Crank Manifesto - Q: Jeez, Jim, are you going to disbelieve everything the administration tells you unless they present incontrovertible proof?

A: Yes. They want it too bad. As we now know, Donald Rumsfeld set the first Iraq attack plans in motion while firemen were still hosing down the Pentagon.

"Go massive," the notes quote him as saying. "Sweep it all up. Things related and not."

The author of the CBS News story, David C. Martin, wrote a superb book about cold-war era espionage, Wilderness of Mirrors, that has provided this site with many item titles.

Q: You don't trust your own government on something this important?

A: You'd have to be an, I don't know, idiotarian or something, to do so.

Due Date - In the Christian Science Monitor, Tom Regan reminds us, "When contemplating war, beware of babies in incubators:"

[Regan's brother] was a father, and he had just heard that Iraqi soldiers had taken scores of babies out of incubators in Kuwait City and left them to die. The Iraqis had shipped the incubators back to Baghdad. A pacifist by nature, my brother was not in a peaceful mood that day. "We've got to go and get Saddam Hussein. Now," he said passionately.

I completely understood his feelings. Although I had no family of my own then, who could countenance such brutality? The news of the slaughter had come at a key moment in the deliberations about whether the US would invade Iraq. Those who watched the non-stop debates on TV saw that many of those who had previously wavered on the issue had been turned into warriors by this shocking incident.

Too bad it never happened.

It later developed that the stolen incubator story was a confection whipped up by the PR firm of Hill & Knowlton, then in the employ of the Kuwaiti government. The striking "Nayirah" who testified that she saw Iraqi soldiers tossing premies out of their terraria turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to Washington, and was, needless to say, nowhere near occupied Iraq.

The debunking came well after the war itself. Nobody deliberating the question of war - no congressman, no reporter - pressed the question of the testimony's truth value. (Its value was of another nature.)

Regan's conclusion is odd:

In his excellent book on war reporting "The First Casualty (of War is the Truth)," British journalist Phillip Knightly shows how important it is for the media to remain vigilant. While war with Iraq may truly be inevitable, it serves us all well if we make sure the reasons we go are legitimate ones, and not ones cooked up by richly funded public relation firms.

Unqualified Offerings might be forgiven for ascribing that strange last sentence to our old friend, liberal bias in the press. As if "richly funded public relation firms" just take it into their heads to do stuff like that for fun. Hill & Knowlton was paid by the Kuwaiti government and its work product was in service to the American government. Regan will never hit the target if he keeps aiming low.

So the question has been, when do this year's incubator stories start. The answer appears to be "this weekend." George Bush and Tony Blair announced that a 1998 IAEA report concludes that Iraq is 6 months from acquiring nuclear weapons. You would think that means that the 1998 IAEA report said that Iraq was 54 months away or something - they sure can call 'em at the IAEA. But apparently that's not what it said:

Instead, Windrem reported, the Vienna, Austria-based agency said in 1998 that Iraq had been six to 24 months away from such capability before the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the U.N.-monitored weapons inspections that followed.

The war and the inspections destroyed much of Iraq’s nuclear infrastructure and required Iraq to turn over its highly enriched uranium and plutonium, Windrem reported.

In a summary of its 1998 report, the IAEA said that “based on all credible information available to date ... the IAEA has found no indication of Iraq having achieved its programme goal of producing nuclear weapons or of Iraq having retained a physical capability for the production of weapon-useable nuclear material or having clandestinely obtained such material.”

Oh. So the White House clarified its position:

A senior White House official acknowledged Saturday night that the 1998 report did not say Iraq was six months away from developing nuclear weapons. “What happened was, we formed our own conclusions based on the report,” the official told NBC News’ Norah O’Donnell.

Who can doubt that they did?

The IAEA also demurs at Bush and Blair's alarm over "new construction" at previously-identified Iraqi nuclear research facilities.

Get ready for a lot more "conclusions" to be formed.

Jim Henley, 09:56 PM

Tired so for tonight, just another episode of

Cooking with Unqualified Offerings - Remember, experts say there are a variety of appliances that will help you to prepare food indoors when the weather prohibits grilling or barbecuing. Not that there's any reason to discuss them here. Tonight, a nice recipe for Grilled Salmon fillets with mustard sauce from Sunset Magazine's site.

For Unqualfied Offerings, recipes are like roleplaying game rules - a nice place to start. This particular recipe, UO adapted as follows:

1. Unqualified Offerings was out of tarragon, so the staff substituted dill.

2. Once the sauce was boiled down, UO stirred in a half cup of olive oil.

3. Wobbly Watch: Sunset would have you believe you need to cook the salmon over indirect heat. Phooey. Let the coals burn down, put the salmon on the grill skin side down and slather the fleshy tops with the sauce. Close the lid on the grill. When the fillets are almost done, flip them. After another couple of minutes, pull them off, peel away the skin and serve.

4. Sunset recommends 35-40 minutes over indirect heat. For direct heat, cut that in half.

Yummy!

Why We Hate Them - The following article is part of a blogburst - a simultaneous and cross-linked posting of many blogs on the same theme. This blogburst commemorates the Munich Olympics Massacre , which began in the dawn hour of September 5th, 1972. Go to the The Index of the Munich Massacre Blogburst to find links to all the other articles.
**********************

I'm not much of a joiner. I haven't participated in "blog bursts" before and don't know when I will again. But I was twelve years old at the time of the Munich Olympics and I saw the whole, awful thing, and the experience never left me. Enthusiasts for the Palestinian cause, however defined, might profit from pondering why that is.

It was obvious to me, watching the masked gunmen on the balconies, and later the garish, uninformative spotlights on the runway, what I was seeing: a crime. I was watching bad guys. My first sustained exposure to "the plight of the Palestinians" was to villains acting in their name. Being twelve, I knew that the villains couldn't win, right up to the moment the good guys lost.

Then came the "discourse." Draw attention to the cause! I'd type more catch-phrases, but it's not worth the disgust. The 1970s were the high-water mark of Fanonist mendacity. It dumbfounded me then that anyone could believe such things, that people like George Habash were allowed to sit for interviews and go unmolested by local police anywhere on earth. Even then, Europe accepted such arguments in a way most Americans instinctively rejected them. To me, Yasser Arafat and the PLO were simply the masterminds of a loathsome criminal act. Weightlifters. That'll show 'em.

I think I'm far from the only American that Munich made a lasting impression on, and to the Palestinian's detriment. Later there was Entebbe and Khartoum and Leon Klinghoffer to reinforce the impression, but it was the sheer squalid cruelty of Munich that set the tone. Even after Oslo, the part of me that hoped for peace warred with the part that couldn't accept that Yasser Arafat should be allowed to live comfortably as a free man.

It was not just the crimes, it was justifying the crimes.

The Palestinians have always had a case. Whether their case was particularly egregious in a global-historical sense is a matter for debate, but you can't blame the Palestinians themselves for a certain lack of detachment in the matter. You can blame their leaders for indulging in a decades-long orgy of apocalyptic gesture, though. And you can note that in their smug self-justification for turning crime into politics, they lost for decades the sympathy of the one country on earth that could bring them something like surcease and recompense: my country.

Readers of this blog know that I am pretty hard on Israel. I believe that many of its remaining security problems are substantially, though not entirely, of its own making. I believe that, at bottom, a critical mass of its political elite would rather have the West Bank than peace. I believe that the founding of Israel in 1948 represented many, many instances of what the Fifth Amendment refers to as a "taking" and that the individual property-holders affected should be compensated financially. I believe that, so long as Israel maintains a distinction between subjects in the West Bank and Gaza and citizens in Israel proper, that there is an occupation, and it is illegitimate. I believe that if Israel can't survive without continued US aid, that Zionism has failed at its stated purpose of ensuring a refuge for the Jews. These are intellectual positions. Since the proportion of Americans polled who say the US needs to pressure Israel to do more for peace grows ever closer to the proportion who think the US needs to pressure the Palestinian Authority, I'd wager that these are increasingly common beliefs. But at least on my part, they come with no particular emotional attachment to the situation of the Palestinians themselves. This is an ascription of collective responsibility for the crimes of a few, and the apologetics of more than a few. It is my failing.

That failing is thirty years old tonight.

Th-Th-That's All Folks for now. Church is in session!

So How's That Going? - Best joke in the world:

Q: Ask me what the secret of humor is?

A: Okay, what is th -

Q: Timing!

Best joke in the world reprinted in honor of Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan just inaugurated a new set of awards for pundits who averred that the Afghan War might present difficulties who are now claiming that the Iraq War will present difficulties. So Andrew, how's that Afghan thing going?

Hell No He Won't Go - Julian Sanchez finally weighs in on escalating the Iraq War, and is firmly against.

It’s possible that tomorrow, photos will be released of Saddam and Osama sharing a tall milkshake with two straws. If that happened, I’d be duly embarrassed, and revise my assessment of the Iraqi threat. Under most conditions, though, the power vacuum created by the dramatic sort of regime change the administration envisions triggers a process of re-equilibriation at least as dangerous as the status quo. Deposing a dictator establishes a kind of political arbitrage opportunity, which political entrepreneurs are eager to exploit. In these cases, though, the transaction costs typically involve guns, bombs, and other implements of commerce in destruction. As post-invasion uncertainty rises, parties on the ground rush to exploit perceived differentials in local knowledge, and we see the same kind of flurry you would on a stock floor when a hot bit of news leaks… if the NASDAQ allowed traders to carry grenades.

After You - Ehud Barak writes in the New York Times:

Freeing the region of Saddam Hussein would also create an opening for forward movement on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It was only after Mr. Hussein's supporter, Yasir Arafat, found himself beaten and isolated in 1991 that he was willing to go to Madrid and enter fully into the Oslo peace process.

Nothing can be assured in advance. But the opportunities far exceed the dangers. The greatest risk now lies in inaction. The history of the last century showed us clearly what the price of paralysis can be. The public debate over Iraq policy must continue. But the readiness to act, once the time is ripe, should not fade away.

Ehud, bubelah. You make it clear that Israel thinks something should be done about Iraq. And you've got hundreds of nuclear weapons and the fourth-largest army in the world. Go for it.

Omission - Can't find Stephanie Dupont on jumptheshark.com. What's up with that?

Quickies - As always, Wednesday was UO's gaming night. So just this 'n' that:

1. My stat server has been unreliably up for some time. The fault of my host, Half Price Hosting, and their software vendor, mystatserver.com. That means that if you posted something on your blog referring to this one - perhaps pointing out that I am full of crap about something - there is a chance I will not notice. So please let me know if you think I should.

2. You can hear full-length streaming versions of all songs on Aimee Mann's new album, Lost in Space, on her website. Mann made one of the best albums of the 90s (Whatever) and had a good one after that too (I'm with Stupid). To my taste, her last record before this one, either the Magnolia soundtrack or Bachelor No. 2 being substantially the same record, was a real comedown - mired in mid-tempo romantic recriminations. (The previous records had uptempo romantic recriminations and downtempo romantic recriminations too. Kidding actually. They had that and a lot more. Since this is breaking news and I'm just two songs into it myself, I'm not prepared to say which records are the more apt comparison.

3. Important piece by Jim Webb in today's Post about the Iraq occupation (to come). As of this afternoon, the few blogospheric responses I'd seen hadn't laid a glove on Webb's arguments. Start with this Instapundit mention to find the attempted rebuttals.

4. Apparently some readers can't get enough of lazy World War II analogies! (Note: If that's not the case, then some writers' market research firms are leading them astray.) If you're one of them, you can always try this Jonah Goldberg column. One of us has to.

5. Crisis Magazine is a Catholic cultural review. Their website has a pretty striking article (about why Christian parents would be wise to let their children read non-christian and even anti-christian children's books) by a young writer of considerable promise.

6. Virginia Postrel is back, bigtime. The most striking of today's many posts? Why southern "hyperliberals" are the way they are. Excerpt:

They're aggressively liberal because their thinking was formed by the civil rights movement, when local conservatives were really, really bad. I am not being ironic when I say that. Unless you were a southern liberal when being "liberal" meant being in the very small minority that believed in ending segregation and treating black people as equals, it is hard to imagine how Manichean the divide was and, in these journalists' minds, still is. (Nowadays, the civil rights movement is like the French resistance. Everybody supported it. But everybody didn't.) They see the conflict as civilization vs. barbarism. Also, if you've lived where evangelical Christians are in the aggressive and overwhelming majority, and you don't share their views, they're a lot more likely to give you the creeps. The same can be said of small-minded self-described liberals when they're in the aggressive and overwhelming majority.

In other words, southern liberals in Big Media are liberals because they think that's the side of good, and they're self-righteous about it because they've seen southern conservatism at its worst. The problem is that they're surrounded by people who think all things "liberal" are good and true, and they haven't adjusted their political categories in 30 or 40 years.

Shh! 2 - Avram Grumer of Pigs&Fishes and Diana Moon of Letter from Gotham stick up for public libraries - the ones in New York anyway.

Are We to be Spared Nothing Dept. - Libertarians are so wacky that they believe, after F.A. Hayek, that state attempts to regulate citizen activities first fail to achieve their objectives, thus justifying further, more intrusive regulations to close the gaps, and so on. Libertarians believe that, say, Greece, in an attempt to prohibit online gambling, will end up banning just about everything that looks like a computing device, like in this ZDNet story:

Law Number 3037, enacted at the end of July, explicitly forbids electronic games with 'electronic mechanisms and software' from public and private places, and people have already been fined tens of thousands of euros for playing or owning games.

Internet cafes are allowed to continue to operate, providing all gaming is prohibited: if a client is found to be running any sort of game, including online chess, the café owner will be fined and the place closed. The law applies equally to visitors from abroad: "If you know these things are banned, you should not bring them in," said the commercial attaché at the Greek Embassy in London -- who declined to give her name.

The law was passed to prevent illegal gambling.

Fun fact: the European Union's "harmonization" process tends to propagate the most draconian laws on any given social "ill" through the rest of the member states.

Adriana Cronin writes on Libertarian Samizdata (whence came this link):

Now, so many words spring to mind - most of them not suitable for a 'family' blog. I will restrain myself and focus my disbelief and fury on one point - the government imposes a blanket ban on games (electronic in this case presumably because it has already banned the other kind) because it is incapable of distinguishing innocuous video games from illegal gambling machines! Not only have governments been preventing people from all sort of activities, now they can't even be bothered to find out what exactly it is they don't want us to do!

Think of it as Evolution in Action - Gary Farber invites us to contemplate advances in human understanding during these last days of the animal kingdom's primacy.

Paradoxes of Capitalism I

Dear Bill: Don't get me wrong, I love the overall quality of Spidey, the Hulk and the X-books these days. BUT without naming names it seems recently that certain Marvel writers like [J. Michael Straczynski] are inserting their own left-of-center political bias into the work being published that is making some politically moderate fans uncomfortable. . . . . I think that MAX titles should stick to the more controversial material and let the PG rated titles stay relatively non-radical. You might think I'm a right-wing nut for letting something printed in a comic book disturb me, but it is a growing concern of mine.

Dear Greg,

You are not a right wing nut, you have valid a point of view. JMS does not have a political "bias", he has a valid point of view. You both have every right to express your views, but Joe gets to do it on the pages of Amazing Spider-Man because he has tripled the sales of that book in under one year, while you (and I) are stuck typing our views on AICN.

Marvel Comics honcho Bill Jemas and a reader in the Don't Ask section of the official Marvel Comics website.

Paradoxes of Capitalism II - Interesting passage from Christopher Caldwell that invites mulling over:

People ask why it is that rich states tend to be more liberal than poor ones. Massachusetts, which is always among the richest handful of states, tends to like tax-and-spenders, while dirt-poor Mississippians are suckers for politicians who will "let you keep more of your own money." (All 62 bucks’ worth!) More specifically, people in the poor states tend not to care if the rich get the lion’s share of the benefit from President Bush’s tax cut, as long as they themselves get something. People from the rich states tend to deplore tax cuts tilted toward the rich. How can this be? Are people in Massachusetts stupid? No. People in Massachusetts are perfectly logical. The most treasured commodity in these parts is oceanfront property–which happens to be the commodity that academic economists use to illustrate "superstar economies" like ours, typified by widening gaps between rich and poor.

If the commodity under discussion is an extremely limited, non-mass-producible one, like oceanfront property (or healthcare, but we can leave that discussion for another time), then our economy works in such a way that a rising tide (to abuse a nautical metaphor) does not lift all boats. The number of dollars in your pocket or in your bank account is not what matters–not unless you’re hell-bent on accumulating crap. What matters is your position relative to the guy who wants to bid against you for the house one street closer to the ocean. In this economy, yes, the rich are now worth 10 times as much as they were 10 years ago and the upper-middle class are worth twice as much. And this does not mean a vastly better life for the former and a considerably better life for the latter. Wrong. It still means a lot more for the rich, of course. But for the middle and upper-middle classes, it means getting bumped out of places like Osterville, MA, or Half Moon Bay, CA, or Everett, WA–and into places like Chandler, AZ, or Arlington, TX, or Gaithersburg, MD.

Caldwell ignores the role of property tax increases in driving people out of homes they already own. And it's not as if oceanfront property were the only good - or even that all desirable goods are non-reproducible like oceanfront property. But I suspect he's onto something about the psychology of resentment in affluent regions and, for that matter, in affluent times.

Decision Tree - The Cogent Provacateur has a substantial piece exploring the popular issue of what to do about the Mesopotamian Pissant, a piece that is indeed both cogent and provocative. Link via Kathy Kinsley, who points out that CP does that rare thing, bring up some stuff you haven't heard a dozen times already.

Kathy herself has more zany excerpts from a fun-loving Islamist/Jihadist/Islamofascist website, including one fellow who apparently really does want to kill me. There is a qualification:

But this should be in the case of jihaad under the leadership of one of the leaders of the Muslims, or his deputy.

Certainly, anyone who recognizes as a "leader" someone like bin Laden, who after all claims to be one and is leading a conscious jihad, that person is definitely my enemy, and not just my civilization's rival.

In a Name - Kevin Maroney e-mails to say he disfavors "jihadists" as a term for hostile muslim millenialists:

I don't like the term "Jihadists" because there really are Muslims--good, decent people--who use the Islamic term "jihad" in its broader, and Islamically authentic, sense of things beyond just "bloody war against the infidel". I don't think it's fair to the people who use the term in its broader sense to use the term in the narrow sense that the worst Muslims use.

It strikes me as being sort of like calling Christian religious fascists "witnesses" or "preachers". It's just not accurate.

Unqualified Offerings asked if Kevin thought "Islamist" was any better. He said yes:

Yes, I think it is. It's not the same as "Islamic" or "Muslim", and clearly refers to an Islam-first movement. It's not a term for a specific small number of people that a broad number of people might use to describe themselves. I think it's a sub-optimum term, because it's not clearly enough differentiated from "Islamic".

I actually like the sense of "Islamofascist", though I think it's a clumsy term. "Wahhabbist" is probably better still.

Note: UO has previously defended the salience of the term "Islamofascist" here. The term fits. It's just clumsy. And like the original term "fascist," its meaning tends to drift over time to cover general bad behavior by people one doesn't like.

More Like This - Eve Tushnet says the War on Terror needs less Roosevelt (both) and more Reagan.

And on Libertarian Samizdata, Dale Amon thinks that September 11, 2002 would be the perfect day to officially launch the invasion of Iraq. This is surely true from an esthetic standpoint - the shift in focus from the war against our attackers to the war our rulers would much rather fight has been a brazen and arguably successful feat of sleight-of-hand. Finalizing the bait-and-switch on September 11 has a symmetry that's hard to deny.

Samizdata also has a superb set of pieces by Amon and Perry de Havilland about the salience or lack thereof of gene clusters - what you call "race." The capper is this one.

Did You Hear the One About...? - Interesting developments in the matter of Jackie Mason and Ray Hanania over the weekend. Blogger Al Barger of Culpepper Log had an e-mail exchange with Hanania himself after Barger apparently googled an angry letter that Hanania wrote to the Lebanese Daily Star that was published on June 4. In the letter, Hanania decried the Sharon government, calling it "nazi-like," calling on all Arab governments that have relations with Israel to end them, and arguing that "it is clear to nearly everyone that Sharon has opened the door to the new possibility of correcting the original injustice of 1948 and restoring Palestinian control over all of Palestine, an action that the pro-Israel American apologists have dubbed as the 'destruction' of the state of Israel."

I'm not particularly scandalized by anything in Hanania's letter to the Daily Star, with a single exception. It would be unusual to find someone of Arab or Palestinian descent who does not sincerely believe that the founding of Israel in 1948 represented several kinds of injustice. To demand that they think otherwise is at least naive and at most pernicious. As the old saying goes, you make peace with your ememies, not your friends, and if you insist that your enemy exchange his view of the conflict for yours in advance of a settlement, then peace is not your top desire. (It is, of course, usually necessary that your enemy be able to understand your view of the conflict between you, and vice verse, but that's not the same thing as discarding his own view.)

Hanania's letter is undated, but there's some textual evidence to be had in the other letters on the 06_04_02 page, most of which bear dates in early April. So Hanania's letter was probably written around the time of the siege of Ramallah. There's internal textual evidence to support this - his reference to Arafat being interviewed while under siege reads as a contemporaneous observation.

The part that bothers me is his statement that "the second intifada is working." There's not a word of praise for suicide bombings as such, but there's a passage of stunning moral opacity regardless:

It proves that by standing up to Israel’s brutality, and even in the face of losing so many innocent Palestinian lives either to Israeli Army murder or suicide bombings, the Palestinians will defeat Israel

Innocent Palestinian lives lost to suicide bombings? Uh, Ray, I think they did it on purpose.

Okay, so at the height of the Jenin incursion, Hanania got hacked off and said shit, and failed to own up to how sheerly squalid the second intifada became over time. That's one plausible reading of the sequence of events. And frankly, as a weblogger, it's strongly in my self-interest to uphold the principle that someone should be judged by the totality of their body of work rather than any given item. Still, just as the Mason camp has shuffled from story to story until it found one that it liked, Hanania's statements on the matter too have...evolved. Here was Hanania in the August 30 Daily Herald:

The Middle East conflict is raw and filled with emotions. It is hard to resist getting pulled into the cycle of hatred and emotion.

I have even succumbed, dragged in by events that stir personal emotions. I have family living in the West Bank and Jerusalem, and I can feel the pain of their suffering. That causes people - human beings - to say things they sometimes regret. And I have certainly said a few things I regret.

But overall, I believe I am a good person who believes in fairness. You don't judge people by one column that is tough and pushes reason to the edge. You judge a person by his overall views. And mine are based on fairness and respect.

I'm with him through most of paragraph two. But from there on out there is something about his tone that is not...manful. "A few things I regret" is evasive. And stand-up guys do not avow that "I believe I am a good person." And there's something weaselly about alluding to saying "a few things" and "one column that is tough" without specifying just what the few things were in the one column, for readers coming in late. I could hang with a Hanania who said Look, people like my dad and grandparents lost their homes to atone for Europe's sins, not theirs. And the guy running Israel right now has always wanted the rest of us gone too, and that hacks me off. You may not see it that way, but these ideas don't come out of nowhere. So I popped off, and wrote this this this this and this, and this and this was a load of crap, and this was poorly expressed, and this was how I feel but I know we all have to overcome that or the abyss yawns, and this and this I'll defend to my dying day. Instead we get evasion. "I have succumbed." And at the end of the column

But sometimes, laughter can break through.

It is not the only way out. But I felt it could help. Sadly, Jackie Mason didn't see it that way. He felt obligated to defend himself against claims I never made. I must have looked easy to pounce on. But the real problem is bigger than even Jackie Mason.

Just as it is difficult to bring Arabs and Jews together across a military battlefield, the same hatred and attraction to confrontation that consumes both sides seems to keep them apart everywhere, including a stand-up comedy stage.

There's something almost Nixonian about this level of self-pity. ("I must have looked easy to pounce on.") As for Mason himself, there's no indication that he did the same research Al Barger did before the storm hit (a point made by the Talking Dog), so he still looks like a jerk. What we have here is one Jew, one Arab, and not a mensch to be found.

(Hanania tries again in this statement on his website.)

Blogorama II is what CATO Mafioso Gene Healy is calling the event scheduled for September 19 at the Rendezvous Lounge in Adams Morgan. Others might think of it as Midatlantic Blogfest III...

Regardless, here is the Quatro Uno Uno:

Date: September 19
Time: 7ish. Or thereabouts.
Place: Rendezvous Lounge, 18th and Kalorama (same as Blogorama, the first)

All D.C. bloggers, friends of bloggers, readers of blogs, friends of readers of blogs, loathers of blogs, and those indifferent to blogs are invite and encouraged to attend. Bloggers are encouraged to promote the event. On their blogs. Of course. Blogorama I was a smashing success. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 people.

Rendezvous was a pretty loud venue, not least because the management flat refused to turn the music off, even though their entire clientele was logocentric - that is, bloggers. But as Gene notes, you can't argue with success. Be there, like Unqualified Offerings will.