Unqualified Offerings: Corrupting America’s Youth Since 2001 - Your free IHS Summer Seminars list.

UNworkable - Stupid unaccountable bureaucracy! Ineffectual talking shop on the Hudson! It took the UN seven months to fire the staffer the leadership considered most responsible for allowing the August 19 bombing of its Baghdad headquarters to occur. Seven months! You’ll note that when the the government of, by and for the people suffered an […]

Latest Notes from the Hellmouth - Your daily dose of outrage comes, as so often, from Zero Intelligence:
MLK is one of those ‘progressive’ schools that suspends everybody in a fight regardless of whether they were instigating it or defending themselves. They have a solution for her problem though - for the past couple of months […]

A Fanboy’s Labor-Saving Device - Eve Tushnet spends three paragraphs saving me work:
First let me get the polemical point out of the way: People who complain about superhero characters’ vigilantism are being too literal-minded and missing the point. The situations superhero characters confront are meant to mirror or illuminate situations we face. Sometimes the vigilante […]

But What About the Mysterious Blue Area on the Moon - Dave Allan, official second-oldest friend of Unqualified Offerings, tips me to Nobel-Laureate Steven Weinberg’s critique of the President’s Manned Mission to Mars program in the New York Review of Books. (Read it fast. Most NYRB articles pass behind a pay wall within a couple […]

Toward More Gaudy Nights - Last week was a busy one, so I haven’t been able to properly address the comment thread for “Gaudy Night” at Brainwash. I hope to get to it in the next day or two. The most sweeping objections come from Rich Puchalsky and deserve detailed comment, but in brief, I […]

A Fanboy’s Reviews - Yes, I’ve become a crummy comics blogger! Let’s try to make up for it a little with some reviews:
Tell Me Something (Jason) - Basically, a James M. Cain story for furries. One-name cartoonist Jason chronicles a love triangle involving a crow poet-turned-pickpocket, his coke-snorting crow ex-girlfriend and her dog husband, who […]

Counterpoint - Hesiod defends the Clinton Administration from - me.
Here’s the essential problem with Jim’s argument. The Clinton administration did not invade or launch a massive attack on Afghanistan for PRACTICAL reasons. Reasons that did not exist with respect to Kosovo where we had a unanimous NATO backing us up.
Hesiod makes a good point. While […]

Not Much Gets Past the Boy - Matthew Yglesias finds the flaw in the “remake the Middle East” ointment:
Along these lines, it’s worth raising the question of whether the current administration really wants a democratic Iraq, or whether the reason their policies seem so unlikely to create one is that they in fact fear such […]

Let’s Not Kid Ourselves - Amid the back and forth between the Clinton and Bush camps over who did and didn’t do enough to prioritize antiterrorism before the massacres of September 11, 2001, the lamest apologia for the Clinton Administration is that they couldn’t have taken stronger military measures against al Qaeda because public support […]

Aargh! Now They’ve Got Me Doing It - Reader Mark Shawhan e-mails
On reading your most recent post (on that special forces unit that got pulled out of Afghanistan), I noticed two things. One of them is a bit trivial: in the fourth paragraph from the end (the one beginning “back to the Guardian claim”), it […]

Fair’s Fair - Virginia Postrel has a point:
Remember when putting troops on the ground in Afghanistan was a sure ticket to disaster, a military action hardly more conceivable than launching a nuclear attack? Remember the lessons of the Soviets and the British? Judging from this week’s discussions, not many people do.
True! Which is why, at […]

Voting for the Terrorists - Well, which ones, darnit? Fafnir helps you make an informed choice. (Will you have the right to slap a “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for Apulus” sticker on your SUV?)

Sweet Relief - What’s that floating away? At least a few libertarian anxieties about John Kerry:
For the first time, he will target a popular tax incentive, known as “deferral,” offered to most U.S. companies that do business in lower-taxed foreign countries.
To soften the blow to corporations, Kerry will propose a one-time, one-year offer to tax […]

A Fanboy’s Head’s Up via this kind e-mail:
NPR’s Morning Edition will be doing a feature on Mike Mignola/Hellboy this April 5th. I did a taped interview with Morning Edition this afternoon to be used in connection with the feature. Our local NPR runs from 5 to 7am and repeats from 7 to 9am. Your local […]

Another Fanboy’s Notes - Good article in the Guardian last week about John Updike, lifelong cartoon fan. There’s no indication that he still follows the field closely, but his love of the medium and his own attempts at a career in cartooning have clearly marked him.
If all Updike’s stray references to comics were gathered together, […]

Look Over There - In case you haven’t learned it from everybody else, former Calpundit Kevin Drum is now essentially The Washington Monthly website - or at least, his relocated and renamed blog, Political Animal, is the most prominent thing about the place. Still indispensible for political analysis from a mostly-measured Democratic perspective.

Annals of We Are Not Making This Up - “Man told to stay away from mascot chicken” reports the Salem, Oregon Statesman-Journal:
He was released from jail later that morning, five days after he took Speckles home from outside Ray’s Food Place, where the chicken is a longtime mascot and local favorite.
Kathy Dean, Gombos’ wife, said […]

Plan Ahead - Will Wilkinson explains why you should go to Libertarian Summer Camp.

Blogger Makes Good - Now-Somewhat pseudonymous Diana Moon has published a profile of film-maker Albert Maysles in The Forward. (Link requires registration. “jhenley/jhenley” will work.) Being a film ignoramus, I learned a lot from it. Like that Maysles made the Stones documentary “Gimme Shelter,” which I’ve actually seen, and which was a pretty amazing piece […]