Weekly Fitness Blog Item - 166 pounds, 33" waist, an uptick of a pound from last week, girth stable, 50 pounds lighter than when I began my official diet last Thanksgiving.

In other weblogs: Michael Fumento continued to make fun of Rich Hailey and taunt "the blogosphere" on his weblog, Advise and Dissent, while claiming, somewhat amusingly, that his weblog isn't really a weblog but a place where "[o]ccasionally I will post a short item." Demarcated with a date stamp. Michael Fumento, meet Rebecca Blood. In his attempt to prove he's not a real blogger he quotes the one supportive blogger he encounters but doesn't link to her, which makes him not a non-blogger, but a rude one.

My referrer logs tell me that Mr. Fumento has clicked through to this site (with that design there's no way he could be employing a professional webmaster), but he's made no substantive response about his problematic claims I identified last week.

Michael Fumento says he has a lot of readers. I've been one of them for years. Now I'm a reader who wonders what other topics I should distrust his work on.

Last week's items got a lot of response. I was actually in the middle of a "low-carb brouhaha" for the first time - I've been content until now to be the only blogger ever, apparently, to mention the "A-word" and not get deluged with cavils.

Rich Hailey has started what he promises will be a series on "Atkins myths." He correctly identifies Myth Number One as a claim by Atkins that "You can stuff yourself and lose weight, as long as you keep the carbs low." And he provides a handy set of citations from Atkins' own book refuting the myth.

Howard Owens chipped in, complete with picture and blood work. Stephen Gordon has put together his own low-carb plan after reading much more than I have. I've only skimmed it, but it's interesting to see that he's dubious about free days, while I consider them essential.

Just to repeat: I am not presently on the Atkins diet. I believe that the master keys to weight regulation are portion control and exercise, including weight training and "interval-based" aerobics - what Glenn Reynolds calls 'the "eat less, exercise more" plan.' I think the Atkins diet can be a good way for obese people to work toward portion control if they can be happy eating the sort of foods the early stages of the diet indicate. I believe sugar and processed starches are the Devil, and Iscariot stuffed into his mouth. I eat them once a week anyway.

It worked for me. It may or may not work for you.

Running along. Your Talking Dog has been posting occasional items about his preparations for the New York Marathon. I worked up the nerve to ask him if anyone ever tries a "walk/run" strategy. By his account, most runners are walking by the end of the marathon anyway. So why not start walking before you need to? His answer:

Most people, though, like to think of themselves as "runners" and do at least try to run, at least at the beginning, even if a more "conservative" approach might serve them better...

Ah the math is beguiling, though. I'm no runner, but I can do .3 miles in two minutes, cantering. Walking for two minutes at a standard 20-minute-mile pace, I can do a tenth of a mile. String those four minutes together and you've gone .4 miles. You have 15 four-minute intervals in an hour. That's six miles. Four of those and you're done.

Problem one is that there's no way I could do that at my present level of conditioning. Problem two is that, for all I know, nobody else could either.

Next week: Nothing about Atkins, no matter what!

If Guns Are Outlawed . . . From Riverbend's blog, which you need to be reading even though she never musters quite the detachment that Salam Pax can:

The looting and killing of today has changed from the looting and killing in April. In April, it was quite random. Criminals were working alone. Now they’re more organized than the CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority) and the troops combined. No one works alone anymore- they’ve created gangs and armed militias. They pull up to houses in minivans and SUVs, armed with machineguns and sometimes grenades. They barge into the house and demand money and gold. If they don’t find enough, they abduct a child or female and ask for ransom. Sometimes the whole family is killed- sometimes only the male members of the family are killed.

For a while, the men in certain areas began arranging ‘lookouts’. They would gather, every 6 or 7 guys, in a street, armed with Klashnikovs, and watch out for the whole area. They would stop strange cars and ask them what family they were there to visit. Hundreds of looters were caught that way- we actually felt safe for a brief period. Then the American armored cars started patrolling the safer residential areas, ordering the men off the streets- telling them that if they were seen carrying a weapon, they would be treated as criminals.

Emphasis mine.

Other Business: In a sign of the maturation of the Iraqi blogosphere, the very first Hot Iraqi on Iraqi Blogfight Action. This is surely an example of the progress we keep reading about in the work of pro-war writers.

Welcome to my Nightmare - What, asked Brecht, is the evil of a man who robs a bank compared to the evil of a man who founds a bank? Well, screw the old dead commie anyway. But let's extend his principle a minute.

Yesterday's car-bomb assassination in Najaf has provoked some interesting reactions. Jeanne d'Arc avers that the US is at fault for not providing better security, somehow. Tacitus thinks the US is responsible because it hasn't arrested a man whose may or may not have had anything to do with the bombing. I myself, in a comment at the Talking Dog, asserted that, Yes, if you conquer and occupy another country and assert ultimate authority over the place, then you are responsible for what happens there by definition.

It's not hard to imagine things the US could have done that would have lessened the likelihood of a successful atrocity like this. Beyond more troops, you could try preventive detentions, expanded informant networks, conspicuous shows of force against minor shows of rebellion, collective punishments against the communities from which malefactors spring.

Some of this, alas, we're already doing. Nowhere near as much as the guy who used to run the place, mind you, and that brings us to my nightmare. During the spring's torture contretemps, I got an e-mail from Eric Mauro saying

Jim, there must be a reason every government in the Middle East engages in torture. My guess is they are effectively at war all the time, or they have police states to not have wars...

I've long had a nagging worry that Saddam ran Iraq the way he did because it was the only way anyone could run Iraq, if you accepted the existence of "Iraq" in the first place - if your priority was holding that absurdly geometrical container of fissiparous faiths and fealties together in that neighborhood, with those rivals. Let me be clear: to say this is the farthest thing from saying Saddam is not really a bad guy after all. He is the worst sort of guy. It's to say that he got and stayed where he was because only a terrible man could succeed in that position. The master crime behind the crimes of Saddam was the founding of Iraq in the first place, that absurd grid laid down by the British Colonial Office early in the century. And all who have since insisted on maintaining those soveriegn borders, a.k.a. "the territorial integrity of Iraq", become participants in a decades-long RICO case, participants in a continuing criminal enterprise. Indicted co-conspirators would be the Arab League, the UN, the British Commonwealth, every Iraqi government since the founding and the United States of America among others. Plaintiffs in the class action suit would be the Kurds, Marsh Arabs, Turkomen and Assyrians. Iran and Israel could probably claim tortious injury, having often been chosen as the external enemy intended to unite the internal factions.

I'm not an anarchist, and I'm not saying "there should be no governments." Nor will I sing Imagine there's no countries. Just the one in question. The root cause of Iraq's woes may well be Iraq as such. By committing ourselves to its perpetuation, we open ourselves and Iraqis to grief and evil.

Light-Blogging Friday as it is Mrs. Offering's birthday. I'll be spending my day singing "Stacy's Mom" with special feeling.

Read Eve's homage to middlemen and her subsequent qualification.

Read Gene Healy on Josh Marshall's interview with Peter "Holy War, Inc." Bergen.

I Used to Be Disgusted but now that John Smith is back at LincolnPlawg and following British "security" "policy" like a gumshoe on a wandering spouse, I am once again amused. Read everything.

Take That, Corporate Welfare Queens - Forbes reports that the Washington Redskins, who play in a stadium their owner built with his own money, are the NFL's most valuable franchise. Number 4 on the list are the New England Patriots, whose owner declined a sweetheart stadium deal in Connecticut a couple of years ago because he felt like a crumb taking it.

Meanwhile . . . - Colby Cosh says libertarians and conservatives are natural allies. Agitator Man Group member Nicholas Weininger demurs.

Hasta La Vista, Southpaw? - The Whither Libertarians and the Republican Party? moves to Matthew Yglesias' blog. I'm particularly interested in the reactions of the liberals in Matthew's comments section.

1) Look. Guys. It's not my place to tell you your business. But what a lot of us are saying is that libertarians are "in play" for the first time in who knows how many election cycles. That is, libertarians will consider voting for a Democratic candidate for libertarian reasons. Maybe, just maybe, more of the old "you're all a bunch of selfish bastards who care only about tax cuts!" routine is not the way into our hearts just now.

2) In the course of attacking the libertarian view of property rights (property is a creature of the State doncha know, or society, and therefore the State can abridge property rights as it likes), several liberals allow that, yes, applied to other rights that are as surely creatures of the State as the right to property this principle justifies anything up to and including chattel slavery, but just because the State can do something legally doesn't mean the action is moral, and just because we hold an expansive view of the "general welfare" clause and believe that ensuring domestic tranquility is a license for the government to do practically anything it wants, that doesn't mean we support every regulation in existence or believe that every transfer payment or entitlement scheme is justified or ideally configured.

To which I say, Fine. Then how about one of you, somewhere sometime, lifting so much as a finger to get rid of some of these imprudent programs, wasteful subsidies, perverse incentives and counterproductive bureaucracies whose theoretical existence you grant. And by "one of you," I mean a politician, though sustained effort by some activists would at least be nice. From the libertarian perspective, the problem with Democrats is that all their energy goes into adding more "good government," and none into getting rid of what they themselves allow is bad government. Give me a Democrat who vows to slash corporate welfare to the bone, shut down the drug war and crank up the personal withholding exemption at the expense of targetted tax breaks. Then I'll get excited. As it is, the most one gets from Democrats, pundit and politician alike, is, Yeah. Sure would be nice if insane agricultural subsidies went away. And I wish our laws didn't call for locking up every seventh black guy for the crime of selling things people want to buy. Maybe those laws will disappear or something. Hope so. In the meantime I've got to agitate for a dozen new subsidies! I can't begin to imagine how the country has survived this long without them!

3) Have I mentioned that in a narrowly divided electorate, the couple of percent of voters with strong libertarian leanings is big enough to tip the balance?

Better Halves - Diana Moon and Jonathan "Head Heeb" Edelstein are debating the extent to which Howard Dean's wife, Dr. Judith Steinberg Dean, will hurt his chances, with reference to this profile of Mrs. Dr. Dean (Mr. Dr. Dean is also an MD) that appeared in a recent Newsweek. See particularly the comments to Jonathan's aside about Latin American Jewish first ladies for an interesting discussion among Diana, Jonathan and Ikram Saeed. I don't know how many bigots or simple tribalists will be turned off by Dean Femme's Jewishness to the point of not voting for someone they'd otherwise vote for. I'd like to think a small number, but I probably underestimate the nation's atavism quotient. In a tight election, even small numbers matter.

But I agree with Jonathan and Diana that Ikram and profile author Eleanor Clift overestimate the negatives Mrs. Dean's professional woman status brings. Both invoke the ghost of HRC, to my mind inappositely. Many of us who disliked Hillary Clinton, disliked her for her politics chiefly, and for the sense that she had ridden her marriage into a position of power rather than earning it through her own efforts. (This was probably unfair - if that 60 Minutes appearance during the Gennifer Flowers flap doesn't count as "efforts," what does?) Mrs. Dean on the other hand has not only made her own career, but expresses a complete disinterest in politics.

Even traditionalists, even the ones liberals are convinced hate Hillary Clinton because they fear and loathe "women of power," have working wives in many cases. Many of them probably take their kids to female pediatricians too. The Dr. part of Mrs. Dr. Dean will not be a problem for them. Me, I think I like her better than her husband. But she's not running.

Mine's Bigger Than That - Via Crooked Timber comes NationMaster.com, "Where Stats Come Alive." Looks very very cool.

A Fanboy's Eureka - In the course of taking up the 1602 Challenge, Nate "Polytropos" Bruinooge let's drop a major "Whoah!" aside:

The odd thing is that I ought to be annoyed at this rash of self-referentiality, but none of the above examples suck . . . Navel-gazing by the craft’s top practitioners isn’t limited to comics – it’s commonplace in twentieth-century literature, and I’d wager a guess that you’ll find the same dynamic in other art forms as well.

Jim slaps forehead: Why didn't I think of that?? Yeah yeah, cause Nate knows way more than I do about stuff. Just because the intertextuality of what I call Amber Age comics is akin to that of high-modernist and postmodernist literature doesn't mean it's an unambiguously good thing, mind you. After all, recent literature itself has not lacked for critics complaining that it is too much about other books and too little about life.

Speaking of the 1602 Challenge, by the way, responses have since come in from Neilalien (short but sweet) and Bill Sherman. Greg Morrow beat the rush by reviewing pre-challenge, while Alan David Doane expresseth but lofty disinterest in the matter. (He also makes my "conspiracy-mongering sound rather more seriously intended than it actually was. But irony: useful servant, dangerous master, you know?)

I have an uneasy feeling I'm leaving someone out, but that's the best that Technorati, such referrer stats as I have and my memory can accomplish.

A Fanboy's FWIW - A not especially informative article in the New York Times yesterday about the legacy of cartoonist Jack "King" Kirby, on whom Marvel and DC creators dined for decades. It can probably said to simultaneously claim too much (fewer than half of the mutants in the X-Men movies were Kirby's creations, and not the ones the author lists) and too little. And since the only art reproduction is distinctly not Kirby, it doesn't even convey the flavor of his drawing. Oh well. Surely better accounts will come in time.

Kirby work that really grew on me over the years: the Hunger Dogs graphic novel for DC, a New Gods tale. Hunt it up if you get the chance.

That Didn't Take Long - The ceasefire in Liberia seems to be collapsing. Reuters reports fighting; AP quotes Liberia's defense minister du jour saying that "reports of rebel attacks on one central town were rumors spread by his own troops to facilitate looting." Everyone agrees that the multinational West African peacekeeping force needs to hasten its deployment beyond the capital of Monrovia. Meanwhile, "West Africans urge US to keep commitment to Liberia."

A couple of things: first, the people who saw the deal removing Charles Taylor (for however long) as vindicating the impulse toward intervention were making the same mistake that others made watching the happy people around the falling Saddam statue that day - mistaking a momentary upturn for lasting success. Second, Diana Moon has a point when she chides me about what can and cannot honorably be done. It's not an overriding one to me, because at some point an obdurate honor becomes folly. But "bugging out on our commitment to the Iraqi people" would still be dishonorable. That's why prudence in advance of making a commitment is so important. In Liberia, there is still barely time for such prudence.

Outside Reading - An important Christopher Dickey essay from Newsweek about a recurring theme on this site - the American government's increasingly open embrace of torture. (Link via Perverse Access Memory.) Thank heavens for on-the-record euphemisms, though!

No need to get out the battery cables or fingernail pliers, it seems. The only thing Jacoby tortures is prose. “Interrogation is the art of questioning and examining a source to obtain the maximum amount of usable, reliable information in the least amount of time to meet intelligence requirements,” Jacoby writes in a legal brief. “DIA’s approach to interrogation is largely dependent upon creating an atmosphere of dependency and trust between the subject and interrogator.”

Dickey spends much of the essay unpacking the official obfuscations. And there's this, along lines first discussed on this site back in January 2002:

But there are some real problems with all this. First of all, as a Lebanese torturer—er, interrogator—of my acquaintance once told me, the real challenge comes if someone is telling the truth: “How do you know?” And what if that truth doesn’t fit with what you really want to hear? And what your bosses really believe—really know in their souls to be the truth?

That's Dickey, in case my sentence construction threw you. I know no Lebanese torturers.

Also, via the Agitator, an article by W. James Antle III on the increasing and possibly semipermanent rift between conservatives and libertarians. (Look for a forthcoming article on this topic from a major liberal magazine.) Antle hits the obvious issues - cloning, gay Americans' freedom of contract, the war - and gets that "The commitment to limited government and constitutionalism that animated Barry Goldwater is conspicuously missing from today's Republican Party and, worse, the conservative movement." He worries, though, about the ironies of libertarians voting for a tax&spend Democrat like Howard Dean:

And Dean by contrast would pair this tax increase with greater federal spending. The centerpiece of his domestic policy agenda is a national health care plan. Thus, a libertarian's vote for Dean is also a vote for higher taxes and a bigger federal government.

Of course, a vote for Bush is also a vote for greater federal spending and a bigger federal government. Taxes are, for the moment, lower. How long will that continue with a budget deficit approaching half a trillion dollars? Not long, I think, which is why I opposed so many of the Bush policies (and non-policies) that have contributed to the deficit. A vainglorious war, a complete lack of spending restraint, the elimination of not a single substantial federal program in three years, expansion of existing entitlements - well, it adds up.

And steel tariffs. And catfish import bans. And yadda yadda yadda. Two factors are at work here: the issues on which conservatives and libertarians have never agreed have become more salient, and on the issues where conservatives and libertarians traditionally have agreed - taxes, trade, federalism - conservatives increasingly suck. Having abandoned the substance of limited government since early in the Gingrich "revolution," conservatives increasingly eschew even the rhetoric of limited government. Animosity aside, they're just no use to libertarians any more.

All this will change again six months into the Dean administration.

Second Thoughts - George W. Bush promised a "humbler America" in the foreign policy realm and we got - not humble. So maybe Howard Dean, who insists he'll put the world to rights, will actually - nah. Wishful thinking.

Thank God That's Over - Fox decides to stop embarrassing itself (about Al Franken, anyway). Not only does this mean I don't have to be fair and balanced any more, it means I can resume feeling mild dislike for Al Franken on those rare occasions when I think of him.

I've switched taglines altogether now, something I considered doing around the time that Gulf War Phase II began. The quote comes, as anyone who follows the hyperlink will discover, from William Stafford's poem, "Thinking for Berky." Stafford was no libertarian, though he was a peacenik, so we share that, but that line is not only sage advice for libertarians, it captures something of the spirit - it will not be sweeping gestures or grand proclamations that bring justice (or Justice), but uncountable and often unnoticed interactions, a dance without callers or choreographers.

And the advice, which boils down to "patience, my little one." It's the kind of friendly reminder that keeps one far from Montana cabins and ordnance manuals. As I read the poem, Berky has gone underground, probably violently, in the name of things the poet values but in a manner that vitiates the same ideals. The poet certainly dances around forthright criticism of her choice, but the title implies that Berky is certainly not thinking for herself. "We live in an occupied country, misunderstood;" would be a mere whine but for its placement. The two lines surrounding it redeem it into a simple acknowledgement of present difficulty, sandwiched between a reminder of what can't be accomplished and a directive on what must be accomplished and how. (And what more libertarian concept could there be than "there are things time passing can never make come true?")

The poem, and the excerpt that becomes this blog's tagline now, have been much in my mind since the spring - that and Eve's allied insight that politicians mostly do what they feel they have to do, and what they feel they have to do is determined in no small part by the rhetorical climate.

So, back to work.

This Is Whose Idea of a "Peace Candidate?" - From Fred Hiatt's Washington Post column today:

"Now that we're there, we're stuck," he said. Bush took an "enormous risk" that through war the United States could replace Saddam Hussein and the "small danger" he presented to the United States with something better and safer. The gamble was "foolish" and "wrong." But whoever will be elected in 2004 has to live with it. "We have no choice. It's a matter of national security. If we leave and we don't get a democracy in Iraq, the result is very significant danger to the United States."

But Democrats will be more sensitive to the needs and desires of our wards, right? More . . . democratic:

And "bringing democracy to Iraq is not a two-year proposition. Having elections alone doesn't guarantee democracy. You've got to have institutions and the rule of law, and in a country that hasn't had that in 3,000 years, it's unlikely to suddenly develop by having elections and getting the heck out." Dean would impose a "hybrid" constitution, "American with Iraqi, Arab characteristics. Iraqis have to play a major role in drafting this, but the Americans have to have the final say." Women's rights must be guaranteed at all levels.

Iraqis have to play a major role in drafting the Iraqi constitution, but the Americans have to have the final say. Never stir up any resentment in Iraq with that program, huh? I wonder: if the Iraqis want to amend their constitution, will the amendments need to be ratified by three-quarters of all the states? Ours, I mean, not theirs.

You'll have to go to the article itself for Dean's amusing explanation that other countries will pony up the troops to let us do more in Afghanistan and Iraq. Just because you're reluctant to send your young men and women to die for George Bush's folly doesn't mean you won't be glad to waste them for Howard Dean's after all.

Also found in the article, Dean's dislike of free trade, or what passes for it under NAFTA and the WTO.

Update Your Bookmarks - The Head Heeb, Jonathan Edelstein, has moved.

Just Go Away - The local sports talk station had a segment Friday in advance of the Washington Redskins-Baltimore Corporate Welfare Queens exhibition game about the "controversy" of whether it was possible to root for both teams or whether there should be rivalry between them. Speaking as a Redskin fan, Maryland taxpayer and Pennsylvania boy who grew up rooting for the Steelers and against the Cleveland Browns (pre-Baltimore move), my hatred of the Ravens is sincere but not conducive to rivalry. That's because my fondest wish is not that the Baltimore Ravens lose, but that they disappear. Rooting against them too much acknowledges their continued presence in what is truly, for Art Modell, the Free State. Instead of affection or rivalry I'll go with lofty if futile disdain, thank you.

The most delightful irony in the world of sports is that here in the epicenter of Big Government, both of our major pro sports team owners - well, semi-pro; we're talking about the Redskins, Wizards and Caps after all - built their teams' facilities with their own money. A shining example to others, if they would but see.

A Fanboy's Reviews - Hey, I've never really done these, so what the heck.

This week there were few enough "floppies" I wanted to buy that I decided to finally blow 10 bucks on Daniel Clowes' Ghost World. I liked ita lot. Some people will find the two main characters too annoying to abide, but it's not like Clowes gives them any breaks. The book is a pretty thoroughgoing demonstration of the limits of kitsch, not just esthetically but emotionally. You make a prison of your own contempt when the only pleasure you value is the security of feeling superior to what's in front of you, and you extend that from objects to people. Our heroines have each other for cellmates, which is company at least, but one of them escapes into valuing someone else as a companion rather than an occasion for ridicule, leaving the other quite alone. The latter's last spoken line sounds like something a parent might say as much as a lover. Strange in a good way. Heck of a story. I like the art, but lack the critical vocabulary to say anything insightful about it.

Daredevil 50 concludes the latest story arc. I read it, as I have the last couple, in the car outside the comics shop. It's hard to overstate my fondness for this book, but the current issue is an oddly unsatisfactory conclusion to what has gone before. For one thing, the course of action is too similar to the previous issue, where Daredevil in his fury achieves a brutal and final (-ish) victory over Bullseye. For another, the book follows the anniversary issue custom of bringing back great Daredevil artists of the past to illustrate sequences within the book. I think DC started this in the 1980s, and people need to start thinking twice. DD 50 is a regular-size issue. It not only has no extra pages to hold all the different artistic styles, it's basically an issue-long fight scene. The artists change every page or so - in one or two cases, I believe there are two artists to a page. Jarring. It works at cross-purposes with the narrative drive.

Arrowsmith #2 - swords and sorcery in World War I. Magic works. There are faerie beasties. And in the United States of Columbia the big controversy is whether to get involved in the Great War in Europe. Young Fletcher Arrowsmith of Connecticut volunteers for the Overseas Aero Corps, so he can learn flight spells and fight on behalf of Gallia against the Central Powers. So far, writer Kurt Busiek has not fallen off the very narrow balance beam he's decided to walk with this one. (Though there are rumors of a "Dark Lord" leading the Central Powers, which would knock him down in the judging if it turns out to be true.) Carlos Pacheco is the artist. In addition to a clean line, he does some nice story-telling. For instance, pages 4-5 are Fletcher and his date heading to a ball and then dancing, and throughout the entire sequence the arrangement of the couple "turns" from frame to frame, so that they seem to dance even before hitting the floor. Very nice.

Wonder Woman 195 I bought because it's the first Greg Rucka issue. If the gold standard for first-issues-by-a-new-writer was Mark Waid's Fantastic Four #60, this is bronze. I'll give it a couple of issues.

Fitness Blog Item Extra - Those of you who read a lot of blogs may have come across last week's tempest, which had its origin in an Atkins diet-related dispute between Michael Fumento and Rich Hailey of Shots Across the Bow. Fumento's blog does not have item-specific permalinks, but you can scroll down to the relevant entries, dated 8/21, 8/20 and 8/11. My interest is limited to pointing out some problems with Fumento's representations:

1) In his 8/11 item about Hailey's criticisim, Fumento writes

As to Atkins, there my response was made quite simple by his picture. "If it works so well why is it you have such a fat face? Time and again I've found that those who defend Atkins with a religious fervor as you do, and ignore all studies, as you do, are nonetheless little porkers. It doesn't bother you that you have a big fat bow on Atkins so long as you get to stuff your face with all the lard and cheese puffs you want. Truly pathetic.

Here's a diet-blog item of Hailey's from August 19:

Ok, for those of you interested, on Monday, I completed two weeks of induction. I've lost 13 pounds on an average of 2060 calories per day, and a carb average of 14 grams per day. For the next week, I'm adding radishes, tomatoes, cucmbers and mushrooms to my salads, plus almonds and macadamia nuts as a snack.

First time around, I went from 305 to 227 in about 7 months. My mistake was thinking that since I lost the weight so quickly, I wouldn't gain it back. I quit the plan, thinking I could eat normally without falling into the same patterns that lead to the 305 pounds in the first place.

So "fat-faced Hailey" is just starting his diet (again), and the shape of his face has no relevance to any efficacy the Atkins Diet does or does not have.

Not as big a deal as it could be, since Fumento was writing on 8/11. He didn't necessarily know that Hailey was in fact only now beginning his Mark II diet. Of course, it still counts as jumping to conclusions, which is not something I'd expect Fumento to tolerate in his critics. Also not the biggest sin in the world, but you'd think a man who has written so much about the Atkins diet over the last year would know that "cheese puffs" are just not on - 15 grams of carbohydrates in a 29-Cheeto serving, and I'm jumping to my own conclusion that at most two of those grams are Atkins-approved fiber. And I don't know about Hailey, but when it comes to Cheetos, "all I want" goes way beyond 29 pieces.

2) Unfortunately, Fumento repeats his argumentum ad Hailey's mug on the 21st, when he really should know better about just where Hailey is in his diet.

3) But it gets worse. That item also makes much of the "after pictures" at a website called LowCarbFriends.com:

I've also directed readers to a pro-Atkins site called www.lowcarbfriends.com filled with wonderful pro-Atkins testimonials. These do often have pictures and the vast majority depict fat people. Whatever it is that attracts them to Atkins, it isn't weight loss.

He includes a picture of an obese woman in his sidebar, with the caption

I'm not making this up: This is an "after" photo from an Atkins dieter as seen at lowcarbfriends.com.

Now I'd never been to this site, so I clicked through, to find - the site doesn't have "after photos" as such. It has "Before Photos" and "Current Photos." A current photo is an "after photo" if the dieter claims to be done (they usually post GOAL REACHED or some such emphasis). Otherwise it's an "in progress" photo.

Fumento's "after photo" can be found in context on this page from lowcarbfriends.com. Scroll down to "Betzi." There you find the Before Photo. You also find Betzi's personal information:

started Atkins: 02/04/02
beginning weight: 435
current weight: 333
goal weight: 175
height: 5' 9" age: 44
location: Tulsa, Oklahoma

And an e-mail address. Compare the current weight and goal weight numbers. Now recall that Fumento claims that

I'm not making this up: This is an "after" photo from an Atkins dieter as seen at lowcarbfriends.com.

But he is "making this up." A woman who says she intends to lose 158 pounds yet has no "after photos." He's also ignoring that Betzi, on her own report, lost 102 pounds in a year and 10 days. (Betzi's entry reads "Updated 2/14/03.")

The kindest construction you can put on Fumento's argument is that it is terribly sloppy. Also cheap. He posts an interim photo of a woman who attests to a 102-pound weight loss and acknowledges the need to lose 160 pounds more, calls that photo something it is plainly not, and holds her up for ridicule on the basis of his misrepresentation. Note that he makes no claim that Betzi is lying about her weight loss - he certainly doesn't indicate that he has done anything journalistic like e-mailing Betzi (the address is right there) to confirm her claims. He's just snorting "Look at the fatty!" (a Pot-Kettle maneuver if there ever was one) and calling it an argument.

I come to this as the guy who wrote "How to Go Off Atkins" a few months ago, so I disclaim cult membership. There are all kinds of criticisms one could make about the folks on LowCarbFriends.com and the data therein. That would be a cut above Fumento's recent blogging on the subject.

I should note that I agree with Fumento's statement in National Review Online that "The only weight-control regimens that work for life require both eating in moderation and exercise." I believe that, once the water weight is gone, Atkins really does "work" so long as it creates a calorie deficit for obese people. It takes a lot of calories not just to get fat but to stay fat. I am not convinced that the Atkins maintenance phase is viable long-term, which is why, while I still minimize my intake of sugars and processed starches, I am no longer myself on the Atkins diet.

But what disturbs me about Fumento's writing on Atkins is that he so rarely seems to be discussing the diet Atkins himself propounded - Fumento never acknowledges that Atkins insisted on the importance of exercise, that Atkins said Eat until you feel full, not until you feel stuffed, that Atkins provides for increasing the variety and quantity of carbohydrates throughout the diet, up to and including whole grains. When Fumento writes about Atkins, he always seems to be trying to win cheap.

Weekly Fitness Blog Item - 165 pounds, 33-frickin'-inch waist. 51 official pounds since Thanksgiving Day, and two pounds lighter than last week. Tried on 30" slacks at Target today. They fit fine around the waist, but the pocket openings ballooned out around my hipbones. Dunno if another cut of slacks would cure that or not. There's not a lot more flab to come off the hips now, so I may be down to what my bones will put up with.

Hitting the 50-pound mark makes me feel sober, reflective and, well, smug. So let's not spend much time on it. I don't know if the scale will drop much lower from here or not. I can identify flab I still want to zap - about 5 pounds worth at a guess - and I can identify muscle I want to add too. On the all-important Costume Fitness Scale, I'm just below Level 4, still. What my weight ends up being at the end of that process, I'm not sure. Somewhere between 155 and 170, likely between 160 and my present weight.

I'm not liking the Body-for-Life exercise system quite as much as Avram Grumer is, but I am liking it. It taught me to work through my leg soreness, which is good. Six sets each for four or five different muscle groups is a lot to fit into a morning before commuting, though I see the logic of how the different combinations of weight and reps is designed to fire the maximum number of muscle fibers. Author Bill Phillips claims that the routines fit into a 42 minute time block but I think he's kidding - the breaks between sets account for almost a half hour just by themselves.

I'll do it through Halloween or so, then find something else. I still believe in changing routines every couple or three months, and I might be ready for a maintenance routine by mid fall. I do much less in the way of Heavyhands now - I use the five-pound dumbbells for my day-after-lower-body-weights cardio routine so I can run less. But the day after my upper-body weight routine I don't take dumbbells on my walk/run at all. And I've stopped attempting to gain strength from Heavyhands use for the time being.

Weight Loss for Geeks: You love books and games, Cartoon Network, fantasy, sf, animation, comics or some sizable combination thereof. You live on Pepsi and pizza, know what's inside your computer. You are a geek. Maybe, you've decided you weigh more than you'd like to weigh, maybe by a lot. You may have felt this way for some time, but now the matter has acquired an urgency it didn't have for some reason - a sober consideration of your sexual prospects, anxiety about interviewing in a soft economy at your present weight, some health concern that tips the scales (in my case, a gnawing fear of Type II diabetes). It may have taken a lot to get you to this point. Among other things, your appearance may have long represented to you a rejection of false values: shallow standards of beauty and glamor. Losing weight and gaining fitness might mean, on some level, becoming more like them, the jerks in high school with big muscles or bubble butts, empty heads and vicious mouths.

That's a lot to overlook or overcome. But like I said, the time, you have decided, is here. So how to do it?

Answer: make a game of your body. Turn the venturesome intellect and sense of play that have stood you in such good stead in the one direction they've never really focused: your physical form and prowess. Become curious about what you can become capable of doing. How fast? How long? How hard? How much? What can you decide not to eat or drink after all? What do you need in the way of macronutrients and micronutrients? Which of the schemers, visionaries, nannies and charlatans in bookstores or bureaucracies gets how much right and how much wrong?

Make charts, spreadsheets. Imagine you've decided to play a thin person in a LARP of your own devising. Make it a point to observe yourself from that outside perspective you've always had on yourself, so you can say, "Well I had no idea I could do that."

Most importantly, turn your ego to the task. You know you have one. No self-respecting geek is without his or her armor of arrogance. You're a freaking intellectual, dammit. Lose a ton of weight for the best possible reason - just to prove you can do it. Promise yourself that, once you've hit your goal weight, you will scribe

I have conceived a truly marvelous method of achieving maximum fitness that this margin is unfortunately too long to contain.

Be a genius. When you want to. Until then, as you were.

Interesting-Looking Blog - IvyJews. Conservative, Jewish, intellectually and ethically rigorous. A group blog with a lot of good stuff on the intersections and collisions among politics, academia and religion. I found "Jesus Saves?" especially interesting in light of the other day's Passion items. Highly unlikely they'd agree with me about much in the way of foreign policy, but hey - it's a big ol' internet.

Running Down the Wind - The Post's great Richard Leiby is more negative about the new/last Warren Zevon album, The Wind, than I, or at least sounds more negative, but his review is fair and knowledgeable. ("As the years rolled on, he released some good albums that not many people bought, and that's too bad. But he isn't the type to tolerate phony praise or pathos, so we'll offer none for "The Wind.")

Leiby calls the album "uneven," which is true enough. Having listened to the VH1 stream now for days, "uneven" is the word I'd use too. I might even be inclined to say that you should pick up Life'll Kill Ya and My Ride's Here first - though I gotta tell you, you should have gotten them already. "Don't Let Us Get Sick," from Life, remains the one I'll sing to myself when the day comes, though the sweetness and modesty of "Keep Me In Your Heart" ("for awhile"), the last song on The Wind, will put it on many sad lips.

Bible or Bigotry? You Make the Call - Speaking of Passion passions, Salon reports that disagreement between the leaders of Conservative Christian and Jewish organizations over the film "is already testing the resolve of one of the most unorthodox political and interfaith alliances in play today: the bond between conservative Christians and Jewish groups, who have come together in recent years over their strong support for the state of Israel."

On its Web site, the National Association of Evangelicals recently posted a statement about "The Passion," which included a passage that rankled some Jewish leaders: "There is a great deal of pressure on Israel right now, and Christians seem to be a major source of support for Israel. For Jewish leaders to risk alienating 2 billion Christians over a movie seems shortsighted."

Now let's think about this for a second. Fundamentalist organizations have become strong supprters of Israel because they believe the Bible decrees that the Jews must retake the Land of Israel. In return for this service, the fundamentalists expect the world's Jews to get one last chance to convert to Christianity before the Second Coming or burn in everlasting hellfire, but - politics, strange bedfellows, you know. The point is, according to the fundamentalists, the Bible says, "Gotta make sure the Jews get Israel."

And they're going to throw this injunction over for a movie? Doesn't that amount to "We don't care what the Bible says, you were shirty about this movie, and anyway, you guys killed Christ. So there!"? That's what I call values clarification.

I have no idea if Gibson's movie would fit my definition of antisemitic or not. (I have a pretty good idea of how many people care whether it fits my definition.) I instinctively side with the artists in cases like this, but the world has not lacked for antisemitic artists. And I can understand why honest conservatives and Christians, reflexes conditioned from years and years of being called bigots of one sort or another, would instinctively resent what looked at first blush to be one more spate of highly-publicised carping by Official Victim Group spokespeople. In practical terms, a cooling of the Christian Right's enthusiasm for all things Ariel Sharon would be a godsend for foreign policies I favor. But the ease with which some of Gibson's defenders slide from anger toward specific critics to vague imprecations against entire groups (Israelis, "contemporary Jews") is instructive.

Ick Factor Overload - I've spent enough space on this site inveighing against what I take to be false, politically-motivated accusations of antisemitism (against war skeptics) that the real thing can be a bit dumbfounding when it crops up. And crop up it does, in this skeevy "analysis" by Mark Landsbaum of the furor around Mel Gibson's forthcoming Passion film. (Link via Letter from Gotham.) This part's creepy enough:

As any Christian with a casual familiarity with the Gospels is aware, Jesus' death was predestined by God and directly resulted from the plotting and insistence of Jews and Jewish leaders, including Judas Iscariot, the scribes, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, King Herod, high priests Annas and Caiaphas, and ultimately was carried out on orders from the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, who unsuccessfully tried to persuade the Jewish mob that there was no reason to kill Him.

Jesus Christ, to coin a phrase. You don't suppose the fact that "the Lord . . . gave his only begotten son" in the land of Israel had anything to do with the large number of Jews hanging around, do you? Just on a hunch, I'm thinking that if the Incarnation had taken place in, oh I don't know, Thailand maybe, Jews would have played hardly any role at all. But consider the astonishing dimensions of what the Gospels tell us took place in Jerusalem. In the dependency of an empire, the local power brokers who had achieved some comfort and status in that distorted polity were willing to play rough against possible threats to their phoney-baloney jobs. And - wonder of wonders! - local power brokers were able to whip up a crowd! What a uniquely Jewish infamy, huh?

(W.H. Auden, more of a Christian than Mark Landsbaum is ever likely to be, put a much kinder construction on the role of the Sanhedrin in the Passion, and a sterner judgment on Pilate: the Sanhedrin, Auden pointed out, believed Jesus a blasphemer, a serious crime indeed. He claimed, to their mind falsely, to be the Messiah. Pilate on the other hand put an innocent man to death because it was the easy thing to do.)

But it gets worse:

One might imagine contemporary Jews could be a tad sensitive about their ancestors' roles in the plot and murder, even though Jesus and His followers also were Jews.

The sheer atavism boggles. The notion that contemporary Jews are either likely or have any reason to feel any particular sensitivity about what happened in Jerusalem is the sort of stupidity only an astounding meanness can explain. But first:

Indeed, Christ took upon Himself all the pain and punishment for all the sins of mankind -- past, present and future -- so we can be saved eternally. It was no small moment in the story of man. But if critics like the Anti-Defamation League have their way, how much more diluted will this all-important message be?

Dude! The ADL can't possibly dilute it more than you're doing in your own article. The Passion was supposed to happen! Have all the stadium-goers carried their John 3:16 signs in vain if even writers for Baptist publications aren't going to check the text? Getting all peevish about the "descendents" of individuals who played a necessary role in making that happen is about as diluting as it gets.

"Descendents" is in scare-quotes for a reason. Individual "contemporary Jews" are as likely to be "descendents" of those who strewed Christ's path into Jerusalem with palm fronds, or those who were off in Galilee or Bethlehem or wherever just gettin' on wi' their shite (to quote Trainspotting) during the Crucifixion and had no idea or interest in what was going on in the provincial Capital.

Okay, nothing I've said here is not intuitively obvious to anyone with half a brain - it's our old enemy collective responsibility in one of its more durable forms. Now and then it's worth reminding ourselves just what's wrong with it, though. And I've always thought that Christian animus toward Jews for "killing Christ" was possibly the stupidest group hatred going, for reasons that I'm pleased to see you can find in a later article on the same site:

DALLAS (BP)--Jewish people are right to object to charges that they are responsible for the death of Jesus 2,000 years ago, according to Southern Baptists' coordinator of Jewish ministries. Jim Sibley of Dallas stands strongly against all forms of anti-Semitism as contrary to the teachings of the Messiah, Jesus Christ, and an assault on the revelation of Holy Scripture.

Later in the article:

"When you ask who is responsible for the death of Jesus, the question has several right answers," Sibley explained. Among the possible answers he finds legitimate are:

-- the Father -- He sent the Son to die.

-- the Son -- He said, "No man takes my life from me. I lay it down."

-- the Holy Spirit who led Jesus to the cross.

-- all of us because it was our sin that nailed Him to the cross.

To be true to the biblical narratives, Sibley believes it also could be said that the leadership of the Jewish nation in collusion with Roman leaders were responsible for his death.

Specific people with specific interests in a specific situation, yes. Plus all of the theological reasons that are supposed to make Christians profoundly relieved that Christ was crucified.

If the Bible had to be read as condemning all Jews ever after for the role of some Jews in the Passion, we would need to reject the Bible. If it were then proven that the Bible and that condemnation were unambiguously and irrefutably True, we would need, like the Mimi Rogers character in The Rapture, to renounce God Himself and accept the consequences of doing so. Fortunately, renouncing Mark Landsbaum will suffice.

Annals of Un-REASON - In one of Justin Raimondo's strangest outbursts, his column today condemns that nest of warmongers clustered around Reason magazine:

God, how I hate that magazine, which falsely claims to be "libertarian." There's hardly a lie spread by the War Party that they aren't willing to swallow: as far as editor Nick Gillespie and his crew are concerned, as long as they have the right to do the drugs of their choice and live out their "alternative" lifestyles, little else matters. Could anything be more repulsive?

Uh, has Justin been getting into Andrew Sullivan's stash of hormone pills or something? There are all of two editors on the staff prone to mutter mealy-mouthed neolibertarian justifications for Bush Administration "security" policy - Charles Paul Freund and Ronald Bailey. (It should be noted that each of these fellows are quite good writers if you can keep them off neo-imperialism.) By my count almost the entire rest of the reason staff count as peaceniks. Jesse Walker? Julian Sanchez? They're my Stand Down buddies. Jacob Sullum, Tim Cavanaugh, Brian Doherty, Nick Gillespie himself - all out-and-out war skeptics. (Matt Welch continues to keep his Iraq opinion cards hidden.) All this is crushingly obvious if you spend any time around Reason's website at all - which Justin or someone at Antiwar.com does, since the week doesn't go by that the site links a Reason article on its front page. It's linked at least five Nick Gillespie essays in the last year. Hell, Gillespie gets linked more than I do, and nobody's called me a warmonger lately.

Be nice, Justin, or I'll tell everyone about Antiwar.com's secret weblog.

Gillespie's own reaction, plus reader comments, is on Reason's not-so-secret weblog.

A Fanboy's Conspiracy of Silence? - Very little discussion in the comics blogosphere about Gaiman and Kubert's 1602. Except me. And whoever I missed. Since 1602 was promoted as a big-deal event with megastar creators, isn't that . . . strange? Unless nobody else liked it either and didn't want to say!

(Sean Collins' quickie verdict: wait and see.)

No Blogging for You! or anyway not much. Tomorrow night is gaming and tonight is prepare for gaming. Things to do to fill your time until then . . .

As noted yesterday, Warren Zevon's final album, The Wind, is now streaming in its entirety from VH1. Go go go!

To twist a cliche, Glenn Reynolds misses the forest for the twigs. After musing, shrewdly, "Put [today's UN bombing] together with the mortar attack on (presumably pro-Saddam) Iraqi prisoners the other day and it almost makes me wonder if there's a third force at work here." Yeah it does, doesn't it. Maybe more than that. But then he tears around the blogosphere for anti-UN jibes instead. That's keeping your eye on the warblogger ball.

Which reminds me, Hesiod's theory that INC people might have been behind the bombing of the Jordanian embassy last week seems far from the worst theory going, and may have its application here. As a "wilderness of mirrors" thing, though, the problem of guessing at the UN bombing culprits goes beyond the question of who dislikes the UN. We also don't know if the bombers hope their attack will chase the UN away, or draw it further in.

Team Comics Held Hostage, Day Umpty-Ump. Eve Tushnet, still not on Journalista's Semi-Comics Blogger sidebar list, despite her having turned into something close to a three-quarter comics blogger in the last month. That said, Journalista proprietor Dirk Deppey has a fascinating follow-on to an Eve piece about the structure of comic book narrative. Dirk: "McCloud managed to boil down a good, working definition of comics into a single sentence. I'll go him one better and reduce it to just five characters: 1+1=3." Then he explains what he means. Good stuff.

DVD Buzz: Suddenly everyone's talking Daredevil: The Movie, since it's out on disc now. Johnny Bacardi likes it. John Holbo likes it not. (Link via Electrolite.) Jacob Levy likes it better than John Holbo. Which reminds me that Sean Collins has argued that Daredevil was a better movie than Spider-man. I don't agree, but it reminds me that Sean's wife, as he noted on his blog, is in the hospital for anorexia nervosa treatment and he misses her. Which reminds me to send my best wishes to Sean and his wife for a speedy recovery and to urge you to do the same.

Salam on the UN bombing.

The annual return of Gregg Easterbrook's Tuesday Morning Quarterback column.

Forager23 on markets, information and the practical benefits of free expression. And pizza.

If I Were in Charge - Design Your Own Hell looks entirely too satisfying. I ain't touching it. But you, knock yourself out. Link via Franklin's Findings, into which this blog seems to be irreversibly transforming.

Fan Mail from Some Finder - Avram Grumer e-mails that "I've been saying for several years that [Finder] is the best comic currently being published." However, he says I made a bad call on the Gene Wolfe affinities:

I got to meet Carla Speed McNeil at last year's Museum of Comics and Cartoon Art festival, and asked her about Gene Wolfe. Turns out she's not a fan; got partway through Book of the New Sun and gave up. She may have gotten far enough through that she got "Ascians" from there, or she may have gotten it somewhere else.

I say she's a Gene Wolfe fan in waiting. It took me a false start before I finished New Sun after all.

By the way, there are free Finder stories on the Lightspeed Press website, includding the short, funny and wordless "Fetch." I mean, come on, people, she's making it easy for you here.

Why I Keep Writing About Castillo - Guy walks into a bar. Or a store, or a movie theater, car dealership, hair salon, rental office, gym. Guy gives the guy behind the counter money and gets his chosen good or service in return.

Another quiet miracle of civilization. Whatever the one guy bought, he clearly valued it more than the money he gave up for it. Whatever the other guy sold, he wanted the money more than he wanted to keep the item. The exchange is made and both are incrementally better off than they were before. The item simultaneously purchased and sold may be diapers or diamonds, flowers or a fare, a gift, an indulgence, a necessity. The money exchanged for it will in turn become diapers, debentures, meals or messages, any of the untold things and experiences that sustain or enrich our experience, that make life possible or worth living.

Voluntary exchange. Commerce, the market. Properly understood, it is as much a human right as speaking freely, assembling peaceably, worshipping as you choose or keeping your own counsel in the face of accusation. The right to seek those who will give you what you want in exchange for what they want.

This right too was traduced in the Castillo case, which is not just about comic books and free expression but free trade, too. Because Jesus Castillo was cheated. "Free" trade means free of force - violence or the threat of same - and fraud. These turn voluntary exchange into pillage or swindle.

Jesus Castillo was swindled. The State of Texas defrauded him by sending a representative under false pretences. The State of Texas came in bad faith, like a jay. Among the safeguards Keith's Comics put on their "adult" material - separate racking, warnings, prohibition on access by minors - the most important was this: if you didn't want Demon Beast Invasion more than you wanted the money in your pocket, you wouldn't buy it. A sure, deliberate barrier, albeit one requiring a certain responsibility on the part of the purchaser. His pocket full of someone else's money (the taxpayers of Texas), the undercover officer trespassed against that barrier.

Cheater. And for what? Pictures, word balloons and captions which no one needed to see who did not wish to see.

It's long been a commonplace that the state, by nature, claims a monopoly on force. Increasingly, it arrogates to itself the right to commit fraud too - for the best of reasons or the best reason it happens to have today. It's one more creeper on the bush of government that needs to be kept pruned.

More Castillo - Eugene Volokh weighs in and then updates. He thinks the Texas Court of Appeals may have made an error, or may just write sloppily-worded opinions. He's also trying to get a copy of the comic in question. No, Eugene! Get Finder instead! Even if you're not paying. All work and no play makes Jack a dull lawblogger. Julian Sanchez responds to Ampersand and the two continue the debate in his comments. Julian follows up with a damn near magisterial consideration of merit and censorship.

Ampersand has more Castillo-related links.

Music Notes - If you fire up RealOne Player and navigate to the CD Listening Lounge, you can hear the whole of Liz Phair's new eponymous album in streaming audio. It's her first record in five years; I like it a lot. Mrs. Offering says she's read some people claim "it's too poppy." This is like complaining that Nadia Comenici sure jumped around a lot.

Your essential questions first: is she still a naughty lyricist after all those years on the Mommy Track? My heavens, yes. This becomes clear long before you get to the chorus of "H.W.C." She's also still funny and has that reflexive wryness - attempting to seduce a boy toy in "Rock Me," she sings to him "You don't even know who Liz Phair is." (And later, "I wanna play X-box on your floor.") Do her songs still have the hooks? Oh yes indeedy. Try, um, practically anything on the CD.

She's a lot more than naughty and funny, though. "Friend of Mine" is an acute breakup song, while "Why Can't I" knows as much about the beginning of a relationship. Best of all, she can make married love sexy ("Favorite").

Meanwhile, Artemis Records offers a cut from Warren Zevon's forthcoming testament, The Wind, called "Dirty Life and Times." I like it - very rootsy and in a good range for his voice. He lived to see his grandchildren born too. Does that rock or what? VH1's (inside)OUT site promises to offer a streaming version of the entire album starting - why, that would be tomorrow. Also, a video, "Beg, Borrow or Steal" from the same page.

A less rueful pleasure: You can see the video for Fountains of Wayne's "Stacy's Mom" on the same site. And you should!

Return of the Spree Graph - Here we go again, alas:

CHARLESTON, West Virginia (CNN) -- Investigators in the killings of three people at Charleston-area gas stations last week are questioning 100 people they consider suspects in those shootings, Kanawha County Sheriff Dave Tucker said Monday.

"We have 100 suspects at this time, and they're being interviewed as we speak now," Tucker told reporters Monday afternoon.

I didn't like this movie the first time.

On the blog front, John Cole's Balloon Juice has some coverage, as does fellow West Virginian the Hillbilly Sophisticate.

A Fanboy's OTOH - I also picked up Neil Gaiman and Adam Kubert's much-anticipated 1602 this week, the miniseries in which "the Marvel Universe starts happening at the end of Queen Elizabeth's reign." It's a supherhero book after Dirk Deppey's heart: if there's a complex theme in there to distract one, I couldn't find it. Unfortunately, I kind of missed them, those complex themes. Having read American Gods and the entire Sandman library, I'm quite sure Gaiman knows what they are. (Perhaps we should enter 1602 into the "case against" evidence in the ongoing work-for-hire trial.) The dialogue is problematic, including one awful stretch between Clea and Dr. Strange near the beginning. Gaiman's trying to freight speech with too much exposition for one thing; for another, he never quite gets the handle on making his characters sound simultaneously like a) Elizabethans, and b) people talking. Pacing is a mess: they're introducing too many characters too quickly. (Nick Fury, Dr. Strange and maybe Matt Murdock would have been plenty in Book One.) As for Adam Kubert's art, it's . . . nice. Nothing revelatory. It actually looked better on web preview pages than it does in print.

Fury is the character who translates best to the milieu - he could almost be the shadowy advisor, Sir Francis Walsingham, from the 1998 movie, Elizabeth. (Hm. Someone ask Gaiman if this is how the whole thing got started.) The Elizabethan Peter Parker seems, at least as of issue 1, to be the most misconceived. He's got Parker's name, flat head and pointy chin, but nothing of his essence.

I was bored. Perhaps the subsequent issues will prove out, but right now I have only a critic's interest, and that mild, in what they might contain, not a reader's.

You Think You've Got Problems - The Jesus Castillo case is bad, but it could be worse. Afghanistan's supreme court has recommended that "two journalists from a weekly newspaper that published articles some people consider blasphemous be put to death.

. . . The 10-page recommendation to the judiciary, seen by IWPR, gives detailed citations from the Koran and hadiths to support its ruling, and quotes from portions of the two articles that criticized Islamic practice. The decision also cites a cartoon illustration to one of the articles, which shows a monkey evolving into a man slumped over a computer, accompanied by the words, "Government plus religion equals cruelty."

per the Pak Tribune. (Via Journalista.)

Afghanistan is clearly another of those anti-modern Islamist hellholes we should invade and - oh yeah. I forgot.

A Fanboy's Finder Find - I think I'd seen the odd mention of Finder on various comics blogs, which is probably what made me flip open the copy of issue 32 on the new books rack at Beyond Comics Friday night. I was instantly won over. My initial acquaintance: a three-page spread of a tribal boy returning from a hunt with some dead crows and being admonished by his grandmother for wasting bullets on "trash-eaters." He's too old to be hunting that kind of game, she chides. He defends himself by arguing that the crows drive out gamebirds, so surely he must have been doing some good, but grandma's having none of it. These are all males, she complains, and "If there's too much of something, it's the girls you have to kill."

That's a hell of a note. I was instantly won by the lack of sentimentality, the matter-of-fact acceptance of hunter values in a notoriously Bambi-oid industry, the shrewd way the boy, presumably the central character, is kept off-center and oblique in the compositions, while the grandmother is strongly framed, and that ruthless and unsettling last line.

Then I got the book home, and found that the very next page places us in a domed city with humans and humanoid animals, flat-screen TVs that keep broadcasting even when shattered and an upstairs-downstairs ecology of aboriginal servants and euro (apparently) masters, all setting up a storyline clearly based on the Lindbergh Baby kidnapping with the protagonist barely discernable.

I was mystified but hooked. So yesterday I bought the first Finder collection, Sin-Eater Part I, at Montgomery County's other great comics store, Big Planet Comics in Bethesda, and read the whole thing yesterday.

I love this book. For those long familiar with the title, forgive me while I enthuse. I realize I'm seven years late to this particular party, but I wasn't even reading comics seven years ago. Some things take time. Finder is a black&white science fiction comic written and drawn by Annapolitan Carla Speed McNeil. The author definitely knows her Heinlein. Unless I miss my bet, there's a lot of Gene Wolfe and Samuel R. Delaney in her background too. Very possibly Robert Silverberg's "Nightwings" impinges. The protagonist, Jaeger Ayers, is a "Finder," a combination tracker, detective and con artist. He semi-not-so-secretly has a lot of Marvel's Wolverine in him - he's a small, hairy wild man who heals quickly and fits poorly into polite society, adamantium skeleton and reflexive belligerence not included. (Wolverine is the only superhero who comes up in two interviews with Speed McNeil that I read today, and he comes up in both of them.) The other Wolverine, McAllister, the great creation of William Messner-Loebs, is in there too. (She quotes a passage directly.)

The world of Jaeger appears to be one of those far-future "kitchen sink" worlds - it's not our time, but artifacts from our time have been recovered, including songs, books and social patterns. People say "Jeezus" but worship multiple gods. Lesbians run bookstores but clans control commerce. The genre can feel like a cheat sometimes, a "future lite," but it doesn't here. Artwise, Speed McNeil has clearly been to school on Japan if not in it. Not to say she draws faux-manga figures - she doesn't - but that she favors stylization over absolute naturalism. She's great at drawing old people and kids. She writes excellent dialogue and her characters are like a magician's trick boxes - they keep seeming to open all the way only to turn out, later, to have some additional hinge to them accessing some further recess. You think you can see clear through but then discover they contain white doves, or something furred and clawed.

She can be a problematic letterer, particularly in the early stories. That's about the worst thing I can say.

I am really resenting the money I sank into Demon Beast Invasion now, boy - I could have Sin Eater: Part Two already.

Apparently distribution can be a problem with this title. Note that you can get all the trade collections and single issues from Lightspeed Press. And by god you should.

Not a Visual I Needed to Have, Thank You - Intro text to an Instapundit item: MARK STEYN DIVES INTO ARIANNA HUFFINGTON.

This is not quite as bad as the unbidden images that accompanied the news, years ago, that John McLaughlin and Martha Stewart were dating, but it's bad enough.

Weekly Fitness Blog Item - 168 pounds; 34" waist, let out. A slight uptick from last week, weightwise, a slight decrease in waist size, to the extent that that means anything. Still at Level 3 on my personal Fitness Scale. Speaking of which, Loyal Reader Chrissy Rockwell can relate, writing:

My fitness plan is totally centered around if I'd rather be Phoenix for halloween (which takes a lot more work as it's a one piece outfit), or Marvel girl with the green mini dress and the yellow mask.

Chrissy did have good tips about where I should look for spandex body suits. Be afraid, world! Be very, very afraid.

On the exercise front, I just may have largely licked my leg soreness issues. To recap: terrible delayed onset muscle soreness centered in my quadriceps has plagued me after leg workouts ever since the winter. The Last Hope plan I settled on for the rest of this month was

o Ice right after lifting, and continuing several times a day thereafter.
o More protien, including a protien shake right after lifting.
o Work through it - don't baby the legs until the pain goes away. Continue a normal schedule of cardio routines, and walk as much as possible. Get the blood pumping.

This was the first week I actually did three weight and three cardio workouts, per the BFL program Avram is on. And the legs were not so bad. I worked out my lower body Tuesday night, had a shake and some ice, slept, had more shakes and ice the next day. I figured out that I had been getting under 100 grams of protien a day, even with nuts. That's fine for the sedentary, but if you're training you should get between .7 and .8 times your body weight in protien grams, so they say. That's 120-130 grams in my case. I did a 20-minute Heavyhands routine Wednesday and walked two miles on my lunch hour Thursday. (It was hot!) Legs tightened throughout Wednesday and hurt pretty noticeably Thursday, but the pain dropped noticeably Friday. That's relief by Day 3, which is earlier than I've been used to. Friday night's indoor Heavyhands workout was kind of lame, but I managed one. I did another full leg workout Saturday afternoon. Today, A definite post-workout fatigue but nothing unmanageable.

It's possible that I was going about "recovery" all wrong - that doing no legwork as long as possible was prolonging my discomfort rather than vitiating it. This week will answer a lot of questions in that regard.

But you have to wonder about recovery, at least the militant "you mustn't exert yourself" version. After all, send the suburban boy to the farm for the summer and he'll come home stronger even though he works dawn till dusk every day and never gets much recovery time. Same with the recruit in boot camp. Recovery must be a trickier concept than I was content to think for awhile.

A mild worry: a regular regimen of protien shakes constitutes a toe-dip in the supplement-enthusiast pool. I don't want to end up spending hours in GNC wondering which L-Taurine packet to buy and all that. The Myoplex Light chocolate fudge shake is genuinely yummy though. Less mild worry is that the extra protien means extra calories.

James Landrith, who kindly thanks me for the inspiration, has lost 25 pounds in 6 weeks. He expects to lose the remaining 25 of his goal in another 6. I expect his weight loss to slow to the point that he loses about half of that over the same period, but if I'm wrong, I'll be very happy for him. Not insanely jealous. Or anything.

Jeremy Scharlack points readers to an anti-carb-control article on Kiro5hin. It's a mixture of good and bad points. Worst: it's not at all clear the author, McBain, knows what the Atkins diet actually says. Example:

However, even these expensive supplements will not make up for eating fruits, vegetables, grains and legumes. Thousands of phytochemicals are present in such foods and heal a multitude of illnesses. Removing phytochemicals from your diet will negate any such benefits, even if you take nutritional supplements.

There is also evidence that whole grains can improve insulin sensitivity.

Which makes me glad that Atkins and other low-carb diets in fact allow fruits, vegetables, whole grains and legumes in increasing variety and quantity as the dieter progresses. Once again the familiar phenomenon of the "two Atkins diets" - the actual Atkins diet, and what people imagine to be the Atkins diet.

Next week: Weight Loss for Geeks.

Iraq is still messed up. Hadn't mentioned it in awhile. Here's an acronym proposal to go with SNAFU and FUBAR:

FUBBAS - Fucked Up But Boring As Shit.

That's Iraq news now. Of course, that applies only if you're fortunate enough to have no immediate connection with the appalling farce, like loved ones on the scene or yourself on the scene or yourself and loved ones on the scene.

For instance, Salam reports that his friend G. (our fellow blogger, G. in Baghdad?) got beaten up by US troops last week - "his sin: he looks Iraqi and has a beard."

Salam and blogger G. desperately want the occupation to succeed, but the evidence of Salam's own eyes makes it hard to hope. Salam's latest Guardian column demonstrates that he continues to be, for now, the most important journalist in the world.

Demon Blog Invasion, After-Action Reports - Dirk Deppey had a lengthy and reasoned commentary on Ampersand's responses to the issue that contained a couple of passages I found particularly interesting. First, he quotes an interview with cartoonist Toshio Maeda:

"At that time [pre-Urotsuki Doji], it was illegal to create a sensual scene in bed. I thought I should do something to avoid drawing such a normal sensual scene. So I just created a creature. [His tentacle] is not a [penis] as a pretext. I could say, as an excuse, this is not a [penis], this is just a part of the creature. You know, the creatures, they don't have a gender. A creature is a creature. So it is not obscene -- not illegal.

"Drawing intercourse was, and is, illegal in Japan. That is our big headache: to create such a sensual scene. We are always using any type of trick."

To the extent you consider "tentacle rape" comics more disgusting than mimetic porn comics, Maeda is essentially saying that restrictions on the latter substantially caused the former: the return of the repressed as interdimensional slime.

Dirk notes that Maeda disclaims any intent to imbue the work with the various lofty qualities the CBLDF's experts discerned at trial. Here we come up against some standard problems in criticism and critical theory though - does creator intent mean anything?

(There's also the question of whether the Supreme Court's Miller decision retains even minimal coherence and cogency if one accepts the core principles of poststructuralism to any appreciable degree. If everything's just another text, where does that leave redeeming literary, artistic, social and scientific value. At that point you can claim justification to censor practically anything or almost nothing.)

I have now put myself through the first chapter of Demon Beast Invasion #2. There is more "nonconsensual sex the protagonist comes to enjoy" than you find in mainstream American porn (corporate porn avoids rape fantasy like the plague) - about as much as one found in the pirate romances of the Rosemary Rogers era. Of course, Romemary didn't do tentacles, just rakehells.

A Fanboy's Question Question Answered - Team Comics^® pitches in to tell me just how didactic Steve Ditko's Objectivist comics were. See

Franklin Harris
Forager23
The Wild Bunch
Johnny Bacardi

Bruce Baugh e-mails

I've read some of the Mr. A and Question pieces in a Fantagraphics album from back when, and yes, they are preachy even by Silver Age standards. Or rather they're about as preachy as O'Neill/Adams and the like, but there's often nothing else. There's just enough action to set up the dialogue, and then it's all dialogue, and a couple of blows at the end. The rhythm is like one of those Golden Age JLA or Silver Age LSH stories where the team splits up into three groups and each one has a fight, and then they all team up for the fight and the end, except there's a speech or an exchange of speeches instead of a fight.

Kevin Maroney said he would post his own thoughts to his LiveJournal this weekend, which is still in progress. (In the meantime, he has an interesting consideration of the esthetics of science fiction on film and an account of last Sunday's Whisperado show/mini-blogfest.)

If I missed anyone, let me know, please.

Fox-y Bloggy - This site will be Fair and Balanced through today, demonstrating that, despite what you may have read on Blah3, it's not just left-wing bloggers who have taken up the F&B cause.

A Fanboy's Genuine Question Question - Steve Ditko's non-Marvel/non-DC title's The Question and Mr. A seem not to be very available, and I've not had a chance to read them. These are the titles where he explicitly incorporated his Objectivist politics and it's a commonplace that he ruined them by being "too preachy." What I'd like to know from people who have read them is, were they? Is it preachiness itself that people object to with these books or what was being preached? Were they "preachier" than the comics of other highly-regarded Bronze Age authors? Than Steve Englehart and Steve Gerber? The O'Neil/Adams Green Lantern/Green Arrow? I can't say, cause I ain't seen, but one thing the early Bronze Age did not lack for was preachiness. So if you know, please tell me.

Tomorrow - Absolutely everything Dirk Deppey is wrong about, and, time permitting, what superheroes are for! I'll probably toss in a couple of the many things Dirk is right about too, cause I'm so genial and can't write a focused post to save my life.

In the Interests of Research I've reserved a copy of Demon Beast Invasion from the excellent Big Planet Comics in Bethesda. $16.95 and the cover, I have to tell you, does not appeal. (I mean, centaur fellatio is one thing, but this . . . ) This is going to keep me from picking up Love Hina or Chobits this week, but dammit, my readers come first!

Demon Blog Invasion 2 - William Dyer has added a substantial update to his analysis since this morning, so it's worth going back to his item if you read it more than twelve hours ago. Amused in Review notes, acerbically, "I definitely think you ought to expect more of a lawyer who manages to rack up $60,000 in fees defending a misdemeanor case that netted a $4,000 fine and 180 day suspended sentence."

Having assumed too much on the one hand, I am not now going to assume as proven the arguments against Castillo's counsel. But again, these are important, and if there's a comics press worthy of the name it needs to investigate them. That means starting with the analysis of Dyer and my reader, mysterydave, going beyond it to the trial transcript, and getting responses from both the CBLDF itself and outside experts. (Really one should talk to the prosecution too.) If CBLDF needs fixing or CBLDF turns out to be a bad vehicle for safeguarding the rights of comics creators and merchants, the field needs to know that. If the errors are, for some reason, lesser than the legal analysis we have so far indicates (say, because of problems with the trial court judge), we need to know that too.

Demon Blog Invasion - Tonight was to be He Responds to his Critics Night across the board, but other commitments (the lawn and exercise) have cut into my blogging time, so I'll probably only deal with the Castillo case, where my errors are most egregious. This is partially a "blog in haste, repent at leisure" item, and partially not.

The first error was important enough to correct mid-day, which was forgetting to paste in the link to Ampersand's initial item on the Castillo Affair from yesterday. See his response to my item of this morning, and finally, his general censorship principles item of this evening.

The first thing to be said is that, on two essential principles, Ampersand clearly got it right and I clearly got it wrong. Specifically, Jesus Castillo was convicted of a misdemeanor, not a felony, and has not served jail time and won't if he successfully completes his probation. I could have avoided this mistake if I had taken the time to read William Dyer's important item before relying on the single news source I'd had until that time. This is what happens when you're rushing to opine before the morning commute, or anyway, when I'm rushing to opine. A useful lesson. Dyer's points overlapped with a couple of e-mails on the topic that I exchanged with reader "mysterydave," but included new material. mysterydave, himself a lawyer, also criticized Castillo's representation:

First, it looks like the CBLDF really screwed the pooch on this case. I pulled the appellate opinion off Westlaw, State v. Castillo, 79 S.W. 3d 817 (Tx. App. 2002)(it may or may not be on the regular internet, haven't checked). In particular, CBLDF consistently failed to object when the state did something outrageous; like, for example, testifying about the presence of a school in the proximity of the store, or asking a police officer to give an expert opinion on the artistic/political merit of a piece of Japanese culture. Castillo loses these arguments on appeal because the CBLDF failed to properly make or renew objections. Which means these might--might--still have been decent arguments if properly preserved.

Second, the argument that everyone has jumped on--that comics deserve special scrutiny as "kid's stuff"--is missing from the appellate opinion. It's not there. Castillo never raises it, the Court never deals with it. Which suggests to me that the CBLDF either failed to raise it, failed to object to it in the trial court and thought it couldn’t raise it on appeal, or that the appellate court simply ignored it. Either way, the appellate court never adopts this standard for comics, and it's really not fair to suggest it did. And for the record: suggesting that comics need special scrutiny is a bad, bad argument, for the reasons everyone else has noted.

The third point, and a point on which it is fair to jump all over Texas, is that its obscenity argument is completely circular. To whit: something is obscene if it is (paraphrasing) offensive to community standards, shows the naughty bits, and lacks artistic value. One shows community standards by, presumably, showing that the community is awash with porno--which Castillo in fact did. Except that in Texas, "the fact these books were available does not mean they were not likewise obscene." State v. Castillo. Which obviously puts Castillo in a bind, and makes it nearly impossible to demonstrate community acceptance. Put on thirty random citizens, all of whom shout they love hot girl on girl action? All it means is that they partake in obscenity...In fact, in a case on which the appellate court relies, a PORN STORE was hit for selling an obscene video; the fact that sufficient demand existed to justify an entire store devoted to porn is evidently not sufficient to show community acceptance. In Texas, apparently, economics is not taught very well.

Finally, a point not raised in the trial court or on appeal, but interesting nonetheless: when looking at artistic value, does one look through the prism of the culture that generated the work or the culture in which the work was consumed. Or in other words, can something have artistic value in Japan but not in Denton? A big question to answer in the internet age….

I asked him what arguments the defense did raise on appeal and he wrote

The opinion is online.

And actually, quite a few arguments were left. In a nutshell, Castillo argued that: 1) even if it was obscene, Castillo didn't know it was obscene, 2) Texas failed to present sufficient evidence to prove the comic was obscene, 3) Texas erred by concluding that the single volume of the seried was obscene, when, viewed in context, the entire multi-volume series was not obscene, 4) the comic was not "constitutionally obscene," 5) Texas erred by admitting evidence about the elementary school, 6) the police officer was not qualifed to give an expert opinion on artistic merit, 7) and the sentencing hearing was not recorded.

Dyer argues that many of these arguments failed because of the conduct of Castillo's lawyers during trial. mysterydave, who asks that we bear in mind that his specialty is construction rather than constitutional law, also muses:

Well, bear in mind that I haven't seen the trial transcript; and it is entirely possible that the appellate court is being unduly restrictive in determining if an objection was made or not. So while it does look bad for CBLDF, it's not conclusive...though I wonder if using lawyers from Buffalo in a Texas court had anything to do with it.

The competence of Castillo's legal team is not an issue where Ampersand is right and I am wrong only because I agreed this morning that incompetence may have been a factor, and indeed called for comics journalism to take up the question. We can't allow general warm feelings toward the idea of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund to prevent questions about how well it is carrying out its mission in practice.

So the second crucial issue that goes his way is whether the Supreme Court's decline of a writ of certiorari establishes a precedent that comic books as such are to be held to a different obscenity standard than other media because "comic books are for children." It appears that no court at any level of the appeal process specifically endorsed this argument of the prosecution. We cannot, as Ampersand notes, say for certain whether the jurors were swayed by the prosecutor's argument or not, but it's entirely possible that they simply applied Texas obscenity law, within the context of Miller, the same way they'd have applied it to a video, a glossy magazine or a weblog.

I put these points first because they are important - by some arguments the most important. And I welcome Ampersand's explanation that

On the contrary, I'm saying the censorship laws should be narrowed, so that fewer works are deemed "obscene" and therefore lacking first amendment protection.

which is a useful clarification of his earlier statements, which seemed rather dismissive of the trouble in which Mr. Castillo and Keith's Comics found themselves.

Here endeth the points of agreement.

Start with the picayune. Ampersand objects to my phrasing at one point:

I'm not sure what Jim means by a "feminist" disapproval [ed. "approval" in original] - as anyone who knows feminism knows, many feminists disagree about obscenity laws. (Try asking Nadine Strossen, the very feminist president of the ACLU, or Avadon Carol what they think).

The diversity of feminist views on obscenity laws is true but not germane. I am familiar with both Strossen's and Carol's views and indeed admire them. You could say that they share a feminist disapproval of obscenity laws, since their stances grow out of their concerns for the harm censorship does to women. But that doesn't change the fact that many people support obscenity laws for what they consider to be feminist reasons. I could find conservative christians who abhor pornography but are against state prohibition of same at any Libertarian Party convention. But I could still speak of Jerry Falwell's "religious approval of censorship laws" regardless of the diversity of views on censorship among Christians.

(Ampersand's clarification means that he doesn't support existing obscenity law, though the clarification itself, a response to reader inquiries, demonstrates that I wasn't the only one to conclude, on the basis of what he wrote, that he did.)

I have two demurrals to the mea culpa section of this item.

First, Ampersand and William Dyer make much of the fact the courts have not established a precedent that "comics are for kids," and their arguments seem sound enough. However, it's clear, precedents aside and competence of the defense aside, that the prosecutor in the case, a government official and officer of the court, attempted to sway the jury with precisely that argument. We do not know that it worked, but neither do we know that it didn't. We do know that the argument is outrageous, prejudicial and unworthy of a man sworn to uphold justice rather than win cases. I know, I know - call me quaint.

Second, stipulating my bonehead error about Castillo's sentence and level of criminal record, there is still reason for comics readers and supporters of free expression to feel outrage about what happened here. The harm to Castillo and Keith's Comics is still considerable. The fine, per the Dallas Observer, was paid by donors. (Link via Franklin Harris.) However, since at least the time of Bleak House we have known that to be involved in a law case is itself a harm - a real harm to an identifiable person measurable in time diverted from productive or entertaining activity, anxiety and usually, financial stress. That's if you win. And every trip inside the courtroom is a risk, no matter how strong your position on the face of it. If Dyer and mysterydave are correct about the errors of Castillo's counsel, that only further highlights the risk and the harm - Castillo's fate was substantially at the mercy of his own representative.

No, this is not uniquely true of the Keith's Comics case, it's a standard feature of the court system (civil and criminal). That's the point. It's the reason why the sphere of the criminal justice system needs to be kept as narrow as possible, and certainly narrower than this.

Ampersand says "Mr. Castillo was sentenced to a year's probation; assuming he doesn't break probation, he won't spend any time in jail." Given that Castillo didn't know he was committing a crime in the first place, it's entirely possible that he could break his probation without knowing it.

Consider one of the errors Dyer attributes the defense in his excellent analysis:

Fairly stiff fine, wasn't it, though? And the appellate court refused to disturb it when Castillo asked it to, right? Well yes — but not necessarily because the Court agreed with the fine. You see, Mr. Castillo's lawyer didn't ask for a court reporter to make a record of the sentencing in the trial court. That being the case, there's no way he could show the appellate court that an objection to the size of the fine had been made to the trial judge — and you have to show that you tried to fix stuff in the trial court before the appellate court will fix things for you on appeal.

As a non-lawyer, my immediate reaction is, Wha-??? They don't record a sentencing hearing unless the defense counsel asks them too? Why the hell not? Point being, a requirement that the defense counsel specifically request that such a record be kept has nothing to do with justice as such, but only with procedure. Thus justice comes to depend on procedure. It may well be that it's the only way our courts can function. But it's also why it should be hard to drag a citizen into one.

In the end, we still face the core facts: an adult sold a product labelled for adults to a fellow adult. The seller was convicted of a crime for his role in that voluntary transaction. The state's representative attempted to prejudice the jury pool by invoking phantom "children" who played no role whatsoever in the exchange that took place in that shop on that day. The defendant may have lost his case because his legal counsel was not up to snuff. I'm still appalled.

Castillo - Franklin Harris has the links. Two notable dissents from the outrage have been raised by Ampersand and William Dyer. Both argue that Castillo's lawyers did a poor job defending their client. Ampersand further expresses a feminist approval of obscenity laws generally and their application to the comic in question - which is to say, contentment that a retail worker should spend 180 days in jail for selling a magazine to a grownup, pay a $4,000 fine out of his retail salary and record a felony conviction for an inflammatory charge on every job application he completes for the rest of his life.

More tonight, but it strikes me that there are two roads forward. On the journalistic road, we need to determine how culpable the CBLDF's legal representation is for the way the case turned out. As activists, the only way to secure justice and mercy for Jesus Castillo would appear to be a pardon drive. This is probably an uphill fight in Texas, but it needs to be waged. Volunteers?

UPDATE: Forgot link to Ampersand's item - just added it. There's also a follow-up that I can't respond to until later.

FURTHER UPDATE: Substantial errors in this item are corrected in the one immediately above it.

Speaking of Economic Rights - It is outrageous that Tonasket constitutionalist Mark Alan got busted by the feds for operating a five-watt radio station in the middle of nowhere. Drive any distance outside a metropolitan area and you quickly hit "dead zones" on your tuner - areas where no FM station comes in. That's on the east coast. I can't imagine the situation doesn't obtain in the more sparsely-populated west. A clearer example of how regulatory regimes come to serve entrenched interests could hardly be imagined. In these cases the entrenched interests include the big media companies and National Public Radio, which vigorously opposed the mild loosening of microstation broadcast rights recently proposed by the FCC. Odious they are, but Clear Channel and Liberty Broadcasting et al are products of a regulatory regime - one whose insistence that the FM spectrum constitutes a commons created a "scarcity" that a more open approach would have had incentives to overcome.

Signs of Life II - Patrick Nielsen Hayden also picks up the story of Tonasket, Washington. He quotes the text of the anti-PATRIOT resolution and observes, "Symbolic and toothless? Surely. These things take time. Don’t underestimate the potency of symbolic action."

A Fanboy's Notes: I Always Wondered That Myself - Quotable:

Also, as I had to admit to myself, The Avengers never made much sense as a team [name]. The Defenders were defending. The Justice League were a league that represented justice in America, but The Avengers? Who were they avenging? Batman's parents?

From an interview with Ultimates writer Mark Millar.

So We Will Be Weirdos Together - Dirk Deppey explains that he doesn't have any animosity toward superhero comics, he just outgrew them. He also quotes Grant Morrison approvingly on the appeal of Japanese manga:

I’m definitely much more interested in what's happening on the fringe where comics cross over with general pop culture and I find myself resonating strongly with the super sci-fi, hyper-realist and fantastic elements which teenagers are absorbing again via comics and via artifacts which owe very little to the weird reiterations of the superhero books.

Morrison also likes the fact that manga excites young readers in a way that US superhero comics no longer do.

So, longstanding Japanese pop culture cliches are fresher than longstanding American pop culture cliches. Got it.

Once upon a time, American superhero comics were bad because they only appealed to children and adolescents and not to adults. Now they're bad because they don't appeal to children and adolescents, but only to adults. That's some bad timing, huh?

Now, I agree completely with Dirk et al that comics need to comprehend more than superhero stories to survive, and I believe that manga clearly has commercial appeal and people who want to make money should sell it. (I haven't been able to find all these comic book stores that supposedly don't. All the shops I go to have manga prominently displayed.) But it seems to me the problem with comic books is less that Americans don't like superheroes than that Americans don't like comic books - for whatever reason. Seven-year-old Offering Boy loves both the animated Justice League and Teen Titans series. While he reads the kid-oriented Justice League Adventures, he has shown no enthusiasm for other children's comics. Scooby Doo? Powerpuff Girls? No and no, despite loving the TV shows. There are kids comics available, to the indifference, from what I can tell based on sales figures and anecdotal experience, of actual kids.

I also take Dirk and Morrison's point about the involuted nature of contemporary superhero stories. Heck, I've made that point myself. Sometimes I despair of anything genuinely new coming out of the genre - the best we can hope for, apparently, is superb pastiche.

Anyway, Eve Tushnet has turned into a much better "semi-comics blogger" than I, and she's been musing a lot about the appeal and validity of the superhero as a concept. Her latest take compares superhero comics to opera:

I think the comics/opera parallel may have value, and help illuminate some of the recent wrangling over superheroics and highly exaggerated characters and situations.

This makes sense to me. And it reminds me that Mrs. Offering's take on the first (hugely sucessful superhero-oriented) Batman movie was that it was really an opera, and she liked that aspect of it.

(Note: the obscure title is a quote of Toiler's from our current gaming campaign. Sorry, I couldn't resist.)

Outrage of Last Week - Peter David's argument against the validity of obscenity laws reminds me that I didn't write about the appalling case of Jesus Castillo last week during my service outage. This is bad because everybody should be writing about Jesus Castillo.

The story: Jesus Castillo worked in a Texas comic book store. He was busted for selling an erotic comic to an undercover officer. These facts have not been disputed: Castillo is an adult. The cop was an adult. The comic was displayed in a separate Adults Only section of the store. The cop was under no compulsion from Castillo to acquire that particular comic. (An excellent, appropriately disgusted recap, comes from Franklin Harris' Pulp Culture column. I cannot recommend this article highly enough.)

The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund provided expert witnesses to attest to the artistic and literary qualities of the comic in question. The DA told the jury that none of that mattered, because comic books have "always" been for children and the "adult" comic was therefore obscene by definition. The jury bought the argument and convicted, the trial judge let it stand and, last week, the US Supreme Court declined to review the case.

This is an outrage. The Supreme Court has said that government may define the boundaries of permissible content for an entire medium - and incidentally to do so with blatant disregard to the simple facts of that medium's history. It's a hideous abridgement of both creative and economic rights, arbitrarily sanctioning one party of a voluntary exchange of value for value as a criminal. Every comics blogger worth his or her salt has noted this matter, but that's not enough - this is the sort of obscenity political writers should decry as well.

Fires and Theaters - Peter David has a useful item on the famous Oliver Wendell Holmes quote about conflagrations in densely populated showplaces:

What is often glossed over is that Holmes' oft' misquoted statement was part of a decision that supported a staggeringly grotesque abuse of free speech.

And then he tells you how. He's right, and wouldn't you know it, Most Evil American in History Wood