Unqualified Offerings

Can I confess that until writing the post below I did not know that the term “dhimmitude” was a neologism first coined by Bashir Gemayal of the Lebanes Phalange? So the totemic catchphrase of “submission anxiety” – the fear that the western liberalism is threatened with subjugation by Imperial Islam – was coined by the [...]

Various people take issue with Garance Franke-Ruta and Kenneth Baer’s arguments that, in Franke-Ruta’s words, “it would be a politically disqualifying act for any presidential candidate to take military action off the table in dealing with a country that is a potential regional threat, and that it would be folly for any group on the [...]

Thoreau buys that nonsense about how chimps make their own tools? I don’t believe chimpanzees can do any such thing. I think they get the tools from – Iran.

Via the Elvis Costello mailing list, a fascinating article from last year about how changes in the way studios master recorded music now makes it . . . awful. Excerpt:
We’re looking at the wave forms generated by a number of modern albums. Sound waves should look like what they’re called: waves, with sharp peaks and [...]

Eric Martin cites the same wrenching McClatchy-staffer blog item I read today, gets some utterly disingenuous shit in return, and explodes
You think this is fucking fun? Watching some ungodly tragedy evolve in slow motion that you knew was going to happen from the day it was just a perverse, malevolent thought in Dick Cheney’s [...]

Over on MatthewYglesias.com, Marty Lederman provides an inside perspective on how the Clinton Administration interpreted the War Powers Act’s strictures in the runup to the White House’s military intervention in Haiti:
The big question here is not the War Powers Resolution, but the Constitution. What sorts of hostilities can the President initiate unilaterally under the Constitution? [...]