Unqualified Offerings

Honestly, the mind boggles. It’s a thin book too, but evidently not thin enough. Or too thin. Keep in mind that Pyle isn’t simply naive. He facilitates terrorism and covers for the perpetrators. Pyle willfully expects to be judged for the loftiest statement of his nominal desires, not even on his intentions, let alone his [...]

A couple of new posts at Decline and Fall, “REMFs and Cannon Fodder” and “Perhaps the Best Iraq Analysis Yet.” From the first:
It is these people, the out-of-touch, the wannabe politicians, who are so willing to contemplate sending others to slaughter the “enemies of freedom.” Those they would send, the infantrymen and other cannon fodder, [...]

Laugh till it hurts, America!
Mr. Bush is already facing skepticism within his own party over the troop buildup and will almost certainly confront repeated efforts by Democrats to force an end to the war.
From the New York Times, going straight after the Onion’s market share. Or maybe the Times is letting some of those “moral [...]

It’s not surprising that as American conservatism has become more nationalistic, evangelical and militaristic that the volunteer military would skew in an evangelical direction. I abhor conscription, but it’s foolish to believe eschewing it comes without costs. Paternalists will argue that we need a draft to rebalance the armed forces’ social distribution. Better is a [...]

By Thoreau
Some interesting and useful talks this morning. One speaker (whom I need to pin down at some point) talked about things that make me suspect that the Borat-like guy from Tuesday’s breakfast was right. Angiogenesis: Scientific learnings of blood vessels for make benefit glorious profession of oncology. Then there were [...]

The President is going to argue that after the US pulled out of Southeast Asia, millions of people died.
One more time. Millions of people died while we were there. A fair proportion of them were people we ourselves killed. In any reckoning of the costs of intervening and withdrawing from Indochina, those people count too. [...]

Alex Tabarrok’s idea for incorporating reality-TV into presidential elections has promise, but I’m thrown by the “Spot the Fraud” section:
Presidential candidates are provided with an economic scenario (mortgage defaults are up, hedge funds are crashing, liquidity is tight).  Three experts propose plans.  The candidate must choose one of the plans.  After the candidate chooses, the [...]

And don’t you forget that Unicorn Museum.
Via Sullivan.

Since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, no western reporter has shown more guts than Nir Rosen. (Steven Vincent came close.) Thus no western reporter has gotten closer to the truth of Iraq than Nir Rosen. Rosen just gave an interview with Democracy Now of what is past, and passing and to come in [...]