Unqualified Offerings

Best bit from Doug Casey’s current WorldNetDaily column:
Once airport security is federalized, the airports will resemble the local DMV, with employees who are overpaid, sloppy, slow, hostile, dimwitted and impossible to fire. But, to look at the bright side, at least they’ll be armed.

A reader writes (it’s Mrs. Offering, actually)
I haven’t read Justin Raimondo’s piece about the Rockefellers and Saudi Aramco, but you are aware that Aramco is the company Dad worked for; and it’s now _Saudi_ Aramco because the Saudi gov’t bought out the American shareholders in the mid-70s. Which is not to say that the [...]

is not dead! The folks who gave you “I Wanna Be a Lifeguard” and “My Baby’s the Star of a Driver’s Ed Movie” have, as don’t we all, a website.
But that’s not what I wanted to talk about.
I want to talk about something that is blotto, at least in the wasteland that is “alternative” radio: [...]

goes today to Natalie Solent, of the cleverly-titled Natalie Solent blog, about Aboriginal-Australian websites linked by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation:
…there was nothing I would confidently describe as crappy about the actual aboriginal material, although much of it had the laboured, wheezy tone of a culture being muffled by subsidy.

27 users supposedly logged into the website right now and every single one of them with a third-level address from avantgo.com. Every single one of them showing dynamist.com/scene.html as a referrer. Which would suggest that Virginia Postrel’s and my sudden popularity is among robots only, or that dynamist.com is suffering a denial of service attack [...]

This site has been proud to be on Virginia Postrel’s link list since around Christmas. It gets a nice bunch of referrals from there every week. Now and then VP finds some specific item worth mentioning and Unqualified Offerings sees a gratifying spike in visits. But today is something else again. UO is getting an [...]

During what came to be known as “The Raimondo Dogpile” last week, Moira Breen asked for clarification of the views of various warbloggers in light of some things I wrote. I would argue that the responses she did and didn’t get , when added to what the the bloggers in question have written since [...]

Ginger Stampley has a good item on college students, college administrations, responsibility and suicide, informed by her perspective as a Rice alumna. What she says about Rice is true about MIT, where student Elizabeth Shinn committed suicide. (Her parents are suing MIT for not stopping the girl.
There was underground black humor — part of the [...]

Thomas Nephew cites a Guardian story about yet another al-Qaeda prisoner revolt, this time in Pakistan. That lengthens a list that already includes another prisoner riot in Pakistan, plus the famous Mazar e Sharif revolt. Think international scolds will shut up about the big bad US treating the Guantanamo prisoners as if they were, you [...]

Unqualified Offerings is actually just leaving the office, and will be back tomorrow. There are a couple of longer pieces brewing, on deterring Iraq for one, and more on “Libertarianism and My Sister,” in response to some e-mail comments by Eve Tushnett. (Note to Eve: I’m not sure it’s really a blog if you go [...]