Unqualified Offerings

Alas, the season finale was thoroughly ordinary television, thanks to the prominence given to “Murphy reconciles with the father we’ve never seen.” On the bright side, the regular cast makes ordinary scripts delightful viewing. I loved the bar scene at the beginning, and there was nice material, but Dad was a sidetrack from the “Is [...]

If anyone who reads this blog knows Arnold Kling, tell him he needs to pump those dumbbells while he’s walking through Sligo Creek Park. More range of motion equals more workload equals more fitness gains. Doing a UO site search on “heavyhands” will find all sorts of useful discussion.
At least, I think it was Arnold [...]

“A paranoid, senile tyrant railed at me almost thirty years ago. But that actually has nothing to do with what I want to write about today.”
Via W&P.

In my post about cooking lessons, commenter Karen demanded recipes.  We aim to please.
Baked orzo with seafood
Serves 4-6
1 lb mussels
1/2 lb shrimp
1/2 cup + 1 tbsp butter
2 cloves of garlic, crushed
1 large onion, finely chopped
4-5 tomatoes, seeded and pureed
1/2 tsp sugar
salt and pepper to taste
2.5 cups orzo
1.25 cups sheep’s milk cheese, crumbled
Preheat oven to 350 [...]

We finally got the Wiiii . . .
(Hat tip: Mrs. Offering!)

Ned Parker’s story in the LA Times overcounts. He reports that Iraq has ended up with two parallel intelligence agencies, but the story makes clear that Iraq has no intelligence agencies. The official intelligence agency, the INIS, gets 100% of its funding from the American CIA and none from the Iraqi government. The alternative that [...]

By Mona
Over at NRO, Victor Davis Hanson cops that his foreign policy views are the results of his “dreams” and “apparitions.” Tho upon waking, he does “remember[ ] that the West of old lives only in dreams,” one wonders why he forgets it when formulating policies for the world as, you [...]

By Thoreau
I have long commented in various forums that Pervez Musharaf is not to be trusted.  He may claim to be an enemy of the Taliban, he may claim to have taken power to counter religious extremism, but he always finds the religious fanatics to be more useful allies than the secular liberals.  Extremists can [...]

By Thoreau
This morning’s Washington Post has an interesting profile of Javad Zarif, Iran’s ambassador to the UN. Unofficially, he also functions as Iran’s ambassador to the US. There are some fascinating details about how he and John Bolton maneuvered around diplomatic constraints so that they could exchange information (when Zarif was barred from [...]

By Mona
AP reports from the front of that “other war,” my emphasis:

SAN FRANCISCO – Federal prosecutors said today they would retry marijuana grower Ed Rosenthal on cultivation charges, even after a federal judge urged them to drop the case and chastised the government for lodging charges solely to punish the self-proclaimed [...]