Unqualified Offerings

Brendan O’Neill says the problem with Iraq is not just the drive to war but the assumption that the West should intervene at all. Steve Chapman asks if Brendan really means it. Brendan says, Yeah, I really do.
Unqualified Offerings is with Brendan O’Neill on this one. It has been on record as favoring deterrence against […]

Reader Munham Yam wonders if Unqualified Offerings had it quite right in its item below about John Poindexter returning to save us all! (See “Annals of Upward Failure” below.) Poindexter has been appointed the head of DARPA’s Information Awareness Office, which has both a mission and a vision. Mission:

imagine, develop, apply, integrate, demonstrate and transition […]

Michael Croft of Ones and Zeros fact-checks the ass of Unqualified Offerings about just what he does during recording sessions, and concludes his e-mail with a popular army joke. Unqualified Offerings reproduces the entire text below. (Cliffs Notes: “I’m an engineer, not a producer.”)

There are two important people in the control room of any recording […]

In a column debunking some internet legends, professionally-folksy Washington Post columnist Bob Levey informs us that

Young people think that anything on the Internet must be true. Oldsters know better. The Internet is a veritable bog of fish stories, larger than life — and very often devoid of truth.

Levey offers no evidence that all or even […]

Reader/Gaming Buddy Bill Dowling and Gamer/Reading Buddy Mike “Epoch” Sullivan brought the latest northern snakehead analysis to UO’s attention yesterday.
Mike has a gaming-oriented blog, which he’ll let you read.

Meryl Yourish plays Would-You-Rather with her favorite superheroes. Batman, Wolverine, Elongated Man, Wolverine and Mr. Fantastic um, come up big.

Andrew Sullivan wrote some really dumbass stuff this morning about “determined and organized” opposition to war with Iraq. (UO only wishes. The extent of any “organization” it can claim is exchanging a couple of e-mails a month with Justin Raimondo, with about half the correspondence consisting of one of us explaining how wrong the other […]

Adjunct fellow Kevin Maroney e-mails about this morning’s item on Clash songs in commercials:

Before you neener too neenerly, you should ask yourself if Strummer and Jones control their songs enough to have any say in whether they get sold to commercials. They probably do, but it’s far from a certain thing.

This is at least possible. […]

Your Official Unfortunate Headline of the Day: “Celine Dion Developing Fragrance.”
(From AP via the Washington Post.)

“I believe in this and it’s been tested by research,” the Clash once sang, “he who fucks nuns will later join the church.”
In my youth, the Clash were uncompromising radicals, who made propulsive leftist punk rock, and their biggest fans loved them as much for their politics as for their backbeat and reggae rhythms. A […]

Istanblog “cheerfully” notes that when it comes to suppressing the Kurds, our allies the Turks have the experience and the interest both:

Ideally they would make sure that the Kurds feel that being a part of the new Iraq would be better for them than being independent. This would mean convincing the Kurds that the new […]

On Samizdata, Perry de Havilland dismantles a much-praised piece by the much-praised Victor Davis Hanson:

Ah yes, I frequently hear ‘European’ taxi cab drivers, nurses, office workers and house painters bemoan those tasteless Americans whilst listening to Beethoven on the radio and discoursing on Sartre with each other… oh pleeeease. I don’t know who Victor Davis […]

Unqualified Offerings missed the news that President Bush appointed Iran-Contra alum John Poindexter to an important scare-quote homeland scare-quote security position at the end of February. (The press conference exchange on the appointment is priceless.)
With Poindexter on the inside and Michael Ledeen on the outside cheering things along, Unqualified Offerings feels secure indeed. There was […]

Tres Producer-third Eric Olsen came up with an intriguing idea - get bloggers to sign up to review music, therefore becoming eligible for (oh yes!) free CDs! Michael Croft of Ones and Zeroes, a producer himself, explains why his conscience says no.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden has finally returned to Electrolite. Yay! Patrick Nielsen Hayden praises a Hendrick Hertzberg review of a book on the Constitution by Robert Dahl. Eh. Glenn Reynolds weighs in, arguing that both Hertzberg and Dahl are criticizing the Constitution for not being democratic enough, but that the framers weren’t trying to produce a […]

From the Associated Press:

An Egyptian American academic was convicted a second time today of tarnishing Egypt’s image and other charges and was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment in a case international human rights groups have condemned as politically motivated.

Egypt gets two billion dollars a year in US aid. You say you don’t like Arab tyranny? […]

Diane E. of Letter from Gotham has a long, important piece today that is the best summation of a first-principles, pro-Israel perspective on the assassination of Hamas leader Sheikh Shehadeh that Unqualified Offerings has seen. UO doesn’t agree with all of it. (Diana makes much of the fact that most Palestinians and Arabs celebrate their […]

Interesting, skeptical consideration of the likelihood of cryonic resurrection actually working, by former unofficial substitute Unqualified Offerings Chad Orzcel of Uncertain Principles. Just an excerpt:

By opting to be frozen, you’re betting your life on the propositions that:
1. Future medical technology will be able to cure what’s killing you,
2. Future medical technology will be […]

According to John Diamond of The USA Today,

An intensive effort by U.S. intelligence to establish a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq is being driven, in part, by a conclusion reached in recent weeks by White House and Pentagon legal and legislative advisers. They believe that connecting Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks would allow the […]

As many people know K/S or “slash” is an underground genre of fan fiction that allows Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock of Star Trek to - fulfill the prime directive as it were.
Now it turns out there is a whole new K/S genre, according to this AP story:

A Russian writer under investigation for disseminating pornography […]

This is just too cool somehow. AH Amin writes to describe himself as follows:

Ex Tank Corps Officer , Major ,Pakistan Army , Author :– Pakistan Army Till 1965, Sepoy Rebellion Of 1857-59, Mans Role In History, Ex Executive Editor Monthly Globe Karachi, Ex Assistant Editor Defence Journal Karachi, Member Orbat.Com, Columnist Pravda, Nation Etc.
Free Lance […]

Matt Welch thinks Unqualified Offerings is wrong about the appeal and achievement of Glenn Reynolds:

If Reynolds was really concerned with “nurtur[ing] a cadre of libertarian-flavored center-right supporters of an expansive war,” then A) he wouldn’t have perma-links to Henley, Yglesias, Alterman or me, and B) he wouldn’t get all that lusted-after traffic. Glenn’s ideological promiscuity […]

Hot Buttered Death thinks he wants to know what Lee Greenwood did to deserve UO’s recent, um, fisking? But he’s wrong. Very very very very wrong.
Hot Buttered Death looks like a great blog if you want great links and pithy commentary - as opposed to what you get here. (Unqualified Offerings should probably have called […]

Anglo-Texan Nigel E. Richardson says “NO ONE HAS A MORE ENGLISH NAME THAN I! NO ONE I TELL YOU!!!!”
Wait! That’s not what he says! He says

Political blogs are starting to bore me now…

and kindly cites UO’s appreciation of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen II as the sort of thing he’d rather read.
Man, Unqualified Offerings can relate. […]

Reader/Gaming Buddy Bill Dowling points out that the main League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume II annotation site linked below is Geocities and thus prone to bandwidth-limit outages. Bill notes that the mirror site, not on Geocities, might be a better bet.

Rimshot Alert

An article in yesterday’s Washington Post points out once again that abstinence-only sex education leaves much to be desired…

Avedon Carol, ladies and gentlemen. She’ll be here all week.

Speaking of The Talking Dog, UO believes your TD was the first to note the odd pattern of sudden morbidity among the younger heirs to the Saudi throne and suggest that something strange might be going on:

Meanwhile, note that the Saudi Prince owner of the Kentucky Derby winning horse died of a “heart attack” at […]

Naturally, The Talking Dog has a resolution to the War of Kurdish Suppression problem, vouchsafed to Unqualified Offerings in the following exclusive e-mail:

Actually, as troubling as your post on this issue is, and as rightly
concerned we should be with pissing off our long-time NATO allies in Ankara,
there is, as always, a creative solution to this […]

Gene Healy culls an interesting passage from Malcolm Gladwell’s book, The Tipping Point:

In the 1996 Houshold Survey on Drug Abuse, 1.1 percent of those polled said that they had used heroin at least once. But only 18 percent of that 1.1 percent had used it in the past year, and only 9 percent had used […]

There is one aspect of Andrew Olmsted’s otherwise praiseworthy call for the President to ask Congress to declare war on Iraq that Unqualified Offerings can’t let go:

Those who oppose such an invasion would have to explain and defend their position, and place themselves on the record should a future attack prove to have come from […]

It’s not just Unqualified Offerings who figures that the Iraq hawks are committing the US to operations to suppress Iraq’s Kurds and Marsh Arabs in the aftermath of a Saddam overthrow. So, according to Thomas E. Ricks in the Sunday Washington Post, do some of the US military’s top brass:

A major goal of U.S. policy […]

Speaking of Sheikh Shehadeh and others, Unqualified Offerings has been doing some thinking. One thing that stands out is the nimbleness of the act’s apologists. First we were told, authoritatively, that bastards like Shehadeh always travel with “human shields,” including children, so the IDF had no choice but to add some noncombatant lives to the […]

Another interesting comment thread on Protein Wisdom, this time involving the assassination of Sheik Shehada and others in Gaza last week, featuring the unlikely pairing of Diana Moon of Letter from Gotham and Jim of Objectionable Content on the skeptics’ side.
Protein Wisdom, loyal readers - where, unlike certain other sites, the comments section is not […]

Glenn Reynolds reads Tony Adragna who reads the House Select Committee Report on the “Homeland Security Act of 2002.” Reynolds says

I hope that the whole idea craters amid partisan bickering. That won’t be a failure. It’ll be the system working.

He’s absolutely right. The proposed Homeland Security Department is the wrong answer to the wrong problem. […]

At supper last night, Offering Boy and I began discussing Freedom Force, a superhero game for the computer that we’ve been playing together and that he’s been working at on his own during the day.
“Daddy,” he said, “I can kill O’Connor!”
‘Red spy’ O’Connor is the quarry in level one.
“Not kill, son, capture. Nobody dies in […]

Avedon Carol on Barney Frank, defender of States’ Rights. The New York Times on John Ashcroft, who could care less whether Congress denies authorization for the Administration’s TIPS program. He’s pressing ahead anyway.
“Major-League Asshole” Adam Clymer in the Times provides an interesting breakdown of the TIPS opposition:

In the House, the attack on the program, known […]

According to Dear Prudence on Slate

While it is true that friends don’t let friends drive drunk, when it comes to pomposity, there is no way to set them straight without making a mess.

I did it! An entire day (Friday) with no Steve Earle posts! Scroll down if you don’t believe me!
Maybe I’ll get nominated for a Bloggie for this!