Unqualified Offerings

Nobilis has reached US warehouses and is supposed to be two weeks away from stores. Spiderman opens in three days. And the new Elvis Costello record is discussed, sometimes savagely, here and here. UO hasn’t had a chance to listen yet; but be warned, it thought The Juliet Letters a masterpiece, though a lot of […]

Objectionable Content has a lot to say about a lot of different stuff, and damned if he isn’t going to try to say it in a single post!
And speaking of tiny fonts, Christ, Jim, do something, huh?

David Kimche, former Rabin aide, former Director-General of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, Iran-Contra figure and architect of Ariel Sharon’s disastrous Lebanon invasion in the early 1980s, not only thinks separation (UO still prefers “disgorgement”) is a good idea, he’s committed his organization to gathering a million Israeli signatures in favor of the idea.
WITHDRAWAL from the […]

Meanwhile, back in Afghanistan…
Osama bin Laden was able to escape the clutches of US troops in Afghanistan thanks to a powerful military commander currently serving with the Afghan government, a rival warlord said.
Commander Hazrat Ali helped the alleged terrorist mastermind flee from the eastern Tora Bora mountains during an intense US-led offensive last December, strongman […]

Michael Isikoff, whom conservatives and libertarians thought was a pretty good reporter when he was being inconvenient to Bill Clinton, says that the only story that seemed to tie the September hijackers directly to Iraq is…a load of crap.
Then, in the chaotic days after September 11, a Czech intelligence source inside Prague’s Middle Eastern community […]

Ginger has a lengthy post about weblog design, text readability, font size and browser compatibility. She says she even increased her font size recently at the best of Gary Farber. It makes me wonder if my own font size is too small. (We keep nice narrow columns here, as we’ve mentioned many times.) I’m going […]

The Space Settlement Initiative site says the key to actually getting our Mars and Moon colonies is property rights. Far be it from Unqualified Offerings to disagree.

For much of Tony Judt’s much-discussed New York Review of Books essay on the Middle East this week, Unqualified Offerings wondered if it even needed to exist. UO first encountered Judt in the early 90s when he wrote, for NYRB, important, clarifying essays about ethical and philosophical sickness among European intellectuals during the Soviet era. […]

Emmanuel Goldstein, proprietor of the Airstrip One weblog, good-naturedly refers to Christopher Montgomery, who took over Goldstein’s Airstrip One column, as his “improvement” on the feature. I wouldn’t go that far, but Montgomery is a damned entertaining writer and today’s contrarian take on the EU’s “intentions” is especially provoking:
That is to say, if a British […]

Thanks to Jane Galt and A Coyote at the Dog Show for linking to UO’s item about British blog imperialism.
But say, shouldn’t it really be “janegalt-dot-COM?” “Dot-NET” sounds sort of, well, collectivist.

Another thing that comes readily to old-media writers is promoting their wares. They learned to either get jobs or keep those submissions in the mail long ago. So when experienced reporter Howard Owens started his blog, he sent a bunch of us e-mails asking us to announce it. (He seems to imagine that a link […]

Comes now the point where Unqualified Offerings really addresses what Steven Postrel identified as the central point of his original e-mail, which is linked somewhere below, and linked from Virginia Postrel’s site too. I’ve been dilatory in getting to this for a few reasons:
1) I do this in my spare time, after work and wife […]

Anent the preceding, Ginger Stampley has reluctantly waded into the discussion of matters Middle Eastern. She has two meaty pieces this weekend that are worth everyone’s time. The first I linked to below. This morning’s piece elaborates on the vexed matter of ethnic cleansing and the limits of US support for Israel, including the strangely […]

A passage in “What is the Opposite of a Stopped Clock,” below, could be taken as a boast that only Tony Adragna, Steven Postrel and Unqualified Offerings have had anything interesting to say about the Middle East, or even about the relative merits of creating a Palestinian state versus intensifying the occupation. That is far […]

Leon Hadar writes to Tres Producers about matters Levantine but he doesn’t write to me. What, I get nothing for reading Liberty all these years?
What’s strange is that Hadar seems to give credence to the Jordanian Dream. One more time: Jordan gets what out of trying to clean up this mess, again?

Two of my favorite thinkers are Virginia Postrel and Ginger Stampley, and both have managed to get very nearly the same thing wrong. What are the odds? Virginia Postrel says specifically that
In his response [to Steven Postrel’s proposal], Jim concentrated entirely on attacking the idea of “serious occupation” as an (undesirable but best available) alternative […]

In which Unqualified Offerings takes its pathetic aping of Kausfiles one step further. Gary Farber links to a story about very bad places - psychiatric group homes in New York City
Stomach-turning, outrageous story of the horrific conditions of these places, many of which are larger than most state mental hospitals in other states. Endless paragraph […]

Believe it or not, political commentators have been discussing Middle Eastern policy on the net. No, really! Would a site that constantly refers to itself in the third person lie to you? They have! Unqualified Offerings has owed Steven Postrel and the world a cleanup post from the “Scorpions and Undershorts” series - as it […]

Unqualified Headquarters has a computer savvy kid, but the adults have traditionally held their own. However, let the record show that it was Offering Boy who figured out how to exit the Spiderman game for the PC. It was not a code problem, just - and Unqualified Offerings insists on this - confusing menus. That […]

Three bass and a trout in an hour at Seneca Creek today downstream of MD 28. If you can find a better spring lure than a suspending Rapala in the Baby Bass pattern - buy it! (And tell Unqualified Offerings what you bought.)

Apparently, this site was down for five minutes this afternoon:
At approximately 4:40pm EDT (20:00 UTC) our network systems indicated a loss of internet connectivity. This resulted in approximately 5 minutes of downtime. As of 4:45pm EDT (20:05 UTC) all systems resumed normal operations. We apologize for this brief service interruption.
Unqualified Offerings apologizes […]

Bruce Baugh, mentioned in one of the Nobilis items below, has taken the plunge and started a weblog of his own.

The link imperialists at Airstrip One are trying to blackmail this site. “Reciprocal” links, they say, so long as UO makes the first move. Well sure, that’s how it starts. Then pretty soon they have Unqualified Offerings announcing Saint George’s Day celebrations and next thing you know we’re changing our name to “A Libertarian Reads […]