It Judt Keeps Coming Back - A few weeks back, Unqualified Offerings wrote about Tony Judt's New York Review of Books essay, "The Road to Nowhere," and followed up with a brief item about Judt's reply to an e-mail question on the Jewish right-of-return to Israel.

Now NYRB offers "The Road to Nowhere: an Exchange," featuring three letters to the Review and Judt's reply. Two of the letters read like, well, like warblog entries. Another points out that Judt's exit from Algeria was much much more wrenching than Judt made it sound. Judt responds to the criticisms at length.

The Missing Link? - It's clear to just about everyone outside the US government that the LAX shooting was a hate-crime if not a terrorist operation. But what went into it beside Hedayat's obvious antisemitism and general alienation? Brendan O'Neill suggests

In the midst of all this, one important factor is overlooked. When US authorities spend months warning Americans that there could be - no, there will be - a terrorist attack on 4 July, what do they expect? When the FBI, the CIA and the Pentagon consistently pinpoint 4 July, Independence Day, as an ideal time for someone, anyone, to strike against America, they almost invite something to happen. Unhinged people like Hadayet delight in making an impact with one-off violent attacks - and unhinged people were effectively offered 4 July on a plate, assured by warning after warning that this would be the perfect day to 'send a message' to America and strike fear into Americans' hearts.

It's an intriguing theory. I think O'Neill overdoes it as the piece goes on. Having come up with a plausible "It could be true" he proceeds as if he has somehow established that it is.

Nevertheless, it rings true. I got ticked off during the months when relentless Columbine hype prompted copycat after copycat. If it weren't for the media's notoriously short attention span we might not have a school-age child left alive in this country. But our undending drumbeat of "warnings" may be creating a newer, stranger phenomenon: virtual copycats if you will - criminals imitating not the famous crime that's already happened, but the famous crime that is supposed to happen soon.

Proving once again, I suppose, that Tom Disch is right: science fiction has taken over the culture.

Offered Qualifications - The Public Nuisance has some thoughts about yesterday's item about, well, Republican pussies. UO should also call your attention to his fine, pithy July 4th item.

John Braue thinks UO missed at least part of the point of Andrew Hofer's piece on early casualty estimates from the latest Afghan screwup. Unqualified Offerings continues to think that it saw Andrew Hofer's point just fine, thanks. In a sense, Braue (whom UO will be praising for something else shortly) is making the same "mistake" - focusing on European elite opinion when the real issue here is Afghan opinion. On that score, preliminary casualty overestimates on Euromedia websites - indeed, overestimates anywhere - are irrelevant.

Put it this way: Is anyone a tenth as mad at Al Qaeda as they were when the WTC casualty estimates were 30,000? I ain't. And please spare UO the "moral equivalence!" horrors - the question isn't whether Al Qaeda are worse than the US Air Force; the question is whether Afghans take their own lives and safety as seriously as we take ours.

Meanwhile, Gary Farber thought that Monday and Tuesday were way too soon for Unqualified Offerings, More Than Zero and Brendan O'Neill to be writing about the Afghan screwup at all.

Dustbury.com relates UO's discussion about left-wing anti-Americanism to disputes over scare-quote multiculturalism. Not UO's point, but it's his point and his blog. Also, as a public service, Dustbury.com decodes the latest from ClearChannel.

Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep - Glenn Reynolds has returned. That means Unqualified Offerings' stint as volunteer unofficial substitute Instapundit has come to a close. UO feels it fulfilled its terms and conditions.

Anthraxblog - the Continuing Series - Nicholas D. Kristof wrote about the Anthrax case in Tuesday's New York Times (link requires registration). His column is mostly devoted to the FBI's apparently lackadaisical pursuit of a culprit, particularly its handling of Steven J. Hatfill. (Kristof refers to him as Mr. Z, but UO readers will see through that pretty quickly.)

Ironically, one of the failures is not enough handwriting analysis!

Although the bureau has polygraphed Mr. Z, searched his home twice and interviewed him four times, it has not placed him under surveillance or asked its outside handwriting expert to compare his writing to that on the anthrax letters.

Kristof also argues that, with Hatfill's name increasingly public, the FBI owes not just the country, but also Hatfill, an aggressive effort to either charge him or clear him.

With many experts buzzing about Mr. Z behind his back, it's time for the F.B.I. to make a move: either it should go after him more aggressively, sifting thoroughly through his past and picking up loose threads, or it should seek to exculpate him and remove this cloud of suspicion.

Meanwhile, Avedon Carol points out that, as a minor, technical matter, Unqualified Offerings completely missed her point in its recent "Anthraxblog I" item. Says the proprietor of The Sideshow:

No, no, Jim, it's nothing to do with all that! I don't believe any government was behind the anthrax attacks! What I believe is that some right-wing loony who happened to be in a position to do so decided - quite privately - to attack some of the right's favorite hate objects.

As she goes on to note, from the time of the demise of the 60s-left underground in the late 70s to the rise of violent ecology-inflected "liberation" groups, domestic US terror was pretty much a monopoly of right-wing fringe groups and individuals.

I know a lot of people like to pretend that 9/11 marked the advent of terrorism in America. Well, it didn't. Conservatives had the luxury, apparently, of not noticing that some of us were being terrorized all along - by Good Red-Blooded Christian Americans. The Aryan Nations don't just hate the government because it's government, they hate it because they believe it has been taken over by liberals and - that's right - Jews. Maybe I didn't think about it much, either, until the night that cop pulled my fan belt out from under the hood and showed me where it had been cut and asked, "Do you have any enemies?" It took me a moment to remember I'd been to see my doctor that day, in the same medical office building on Rockville Pike that holds an abortion clinic that is frequently the target of anti-choice demonstrations. I pointed to my pro-choice bumper-sticker.

"Liberal" organizations have been getting anthrax threats for a long time, long before 9/11; at Planned Parenthood, it is routine. So why wouldn't the idea of a domestic, right-wing terrorist be the first, rather than last, likely scenario in a new round of attacks on targets that are identified by right-wing pundits as "liberal" - the media and two leading Democrats?

You should read her entire piece to get the full sense of her argument, which is akin to the theory that Pim Fortuyn was murdered because vicious rhetoric about him in establishment media incited a crazy to murder. However, Unqualified Offerings finds Avedon's thesis uncompelling, for several reasons. These reasons do not have to do with whether right-wing talk shows count as "hate radio" or whether their popularity means that "left-wing media bias" is or isn't a myth.

1) Motive aside, means and opportunity concerns restrict us to a small pool of possible suspects, men (and some women) who are highly-educated, materially well-off, with a substantial experience of the US government and how it works. Such a person may or may not listen to conservative radio talk shows. But such a person can not possibly be under the delusion that a Senator opens his own mail.

2) The American media may be identified by "right-wing pundits" as liberal. (I think of myself as a right-wing pundit, and I certainly think the American media is "liberal" in that term's debased, contemporary managerialist sense.) But The New York Post makes a pretty absurd target for someone striking at the "liberal media." The National Enquirer is, to a lesser extent, another odd choice for fulfilling that motive. (Tom Brokaw I'll give you.)

3) Something I did not know that I learned from Kristof's column. To quote:

Whoever sent the anthrax probably had no intention of killing people; the letters warned recipients to take antibiotics.

For Anthrax Man to be trying to kill Democratic senators, he must first be trying to kill anyone at all. Then he has to be using a method that he could plausibly believe would actually reach his targets.

On the Advantage: Greg Pearson! front, Kristof tentatively concludes

My guess is that the goal was to help America by raising preparedness against biological attacks in the future.

Of course, Reader/Gaming Buddy Greg suggested this almost a week ago. We should bag the Homeland Security Department idea and just leave our domestic safety to UO's gaming group.

Idle Hands - Do some bloggers have way too much free time? The Public Nuisance proves that they do.

He also has some fair criticisms of a generation of Republican governors and mayors:

Governors such as Tom Ridge, Chris Whitman, and Tommy Thompson became known as a new kind of Republican, mostly because they implemented the popular part of the Republican agenda (tax cuts) while the Clinton boom meant they could ignore the down side (service cuts and/or budget deficits). During the height of the boom, a Governor could pretty much get sworn in, take a six month fishing vaction, and return to the capital just in time to take credit for the tax cuts that had just been enacted and the new jobs that would offset the revenue loss. George Bush was more hard line than the Republicans mentioned above, but even he was able to burnish his unimpressive moderate credentials by putting new money into education.

Most of these politicians were Republicans, and most were labelled as "moderates", guaranteeing a generally fawning press coverage. Quite a few, like Richard Riordan, came from successful careers in private industry, and an invariant mantra of theirs was that if elected they woud "run government like a business." Finding themselves more flush with money than any prior office holders due to the general economic good times, they spent the windfall buying their own popularity with new programs and lower taxes. Barely one of them did what a well-run business in the same circumstances would have and put money away for the inevitable slump. As a result, state and local governments all over the country are now facing the worst budget crises in decades, since nobody wants to undo those popular progams and the end of the boom means there are no longer tax funds to support them.

Boo to the Repubs in question for not having the stones to make the case for cutting "popular programs" to go along with the tax cuts. Boo to the Dems for fostering a metacontext in which any program any government ever institutes gets treated as a critical need that only the heartless or myopic could possibly imagine cutting.

Speaking of metacontext, the reason those governors and mayors got labelled as "moderates" and got fawning coverage from the establishment press is precisely because they intended no serious effort to reduce the size and scope of their respective governments.

Incoming... off to port of the Good Ship Offering. Reader/avowed pinko Kevin Maroney found something extremely irritating about the Brendan O'Neill piece below:

I am a leftist. My father is a leftist. My mother is a leftist. My grandparents are leftists, and so are most of my friends and most of the people I admire. I love America. I love what America is, and what America can be. I love America enough that I stood in freezing rain for five hours just for the chance to shout my disapproval at the people who stole America's government away from the American people in 2000. And I'm sick of being told that I hate America.

Are there stupid leftist criticisms of America? You bet. But there are stupid criticisms of America from every conceivable political point of view; for some reason, when right-wingers say that America has "turned its back on God"--which they say a lot--people don't generalize that to "the rightists hate America". Why do you think that is?

Unqualified Offerings sort of sees where Kevin is coming from here. Certainly in the nine months since it joined the political diaries of the world, it has enjoyed cordial converse with southpaws - Ginger Stampley, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Gary Farber and Avedon Carol are only the first to come to mind. UO has seen right-wing critics labelled "anti-American," and not just by Clintonites. The term has been free on the lips of hawkish types when they discuss war skeptics and war opponents in libertarian and conservative ranks. I believe the neocon establishment even adverted to the term when the famous "anti-regime" issue of First Things came out a few years ago.

Beyond that, I can't help finding a tendency that can fairly be called "anti-American" more prominent in some left wing criticism than in right wing criticism. I think there are two ways this is true.

First, a lot of leftist criticism has a strong double-bind element to it. You'll see a leftist complain that the US meddles too much in other countries' affairs and that the US has not brought a just, lasting peace to the Middle East. A rightist will argue either that we should settle those people's hash or that we should not entangle ourselves in other countries' business. But not both at the same time, or serially. A certain kind of leftist will complain about "white flight," then turn around and decry "gentrification." On the other hand, if we all started professing Christian faith in a Falwell-approved manner, the religious right would not turn around and accuse the nation of excess religiosity.

The other thing that contributes to the impression of "anti-Americanism" on the left is that while the right's models tend to come from an idealized version of the American past, the left's tend to be the present or future of other countries, whether from Europe or the Third World. From the "Progressive" infatuation with Prussian bureaucracy at the end of the 19th century through the successive enthusiasms for Stalin, Mao, Fidel, Ho and Danny Ortega (with the EU in the "repeating as farce" role), an important and often dominant strain of left-wing rhetoric has been, "We need to be less like ourselves and more like these other people. When a prominent Canadian feminist tells a conference that, compared with US dominance, burkhas and beatings and purdah and suttee are nothing when it comes to the oppression of women, what is one to call it but Anti-Americanism?

Now I can see why a smart, honest leftie like Kevin Maroney would not want to be tarred with that brush, any more than Your Right-Wing Diarist wants to be lumped with Larry Kudlow and Michael Ledeen and - Jerry Falwell. There's an indigenous American leftism that does not fall into these traps. And there is now clearly a European leftism - as seen in Brendan O'Neill - that sees through them.

Poetry Thursday - Unqualified Offerings quails at the prospect of what follows. It's suicide to follow not just Frost but top-notch Frost. And then there's a strong sense that "foods shouldn't touch."But UO and Offering Boy just got back from the fireworks and it took this website back. The following poem appeared in The Hudson Review. Summer 1998.

Independence

Comets, starfish, switchback dace,
willows, jackpots of glittering coins, and hairnets --
the fireworks bloom as absurdly
as evolution itself,
and with a Big Bang.

Cosmologists want to replace "Big Bang"
with something more genteel, but they got it right the first time.
I saw my baby being born
and it was loud -- mother, nurses, monitors, then
the star of the hour.

Now we lie on our backs, knees up,
and the youngest scream at what they understand
perfectly well.
Novae light nebulae of smoke
for the finale, then

we rise, stretch and get our balance back
and on the ride home, a slim girl
at the edge of her parents' lawn
holds up twin
handfuls of green fire.

© 2002 by Jim Henley

The Force That Would at Last Prevail - Brendan O'Neill hates American Imperialism. Brendan O'Neill loves America's virtues. And Brendan O'Neill has no patience whatsoever with anti-Americanism. His Fourth of July item may turn out to be the finest tribute to the USA this holiday.

In this sense, anti-Americans end up criticising all the things that are good about America, while sidelining or overlooking the things that are bad. For me, the great things about America are precisely its huge cities, perfect illustrations of how man can take desolate land and turn it into something spectacular; its democratic traditions, which at least hold dear to the theory (if not the practice) that we are all equal; and its lifestyle, the fact that you can buy, buy, buy as much as you want, and that even America's poorest live lives that would have looked luxurious to our forebears.

For 'anti-Americans' in the past (though they would never have styled themselves as such), the biggest problem with America, and capitalism more broadly, was that there wasn't enough - people's potential was too often squandered, production and development was too slow or non-existent, and if anything there was a lack of ambition. For today's anti-Americans (who do consciously style themselves as such), there is just too much of everything and we should rein it all in before the planet explodes.

Nonsense. America is inspirational. Those who want to live in a better world could do worse than take America as their starting point - and move onwards and upwards from there.

And that's just a taste.

That's a Hard Mystery of Jefferson's - Ya know what? "The Black Cottage" is in the public domain. So with pride and pleasure, Unqualified Offerings presents not only the best poem Robert Frost ever wrote, but the most important poem ever written about the United States.

Something tells me this is for Eve Tushnet.

The Black Cottage

We chanced in passing by that afternoon
To catch it in a sort of special picture
Among tar-banded ancient cherry trees,
Set well back from the road in rank lodged grass,
The little cottage we were speaking of,
A front with just a door between two windows,
Fresh painted by the shower a velvet black.
We paused, the minister and I, to look.
He made as if to hold it at arm's length
Or put the leaves aside that framed it in.
"Pretty," he said. "Come in. No one will care."
The path was a vague parting in the grass
That led us to a weathered window-sill.
We pressed our faces to the pane. "You see," he said,
"Everything's as she left it when she died.
Her sons won't sell the house or the things in it.
They say they mean to come and summer here
Where they were boys. They haven't come this year.
They live so far away--one is out west--
It will be hard for them to keep their word.
Anyway they won't have the place disturbed."
A buttoned hair-cloth lounge spread scrolling arms
Under a crayon portrait on the wall
Done sadly from an old daguerreotype.
"That was the father as he went to war.
She always, when she talked about war,
Sooner or later came and leaned, half knelt
Against the lounge beside it, though I doubt
If such unlifelike lines kept power to stir
Anything in her after all the years.
He fell at Gettysburg or Fredericksburg,
I ought to know--it makes a difference which:
Fredericksburg wasn't Gettysburg, of course.
But what I'm getting to is how forsaken
A little cottage this has always seemed;
Since she went more than ever, but before--
I don't mean altogether by the lives
That had gone out of it, the father first,
Then the two sons, till she was left alone.
(Nothing could draw her after those two sons.
She valued the considerate neglect
She had at some cost taught them after years.)
I mean by the world's having passed it by--
As we almost got by this afternoon.
It always seems to me a sort of mark
To measure how far fifty years have brought us.
Why not sit down if you are in no haste?
These doorsteps seldom have a visitor.
The warping boards pull out their own old nails
With none to tread and put them in their place.
She had her own idea of things, the old lady.
And she liked talk. She had seen Garrison
And Whittier, and had her story of them.
One wasn't long in learning that she thought
Whatever else the Civil War was for
It wasn't just to keep the States together,
Nor just to free the slaves, though it did both.
She wouldn't have believed those ends enough
To have given outright for them all she gave.
Her giving somehow touched the principle
That all men are created free and equal.
And to hear her quaint phrases--so removed
From the world's view to-day of all those things.
That's a hard mystery of Jefferson's.
What did he mean? Of course the easy way
Is to decide it simply isn't true.
It may not be. I heard a fellow say so.
But never mind, the Welshman got it planted
Where it will trouble us a thousand years.
Each age will have to reconsider it.
You couldn't tell her what the West was saying,
And what the South to her serene belief.
She had some art of hearing and yet not
Hearing the latter wisdom of the world.
White was the only race she ever knew.
Black she had scarcely seen, and yellow never.
But how could they be made so very unlike
By the same hand working in the same stuff?
She had supposed the war decided that.
What are you going to do with such a person?
Strange how such innocence gets its own way.
I shouldn't be surprised if in this world
It were the force that would at last prevail.
Do you know but for her there was a time
When to please younger members of the church,
Or rather say non-members in the church,
Whom we all have to think of nowadays,
I would have changed the Creed a very little?
Not that she ever had to ask me not to;
It never got so far as that; but the bare thought
Of her old tremulous bonnet in the pew,
And of her half asleep was too much for me.
Why, I might wake her up and startle her.
It was the words 'descended into Hades'
That seemed too pagan to our liberal youth.
You know they suffered from a general onslaught.
And well, if they weren't true why keep right on
Saying them like the heathen? We could drop them.
Only--there was the bonnet in the pew.
Such a phrase couldn't have meant much to her.
But suppose she had missed it from the Creed
As a child misses the unsaid Good-night,
And falls asleep with heartache--how should I feel?
I'm just as glad she made me keep hands off,
For, dear me, why abandon a belief
Merely because it ceases to be true.
Cling to it long enough, and not a doubt
It will turn true again, for so it goes.
Most of the change we think we see in life
Is due to truths being in and out of favour.
As I sit here, and oftentimes, I wish
I could be monarch of a desert land
I could devote and dedicate forever
To the truths we keep coming back and back to.
So desert it would have to be, so walled
By mountain ranges half in summer snow,
No one would covet it or think it worth
The pains of conquering to force change on.
Scattered oases where men dwelt, but mostly
Sand dunes held loosely in tamarisk
Blown over and over themselves in idleness.
Sand grains should sugar in the natal dew
The babe born to the desert, the sand storm
Retard mid-waste my cowering caravans--
"There are bees in this wall." He struck the clapboards,
Fierce heads looked out; small bodies pivoted.
We rose to go. Sunset blazed on the windows.

Deeper, Deeper - ZDNet has an article on what passes for the "deep linking" controversy. Near as Unqualified Offerings can tell, the only way deep linking bans could pass legal muster would be if the various branches of government do the same unprincipled belly-up-legs-spread-tail-tuck for Big Media that they've already been doing on the digital media rights front. Oops!

So far though, the news is good:

In one of the highest-profile cases, Ticketmaster.com tried unsuccessfully to quash rival Tickets.com's attempts to deep link. A federal judge ruled that deep linking is acceptable as long as surfers can discern the source of the linked page. But auction site eBay has succeeded in preventing rival auction sites and aggregators from linking to pages on its site by making legal threats.

This seems like a superb standard. If you link in such a way as to misrepresent someone else's content as your own, that's fraud. (Allowing an article from another site to open in your site's frame so that people could imagine it to be your content.) Otherwise...

Anyway: Here is what you are doing when you "deep link": You're making a statement (that is "speech") consisting of factually correct information that a particular other statement (that is "speech") may be found in a certain virtual place. It's pretty clear that if, instead of linking to an interior page of the Dallas Morning News or NPR, someone just typed out the URL as website text that a user could paste into a browser's address bar, that it passes every test for protected speech. All "deep-link" banners would be doing, then, is insisting on one extra level of inconvenience for people who might want to come to their site. Genius!

Easy Pieces - Justin Raimondo, ahem, fisks, as they say in the blogosphere, warrior-for-profit Larry Kudlow. Kudlow makes a fat, soft target and Raimondo does not miss.

The Kudlow Doctrine is dead wrong, and profoundly anti-capitalist. For war sets the stage for the eventual strangling of free markets. High taxes, more systematic government regulations, and the massive physical destruction of capital, including especially human capital – these are the conditions for the eradication of market mechanisms and their replacement by the machinery of the State. The war spirit also gives added impetus to the arguments of our latter-day Mensheviks, the Blairites, Clintonites, and various and sundry other Third-Wayers who argue that war means the era of Big Government is back.

Plus great quotes from Ludwig von Mises.

We Hold These Truths - Happy Fourth of July to this site's American readers here and abroad! When our forefathers formally declared independence 226 years ago, they felt it incumbent upon themselves to explain the political reasons for their political act. They went considerably beyond "Hey, this ain't working!"

For that reason, it strikes Unqualified Offerings that blog entries are an apt way to honor the holiday. Imitatio Jefferson if you will. So blog this UO shall!

Broadly speaking, there are about four serious views of the relation of the Declaration of Independence itself to the American State. One faction holds that the Declaration can not be said to have any force whatsoever - it was superceded by the Constitution, and the Constitution, either in its "original intent" or in its protean incarnation as a "living document" is the only proper national guide. Another holds that the Declaration's central claims are not only false but pernicious. "There is not a word of truth in it," wrote John Calhoun, certainly not that piffle about all men being created equal. In the movie "Dazed and Confused," the leftist teacher sends her students off to summer vacation with the reminder that the Declaration was just the grumbling of a bunch of rich white men who didn't want to pay their taxes. Representatives of the "scold wing" of contemporary conservatism can't hang with the plain meaning of liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Another faction believes that the Bad Parts in the itemized bill of complaints (alluding to the Crown's limits on appropriating tribal lands) vitiate the entire document.

The fourth tendency holds that the Declaration is not just a founding document of the Unitied States, but the founding document - that the Constitution, indeed the nation itself, has purpose and legitimacy only insofar as it faciltates and furthers realizing the principles inherent in the Declaration. This is the view that Unqualified Offerings holds, in company with Madison and Lincoln. (About this vexing figure for libertarians, more later.) It is dangerous for people to hold this view, both for the country and for themselves. (I would argue that each approach the Declaration listed above has its moral hazards.) To hold it is as much as to say "My loyalty is not a given, and could be withdrawn." The risks to the State here are obvious. The risks to the individual are almost as obvious: hubris, an alienating aloofness, the possibility of being lethally wrong should one decide the time has come to dissolve one's political bonds with one's fellows.

Of course the State poses its own risks to the principles of the Declaration. But as Frost suggested in his greatest poem, "The Black Cottage," those principles have the hardihood of weed:

Her giving somehow touched the principle
That all men are created free and equal.
And to hear her quaint phrases--so removed
From the world's view to-day of all those things.
That's a hard mystery of Jefferson's.
What did he mean? Of course the easy way
Is to decide it simply isn't true.
It may not be. I heard a fellow say so.
But never mind, the Welshman got it planted
Where it will trouble us a thousand years.
Each age will have to reconsider it.
You couldn't tell her what the West was saying,
And what the South to her serene belief.
She had some art of hearing and yet not
Hearing the latter wisdom of the world.
White was the only race she ever knew.
Black she had scarcely seen, and yellow never.
But how could they be made so very unlike
By the same hand working in the same stuff?
She had supposed the war decided that.
What are you going to do with such a person?
Strange how such innocence gets its own way.
I shouldn't be surprised if in this world
It were the force that would at last prevail.

Department of Etymological Regrets - It turns out Baldrick was wrong. Irony is not "like goldy and bronzy, only made of iron." Unqualified Offerings was seized with the notion of actually creating concepts for "goldy" and "bronzy." But when it consulted the best American-language dictionary going, the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, it learned that "iron" and "irony" have, alas, two different roots.

Irony (etymology) - French ironie, from Old French, from Latin ironia, from Greek eirneia, feigned ignorance, from eirn, dissembler, probably from eirein, to say. See wer-5 in Appendix I.

Iron (etymology) - Middle English iren, from Old English ren. See eis- in Appendix I.

Yes, it's been a slow holiday-eve here at work. Why do you ask?

Icthyoterror Watch - The Post has a follow-up story on the northern snakehead menace in Maryland. Tons of people are now trying to catch the snakeheads believed to infest it. (Biologists are convinced there are multiple snakeheads there.) Unqualified Offerings hopes they get the bastards soon, as the Matron of the Offerings has begun to have bad dreams about them. (Coincidentally, UO dreamt this morning that he was sharing a dock with someone who hooked a large northern pike in weedy waters.)

This site is by no means making light of the snakehead threat, as they pose a clear and present danger to the Unqualified Offerings way of life. An idiot local radio station has mounted a "Save the Snakehead" campaign. If they get their wish, it will be the only kind of fish we have in Maryland, the way those things eat.

Snakeheads delenda est!

Anthraxblog II - Before the last site crash hereabouts, Unqualfied Offerings had completed a longish compare-and-contrast of two anthrax-related Instapundit citations. The first one was a brief commendation of a Michael Barone column in which Barone lamented the FBI's fixation on the "domestic scenario." Barone complained (article now costs two bucks) that much of the case for a domestic suspect rested on handwriting analysis, which seems to have about as much scientific validity as astrology. (Italics are close paraphrases of Barone's text.) Cut to a June 19 Instapundit item from a reader who prefers to remain anonymous, who copied Glenn Reynolds on a memo to (not from) the FBI. The memo could theoretically be by anyone from Dick Cheney to the secretary of a graphology club. UO had the notion it might be from burnt-out case James Woolsey, back from fruitless efforts to tie Iraq to the September massacres. But there's reason to think it's not him. Now, here is a good chunk of the memo:

At that point it is not unlikely that knowing the next day was his last and that this was his last "public" statement that he might contemplate his place in history and have a desire to claim credit for his role. Thus a search of this letter for signs of that are not as much of a stretch as one might think. So what do we see in it? The initial block letter in the message is a "T" that has extra strokes in it. The same with the start of the second line. The same with the start of the last line. In fact, based on the limited quality of the copy available on the FBI website, there are several other letters that have extra strokes (an extra boldness). All of them appear to be A's and T's. They of course are all the letters needed to spell ATTA. It could have been subconscious. The capital D's that start the other lines of the letter show no extra strokes. Also this letter seems not to be written with a felt-tip pen, and thus might yield more information based on the pressure of the various strokes of the pen -- but this cannot be determined from the website example. . . .

There are other areas of interest in these letters that might give up a clue or two -- such as the downhill slant of the writing, how the "1" was made, how the "4" was made, the spelling of "penacilin" and the warning including it, the absence of periods on one of the letters, the presence or absence of fingerprints on the letters and particularly on the envelopes, how the letters were folded, etc., etc., etc.

"Handwriting analysis" pointing to a domestic origin bad. Handwriting analysis pointing to a foreign origin good. Got that? But wait:

but most of these would be aided by a direct conversation and better copies of the letters and envelopes than are available on the website. Also, there is the matter of the letter not posted on the website. Perhaps it is simply a photocopy of the other letter, but if it is different, there could be something to be learned by it.

Whoever our memo-writer is is working from publically-available copies on a government website! This is not some insider leaking details to a high-circulation internet writer. This looks for all the world like some flavor of buff. The whole purpose of his letter seems to be to inveigle the FBI to give him (or her) access to the actual evidence. At the time of this memo, he or she clearly doesn't have it. The fact that it's this memo that Anonymous copies Reynolds on, rather than a "What I learned when the FBI brought me into the inner circle of the anthrax investigation" missive strongly implies that the FBI said, "Gee, no thanks." Now this is the same FBI that, well, we all know what their track record is. But UO thinks the memo writer who prefers to remain anonymous has the air of those psychics who show up in the wake of moderately-famous crimes, full of ideas for the police.

The memo writer ought to just start a blog, like the rest of us amateurs.

Anthraxblog I - Might as well just bow to the inevitable and change the name of this site.

In between dollops of immoderate, head-turning praise for this weblog (she even recommends Unqualified Offerings for a summer job¹), Avedon Carol returns to the question of motives for last falls anthrax attacks.

I think it's significant that Anthrax Man didn't just mail to the media and "congress (which holds the federal purse strings)" but to Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy. No one who is working for Iraq has any reason whatsoever to go after the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, nor is Leahy the appropriate person to frighten into supporting an attack on Iraq or defense-related spending. Daschle, yes, but both the Iraqi-attack and scare-attack scenarios make more sense if aimed at someone who is actually working on intel/defense rather than someone whose power and influence lie in being the head of a purely domestic committee.

Some time ago, Avedon linked to a Richard J. Ochs chronology overlaying the legislative history of the USA-PATRIOT Acr with that of the anthrax attacks. First off, it does the libertarian heart good to see the return of left wing skepticism of big government. We missed you guys the last 8 years! Second, remember that Unqualified Offerings would never say never about governments doing bad bad things. But I'm still not sold on the anthrax-terror law-anti-Democrat nexus. A minor quibble. The chronology makes much of the Daschle and Leahy letters being postmarked the same day that Senator Russell Feingold blocked a vote on USA-PATRIOT without debate. The immediate question that would seem to arise is, "Why didn't Anthrax Man send a letter to Russell Feingold too?" Another minor quibble: Part of any true chronology of the anthrax hoax has to include the letter to Quantico accusing former USAMRIID scientist Dr. Asaad of being a terrorist (sent "late September" per the FAS chronology). That would seem to be an important part of the puzzle, and it's a loose end that Ochs leaves not just untied but unacknowledged.

Bigger quibbles. If Anthrax Man is Made in the US like his product, then the text of his letters is deliberately designed to throw people off the scent. Why wouldn't it be possible that the targets be chosen with the same aim? For instance, if your aim is to have America suffer an anthrax attack, or your aim is to frame an innocent man for a crime, your targets will not matter so much.

Biggest quibble: Why bother? If you're the federal government, I mean. What were the chances that USA-PATRIOT was going to fail? There's an iron legislative principle at work: bad occurences guarantee a bad law will be passed. Someone blows up a federal building? Pass a bad "anti-terrorism" law. A plane crashes into Long Island Sound? Pass more antiterrorism regulations, even though the plane crashed by accident. What were the chances that we were going to get through a truly bad terrorist attack on US soil without a bad law being passed to show that the government was Doing Something? Nil. The US national security establishment may not belong to the class of fuzzy, bigeyed things, but it doesn't tend to sweat the small stuff, and Daschle and Leahy's opposition was small stuff. In the end, they were going to roll.

It says here.

Avedon adds one odd bit that I can't help seeing as ideologically tinged.

(Moral Clarity note: In any case, it looked like the Republicans had launched hate campaigns against these two Democratic leaders and someone had then tried to kill them, yet not one prominent Republican stood up to decry murder attempts on two Senators. My moral compass says that trying to assassinate Daschle and Leahy is significantly More Bad than being Noam Chomsky; where's the outrage?)

Good gravy! That's because everyone was decrying germ warfare against Americans in general! Why would anyone, Republican or otherwise, prominent or not, condemn the attempted murder of "two Democratic leaders" more than the actual murders of a mailroom worker, a nurse, and three other admittedly non-prominent victims?

¹Based on salon.com's life expectancy per their most recent 10Q.

Adventures in Multiculturalism - Per a story in The Independent:

A tribal council ordered four men to gang-rape an 18-year-old woman to punish her family, after her 11-year-old brother was seen walking with a girl from a higher tribal caste.

Now for the good news:

Police raided the central Punjabi village of Meerwala yesterday and arrested six people, including the rapists and witnesses, a district police officer, Farman Ali, said.

Forest, Trees. Trees, Forest. - Andrew Hofer apparently finds the most notable thing about the latest botched American attack in Afghanistan is that the initial casualty estimates were an order of magnitude high, and that at least one British paper's website was slow to update the estimates. He closes with the blogosphere's thousandth mention of the undying, inflated casualty figures of Marc Harold.

Maybe warbloggers also always fight the last war. Unqualified Offerings can't help shake the feeling that between the fact of the attack itself and some British paper's initial hyping of the numbers, actual Afghans are going to get more worked up about the former than the latter. That's not good for our side. But it's understandable, and incidents like this are going to make prosecuting the Afghan war harder. Perhaps our rulers should pay a little more attention to the war we already have, and less to the one they're itching to fight instead.

UPDATE: Welcome, More Than Zero readers! If you're looking for the part of the above where I actually call Andrew Hofer a bloodthirsty fiend or even imply it, I apologize - it was never there. I assume this was a bit of jocularity on the part of MTZ's proprietor. (The alternative explanation, that Hofer assumes all criticism from the dovish side must be based on emotional or moral complaints, is not demanded by parsimony.)

Andrew has amplified his expression of regret over the deaths of the civilians in question. However, my concern was not with How Andrew Hofer Feels. My concern is that we're establishing a pattern of lethal carelessness in the Afghan campaign that strengthens the hand of our enemies - enemies that I assume Andrew Hofer wants to see defeated as much as I do. That Marc Herald's numbers from the spring are willfully bad (I am convinced they are), or that the actual numbers of dead from the latest incident are maybe a fifth of the initial reports (confirming the Unqualified Offerings Iron Law of Casualty Estimates), struck me last night and strikes me this morning as irrelevant to the question of "Is this kind of thing good for us?" If we do manage to turn a sizable portion of the Afghan population against us, it will be the actions, not European media accounts of the actions, that do it.

Signing Off - Like you need to know that. Tomorrow. Liberty Magazine: Slow-Motion Weblog - and more. (If I think of something.)

Culture Beat - Oh please let Unqualified Offerings be the first to blog this, um, shocking plagiarism scandal, please please please?

Northern Soul - Happy Canada Day to our loyal Canadian reader.

UPDATE: Sic.

Watch Watch - And now there is Sully Watch, focusing like a laser beam on Andrew Sullivan.

I was wondering today if these new sites were living proof that Nietzshe was right that ressentiment is the fatal flaw of the left. But you could argue that the "watch" phenomenon began with Smarter Times, and even a nonconservative right-winger like me would shy from dismissing Smarter Times. Of course, the proprietor of Smarter Times eventually decided to untether himself from watching someone else's paper and went off to start his own. Will Sully Watch and Instapunditwatch and Illuminated Donkey Watch (forthcoming) similarly free themselves some day? In the meantime, don't they ever go fishing?

Catfishin' with Unqualified Offerings - This past weekend Unqualified Offerings confirmed its recent discovery that catfish are fun to catch. It took its medium-duty rod this time, figuring that it would give it enough power to haul one up that four-foot bank. In the event, the fish it caught was upstream somewhat, where the bank comes right down to the water level. But it was a darn good thing this website had its medium-duty rod, because it hooked the fish right next to a fallen tree and had to keep the prize out of the branches by brute force. It still took a few minutes before UO could actually bring the fish any closer to shore.

21 inches. Weight? Can't say. UO is still not wild about handling catfish. The barbels (aka whiskers) aren't actually dangerous, but the fins are sharp and infectious. Nor do catfish have handy scale-hook slots under their mouths like bass and trout do. So Unqualified Offerings just took the tape to it, then worked the lure free with its needle-nose plyers.

Unqualified Offerings also encountered its first snake of the year. Happily, it had been instructed to uphold the "They're more afraid of you than you are of them" masquerade and spent the entire encounter dashing lickety-split away from Unqualified Offerings.

Which is good, because they aren't actually more afraid of UO than UO is of them at all.

Also saw bats. Bats aren't scary.

Once again, for those who come to this site for angling advice, UO caught its fish on a green Rebel Crawfish. Strange thing about catfish, and UO realizes this is projection on its part. But: You land a bass, and its expression suggests, "Duh, what's going on." Land a catfish, and the eyes seem to say, "How can I take this bastard?

For this site's extreme readership: If you're not that excited about catching catfish on a crankbait, don't worry - there's a much stupider technique you can try.

The Lamb Shall Lie Down with the Lion - You would expect an Israeli peacenik like Ran HaCohen to despise "fanatical" Jewish settlers in the Occupied Territories. You'd be wrong:

Now you may think that the Israelis inside the Green Line support dismantling settlements, but those in the settlements oppose it. This sounds logical, but it is not true. Remember that by far not all settlers are ideologically motivated. Some moved to the occupied territories for promises of better life: fresh air, beautiful view, rural serenity. Many others, probably most of the settlers, were transferred to the occupied territories by the dull coercion of economy: while flats within Israel are extremely expensive, houses in the settlements are generously subsidised. Having to choose between an unaffordable small flat in Jerusalem and an almost-free spacious house in a nearby settlement, with a generous state mortgage, a generous state bonus, a generous reduction on income-tax as well as generously improved public services (education, health, infrastructure), many lower middle-class families opted for the latter. One can hardly blame them for that.

Cue ironic "Israel: Libertarian Paradise" promotional video. HaCohen continues

Betrayed twice, because public opinion turned against the settlers as if they – and not the government that sent them and holds them hostage – were the ultimate source of evil. The rhinocerised nationalistic daily Ha'aretz attacks settlers on a daily basis (e.g. a recent article by its Editor-in-Chief), urging them to leave "for their own sake", as if people who somehow managed to buy a cheap housing unit in a settlement could simply leave it behind and buy another house somewhere else.

The subsidy programs continued through Likud and Labor governments alike. When settlers have asked for similar assistance to get the hell out, they've been turned down - by Likud and Labor governments alike.

Which leads to HaCohen's intriguing Modest Proposal:

Jews in America and world-wide should therefore use their money to support settlers who wish to leave the occupied territories and return to Israel. This should not even be a "political" issue: the settlers (and their children) are held hostage by the Israeli government, exposed to deadly violence. You do not have to be a dove to support people's right not to live in the middle of a battle-field (unless they want to). Sums and conditions can be negotiated, using as guidelines the compensations paid by Israel to the settlers evacuated from Sinai when it was returned to Egypt.

Don't Panic - Instapundit.com is dark because of Glenn Reynolds' vacation. (Matt Welch and Ken Layne are on hiatus too. That's a lot of famous bloggers.) Reynolds said he considered appointing an official fill-in, but decided against it because it would make the site too much like a job.

But there are still all those readers to think about, their mouse hands twitching bookmarkward several times a day, then faltering as their owners remember that there will be no Instapundit fix today. Or tomorrow.

That's why Unqualified Offerings is offering itself as the unofficial comfort food of the Instapundit-lorn. Here is this site's body. Take it and eat. UO looks forward to providing for all your Instapundit needs, with a couple of minor adjustments:

o Unqualified Offerings will not post quite so often as Instapundit does.
o Actually, Unqualified Offerings won't post any more often than usual.
o Unqualified Offerings won't be expressing the same opinions one finds on Instapundit.
o Unqualified Offerings will not, in fact, be much like Instapundit at all.

Well! If you're ready so am I!

Credit Where Credit is Due Oh Yes! Dept. - Unqualified Offerings is pleased to report that Justin Raimondo credits this site by name for coming up with the term "split-screen republicanism," especially since, ahem, he hasn't always done so.

Raimondo's Friday column is a response to Glenn Reynolds' most recent FoxNews.com column. For my part, I think that Justin both mistakes the intent of Reynolds' column and finds its central flaw. When Reynolds writes about how "we have to be able to trust the government," I don't think he's urging the people to trust the feds or expressing his own faith in them - he's calling for the feds to actually act in a trustworthy manner. Where I agree with Justin is that, structurally, we can't trust them. All the demands that federal law enforcement and intelligence act honorably are wasted. Where there is secrecy and vagueness of mission, there will be chicanery and bureaucratic self-interest.

A note on an old, unrelated issue: A few months ago, some bloggers noticed the relatively low number of hits they were getting from attacks on them in Justin's columns and from there questioned his traffic claims for Antiwar.com. There are two reasons why you'd get low referrals from antiwar.com regardless. For instance, I got no referrals from Friday's article. Why? Because his link to my site was to a Google cache page. Someone may have clicked through from the Google cache page to the actual Unqualified Offerings site, but they'd show up as referred by Google, not antiwar.com. The other reason is that, assuming I'm a typical antiwar.com reader, I don't actually click through many links from Justin's columns. He puts a lot of links in there, and if I followed them all I'd read nothing but antiwar.com stuff all week. (Yeah yeah, I know: you figured that was the case anyway. You're killin' me, you know that?) And the prose has a certain...propulsive quality that tends to carry you right past opportunities to click out.

Jihad in Baltimore - The great Post reporter Richard Leiby profiles Abu Mujahid, ne Aukai Collins, in the Washington Post. Mujahid is a Euro-American prison convert to Islam who fought in Chechnya and southeastern Europe. According to the post, in his book memoir, My Jihad, he angrily rebukes the idea that terrorism can have any legitimate function in Holy War as he conceives it.

Mujahid currently lives in a Baltimore slum. He worked for years as an informant for the FBI and CIA. There was a falling out. He now gets strip-searched every time he enters the country. He says he tried to warn the FBI about 9/11 hijacker Hanji Hanjour. The FBI says Mujahid never mentioned Hanjour.

Fascinating story.

Taking Political Correctness to an Absurd Degree - No, not the Pledge decision. UO can't get worked up about that. It's this: an MSN.com promo this morning on grilling has a picture that shows the grill being tended by a, well, a vaginal-american. The infamy!

Last Thoughts (For Now) on Domestic Anthrax - Anthrax did not prove to be anything like a "weapon of mass destruction." But someone killed five people. That someone has to pay. And if the feds are delaying the murderer's comeuppance for political purposes, they need to pay too. (NB: UO opposes the death penalty.)

Which leads to a final speculation. Someone within the FBI may feel the same way. If there's a greymail or political convenience bump on the road to justice, getting the names of domestic suspects out there may represent someone's attempted detour around it.

Q: Vox populi vox handgun?
A: Exactly.

Q: Do you like that idea?
A: Let's close with a final cautionary note from Greg.

Even if Hatfill is as guilty as Richard Jewe...er, bad example.

Q: The FBI has been wrong before, in other words.
A: I thought I said "Let's closewith..."

Q: Hey, I'm just as much in charge around here as you are. Could they be putting names out to try to scare a suspect with the specter of a vigilante?
A: They certainly could.

Q: Thank you.
A: Yeah, right.