Mail Call - Kevin Maroney writes

The impending death of Warren Zevon bothers me more than I thought it would. I listened to Life'll Kill Ya over and over and over again when it came out, to the point where my officemate ordered me to stop.

I do take some small exception to your characterization that "I owe Zevon for a lot more than some great records he made in the 70s and Oughts. (Betweentimes, Homer nodded.)" Sentimental Hygene is a terrific album--not every song on it is great, but the great songs on it make up for its occasional weaknesses. "Boom Boom Mancini" and "The Factory" are songs anyone could be proud to write, and "Even a Dog Can Shake Hands" is one that I think only Zevon could have done.

In fact, Sentimental Hygiene came out in 1987 and Zevon's earlier 1980s work included the live Stand in the Fire, which is simply superb; The Envoy, which is pretty darn good (see this Virginia Postrel appreciation; and yes, Virginia, I once heard Zevon explicitly say that the title track was about Philip Habib); and Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School, which is also pretty darn good.

Unqualified Offerings is listening to Sentimental Hygiene right now. "The Factory" sounds a little too programmed - the airwaves were lousy with self-conscious "working class rock" anthems back in the day. "Boom Boom Mancini" is every bit as good as Kevin reminds:

They make hypocrite judgments
after the fact
but the name of the game
is be hit and hit back

Overall it's a very good record, with some top-drawer songs even if the CD ias a whole is not top drawer. Upshot: UO wishes to revise and extend its earlier remarks.

To UO's skepticism that Robert A. Heinlein was really a "hard science fiction" writer, Patrick Nielsen Hayden e-mails a gratifying "Exactly," and follows with

Heinlein was always as interested as any "New Wave" writer in the business of "pushing the genre's boundaries." In the 1940s, he and Campbell essentially operated as an avant-garde literary movement to yank the field's standards up to the level of slicks like COLLIER'S.
One of the most interesting revelations in GRUMBLES FROM THE GRAVE, the posthumous collection of letters, is that from the 1960s on, Heinlein was a big fan of metafictionist John Barth. The several sprawling, discursive, meta-whoozy novels of Heinlein's later career, often derided by his core fans, make more sense if you consider that he may have been trying to write stfnal John Barth novels. (It doesn't necessarily make them any better, but it does cast some light on them.)

Anyway, a great deal of what we call "hard SF" is rooted more in stance and attitude, and turns out to be surprisingly light in substantive science or technological speculation. It's been pointed out more than once that SF stories that mostly feature guys arguing about libertarianism generally get categorized as "hard SF," while SF stories by women like Nancy Kress that burst with real science often get tossed onto the "soft SF" pile. In a similar vein, note that one
of the commonest assertions about Heinlein -- that most of his heroes are engineers -- is flatly, provably untrue.

I don't have much to say about Bester that hasn't been said before. I should really re-read TSMD. To my mind, it's his short stories, like "Fondly Fahrenheit" and "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed," that clinch his greatness.

UO cannot let pass an opportunity to commend another Bester short story, "5,271,009."

Jeanne De Voto, who maintains an interesting non-blog website, takes issue with one of UO's dawn items from September 11, 2002, titled "It's So Easy II." In that item UO expressed doubt that the US had done such a fine job of transforming the cultures of Germany and Japan as the maximalist hawks have been crediting us with. UO wrote:

We've created a Japan that is incapable of defending itself from its most significant regional rival and that is so mired in paternalism - you think occupation may have reinforced that? - that they can't even rebuild a city after an earthquake. As for Germany, it's the driving force behind the EU, and we know what we right-wingers think of that. See any connection between the EU's pathological anti-militarism plus its mania for criminalizing dissent and the denazification experience? With its corporatist ideology and self-conscious attempt to create a "European" identity, the EU can be said to be, at best, "fascism with a human face." (Note that I do not say human brain. Or heart.) The ideology may run from Brussels, but it's made in Germany. I would suggest that we are good at transforming cultures, but not to our specifications. I can just imagine how Iraq turns out.

Jeanne writes:

I'm not at all sure this is a fair criticism; in fact, I'm pretty sure it's not.

Granted, the Germans wouldn't piss on us to put us out if we were on fire. And granted, both Germany and Japan have social problems. In neither case did a perfect society emerge from the combination of their postwar condition, their history, and our occupation.

But "creating a perfect society" wasn't on the agenda; solving the existing problem was. Neither Japan nor Germany is militarily aggresssive today. It's been well over half a centiry, and neither has displayed the slightest inclination, in action or in the popular imagination and will, to attack its neighbors. Neither is militaristic. Neither is politically unstable or likely to fall victim to a coup d'etat. Both are world powers. Both are peaceful and prosperous, Japan's economic malaise notwithstanding.

I'd say that's doing pretty good. I'd also say that if we can say those things about Iraq in sixty years, we'll be entitled to pat ourselves (and the Iraqis) on the back, even if their society isn't perfect - and even if they're not especially friendly toward us. Creating allies is a nice bonus, but it's not the point of the exercise, now or then; creating societies that are able to live in peace with their neighbors is.

Jeanne makes some good points, and Unqualified Offerings is unsure how far it would want to push its thesis. It's certainly not the top item on UO's list of reasons not to commence an era of US-Israeli suzerainty in the Cradle of Civilization.

And yet there may be something to it. Consider this fascinating article about the Munich Olympics massacre that Glenn Reynolds unearthed earlier this month, particularly this passage:

Worse followed. The Germans had 17 officers hidden on the 727 to capture or kill the first two terrorists, but they grew worried about their mission, and fearful for their own safety in the plane. An officer held a ballot and, in an act of sheer cowardice, all 17 men voted to leave. The helicopters carrying the terrorists were already landing and there was no time to hide a new squad on the 727.

I would argue that a culture where such a thing can happen has definitely been transformed, but to no one's credit. Nor is the problem simply "cowardice" brought on by doctrinaire anti-militarism. As German reader Ralph Georgens wrote to Instapundit.com (same link):

When fighting terror Germany is walking on thin ice, though. If German authorities had dealt with the terrorists in Munich as harshly as it seems appropriate now, with the benefit of hind-sight, your paper might very well have published an article called "The German way with massacre". alluding to some altogether different historic parallels. Today's world opinion would be happy to draw the same parallels if Germany did not act with the restraint it shows right now.

Once at Clyde Peeling's Reptiland in Allenwood, PA, I got to see a timber rattlesnake that had had its venom sacs surgically removed. Reptiland is the place for such a thing, as it is fit for captivity only. And Germany is lucky. (And European fascism has other avenues of growth.) Japan is also no threat to its neighbors, but its neighbors, China and Russia, are decidedly a threat to it. I'd also give our "work" higher ratings if it didn't involve keeping troops in place to this very day.

If, 60 years from now, we still have toops in Iraq (and Iran, and Saudi Arabia, and Syria, and...), no, I will not feel we've done such a great job. We're not Iraq's neighbor anyway.

All's Right with the World - Rothbardian critic Myles Kantor is back on the Sopranos beat. The first installment his commentary on the new season is less meaty than his previous writing on the topic, but the new season is young. For a more detailed review of the first episode of the new season, see Radley Balko. Check Kantor's archive, starting with "Made Men and Whores" and working backward from there.

On the Move - Scrappleface has moved to his own domain. Update your bookmarks. Today's news: "Iraqi Republican Guard Moved to Undisclosed Location."

Thought for the Day - Isn't it...odd, when people who for months have been calling their skeptics "appeasers" and likening everyone from Saddam Hussein to Yasser Arafat to Adolph Schickelgruber suddenly invoke Godwin's Law when those opponents start tossing in a Hitler reference or two? (For a single example among the possible, scroll to the bottom of this Steven den Beste item.)

Radio is a Sound Salvation - Craig Danuloff, proprietor of the Trainspotter's Guide to Elvis Costello site has, quite sensibly, started the Trainspotters' News weblog with links to new Elvis info. File this one under Highly-Qualified People Blogging on Subjects They Know Well.

Expanding Universe - I've been trying to get myself out of a rut of following the same blogs all the time. There are some newish bloggers - and some that are just new to me - that deserve attention. Here's a quick list:

Aziz Poonawalla (unmedia) - An American muslim blogger, apparently of Indo-Pak descent, doing a very fine, rational job of questioning the expansion of the War on Terror.

The Poor Man - This demoblogger is just way, way funnier than I am. I despair, frankly. Here's a sidesplitting takedown of a silly Mark Steyn column. The Poor Man has affectionately referred to me as a "corporate shill" on a (presently unavailable) archived post. To this I can only say that

Unqualified Offerings uses Zildjian cymbals.

Or would, if it played drums.

Jesse Walker - It seems like all the real energy in the blogosphere lately has been among the lefties. So it's nice to be able to cite a fellow libertarian. Walker is a longtime contributor to libertarian magazines and the author of a book on the history of radio. What am I chopped liver moment: Walker quotes an e-mail from longtime Liberty magazine contributor Clark Stooksbury in which Walker says Stooksbury "praised me for being, by his count, 'the second non-evil blogger.' (The first? Gene Healy.)" Dammit, Clark, I was "non-evil" months before these parvenus even heard of Blogger! Here's a taste of Jesse Walker:

More from the president: "We have no specific threat to America, but we're taking everything seriously." I love this man. No, really. Everything he says sounds like a Zen koan or an acid revelation. You can ponder his words for hours, and you'll never quite make sense of them, but maybe, just maybe, you'll attain enlightenment.

Colby Cosh is funny, Canadian and about as libertarian as can be expected up there. He has an interesting post on Canada's healthcare squeeze. His first ever post was a rioutously funny attack on US drug czar Asa Hutchinson for basically butting in where he wasn't wanted. (Canada. Not that he's wanted here either.) Item-specific anchors seem to be a recent improvement, so go to the bottom of this archive page for the Asa Hutchinson piece.

Speaking of Liberty magazine contributors, Timothy Virkkala offers Instead of a Blog. On offer right this minute is a longish piece on novelist Paul Auster. Well, it would be long on a blog. Well, not this blog. But a lot of them. Turn-ons: Nice design. Virkkala's a fine writer. Turnoffs: How the hell do I get to the archives?

Kelly Jane Torrance - This blog is very new. In fact, it started yesterday. (I met Kelly last night at Blogorama - yes, yes, I need to get to that story too.) Kelly says she'll be writing about culture rather than politics, and commences with a piece about a concert of the National Symphony Orchestra. Keep an eye on this one. Inaugural annoyance: You know how a lot of Movable-Type based weblogs feature the default grey text on a white background instead of more readable black text? Kelly has taken it a step farther: grey text on a grey background!

This is Sports Center with Unqualified Offerings - How good a football analyst is retired Redskin great John Riggins? With a couple of hours to kill between work and the Blogarama in Kalorama last night, UO chose to eat fast food in the car so it could listen to Riggins' Thursday evening show on WTEM rather than, well, eat in a more civilized fashion. Perhaps Riggins' personal history has made national venues leary of using him, which is a shame. People who haven't heard him probably wouldn't believe it, but Riggins is a brilliant observer of the sport. He talks in real english, not cliches, goes beyond the easy notions and is, perhaps most surprisingly, a keen appraiser of human character. (Apparently it's all the therapy.)

He's getting more ESPN work lately. Don't miss him.

In other football news, according to Defensive Coordinator Tim Lewis the Pittsburgh Steelers will attempt to improve their anemic pass rush this weekend by "only counting to three-Missippi [sic]" before rushing, rather than the five-Missippi the team used in weeks one and two.

And if That Doesn't Work, the EXTRA-Special Republican Guard... - Interesting link via Instapundit to a Guardian story doubting the reliability of Iraq's Republican Guard. Oops! Unqualified Offerings left off the regulation "Elite" descriptor! Ohnoooooooooooo!

Anyway. The Guardian first says

But the Republican Guard would not be allowed to join street-fighting inside Bagh dad. Its forces would be kept outside the centre, defending three access routes to the capital, where they would be at the mercy of US bombers.

The Guard, which numbers 50,000-60,000 men, was originally set up as a counterweight to the regular army, and to protect the Iraqi regime, especially the presidential palace in Baghdad. It grew dramatically during the 1980-88 war with Iran, developing a broader role as an elite force.

Although highly privileged and well-equipped in comparison with the regular army, it has become less trusted as a result of several coup plots involving officers from the Guard. One plot, unmasked in 1990, two months before it was due to take place, included a brigadier-general from President Saddam's home town, Tikrit. A member of the Iraqi leader's own tribe was also arrested but later freed.

Pause to note that while, while we are frequently reminded of all the folks Saddam has killed, not a few of them were trying to kill him. Iraq had its first military coup in the 1930s. But here's the rich part:

This led to an expansion of the super-elite Special Republican Guard (SRG), which is now the only major force trusted enough to operate in central Baghdad. Members of the SRG come mainly from areas of Iraq that are noted for their loyalty to President Saddam, including Tikrit. Several of the top officers are drawn from his own family.

Ooh, no one expects the Special Republican Guard!

The Guardian does not say whether the SRG's chief weapon is fear - surprise and fear - but it stands to reason. There's more of course:

Various other forces dedicated to intelligence and internal security - possibly totalling more than 100,000 men - could theoretically be deployed in a last-ditch defence of the regime. These include the Special Security Service, the General Intelligence Directorate, the Military Security Service, Military Intelligence and the Border Guards, which all have paramilitary elements.

And you can bet that each of these groups despises most of the rest of them. What, you think interservice rivalries among intelligence agencies only happen here? It's an iron law of the universe, like the Second Law of Thermodynamics. But what if the groups listed just aren't...creepy enough? Not to worry:

In addition, there is the Saddam Fedayyeen, a thug militia run by President Saddam's elder son, Udai, which specialises in internal repression - such as cutting off tongues and beheading prostitutes.

Members cover their faces and alternate between white uniforms in summer and black in winter. There is also a youth wing for the under-18s. It is doubtful, however, whether the Fedayyeen's skills would be much use in a full-scale war.

Not likely, since the US tends not to invade using the Elite Callgirl Corps, and our Army has a proud tradition of "living off the land" on that score, rather than depending on a complex logistical, um, tail.

Unqualified Offerings will stop now.

Cynics might note that, when the US wants to plant, well, propaganda, it has a history of using foreign left wing media where possible. Which doesn't, however, mean the story isn't true. There could be powerful incentives for a Republican Guard commander to take out La Famille Hussein, secure Baghdad with his own troops and gamble that the Americans will cut him in on the postwar action rather than expend more blood and treasure than necessary. It worked for the Northern Alliance guys in Afghanistan.

Make That Two - Philip Gold writes "An Anti-War Movement of One" for the Seattle Weekly. He's not as lonely as he thinks.

When you look at what passes for "resistance" nowadays, you cringe in embarrassment that this is what's left of the left. Pompous. Arrogant. Self-righteous. Self-referent. Impotence chic at its finest. Punch up www.notinourname.net and read their "pledge of resistance." Or imagine my feelings--I almost said, "Feel my pain"--when I did a local church panel recently. A man in the audience asked if America would die like Rome, Nazi Germany, and the British Empire. One panelist agreed that, yes, America will die. The audience applauded.

And that's why I've come to be an anti-war movement of one, talking to anyone who will listen, not about how evil or how good we are, but about the world as it is and the vortex we're approaching.

(Squint and) Get Your Freak On - Teresa Nielsen Hayden discusses, and generally praises, a map of fetishes by Katherine Gear. She also links to it, which Unqualified Offerings will not, on the off chance that having the URL in the page code here would cause site availability problems for readers. Unqualified Offerings does not disapprove of the subject matter as an object of study mind you, but these old eyes can't read the damn map! Maybe if it were in braille. With chocolate syrup all over i - hey, where were we? Oh yes. Teresa's critiques of the map seem pointful:

What do I think is missing? First, she locates the entire S/M constellation in the "pleasure through pain" area, leaving out its aspect of cession/assumption/exchange of control. Second, she doesn't draw any connection between piercing, marking, tattooing, etc., and the other varieties of body modification and transformation. And third, while she's found places on the map for vampires, furverts, ponygirls, adult babies, etc., there's no overall siting of roleplaying and costume play as a major sub-theme in its own right.

Oddly enough, one time on the Elvis Costello Mailing List, Unqualified Offerings allowed that it was, as readers of this site know, "into roleplaying games." It turned out that many many readers thought UO meant sexual roleplaying - alter ego adventure games never crossed their mind.

Unqualified Offerings ain't saying about the other kind.

We Interrupt This Warblog with stunning news. With no fanfare, the legendary Thomas Nephew has once again begun updating Newsrack Blog. Thomas was a very early warblogger, starting on 9/25/01. Unqualified Offerings should stress, for those coming in late, that Thomas was something of a big wheel as a pundit blogger. (Much moreso than this site, for certain.) He was also an attendee - indeed, the ringleader - of the first DC Blogfest. That otherwise happy event immediately preceded (some would suspect precipitated) a lengthy absence from blogging.

But he's back! His index page shows an item from 8/19, though UO is not convinced he actually posted it then. (This site eventually stopped checking Newsrack regularly, but it believes it has been to the page more than once in the last month.) There is another item on German politics from today. UO's liberal readers will be glad to know that Thomas is himself of Southpaw extraction (a requirement of living in Takoma Park, MD).

So Welcome back, Thomas! UO says. The rest of you, check him out.

And There You Have It - Score one for the folks that predicted that the Bush Administration would ask Congress for a "blank check resolution" that would permit it to launch a full-scale war anywhere in the middle east, while supposedly asking for authorization to use force against Saddam Hussein. Here's the money shot from the Administration's proposed resolution:

Now, therefore, be it

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This joint resolution may be cited as the “Further Resolution on Iraq”.

SEC. 2. AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES.

The President is authorized to use all means that he determines to be appropriate, including force, in order to enforce the United .Nations Security Council Resolutions referenced above, defend the national security interests of the United States against the threat posed by Iraq, and restore international peace and security in the region.

(Emphasis added.) The text is, to say the least, perfectly consistent with the hopes of the maximalists (that are also the fears of the minimalists) that the conquest of Iraq will cause the middle east to spin "out of control," "necessitating" further US action against and in other regional countries. Those of scientific bent might also mutter, darkly, that the mark of a fruitful hypothesis is its predictive value, and here the prediction would be, of course, that the Administration will make damn sure that things spin out of control, necessitating further action against and in other countries. "Sweep it all up," as the man wrote. "Things related and not."

And so here we are. And there we shall be.

Think of It as Science Fiction in Action - Natalie Solent has a further thought on UO's cranky e-mail to her of Monday evening. It's a good thought, and Unqualified Offerings takes her point. It has a response nevertheless. Actually, UO wrote the response last October. (No wonder Dhalgren made sense to this website!) As a bonus, you get to read insults to Ellen Goodman.

Speaking of Science Fiction there are a lot of bigtime bloggers out there who are bigtime science fiction experts and serious political bloggers. Yet when UO searches for pieces using Alfred Bester's classic The Stars My Destination as a jumping-off point for thinking about the very live question of weapons-of-some-destruction proliferation, the only thing it finds is this James Pinkerton article from last fall.

What, as they say, is up with that? Jim's assignment desk:

Avedon Carol
Avram Grumer
Christine Quinones
Gary Farber
Patrick Nielsen Hayden
Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Go to it, please. Anyone (listed above or not) who has, in fact, already done a "Stars My Destination" piece, by all means fact-check UO's ass and this site will run a correction and a link.

Bonus question: Isn't Pinkerton wrong when he declares that Stars has a "pessimistic conclusion?" UO did not read it that way at all.

We Get Letters - Feedback indicates that - readers like science fiction! Samizdatist Tom Burroughes writes that

Quite a lot has of course been written about the snobbery shown by so-called mainstream literary types towards this genre. And yet I fail to see why. A lot of speculative sf is both first-class storytelling and often says a lot about present-day concerns but, because it is set in the future, can look at issues and themes in interesting ways. I am currently reading "Fountain of Youth" by Brian Stableford, which as the title suggests, looks at things like fear of death, man's hope for immortality, etc. A friend of mine once noted that SF is one of the few genres where you still get genuine romantic fiction (romantic as Rand would have used the term).

And of course SF is a reach seam of libertarian gold - Niven, Heinlein, Anderson (Poul), Maclead, Hamilton, Benford, Brin, E. Paul Wilson, L. Neil Smith

UO is not a massive fan of most of the canonical "libertarian SF" writers, though it has read quite a lot of Heinlein and Niven, both of whom are probably better writers than their fans give them credit for. Try Niven's story "Convergent Series" for a solid example of what the lit'ry types - like UO - think of as "real writing." As for Heinlein, this site is not infrequently struck that he almost seems miscategorized as a "hard SF" writer - once one gets beyond the children's books - and his lasting achievement seems precisely a literary one: he changed the way SF stories were told. (Borges might have been describing Heinlein's method when he wrote that a camel is not exotic to an arab. I believe it has been established that Borges read Heinlein at some point.)

And Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword is just a stunningly cold achievement - as impressive, in its way, as a contemporaneous saga by JRR Tolkein.

What's interesting is the libertarian sensibility running through non-movement authors like Dick and Delany. (I believe that Delany's books have been nominated for a Prometheus Award more than once. I wonder how the acceptance speech would have gone...)

Micah Holmquist e-mails that he likes Delany because "unlike many writers in the genre, I never got the sense he was a SF writer as opposed to just a writer. Then again, I probably enjoy his essays more than his SF." UO has always been big on the essays in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, but feels, overall, that French criticism eventually ruined Delany as a fiction writer.

Daryl McCullough e-mails that

Vonnegut was one of my favorite science fiction authors ("Slaughterhouse Five", "The Sirens of Titan", "Cats Cradle", "Player Piano") before I found out that he wasn't a science fiction author. It's a strange contrast between his establishment-defying novels and his need to be accepted by the real literary establishment (which I don't think he is, actually).

About Dahlgren---to me, what is best about science fiction is not the science part (which is usually pretty bogus) but the fact that the freedom achieved by throwing out the restrictions imposed by realism allow the author to tell stories that couldn't otherwise be told. Of course, this loose description fits fantasy and South American "magical realism" as well as science fiction, I guess.

I could never force myself to read the book reviews in The New York Review of Books. The reviewers always seem to have their noses high in the air, and almost always have a (philosophical or political) axe to grind that gets in the way of an honest review.

Point taken, though some of UO's favorite thinkers, such as Tony Judt and John Searle, have been regular NYRB contributors. Mind you, another (valid) complaint against NYRB is that they do nothing to foster new talent - you pretty much have to be famous already even to get your letter printed. And they are the mouthpiece of the increasingly execrable Gary Wills too.

Unqualified Offerings guesses there's good and bad in everyone!

Blog on the Move - Brendan O'Neill has a redesigned site at a new domain. Update your links accordingly. Unqualified Offerings generally gives it one thumb up. Turnoffs:

o Grey typeface
o No link to UO!
o A lot of recycled material from his blogspot blog, possibly excused by testing needs
o His "anchor line" is ambiguously placed. UO has noticed this problem on more than one weblog. "Anchor line" is UO's term for the line that generally includes the item time/date stamp, the item-specific link/anchor, and often author credit and comment link too. e.g "Jim Henley, 08:54 PM" or "posted by Jane Galt at 5:04 PM | Comments [31]"". The problem is that on blogs like Brendan's (and yours too, Gene Healy!), the anchor line ends up equidistant between the bottom of one post and the top of the next - you're not sure, if you're in the middle of the page, which item it takes you to. Since some bloggers put their anchor lines at the top of their posts and others put them at the bottom, there's no standard assumption to fall back on.

So it would be cool if Brendan (and Gene!) would "change his printer ribbons" (black text, gentlemen, black!) and move his anchor line a little. But Unqualified Offerings will certainly be checking Brendan's site every day, and recommends that you do the same. (Gene's too!)

UPDATE: Oh yeah. The actual link to Brendan's new blog was missing from the first version of this post.

One for the Hawks - This morning it looked like the Bush Administration had been caught flagrantly refusing to take Yes for an answer on the matter of Iraqi inspections. Certainly the Administration's opaque claim that the issue is "not a matter of inspections... [but] disarmament" (and how does one verify disarmament, fellas?) was obvious bad faith. But if this report in the London Evening Standard is correct that Iraq is talking about unfettered access to "military sites only" then the word "unconditional" simply doesn't apply to Iraq's acceptance. This doesn't especially matter to Unqualified Offerings, but to those war skeptics who nevertheless feel it important to disarm Iraq and verify that it is disarmed, it logically should. (It won't matter to Brendan O'Neill either, mostly for the same reasons it doesn't matter to this site.)

Mind you, Iraq doesn't seem to have said it was their final answer. There may be another round left to play. Nor is it necessarily the US government's final answer either. As one commentator wrote back in mid-December - oh it was me -

Meantime the Administration is pushing for a reintroduction of "UN inspectors" into Iraq. Eerie Prescience Bid: the idea is likely to get the inspectors in, then claim that Saddam is not cooperating with the inspection regime, building the complaints into a casus belli

Haven't lost that one yet...

This is Sports Center with Unqualified Offerings - After last night's Eagles-Redskins game, Unqualified Offerings is inclined to think that the so-called rejuvenation of John Madden has been oversold. On one first-half incompletion by Shane Matthews near the Eagle end zone, Madden repeatedly explained that a hit on Matthews as he threw the ball kept him from being able to get the ball all the way to the receiver, Rod Gardner. He repeated this as the replay, repeatedly, showed the ball hitting Gardner's hands. On another play he said, several times, that an Eagle receiver had victimized Redskin cornerback Champ Bailey when it was, as the replay showed, Fred Smoot.

Since Monday Night Football manages to show just about every play from scrimmage at least twice, there's no shortage of opportunities to correct one's impressions.

Meanwhile, the poor, beloved Steelers of Unqualified Offerings and Ideas Etc. and Balloon Juice have managed to look awful in losing to teams that a) employ a spread offense, b) pass on every down and c) run only as an afterthought. This means not only that the Steelers look like a longshot to win the AFC North Division right now, but they may well be the worst team in the CFL.

Blogging Tribulations - Natalie Solent deals with e-mail from a crank.

Get Outta Town - Gary Farber rightly contemns Margaret Atwood's mealy-mouthed maunderings about science fiction in this (where else) New York Review of Books review (of Ursula K. LeGuin).Atwood is one of those literati who has written books set in the (not to say overly programmatic) future who fairly quailed at the prospect that the term might be applied to them. One of the reasons Unqualified Offerings despised Kurt Vonnegut was his famous "Do what you want with the girl, but leave me alone" essay in which he noted that critics of the day universally mistook SF for a kind of textual urinal. Vonnegut did not demand that critics overcome their prejudices. He demanded that they stop thinking of him as a science fiction writer.

Unqualified Offerings will take Samuel R. Delany any day. After he wrote the ambitious, trippy Dhalgren, outraged old guard critics and readers cried that the book wasn't really science fiction. Is so, Delany said. Is not! they sputtered. Is so, he maintained. What the hell else do you call a mobius strip-shaped novel about a hippie stuck in a time loop?

Solidarity forever!

Only Semi-Related Aside: Paul Theroux, in his essays has betrayed some appreciation for the genre. Strange that his own novel set in the future, O-Zone, is unreadable, while its predecessor set in the present, The Mosquito Coast, is not just a far better book, but far better science fiction.

Not Which But Both - I really like Eve Tushnet's pieces about working at a crisis pregnancy center. Here she responds to an e-mail from a fellow pro-life Catholic about whether "sav[ing] a life" or "empower[ing] the woman" takes priority in Eve's mind. Lots of good stuff, but here's the nut:

So really, the best thing I can do for the baby is to provide an example of love and Christian witness for the mother, I think. Our handbook uses the slogan, "How can you convince a woman to love the child she can't see if you won't love the woman you can?"

You're Either with Us Cont. - Glenn Reynolds shrewdly suggests that US intelligence has penetrated the Al Jazeera TV Network to good effect, and Unqualified Offerings doesn't say "shrewdly" just because Glenn averred that this website's praise for him is "rare," rather abashing UO. No, Unqualified Offerings says this because - hand on heart - it had the same thought over the weekend and, if it were not a lazy weblog, really really really intended to write something about it, honest. Reynolds:

I imagine that, had [Al Jazeera reporter Fouda] cooperated, his name would have been left out of the reports. I also think that this is bad for Al Jazeera in general. Notice how many people who have given interviews to Al Jazeera have either (1) disappeared without a trace; (2) been killed; or (3) been captured?

You'd almost think that Al Jazeera was a stalking-horse for the CIA.

He bases the surmise on an unlinkable Bloomberg report and this Washington Post story about Binalshibh's capture.

UO's only concern is that burning the Binalshibh interviewer, Fouda, may be satisfying in the short term - he's no friend of the US - but in the long term, we'd surely be much better off with a trusted pipeline to our enemies that we've got completely sewn up than...an untrusted pipeline to our enemies. (Viz. Operation Double Cross during World War II.) Unqualified Offerings would like to have a lot more dilemmas like the one Binalshibh presents, where UO's principled opposition to the death penalty wars with its impulse to propose a lottery whose prize is a place on the firing squad.

Point of pride: UO has previously written about the utility of those neither with us nor against us, in a general way.

One other thought: From time to time, those considering the merits of prophylactic war against Iraq or mulling the possibility of Iraq-al Qaeda ties allow that "perhaps the government has very scary evidence that they can't show us" because of concerns about that famous duo, Sources and Methods. Unqualified Offerings notes that in cases like Binalshibh's, where the government considers the matter important enough, and where the evidence has been solid, the government has shown itself pretty willing to compromise sources and methods to make a capture or a point. Which suggests that when it comes to Iraq, the government either doesn't consider the matter important, or doesn't have solid evidence, or is making some culpably strange judgments.

Production Metric - How desperate are the hawks to somehow link Saddam Hussein to the massacres of last September, and how how thin are the links? This thin:

A draft version details how two leading al-Qaeda members, Abu Zubair and Rafid Fatah, were trained in Iraq and are still linked to the Baghdad regime.

(Text from the Sydney Morning Herald.) What's thin about that, you ask? This:

US and British intelligence officials say the Blair dossier will reveal how during the 1990s Zubair's Supporters of Islam organisation was sent by Saddam into northern Iraq to assassinate leading Kurds and to build chemical warfare facilities.

Zubair has reportedly defected from Saddam to al-Qaeda, but his family still enjoys privileges in Baghdad. He reportedly ran training camps in Afghanistan for bin Laden before September 11 last year but vanished just before the US-led invasion. Fatah, also known as Abu Omer al-Kurdi, was also trained by Saddam and worked with Zubair against the Kurds, the dossier says. It is not known when Fatah left Iraq but he too became a leading al-Qaeda member. His whereabouts are not known.

So, Saddam Hussein trains some creeps to do nasty business for him. Later, they go off and do nasty business for bin Laden instead. On the face of it, this is about as impressive as the fact that the US got Osama bin Laden into the jihad business, another creep who began by doing nasty business (not that Unqualified Offerings is complaining) for one party before going off to do nasty business for someone else (whether your preferred "someone else" is himself, the Pakistani ISI, the Saudi Royal Family, elements of either of these last two groups, or whatever.

To reiterate: it is possible that Saddam Hussein sponsored the murders of September 11, the anthrax attacks, the OKC bombing, the first WTC bombing, the death of of Princess Diana and the career of Faith Hill. But the evidence for any of these things that has been presented sucks rocks. Compare the amount of detail offered about, say, the genesis and development of the Hamburg Cell with the amount of detail offered about a supposed Saddam-al Qaeda marriage (of convenience or otherwise).

As I Was Saying - In this space was a long post recommending Demoblogger William Burton's weblog (which is cleverly titled William Burton) albeit a post with one tiny flaw (an unclosed HTML tag). What happened after that is just further proof that Kathy Kinsley is right about my needing to switch hosts soon. Check out the following entries in particular:

Stopping Terror, Not Just Stomping Terror - A good, Kausfiles-like SeriesSkipper recap of Robert Wright's Slate series on approaching the War on Some Terror.

Tilting at Strawmen - A response to what Burton takes to be caricatures of Wright's positions by Eugene Volokh.

Daschle Won't Be Stampeded - A shrewd analysis of the politics of a congressional vote authorizing the use of (further) force against Iraq.