Unqualified Offerings

Looking Sideways at Your World Since October 2001

Archive for August 6th, 2007

Monday, August 6th, 2007

Knight and Fog

A soldier named Scott Beauchamp who published a “Baghdad Diarist” in the Non Republic and set off another warblogger frenzy has, if Michael Goldfarb and MNF-I’s public affairs office are to be believed, recanted all three of his articles, including the two earlier ones that nobody much minded. Previously TNR reported that Beauchamp “stood by [...]

Monday, August 6th, 2007

The New Other Foot

Tor was kind enough to send me Ken MacLeod’s new book, The Execution Channel, billed by Cory Doctorow as the world’s first “blogothriller.” The book holds one of Roger Zelazny’s funhouse mirrors up to life in the GWOT era and soon after. The book takes place in the near future and, we learn as the [...]

Monday, August 6th, 2007

Call No Man Happy While He Lacks Henchmen

I can only assume new regulations against owning “too many” smoke detectors will be promulgated within a week. My favorite passage . . .
He said officials learned in January that Hahn had returned to the area after serving in the U.S. Navy.
HO-kay . . .
UPDATE: Doh! Via Unfogged!

Monday, August 6th, 2007

Threads that make you go “yum!”

By Thoreau
Today on Hit and Run there was a thread about lamb. Now, Katherine Mangu-Ward wanted to make some point about economics and trade and CO2, and a few of the commenters decided to construct and burn an environmentalist strawman, but some of us realized what the more important issue was: How best [...]

Monday, August 6th, 2007

A Few Words

Matt’s right that, “What do you think about China?” is an important thing to know about the candidates. In particular, I’d like to know who wants to use “the rise of China” to justify stuffing DoD’s goodie bag full of expensive toys forever. In another way, though, I’m almost glad to hear less about the [...]

Monday, August 6th, 2007

You could have knocked me over with a feather

By Thoreau
Weapons given to Iraq are missing.
How could this possibly be?  I guess we’ll have to ask Santa Claus for more weapons.  Surely he’ll deliver…wait, what’s that you say?  Oh, great, two complete surprises in one day!