Unqualified Offerings

to the Littlest Offering, who turns five today.
And which makes me wonder, as I do sometimes, whither Daddy-blogging? Mommy blogs have been much discussed. Where are their counterparts? The significant sources of daddy-blogging I know are Holbo, Peters (as of June) and Nate of Polytropos. In Nate’s case he keeps it to a separate blog [...]

Going through my archives for March 2003 I discovered a PNAC link whose URL made me chuckle (part of it anyway). Speaking of which, does the fact that the same crowd is once again insisting that we have always been at war with Eastasia mean we really are about to win in Iraq and need [...]

Although Guard officials said the new unit would not collect information on American citizens, top National Guard officials have already been involved in tracking at least one recent Mother’s Day anti-war rally organized by families of slain American soldiers, according to e-mails obtained by the Mercury News.
From “State Guard forms anti-terrorism intelligence unit” in the [...]

Natalie Solent picks from a Crooked Timber thread an excellent analysis of why expropriation-with-compensation is nevertheless troubling.

Kleptocracy, Whiskey, Sexy! (Libretto. Soundtrack.)
It’s the kleptocracy (see BBC link) that should hold our attention. Iraq has been one since before Saddam Hussein. So it remains. All the stories about the post-election wrangling over who got which ministries made clear what the stakes were: patronage and graft.
“Obviously the Ministry of Oil and the Ministry of [...]

If you don’t really know who “Larry Brown” is, you’re not going to get this one, but it is, pace Off Wing Opinion where I got the link, hilarious as opposed to hysterical.

Not just the best Firefox extension ever but the crowning achievement of human evolution, the bugmenot extension for Firefox. What does it do? It puts a “bugmenot” option in your context menu when you right-click on a user/password field on an Establishment Media Enterprise (”EME!”) website. Click it and the extension goes to BugMeNot.com, finds [...]

Let’s try to make a point about Kelo with maximum calm here, shall we? We’re told that it’s a “public use” to take property from one owner and hand it to another. It’s supposed to benefit “the community.” But who’s the “public” here? The Kelos and the Days and their neighbors? Apparently not. Who is [...]

Interesting story in the Boston Globe on the new translations of Michel Foucault’s infatuated reporting from revolutionary Iran. Author Wesley Yang argues Foucault of all intellectuals, Foucault should have had stronger antibodies against such enthusiasm:
There is a long tradition of Western intellectuals going abroad to sing the praises of revolutionaries in distant lands and finding [...]

Sometimes with a melody attached, sometimes not.
Knappster is right: it’s time for a new national anthem. He’s picked the right one too. And that song has a Star Trek reference, so it’s perfect for Tom Disch’s America.
Time lag among libertarians: Alina Stefanescu turns to Robinson Jeffers for consolation in the wake of Kelo. The country [...]