Unqualified Offerings

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 [...]