Unqualified Offerings

Other sites not only get useful referrer information, but they get actual search strings from major engines that found them. All Unqualified Offerings gets is a list of unconnected keywords. In many cases, not only can it not figure out how those words found this domain, it can’t even figure out why someone would type [...]

I know I’ve had occasion to mention Airstrip One items before, and mostly favorably, but I want to stress what a valuable site it has become. Chiefly, Airstrip One has become the best source for links on the situation in Afghanistan. By an amazing coincidence, as soon as the Administration shifted its rhetorical focus to [...]

Steve Coll says that one of the problems for Afghans with their recent history is that they don’t even know what their recent history is:
To a greater extent than any other armed conflict on the planet, Afghanistan’s unfinished 24-year war has been shaped by rival foreign intelligence agencies: The Soviet Union’s KGB, America’s CIA, Pakistan’s [...]

Michael Wilbon has an excellent appreciation of the USA-Russia hockey game in Saturday’s Washington Post.

“The East German Judge.”

I remember the years of “amateur” Olympics – Mark Spitz and Eric Heiden and, especially, Sugar Ray Leonard, Maryland’s Pride. I remember the Miracle on Ice and even, prepubescently, Peggy Fleming. Oh the lost years of glory, before professionalism, sponsorships and the Dream Team, when athletes competed for the love of sport itself. Now NBA [...]

Tonight’s excellent USA-Russia hockey game puts me in mind of two related things, one of which goes here, the other in another item.
You hear people complain that this year’s USA-Russia matchup doesn’t mean and couldn’t mean what 1980’s “Miracle on Ice” game meant. How true. Now say it with me: Huzzah!
Here are some reasons why [...]

in Saudi Arabia, according to this Elaine Sciolino story in the International Herald-Tribune. The story would be more heartening – bored youth strain at the bonds of oppressive theocracy – if so many of the incidents Sciolino recounts didn’t involve young men harrassing women. Not just “harrassing women” by an expansive spring-ovular-in-women’s-studies definition either, but [...]

Reader Ronald Carpio volunteers for the hopeless job of keeping Unqualified Offerings honest:
You have a point that encouraging an increasingly hostile Europe
to arm itself may not be the smartest idea. But isn’t the main
reason why Europe has been relatively under-armed, the presence
of massive US forces? You’ve advocated a neo-isolationist foreign
policy before; if the [...]

It’s not just the book description of this Amazon.com entry, it’s the reviews. The first one reads like the sort of e-mails people send the Tony Kornheiser radio show. (Via Andrew Sullivan’s site.)