Unqualified Offerings

It’s a few years old, but Stuart Stevens’ firsthand chronicle of experimenting with performance-enhancing drugs was interesting reading. Many UO regulars will blanch at Stevens’ praise of the then-new WADA at the end. I don’t know how Stevens feels about the way WADA’s crazy protocols and procedures have evolved – and yes, I did look. [...]

My town. Kind of my town, anyway.

Jonathan Schwarz on our friends, the Egyptian security services, who know how to treat a kid.
Mark at Exporter Importer blog marked the 4,000th American military death in Iraq in October, noting, “The Iraq War has seen more Americans killed in combat than the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War or all [...]

While I ignored you all, Jeremy Lott wrote an interesting article on the long history of GOP “bloody shirt” politics. From Robert Ingersoll to Rudy Giuliani as it were.

Glassbooth’s cool feature is that it lets you allocate “importance points” to issues, then serves you questions on the basis of your points allocation. I put high emphasis on drug war, civil liberty and national-security issues and much lower values on economic matters. That’s where my priorities are these days. To little real surprise, Glassbooth [...]

I have no idea what postage is for a one-ounce, first-class letter. I realize I could find out in two seconds using the reason I don’t know the answer in the first place. But the point is, I don’t know the answer in the first place.

We return to an evergreen obsession of Unqualified Offerings.
Nobody doesn’t hate Greg Easterbrook! Even I stopped reading him somewhere after he first moved to ESPN from Slate. The great Slate columns represented an intelligent man looking at the game with his eyes rather than his preconceptions. And he was right far more often than he [...]

MondoGlobo aims to start an open-source civil-liberties organization called QuestionAuthority. It’s the kind of thing that could work if people get behind it.

Italian police burst into the room of a suspected Mafia mobster in Sicily and arrested him as he watched a television show about the arrest of a Mafia boss, investigators said Friday.
Reuters, via Poliblog.

By Thoreau
I’m watching a rerun of the GOP Presidential “debate” while I do housework. One of the questions posed was “What 3 government programs would you eliminate or at least cut significantly?” I’ll give you 4:
1) 50% reduction of defense spending, and a heavy audit of the remaining 50% to identify more [...]