Unqualified Offerings

As libertarian Alan Bock says of himself, I too have always been better at the theory than the practice of capitalism. But that could change! Prominent among the spam I’ve been getting are come-ons for penis enlargement. Almost as numerous are ads for mortgage refinancing. So it hit me: Why not one company that does [...]

I am by no means sold on the new Justice League cartoon series yet. But there was an amusing bit in tonight’s episode. Green Lantern is on trial on a distant planet for allegedly destroying its neighbor, standing before a panel consisting of what appear to be the images of three AIs on a giant [...]

Michael Kinsley famously said. Last night I talked on the phone to an old friend of mine in the national security bureaucracy. Eventually the topic came around the the War, and the “What now?” question. Anent the possibility of war with Iraq (not to mention “Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and ‘parts of Egypt’ “) he adverted [...]

Despite frequent cracks about our “many loyal reader” (sic), recent reviews of server statistics lead management to believe that Unqualified Offerings’ readership may actually be, according to our source, “in the high one-figure range.” The editorial staff would like to thank our early adopters.

I couldn’t work up the energy to dismantle Barbara Kingsolver’s stupid op-ed in yesterday’s Washington Post. Or Friday’s Post – I’m repressing. In it, Kingsolver compares the most appealing things (to a liberal) that Franklin Roosevelt said in one speech to the least appealing things (to a liberal) George W. has done. And, as with [...]

Two potted histories of civilian casualties in warfare, one by blogger Steven den Beste and one by paleocon historian Joseph Stromberg. For den Beste, the special status of civilians was a brief sentimentality of history that needs to be put aside. Stromberg doesn’t think so. I’m with Stromberg, but you can read den Beste’s essay [...]

Instapundit quite properly crows about an item in the New York Times:
I mean,” she continued, after insisting, understandably, that her name not appear in print, “it’s a white powder, made by who, and cut with who knows what? Who is going to put that up their nose now?”
Instapundit had predicted soon after the first anthrax [...]

A skeptical account of “Colin Powell vs the War on Everyone Crowd.” Though it appears in the Village Voice, it’s refreshingly free of agony over the Taliban and al Qaeda themselves. Just how grandiose are the hawks’ ambitions? Here’s fellow traveler Michael Ledeen at a panel discussion at the end of October, as reported by [...]

Instapundit writes:
Tell also ignores the real scandal of the “USA Patriot Act” — which is that most of it isn’t about terrorism at all, but is simply a bureaucratic grab for things that have been on wish lists for years.
When this crisis is over, some people in Congress, and in the agencies, need to be [...]

Unqualified Offerings must string together four words that it would normally rebel at putting together: Terrific Molly Ivins Column. It’s not that the points she makes are original, but they’re essential, and she states them with verve:
WHOA! The problem is the premise.
We are having one of those circular arguments about how many civil liberties we [...]