Unqualified Offerings

In discussing Philip Larkin’s poem, “This Be the Verse,” John Derbyshire writes
Though heterosexual, he never married, and seems not to have had much liking for women beyond the sexual interest.
My reading of Larkin’s life, based on biography and poems, is that Derbyshire is wrong on this. We didn’t just learn […]

A story too weird to do more than link. To tease out the symbolism explicitly would be like stomping a puppy to death.
Via Amygdala.

On Drugs. Dale Franks has it. I would advise the relevant county officials and bar association members to assume that a combined federal-state task force is already poking into everything they do, hoping to get their butts on something. The drug war is such a big boat of gravy for the law enforcement bureaucracy that […]

Matthew Yglesias promises that he will now have one blog replacing the old many blogs. Taking obvious inspiration from the old UO fanboy and non-fanboy feeds he’ll be offering separate sports and non-sports feeds at the new site. He’s pretty good on sports, though, so I wouldn’t skip that, unless you see sports like dogs […]

The Editors riffs on Gene Healy ripping on Tyler Cowen tripping on Alex Tabarrok. And Peter Beinart, but who cares about Peter Beinart? Ed:
But it is very easy to imagine how, if George Bush the First had decided to press on to Baghdad - as, four years ago, all serious people agreed he should have […]

Happy 33 and 10 to Mrs. Offering, the best wife a blog ever had.

Alex has an interesting entry on studies of poor South Americans who get titled to land on which they’ve squatted, and what it does and doesn’t mean for their economic progress:
The good news: Poor people with secure title to their land do indeed invest more in improving their homes than poor people without secure title […]

Andrew Bacevich has a useful if summary article on “The Islamic Way of War” in the latest American Conservative. In synopsis, Bacevich says that after a few decades of futilely trying to play the machine-age big military game, Muslim countries and sub- and transnational movements have given it up as a bad job. Bacevich’s thesis […]

Kieran Healy on a problematic Post essay on lethality in Iraq. Excerpt:
All of my own caveats apply to using the number I just calculated to assess the seriousness of military death rates in Iraq. As I’ve said before, the acid test is quite straightforward. Would you—can you?—take a commercial flight to Baghdad tomorrow, get a […]

Provisionally, the second-best exercise decision I ever made was to run less often for shorter stretches. (The first was sucking it up and running much more slowly.) Last week I got in 15 miles in five sets of 3. I also felt some important and useful improvements in my running mechanics.
Fifteen miles isn’t too damn […]

Mona has a “The contemporary Republican Party is no home for libertarians” piece starting from the Republican Party’s repudiation of libertarian Bob Smither in Texas. Smither’s from the conservative end of the Libertarian Party, and has promised to caucus with the GOP if elected - he’s running to fill Tom Delay’s old seat, for which […]

Well.
Thematically and strategically, I get it. Take the cuddliness out of Al. Show the seamy underbelly of the “community” that has been the theme of the series: If you’re somehow outside the community, you’re expendable.
I do have trouble accepting Seth Bullock and Charlie Utter acquiescing in the expedient murder of an innocent.
Lots to question. Lots […]

The push is clearly on for war with Iran. Most of the features of the last “crisis” repeat in this one. Officials and their auxiliaries deem conditions that have obtained for years to somehow suddenly be a “crisis.” People who despise the United Nations argue that we must act in defiance of the UN to […]

Blotto has a website. “I Wanna Be a Lifeguard” is available as a free MP3. Perhaps some of the concert links will include other (and greater) Blotto classics such as “We Are the Nowtones”; “She’s Got a Big Boyfriend”; and - their ultimate achievement - “My Baby’s the Star of a Driver’s Ed Movie.”
That’s via […]

Paradigm Shift lists one of the searches in AOL’s released data, for user 17556639:
17556639 how to kill your wife
17556639 how to kill your wife
17556639 wife killer
17556639 how to kill a wife
17556639 poop
17556639 dead people
17556639 pictures of dead people
17556639 killed people
17556639 dead pictures
17556639 dead pictures
17556639 dead pictures
17556639 murder photo
17556639 steak and cheese
17556639 photo of death
17556639 photo of death
17556639 death
17556639 dead people photos
17556639 photo of dead people
17556639 www.murderdpeople.com
17556639 decapatated photos
17556639 decapatated photos
17556639 car crashes3
17556639 car crashes3
17556639 car crash photo
Book him! As […]

This bitter Wilfred Owen poem is quite good, I think:
Soldier’s Dream
I dreamed kind Jesus fouled the big-gun gears;
And caused a permanent stoppage in all bolts;
And buckled with a smile Mausers and Colts;
And rusted every bayonet with His tears.
And there were no more bombs, of ours or Theirs,
Not even an old flint-lock, not even a pikel.
But […]

David Grossman’s eulogy for his son is quite beautiful.
Part of the pity and terror of war is that many victims deserve a beautiful eulogy, but few have mourners with the eloquence to produce one.

Put a passage like this in the first paragraph:
Heck, I may have managed to upset both sides with just the first sentence of this post. One wrong word and the Right might identify me as a terrorist sympathizer who doesn’t understand the dangers of al Qaeda. One wrong word and the Left might identify me […]

CBS4 in Miami got ahold of leaked video of the alleged first meeting between Narseal Batiste and Informant Number 2 at a hotel room in Miami. The video is heavily edited, and thus useless for evidentiary purposes. Specifically, it can’t answer the question I’ve had since the indictment was first unsealed: Was this a real […]