Reconstruction Women - Unqualified Offerings will not, not, not , not, NOT entitle this piece "Pimp Mommy," even though Eve Tushnet's e-mail began

I found you a couple moderate Muslim chicks...

Eve's blogwatch links to the wide-ranging Veiled for Allah, by Al-Muhajabah, which has a foot in both tech and pundit-blogging; for an altogether different blogging experience steeped in, shall we say, the carefree enthusiasm of youth, Eve offers The Muslimah Ya-Ya. This is a group blog of young muslim women from all over. Recommended for those who can handle the spelling "kewl" used unironically.

Eve herself has two substantial items on Israel, Zionism and US Christian support. See THE PAST IS ANOTHER COUNTRY and REGARDLESS.

Revising and Extending my Chili - Walter in Denver, who got the whole chili ball rolling the other day, clarifies his position:

Since I started this no beef/no bean thing I feel I should clarify what I meant.

Chili/e should be green and contain pork. (Chile con Carne) Sometimes this is referred to as New Mexico, or green, chili/e. This contains no beef, beans, or tomato. Red chili has tomato in it and normally contains no meat at all. This is used as a sauce, often on enchiladas. (Spanish word for 'in chile') The thing that most in the US are used to is Texas chili, a beef and bean concoction that while pleasant enough, isn't a Mexican food. I was referring to Mexican chile recipes.

Let Mexico be Mexico, Unqualified Offerings says. But Texas blogger Michael Croft of Ones and Zeros e-mails that his fellow Texans say

"If it had beans in it, we'd call it stew."

That's from an e-mail with the subject line, "In Texas, foreigners have been shot for requesting beans in Chili..." foreigners meaning anyone not from Texas. "Fillers (including beans) are banned from most civilized chili cook-offs," he adds, "Probably to forestall violence. An important consideration in Texas."

He further testifies that

Ginger and I are card carrying members of the Houston Heights Axis of Liberal Bloggers, and thus cannot agree with PNH that libertarianism is a rationale for understanding the difference between Chili and Stew/Roux/Ghoulash....

In response to a query from this website as to what constitutes "filler," he provided definitions and a list of links to chili contest webpages. Filler

are abominations (abominatia?) such as beans, hominy, pasta, etc. which may (in the case of rice or beans) be served as a side dish with chili, but not in it.

Contest rule links:

Washington (DC) Area Parrot Heads Club. (Scary. Sounds Jimmy Buffett-oriented.)

International Chili Society

Chili Appreciation Society

California State Chili Championship Cookoff

Mayou Spice's Texas Chili History page

Unqualified Offerings tried but failed to find a link to the lyrics, or even an mp3, of Kent Finlay's anthem titled "If You Know Beans about Chili, You Know that Chili Has No Beans."

Finally, Jesse Walker, who also admits to a proclivity for "neocon chili," follows up his e-mail of yesterday:

Like I said, I'm ambivalent about corn. More to the point: Like I said, if I were typing that e-mail in my kitchen, I would have remembered other ingredients. You mentioned one in your most recent post: cumin. How could I have forgetten?

People who watch ESPN much may recall a promo for the College Gameday show a couple of years ago. One of the younger Gameday guys (UO can't tell them apart) is passing through a stadium parking lot and stops to sample a tailgater's chili. "That's good!" he says, "but it would be perfect with one more thing:

"Cumin!"

The tag line of that promo series was There's nothing we don't know about college football.

...Is That Everybody Has Them - Matt Hogan e-mails:

In re: the below [on muslim bloggers the appeal of wahabism]:

Does this mean Wahhabis are Muslim neocons?

Well, yeah. Think of them as the "National Greatness Conservatives" of Islam.

Bound for Glory - Excellent article about Warren Zevon's Letterman appearance in The American Prowler by Paul Beston.

Yahoo reports that Zevon has done a cover of Bob Dylan's Knockin' on Heaven's Door" for the postumous album. Well of course he has. Also, Dylan has been performing as many as four Zevon tunes on his current tour, according to reports.

I Did Not Know This Department. From a New York Times profile of Irish poet Paul Muldoon, who co-wrote the title track of My Ride's Here:

He and Mr. Zevon had also been working on a musical, "The Honey War," about a dispute over gaming rights to an American Indian casino. Mr. Zevon recently announced that he has terminal cancer, and the project is on hold.

What Unqualified Offerings wants to know is, did he see the new Bond film like he wanted, and did he like it? And yes, UO googled the question. No information available.

In walked Charlton Heston with the Tablets of the Law
He said, It's still the Greatest Story
I said, Man I'd love to stay
But I'm bound for glory
I'm on my way
My ride's here

Warren Zevon and Paul Muldoon, "My Ride's Here"

Further Reading - Thomas Nephew of Newsrack also writes specifically about Aziz Poonawalla and other corners of the blogosphere. Worth reading.

Fables of the Reconstruction - One has heard much in the last year about the need for moderate muslims to "take their faith back" from extremist, intolerant crazies. (In between "religion of peace" items implying that there is no such thing as a moderate muslim.) Unqualified Offerings believes that the wished-for movement has begun - in the blogosphere.

Readers already know about Aziz Poonawalla of Unmedia and Shi'aPundit. His recent curse upon suicide bombers builds on an essential earlier essay he cross-published on the interesting alt.muslim site. The essay, "Bin Laden's Fatwa: A Call to Harabah," argues from Muslim theology that "Bin Laden's ignorance about Islam and the laughability of his claim to religious authority is well-illustrated by his own words."

What OBL calls for here is not jihad, since he has already explicitly targeted non-combatants, but note that he goes further here and calls for plunder as well. This is actually a call to harabah, or "war of intimidation." Note that harabah is strongly condemned in the Qur'an, for example the explicit reference in 5:33 to those whose intent is "mischief through the land".

Aziz claims, boldly, that "Islam is actually the solution to the problem." He argues for a program of taking the fight against Bin Ladenism to its real home ground, which is Bin Laden's claim to religious authority.

Aziz is just one of a new wave of moderate Muslims who have begun to work out the fate of their faith through weblogs, however. A newcomer to the endeavor is Zack of the Procrastination blog. Zack's first post dates from July, but he has only begun actively updating his site this month. He blogs photos, he talks hiking and other personal pursuits (nice pictures!), but he has also begun to join the "reconstruction" colloquy. Yesterday's "Wahabis as born-again" item picks up from a post of yet another American Muslim blogger, Bin Gregory. Gregory's item, "Wahhabism: Ideology of Discontent," starts by quoting a survey of attitudes among Muslims in the Russian republic of Daghestan, the province neighboring Chechnya. The quoted passage from the survey notes that "data indicate that the central determining factor in a respondent's evaluation of Wahhabism is his or her view concerning Daghestan's relation with the [Russian] federation," and that "Survey results also show that Wahhabism appeals more to men than women, more to rural than urban residents, and more to the young than to the old -- thereby supporting anecdotal observations that Wahhabism holds particular appeal to young men from the villages."

After paraphrasing the Dhagestan data as showing "Wahhabism is the ideology of discontent," Bin Gregory continues:

A study just waiting to be conducted is to compare affilliation with wahhabism to lack of religious upbringing [outside of the gulf, of course]. My own observation is that wahhabism appeals more to those who were irreligious in their youth and are then "converted", and those who come from irreligious households, where it plays into that perennial youthful vice of condemning your elders.

Zack notes that his own experience confirms this:

As a Muslim, I can offer some anecdotal evidence about this. The extremist and/or Wahabi strain of Islam, in my personal experience, is found mostly among people who are born-again Muslims. They can be Muslims born and raised in the West who found religion as a sort of rebellion from the mild religion/culture of their parents. They can be immigrants from Muslim countries who found religion as a reaction against Western society. There are also increasingly people in Muslim countries who are finding an extreme form of Islam somewhat late in life after a somewhat irreligious existence.

He continues to discuss the spread of Wahabism among the middle class as he has observed it.

Bin Gregory has been blogging steadily since July. (Unqualified Offerings is late to this party.) See his striking meditation on John Walker Lindh, whom he calls "my evil twin brother," upon Walker's conviction last summer.

From Bin's site you can also find a link to Muslims Against Terrorism. I suspect that if I had more energy, I could find more interesting "moderate" muslim bloggers by following Bin's links.

So what do we have here? A growing network of serious young men (I have found only men so far) actively engaged in challenging the extremists of their faith on the basis of their faith. They are already doing important intellectual work for far too small an audience, but we can expect that that audience will grow and that this formative work will not be wasted. Some of our muslim bloggers will go on to write for other media with more readers. Some of them will inspire people we don't know yet to do the same.

Do not expect their reconstruction to be an abnegation. Their repudiation of the murder of innocents, antisemitism and the stoning of women will not often also be their acceptance of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, nor even, in all cases, Israel's founding. It will not be tantamount to support for a US conquest of Iraq (and Iran, and Syria, and Saudi Arabia, and Egypt...) and a "MacArthur-style regency" to "reconstruct their culture like we did with Germany and Japan." Some of the thinkers we are discussing may support some of these things, others will consider them wrongheaded if not evil. "Islam" means "submission," but not submission to the Weekly Standard.

So what about the rest of us? First, we should acknowledge that this conversation has indeed begun. "We" here is warbloggers specifically and pundits generally. If you run a weblog, let there be no more "If the Islamists don't represent all muslims, how come we never hear 'moderates' condemning the Islamists?" posts. The answer henceforth is, Because you haven't told people. (Unless you have.)

Since the reconstruction must go beyond the world of political blogs to the world of politics itself, the next "rest of us" to consider is "What can US policy do" to further the effort. For a first start on an answer, let's return to Daghestan:

Data indicate that the central determining factor in a respondent's evaluation of Wahhabism is his or her view concerning Daghestan's relation with the federation.

These people have a big job ahead of them. Let's not make it harder, America.

Life Imitates Gene Wolfe, or, The Vodalus Approach, Continued. Newsweek reports that the FBI is investigating a possible financial connection between the Saudi government and the 9/11 hijackers. This is not We think someone may have known someone. This is, We think money from this government official passed through these specific people to these particular hijackers.

Nov. 22 — The FBI is investigating whether the Saudi Arabian government—using the bank account of the wife of a senior Saudi diplomat—sent tens of thousands of dollars to two Saudi students in the United States who provided assistance to two of the September 11 hijackers, according to law-enforcement sources.

Names, please?

THE BUREAU, THEY SAY, has uncovered financial records showing a steady stream of payments to the family of one of the students, Omar Al Bayoumi. The money moved into the family’s bank account beginning in early 2000, just a few months after hijackers Khalid Almidhar and Nawaf Alhazmi arrived in Los Angeles from an Al Qaeda planning summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, according to the sources. Within days of the terrorists’ arrival in the United State, Al Bayoumi befriended the two men who would eventually hijack American Flight 77, throwing them a welcoming party in San Diego and guaranteeing their lease on an apartment next door to his own. Al Bayoumi also paid $1,500 to cover the first two months of rent for Al Midhar and Alhazmi, although officials said it is possible that the hijackers later repaid the money.

Sources familiar with the evidence say the payments—amounting to about $3,500 a month—came from an account at Washington’s Riggs Bank in the name of Princess Haifa Al-Faisal, the wife of Saudi Ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, and the daughter of the late Saudi King Faisal. After Al Bayoumi left the country in July 2001—two months before the September 11 terror attacks—payments for roughly the same amount began flowing every month to Osama Basnan, a close associate of Al Bayoumi’s who also befriended the hijackers. A federal law-enforcement source told NEWSWEEK that Basnan—who was recently convicted of visa fraud and is awaiting deportation—was a known “Al Qaeda sympathizer” who “celebrated the heroes of September 11” at a party after the attacks and openly talked about “what a wonderful, glorious day it had been.”

The shocking thing here is less the fact of a money trail connecting hijackers and the Saudi government - let's face it, a lot of us have assumed that one existed for over a year - than that the trail runs specifically through Prince Bandar. Bandar, who had his own small part in the Iran-Contra affair whose alums figure so intriguingly in current US "anti"-terrorism policy, has long been regarded as so solidly pro-US as to have diminished influence back home.

(Old British joke: Foreigner stops Brit on Downing Street to ask directions. Foreigner: Which side is the Foreign Office on? Brit: Yours. This joke captures a universal suspicion of non-diplomats toward diplomats.)

Newsweek adds an important caution:

Administration officials stressed repeatedly in interviews that they do not know the purpose of the payments from Princess Haifa’s account. It is also uncertain whether the money was given to the hijackers by Al Bayoumi or Basman. White House sources also raised a number of other cautionary notes, saying that it was not uncommon for wealthy Saudis to provide financial assistance to struggling Saudi families in the United States. “The facts are unclear, and there’s no need to rush to judgement,” said one administration official.

This is fair. Followers of the sniper case, for instance, have seen numerous "explosive" "connections" to international terrorism dissolve on examination. But it certainly deserves some serious follow-up.

Unless you're the Bush Administration!

But other sources describe the financial records as “explosive” and say the information has spurred an intense, behind-the-scenes battle between congressional leaders and the Bush administration over whether evidence highly embarrassing to the Saudi government should be publicly disclosed—especially at a time that the White House is aggressively seeking Saudi support for a possible war against Iraq. “This is a matter of the foreign-policy interests of the United States,” said another administration official, who cited the need to prevent a rift in the U.S.-Saudi relationship.

The only sane, the only patriotic response to this is, Yes, dumbass! This is a matter of the foreign-policy interests of the United States. Now start acting on those interests!

Al Qaeda slaughtered 3,000 blameless Americans fourteen months ago. They have made plain their intent to slaughter more. If a country paid for that slaughter, they are our enemies.

There was a moment in the Iran-Contra hearings that crystallized not just the arrogance but the opacity of a certain class of operators and their cheerleaders. Pressed on some detail of his part in selling military hardware to the Islamic Republic of Iran, the takers of American hostages and, through their Lebanese clients, the kidnappers of American officials and killers of American soldiers, Oliver North grew annoyed at the questioner's impertinence and determination to air all this dirty laundry, the soiled undergarments of the national security state.

"This country has enemies, Senator," he said, disdainfully.

Yes! this site shouted at the TV, there being no world wide web back then, and you've been playing footsie with them, you MO-ron!

As the poet said, "We must suffer them all again." How many times have you seen hawks claim that it's absurd, disingenuous, dishonest even, to argue, as some of us have, that the Administration's Iraq jones threatens to interfere with the war on Al Qaeda? Let's narrow down that pull-quote, shall we?

But other sources describe the financial records as “explosive” and say the information has spurred an intense, behind-the-scenes battle between congressional leaders and the Bush administration over whether evidence highly embarrassing to the Saudi government should be publicly disclosed—especially at a time that the White House is aggressively seeking Saudi support for a possible war against Iraq.

Can it get any clearer? No. It can't.

What's Cookin'? - Note that our food section contributors below are good for more than just meals.

In a follow-up piece on the coming Poindexterschina, Electrolite publishes reader mail explaining just what "story telling, change detection, and truth maintenance" mean in information science. Interesting and genuinely informative. (Elton Beard follows up too.)

Chad Orzel has links to pieces on the Muslim Brotherhood and a famous incident from the history of a sport Unqualified Offerings pays little attention to, college football.

Jesse Walker writes about the arrest of an Iraqi defector who has been well-placed to assume a major leadership position in post-Saddam Iraq but who - drat the luck! - just got arrested in Denmark for "war crimes, with human rights abuses, and, in general, with acting like Saddam Hussein." The phrase "gassing the Kurds" makes an appearance. These MacArthur-style regencies are like weddings, I guess. Just all kinds of little snags in the preparation.

Chil'in' - Naturally this morning's chili item brought more mail than anything this site has written since 911 got that call about the guys sacked out in the Caprice last month. Moral: be a food blogger. Food makes people happy. Politics upsets people. Consider Chad Orzel of Uncertain Principles. Sometimes he writes about politics, and when he does, he often sounds cranky. (And most of his commenters sound ridiculously cranky.) But when he writes about food, as in the following e-mail, things are quite otherwise:

You write: "Patrick Nielsen Hayden of Electrolite e-mails that Unqualified Offerings is 'wrong' that real chili should be bean-free. He blames this site's 'libertarianism.'"

I don't know as I'd blame libertarianism, so much as crediting the availability of Hard Times Cafe restaurants in the DC area. I still tend to think of chili as involving beans, but at the very least, their Texas-style chili convinced me that the beans are optional.

Yet another fine restaurant that I really miss from my days in Montgomery County (I lived a mile or so from their Rockville branch). I need to arrange another visit to NIST sometime soon, so I can get a "Cheap Eats" fix...

The virtues of Hard Times Cafe go beyond chili, actually. In fact, while Unqualified Offerings learned much about chili from eating there, these days it tends to pass the chili by. That's because Hard Times has the best buffalo wings in the area. Just as barbecue sauce is too often an excuse to cook meat badly, wing sauce often exists to disguise the fact that you have been sold a heat-blasted snippet of rope tied to a small bone. Hard Times wings are meaty and moist (saving the occasional off day), and the sauce will clear those winter sinuses too. They also serve a "Texas Chicken Sandwich," charbroiled filet coated with wing sauce, that is one of the planet's top ten food items.

Back to chili, the Hard Times recipe page is a bit of a cheat (box of [relevant] Hard Times spice mix appears frequently) but it does have some useful preparation tips that go beyond ingredients lists.

Jesse Walker goes beyond UO's ingredients list in this excellent e-mail:

You are, of course, absolutely right about chili. Beans are bland islands in a dish whose lively flavor should be uninterrupted.

That said, I'd put more into the dish than you would. I've never actually written down my chili recipe, but it includes not just the ingredients you listed, but cut tomatoes, sliced garlic, lime juice, three varieties of chili powder, a wee bit of sugar, and all sorts of fresh peppers (limited by how much spiciness I think the people I'm cooking for can handle: I dig habeneros, for example, but not everyone can deal with them). And more: even if you ignore the ingredients I'm ambivalent about adding (sometimes corn seems right, sometimes it doesn't), I'm sure I'm forgetting materials that would instantly occur to me if I were typing this in my kitchen.

Unqualified Offerings has been a fan of Jesse Walker's for years, but...corn? Lime juice sounds interesting though.

Reader Grant Gould adds his voice to the "anti-beaniotarian" chorus, and ties chili back in to politics:

You are 105% correct. Real chili does not contain beans. Out here on the East Coast, I even find it necessary to tell people that real chili is thick and viscous -- what they have out here is usually a thin, reddish bean soup. Chili heathens are everywhere.

I do have to slightly disagree with your recipe, though: Replace that tomato sauce with a bit of tomato paste and a bottle of beer. The alcohol from the beer will help draw out the flavour of the other ingredients. That will let you make a powerfully tasty chili from mild ingredients, rather than the how-much-spicy-stuff-can-I-pack-in "manly" chili that many sou'westerners and faux-sou'westerners insist on (they're probably neocons). It also helps to soften up tough cuts of beef, allowing you to use tough, cheap, flavourful meat.

It might be that chili recipes are really signifiers of one's political persuasion -- from the Southern Democrat (open "Hormel" can, pour out, stir) to the west-coast liberal (five beans, no meat, takes hours to cook). Neocons have their Habenero Hellfire Testosterone chili, East-Coast liberals their watered-down and inoffensive tomato-and-bean-soup, and of course the centrist just throws whatever is in the larder into the pot and boils it for a while (which works better than you'd expect, though sometimes you end up wondering why on earth this chili has a potato in it).

That tomato paste and beer substitution sounds genuinely exciting. Ironically, Unqualified Offerings tends to make what Grant classes as "neocon" chili. Its most recent effort included three different kinds of pepper (black, white and cayenne) plus chili powder (but also salt, brown and white sugar, and cumin). Next time it will try the beer, much less chili powder if any, and maybe at least taste it without the sugar and cumin before adding any. This website stresses that it used very moderate amounts of these last ingredients.

Finally, Patrick Nielsen Hayden avers that he would eat UO's chili recipe of this morning because it is Atkins-compliant.

More Decadence from the Coastal Left - Patrick Nielsen Hayden of Electrolite e-mails that Unqualified Offerings is "wrong" that real chili should be bean-free. He blames this site's "libertarianism."

Plainly, the liberal Patrick Nielsen Hayden is not from Texas. (Follow-up inquiries produced a claim that he is from Arizona.) Still, before this site's readers accept the hegemonic biases of a denizen of New York media circles try this:

Equal parts

beef (grind or cut of your choice)
red bell peppers
onion
tomato sauce (unless you really are from Texas)

Cook it like chili, seasoned to taste.

Sorrow and Anger - Some prick blew up a bus in Jerusalem today, killing 11 people, including children. Of course there will be wounded too, including the grievously wounded. Aziz Poonawalla's imprecation against the murderer is eloquent, driving fury, a prodigy of religious faith and moral clarity. I want to quote from it. I will not. Read the whole thing. Read it now.

Imitation Tech Blog Post - Reader/Gaming Buddy Mike Jacobs e-mails to point out this t-shirt.

Yes, Unqualified Offerings does think it's funny.

The Grand Strategy That Dare Not Speak Its Name Still - A Kuwaiti policeman seriously wounded two American soldiers by stopping their car and blasting them with a gun. He then fled to Saudi Arabia. AP calls it "the latest violence against U.S. troops who are preparing for a possible showdown with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein."

Meanwhile, in Iran, demonstrators carry pro-US signs and "press demands for freedom of speech and the release of all political prisoners." Why the difference in attitude?

We're not in Iran.

As Unqualified Offerings noted more than a year ago, paleoconservative Scott McConnell put it as pithily as it can be put. When it comes to the Middle East, "The conclusion is inescapable: the less we are there, the more we are liked."

Create two, three...many Irans, that is the watchword. There is even a role for massive troop movements. The bulk of our forces will be best concentrated here.

So Much to Blog, So Little Time - UO has all kinds of things it wants to write about, like "Rogue States' Rights" and "Pack vs. TIPS" and...other stuff. But it's a quick hits kind of night. This website feels it can lick that cold soon with some extra sleep, and it has to get in touch with its sister about revising the resume. Dang, Unqualified Offerings said, that takes us up to the weekend, and people don't read blogs on the weekend. (Except for those of you who do read blogs on the weekend, and Unqualified Offerings loves you for it.) Anyway...

Referral log discoveries. walterindenver is a libertarian blogger from, well, you guessed that part, right? He appears to have been blogging since June. Quotable: "Well, it would be much easier to build a successful religion than a successful Libertarian party. More lucrative, too, I imagine." See also his list of beliefs. Unqualified Offerings must reluctantly disagree with him about chili: the genuine article contains no beans.

Also discovered among referrers. Noosphere Blues praises "Jim Healy" for his liberty-based bashing of the Republican Party. Gene, I'll go halves with you on the credit.

Speaking of Gene Healy he explains the little reason why smart people are less upset with the idea of telemarketers collecting data on you than they are with John Poindexter collecting data on you.

Isn't intellectual honesty something? Max Sawicky, lefty economist, doesn't like the Republican idea of robbing the government of its "fuel" (money) now through tax cuts to stall the engine of government (new programs) later. But, says Max in this carefully-argued post, "by its own lights," it's been a relatively effective plan. (He's responding to a contrary argument by Brad DeLong.

Thanks for your memories. Colby Cosh wrote a special post just for Unqualified Offerings about a single, disastrous play in Sunday's CFL Western Final. A triumph of narrative art resulted. Quotable prelude: "I bet the CFL is a lot of fun to watch if you don't care about it." (UO would believe the kicker in question believes, like a lot of US sports fans, that the Canadian field is "ten yards longer" than a US gridiron, when, properly considered, the field is thirty yards longer. But Colby says the k-i-q is a product of Canada.)

The great debate is elsewhere. Eve Tushnet and Julian Sanchez file complementary reports on a highly publicised debate over Iraq policy between New Republic and American Prospect teams. The reports are excellent. The debates, according to Eve and Julian, not.

Crock Files - Chris Mooney points out in Slate that the so-called No Fly zones over northern and southern Iraq, and US and British enforcement of same, have no direct origin in UN Security Council resolutions:

However, the New York Times editorialized at the time that Resolution 688 provided a "dubious justification" for setting up the no-fly zones because it did not authorize the use of force to stop Iraqi abuses. And in 1993, the U.N. legal department announced that it could find no existing Security Council resolutions authorizing the United States, Britain, and France to enforce the no-fly zones. They are never explicitly mentioned in Resolution 688 or elsewhere. Furthermore, Resolution 688 was not enacted under Chapter 7 of the U.N. Charter, the section that is used to authorize and legitimize the use of force.

France later backed away from its involvement in the no-fly zones, leaving the United States and Britain to enforce them. Other U.N. Security Council nations have never accepted their legitimacy. So the dispute over whether Iraq's firing at planes over the no-fly zones constitutes a "material breach" actually exposes a long-standing divide at the United Nations. No wonder the administration has been hesitant to cite Iraq's recent anti-aircraft fire as cause to demand further military action from the Security Council.

Complaints that a country is firing on planes you're flying over their territory are a bit disingenuous. But then, what else is new?

Morning Murder Minute - How safe is Montgomery County? Or, if you prefer, out of touch with reality? This much: Police have released some of the 911 tapes from the second day of the sniper spree. Most callers did not initially recognize the murder victims as murder victims! Here are some excerpts, via Channel 7's website:

[Sonny Buchanan]
"What's going on there," the 911 operator said. "Um, this guy's lawn mower did something man, it chopped him up, he's bleeding real bad," the caller said. "He's down and out."

[Sarah Ramos]
"I need ambulance and police at Leisure World Plaza, at the end by the post office. A girl just got shot herself," the caller said.

"She just what?" asked the operator. The caller told the operator, "she just shot herself, sitting on the bench here."

[Lori Rivera]
"We need an ambulance at the corner of Knowles and Connecticut. A woman was vacuuming her car, something blew up, she's unconscious, she's got blood coming out of her nose and mouth," said another caller.

[Prem Walekar]
"Oh my God," said the caller. The operator said, "Ma'am, listen to me. What's wrong?" The caller responded, "a man has been killed in front of me." The operator asked, "how is he being killed in front of you?" The caller said, "he was shot, I don't know."

Meanwhile, Channel 7's website does not have any stories about their "special report" from Antigua.

Segway News You Can't Get Elsewhere - Lots of bloggers have noted that you can now by Segways from Amazon. Only Unqualified Offerings will tell you that it had a dream just this morning that it rode a Segway to visit its doctor.

A NyQuil-induced hallucination? We distort, you deride.

Anthrax Suspect Enters Plea! - Yes, Unqualified Offerings is an asshole to choose a title like that for this story in the Stamford Advocate. No, while the truth is a defense in libel cases, it is not a defense against charges of being an asshole. What can Unqualified Offerings tell you?

Spree Graphs Extra! - Scouring the web to bring you sniper news you haven't gotten elsewhere, Unqualified Offerings notes this original reporting from Blackalopolis News Center, by Tamarah Davis. It's an iron rule of sniper coverage that every biography of John Muhammad will assign different dates to his conversion to Islam and his family's name change, and Davis's report follows the rule. She places the initial conversion "to Islam shortly after splitting from his first wife and joining the Army" in 1985. (Alas, she does not provide a source for this date.) This passage about a rumored post-NOI conversion to more traditional Islam was interesting:

Some neighbors have reported that Muhammad had recently begun attending a mosque that is not affiliated with the Nation of Islam, though members of the Islamic Center of Tacoma, this city's largest traditional Muslim mosque, said he had not worshiped there.

as was this brief discussion of possible Muhammad-Malvo membership in the Nation of Gods and Earths, aka the "five percenters". Davis:

Members of the Five Percenters, which split from the Nation of Islam in the 1960s, said they have members in Seattle but not Muhammad. Their followers never take that surname. Daoud Majestic, a Five Percenter in Pennsylvania, said that when Muhammad became a black Muslim 17 years ago, the Nation of Islam often used ''Word is Bond'' and advocated that the black man is God. The Nation has since toned down its rhetoric, Majestic said, but some older members still use it. ''It's very possible that he still used that kind of terminology,'' he said.

But another Five Percenter said that the phrase ''Word is Bond'' is commonly used in hip-hop music.

This Davis, she talks to people. I think they call it reporting. Unqualified Offerings commends the practice, though it would (almost) never take such steps itself.

Here's the really intriguing part. Davis, who is apparently based in Seattle, may have found yet another attempt by Muhammad and Malvo to contact a Catholic priest during the spree, not in Ashland, VA, but in Bellingham, Washington:

Another element of Muhammad's medley of religious influences showed in the final week of the reign of fear, when the snipers reportedly reached out to Catholic priests in Ashland, Va., where that city's victim was felled, and in Bellingham, Wash., where Muhammad and his alleged accomplice, 17-year-old John Lee Malvo, had recently lived in the Lighthouse Mission, a homeless shelter.

Shortly before 5 p.m. on Oct. 18, Janene Jensen, pastoral secretary of the Catholic Church of the Assumption in Bellingham, received a mysterious call from the man she now believes is Muhammad. ''Is Father there?'' he asked. When she replied no, he demanded to know why, muttered something, then slammed down the phone.

The Rev. Jay DeFolco, who missed the call because he was at a funeral that evening, was startled when he saw Muhammad's face in the newspapers the following week. He recognized Muhammad from the free meals offered at the church each Sunday, often frequented by Lighthouse Mission members. ''He was one who was midlife, healthy, strong, capable, tall, so he stood out,'' DeFolco said.

Chilled by his encounter with the accused murderer of 10 people, DeFolco regrets missing that call. ''I wish I could have been here,'' he said. ''Maybe we could have saved another life.''

Davis' conclusion? "the piecemeal approach that John Allen Muhammad took to religion suggests that his fractured personality, more than his spiritual beliefs, led to the terrifying violence that killed at least 10 people."

For a sympathetic discussion of Five-Percenters and a kind of exegetical denial that Muhammad and Malvo could have been motivated by Five Percenter ideology, see this Middle East Research and Information Project backgrounder (No. 111, they ask citers to tell you). The refutation can't be definitive, since it turns on a claim that Muhammad and Malvo fail to adhere perfectly to the tenets of Five Percenter belief in their words and actions and, well, who adheres perfectly to anything? But it's worth reading for its brief history of the movement.

Spree Graphs - Matthew "False witness" Dowdy's trial was scheduled to start today, but it's been continued until December 30th, per Fredericksburg.com. Dowdy remains in custody.

There's a Pony in Here Somewhere Redux. Pants were wet in certain corners of the blogosphere when the Washington Times reported that "Federal authorities are investigating whether accused snipers John Allen Muhammad and John Lee Malvo had ties to a growing sect of militant American Muslims committed to waging holy war against the United States," a subsidiary of Jamaat al-Fuqra known as Muslims in America. The pattern is familiar - some organ reports that the Feds are going to check for this or that possible terror connection, neo-whatever pundits cry ah hah! and...nothing ever comes of it.

In this case, the WashTimes is even late with the story. The Post first reported that "The FBI is looking into whether the two men had ties to Jamaat ul-Fuqra..." on October 24th.The WashTimes reporter tells us that the sheriff of Charlotte County told the reporter that the FBI told the sheriff that there was a "connection" between Muhammad and an al-Fuqra outpost in Georgia, but not what the connection was. The reporter also tells us the the FBI would not tell the reporter anything about what the sheriff says they told him. Got that?

A Bad Man to Know. Meanwhile, the roundup of people connected with Muhammad's various document scams continues:

A Jamaican man who Antigua authorities believe showed the Washington, D.C.-area sniper suspect how to illegally obtain passports was indicted on passport fraud charges by a federal grand jury Tuesday.

says an AP story in the Stamford (CT) Advocate.

By the by, local channel 7, WJLA-TV, promises a special report from Antigua tonight by a reporter who, per the radio promos, tracked down one of Muhammad's friends, who gave them the "real reason" Muhammad spent so much time there. (Sun? Beaches? Island women? No place the ex would look for her kids? Nah. Must be something trickier.)

On the Other Hand... Those looking for a report (from someone other than Harjeet Singh )of Muhammad actually saying anti-American things in the wake of September 11 can find some satisfaction in this passage from last week's Seattle Times investigative report:

A few days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Muhammad, still living intermittently at the mission, wandered into the Horseshoe Restaurant, which boasts of being the oldest place in Bellingham for "great food, fine tobacco and a place to meet with friends over a good beer."

He picked a stool at the bar in the Ranch Room. A few stools away, on the other side of the L-shaped counter, a small group of locals sipped their own morning beers and vented their outrage at Osama bin Laden. One said the United States should bomb the hell out of al-Qaida.

Muhammad took exception. In a calm, even tone, he told the men that the CIA had sponsored a lot of terrorism in the world, and that the U.S. was itself a terrorist state. The group glared at the stranger who interjected himself into a private conversation.

One man came unglued.

He was a local fisherman and crabber named Drew Sandilands. He is 47, with weathered hands and a wiry, slender-strong build. If anyone in the group could have physically challenged Muhammad, it was Sandilands. And if anyone had reason to, it was he: His cousin was the airline pilot of one of the jets that was hijacked and slammed into the Trade Center.

Sandilands told Muhammad to get out or he would "get his ass whupped."

Another man in the group, Tracy Ridpath, held Sandilands back.

As calmly as he had walked in, Muhammad walked out into daylight and out of trouble. Sandilands followed him outside, but Muhammad was already gone. The fisherman later told his buddies that he had a feeling Muhammad was a terrorist.

The profile is actually pretty good, the passages on Muhammad's custody woes (substantially of his own making, it must be said) evoking pity and terror. As a merciless, clear-eyed portrait of a man on the road to hell, it is pretty strong. An excerpt:

During the most stable part of his marriage to Mildred in Tacoma during the 1990s, Muhammad ran an auto-repair business that thrived for a while, then fell apart. Close friends say that as the couple's marriage disintegrated, primarily because of Muhammad's chronic womanizing, so did the business.

Mildred's brother, Charles Green, who lived with the family for stretches at a time, has said Muhammad made a habit of taking sex from female customers as pay for his auto services. Family friends in Tacoma corroborate the story.

The ST team claims agnosticism as to Muhammad's "real" motives:

The degree to which his personal bitterness merged with militant ideology, or whether one exacerbated the other, may never be known. Muhammad himself may not know.

Why did Muhammad and Malvo focus their attack on the Washington, D.C., area? Was it to paralyze the control center of the nation Muhammad had fought for and had come to despise? Was it to extort the $10 million he and Malvo demanded in one of their taunting missives to police?

Or was it, as his ex-wife Mildred and her family believe, a perversely circuitous plot to kill her? She lived in hiding with their children in Clinton, Md., and Muhammad had located them.

The ST story also has a picture of Muhammad playing Risk with fellow GIs during the Gulf War.

Not a Strong Start. Lee Malvo's Virginia lawyers haven't had much luck with the judge so far, according to NBC4.

The oldest story? The Antigua Sun adds some detail to the Muhammad-Norman Migill Manroe connection. (Manroe is the man arrested in Connecticut.)

“[Manroe] was arrested and sentenced to prison in the name of Kenny Williams. After he served his time he was not deported because it was felt that he was Antiguan. Kenny Williams was sentenced on 16 Feb., 2000 and was fined $50,000 forthwith or seven months hard labour. He got out of Prison in June 2000,” Fuller added.

Fuller also disclosed that Muhammad paid a visit to “Kenny Williams” Manroe while he was in prison and the task force is trying to obtain a copy of the prison record.

Which is to say that Muhammad visited a convicted drug trafficker in prison. Hm. Williams served his time between mid-February and June 2000. According to this useful chronology in the Seattle Times, Muhammad arrived on Antigua in late March. That theoretically means that Muhammad could not have met Manroe on Antigua before Manroe's sentence. So Muhammad flies to Antigua and within at most a couple of months is looking up a convicted marijuana smuggler in prison.

Timelines and Terrorism. The breathless Washington Times report on possible "links" between Muhammad and Jamaat al-Fuqra claims

Mr. Muhammad converted to Islam in 1984 and, as a former U.S. soldier, was stationed at Fort Lewis near Tacoma, Wash., at the time of the initial al-Fuqra attacks. Al-Fuqra also was named in the August 1984 slayings of three India natives in Tacoma and in a series of fire bombings in Seattle.

This simply isn't true. As the Seattle Times chronology, among many other sources, notes, Muhammad didn't join the US army until late 1985, and was not at Fort Lewis until then. The date of Muhammad's conversion to Islam is also very much up in the air. The Post interview with Mildred Muhammad says the conversion came "by 1997." The Sacramento Observer says John and Mildred converted "after the Gulf War."

So let's go straight to the horse's mouth, shall we? In his official statement, Louis Farrahkhan declares that "We searched our own files. This young man, John Allen Williams, while he was in the armed forces in Ft. Ord, California, began listening to the teachings of Islam as taught by the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. And when Ft. Ord was closed, he then moved to Ft. Lewis in Tacoma, Washington, I believe it is, and he visited the Study Group in that area from 1994 and 1995. And in 1997, July 17, he became a registered member of the Nation of Islam." Farrakhan also says that NOI lost contact with John Muhammad in 1999.

According to CBS News, Muhammad was transferred to Fort Ord in 1992.

Speaking of Surveillance - On the I Did Not Know That front, Eric Mauro tips me to the news that

Bobby Fischer, the eccentric chess prodigy who dueled Soviet grandmasters and won a world title in 1972, was investigated by FBI agents who suspected his mother was a communist spy, according to the bureau's records.

according to the Washington Times.

Here's the original, fuller story in the Philadelphia Enquirer.

Cute story! FBI follows half-batty single mom around for thirty years:

FBI agents checked birth records, posed as student journalists, and considered cultivating other chess players. They hounded Fischer's mother, reading her mail, quizzing her neighbors, studying her canceled checks.
...
Did she hear FBI footsteps? "Absolutely," said her son-in-law Russell Targ, now a physicist in Palo Alto, Calif. "They made it hard for her to keep a job."

Hope you liked it folks, because it's all coming back.

Next Step - In First-Ever Ruling, Secret Appeals Court Allows Expanded Government Spying on U.S. Citizens, writes the American Civil Liberties Union.

So. Can they appeal this to the Secret Supreme Court?

Agitated - Unqualified Offerings has been taking it easy, but Radley Balko, aka The Agitator, has not. He delivers himself of two major pieces this week so far - a takedown of the absurd suggestion that CATO somehow launders corporate money for select politicians, and a no-holds-barred refutation someone named John J. Miller, who argued in the New York Times that if only libertarians voted for Republicans rather than Libertarians, a few more Republicans would get elected, making Republicans all happy and stuff.

In his merciless list of reasons libertarians could rightly care less if they ruin the occasional Republican candidacy, Radley leaves aside the whole empire thing and still has quite a long list. He doesn't even need to mention UO's absolute, bottom-liner: this site will swear its allegiance to no Party committed to maintaining our insane, cruel drug war (until just recently the biggest single menace to our status as a free people).

Unqualified Offerings wishes it could remember, but there was a superb essay in Liberty a couple of years ago, arguing that, taking the long view, the Republican Party was a far greater menace to libertarianism than the Democratic Party. That's because the Dems simply oppose the precepts of libertarianism forthrightly: they are the avowed Party of Government. Taxes must never go down; "we" have to have a policy for everything; There must be something we can do because there's always something we can do.

You can have, the author argued, a great debate with such people, a grand discourse on the nation's meaning and destiny.

But the Republicans! Their offense is not disagreement. Their offense is much worse. They appropriate our rhetoric, drawing the support of many who appreciate our principles - small government, voluntary exchange, self-defense and free enterprise, responsibility and liberty - but they besmirch those principles by their actions. Instead of free enterprise, corporate welfare. Instead of small government, trivial nips and tucks calculated to annoy no crucial interest group, instead of free trade, price supports and tarrifs, instead of responsibility, drug wars. Republicans traduce our ideals, and the public comes to associate their practice with our principles. It's not fair, but it's the way the mind works.

(Look at the damage slavery did to the prestige of property rights. It's absurd - the problem was not the concept of property as such, the problem was that holding propery specifically in other human beings was an abomination. [Okay: Using hairdryers. Not okay: Throwing a running hairdryer into your spouse's bath.] But that's the way many minds and much rhetoric works.)

Morning Murder Minute - The Hartford Courant reports that the FBI crashed a dinner party given by Paul Gianquinto last week looking for his brother Peter, Muhammad's alleged partner in his document swindles on Antigua. Not a close family, though:

"I told them I hadn't seen him in four years, not since the funeral for our mother," Paul Gianquinto told The Hartford Courant. "My brother certainly surrounds himself with shady characters, so this seemed fairly typical for him."

So his parents really did the "Peter/Paul" thing when naming their kids.

Good profile of Muhammad friend Robert Holmes in the Seattle Times. Holmes called the Seattle FBI with one of the crucial tips on Muhammad:

"John knew I was the only one who knew it was him," he went on. "No one knew what I knew." Holmes' knowledge included that Muhammad had fallen apart when he lost custody of his three children the year before, that his ex-wife, Mildred, lived on the East Coast, that Muhammad was a marksman, and that he had discussed equipping a long-distance rifle with an illegal silencer. Holmes said Muhammad had told him, "Can you imagine the damage you could do if you could shoot with a silencer?"

Whither the white van? The Post discusses.

North Korea Has Nuclear Arms says the MSNBC headline. That means it can't hug its children, right?

South Korean officials doubted the credibility of the report.

so maybe it can hug its children after all.

Lazy Blogging - Unqualified Offerings has to update its resume just in case, so activity has been light this weekend. This site hopes for more activity in the near future - some good e-mails have come in, and Scott Koenig has issued an interesting challenge on Indepundit. And in the meantime, for all you employers out there, there are two kinds of people in the world - the kind who get relational databases, and the kind who don't. Unqualified Offerings is one of the former.

American Dunkirk and Beyond - Bill Humphries of More Like This writes in praise of Glenn Reynolds' American Dunkirk article, and continues

I'm still stunned at how quickly NYC was able to clear the ruin of the Trade Center, it's as much a modern engineering/management marvel as the fabled project where things get built. Anyway, if you haven't read William Langewiesche's American Ground, serialized in the Atlantic Monthly, please do. His experience of the project mirrors what Prof. Reynolds talks about in his column, and gets past all the hero-worship that the FDNY and NYPD (to a much lesser extent) milked out of the tragedy.

Blogwatch Auxiliary - Stuff I've seen out there that I like:

DC Blows takes out after a peeve of my own - publicly-subsidized sports stadia. Also, praise for Colin Powell and a very personal catalog of selected DC bloggers.

Amygdala has so much good stuff that it's pointless to link to any specific item. Just start at the top and work down. I know you stopped checking Amygdala as often when Gary announced that he didn't have as much time for blogging, but there has been a recent explosion of activity and a visit will more than repay your time.

Colby Cosh has before and after pieces on the CFL Western Final, reminding me how aggrieved I am that there's not televised CFL in the US any more. Plus, advice for lovelorn women.

Colby's item reminds me of an occasional response of mine to people who ask me who I think really shot JFK. Lean toward the questioner, frown soberly and intone

I don't think Kennedy was really assassinated.

If you are so inclined, you then spin out a lengthy hypothesis involving Hodgkins Disease, the American Medical Association and Jackie's insurance coverage. Otherwise, just look annoyed at your interlocutors' naivete when they doubt you.

Eve Tushnet has more than one piece on objectivism and egalitarianism, but it's not nearly as gruesome as it sounds. Also the table of contents for her yet-to-be-written conversion memoir and some interesting pull-quotes on Zionism taken from her current reading.

Seablogger works around to an attack on Garrison Keillor, and why not?

Jesse Walker muses on Alexander Cockburn, Merle Haggard and the rocky road leading to left-right antiwar cooperation.

Steven Chapman has a very useful review of the extended-edition Lord of the Rings DVD (cliffs notes: Buy it), a new caption contest right below that, Kyoto, rain-dancing and the Myth of the Fall and more.

Samizdata offers a cool robot toy and Zombies in Britain, in and outside of the movies.