Unqualified Offerings

It’s the old US-Israel story of a country whose own best interests are subverted by the unnatural control its supposed ally exerts on its decision-making. Tony Karon explains.
But Schiff also makes clear that, plainly, the Israelis had no idea what they’d signed up for, which is why, as Winograd concluded, they waded into battle without […]

By Thoreau
Abu Laith al-Libi, the number 3 guy in Al Qaeda, met a fate similar to that of numerous other Al Qaeda number 3 guys and spontaneously combusted.  (It actually happens all the time, it’s just not widely reported.)

The corrupt and decadent Redskins organization may interview Steve Mariucci. Local radio blowhards were snarking about this a couple days ago: “Get used to losing!” one said. This is stupid. (Ref: Pro Football Reference.) Mariucci won 59% of his regular-season games during six seasons in San Francisco. He made the playoffs four times and advanced […]

By Mona
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Was just given a gift of a fancy Motorola cell phone. On page four under the subject “Use and Care,” the User Guide says:
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Don’t try to dry your phone in a microwave oven; and
Don’t drop your phone.

If one needs to be advised of either of those points, one […]

By Thoreau
Will wins the thread:
How do we know that the Bush Administration didn’t commit this act, very be simply, it was actually pulled off. If Bush & Co were behind this the Twin Towers would still be up & the whole operation would seriously behind schedule & tens of billions of dollars over budget.
Bravo!

By Mona
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Waterboarding, that is.
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And so legal sometimes, and not others.
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So sez our Attorney General, Michael B. Mukasey, in a letter to Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. But he isn’t inclined to share with the Committee under what circumstances waterboarding is licit, and declines to provide any further […]

By Thoreau
As a libertarian, I generally do support the right of consenting adults to do whatever they want without hurting others.  However, I would argue that serving as inspiration for the TSA’s inevitable Next Big Idea is a negative externality.  I therefore oppose this new concept in aviation.

By Thoreau
Friend of the blog Jennifer has ventured into the world of 9/11 Truthers and written a nice report on her travels. She observes (correctly) that it’s almost impossible for the educated layman to know what to believe. Hell, even I don’t know enough about the physics of melting steel to give an […]

I’m pretty much in the tank for Office 2007, especially Excel and Outlook. The unfairly maligned Fluent interface is fantastic once you climb the learning curve. But, unless I’m missing it, the productivity programs still, all these years later, lack a “Save to Backup” feature. If I’m working on an article called “The Big Waste” […]

La Rana, in comments Chez IOZ:
FISA is too antiquated to deal with modern technology, but that shit Locke said about foreign affairs, well that is like totally applicable to communication packets.

By Thoreau
Rolling Stone details the FBI’s efforts to coax angry young men off of their couches and into terrorist activity.
I’ll let the legal experts sort out whether any particular case is entrapment.  I’m willing to contemplate the possibility, for the sake of argument, that you could have an ideal Platonic sting in which the informant […]

Rudy Giuli drops out before he terminally pisses off the other GOP candidates. One of those other candidates wins the election. Needs to nominate an attorney general . . .

Isn’t it obvious that agents of the Ludwig von Mises Institute planted the FISA-slurping editorial in Cato Legal honcho Roger Pilon’s name so that their accusations against the “Kochtopus” would sound more plausible? CosmoBeltwayLiberSanchez doesn’t even consider this.
Let’s be clear here: This doesn’t prove that PaleoRockwellitudinarianism is the awesome!!!1!one!!eleven! part of the movement after all, […]

By Thoreau
Two articles of clothing for the fashionable authoritarian-in-libertarian-clothing:
Here and here.
(Yes, I know, the second one may not be historically correct, but it’s a shirt of the general color that I found with 30 seconds of googling. Find a better one and I’ll update the link.)

By Thoreau
It was brought to my attention in a H&R thread that Roger Pilon at Cato is endorsing immunity for telecoms that broke the law, and renouncing the very idea of requiring warrants to intercept communications:
Obviously, this is no way to conduct the serious business of foreign intelligence. The ever-changing rules — criminalizing transgressions — […]

The front page is visible, but it appears impossible to get into individual items and comment threads. I’m opening a ticket with our hosting service. Meantime, if anyone has experience with Wordpress’s “No Input File” error, please e-mail me at “jimhenley at gmail dot com.”

Blackgrd contra Mikulski.

By Thoreau
A neat little article on the physics of viruses.

By Thoreau
You know, I was prepared for a good TV night.  I had an early class, and I’ve had a lot of stuff going on today, so I figured tonight I’d settle back and watch as criminals acting on orders from shadowy businessmen conspire to escape from justice.
Instead we’ve got Bush on TV.
Wait a minute…
Even […]

By Thoreau
CNN ran an interesting report on undercover inspectors getting fake bombs past the TSA:
The screener then pats him down, running latex-gloved hands over Jason’s legs, arms and torso. And he pats down Jason’s back, including the lower part where the device is concealed.
But Jason explains away the back support. He tells the screener that […]

By Thoreau
I was not aware until today that Mosul had become a haven for Sunni militants.  Well, apparently it has, and the Iraqi government is planning on offensive in the city.
I knew that Mosul had experienced a lot of problems due to the ethnic divide and location in disputed territory.  I was unaware that insurgents […]

Matthew Yglesias on AJ Ayer.
Wirkman Virkkala on Herbert Spencer. (UPDATE: More.)

“Everybody thought” Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, even the Clinton Administration:

It was March 1997. For six years the UN inspectors had been probing the secrets of Saddam’s weapons programmes, in the process destroying huge quantities of chemical munitions and other production facilities. To enforce Saddam’s cooperation, Iraq was subject to crushing sanctions.
Now, Rolf Ekeus, […]

Killjoy Howley informs us that the tradition of the temple prostitute . . . probably didn’t exist. By way of compensation, she’s got the best blog-entry title in dog years.

This one guy at the Republican debate sounds pretty refreshing. Anyone know anything about him?
UPDATE: Damn, wrong link the first time! Fixed now. Thanks Steve E.

Libby wants to take some of the massive amount of money the US spends on prisons and convert a portion of them to drug treatment facilities. This seems reasonable, if we first disentangle drug use from addiction conceptually. The US legal system construes any illegal-drug user as an “addict,” and probably sends people to “treatment” […]

The high-summer major-party political convention is itself an anachronism now. Conventions have long since become partly group therapy for factions and mostly (a boring) season-opener for voters. But with the ever-earlier, more compressed primary schedules, the parties ought to move up the conventions themselves. They can get the fol-de-rol of platform fights and speech sequences […]

Some Bad News Kennel victims are on the way to new, peaceful lives.
The Bad Rap home page.

Forgot to mention, I have a review of John Robb’s Brave New War in the February print-edition of reason magazine. The review could justly be described as “mixed.” As I put it in the contributors section, BNW is “a thin book with a fat book inside struggling to get out.”
Eventually the review should make it […]