill does have a circumstantial Iraqi tie, he'd be the ideal name to drag out in public.

Q: But that would mean the FBI was allowing the government to politicize a serious criminal investigation!
A: You can be pretty fucking disingenuous sometimes, you know that?

Q: Is that your theory then? Or are you an "Iraq did it" guy now, or what?
A: As I said, "On the basis of what we know, it's too soo - "

Q: Don't be such a weenie.
A: Okay, I still think the most probable explanation of what's going on is greymail.

Q: "Greymail?"
A: Fancy espionage case term. It happens all the time, I understand. Person is suspected of spying because, well, the person is a spy. Person retains slick lawyer who makes a specialty of these cases. Lawyer sadly informs government that to defend his client, if the case goes to trial he will be forced to use this, this this this and this classified information, which will mean that this classified information will likely become public. By an amazing coincidence, these bits are embarrassing to the government. Government says, Hold on a minute... Client ends up with a plea bargain or no prosecution at all.

Q: What embarrassing information would a domestic anthrax suspect have that would make the government afraid to arrest and try him?
A: The obvious possibility is that we still have an offensive biological weapons program. Or anyway had one well after we officially renounced biological weapons more than a quarter-century ago.

Q: You really are an anti-government extremist aren't you.
A: (Shrugs.) Just considering. There's one other possibility...

Q: Oh?
A: Call it the "supervillain scenario." They know who Anthrax Boy is, and they've confronted him. And in between "bwa-ha-ha-has" he's mentioned that he has other germs and delivery systems out there, and they launch if anything happens to him.

Q: Seems farfetched.
A: Those towers looked pretty sturdy, didn't they? Ever see 'em?

(Link via Antiwar.com.)

Sigh - Libertarians tend to think Clarence Thomas is the most reliable defender of individual liberty on the Supreme Court. The high-school drug testing decision shows just how low a standard that is.

(Link via What She Really Thinks.)

Fifth Column Watch - Unqualified Offerings begs its readers to be vigilant against the new threat of icthyoterror.

Note to Toiler: Another PRC-al Qaeda angle?

Department of I Resemble That Remark - Istanblog has more reason to fear Bush's new middle east policy than the rest of us:

Bush told allies he "won't be putting money into a society" dominated by corrupt leaders.

For an American living in a country dominated by corrupt leaders, which receives massive amount of money directly and indirectly from the US government, this sounds pretty scary. So the question is, should I believe that Bush is a man of his convictions, or that he's a lying politician?

See his take on the theoretically-big Rose Garden speech too. (Turns out to be the same link I already gave you.)

Department of Grrr! When Libertarian Samizdata added a "Havens of Flourescent Idiocy" section to their links list, I thought it was a little over the top. Reading Blowback on the internet-radio royalty decision, I have to reconsider:

Where do all those smug, self-satisfied techno-libertarian weasels stand on this? This issue illustrates the vacuousness, and the subservience to the whims of Big Capital, of their nonsensical positions. Their triumphalist rhetoric is a masochist moan, delighting in submission...

Criminy. Once more for those who weren't paying attention the first time: The royalty decision was made by the duly - we won't say constituted - organ of the regulatory state. The royalty decision was your federal government at work. It was your precious guardian of the public good, the federal government - hell, the Library of Fucking Congress, repository of all that is sober and well-indexed. And the People's Tribune, the "In a Democracy, the Government is Us," made its decision explicitly on the basis of which channel supposedly most benefitted Big Capital and for no other reason. The net radio royalty decision represents regulatory capture in its starkest form.

(Link via Avedon Carol, dammit.)

Department of Eeew! - Daddy Warblogs unearths an appalling NRO article by Larry Kudlow. The Daddy accuses Kudlow of advocating an invasion of Iraq purely for the sake of US business interests. Why does he draw this stale, tired paranoid conclusion? Because Kudlow comes right out and says so.

Now and then someone talks about whether pro-war libertarians should take "anti-war libertarians" seriously or not. Hey, it's your call, guys. But know that I'll take you folks more seriously when you start separating yourselves from bastards like this. If it leaves less time for making fun of Robert Fisk again, hey, there's a war on and we all have to make sacrifices.

Just You Wait - Unqualified Offerings is tired, Egypt, tired. Therefore it planneth not to write any major pieces tonight after all. Just a few bits here and there. Meantime, Ginger Stampley says the problem with the Reynolds Plan for keeping the War on Terrorism from dragging on by taking out Iraq and Saudi Arabia right away is that it wouldn't work.

Glenn Reynolds was surprised by UO's "Now he tells us" remark in the follow-up, writing that he thought he had been obvious about it. As I responded to him via e-mail, he has indeed frequently written that the most effective way to protect the country from terrorism is to wipe out the terrorists (NGOs and states) on their home ground before they get here. But unless I've misread, he's always framed his preference as a security argument rather than a liberty argument. That is, "This is the most effective way to protect ourselves" rather than "This is how we best protect our rights from being usurped by our own government." This last part is the part that's new to me, a multiple-daily-visits Instapundit reader for the last nine months. But I may have missed it.

Meanwhile, John Braue, known to Instapundit writers as "another writer" whom I quoted, has a follow-up item of his own, in which he explains why he doesn't think it far-fetched to predict the end of liberal democracy in this century. Braue is more hawkish and more conservative than I am. I am finding him a writer of considerable heft despite those obvious flaws. (He said with the trademark deadpan irony for which this site - and dozens like it - are known.)

My take on declining political participation is that it is itself a kind of vote: to the extent lower voter participation rates reflect a decline in interest in politics it reflects a concomitantly greater increase of interest in nonpolitical life. The political sphere should let them get about it by circumscribing itself. What we get instead is the government-media-policy class earnestly declaring their intention to "make politics relevant" to people again - that is, to force those uncaring bastards to pay attention to us, dammit. An old friend of mine who reads this blog believed that the cold war was just a jobs program for engineers and mathematicians. There's an extent to which he wasn't wrong. To that same extent, the welfare state is a jobs program for the high school poli-sci club. Unlike the chess club, however, when they grow up they have ways of forcing you to take an interest in the same things they did.

I'm not a non-voting libertarian, for all that I sympathize with the bumper sticker that says, "Don't Vote. You'll Only Encourage Them." But actually voting - for all candidates at all levels of government - is something a citizen does at most one day out of 365. It simply can't outweigh what you do the other 364.

E Pluribus Unum - Unqualified Offerings generally avoids presidential speeches, devoting that time to more productive pursuits. But out of a sense of duty, it has read Bush's Middle East speech of the other day. This site has all kinds of thoughts, but the first one is this: remember how The Talking Dog cheekily suggested making Israel the 52nd State? Well, on the basis of the President's speech, it's clear that Palestine is slated to become number 53. We're apparently not only going to lay out its entire governmental structure, we're also going to help them set it up, and surely toss some block grants in for good measure.

Best unintentional humor part?

This will require an externally supervised effort to rebuild and reform the Palestinian security services. The security system must have clear lines of authority and accountability, and a unified chain of command.

Advice from the country whose interservice jealousies did so much to make the September Massacres possible:

"See this Org chart? Don't do it like this."

Anyway America, Unqualified Offerings hopes you like the Middle East, because it's yours now.

My Spider Sense Is Tingling - Virginia Postrel has a long, fascinating item about superheroes, terrorism, and the necessary violent fantasies of little kids. Check out "Killing Monsters."

UPDATE: Fixed a bad link, thanks to a head's up from Michael Croft.

War vs. War On - Glenn Reynolds agrees that freedom is worth the odd nuke - which is nice, since Unqualified Offerings woke up this morning wondering, "Did this site really write that?" He raises a couple of objections to UO's conclusions. One of them is just the old "not all slopes are slippery" argument. That's true enough, but doesn't in itself determine whether any given slope is slippery. (Is the progression from the Effective Death Penalty and Anti-Terrorism Act to USA-PATRIOT not a slippery slope, for instance?) The other (allied) argument is stronger, and genuinely intriguing:

My nightmare scenario, in fact, is one in which the "war on terror" starts looking like the "war on drugs." Which is why I'm in favor of invading Iraq, giving the al-Sauds the boot, and in general fighting a genuine war rather than settling into long-term chronic-illness mode. The bureaucrats naturally favor the latter, as it involves less accountability (you can't really "lose" a "war on" as opposed to a "war" -- you just need more money!) and long-term funding. But in opposing honest-to-goodness war in favor of law-enforcement techniques, you make the police-state aspects of a "war on" (like the War On Drugs) far more likely to materialize.

Well now he tells us, the cynic might say. But believe it or not, UO is not a cynic. And it's nice to see a pro-war libertarian making an argument on the basis of concern for - American liberty. But Unqualified Offerings thinks that, while Reynolds' concerns about an unending "war on" are acute, that the expansive war he favors - against Iraq and the Saudis, with occasional other targets thrown into the mix too - doesn't avoid the "war on" problem. UO thinks that the war has structural requirements that will make it as endless as any "war on." UO furthermore believes that US policy, particularly Bush administration policy, is being made by people for whom the endless part is a feature rather than a bug. Spelling out some of the reasons why will have to wait until tomorrow, though. (It's UO's gaming night.) So all readers, new and old, are invited to return.

Or Get Off the Pot - John Braue shows the alluring skull beneath the skin of all the talk about the US fostering "liberal democracy" by force of arms.

And democracy within the member states of the Final Alliance? I have written on that in the past. Suffice to say for repetition's sake that I see no hope of democracy on the national level in the West lasting out this century.

We needn't like this future. I don't like it. But I think that if we want a different future, we should decide what it should be and how to get it, and to decide right now.

Already on it!

Unqualified Offerings finds Braue's musings on the prerequisites and outcomes of his "Final Alliance" to be entirely plausible, and deeply, deeply scary. The evidence is accumulating steadily already. Prominent hawks, to their credit, have criticised this or that government grab for control in the guise of warfighting. Which is not to say that they can have what they want - an expansive war against "terror" or "islamofascism" or "jihadism" or tyranny AND a free society.

The time is coming to ask, Which do you want more, the freedom or the war? Because this may not be a hypothetical question. It's looking less and less like one, for all the reasons John Braue adduces. So pick.

Obviously, Unqualified Offerings picks the free society. Let's assume that keeping such liberties as we have and maybe, perish the thought, expanding them, treating the threat of stateless terrorism as a police and intelligence matter and state terrorism as a matter for deterrence and retribution, not "preemption," makes America somewhat less secure. Let's even say that the price of, oh, habeas corpus, a prohibition on torture and something akin to privacy is a major attack on an American city sometime in the next ten years. A tactical nuke or an epidemic that will kill people in the high five figures or low six. (These are realistic "worst case" numbers, as I've argued before.)

Would it be worth it? Hell yes. It would hurt a lot. And afterward we'd have to clobber the perpetrators like we clobbered Afghanistan, just to prove attacking us isn't a casual business. This is, to repeat, a big damn country. A mighty country. A country that ought to have the guts to remain true to itself at some cost. And some benefit. Like still being this country, and not some other in the same place we used to be.

What's in a Name Dept. - Daddy Warblogs fact-checks the ass of Warblogger Watch:

I really must change the title of this blog. And why do I get the impression that the Warbloggerwatch guys only read my stuff in the expectation of finding wall-to-wall babykillin' rhetoric? They look, they find none, but nonetheless go away and append the nom de guerre "prominent sabre-rattler" to my good name. OK, so I'm going to say this nice and loud so that no one will get it wrong in future:

And then he does. Unqualified Offerings admits to having been slow to catch on to the Daddy Warblogs experience, and partly because of the (actually very clever) name. He's proving himself one of the most independently-minded and intellectually adventurous warbloggers around, regardless.

Where Do You Get Your Ideas? - Your antigovernment extremist types like Unqualified Offerings not only oppose centrally planned economies, they are skeptical of government regulation of the economy to protect the public. They even conjure up a spectre called "regulatory capture," whereby the institutions that supposedly exist to control the big players in an industry end up serving the biggest players in that industry. Where do such unsporting notions come from? Let's ask Marc Fisher of the Washington Post, writing about - why, he's writing about the death knell of internet radio!

But the sounds of freedom dimmed last week, when the Librarian of Congress, James Billington, decreed a fee scale that's likely to silence most Internet stations.

Billington approved a structure that lets traditional broadcast stations pay royalties only to the writers and publishers of songs they play, while Web stations must pay those fees plus extra royalties to the record companies and performers of the music. Billington accepted the recording industry argument that traditional radio could keep its exemption from those fees because airplay promotes record sales.

Good thing we have an author of books on Russian history deciding what new-technology business structures will be "fair!" (One might wish he knew a little more Russian history.) And a good thing he's making decisions based on which medium supposedly best serves the pecuniary interests of existing conglomerates!

We Get Letters and then we don't respond. I owe several of you e-mails. E-mails make me happy. They prove the existence of that most wondrous of things, an engaged readership. So I suck ass letting them go for any length of time. I'm going to work on catching up over the next couple of days.

Out on a Limb - After repeatedly avowing - accurately - that he had not, repeat not, accused the Israelis of being behind the September massacres, Justin Raimondo now walks right up to the edge of saying otherwise, depending on what you think "facilitation" means.

The recent revelations by ex-FBI wiretap translator Sibel Edmonds of an unnamed "Middle Eastern country" with agents inside the FBI obstructing, mistranslating, and misdirecting official investigations make the question of "foreknowledge," "pre-knowledge," or whatever you want to call it moot. As I pointed out in my last column, the Edmonds allegations raise the ante considerably, from passive foreknowledge of 9/11 to the sinister possibility of Israel's active facilitation.

I'd be the last person to say, "No! Israel would never do such a thing!" Israel has a government, it has a national security establishment and an intelligence apparatus. Governments, national security establishments and intelligence apparatuses do crummy things all the time, and deliberately. And the US government's attempt to whitewash Israeli intelligence activity in this country inspires rather than quells suspicion in some quarters.

But still.

Justin's column completely ignores multiple reports of Israeli warnings to the US of a planned al Qaeda strike in the US, including reports that appeared on his own website. I have a hard time seeing that as other than bad faith. If he doesn't believe these reports, even though he has previously implied that he accepted the accuracy of some of them in his own columns, then he needs to explain why.

He assumes that if Israel has spies somewhere, those spies must have, before the fact, uncovered whatever turned out to be important after the fact. He assumes that the various Israeli operations in the US - the "art students," the moving companies, the possible moles among FBI translators - must be coordinating seamlessly, perhaps the least plausible assumption of all. He ignores the possible drug angle. (Israeli gangs seem to control a lot of the Ecstasy trade; the "art students" seemed to concentrate particularly on DEA offices; and intelligence agencies and drug gangs go together like sin eaters and stale bread.)

On the question of motive I have only a couple of things to say. "Now they'll know how it feels" is a pretty speculative payoff for a high-risk operation - which is what the "facilitation" of a massive attack on your most important ally is. For one thing, whenever the US wants something in the Arab world, it tacks against Israel at least tactically. Happened in the Gulf War. Happened last winter. That our famously changeable administration is singing a tune congenial to Ariel Sharon this week is no guarantee that it will still be singing it next week. Israel's critics have always said that its domestic US lobby has an unbreakable grip on Congress and American policy anyway. If that's true then why would Israel need to make sure that "Now they'll know how it feels?"

There are several reasons, having nothing to do with antisemitism, why Israel gets under the skin of movement libertarians and other isolationists. Hardcore libertarians and isolationists oppose foreign aid. Israel is the single biggest recipient of US foreign aid. It's the direct cause of foreign aid to the second-biggest recipient, the fuzzy, big-eyed government of Egypt. Libertarians and isolationists oppose entangling alliances. Many US supporters of Israel speak as if there was no meaningful distinction between US and Israeli interests. Libertarians hate socialism and other forms of collectivism. Israel is a socialistic, collectivist society. Libertarians believe property rights are the foundation of almost every other freedom. Israel is just awful on property rights, particularly the property rights of Arabs.

To argue for the elimination of foreign aid means, inevitably, having to answer the "What about Israel?" question. Ditto to argue against interventionism generally. You simply cannot advocate what, for lack of a better term, I'll call "isolationism" without having to address the problem of Israel. That inevitably requires arguing that no, Israel shouldn't have US aid, including US military aid, and that requires saying why, and then the trouble starts.

There are indeed politicians, columnists and, yes, webloggers, who dismiss any criticism of Israel as antisemitism. There are also Israeli partisans who argue in bad faith. And there are interventionists and, for lack of a better word, imperialists, for whom Israel is simply a convenient excuse for the grand design they would pursue regardless. (Of course there are also antisemites who cloak their hate in criticism of Israel.) So it gets frustrating to be a movement libertarian or paleoconservative. Israel can become their - no, let us be clear, our - Great White Whale.

And then, too, the trouble starts. After clarifying Israel's flaws we start minimizing those of its enemies. Yasser Arafat, a venal, self-interested charlatan, the very exemplar of Hayek's principle that under socialism the worst rise to the top, becomes "the father of his country." Theocrats become reformist visionaries. Military dictators become - reformist visionaries.

The Palestinian and larger Arab and Muslim struggle against Israel is itself rooted in collectivism, socialist mindsets and group hatred. It isn't individualism, classical liberalism or republican prudence that makes the Pakistani laborer and intellectual so burn with rage on behalf of the Palestinians. It is religious chauvinism. There is nothing antiwar about Pakistan's approach to Kashmir, nor anything isolationist about Saudi and Iraqi subsidies to the families of suicide bombers.

None of this is an argument for giving Israel a blank check to fulfill the territorial dreams of its maximalists, or even to continue subsidizing the bulldozing of houses and confiscation of land. It isn't an argument for making Israel's survival a core US interest. It isn't an argument for pardoning Jonathan Pollard or letting his successors work unmolested. But it's a caution against confusing a disproportionate US involvement in Israeli business with a disproportionate evil in Israel as such.

The attacks on the US last fall were deeply, deeply evil acts. To accuse anyone of perpetrating or knowingly allowing them is to accuse them of a great evil. That's a serious claim and calls for serious evidence. That's why perfectly reasonable people insisted on evidence against al Qaeda last fall, and when they didn't feel they got it, opposed the war. (My view is that what we learned from the war establishes al Qaeda's and bin Laden's culpability definitively.) It's why some of us insist that the Iraq hawks have not come close to meeting anything approaching a standard of proof of Iraqi involvement in the September massacres. And it's why it's as reckless or moreso to speculate about Israel actively facilitating the attacks on the basis of the evidence we have.

What About the Murder of your Red Indians? - The title of this piece comes from a USSR-era joke. The punch line depends on an old tactic of Soviet officialdom: confronted with complaints about this or that human rights abuse, throw Slavery or the Indian Wars back in the American face and pout. (Given that the Russians also had slavery until the 1860s - they just didn't import from so far away - the Indian Wars made a better snappy comeback.)

What brought the joke back to me was a letter from The Talking Dog to Eve Tushnet about her views on the Middle East. No, not the clever bit about making Israel the 52nd state. (And it is clever. See why TD doesn't propose making Israel the 51st state. You'll have to do some scrolling to do this because TD, ahem, does not have item-specific anchors.) No, it was a separate, serious e-mail to Eve that stuck out, especially this part:

As to the stolen land argument, I daresay the occasional Navajo or Sioux might have better reason to question a certain other country's legitimacy than those of Palestinian Arab descent. There are land grabs, and then there are acts of genocide accompanied by land grabs. Israel can, at worst, be accused of the first one. The United States? Well, let's move on...

Now I don't bring this up to have a Cold-War style laugh at the Talking Dog's expense. It wouldn't be fair, for one thing. Even a casual reading of his entertaining and engaging site makes it clear that TD is no knee-jerk likudnik. What I see in his writing is the principle that Yitzhak Rabin enunciated: to pursue peace as if there were no terrorism and fight terrorism as if there were no peace.

No, the reason I bring it up is because, all so's-your-old-man maneuvering aside, I think TD has hit on the precise analogy for the struggle between Israel and Palestine. In a tribal struggle for collective dominion over a land, the line between combatant and noncombatant blurs. A homestead on the Plains contained civilians by our lights, invaders by the lights of the Sioux. A Lakota hunting camp contained women and children as far as the Sioux were concerned, the "infrastructure" of murderous rebellion to the Army.

Natalie Solent feels keenly the death of every Israeli child, and presents each fresh horror with stunned disbelief. But from King Philip's War to Wounded Knee stretches a sequence of bilateral atrocity in which nothing that has happened in the last fifty years in the land between the Jordan and the Med would have trouble fitting. The Arabs consider the Jews to be invaders. The Israelis consider the Palestinians to be savages. Certainly Israel has at times been invasive and the Palestinians have been savage. They've been subject to the same flights of apocalyptic fervor that in the nineteenth century gave the American continent Panther Across the Sky and Wovoka. Even the imbalance of power is analogous.

I say all this as an American of European descent who has no intention of giving the continent back to its original inhabitants. Nor do I expect, or wish, Israel's Jews to pack up and set sail for someplace else. But the savagery of the Israeli-Palestinian war is nothing unprecedented. It is tantamount to structural.

Reading Around - Some goings-on in punditspace.

Brendan O'Neill makes clear which pigeonholes he doesn't fit into.

Virginia Postrel returns from hiatus.

Somehow in discussing Eve Tushnet's weekend, er, offerings, I missed a superb piece on how not to be pro-life:

First, any stance that treats children as punishment is anti-family, anti-life, and deeply anti-Christian.

There's more. All excellent.

Perhaps feeling peevish at being described as "semi-retired," Perry deHavilland cocks his ear trumpet, clangs his walker over to the Granville Automatic and bangs out a half-hearted defense of Randians.

We Interrupt This Libertarian Isolationism to bring you the following bulletin. Unqualified Offerings has learned that catfish are worth fishing for.

1. They are big.
2. They fight hard.
3. You do not have to use the sort of bait that Francesco Redi might use to disprove spontaneous generation.

There is a deep, slow stretch of Seneca Creek a couple of miles above the Potomac in a currently-rural section of Montgomery County. A long unused rope swing hangs down into the water. The bank is steep there, with the shore a full four feet above the waterline. Unqualified Offerings has believed for some time that it was home to sizable finny friends, but had not been able to prove it. Last night around dusk, it tried the water with a largish, green Rebel Crawfish. As your professional fishing writers say, BAM! I figured I had a big bass. The fish stayed deep and ran a lot. I was using my ultralight rod with four-pound line, so it could do that if it wanted. I fought that fish for something like 5 minutes when it slipped the hook. So I cast out again and, yes, BAM! This one I fought longer. It was a genuine rod-doubler. The activity made several other big fish show themselves too. Again it stayed deep and again I thought, mistakenly, I had the biggest smallmouth of my life on the line.

But no. When I got it to what passes for the shore down there, I saw the whiskers and the soft dorsal. It was easily the size of my leg from the knee down. There was no question of lifting it up to my level as a dead weight. I wasn't eager to mess with the whiskers anyway, and the storebought catfish I've eaten always struck me as having an overly meal-y texture. So I just lifted until the line broke off.

I don't really care if you call it, technically, a catch or not. It was a blast.

Political Self-Test Test - So which self-test is best? Or, to get all reflexive and metacontextual, which self-test does this self prefer?

First, a late entry in the sweepstakes, The Political Quiz Show. It comes via Ginger Stampley via Avedon Carol. (The League of Extraordinary Sherbet-Colored Blogs strikes again!)

I have to say, this one sucks so bad I couldn't even finish it. It's not just that the results restrict themselves to the one-dimensional left-right continuum, but that practically every question imprisons one in bad choices. Consider

2. Which do you trust more:

The Pentagon or
The U.S. Postal Service?

The executive branch or
The legislative branch?

The FBI or
The IRS?

The CIA or
The Peace Corps?

The Joint Chiefs or
The United Nations?

Christ in kneepads, I don't trust any of them! I can't consider any of the pairings personally decideable and I don't have either obvious opt-out option: "Equally trustworthy"; "Equally Untrustworthy."

3. What about private institutions and people? Which do you trust more?

Trial Lawyers or
Doctors?

Union leaders or
Business executives?

Professional athletes or
Team owners?

Trust to do what, exactly? I suppose on a feelie level I would pick doctors over trial lawyers.

The Political Quiz Show has example politicians along its continuum. Interestingly the "most liberal" person they can imagine is Jesse Jackson and the "most conservative" is Ronald Reagan.

So, here's my political self-test test answer. Find links in previous items, please. It's late.

1. Ideology Selector - Most flexible. Questions seem representative. Deepest range of results.

2. Political Compass - Rather Brit-centric. Questions seem written from a "left" perspective. Conflate "libertarianism" with personal license.

3. Politopia - This one is much worse than the two ahead of it. The questions are functional but boring.

4. The Political Quiz Show - Questions can't even be meaningfully answered unless you accept a great deal of the "dominant paradigm" those buttons are always urging us to subvert.

Say It With Me Now!

Who has the most readers??

Drudge!

Who has the BEST readers????

UNQUALIFIED OFFERINGS!!!!

Several loyal readers wrote in to suggest that the political self-test I was thinking of in the item below is The Political Compass. Kathy Kinsley wrote to suggest that it's actually the Politopia quiz from the Institute for Humane Studies.

I've seen the Political Compass quiz before and taken it. (I'm a 4.88/-2.77, if you must know.) I haven't seen the Politopia quiz. (According to Politopia, I'm between Drew Carey and Ayn Rand, which actually gives me an idea for what The Drew Carey show could do if that Mimi chick ever left...)

But dammit, neither of them are the one I was thinking of! I don't think. I distinctly remember two features of the quiz I have in mind that neither test under discussion has: first, you got to weight the questions as Very Important, Somewhat Important or Not Important as you answered them. This strikes me as a crucial innovation. Second, when you completed it, it gave you a "fit list" of several political philosophies in order of match.

So, um, while you really are the best readers a political diarist ever had, I decided to just find the thing myself. And I did! It's called the Ideology Selector. It could stand updating. It takes a long time to load. But damn if they don't have me pegged:

#1 Left-libertarian
#2 Libertarian
#3 Paleo-libertarian
#4 Radical
#5 Paleoconservative
#6 Centrist
#7 Third Way
#8 Conservative
#9 Neoconservative
#10 Liberal

Each ideology comes with a link to an allied website - Cato for "Libertarian," mises.org for "Paleo-Libertarian," The Rockford Institute for "Paleoconservative" and so on. The link for Centrist is worth the cost of taking the test, which is a ton of popup ads. I have to say, their idea of left-libertarianism (based on the example site they link to) looks a lot more left and a lot less libertarian to me. I can hang with being called a "left-libertarian." I can't hang being classed with the anarchists. Too many meetings.

I wonder if this is going to queer my link on C-Log...

Of Making Many Blogs... - Chad Orzel, who has been running a booklog for some time, has started a general weblog too, Uncertain Principles. He is kind enough to cite the influence of Unqualified Offerings on his blog title, saying that his title is "in the tradition of self-deprecating weblog names ." (I've always thought I was the best self-deprecator in the world. I am the greatest! Self- deprecator!)

Chad is a physicist and while his weblog is still very new - it has, um, two items so far - his introductory item has interesting thoughts on the metaphorical misuse of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle by humanists and literary types.

Keep an eye on this one.

Libertarianism in Normal-Land - With Perry deHavilland in something approaching semi-retirement, Brian Micklethwait has become my favorite active Libertarian Samizdata contributor. And his essay today on the plain meaning of words and "fixed-sum economics," among other things, is simply the best contribution to libertarian philosophy I've seen this year.

Fail to deal with it and there are two characteristic ways in which the fixed quantity of happiness/wealth fallacy will deal with you.

People who are nice, and who don't like the idea of making other people miserable, restrain themselves from getting rich and happy. We see that syndrome all around us, and especially at political demonstrations of the concerned variety.

But then there is the screw-you-Jack response, which consists of saying that I want to be happy and goddammit I've a right to be happy! And that if that means others have be unhappy, then to hell with them!! And we see that all around us also, in the form of exuberantly busy capitalists who just want to get rich, and if that means they have to think of themselves as quasi-criminals, then so be it. They can live with it. With friends like these, capitalism doesn't need enemies. (Screw-you-Jack capitalism is especially rampant in the financial world, where it takes a little bit of imagination to realise just how much good you are doing for the world by, e.g., placing a bet on the price of next year's corn crop. It's obvious that you do a bit of good for other people if you sell them newspapers and sweeties, but perhaps not quite so clear that you and your confreres are actually making modern agriculture possible if you trade in agricultural futures.)

These two characteristic social types, the self-sacrificing conscience-ridden misery and the selfish capitalist bastard, dance a sort of self-reinforcing dance with each other, each reacting in horror to the other's existence, but neither realising how much, intellectually speaking, they have in common. The unifying error is that in living your life you are condemned to choose between your own happiness and the happiness of others, between selfishness and altruism.

There's more. Keep your eye on this Mickelthwait fellow.