Why It Matters - In the comments sections on some conservative sites where the proprietors have denounced Luskin's attempt to intimidate Atrios, some of the man's fellow travelers have airily avowed that this story is of no interest "beyond the few thousand people who read blogs." Well okay, sure. To that I would say, if you're reading this, or commenting on someone else's site, you're one of those few thousand people, so why pretend it doesn't interest you? Second, people who aren't interested (non-blog readers) probably should be. Anytime one American tries to shut another American up under color of law, it matters, especially when the "coloring" is so obviously outside the lines.

Until Wednesday, Atrios and Luskin were two citizens participating in the American tradition of over-the-top political expression. I never read enough Luskin to know or care if he was the creep his critics painted him as or the sentinel of truth his partisans celebrated. I read enough Atrios to respect his energy and intelligence but find his unwavering devotion to, my god, the Democratic Party of all things almost incomprehensibly foreign to my sensibilities. But as of Wednesday, one of them is a bully and a coward and the other is not; and one of them is at least an ideological if not personal hypocrite. (Conservatives hate promiscuous litigation, remember?) And personal hypocrite doesn't look like such a bad call.

It matters because character studies matter - new lessons in human weakness and strength merit attention. It matters because free expression matters. It is not just Atrios' rights we're dealing with here. Were Luskin's legal claim to prevail it would establish radically burden sole-proprietor internet opinion sites - blogs, bulletin boards, any site with a discussion forum. It would fence off an exhilaratingly free range.

I Was Right About You - So the other night, when the news of the Donald Luskin legal threat against Atrios hit the news, I declared that Luskin was "a pussy." And then I wondered if I was being not just foul-mouthed but over the top.

Turns out, not. The Atrios letter hit Wednesday night. As I mentioned at the time, there was at least the possibility that the letter was a fake or a huge misunderstanding. (I essentially called Luskin a subjunctive pussy.) Luskin has updated his weblog each day since then. Not one word about the letter to Atrios from a man purporting to be his attorney. Not only has the story been widely reported on the sorts of sites that a conservative blogger/columnist is overwhelmingly likely to read, we know that Glenn Reynolds e-mailed Luskin for confirmation two days ago.

So. The story has been out there for two days. One of Luskin's biggest promoters asked for clarification two days ago. Luskin has had access to the internet. Luskin has not publicly denied the story or clarified it. Nor has Luskin so much as owned up to his action on his website - not even a bwa-ha-ha.

So, like I said, pussy.

Blogarama V.5, Venues Clarification Exercise - RGB Greg Pearson reminds me that Marriott, they went and built two hotels in Crystal City, about two blocks apart. I have confirmed with Chad Orzel that he's in the Crystal City Marriott, not the "Crystal Gateway" Marriott, so the Crystal City Marriott is where you go. 7PM. The bar is on the second floor, looks like the restaurant and is called "Bistro," or at least has a sign that says Bistro. If you don't find people, ask at the front desk where the "blogfest" is.

Map. Driving directions.

Speaking of Eerily Prescient Terrorism in Marvel Comics of the 1970s - I could swear that somewhere between Daredevils 110-114, the Mandrill collapsed the top floors of the World Trade Center, killing many people. (Captions inform us that Daredevil's super senses can perceive all the deaths.) Am I imagining this? Was it a different skyscraper?

Terrors of the Imagination - The Fiore post below reminds me of Avengers 113, titled Your Young Men Shall Slay Visions. It was Steve Englehart at his most earnest, and since I was an earnest lad myself, it made a big impression on me. Vision and Scarlet Witch kiss in public. She's a mutant, sure, but he's an android, so the kiss inspires outrage and bigotry. Anti-synthezoid bigots attack the Avengers, hoping to kill the Vision, willing to take down any Avengers who get in their way. They believe they are making a last stand on behalf of the human race. Here's the thing: the attackers are suicide bombers. They call themselves "the Living Bombs." A synopsis of the issue appears about a third of the way down the Avengers page from Forgotten Comic Book Character HQ.

I remember finding the idea of suicide bombers pretty unnerving. It's oddly more unsettling in retrospect - suicide bombings were not common features of real life back in 1972. Terrorists tried to get away. There had been the kamikaze in the 1940s; there would be the surge of murderous martyrdom in Lebanon beginning with the next decade. (The Wikipedia link quotes the London Times using "suicide-bomb" contemporaneously to describe kamikaze planes.)

But in 1972, suicide bombing as we know it existed purely in the imagination of a comic book writer. There is a qualititative difference between flying a plane into a warship during a battle and walking up to someone on the street and blowing you both up. Englehart was ahead of the goddam curve on that one.

Someone stupid enough might try to find some link between Avengers 113 and young Lebanese radicals - some kid who read a comic and later became a revolutionary. But the answer is probably simpler. Englehart wanted human villains to take on much more powerful foes. He must have wracked his brain to come up with something regular shmoes could do to superheroes. And at some point it hit him that, were they fanatical enough, sure enough that they were in the right and the situation was desperate, more committed to victory than self-preservation, there was a way. One of the bombers even declares that he is willing to "martyr" himself.

What we're actually observing between American newsstands in 1972 and Levantine war in 1980 is simple parallelism - different people, similar problem (taking out superior targets for millenialist reasons), same "solution." One imaginary, the other all too enduringly real.

Happy Halloween - The most perfect night for trick-or-treating in years, warm (c. 60F), dry, a bright quarter-moon. Not a lot of trick-or-treaters, alas, but a nice outing with Offering Boy (as Eddie from "Ed, Edd and Eddy") and the Littlest Offering (fairy princess).

Hot Liberty has a great Halloween treat suggestion, and Dave Fiore reminisces about two great lost Halloween traditions - the Rutland, VT Halloween parade, and the numerous early Bronze Age comic book stories set there. Dave points to a website devoted to Rutland Parade comics issues maintained by Rutland native Ian P. Berger.

When I was a kid, I dearly wanted one day to get to the Rutland Halloween Parade. Now I am left with nothing but questions, like: Why was the annual parade discontinued? and Come to think of it, wouldn't a Halloween Parade in Vermont be cold as hell? and It's all Howard Dean's fault somehow, right?

Ah, no matter.

Unqualified Offerings Gets Results - Chrissy Rockwell is a buddy of mine from the Elvis Costello list who has recently begun actively blogging at A Fine Idea at the Time. She's now appeased me by changing her template color so that the Unqualified Eyes can actually read the thing. Thanks, Chrissy! The blog is not just all politics all the time - not even mostly politics most of the time.

Meanwhile Dave at the new semicomics blog, The Intermittent, kindly avows that UO "is in many ways the inspiration for this here blog. To the extent we suck, however, blame us, not him." But can I blame him to the extent that I suck, is my question.

I should note that UO in no way inspired his fondness for the band Rush. Anyway, it looks like The Intermittent will be a great blog for comics and other stuff.

Blogarama V.5 - Our unassuming little party will begin, for the sake of simplicity, at the bar in the Crystal City Marriott at 7PM tomorrow night, Saturday November 1. Eventually it will probably move over to Restaurant Row. If in doubt, ask at the registration desk "where the blogfest is." We will keep them informed. Guest of Honor Chad Orzel has to attend a panel at his physics convention at 8pm, so what happens at that point will be a matter for group consensus, determined at that time.

UPDATE: Added day info. Party is Saturday, not tonight.

UPDATE UPDATE: See above for venue clarification.

Aside to Atrios - Ya know, tort reform really isn't such a bad idea.

Stupid Flies II - From this morning's Washington Post:

SINJAR, Iraq -- Commanders of U.S. military forces responsible for monitoring the border between Iraq and Syria say there is no evidence from human intelligence sources or radar surveillance aircraft indicating that significant numbers of foreign fighters are crossing into Iraq illegally.

1) That's because they're all in Mali!

2) Um, commanders? What about significant numbers of foreign fighters crossing into Iraq legally?

3) Sinjar. That's a cool name for a town.

Stupid Flies! - Via Glenn Reynolds comes this story of Al Qaeda camps in the wilds of Mali. Bu-but - shouldn't the builders all be in Iraq now?

Weenie - Apparently Donald Luskin of National Review Online has threatened legal action against Atrios. From his lawyer's letter:

You recently linked to Mr. Luskin’s October 7, 2003, posting on his website entitled “Face To Face With Evil,” in which he chronicles his attendance at a lecture and book signing presented by Paul Krugman. You chose the unfortunate caption “Diary of a Stalker” for your link. More importantly, your readers, in responding to your invitation to comment, have posted numerous libelous statements regarding Mr. Luskin. Picking up on the theme you introduced, several have made false assertions that Mr. Luskin has committed the crime of stalking.

If the letter is a fake, it will be discovered to be such in short order, and Atrios will have ruined his reputation. It will be the greatest blog flameout of all time.

Gee, what are the odds?

So I'm assuming the letter is genuine until demonstrated otherwise. If it is ever so demonstrated, I'll apologize for expressing the following personal opinion: Donald Luskin is a pussy. I hasten to point out that being a pussy is not a crime.

The other day, Matthew Yglesias had a funny little item about Conservatives Against Metaphor. This fits right in, except for the funny part.

UPDATE: Arthur Silber has a much longer response that boils down to "pussy."

UPDATE UPDATE: Don't mess this Atrios follow-up. And links to other comments can be followed from here.

UPDATE³: Don't miss the Poor Man. Short but sweet.

You Had Me For Awhile There - Henry Farrell has a good defense of good academic prose, worth reading despite Henry's unaccountable assertion along the way that "One may not agree with Edward Said on the facts - but his prose is compelling precisely because of its vigor and clarity." I've really only read Said's journalism, but it was gaseous nonsense, with all the vigor and clarity of a steam room. This is quite apart from the question of whether Said was the Devil.

Tell Me About It - Brendan is rapidly turning Human Liberty into an advice column. See his reader mail ("The thing is, I never wanted to load Linux anyway, I just took the CD to humor him. Now I've lost a friend. What can I do?--Sad in Austin" and "I am so fascinated by radical subsidiaritanism, but I noticed that most of the people who share these ideas are men. What can be done to make these ideas more appealing to women?")

Maybe he can help the people in this Agitator comment thread.

They Say It's Your Birthday - Not blog birthday; Happy Human Birthday to Nate of Polytropos, his last as a pre-parent. Nate is as nice and bright a guy as his blog suggests, by the way. Tonight's offering, an even-handed appreciation of 24, complete with first-season spoiler.

Took a Minute but then I realized - the connection between the previous two items is pretty freaking obvious, isn't it?

Can the Schools Get Any Stupider? - Do you mean before or after this?

NEW YORK — A 14-year-old New Jersey schoolboy — whose dad and stepdad are in the military — was suspended for five days because he drew a "patriotic" stick figure of a U.S Marine blowing away a Taliban fighter, officials said yesterday.

"He's been punished for the drawing," said Tinton Falls school superintendent Leonard Kelpsh. "We felt it was highly inappropriate, and we took it very seriously."

Criminy.

When I was 14, most every classmate's dad had served in the Big One, and all the boys spent their class time drawing not just guns but tanks and planes. Oh yes! German ones! Not because we were little Nazis - that was only a few of us. Because we thought guns and tanks and planes were cool, and the Germans had some of the coolest. And I so rarely hear of Bund activity involving my former classmates.

Now, get the Administration at this joint a copy of Killing Monsters, quick, and drop it in the Clue Courier pickup box.

(Columbine! What if this guy comes to school and blows away all the teacher's that belong to the Taliban??? Silly person - "taliban" means student.)

I Come to You and See All This Ruin - Liberty&Power reports that the Alabama Scholars Association is protesting more shenanigans:

Drawings and photographs by Trobaugh depict scenes that could be construed as homosexual in orientation or theme.

The exhibit had been approved by the chair of the Art Department for display in the entrance to the Bean Brown Theater at Shelton State. The day after the exhibit went on display, President Rogers personally contacted the department chair and told him that the art would have to be removed. He had received "complaints," he said. A day later, and under orders from the president, the art was taken down.

The ASA is deeply concerned by the decision of President Rogers to censor an already-approved display of drawings and photos simply because it might be controversial.

Through the wonders of the internet, you can view the works from Professor John Trobaugh's installation. The digital manipulation photography of human nudes is not to my taste. There's a series of "queer Ken doll" photographs to which I can muster a "cute!" and not much more. ("Meeting Mr. Wright" is my favorite. "Sycamore," a girl doll photo serving as a changeup pitch, is pretty good too.) The digital prints of ink wash drawings I rather like, especially "Burning Brick or the Downtown High Rise Burns Today" and "Fly Protection or Radio undercover." One of the gay-themed prints, "Sleeping Target," is pretty good.

But it's not about me. I've always been jazz and photography-impaired. It's about the fact that the gallery found Trobaugh's work worthy. I can see that even for the things that don't float my boat there is an active esthetic intelligence at work. Nor is this narrow "statement" work - less We're here, we're queer, get used to it than We're here, we're queer - oh look at how the light falls on that surface! The exhibit doesn't qualify as obscenity. Total illustrated dicks: 2, both in the same drawing. Total photographed dicks: one or two. (Hey, it's digital manipulation! I can't quite tell in one case.) Dicks, photographed or drawn, in physical contact with another man's flesh: 0.

More from David Beito's Liberty & Power report:

We cannot help noting that Rogers justified his censorship by saying that theater-going families might be offended by Trobaugh's works. The play currently in production is "Arsenic and Old Lace," a play about serial homicide and poisoning.

Finally Arriving at the Party - Mrs. Offering and I are surely the last couple in America to pick up on 24, but we both watched the season opener tonight, me fortified with spoilers from the Tony Kornheiser Show. I mean, I liked it, but who would want to work in that office? (The CTU office.) All those reflective surfaces, the oddly-angled and plain too dim lighting - I couldn't imagine actually concentrating on a project in that place.

Idle Rich Smackdown - Daniel Drezner vs. Max Sawicky. So far it's an entirely indirect smackdown, as the two items seem to have been written independently, but they make an interesting contest. Naturally, I think Drezner has the better of it, though I hasten to point out that I haven't seen the TV special in question.

The Clues Return to Neolibertariana - Megan McArdle in TechCentralStation can't quite bring herself to accept the implications of a basic libertarian insight: whatever else war is, it's a massive government program.

That we are even thinking about beggaring Iraqis over so trivial a sum boggles the mind. And I'm beginning to wonder if my support for the war didn't rely on a Miracle Mile in which our government, in defiance of my basically libertarian instincts, had the desire and the will to do whatever it takes to help the Iraqis become prosperous and free.

Make the Magic Happen

But I haven't given up hope yet. I don't think that the American citizenry begrudges the Iraqis a little financial help, if it will help bring peace and prosperity to a dangerously -- and expensively -- unstable region. After all, we're talking about $35 apiece, which is a bargain for what we'd be getting.

No liberal plumping for a municipal surcharge "for the children" ever put it in a more heartfelt fashion. I'm not saying that we should, in Megan's words, start "charging the Iraqis for the privilege of being invaded." I'm saying you should have thought of that before you left home. It was always going to be the real United States that conquered Iraq, not some textbook actor from a think tank monograph. And it was always going to be led by real politicians and real bureaucrats, not philosopher kings.

Glenn Reynolds, linking to Megan's article, has a McArdlian moment of weakness (read: insight) himself before pulling it back together.

Technical Bulletin - I'm in possession of a mySQL update query from Michael Croft that should solve my categories problem. Thanks, Michael!

Thirty seven people in 2203 will listen to Kylie Minogue and love it - Will Wilkinson channels his inner Walter Benjamin. Bonus for this site's liberal readers - Charles Murray abuse!

Speaking of good art since 1950, Will's item inescapably reminds me that the following verse from the Barenaked Ladies' "It's All Been Done"

Alone
and bored
on a thirtieth century night
will I
see you
on The Price Is Right?
Will I cry
will I smile
as you run
down the aisle?

is just a damn fine piece of writing.

My Blog Wants to Party All the Time - Blogarama V.5, in honor of Chad Orzel's visit to DC for a physics conference, will take place early Saturday evening in Crystal City. Details to follow tomorrow. We already have several commitments, but anyone is welcome.

After-action reports on Blogarama V continue to appear. Glen Engel-Cox, Jeremy Lott (now web editor of the American Spectator), tequila mockingbird ("the first rule of blogorama is…that you must post about blogorama"), Wolfgang Norton (who lacketh item permalinks), Brooke Oberwetter, Missy Schwartz, maybe someone I missed.

A Modest Proposal: Comics Blogging - Steven Grant interviewed writer Ed Brubaker last week - in some ways it was more of a mutual interview about the conditions of the marketplace and everyone's favorite topic, the shift from a floppy-based to softcover-based economy. During the transitional phase this presents the clear problem of how to write for two different formats simultaneously. Among the problems:

I think that's been a flaw in Marvel and Crossgen collections specifically, that there's a strong emphasis every month with reacquainting the reader with the concept that works against trade paperback collection, there's that "make everything insanely clear for the reader" emphasis monthly comics are prone to (and, perhaps not coincidentally, mostly fail at) that simply becomes painful and often embarrassing redundant in collections, particularly when the same descriptive phrases are used over and over, from chapter to chapter.

Hm. Might I suggest that comic book publishers consider editing? For the trade, you have the option of cutting balloons, captions, panels and even entire pages if they prove redundant. In some cases, you might need to commission the equivalent of a page or two of work from the artist or writer to plug any gaps in flow. But it could be done.

Poetry Corner - Polytropos and God of the Machine are on about poetry workshops. I can say from experience that not one in a hundred works the way Aaron Haspel (and I, largely) would want them to work. The sacred texts of the poetry workshop as actually taught in America are Richard Hugo's The Triggering Town, Peter Elbow's Writing Without Teachers and William Stafford's Writing the Australian Crawl. The best you can say about any of these books is that they are dangerous in the wrong hands. Elbow's and Hugo's books have a certain amount of value, like Radium, and should be treated accordingly. (Nate describes getting some genuine use from Peter Elbow.) In my darkest moments I suspect Stafford's Australian Crawl of deliberate sabotage - attempting to make it as unlikely as possible that potential competitors would ever be able to produce work as good as Stafford's own best poems.

All three books are very seventies, deeply concerned with silencing your inner editor during composition, less concerned with making sure you understand that you have to turn the thing back on at some point, preferably before subjecting other human beings to what you've written. (The better workshops choose Donald Hall's Poetry and Ambition. This is a book to love. Favorite passage? Where Hall allows that perhaps silent reading of poems is not an unalloyed evil.)

Outside grad school, workshop culture performs a vulgarly religious function. It exists to bring comfort and meaning to middle class lives. The plain rooms in which workshops take place recall the austerity of the Quaker Meeting Hall, and it construes the vocation of poetry so as to provide maximum solace. Find your inner voice. (You have one. You're special.) Focus on the details of your life. (Your life is meaningful!) As a member, by the skin of my teeth, of the middle class, I don't disdain its comfort or meaning. But I could not love them half so much loved I not poetry more.

I completely agree that poetry can be taught. But as Gandhi said of Western Civilization, that would be a change.

There and Back Again - Just follow the directions. (Via Amygdala.)

Cutoff Man - Andrew Chamberlain's intellectual scalping odyssey continues:

So contrary to my initial thinking, it looks like we can make a strong case for repeal of anti-scalping laws after all. Somehow, I knew the argument would lead here, given enough time...

It is, no lie, cool that Andrew is this intellectually supple. He is a blogger to keep your eye on. (The question was always less Do venues have good reasons to oppose scalping than Why should this particular contractual issue be a matter for the criminal rather than the civil law?)

Now is surely the time to explain why he's better than Paul Krugman, as I promised to do days ago. Both of them tried to explain the reasons venues have not themselves "scalped," though a few are now moving in that direction. But Krugman's construction reveals a surprisingly deep error for an eminent economist. Krugman:

Ticket scalping is nothing new, though it continues to pose something of an economic puzzle. The fact is that there are a number of public events--most notably sports, but also concerts, plays, museum shows, etc.--for which tickets are consistently sold below the price that would limit demand to the available supply. Exactly why the owners of stadiums and theaters do this is a matter of some dispute. One theory (due to Chicago economist Gary Becker) is that tickets are underpriced because those who sell them believe that it is crucial to their image to have sold-out houses. Beyond this, many stadium and theater owners seem to believe that as an overall marketing strategy it is important that access to their most popular events be available to enthusiasts at moderate prices. For example, why doesn't George Lucas allow theaters to offer special preview showings of The Phantom Menace at astronomical (galactic?) prices, when surely they could find tens or even hundreds of thousands of people able and willing to pay? Presumably because so blatant a statement that wealth hath its privileges would alienate the tens of millions of nonwealthy moviegoers he counts on to turn the film into a megahit. Whatever the precise reasoning, what is clear is that when it comes to big games and big shows, private sector entrepreneurs themselves often feel that it is a bad idea to let market forces rule.

Chamberlain:

The question is, "why don't box offices just raise ticket prices, still sell out events, and increase profits"?

Well, there are good economic reasons firms systematically underprice tickets, and then try to prevent resale. Here are three:

1) Underpricing tickets generates "excess demand" for events. This leads to queues for tickets, vigorous word of mouth discussion, and a mentality of scarcity. This is a form of cheap advertising. And by cutting marketing costs, it may be consistent with profit maximization.

2) This explanation comes from economist Steven Landsburg. He argues lower ticket prices get fans in the door, and then leave them with more cash to spend on things like hot dogs, beer and t-shirts once inside. Instead of maximizing ticket revenue, teams jointly maximize profits from tickets plus food and memorabilia. And since these things are complimentary goods, that makes the most money.

3) The value to consumers of events like concerts and baseball games depends partly on how many other people are there. Economists call this the "bandwagon effect". Full games and shows are more fun than empty ones. So teams want to fill the seats, and they price below equilibrium levels to do that. If they allowed ticket reselling, it's possible not all seats would be sold, reducing the value of the event overall, possibly reducing demand for future events, and resulting in lost food and memorabilia sales (see "appendix" below).

What's the big difference between the two passages, other than the fact that Andrew comes up with more plausible reasons than the paid columnist? Unaccountably, Krugman imagines that "market forces" and an aversion to "so blatant a statement that wealth hath its privileges [as to] alienate the tens of millions of nonwealthy moviegoers he counts on to turn the film into a megahit" are somehow different things - that a venue's aversion to alienating its audience is not also a market force.

To be sure, Krugman later elaborates on his distinction - "Well, the people who run the box office are attempting to pursue social goals--albeit in the ultimate name of profit--which require that tickets go not only to those who can afford to pay a lot but also to those who really care and are willing to book early and/or stand in line." and "And so there is a running conflict between the long-run thinking represented by the box offices and the short-run market forces represented by scalpers--a conflict that seems increasingly to be running in the scalpers' favor." But the overall impression is that, in Krugman's mind, "short-run market forces" is practically a redundancy, and that longer-term thinking is somehow not economic. Odd. Or maybe, given Krugman's politics, not.

PC and Neo-PC, Again - Atrios responds to my connection of him, Taranto and Easterbrook from Friday. Worth reading. I agree with him that identity politics is, among other things, a response to constructions dominant groups place on marginalized ones. But I don't think that's all identity politics is, and I think it tends to be a self-destructive strategy. Crucially, identity politics is a way for a sub-group elite to attain and maintain status and power within the sub-group. Getting to make the rules on just who is an Uncle Tom or self-hating Jew is power, and not always, or even, I would argue, usually, constructive power. There's a huge difference between "We're here, we're queer, get used to it" and "Real gays don't [X]."

Identity politics can also be a response to constructions dominant groups remove from marginalized ones, and in that mode is reactionary. I'm not for a moment going to argue that racism, antisemitism, the hatred of gays and other familiar prejudices are "things of the past." But the country has experienced genuine liberalization on all these fronts over the last half century. That leads to assimilation anxiety which leads to identity politics. Again, this is only one of the drivers of the phenomenon, but it is such a driver.

A final, unironic note: I admire Atrios's consistency. I think he's too free with the charge of antisemitism in Easterbrook's case (he does use the term), but I think he's often too free with the charge of racism too. But he stands in stark contrast to both the Sharptonite left, which sees no evil when it comes to Jew-hatred, and has even fostered such, and the "neo-PC" of the uberhawks, those neoconservatives, neolibertarians and neoliberals, Jewish and Gentile, who were in the forefront of the reaction against "political correctness" but replicate its tropes freely for the sake of smearing opponents of their desired wars.

Tonight's Debate - Firing General Boykin for his religiously-based statements would be to apply an unconstitutional religious test for public office. Discuss.

"Progress"ive Thinking - By the logic of Flypaper Theory, the lesson of the weekend's hallmarks of progress is clear: we must keep Paul Wolfowitz in Iraq. He sure does seem to draw flies. I can't imagine what moral case the hawks would make against the direction. If it's okay to troll public servants whose names you don't know before the Islamofascist hordes, there can be no reason not to do the same with public servants whose names you do know. The utilitarian case is surely greater - your Al Qaeda operative, Ba'athist holdout or rejectionist deadender fly of your choice has to get a lot more excited about the possibility of taking out an Undersecretary of Defense than some Spec IV Guardsman who never appeared on any panel at an AEI Symposium. I didn't want to put any of our troops in the way of this particular harm, so I have no reason to put the Undersecretary there either, nor to suggest that, should he be called upon to make the ultimate sacrifice in the War Against Terror, we should go to our bench, starting with Dick Cheney, nor to speculate on the "stickiness quotient" of moving General Boykin's headquarters to the Al Rasheed. But that's why you can't have us peaceniks setting policy: we lack the ruthlessness to wage these Savage Wars of Peace like they need waging.

Weekly Fitness Blog Item - 161 pounds, 32.5" waist. The weight is a new low, but I no longer have a weight goal as such. At this point it's all about the buns of steel and the six-pack abs. Getting there means losing some remaining fat, but I'd be hard-pressed to put a pounds figure on that. The other goals are health-related - resting pulse, blood pressure and cholesterol and the only one of those I can get my own metrics on is pulse rate.

This was a week of much cake (latebreaking birthday celebrations), and a lavish and tasty spread at the inaugural party for my brother-in-law's new jewelry store in Sterling. (He does wonderful custom work and now is the time to get your Holiday orders in. And yes, if you mention Unqualified Offerings, I will get a small cut.) It was also blogarama week, so there's something of an "after picture" available from Julian Sanchez. It's not full-figure, but faces don't lie. (I'm the one who is not Eve Tushnet, in the grey polo shirt.)

Michael Fumento has a column in the Washington Times from last week attacking the South Beach Diet, which he nevertheless allows is

superior to Atkins in two ways. First, it encourages consumption of healthier unsaturated fats, while saturated fats like lard and those in bacon are emblematic of Atkins.

Second, while the "South Beach" allows carbohydrates, it promotes higher-fiber ones. Fiber is good for overall health. Further, by adding noncaloric bulk to food, it can aid weight control. But "South Beach" still can't be called a high-fiber diet since it discourages carbohydrate consumption.

This is just ridiculous, given how little fiber there actually is in the processed starches and sugars that Atkins and South Beach prohibit. I should note that your Talking Dog has not had much success with South Beach. Mrs. Offering is just starting it, and I'll provide progress reports.

Speaking of progress reports, Bruce Baugh continues to lose and explains how it's done:

I've made a good start on breaking a habit I know is trouble: of indulging in junk food when I'm particularly upset or depressed, the old "comfort food" trap. I'm building up a little shelf of things that satisfy the craving for something sweet and yummy without busting the diet too badly and that I don't normally eat, so that they retain their specialness. I realize this isn't rocket science, but there's a difference between knowing it needs doing and actually doing it [ . . . ]

Jeremy Scharlack is not dead, nor has he fallen off the fitness wagon. Jeremy, we salute you.

Avram Grumer is 11 weeks into Body-for-Life. I think I officially count as a BFL dropout now, and I'm still transitioning to whatever workout routine I'll settle on next. Probably Heavyhands again for awhile. I finally dragged my lazy butt out to the park this morning for a half-hour session with the five-pound weights, but it was a ragged one, and after three weeks of minimal weight training and only a few miles of walking per week, my resting pulse is back up near 60.

MT Guru Wanted - I'm implementing a very simple category system for UO in Movable Type. Still to do is, ideally, assign 2500+ messages to the "Main" category. I really, really, really do not want to do this one at a time. If anyone knows a way to automate this, I'd greatly appreciate learning it.

Shorter Matthew Yglesias (Sorry, Matt. I just can't resist.)

The most successful liberal programs give government money to people who don't need it. Liberals need to keep that up.

Better Living Through Libertarianism - Shit! Julian got mugged last night. Bad enough that: a) anyone should get mugged; b) someone I like so much should get mugged; but, a buddy should get mugged like the day after I saw him.

But what's interesting is, believe it or not, what the whole thing says about rational calculation and utility maximizing. At least, that's Julian's story. Your must-read blog post of the weekend.

There and Back Again - Leon Sparx backpacked into and through Baghdad and back to Brooklyn over the summer. His journals and photos are worth a look.

Look Over There! - Dan Scheltema's Dislogue has moved.

Faith, Hope and Above All Charity - The fine Canadian blogger Kevin Michael Grace of the Ambler is in serious financial straits. He has a Paypal button and would be grateful for any help readers choose to provide. Jeremy Lott has more.

Funny Money - Boy, if people read more than the headlines, they'd find considerable amusement value.

Headline: Donors Promise Iraq $33 Billion, Smashing Expectations

Paragraph six:

The highest estimate for pledges from non-U.S. donors came from the Iraqis themselves. Planning Minister Mahdi Hafez told reporters they had matched Washington's promise of $20 billion.

So, in a heartwarming outburst of internationalism, Iraq - donates $20 billion to . . . Iraq.

1) I'm really glad my own CFO isn't in charge of this project, because I'd have a damned hard time convincing him to book Iraq's contribution to . . . Iraq to the Donation account.

2) For some reason I'm flashing back to the one time I helped man the phone bank for the local PBS station pledge drive. During our brief training session, the producers warned us that sometimes we would pick up the phone to find there was no one there. We were supposed to chatter into the dead air as if we had a live caller. These dummy calls were pump primers, made on the theory that real callers would feel more comfortable calling in if they felt others were doing it too.

Strange the things that go through one's mind.

(Link via the Politburo Diktat, who expresses a certain confusion at the fact that one AP headline reports "33 billion" while another AP story reports 13 billion. I respectfully suggest that subtracting 20 from 33 will clear up much mystery.)

Oh by the way, from the first story linked: "EU External Affairs Commissioner Chris Patten cautioned that past experience had shown there was often a huge lag between promises and delivery of aid." But on the bright side:

Pledges piled up from poorer nations too, with Vietnam offering $500,000 worth of rice and Sri Lanka 100 tons of tea.

Will Wonders Never Cease - I actually agree with James Taranto. Mostly:

Well, allow us to explain. Easterbrook's essay was an expression not of anti-Semitism but of a lesser, though still insidious, form of prejudice. Call it liberal condescension. This sentence from his apology reveals all: "How, I wondered, could anyone Jewish--members of a group who suffered the worst act of violence in all history, and who suffer today, in Israel, intolerable violence--seek profit from a movie that glamorizes violence as cool fun?"

"Members of a group": This is the language of liberal identity politics. And note that this is a philo-Semitic prejudice, not an anti-Semitic one. Easterbrook's premise is that the suffering of the Jewish people ennobles Jewish individuals--or should--even if those individuals have not themselves suffered. Thus he presumes to hold Jews to a higher moral standard by virtue of their Jewishness--though in fact all he's doing is asking them to agree with his highly debatable opinion (does it really make any sense to liken stylized Hollywood violence to the Holocaust?).

Ideologically, Easterbrook's earnest criticism of Jewish studio executives is of a piece with Maureen Dowd's racist rant against Clarence Thomas. Because Thomas is black, Dowd, like other liberals, expects him to conform to liberal orthodoxy and thus treats his conservatism as a far greater offense than that of, say, Antonin Scalia.

"Racist rant" is inflammatory, but the Clarence Thomas comparison seems apposite. (I should note that eventheliberal Atrios rebuked Easterbrook for placing group duties on individuals. That means Taranto is too hard on liberals as a class, and that Atrios and Taranto are secret soul mates.)

What the hell was Easterbrook trying to say? In outline: Movie violence causes terrorism. Jews disproportionately suffer from terrorism. Two Jewish executive responsible for a particular violent movie are acting against their (group) self-interest by releasing a violent movie for the sake of profit. I don't want you to think I think they worship money because they are Jews - they are no worse than other Hollywood executives in that regard. BUT THEY SHOULD BE BETTER.

This is a really dumb argument, but it's not written out of loathing for the Jews, and it does not ascribe loathsome qualities to Jews qua Jews. (It's pretty hard on Muslim filmgoers, though.) It's not hate speech, but it's patronizing as hell, and as sloppily written as it has been sloppily read.

Better Experienced Over the Internet - I was vaguely aware that Jewsweek was out there, but it turns out to be quite the lively site. But um, guys, spellcheck is not enough:

The show, which is currently being taped, will air in six half-hour installments early next year. We're waiting with baited breath.

(My emphasis.)

From the same roundup, a possible blogger triumphalism occasion:

The House of Representatives voted to mark the 350th anniversary of the arrival of Jews in North America, establishing a "Jewish History Month" next year to mark Jewish contributions to US cultural, economic and civic life.

No word yet whether Jonathan "HeadHeeb" Edelstein will be invited to the White House for the signing ceremony. BUT HE SHOULD BE.

It Pays to Increase Your Word Power - Enthymeme is the word of the day, courtesy of the permalinkless Zizka, who suggests

Recent claims that Bush never actually said that Iraq had WMD, or that Saddam was allied to al Qaeda, or that the Iraqi threat was imminent, actually make Bush look worse. His careful avoidance of the clincher sentences makes it very likely that he knew that they weren't true. An enormous swarm of administration statements convinced the American public of several untrue propositions, while at the same time carefully avoiding legal liability.

Even the Liberal Matthew Yglesias came to the Blogarama on Kalorama last night, braving a CATO-heavy crowd and really livening up the evening. (Julian has pictures) In addition to the usual suspects, I got to meet Agitator Man Group member Brooke Oberwetter and Brendan Huhn of the newish Human Liberty. Andrew Chamberlain of Ideashop was there, and I wish I had properly recalled that he was the author of an excellent consideration of scalping that I still intend to get around to comparing favorably to a similar article by Paul Krugman.

The atmosphere was convivial, but the attendees did not shy from controversy.

Glen Engel-Cox: Thor, of course. Thor is a god! That's easy.

Eve Tushnet: The Hulk. I hope the Hulk would win. I don't like Thor and I do like the Hulk. I identify with him.

(Let the record show that this was a serial argument. Eve didn't arrive until Glen had left. Which reminds me, Radley Balko and Gene Healy averred that they often skip the comics posts. I'm sure Dirk Deppey often checks in only to see that, Damn, just more bitching about politics again. And poor Sean Collins!)

It got so late, particularly for a middle-aged man with a day job, that I stupidly confused "an individual rights argument" with "an equal protection argument" while Eve and I were having a full and frank exchange of views on - what else? - gay marriage. But it was a ton of fun. I got some leads on paid writing jobs, we all sang a rousing chorus of the Dean Campaign official song (kidding!) and, eventually, most everyone but Matt, Missy, Andrew and a few die-hards left. But we'll be back! Oh yes! We WILL be back!

Stop Me Before I Blitz Again! - Football Outsiders is having a Tuesday Morning Quarterback homage contest. (Link via Instapundit.)

In a Shocking Lapse of Narcissism I forgot to wish myself a Happy Blogiversary last night while writing about other stuff. Unqualified Offerings is now two years old. I am pleased to see that in a mere two years, our leaders have begun pretty much running the world the way I want. (Uh, Jim? You're confusing yourself with Steven Den Beste. Oops! I hate it when that happens!)

Two Years Ago in Unqualified Offerings: Even this war, begun for the least assailable of reasons (the bastards killed thousands of us in our own country), has led to an awful "antiterrorism" bill, a stupid new government agency, budgetary profligacy and at least a temporary increase in the prestige of the very folks who failed to protect 6,000 people from deadly force.

One Year Ago in Unqualified Offerings: There are two arguments against [releasing the Muhammad/Malvo extortion letter]. First, that the information might panic people. Folks, you have no idea what panic is until you convince an entire metropolitan area that you're keeping stuff that might save lives secret from them. Second, that doing so might make the sniper mad, that his demands include keeping his communications confidential.

Well what is he going to do, shoot somebody?

EventualPundit - By the time I get around to writing about the Gregg Easterbrook situation people will have forgotten that it ever happened, but I'm tired now, and I've got gaming prep to do. Will I get to it before Thursday's Blogarama on Kalorama? I don't know. Will I have written responses to Eve's most recent same-sex marriage arguments before I see her at said Blogarama? I sincerely doubt it. Do I think that My Stupid Dog's critiques of SSM opposition that he wrote in series for Marriage Protection Week last week are well worth reading if occasionally a little glib? Yes. Will Hostmatters continue to suffer DOS attacks like it has every day this week, to the point where it hardly matters if I post anything or not? Maybe.

Mail Call: Sympathy for the Devil - Reader Chris Borthwick writes

I know it’s now taken as a given that Stalin paused at the Vistula only to let the Germans wipe out the Polish resistance, but there is a purely military case that could be and has been made for it on the groiunds that his forces were overextended and needed to let supplies catch up – a case that I was more skeptical about before I learned that Eisenhower didn’t want to take Paris, would have let the Nazis burn it down if De Gaulle hadn’t forestalled him by a sudden dash, and felt afterwards that it had delayed the end of the war (and thereby caused the deaths of a large number of people, including Jews and Poles, though I’m not saying Eisenhower himself saw this as primary) by forcing on him the responsibility of supplying a large number of people who weren’t his army with food and fuel.

Interesting.

The Pure Thing - The signal feature of antisemitism as a bigotry is how eerily it mixes admiration with loathing. People who hate blacks or the Irish don't also profess wonderment at Black and Irish achievement. Bostonians wanted to keep dogs and Irish out of their offices and schools, but not because they feared dogs and Irish would "take over." No Klansman ever despised blacks because he thought them too "cunning." The despisers of Hispanics don't imagine that the mestizo constitute a master race. The wrinkle of admiring people you despise, and despising them substantially because of what you take to be their greatness, is known primarily among the haters of Jews (and also anti-Asians).

For this reason, I was actually a little nervous about participating in Jonathan Edelstein's Arrival Day blogburst last month. I was honored to be invited, and figure that, as an American, I have profited from Jewish-American culture in countless ways. But participating meant writing as a Gentile about American Jews as a group. I chose a subject dear to my heart, the comic book industry, and the outsized contribution of American Jews to its flourishing. This was extremely well-trod ground, covered many times by both Jewish and non-Jewish historians. It's a story well worth telling. But in the back of my mind I couldn't help wondering where the line lay between saying "American Jews made an outsized contribution to the comic book industry" and "Comic books were a Jewish plot." Substitute "Hollywood" for comic books in the foregoing if the problem isn't clear.

I decided that it came down to the intent of the speaker. Which brings us to the already famous speech to the Organization of the Islamic Conference by Malaysian Prime Minister Datuk Seri Dr Mahathir Mohamad last week. His defenders, quoted prominently (of course) in the Malaysia Straits-Times, insist that his remarks about how, oh, Jews control the world by proxy, were taken out of context. This seemed unlikely, but since I came within half a blog item of taking Gregg Easterbrook's remarks out of context Sunday night (a matter for another post), I figured I would read the full speech just to be on the safe side.

Eeuww!

The absolute kindest construction you could put on Mahathir's speech is this: whoever leads the OIC is going to be someone who believes Jews control the world by proxy; better an antisemite who insists that terrorism is self-defeating than one who waves the pom-poms for martyrdom. But I don't think that view survives contact with the speech itself.

Mahathir's speech follows this trajectory: First he says that the Muslim peoples and nations are oppressed. Next he explains the internal reasons for the parlous state of the Ummah - essentially, they are bad Muslims. The peoples, sects and leaders squabble among themselves, and since the late Middle Ages reinterpretation of the Quranic injunction to "Read" as meaning to study religious texts to the exclusion of other fields, Muslim science, arts and liberal arts have undergone a long decline. Mahathir makes clear that the biggest problem with the collapse of learning and research is that the nations of the Ummah cannot produce their own weapons. There are also Muslims who counsel that oppression in this world is simply the will of Allah, that the rewards come in the next one.

There is a feeling of hopelessness among the Muslim countries and their people. They feel that they can do nothing right. They believe that things can only get worse. The Muslims will forever be oppressed and dominated by the Europeans and the Jews. They will forever be poor, backward and weak. Some believe, as I have said, this is the Will of Allah, that the proper state of the Muslims is to be poor and oppressed in this world.

So far, "the Jews" are twinned with the equally collective "Europeans" as oppressors of the Ummah, part of an amorphous West that trods on the Muslim face. The Jews may be miserable, but they have company. That changes within a paragraph:

But is it true that we should do and can do nothing for ourselves? Is it true that 1.3 billion people can exert no power to save themselves from the humiliation and oppression inflicted upon them by a much smaller enemy? Can they only lash back blindly in anger? Is there no other way than to ask our young people to blow themselves up and kill people and invite the massacre of more of our own people? It cannot be that there is no other way. 1.3 billion Muslims cannot be defeated by a few million Jews. There must be a way. And we can only find a way if we stop to think, to assess our weaknesses and our strength, to plan, to strategise and then to counter attack.

If you add up all the Europeans, Jews and Americans, you surely don't come up with a "much smaller enemy" than 1.3 billion people. Mahathir's defenders insist that we look at the context of his remarks on the Jews. The context is clear: Mahathir's entire speech is about what "1.3 billion Muslims" need to do to triumph over "a few million Jews."

Okay, which Jews? Almost all of them:

We are actually very strong. 1.3 billion people cannot be simply wiped out. The Europeans killed six million Jews out of 12 million. But today the Jews rule this world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them.

In context, this is no better than out of context. The notion that "the Jews rule the world by proxy" is ridiculous, of course. What's classically antisemitic about Mahathir's speech is that familiar combination of admiration and loathing. In context Mahathir is saying, "We must be clever, like the Jews." Not just so they don't get all the Nobel Prizes and violin chairs in the Israeli Philharmonic, but so we can beat them.

We also know that not all non-Muslims are against us. Some are welldisposed towards us. Some even see our enemies as their enemies. Even among the Jews there are many who do not approve of what the Israelis are doing.

We must not antagonise everyone. We must win their hearts and minds. We must win them to our side not by begging for help from them but by the honourable way that we struggle to help ourselves.

Dude, even among the Israeli Jews there are many who do not approve of what the Israelis are doing. I don't approve of what the Israelis are doing. But if you want to "not antagonize" me, you might try not peddling essentialist paranoid fantasias about cunning Jews bestriding the world like a Colossus.

The enemy will probably welcome these proposals and we will conclude that the promoters are working for the enemy. But think. We are up against a people who think. They survived 2,000 years of pogroms not by hitting back, but by thinking.

They invented and successfully promoted Socialism, Communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong, so they may enjoy equal rights with others. With these they have now gained control of the most powerful countries and they, this tiny community, have become a world power. We cannot fight them through brawn alone. We must use our brains also.

Here's some more context. Israelis weren't around to invent all those dubious things. There's something drolly subjunctive, in a certain frame of mind, about "so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong." (I realize I am dealing with a translated text. I'm going with the Straits-Times version on the theory that it counts as the most authoritative English translation.) Again, more admiration mixed with loathing.

Speaking of context, democracy is not something Mahathir is big on. Earlier in the speech, he identifies it as a source of the Ummah's schisms:

Apart from the new nation-states we also accepted the Western democratic system. This also divided us because of the political parties and groups that we form, some of which claim Islam for themselves, reject the Islam of other parties and refuse to accept the results of the practice of democracy if they fail to gain power for themselves. They resort to violence, thus destabilising and weakening Muslim countries.

So what do we have here? A powerful man, leader of one of the world's richer nations, before an audience of other powerful men - rulers of countries - insisting on the need for "unity," which, oh coincidence! would increase the power of the organization before which he is speaking, in the name of the struggle of "1.3 billion people" against "a few million" other people. A collectivist call to a collectivist struggle against a collectivist enemy. That, loyal readers, is your context. Here is not your context:

o A distinction between the State of Israel and the Jewish people;
o A suggestion that the very obsession of "1.3 billion people" with "a few million" other people is self-defeating and absurd;
o Any awareness that American policy is driven not by powerful Jews but by powerful Christians (as Justin Raimondo and other American critics of Israel have noted time and again);
o Any call to liberalism as such; Mahathir is actually calling for a program of corporatist modernization of the Ummah - that is, his program is fascist in the truest sense;
o code words!

The Islamic world can do a lot better than Mahathir and the self-interested leaders who praised his speech, and I hope it does.

Political Tourists - A couple of weeks back I wrote about my bemusement at being characterized as a "lefty blogger" by William Sjostrom. One of his commenters wrote

My reading elsewhere of Henley and 'Hesiod' (previous posts) is that they are completely untrustworthy. They take a 'soviet' view of the USA and world events.

For my part this is true, in the sense of having a view that the US is becoming ever more 'soviet.' Oh, not in a Stalin way or even a Leninesque one. I expect us rather to skip straight on to the Brezhnev Era, or maybe the glorious days of Gorbyism. Which brings us back to this site's typical preoccupations, or at least it will in a minute.

One of the classic works of conservative thought was Paul Hollander's Political Pilgrims, a history of idiot-left enthusiasm for Communist regimes running from John Reed and Paul Robeson through the Sandalistas of the 1980s. I believe it was in that book (I don't own a copy), in which Hollander noted just how easily satisfied the "pilgrims" were. Western enthusiasts went to Soviet Russia, or Mao's China, or Castro's Cuba, and reported back rapturously of the wonders they had seen: factories! schools! hospitals! What a bold future these progressives were building in their countries!

Gosh, the pilgrim's critics pointed out. Factories. Schools. Hospitals. We have those here. Even during the Depression we had factories, schools and hospitals. Imagine swooning over instances of what are, come down to it, mere base-level "achievements" of all but the most pathetic of countries. And the critics were right. That their heirs on the right now breathlessly report the US-given miracle that under the Iraqi Occupation Authority, Iraqi children are going to school, doctors are making rounds in Iraqi hospitals and Iraqi shopkeepers are transacting business, tells us a great deal about the collapse of American conservatism. Time was they knew better than to consider this kind of thing bragging material. Do they want a cookie?

(Via Gospodin Hesiod, Newsweek notes that the schools and hospitals were open last May. As for the shops, they've been open for five-thousand years now in that area.)

(P.S. Yes, I know that Hollander is alive, supported the Iraq War and considered war skepticism "anti-American." I never said the collapse of contemporary conservatism wasn't total.)

Happy Birthday to Kevin Drum, who shares October 19 with me. The coincidence inspired an amusing aside on astrology by Patrick Nielsen Hayden, which reminded me of my own standard response when people want to know my "sign":

You tell me.

You know, if astrology were real, "What's your sign?" would count as an extremely nosy question to ask a stranger. Since the people who ask it tend to be the ones who think it's real, it's a nosy question anyway.

Four More Years - The head of Third Corps says US troops may stay in Iraq until 2006. The usual multipliers apply.

But That's What I Was Afraid Of Dept. - Oh joy:

In an eight-hour visit, Mr. Bush for the first time drew explicit comparisons between the transition he is seeking in Iraq and the rough road to democracy that the Philippines traveled from the time the United States seized it from Spain in 1898 to the present day.

"Some say the culture of the Middle East will not sustain the institutions of democracy," Mr. Bush said, taking on the critics of his oft-stated goal to use Iraq as a laboratory for spreading democratic institutions in the Middle East. "The same doubts were once expressed about the culture of Asia. Those doubts were proven wrong nearly six decades ago."

While the administration often speaks of the occupations of Japan and Germany after World War II as rough models for the effort to rebuild Iraq, Mr. Bush used the visit here to make a less explicit analogy to the American administration of the Philippines, which also led to the formation of a democracy. But the comparison has less power to reassure, given that the Philippine government did not gain full autonomy for five decades.

And before that there were the concentration camps, the 200,000 civilian dead in the 1899-1902 insurrection - all the stuff Max Boot actually likes.

Curiously, Bush's speech amounts to a claim that the Philippines became a democracy "nearly six decades ago." This is true as far as it goes, which is from the mid-forties through the late 1960s, when the Philippines was merely an ordinarily corrupt client state. Then almost two decades of Ferdinand and Imelda. But we eventually let Marcos fall to the People Power rebellion, which was wise of us, though many hawks at the time considered it feckless and likely to embolden our enemies.

We Get Letters - Steve Cook e-mails

I wouldn't have pegged you for an "Ilsa, She-Wolf of the S.S." fan.

Hey, I'm not! I haven't even seen the movie. I just like Chris Puzak's description. Steve also tips me to a 1999 Paul Krugman article for Slate on ticket scalping that we'll come back to soon.

Loyal Reader Matt reminds me that I should link to a surprisingly conservative (in the true sense of the word) article by Meline Toumani on Alternet, The Truth About Our Good Intentions. This is a top-notch piece of work:

What can we, in America, know of how it feels to be a citizen of any other country in the world?

We do not have brigades of well-meaning volunteers from, say, the Netherlands arriving in our neighborhoods with bold promises of teaching us how to run our schools. We do not have representatives from Singapore engaging in optimistic efforts to reform our legislature, or teams from France trying to develop our media. Scruffy Swedish twenty-somethings, fresh from college, do not take up residence in our midst and teach us about the importance of government-sponsored healthcare.

Though we pride ourselves on traveling the world to help solve its problems – charity or bust – we do not know how it feels to be always on the worse end of the expression, "It is better to give than to receive."

The article includes a side trip into recent Iraqi polling data, but to its larger point, Iraq is simply the latest particular: "the U.S. – and especially our current administration – has a terribly difficult time putting itself in the other man's shoes."

Let's be clear what Toumani is not saying, and what I'm not saying. That "the other man" is better, nobler, wiser, even necessarily correct on the merits in any particular case where he disagrees with us. No, what I'm saying, and what I think Toumani is saying, is simply that the other man exists and is not us. Toumani continues:

. . . we just keep on shaking our heads at the ungrateful beggar who doesn't appreciate all we've done for him, never seeing him as the angry man whose Hobson's choice is between starving and humiliation.

Toumani implicitly places almost all the blame for this on the United States. I think s/he would do well to recognize the double-bind that the "international community" has often placed on us, though. The hawks are not incorrect when they note that the United States gets criticised for not intervening where it doesn't intervene (there are a few such places), and intervening where it does. Pick a crisis point and there is at least one faction clamoring for American assistance and some combination of goodhearted and venal elites back here determined to give it to them.

Jonathan Pearse wrote in about last week's item on orchard-flattening and the partial restoration of the Shatt-al-Arab marshes in southeastern Iraq:

Jim, while you make a fair point about the marshes and efforts to restore them, it seems to me that it is precisely because George Bush snr and his then colleagues encouraged the Shiites to rebel without offering backup, and hence leaving them to twist in the wind, that we owed them and their brethren an obligation to put that aright. It strikes me that Bush snr's abandonment of the Shiites and Kurds was a shocking policy, a shameful one, and that the original coalition powers of Gulf War I had a moral responsibility to try and fix the problem. Whether that problem has been fixed is, of course, another matter. Time no doubt will tell.

And by the way, that has nothing to do with 9/11, pre-emption and the rest. It is, if you like, almost a Nozickian policy of "rectifying an injustice," in this case, to a group of people we (I'll include Britain in that) encouraged to act and then abandoned.

Let's state right out that this is the best of hawkish arguments, and the most compelling. There is no question that, whether they are properly grateful to the US and Britain or not, the Marsh Arabs are better off with Saddam out of power. I think your better class of hawks brought up the marsh arabs not out of opportunism but sincere shame at the events of 1991. Still.

Accept for the sake of argument that there was any humanitarian motive behind the conquest of Iraq, and any desire to do right be people the US had used and abandoned. Accept for the sake of plain truth that Saddam Hussein was a bad actor who richly deserved to lose his loathsome authority. Accept all that, and the actual humanitarian principle the US has established is simply: We decide. We decide whose depredations against "his own people" matter, and when. We decide who gets to engage in collective punishment and who doesn't, who has to contemplate "power sharing" with their rebels, and who gets to bomb their rebels into gravy.

The Bush I regime's policy toward the Marsh Arabs was as feckless as the hawks say it was. If you were going to back off supporting a Shi'ite revolt if the Saudis start worrying about how it will help Iran, then maybe you should have asked the Saudis before encouraging people to rise up and be slaughtered. If you're going to let Saudi Arabia dictate policy for you, don't dilly-dally about it. (Essay topic: The US incitement and abandonment of the Marsh Arabs in 1991 is not morally equivalent to the Soviets pause across the Vistula while Germany liquidated the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising because . . . ? Show your work.) You may think the Clinton Administration's Iraq policy feckless too. I'd call it, with its 14,000 sorties a year over "no fly zones" we pulled out of our fictive ass deeply cynical, but stick with feckless if you prefer.

Do you really think that people you consider "feckless" will not one day be running American policy again, Britain and the US being democracies? Have you noticed all the places (*koffkoff* Khazakhstan *koffkoff*) where current policy toward your non-humanitarian rulers looks pretty feckless too, even though US policy is supposedly being run by the morally-serious, spiny regime of your dreams?

We decide is our real message and the one the world perversely declines to rally 'round.

Weekly Fitness Blog Item - 163 pounds (again); waist 32 and a quarter inches (roughly). Today's measurements double as 43rd Birthday figures. I'll take 'em. Down 53 pounds since Thanksgiving Day last year and probably about 60 pounds since my 42nd birthday, though I was too afraid to weigh myself at that time. My waist is easily 10 inches less than last year.

This was a good week for fitness mail and fitness links. Last week's report on a small, controlled study comparing low-carbohydrate and high-carbohydrate diets sparked considerable interest.

Reader Mike Wells notes

Regarding yesterday's fitness blog topic, I just had to point this out:

"The low-carb meals were 5 percent carbohydrate, 15 percent protein and 65 percent fat."

Did you notice that that adds up to 85%? What do you suppose the rest was?

That puzzled me too. I wondered if the rest was dietary fiber, which doesn't count as a "net carb" in Atkins-like diets. (Fiber is esteemed.) But that would be as much as 300 calories in fiber a day, which would be upwards of 80 grams of the stuff per day. At that rate, your body would actually start pooping out meals you hadn't even eaten yet. Mike's follow-up theory: "I figure they must have been eating the place settings."

One reader wrote that

What convinced me to take my first Atkins plunge was my disastrous experience w/a rice diet.

Why a rice diet? Because it's easy. You measure the rice out in the morning (one cup=784 calories), cook it, and eat that cup of rice throughout the day. No muss no fuss. Maybe I did a heaper, getting me up to 1000 cals p/d, still not a lot.

I did it for a week.

I didn't lose one pound. Not one pound. Zippo.

That sounds a starvation ration, so the body would tend to shut down. What surprises me is that there wasn't even the water-weight loss that accompanies the beginning of many diets. People deprecate that initial flush, but it provides immediate positive feedback from the scale, and in my case at least, I felt less bloated (thinner) right away.

That problem of the body ratcheting the metabolism down if your caloric intake drops too low is key, and related to our first In Other Fitness Blogs Item . . .

Even the liberal Atrios was moved to comment on one of the quotes in the report on what we'll call the "Restaurant Study" (discussed last week). Atrios zeroes in on a curious quote from a skeptical nutritionist:

"It doesn't make sense, does it?" said Barbara Rolls of Pennsylvania State University. "It violates the laws of thermodynamics. No one has ever found any miraculous metabolic effects."

and responds

Look, this doesn't violate any laws of thermodynamics. The issue is not whether a measure of energy, a calorie, is the same regardless of the form it's stored in, the question is whether or not the form it is stored in has any impact on the way your body processes it.

Right. Think about the rice diet example above. On paper, a woman whose weight is stable at 1800 calories per day and eats only 800 calories per day ought to lose two pounds of fat in a week. (1000 calories/day x 7 days / 3500 calories per pound of fat = 2 pounds.) Bodies are not on paper, though. Most of the ones facing such a deficit will find a way to reduce operating expenses, as it were, to keep as much fat as possible. As far as your body is concerned, the crops have failed and you're in danger of starving.

This is a clear instance of the supply of calories changing the use of calories. That's a metabolic effect for sure. Whether you consider it miraculous or not is between you and your pastor. We may not yet have discovered "any miraculous metabolic effects" in the other direction (where the right intake of foods convinces your body to increase operating expenses) but that doesn't mean they don't exist, for some agreed-upon value of miraculous. (They may not exist. But if the results of this study are replicable, it'll definitely be time to start looking for them.)

Alan Sullivan announces a 15-pound weight loss on Fresh Bilge. The blog, I mean. Announces on his blog a 15-pound weight loss. Not, Loses 15 pounds consuming bilge, but only bilge that hasn't sat around for awhile. Via the same item I discover Marn's Big Adventure, whose proprietess describes her weight room interactions thusly:

Fortunately, all the weightlifting guys know me fairly well now and they tend to see me as this looney tunes charmingly eccentric older woman. I am allowed a wide range of social gaffes because of my gender and advanced years. Of course, I would never take advantage of this situation for my own amusement, just to see how far I can go.

No. Not me. Not ever.

A very entertaining item. Marn says she's begun taking Creatine, which freaks her husband out. She also says that, through week one at least, Creatine doesn't seem to have produced any noteworthy difference in results.

Bruce Baugh is down another pound. This is perfectly fine progress still. Some weeks you lose more, some less, even when still very heavy.

Via All the World's a Stage, yet another quickie basal metabolism calculator from Time Magazine: Multiply your weight by 13 (15 if you are active), and if you want to lose weight subtract 250, and that should be your caloric intake. Worth noting: an extra handful of nuts or two extra servings of potato chips a day will use that 250 calories right up.

At Catallarchy.net, Jonathan Wilde designs an experiment to test whether the low-carb diets lead to greater weight loss than high-carb ones. It's a thought-experiment, and Jonathan declares that

My two posts on the Atkins Diet were made not as a search for the efficacy of the Atikins Diet, but rather to bring about discussion on the scientific method itself. I'm not primarily interested in whether or not the Atkins Diet 'works', but rather how one would go about finding out if it works.

It's a useful illumination of the deficiencies of actual diet studies.

Finally, MSNBC reports that, for the first time in years, America stopped getting fatter. The reason? Actually, the article doubts that it knows, but a drop in restaurant meals may be a factor.

Metablogging - Around and about:

From your lips to God's ears. Gary Farber wants to make me rich. I appreciate the thought nearly as much as I would appreciate the fame and fortune. Gary's item prompts a something I should mention - I would not argue that Captain America should be depicted, in comic or film, as a libertarian. Indeed, I'd like to see Steve Rogers more clearly written as a New Deal liberal, with those instincts and biases. Steve Rogers would by nature be an uber-interventionist abroad and at home, and it would be fun to write him that way.

Now, give me a crack at the Question and I'll give you the libertarian comic book of my dreams - like Ditko, only fun. None other than Franklin Harris approved my Question pitch when I shared it with him.

Cheeky, cheeky - Over at MatthewBarganier.com they're trolling for links. They're hinting broadly at some kind of quid pro quo where you link to them and at some point they favor you with an addition to their so-far non-existent blogroll. Fellas: this is what we call a faux pas.

Oh the sad state of libertarian institutional blogs. How come TAPped can run a blog with all kinds of links to liberal bloggers, and Town Hall can run a blog with all kinds of links to conservative bloggers, but Reason doesn't bother putting up a libertarian blogroll on Hit & Run and Antiwar.com, late as it is to the blogging party, wants antiwar bloggers to ask it to dance first? Has this got something to do with that Ayn Rand book on the virtue of selfishness that I never bothered to read?

Back from the big Hostmatters outage yesterday. Normal blogging resumes now.

Last Word (?) on Scalping goes to Chris Puzak. Don't miss his . . . appreciation of the sexploitation movie Ilse, She-Wolf of the SS either:

Gory scenes of torture are interspersed with gratuitous nudity and campy acting. In other words, it’s like Hogan's Heroes combined with Bob Crane’s home movies.

A Little Off the Top - All Scalping, All the Time! Kurt Hemr writes

FYI: Massachusetts law provides, "No person shall engage in the business of
reselling any ticket or tickets." Mass. Gen. Laws c. 140, sec. 185A. For a long time, the Boston police arrested anyone who tried to resell a ticket at Fenway and charged them with violating this statute, even though a 1924 court decision had held that selling a ticket for face value or less cannot be a "business of reselling." In 1999, a fan who had been arrested when he tried to sell a spare ticket at cost outside Fenway obtained an injunction from the federal court in Boston barring the police from arresting people who sell at cost or less. The upshot is that in Massachusetts, scalping -- selling at a premium over face value -- is illegal, but resale for face value is not.

Anyone want to hazard a guess where a lot of those Red Sox tickets used to end up?

Dooley writes

One more wrinkle to consider in your thoughts on ticket scalping, generally, it’s only illegal near the site of the event. Ticket brokers are quite happily marking up face value and are free and clear. The ‘loveable, loser cubs’ decided to cut out the middle man this year and open their own ticket scalping service a block from the park (see the Chicago Sun-Times).

Interestingly enough, this seems to be a fraud not on the customers (who after all are only paying what they are willing), but on the other 29 MLB clubs who get a piece of ticket sales.

I can not consider myself for or against scalping laws. I have used ticket brokers several times to attend Giant’s games, and quite willingly paid over face value for a ticket in the sun (SF in the summer don’tcha know). I would urge you to think just a bit more about the counterfeit ticket angle. You seem to assume that a policeman can tell the difference between a counterfeiter and a legitimate ticket scalper. I don’t think that’s necessarily true. The ticket brokers here just use specialized printers to print the ducats on card stock. This is easy enough to duplicate. A ticket broker moving counterfeits has an address to track back to and seek redress. A scalper is effectively anonymous leaving situations (e.g. multiple ticket holders for a single seat) that the event organizer has to make good to continue in business. I don’t know that this justifies scalping laws, but seems a lot closer to the truth than mere resentment. To paraphrase Heinlein “Never attribute to malice what mere stupidity can explain”.

It's an interesting point about ticket brokers (which are legal in Massachusetts - here's a list of them) and the problem of counterfeiting. I grant that it would be harder to catch a counterfeiter selling off the street rather than out of an office. But it's not Mission Impossible:

1. Caveat emptor certainly applies. When you decide to buy from a scalper, you are accepting a certain risk.

2. That risk can be reduced. Counterfeiters don't make money producing a couple of tickets for one event. They need to produce lots of tickets for lots of events. Unloading those tickets means being on the street, in the flow of traffic to a venue, on multiple occasions for sustained periods. Let people who buy tickets on the street trouble to remember what the person who sells them their tickets looks and sounds like. Let the police redirect the a fraction of the manpower currently going to hassling honest resellers toward investigating, arresting and prosecuting dishonest ones. You can't eliminate counterfeiting, but you can adjust the marginal risk so that selling fake tickets approaches reselling real ones in profitability terms.

What prodigies of domestic tranquility we could accomplish if our laws and enforcement of laws concentrated on the dishonest rather than the honest generally.

Fitfully Amusing but Cheap - the Wiggum or Bush Quiz from EjectBush.com. First off, I got 94% right, and I'm not a regular Simpsons watcher, so I'm not down with the Wigs. Second off, I'm not exactly easy on the President, but collections of malapropisms don't impress me. I've always suspected you could put such a list together for almost anyone who does a lot of public speaking, including extemporaneous speaking. Stick to the somewhat larger matters of fiscal incontinence, military vainglory and the metastasizing domestic "security" regime.

(Link via Using Bees to Effect Vengeance.)

People Unclear on the Concept - Today's e-mail brings the following:

I just searched in Google for pennsylvania auto insurance coverage and found www.highclearing.com ranked 32. I have a related website about Insurance - Auto that's purely informational (so I'm NOT a competitor of yours) and I'd like to link to your site.

I consider my site to be one of the best resources for this type of information. I get a decent amount of visitors to it so if I link to you, your site should get some decent traffic from it.

I only link to good quality sites... I think you'll find my site to be high quality as well. In exchange, I would ask that you also link to my site. I've already linked to you and will keep it there for a few days until I hear from you. Please let me know asap if you're interested and i'll send you my information.

Thanks!

And thanks to you, Angela Palmer! I hope your informational website is at least as useful to auto insurance purchasers as mine is. And I hope that, as you continue to develop and improve your site, you start reading the material that comes up in those Google searches you do. It provides that extra level of quality that can make your page stand out.

Of Imagination All Compact - Recently hawks and Bush Administration supporters have been playing up this Washington Post story:

'A Gift From God' Renews a Village
Iraqi Engineers Revitalize Marshes That Hussein Had Drained

While doves and administration critics have highlighted one from the Independent:

US soldiers bulldoze farmers' crops
Americans accused of brutal 'punishment' tactics against villagers, while British are condemned as too soft

In one case, we ameliorate someone else's war crime, in the other we commit our own.

Well, the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. And that's the problem: we've gone into the God business. And we expect to be loved for the giving and - not even given a pass on the taking away - no, we want the Iraqis to love us for destroying their orchards too. Nor are they supposed to remember the actual sequence of events in 1991 that culminated in Saddam's ecological pogrom - the Shi'ite revolt the US encouraged and then allowed Saddam to put down. If they note that, according to the Post article, Iraqi irrigation officials and the occupation authority have only managed to restore about 10% of the original extent of the wetlands so far, they must not connect the 90% that is still parched with US decisions a dozen years ago. They are certainly not to draw parallels between Saddam draining marshes to deprive rebels of cover and punish the locals for rebellion and the US destroying orchards to deprive rebels of cover and punish the locals for rebellion. (The orchard is a lot smaller than the marshes. We're either much nicer or just getting started.) That would be anti-American. And that's what we can't have - Iraqis looking at things like Iraqis, rather than like us.

If they can only start looking at things from our perspective, perhaps they will be gods too.

It is an unalloyed good thing that we have enabled partial restoration of the marshes. That good is embedded in many unalloyed bad things. The real problem is that we have arrogated to ourselves more power than we can possibly use wisely. It's a problem for the rest of the world, but it's a bigger one for us.

(See Electrolite too.)

Happy Birthdays are in order for the Illuminated Donkey, who turned two in blog years last week, and Journalista, a year old as of a few days ago. The Donk and I commenced blogging at almost the same time (the UO anniversary is the 21st of this month, so mark your calendars!) and he'll always have an honored spot on the O.G. list to the left. Dirk Deppey's Journalista is simply the indispensible comics blog.

A note to this site's political readers: you should make Journalista a regular stop - Dirk regularly covers newspaper cartoonists here and abroad who have exceeded local freedom of expression limits.

Don't You Know There's a War On? - Hot Liberty joins the Draft Boy Columnist Ben Shapiro movement.

All Governments Are Gangs. PATRONIZING Gangs. - From YourDictionary.com, Presidential Debates Rank at Grade School Level:

"The results of our analysis indicate that the grade level of the language of political debates, from the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 to current series of presidential debates, has declined from a 12th grade level to a high 7th-grade reading level," said Paul JJ Payack, President and CEO of the Danville, California-based language portal.

Amiable Dunce Watch:

In the Reagan-Mondale debates of 1984, Reagan's arguments averaged a grade level of 9.75, down a grade from his debate with Carter. Mondale's sunk even farther to 8.7.

You have to wonder what the score was on that closing speech about driving along the California coast thinking about the time capsule though. We never will find out where Reagan was going with that one.

The article, alas, has not been updated for the most recent Democratic Presidential debates, nor the ones from the California recall. Enterprising readers are invited to import transcripts into word, clean them up, run the Flesch-Kincaid scores and e-mail me the results, earning fame as a UO e-mailer.

Well, not fame.

Link via Using Bees to Effect Vengeance.

A Brief Reminder That You're Reading This Blog - War is bad.

Weekly Fitness Blog Item - Yeah, a day late. Sorry. (To the people who avoid the blog on Sundays, I mean.) 164 pounds, one pound up from last week's new low. I forgot to take a waist measurement.

MSN has an amusing article comparing good weight loss compliments with bad weight loss compliments. Yeah, let's cut straight to examples of the latter:

"Once I reached goal, my grandmother said several things that were supposedly compliments: She pointed to her back end and said 'You used to be out to here...' Another: 'You have such a better personality now.'"

Bruce Baugh has some excellent diet news. He's down 11 pounds in his first two weeks, which is a solid start. On a related note, Diana e-mails me a link to an AP report of a study that seems to indicate that you really can take in more calories on a low-carbohydrate diet than on a high-carbohydrate diet and still lose as much or more weight.

Critics will note that the Atkins Foundation funded the study. The article asserts that "it had no input into the study's design, conduct or analysis."

The usual caveats apply: newspaper accounts of scientific studies are often simplistic; I haven't seen the study itself; and what matters is neither the funding source or this particular report, but whether the results can be replicated. On that score I make no predictions, but a couple of things jumped out at me:

Two groups were randomly assigned to either lowfat or low-carb diets with 1,500 calories for women and 1,800 for men; a third group was also low-carb but got an extra 300 calories a day. [ . . . ]

Everyone's food looked similar but was cooked to different recipes. The low-carb meals were 5 percent carbohydrate, 15 percent protein and 65 percent fat. The rest got 55 percent carbohydrate, 15 percent protein and 30 percent fat.

Let's crunch some numbers here. 1800 calories, 15% "protien." The article is maddeningly unclear if that's 15% of the mass of the food or 15% of the caloric intake. If the latter, that's about 67 grams of protien a day. Good thing there was no weight training component to this protocol!

The Maybe You're Missing the Whole Point Award goes to Dr. Samuel Klein of Washington University, who "said perhaps the people eating more calories also got more exercise or they were less apt to cheat because they were less hungry."

If it's the latter, Dr. Klein, this is what Atkins and his advocates always advanced as a virtue of the diet - superior satiety. Since other Atkins critics like Fumento dispute that high-fat diets provide superior satiety, Klein's take is itself surprising. As for the possibility that the low-carb proponents got more exercise, it's worth investigating - maybe secret Atkins operatives got their people on the treadmills every day. But let's look at what would have to be true for Klein to be right about that.

Over the twelve-week span of the study, the high-cal, low-carb group lost an average of three pounds more than the low-cal, high-carb group. A pound of fat is about 3500 calories, so that's 10,500 calories over 12 weeks, which is 875 more calories lost per week. In the meantime, the high-cal, low-carb group ate an extra 300 calories per day, which is an extra 2100 per week. (Ignoring Klein's flier about cheating for a moment.) Add the extra intake and the extra outflow together, and the high-cal, low-carb group processed 3,000 more calories per week than the low-cal, low-carb group.

Longtime fitness blog readers know that if you run or walk one mile you burn off - ding! that's right, Mary LaCroix! 100 calories. So for Doctor Klein to be right, the average hi-cal, low-carb participant would have to be doing 30 miles per week more than the low-cal, low-carb dieter.

For twelve weeks.

I'll just bet.

Now, all that said, what do I think this study is really telling us? Here are the key facts: there were 21 participants. It lasted twelve weeks. Everyone picked up their meals at "an upscale Italian restaurant," which cooked them to the specifications of the experimenters. All groups not only lost weight, but lost impressive amounts - even the low-cal, low-carb laggards dropped 17 pounds.

Conclusion: you can lose weight by submitting to small-scale intensive intervention. A diet that skimps on simple starches and processed sugards and is high in fats and oils may be marginally more effective in these short term conditions. But as we've seen in longer and looser studies, the real problem is that people go off the wagon and gain their weight back in the long term. (Needless to say, it's too soon to say I'm not one of those people.) We don't have any studies yet that suggest that low-carb diets solve this larger problem.

Now the pointless personal details: still working my way back into the exercise swing: last week I had one weight session, one intense cardio session, 10 miles of lunchtime walking and two hours splitting wood on Saturday. Sunday, officially the next week, I did a double-length Heavyhands session, toward the end of which I got a bad twinge in my ankle.

Captain America versus the Scalpers of Doom - Columbus Day or no, it was a big day for mail. Philip J. Birmingham writes

Long time listener, first time caller, Jim!

which has to be the coolest possible way to begin a blog e-mail. He continues

You make some good points, but I think you've missed a huge source of resentment concerning scalpers -- they are seen by most people as exacerbating ticket scarcity, and benefitting from it.

I don't know if it's a valid perception, but it's behind a lot of the grumbling about scalpers and ticket brokers.

Matt H. writes

One time John Stossel did a segment or part of it on scalpers, and when he argued with the crowd about how both sides were happy, one participant piped up, to broad assent that "I just dont want him making all that money".

So it is resentment as you are saying.

And Matthew Crane writes

These laws really do screw the average fan.

I do have to make note of the types of people that pursue scalping for a living here in Boston, though. The scalping that occurs around Fenway Park has evolved into a monopolistic syndicate of scalpers who will not allow a ticket to be bought or sold between Kenmore Station and Fenway Park unless THEY are the middleman. It's truly fascinating to see how the system has evolved around Fenway. They are ruthless scumbags whose only "virtue" is that they are willing to risk the occasional arrest and subsequent misdemeanor fine. It's a small price to pay in exchange for the outsized returns they get from rigging a market distorted by a dearth of information created by the anti-scalping laws.

The Fenway situation is a textbook case of how organized-crime syndicates arise when legislators try to repeal supply and demand. Any average fan that tries to sell a ticket in Kenmore Square will be forced to sell to a scalper at the lowball price the professional scalping syndicate sets. Anyone outside the syndicate caught trying to sell to the public will be told in no uncertain terms that this is the scalper's territory and that he'll be pummelled by the scalper and his buddies if he remains. Therefore, Joe Yuppie from Suburb, Massachusetts has one of two choices: try and sell his extra tickets closer to the park where the syndicate doesn't control the turf but where the cops are more vigilant to arrest scalpers, or accept the syndicate's lowball offer.
I wouldn't be surprised if the scalpers and the cops have basically come to an arrangement where there won't be arrests for anyone scalping tickets from Kenmore Square up Brookline Avenue to the Mass Pike bridge.

Repeal the scalping laws, allow fans to sell their tickets in an open, information-rich market, and watch the low-grade organized-crime element to scalping whither away. It will most certainly be a better situation for the fans.

As an aside, I think the day is fast approaching where non-season, individual-game tickets will be sold by ballclubs with dynamic pricing based upon the demand for the game. While that may lock the "average" fan out of a game when the Yankees come to Fenway Park, it probably means that a ticket will be very reasonable when the D-Rays are in town. In any other setup, scalpers WILL get money that could just as easily be in the ballclub's pocket.

This last seems likely. I think I saw something on the net just within the month about various venues moving to a bid system. Ticket pricing will probably evolve in the direction of airline pricing - a welter of different price points etc. People complain about airline pricing but two things are worth remembering:

o Air travel is much cheaper than when I was a callow youth. There really was a time in living memory when only rich people flew.

o Like air travel, live entertainment is a futures market. In the futures markets we're used to thinking about, like agriculture, there is a long lead time to a certain event (a harvest) with an uncertain supply. In the live entertainment business (sports, concerts, theater etc.), you have a long lead time to a certain event with an uncertain demand. In each case, dynamic pricing can cushion the shocks of swings in the uncertain factor. In each case, the supplier - of pork bellies, passage or pastimes - faces substantial fixed costs.

Captain Amerimail came from a number of people. Jesse Walker writes:

What you're really saying, I gather, is that Marvel should catch you now -- you're falling.

Exactly. Did I not bail them out when they were down on their knees? Or am I confusing myself with Ike Perlmutter?

RGB Bill Dowling suggests ending the first Cap movie with the version of Cap's revival seen in the Ultimates series. Everything prior takes place during WWII:

So you can still get the Man Out of Time aspect going at the very end without actually devoting much movie time to it (and you know how those hollywood types love to set up a sequel at the end).

I think the problem here is this: If the first movie is good, if viewers enjoy it, it gets good reviews and it makes money, it's a good movie about a superhero in World War II - a patriotic icon in his element. The ending then commits the second movie to being Something Else Entirely. So even if the second movie is good on some Parnassian scale unrelated to Hollywood's twin gods of popularity and profit, it is good in a different way than the first movie. The studio sets itself up for a serious problem - it can't be sure the audience for the first movie will enjoy the second, because the second won't be providing the same kind of pleasures the first movie did. And it can't be sure the audience that spurned the first movie will give the second one a fair shake - to them it's another damned Captain America film.

Bill makes me think, though, that my prescription was sort of backwards. So let's toss out an alternative:

Start with some variant of the WWII teaser scene I sketched out - Cap helping actual GIs in the field - then cut to the discovery of Cap's frozen body in 2003. Do all necessary WWII stuff as flashbacks. Some temporal jumps, with a lot of looks backward, in the storytelling could actually contribute to the theme. Worst case scenario - the only thing people like about the movie is the WWII scenes. All the reviews say the character only works "in that more innocent time."

So you set the sequel entirely during WWII.

Still to come: Can This Comic Be Saved, thoughts on Captain America as a comics character and solo title.

Yet More Comics Blogging - Dirk Deppey had some fascinating stuff to say about superhero comics and continuity on Friday. I'm just going to pick out one small part to agree with, and leave the rest as an exercise for the reader:

In this regard, working in a shared universe with a long history can only further hobble the aims of the artist. Going back to Morrison's New X-Men, it's interesting that in the current Magneto storyline, no reference is made to the other superheroes based in Manhattan when Magneto tears the city apart. This isn't coincidental; if the rest of the Marvel Universe were allowed into the story, it wouldn't work. For Morrison's purposes, it's far more effective to pretend that the rest of the company's continuity simply doesn't exist. Under the circumstances, it's probably the smartest thing he could have done.

Yes, absolutely! Heck, from what I can tell, Morrison is even ignoring all of the X-Men who don't regularly appear in the book he writes. I've written about continuity and its discontents before (skip down to item six). Suffice it to say that after a company has been producing superhero comics for a couple or few decades, they just have too darn many heroes crowded into their world. And some characters just fit poorly in the "heavy-continuity" approach. I consider it a truth thoroughly demonstrated that all the best Superman stories, for instance, are the ones that take place outside regular continuity.

Captain America Calling - So where were we? Sean Collins was overpraising the current Captain America storyline. Dirk Deppey and Johnny Bacardi were doubting that Cap was good movie material because "Captain America has the single goddamn silliest costume in all of comicdom," as Dirk Deppey puts it.

The American flag is fine as a banner on a pole, but paint it on a suit of chainmail, give it wide, swashbuckler booties and throw in a mask with itty-bitty wingtips and the sans-serif letter "A", and you've got the most garish set of clothes anyone could possibly be asked to wear. What works in a World War II-era comic book is going to look unbelievably ridiculous when wrapping a live human being on the big screen.

Hey, he may be right! This might be why the makers of the appalling straight-to-video Cap movie of 1991 inexplicably had Steve Rogers make (what passed for) the climactic final assault on the Red Skull's . . . balcony actually, where he was playing piano, and not wearing his skull mask either, and did I mention that in the movie he was Italian?

But I'm losing the thread here. My point is Steve Rogers spends the entire end of the movie in mufti. In fact. after the early WWII scenes, you hardly ever see the Captain America costume.

One interpretation of this seemingly bizarre choice is that Johnny and Dirk are right and the moviemakers (we cannot call them "creators") knew it - the movie becomes the proof of their thesis. Another interpretation is that this movie sucked so bad that anything the makers did is presumptively wrong.

I'm plumping for the latter view.

Do not get me wrong - I see the difficulty. But there have been some real advances in fabric and materials in the last decade, and Hollywood has an extra decade's wisdom on successfully solving costume design problems. The Batman latex suits worked until Joel Schumacher started adding nipples; a purist Spiderman outfit came off well, which is surely the last thing anyone expected; even the Daredevil costume, while changed from the comic, was recognizably descended from it. There's a Batman short film (link is to a massive video file) around the internet now. As a story, it's crap. As acting, it's a joke. But the costume, which is much more like the comics costume than the old rubber suit, looks pretty damn good. There are lighting tricks and camera angles.

And in the end, it's an uphill battle. I think you win it by incorporating the battle into the story itself - not by surrendering to kitsch, but by fighting through it.

Open on a foxhole near Tripoli. Daytime, but with the sandstorm it's not doing the GIs much good. There's an upturned jeep beside the depression, and three black GIs from the motor pool taking fire. They're lightly armed because this is the segregated army, though we don't stress that. A tank shell blasts the jeep to smithereens. The camera angles are all low, right down in the hole with the troops, and when the glare from the blast subsides, a Wehrmacht rifleman almost trips in with us. He tries to fire, but one of the troops, a sergeant, gets him first.

Another shell hits near the hole, showering the soldiers with sand. What are we gonna do? a private demands. Take a bunch of them with us, says the sergeant. He rolls to a vantage point and fires.

Smoke, sand, voices, guns, confusion. More jerries appear out of the sand, and one of them gets the drop on the Sarge.

Then the shield creams him. And the sergeant and the camera track the spangled disc as it bounces back, and when it gets picked up we get our first, momentary full-figure shot of Captain America.

Then, because he's a soldier and not an idot, he hops down into the foxhole with them.

"You ain't one of them," the sergeant says, "but who are you? And what kind of uniform is that??"

"The one they gave me, Sergeant. Are you ready to get out of here?"

"Yes, sir!" he says, that being the most politic way to address a white man, no matter how oddly-clothed. "I don't know if that tank's ready to let us out of here, though."

"Sergeant," the costumed white guy says, "give me a grenade and some covering fire, and he won't have a choice."

Roll titles.

And now you start the flashbacks and explain the backstory. But as I learned from a Rita Mae Brown book on writing, job one is to establish your leading man with a memorable first shot. The initial impression you make on the viewers is "ridiculously-garbed savior." You invest the credit immediately and make sure the returns pay off.

So where do we go from there. We establish a slightly variant origin. Steve Rogers was 4F, sure, but not just because he was scrawny - he's got something else wrong, a heart murmer or something. There's a super-soldier program, but it's not "Drink this potion and become the clean-cut version of Mr. Hyde." It's work. At the end of it, Steve Rogers is a fine physical specimen, but they don't want him so much for combat.

No, they want him to sell war bonds. And generally be a morale booster. And entertain the troops. So they put together a patriotic circus outfit and he does USO. And when he expresses his frustrations to the immigrant scientist who runs the "US Army Performance Enhancement Program" the scientist allows that, confidentially, he has some notions of how human performance enhancement could be taken to an even higher level.

Why are you telling me, and not the army? Steve asks him.

The immigrant scientist, who must be a good actor, gets that when you've seen the kinds of things I've seen you are none too quick to trust nations even good ones look - it's a look, haven't you seen it? - and says . . .

Something more profound than I can come up with extemporizing like this. But you get the idea. And one night the USO troupe gets too close to the action and Steve, in costume, saves the day. And that gives the boys in charge an idea. (Recall how the excellent Enemy at the Gates is, in one sense, about creating a superhero through propaganda.) And that gives the Nazis an idea of their own . . .

Now this is an awful lot of World War II, and you might start to wonder if there's any time left for the "Cap gets revived in the 21st century" section. And I'm not sure there is. Maybe you keep the entire movie in WWII. (This fan thinks that's the way to go.) In one sense that would be a shame, because the contemporary revival is the triple-axel of this whole routine - the longstanding "man out of time" trope dovetails right into the costume too garish for words problem. Pull it off, and you've got the best superhero movie yet. Blow it, and it's 1991 all over again, with a lot more red ink.

What about Marvel, though? What kind of tie-in do they get with the comic if the movie is set entirely in the Second World War? Marvel has all kinds of options here - not least, they can reset the monthly title as a World War II book. They did it before. During the Tales of Suspense days in the 1960s, Marvel for a time set all the Cap stories during the War. Cap's present-day exploits could be confined to the Avengers. Or Marvel could drop acid and start a second Cap title. I mean, if one book doesn't sell, maybe a two will not sell even better.

That's the other end of it, though, right? Cap has had a problematic commercial and artistic history since Prince Namor played discus with his time capsule. In addition to the question of what the hell do you do with a Captain America movie, we have to ask what the hell you do with the Captain America comic. Because we can't say the last forty years have given us very many good answers. But this item is already too long, so we'll have to return to the subject another day.

UPDATE: Sean Collins points out that I confused his views Cap's costume with Johnny Bacardi's opinion. I've corrected the item. I take full responsibility for blaming the problem on my Oxycontin habit. Sean's official view is that Cap's costume can work fine in live action. I think he's probably right.

A Fanboy's Impulse Buy - I paused by Big Planet's counter display of mini-comics this week and picked up CELLS, by Scott Mills. I assume I'm the last comics reader to discover this title, but let me enthuse a bit anyway.

CELLS is a saddle-stapled 21-page black & white book, size about 5" x 8". It came out in 1998 and costs $2, which is money well spent. It's the story of two prison inmates, one black, one white, over a twelve-year span. The figure rendering resembles what you'd find in a newspaper humor strip, but it's enough. Everything you need to know about what these guys are doing and thinking comes across clearly. Mills is also great at page layout and storytelling - page 3, which ends a conversation by transitioning from a small strip of narrowly-focused panels along the top to a surveyor's view of the prison yard in the bottom two-thirds of the page, sold me on the book. Now and then you see something in this medium that convinces you the creator really knows what he or she is doing.

The base page is a three x three panel grid that Mills rings variations on the way Shakespeare modulated the pentameter - now a double-wide panel to start the top row, now two entire rows given over to a top-down view of the cell, now a dislocated, unmoored panel gets a row to itself. There's the occasional 6-panel page (three rows of two panels), but the three-row schema, allowing for double-height interpolations, breaks only once toward the end (ironically, on a page with three rows).

So what's it about? Friendship. Loss. Maleness. Male bonding if you want to be glib about it, but I don't. Mills writes well too. Browsing around the web, it appears there's a lot more of his work for me to catch up on. I'm there.

Good Seats Still Available? - From yesterday's Washington Post:

Homeless for nearly three years, George Crouse was handed the equivalent of two weeks' worth of hot meals, a wardrobe of new clothes, or a night at the Ritz-Carlton recently when someone stuffed a ticket to a Red Sox game into his coffee can instead of spare change.

He could have walked to Fenway Park and scalped the grandstand seat for $250 or more. But Crouse went to the game. "Sell it? No way," he said from his perch atop a milk crate on a subway platform outside Massachusetts General Hospital.

Of course, he could also have gotten busted, as noted in this AP story by Tom Kirchofer:

Scalpers in Massachusetts face a $500 fine for their first offense. A second offense carries a fine and a possible one-year jail term.

For scalpers who choose to ply their trade the old-fashioned way, Boston police spokesman Kevin Jones said officers will be patrolling near the ballpark.

"We'll have special scalping details," he said. "Plainclothes officers will be out in the Fenway Park area."

So my question is, why?

I don't think there's an answer beyond sheer resentment. On this side, I have somebody with a ticket. On that side, I have somebody willing to pay $250 for that ticket. On whose behalf is the state intervening here? The only possible answer is, on behalf of people who would also like that ticket, but are willing to pay much less.

Well that's nice.

One argument would be that some people just can't afford to pay $250 for a ticket to a ballgame. Me, for instance. Of course, tens of thousands of tickets were sold at the official prices of $35 to $65 dollars, so tens of thousands of buyers payed much less than $250. But that brings up something else: plenty of people just can't afford to pay $35-65 for a ticket either. But nobody's passing laws to get them into games at their preferred price. Nor should they be.

There's a bigger problem when it comes to ticket availability. There are only so many tickets to go around anyway. Stadium seating is finite. In many cities in many sports, all tickets go to season ticket holders, and the waiting list for season tickets is measured in decades. If you're part of the out-group and you want to see a game, you have to get in on someone else's billet. That means you either have to have a connection with the in-group - and there's an egalitarian arrangement for you, succeeding on the basis of who you know - or you have to buy someone else's seat.

You might suppose that scalping laws help you do this - someone who has to sell his tickets one week - can't make the game - has to let them go for a "fair price" (whatever that is). But aside from the issue of justice to the seller (preventing him from getting the best price on his goods), scalping laws may discourage him from unloading his tickets at all. Limited to recouping only, say, face value, he may not bother to drive in to the stadium and park, or place an ad in the classifieds. He may also simply be scared of the complexity of many anti-scalping regimes. So his ticket simply vanishes from the market and his seat goes empty. Now the out-group member has less chance to get into the game than he otherwise would.

The other argumentum ad resentment is aimed at the seller - the scalper (particularly the professional) doesn't deserve the extra money. And besides, a lot of them are skeevy-looking.

Once again, some people are setting themselves up in judgment of the kind and amount of labor other people perform. If scalping is so easy, why doesn't everyone do it? The scalper works to acquire the tickets (standing in line, etc.). The scalper works to sell the tickets (traveling to the venue, finding buyers, negotiating). The scalper takes a financial risk to do these things (as anyone who sees the forelorn fellow brandishing a handful of unwanted passes five minutes before the concert will realize). The scalper provides a genuine service. Some people can't afford season tickets, but like to get to one game a year, or hear about the concert late, or can't get off work to stand in line, or can't get through to the 800-number, or decide they want to go at the last minute, or want to upgrade to really, really good seats for once in their lives. For these people, scalpers are a boon.

A few years ago, a friend and I heard about an anti-land mines benefit concert at DAR Constitution Hall the day of the show. We decided to take our chances with the scalpers and got in for not too much over list price. That evening we enjoyed great performances by Steve Earle, Emmylou Harris, Buddy Miller and Sheryl Crow, all thanks to the inexplicably underground economy.

There is a separate issue of those who sell counterfeit tickets. That's simple fraud, and not only is but should be against the law. But laws against "scalping" legitimate tickets probably make it harder to separate sellers of legitimate tickets from sellers of fakes. Imagine how different the atmosphere outside a venue where the seller of the real thing has no reason to shy from the cops but the seller of the fake does.

In the case of team sports, many teams make a prohibition on reselling tickets for more than face value part of the season ticket purchase agreement.

"We view it as unethical and in some cases against the law," [NFL spokesmen Greg] Aiello said. "It suggests a desire to profit personally and perhaps illegally on the coattails of either the NFL or the team."

And hey, says the NFL - that's our job!

Such a policy may or may not be wise, and teams can and do take season tickets away from flagrant violators. But there doesn't seem to be any reason for local and state governments to turn a contractual arrangement between team and fan into a criminal matter.

Lock Up Your Blogrolls! - It's time for Blogarama V! Enjoy hilariously in-group sourcing at the Rendezvous Lounge on 18th Street in Adams Morgan, Thursday October 23rd at 7pm. You don't have to be part of the in-crowd to come. You don't have to be a libertarian to come. You don't even have to be a blogger to come. Just get down there and party with the prolix.

It's not just me saying this stuff. It's a real party. Will Wilkinson will even sleep on your couch.

Fair and Balanced Sidebar Update - Another month has gone by. The old New Crew links have been flushed through to other parts of the blogroll, depending, and a new New Crew has been installed. These are a dozen bloggers, not previously blogrolled here, that I think are worth your time. Some of them, like Walter in Denver and Greg Greene, are way past due for linkspace here. Others, like Dave Fiore of Motime Like the Present and John Jakala of Groteque Anatomy, are actually newish bloggers. This month I was interested in adding some intelligent hawks and conservatives for variety, thus we welcome Daniel W. Drezner, Tom Maguire of Just One Minute and My Stupid Dog. Not to be confused with The Talking Dog, who is excitable, sure, but not dumb. Rafe Colburn is one of blogging's Grand Old Men; the Modulator an eclectic political blogger; and Bruce Baugh a fanboy intellectual of renown. Walter in Denver is your source for drug war outrages and western politics commentary; Fiore and Jakala strong additions to the blogspace at the intersection of comics and literature. Dan Scheltema of dislogue doesn't seem to cover comics, but is terrific on books and, you know, life. Greg Greene manages to be a committed liberal and a shrewd political observer.

Other site changes: "Team Comics/Comix" has been renamed "Comics & Culture." That lets me sneak Aaron Haspel further up the sidebar. Plus, what I like about my favorite comics bloggers is the way they connect their interest in comics, and the esthetics of comics, with their interest in other modes of expression. (You know, like books and such.)

The tiny new "I'm a Joiner" site includes the group blogs I belong to.

Next month, another New Crew. Way it works is, as I'm surfing, something convinces me that I should be linking someone, and I add them to the Next New Crew section of the sidebar. When I hit a dozen, I've got the next batch.

We Get Letters and we are determined to process them more quickly now that we have a shiny new in-box (in Mozilla Thunderbird).

On the reenactment front, Steve Cook sends a link to the "London Riot Re-enactment Society," which, but I suppose you've already guessed this part, "will stage re-enactments of noted riots from London's history, with some attempt at historical accuracy."

I think we can all agree that that is just too frickin' cool. Don't miss the crucial link, Which riots? And my blogchild, Michael Croft of Ones and Zeros, informs me of the English Civil War Society of America

They do, in fact, do naval as well as Colonial and ECW. At least one of these units is based out of Ellicott City, MD...

The Society also regularly works with the replica of Captain Henry Hudson's 1609 ship Halve Maen (Half Moon), performing exciting landings and battle engagements as Dutch soldiers, upon land and water, for the education and entertainment of thousands of spectators.

On another front, reader Lon sends two Alan Moore-related links, an interview with Comic Book Artist about the Watchmen/Charlton connection, and the great lost Twilight proposal for DC, a company-wide crossover that would have resolved continuity issues without destroying the company's multiverse. I haven't had time to read the Twilight proposal yet, but I did read the interview, and this passage in particular stuck out:

And also, there did seem to be a rash of quite heavy, frankly depressing and overtly pretentious super-hero comics that came out in the wake of Watchmen, and I felt to some degree responsible for bringing in a fairly morbid Dark Age. Perhaps I over-burdened the super-hero, made it carry a lot more meaning than the form was ever designed for. So, for a while, I went off to do stuff that was very non-super-hero, and going into other areas I was interested in.

I'd say that Moore is only partially right here. The problem is not so much that he and his followers imbued the superhero story with too much meaning, it is that post-Watchmen writers mistook one particular complex of meanings for all the possible ones, and made cliches of them in jig time. Simply put, they mistook darkness for depth. (As I've observed before in this context, Mr. Frost could have told them differently.) Wile E. Coyote not infrequently fell into the same error.

This is threatening to turn into my Where the DC Renaissance Went Wrong item, but for now I'll just mention that Sandman got better as it became less of a horror book. (Okay, Sean, that's the best I can do re this month's theme!)

All Governments Are Gangs as Arthur Silber reminds us. As a political extremist, I tend to think of the Republican and Democratic parties less as exponents of ideologies than as constituent service organizations - the Chamber of Commerce, defense contractors and low-church adherants over here; public employees and recipients of transfer payments over there. Our elections have all the philosophical moment of Lions versus Kiwanis. Or maybe, in light of Arthur's item, Jets versus Sharks.

That Word, Senor. I Don't Think It Means What You Think It Means. - My Stupid Dog explains what is and isn't "deregulation."

News You Can Use - Do you keep getting abducted by aliens over and over again? These people know just how to stop it. Not a spoof site, so far as I can tell.

Mail Reenactors - Kevin Carson of the Mutualist writes

While I enjoyed your reenactor buddy Michael's email, I take violent exception to one statement in it: his equation of the International Working Men's Association with the "Communist Party." Both the First and Second Internationals included a wide variety of workers' movements. The First included a large segment of Proudhonians, among others; the Second IWMA included a number of individualist anarchists in the U.S., including Benjamin Tucker (no one's idea of a communist).

Interesting! Michael himself plays a Communist - his 19th-century civilian ID is that of an immigrant German red. Perhaps said civilian simply intends, like Communists everywhere, to have his party take over whatever movement he is in.

And from Jonathan Pearse, the sole Samizdata contributor who still speaks to me:

I liked the long email you reproduced about the hobby of military re-enactment. Funnily enough, back here in Britain, you may have heard of our "Sealed Knot" society, which stages re-enactments of the battles of the English Civil War of the 1640s, such as the Battle of Naseby, with folk dressed as Cromwell's Parliamentarian forces against King Charles' Cavaliers. I would imagine the kit costs a lot of money, since the soldiers often wear metal armour on their upper bodies, metal helmets, as well as period-piece muskets, pikes, swords, and so forth. There certainly seems to be lots of interest in historical dramas and the associated costumes at the moment, both on TV and in the movies, shown by films like Gladiator (great early battle scene) or the British television dramas, "Sharpe" and "Hornblower".

However, I am not sure how easy or difficult it is now to stage such events in Britain since even dummy firearms and rifles may be affected by our idiotic gun laws, which as you may have noted, have been such a great success in Britain,,,er, whatever.

My fantasy - re-stage the Battle of Trafalgar with about 25 men o' war on each side, say in the Mediterranean. Lots of cannons and grog rations all round.

That would be very cool. However, I think it would inescapably be a lot like work. Keeping a vintage ship afloat and ambulatory is quite a bit more involved than marching around a field somewhere. Add in the need to actually maneuver the ships and fire guns and you're into an impressive undertaking.

All the more reason to do it, of course.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow - Like I'm ever right about these, but I at plan to offer

Captain America Calling
Where the DC Renaissance Went Wrong
A Plame Game update
A Bureaucrat Reads the Iraqi Reconstruction Bill (permission pending)

I also plan to start wall-to-wall non-stop coverage of the California recall election from now until - what? It's over? Oh.

Comics I Didn't Buy This Week - 1602 #3, baby. I'm free!

He Don't Live Here No More - Mark Kleiman's blog has moved.

Imitation Tech Blog Item - Mozilla Thunderbird has much better filters and rules than I thought it did when I wrote about it last week. I'm giving it an extended workout, and have it sending all my mailing list mail to different folders, keeping my in-box manageable. (My correspondents know, to my chagrin, how appalling my in-box is.) It's better on that front than Opera's M2, which doesn't recognize mail from Costello-L as listmail and lacks, in the current version, any way to set it manually.

I'd like to dump Outlook Express for security reasons. Damn if it doesn't have a couple of usability advantages over Thunderbird, though. For instance, to file a read e-mail in Outlook, a toolbar icon drops down not just a complete folder tree, but a top-level list of the last half-dozen or so folders in which I've filed mail - much quicker than Thunderbird's toolbar option, which requires you to navigate the whole folder structure. I imagine Thunderbird will get there, but it's tedious in the meantime.

Hold That Thought - Eve also works to improve my Blogosphere Ecosystem rating by responding to my various arguments of the other week on same-sex marriage. Responding voluminously. Eve! How about a "here are the links in order" post so your loyal readers can better navigate the channels of your thought? I love blogs, needless to say, but scrolling up a lot of items while reading down long ones can be hard.

I haven't had the chance to read them yet. I can't even figure out how Eve had the chance to write all that. The arguments are definitely fresher and more carefully considered than what you find at NRO, though, that much is clear. Start (for the time being) at the top of her site and work down.

Dust Off the M-Word, Fanboys! - Eve Tushnet has a damn-near magisterial mini-essay about superhero conventions, and how they might be used the way Shakespeare used the conventions of the revenge tragedy in Hamlet - sneakily:

There are countless levels to Hamlet; here are three: revenge tragedy, commentary on revenge tragedies, commentary on characteristic difficulties of human existence. If Hamlet were just a revision or satire or takedown of an Elizabethan dramatic genre, we wouldn't care too much today. Similarly, there have been scores of attempts to Hamlet-ize superhero conventions, but most of them end up just being comics about comics, and really, what's the point? I want to do something that works on all three levels, but mostly the first (basic story) and third (human condition).

This can be a problem not just in comic books but in postmodern works generally. The author apes the forms of a genre story, demonstrating that genre stories can be silly and - well, it stops there. And so what? It's the difference between early Twin Peaks and later Twin Peaks. Both were, among other things, about the ways that thrillers defer, distract and dissemble. But early Twin Peaks - meaning, through the resolution of Laura Palmer's murder - also condescended to scare the living fuck out of you now and then. The show functioned on Eve's levels one and two. (I am not presently prepared to claim that Twin Peaks had anything to say about the Human Condition, even at its best.) In subsequent episodes Lynch and Co. simply jerked our chains without even the courtesy of an actual walk in the park to go with it. The show became pure level two, suitable only for recent postgraduates going through a phase. (One in which they could imagine that it was other people's chains being jerked, not their own, even though they were the only ones still watching.)

Read Eve's essay in conjunction with Sean Collins' comments about "Superman versus Moby Dick," which I quoted earlier. I think argument also points up a danger in Dirk Deppey's precept that

I simply don't think that the superhero genre can withstand the scrutiny inherent in stories that attempt stark realism without acknowledging the absurdity of the core concepts.

You can get stories that imagine that once they've acknowledg[ed] the absurdity of the core concepts" they've done enough, and can congratulate themselves on their fine work of acknowledgement.

UPDATE: Doh! Forgot the link. Thanks to Dirk Deppey for pointing it out.

Everybody Needs a Hobby - My poet/reenactor buddy Michael sent this great e-mail expanding, correcting and qualifying what I had to say about my first-hand impressions of Civil War reenacting as a hobby. I'm running it essentially whole, because it's so good. If you edit a magazine and would like to pay Michael good money to write about the hobby for you, drop me a line and I'll put you in touch.

Michael writes:

I've enjoyed UO's take on reenacting. But to clarify a couple of points, the Brady Sharp Shooters were the 11th company of the 16th Michigan, which arrived in DC after the first battle of Bull Run, and then served through the rest of the war with the Army of Potomac and were in at the end at Appomattox.

If you've seen the movie "Gettysburg" you'll remember the Chamberlain character indicating to his men (the 20th Maine) that they were it -- the end of the Union line, and had no one on their left. In fact they had Brady's, and Berdans (1st US) Sharpshooters, and a couple of other light companies from Vincent's Brigade guarding their flank and shooting up the Johnnies as they attacked Little Round Top.

The reason you thought Connecticut is probably because Josh and I were talking about this weekend's event, at Harrison's Landing, where we'll be falling in with other "authentic" reenactors to portray the 10th Connecticut on the Petersburg front.

As for the cost of an "authentic" kit, your estimate made me curious, so I toted it up:

Forage Cap from quality maker: $95
Sack Coat and Trowsers from historic clothier: $300
"Federal Issue" wool flannel shirt: $100, on sale
Canton flannel drawers: $55
Woolen knit stockings: $30
Jefferson bootees: $120
Leather accoutrements (waist belt and buckle, cartridge box with sling and plates, cap box: $200
1861 Springfield rifle-musket, with sling, quality bayonet, and 2 rivet scabbard: $600
Haversack: $50
Canteen with proper cover and strap: $50
Canteen half (plate), utensils, tin cup: $40
Reproduction issue blanket: $125
Rubber blanket: $40
Shelter half: $100
Knapsack: $125, on sale
Actual 1860s reading glasses and pressed paper case: $70
Wallet, stationery, comb, bank notes, enlistment papers: maybe $50
International Workingmen's Association (i.e., Communist Party) membership card: free to citizens

The chance to chant "Fredericksburg!" at the wall on Cemetery Ridge: Pricele... well, $2,150

As we said on the march, most who really get into it will, over the years, continue to spend more. On the other hand, one can buy used or lower quality "sutler row" items and cut these costs about in half, and probably the great majority of reenactors do.

Also, nearly every unit can draw on stocks of surplus clothing and equipment to outfit recruits. Most give their new guys a year or two to procure the basic outfit, sometimes longer. Brady's has members who have attended intermittently for several years without buying anything, or anything much.

Because Josh and I and some of the others in Brady's like to go to some of the more intense events where people really care about whether or not your coat is correctly made of the right fabric, we've gone a bit further than most. In my case I've probably spent a total of $3,500 to $4,000, including the above, two additional rifles (a target rifle with a barrel-length scope and a Sharps 1859 Infantry Rifle), a Confederate uniform and accoutrements, a greatcoat, a Hardee uniform hat, domet flannel "issue" and cotton civilian shirts, cotton stockings, and other items, all on top of my sutler row starter kit (coat, trowsers, wool stockings, and boots), and not including the pens, ink, inkwells, and other items I've picked up for my impression of a company and regimental clerk.

Ammunition runs about $7 for a 1 lb. can of black powder (good for maybe 120 blank cartridges), and $7-8 for a tin of 200 percussion caps.

Of course, it's not uncommon for "mainstream" reenactors to spend much less on the basic uniform and equipment, but then more than make up for it by procuring elaborate wall tents, lanterns, iron cookware, cots, camp furniture, and other fripperies.

In all cases, the ostensible justification for this shameless outlay is that, on some levels, reenacting is little different from most other middle-class American leisure activities: skiing, hiking, biking, boating, and golf all have significant entry costs and offer endless opportunities to spend more. For reenacting there's some compensation in the idea of a higher civic purpose ("honoring the sacrifice of the boys of '61," "teaching people about their history," etc.), hands-on historic research, the high resale value of better quality items, and the low cost of actual events (registration for most events runs from $5 to $25, sometimes including food).

Add in the fantasy and little theater aspects and you have a very compelling hobby. Add in the communal aspects -- all you have to do to be accepted is show up and play by the rules -- and standards for achievement that are far more objective than any you are likely to encounter in most day jobs (is your musket clean? do you know the drill?), and addiction becomes understandable. Well, to us, anyway.

For me, it's also provided the opportunity to meet a wide range of people that I would not ordinarily encounter in the halls of the bureaucracy. It's been refreshing to be around folks who know how to take care of themselves in the woods, enjoy singing around campfires, drive trucks, and do not habitually spend their days writing memos about circulars affecting a particular regulation or legislative initiative. I also like the fact that, unlike wannabe literati, no one hopes to be remembered by posterity as one of the leading figures the 21st century in their field.

Dottie says it's made me a better person. I don't want to think about what that says about me before, but it does make me even happier to be a soldier of the republic -- a soldier who doesn't hurt anyone, and gets to go home and take a shower after every battle.

The Meaning of "Life" - and "Life" - Ogged at Unfogged picks up yesterday's item about the distinction between life and liberty and runs with it, in the direction of the Farsi distinction between life and life. Very much worth reading. You should believe me even though the item says nice things about me.

Right from the Beginning - At gaming tonight it developed that fully half of our foursome, comics readers all, Watchmen readers too, did not know that Alan Moore's initial proposal for what became Watchmen used the Charlton heroes. Thinking of last night's item on John Byrne's aversions, I crowed, "I was even more correct than I thought!" RGB Bill felt that claim was damn near logically impossible.

There's your Trouble, the Continuing Series - In a political item, Sean Collins offers the following response to my Saturday musings about libertarianism, Democrats and Republicans:

On a related topic (though he'll insist they aren't), Jim Henley makes some good points about how the Bush administration is super-un-conservative in the big-government sense of the word, but then says that "the national greatness types, and the Administration whose foreign and 'defense' policy they drive, are the salient threat to liberty in America today." And here I thought the salient threat to liberty in America today was, y'know, terrorism.

This is a basic and important error. No, the salient threat to your liberty is not terrorism. Terrorism is a threat to our lives, not our liberties. Osama bin Laden and his ilk can not take away a single freedom - we can only do that ourselves. Say you believe that al Qaeda really does want to impose the Caliphate on the United States. Well, they can't. A free and mighty people simply can't be imposed on that way. Simply decide you would rather die free than live enslaved and no ragamuffin "army" of religious malcontents can dictate our political and cultural destiny.

It occurs to me that this is yet another problem with accepting the idea of a tradeoff between liberty and security. Every time Bush and Ashcroft evoke fear to justify new domestic security legislation, every time Bush and Rumsfeld conjure some new bogyman from a two-bit thug with a palace, they weaken the country's anti-tyranny immune system by insinuating that life is more important than liberty. Get people to believe that hard enough and you have established the preconditions for the Caliphate, the Soviet or the Bund.

Lincoln said

No foreign power or combination of foreign powers could by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us it must spring up from among us, it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die of suicide.

Every word remains true today. We might only add that a slow-motion suicide by VICTORY Acts and imperial overstretch could mean it falls to some foreign power to deliver the mercy shot.

You Captain America Placeholder Item - Today's reading comes from Sean Collins, Dirk Deppey and Johnny Bacardi. Sermon in a day or two.

Today's Proposition comes from Sean T. Collins, who writes:

In other words, using [giant alien starfish] Starro the Conqueror isn't any more or less silly than, say, having a guy wage a decades-long oceans-wide vendetta against a white sperm whale, and then actually having the guy find the whale and get killed by it.

I suspect I'd agree with this five days out of seven. The point he goes on to make, the overriding importance of execution rather than any particular collection of tropes in play, I'd agree with at least as often.

Can We Still Be Friends? - How times change! While searching the archives for my "Democratic platform," I discovered that I once wrote this:

I have a mild personal fondness for Dubya, or the image of him . . .

So, for old time's sake, what could the President do to get himself back on my good side, me being influential and all. Specifically, what could he do to convince me that sane libertarians should support his reelection, with votes if they're inclined or just warm wishes. Let's see:

1. Clean house. Dump Cheney for Chuck Hagel. Sweep out Rumsfeld and the latter-day Best and the Brightest at Defense. Fire whoever betrayed Valerie Plame. Send Ashcroft back to Missouri and have him take USA-PATRIOT Act author Viet Dinh with him. All of the above are make-or-break.

2. Drop efforts to kill the PATRIOT Act sunset provisions. Abort the VICTORY Act. Fast-track the Iraqi transition. A big reason for dumping Cheney and the aviary (hawks) in step one was to clarify that Iraq is not a stepping stone to further wars and we are not staying forever. That done, I can be more patient about withdrawing from Iraq, but we should still get out expeditiously - it's not our country, we don't understand it and we can't and shouldn't run it for them.

3. Cut spending! Offering Boy and The Littlest Offering are going to need enough disposable income to support Mom and Dad in our dotage. I can't have the President funding current accounts out of their future earnings the way he's fixing to do.

4. Tariffs and farm subsidies. Kill all the ones you proposed. Say sorry, you have no idea what came over you. Invite the leaders who walked out of Cancun to the White House. Announce that helping them open up their economies will strike a blow against terrorism. Everything else does.

5. The Real Federalism Initiative: Announce that you'll veto interference with state prerogatives on marriage laws. Turn drug policy over to the states - it's street crime or pharmacy licensing, one way or the other. Announce that you'd like abortion to become a state issue again too - a safe proposal since there's no chance of it happening.

6. Kill corporate welfare, increase the personal exemption to its 1948 level in current dollars. Yeah, this was on my Democratic platform too. You can't blame a guy for trying.

7. Announce an intention to trim the Federal Register by a third. Promise that you'll put former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson in charge of the commission to choose regulations to wipe out.

I could come up with more, but one through five are already more than I could hope for (but not less than I need).

Once More Into the Breach - Noah Shachtman has the best article yet in the growing genre of "libertarian disenchantment with the Republican Party," on the American Prospect's website. Least supportable assertion: that I am "influential." But in addition to spelling my name right and reproducing my quotes accurately, the article also has almost all the necessary qualifiers and captures the key issues. He stresses the centrality of the war, but makes clear that there's more to it than the war.

Glenn Reynolds says this too, in response to Shachtman's article. It goes well beyond the war, and probably beyond the Administration too. The condemnations of libertarianism in establishment conservative media like the Weekly Standard and NRO play their role.

Did Howard Dean secretly pay Rep. Patrick Kennedy to attack him for insufficient devotion to gun control? Because he should have. The issue has proven a loser at the polls, and there's nothing that says Red State Vote Pickup quite like being attacked by a Kennedy over guns.

Check out the Hit&Run comments thread on the Shachtman article for some good discussion, and also some, well, illuminating discussion. There are good and bad arguments on the question of whether libertarians should split with the Republican Party and whether they should support whichever Democratic nominee - two separate issues. I was never a "lesser of two evils" libertarian, so my answers to the two questions tend to be Yes, and No. I do believe, most days, that LOTE libertarians should withhold their votes from Dubya in 2004, because the Repubs are no longer the lesser of two evils.

I tend to hold with Reason commenter Jack:

Call me crazy, but I think the best strategy is for lower-case libertarians to vote for the Libertarian party candidate. Neither major party cares who its voters *are*, as long as they do, in fact, vote for their candidates. Both sides will simply look at their voters as supporting the totality of their platform. Not-voting as a form of protest is irrelevant, since politicians don't actually care about voter turnout, no matter how much the media cries about it. (And don't kid yourself that if only the turnout is lowered far enough it will discredit the government. The Denver school board had an election a few years ago with a turnout of only 8% and I haven't noticed any letters to the editor claiming that the school board lacks legitimacy.)

The most successful reshaping of American politics in the last 20 years came in 1992, when Ross Perot put the deficit on the public's radar and torpedo'ed Bush the Elder's candidacy. Libertarian concerns will start getting taken seriously when one party notices that Libertarian candidates are consistently collecting more votes than the margin of defeat between the major party candidates.

Mind you, I've been following that strategy for two elections now and Utopia has not arrived. But the Democrats won't nominate a genuine peace candidate, and I lack the robust faith of some of my liberal readers that simply replacing the current President with a Democrat will solve "our" problems.

I laid out my "Democratic" platform months ago; I should do a Republican one.

So You Know - Scrupulous conservative blogger LT Smash of The Indepundit is back. You may recall his excellent sniper spree coverage of last year. He got called away by other responsibilities for quite awhile, but he's blogging again.

Mind You - Watchmen is not above criticism. One of these days I'll get around to it. I really wanted to talk about Captain America, darnit, until I got $#^^%#) distracted!

Comics Blogging - Via ADD, you can go through the looking glass into a world where Watchmen should never have been written. The Dark Knight Returns, neither - according to cartoonist John Byrne and his loyal minions. How long does it take to dismantle what initially appears to be a sensical, if not sensible, argument? Not long. Byrne says "all-ages" books should never become "mature readers books" - meaning, really, that all-ages characters should never feature in mature-readers stories. This is the rap he pins on DKR, and Watchmen too.

Now, you may have trouble remembering all those lovable Rorschach stories from your childhood, on account of the fact that they didn't exist. As every aging fanboy and comics historian knows, while the Watchmen heroes were based on the Charlton licenses DC acquired in the early 1980s, DC had Moore swap out the actual Charlton heroes from his original proposal - so that DC could continue to use the Charlton heroes (pretty much in "for all ages" books"). Watchmen came out, featuring no Charlton heroes, at a premium price point, in comics shops only. It reached the wider public in the form of a pricey (for kids) trade paperback. Byrne's response to this objection?

. . . this must be some new usage of the word "new" with which I was not previously familiar.

Let's talk about how stupid this is for a moment. Byrne's claim is that, because the knowledgeable fan could trace the lineage of the Watchmen characters back to the Charlton heroes, that they somehow really were the Charlton heroes and should fall under his rule that characters that began life in all-ages stories should never appear in mature-readers stories. Hm. The idea is not to mess with the younger audience that expects to be able to appreciate the stories of their favorite heroes on their level, and not to mess with their muggle parents expecting the heroes their kids have been reading about to appear only in stories fit for their kids to read.

Thing is, the kids in question - if they saw Watchmen at all - were not going to think, Cool! They're my favorite Charlton heroes with the serial numbers filed off! Dad, can I buy this one with the smiley button sluicing down a river of blood? It's got a leftist's horrified reimagining of The Question, who's like, the only two-fisted crimefighter out there who knows that A is A! Can I, dad? Huh? Huh? The Charlton heroes were not that popular in the first place, which is a big reason why Charlton went out of business and DC was able to buy the trademarks. You had to be a certain age, with a certain devotion to the hobby, to know or learn that the Watchmen were modeled on the Charlton stable - you had, pretty much, to follow the pre-internet fan press. This already puts you in late teens or early adulthood. The gum-cracking casual schoolboy reader of John Byrne (and Dirk Deppey's) dreams was never going to make the connection, and thus was never going to be misled. Hell, just this month I had to do an internet search when I couldn't remember who Ozymandias was supposed to be. (Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt. Did I ever read a Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt comic? No. Did I even know Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt existed? No. Did the Beav, who loved Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt because - well, who the hell knows why? - see Ozymandias while flipping through an issue of Watchmen and think, Can't fool me! He may be named after some poem from school, but that's my Peter!) No.

That's the practicalities of the audience - no one was going to be confused. Now the esthetic realities.

Moore and Gibbons changed the names.

Moore and Gibbons changed the costume designs.

Moore and Gibbons changed the personalities.

Moore and Gibbons changed the continuity.

What are you left with? An interesting bit of comics trivia about the genesis of the series. And that's it. You don't understand Watchmen less or better knowing that somewhere behind it lay a proposal for the Question, Blue Beetle, Sarge Steel, Nightshade and Captain Atom. Nothing in the story fails to make sense without that knowledge that becomes clear once it's acquired. It lacks the allusive importance of knowing who Planetary's Doc Brass really is. You've missed something if you don't get the references in Planetary or Astro City. Recognizing the Charlton ancestors of the Watchmen is immaterial to understanding that story.

Byrne eventually gives the game away by saying that superhero stories should stay in their "nitch." The difference between him and, say, Dirk Deppey, is that Dirk regrets the influence that Dark Knight and Watchmen had on mainline superhero comics, but not Dark Knight and Watchmen themselves. (As I understand his argument.) What we have here is a bunch of old farts complaining about how things sure have changed. The minor irony is that they blame another bunch of old farts for this, but since I have a dog in that fight, I'm not going to push that angle.

Man, that Byrne sure could draw though. I think he was my favorite artist for awhile in the late 1970s, when he was doing Iron Fist and X-men.

A Fanboy's Notes - Also from Bruce Baugh, news that the new edition of the Gamma World RPG will be out shortly. I got to see this in manuscript, and it's a remarkable achievement - older gamers will find a cleaned up presentation and system update that nevertheless captures the spirit of the game you remember. I would say that it does for GW what Dungeons and Dragons Third Edition did for D&D: revivifies it. It's a nostalgia fest, true, but not only a nostalgia fest. Bruce and his team can be proud. I was particularly impressed with the GM section by longtime Usenet presence, Lizard.

Weekly Fitness Blog Item - 163 pounds, 32.5" waist. New lows in each metric. And this was the week I took off - didn't lift weights or aerobicize at all. I walked about 6 miles during lunch breaks, but that doesn't count as real exercise. I also ate a fair amount this week, too.

So is that the secret, eat more and exercise less? Nah. Over the long term, a calorie deficit or surfeit determines whether you lose or gain. On the level of a single day or week, it doesn't. My middle-aged bod really needed the rest, but I have to get back to work tomorrow. I may start resting one week out of every four or eight, though.

Why it's good to get in shape. Because you never know when a hurricane will strike! I spent two hours this afternoon splitting firewood that was, pre-Isabel, my tree and my neighbor's tree. If Isabel had hit last fall, the cleanup would have defeated me. I might have even suffered a coronary.

In other fitness blogs. From Bruce Baugh, something I did not know:

[F]at stores (among other things) whatever allergens and miscellaneous toxins were floating around in the body at the time the fat was laid down, and when the fat's burned off, all that stuff gets released.

Bruce explains what that means for him, given his immune-system problems, and how he's managing the difficulty.

In other other fitness blogs. Nothin'. I think some folks have fallen off the wagon.

Imitation Tech Blog Item - The browser world was really stagnating there for awhile. Opera was stuck on version 7.11 for dog years, and Mozilla Firebird hasn't had a dot-release since 0.6.1 came out in July. But now Opera 7.2 is out, and Mozilla Thunderbird - Firebird's companion e-mail program - has advanced from 0.1 to 0.2, with 0.3 on the way.

Opera 7.2 has a very cool trick for website owners: bring up your side and press Shift-F11 - Opera will toggle to "small-screen view," showing you what your site would look like on a PDA. Apparently, Unqualified Offerings scales pretty gracefully.

Thunderbird is functional. There's just enough about it that I don't like to keep me from using it, though. The present, pre-release version seems to be light on rules for handling incoming mail - I haven't found a way to shunt certain subjects or return addresses to folders other than the in-box, for instance.

I'd like to ditch Outlook Express. I'm going to give M2, the Opera mail client, another look. There is of course no Internet Explorer development news to report. IE really was the best browser for Windows users a year or two ago. Now it's only good for running Movable Type.

Last Out in Blogger Inside Baseball - Gee, the items below sound self-absorbed and waspish. That'll be enough of that! Tune in tomorrow for good cheer and fellowship.

You Like Me, You Really Like Me! III - Yes, it's blogger inside baseball night at Unqualified Offerings. Sorry.

Arthur Silber has a substantial, and angry response to the William Sjostrom article discussed in the item below this one. I'm not actually angry myself, and hope I don't sound it in the item below. I completely endorse Arthur's general thesis, though I didn't read William Sjostrom's item as maliciously intended. (I didn't even read it as sucking up to Glenn Reynolds for a link, and believe me, I interpret a lot of "Glenn was right!" posts that way.) I wasn't even offended at being called a "lefty." If you can be a "lefty" and also complain that the Administration's actions in Iraq ignore the insights of FA Hayek, argue that preemptive war sucks because it's too much like gun control and state flat out that property rights are human rights, then I'll be a lefty.

It sometimes amuses me that I'm probably on more liberal blogrolls than conservative ones these days. This is a minor irony of history. The nimble libertarian has to decide where the most imminent threats to liberty reside and align himself accordingly. Waco and Ruby Ridge were a decade ago. ClintonCare was defeated about the same time, though great chunks of it have been smuggled into law piecemeal, as much by Republicans as by Democrats. Republicans control the White House, the House of Representatives and the Senate. Since the Spring of 2002 it has been clear to me that the "national greatness" "conservatives" had successfully hijacked the war against the terrorists who murdered three thousand blameless Americans in Fall 2001, turning it into the drive for the "benevolent hegemony" that they had been urging since the day the Soviet Union exhibit opened in the Museum of Bad Ideas. I believe their success, and even the sustained attempt, would mean the ruin of what I love best about my country. I could be wrong. But I don't think I am.

That means that the national greatness types, and the Administration whose foreign and "defense" policy they drive, are the salient threat to liberty in America today. For the time being, "the Left" simply doesn't pose an equivalent threat. In addition, this Administration stinks in all sorts of other ways important to libertarians. It stinks on trade, it stinks on spending, it stinks on drug prohibition, civil liberties and even federalism. It has not, to the best of my knowledge, even proposed the elimination of any significant programs, let alone actually eliminating any. It has driven up the price of my catfish, lumber, produce and steel. It has interfered with state prerogatives on drug laws and marriage rights.

In short, in areas (political economy and civil liberties) where a Democratic Administration would surely stink, it has stunk nearly as bad. In areas where it has stunk most (national "security"), the Democrats might stink marginally less. This doesn't mean I'll vote for a Democratic presidential candidate - I'll probably vote Libertarian again. But I'll probably hope for a divided government, with a Democratic President and a Republican Congress. As rulers of the country, the Repubs make a great opposition party. They'll kill expansive proposals from a Democratic President just to make liberals cry. It's clear that they won't take much initiative to actually reduce government beyond that.

But the upshot of it is, right now a bad Republican President is in the White House, with a Republican Congress to roll over and play fetch. They're the problem, and their vainglories and malfeasance the inevitable focus of this blog. That makes me more fun for liberals to read than I'm likely to be during the years of the Clark Administration. They can decide that I've "really gone downhill" when that happens. Bill Clinton made me a libertarian. Thanks to George Bush and Dick Cheney and the PNAC gang, I feel more libertarian and less conservative than ever.

You Like Me, You Really Like Me! II - William Sjostrom recalled what I wrote about ressentiment and administration apologists after Glenn Reynolds grew concerned about what critics of the betrayal of Valerie Plame by the White House might or might not have said about Philip Agee back in the 1970s - the ones that were old enough to follow the news, anyway.

Then Sjostrom notes the semi-incredible fact that the LA Times chose to publish an op-ed on Plame Game by Agee himself this morning, which would be rather like asking O.J. Simpson to provide commentary on the Laci Peterson case, which, come to think of it, didn't some TV network actually do that?

From this, Sjostrom draws the curious conclusion that

[Initially, I] reluctantly had to agree with lefty blogger Jim Henley that it was unfair to target most current leftists over an event of 1969.

Silly me. I should have known better.

Not being a reputable economist like Sjostrom, I can't really see the logic here. I could only agree that Old William was "silly" if it followed that

1. The LA Times somehow stands for "most current leftists."
2. Its decision to publish an op-ed amounts to an endorsement of Agee's actions in the 1970s.
3. The point of my original item was all about fairness to leftists.
4. What any given person felt about Agee had anything whatsoever to do with the objective importance of high government officials burning a clandestine services officer.

Near as I can tell, the only one that comes within even sniffing distance of being the case is 2. 2 is an important one, for sure. But Agee is probably not the worst person to get op-ed page space in an American newspaper. It may even be a misstatement that "the LA Times actually drags Agee out" - Agee may have submitted the article on his own initiative. Should the LA Times have run it? I would. The job of an editorial page is to be interesting, and it's interesting to have the man who did so much to inspire the Statute of the Day commenting on the scandal of the day. I'd for damn sure run response op-eds by Agee's critics, too - even more interesting. Controversy! It sells papers. (Remind me to blog a response to Agee's article after dealing with current business. Were I running the LAT, I'd also have included a factual article to run alongside Agee's article to provide more than just his side of his story.)

The LAT runs a blistering attack by Susan Estrich on its "Schwartztober Surprise" article on the same op-ed page. Does that mean it endorses Estrich's criticism? Does it mean "most current leftists" endorse Estrich's criticism? (I'm thinking not.) It ran a Max Boot op-ed the day before. By doing so, did it show approval of Boot's 2001 regret that the US had not suffered more casualties in the Afghan War? I'm thinking not.

Is there any justification in leaping from the LAT's decision to run an article by Philip Agee to an assumption that "most current leftists" approve of what Agee did? Really, this one isn't hard. The answer is no.

Was my original article about how right wingers should be "fair to leftists?" Not really. It was about ressentiment - about being so obsessed with some real or perceived antagonist that your very habits of thought become the prisoner of that obsession. We've long known that the ranks of the left are full of people whose chief concern is being against whatever conservatives are for because conservatives are bad, bad people. Among other things, it means that, when one of their own gets his fingers or his dick caught in a scandal, their concern is less "What is the truth here?" than "Will this make our enemies happy?" When Democrats controlled the Presidency and half or all of the Congress it was easy to imagine that this was purely a liberal problem. Hey, that's what Neitszche said! Now that Republicans control the Presidency and both houses of Congress it's clear that ressentiment goes both ways.

Lastly, let's imagine that every single "leftist" out there attacking the Administration over the betrayal of Valerie Plame loved Philip Agee. Would it make any difference? To how we thought of every single leftist out there, yes. To the scandal itself, No! This can't be stressed strongly enough: what matters is the factual question of whether "senior administration officials" burned a clandestine employee of the CIA, a risk to national security, the ruin of the career and/or a violation of the felony code.

What I was saying was that Glenn Reynolds, in the post in question, was letting his resentment of "the left" distract him from what mattered and that, moreover, he was representative of his ilk (pro-administration hawks). I may have been right or I may have been wrong, and William Sjostrom may have been right or wrong to "reluctantly agree" with me at the time. But the LA Times' decision to run an op-ed by Philip Agee simply doesn't speak to the issue.

[Better line of attack, if anyone's looking for one: How can you say that one outlet's decision to give Philip Agee a soapbox has nothing to do with the attitudes of "the left" in general, while one sentence in an unusually tortuous Glenn Reynolds post somehow is representative of - hawks? "the right?" "Neos?" Whatever your pet term is today, Jim. Then I have to go digging up other examples of ressentiment among Those People while William Sjostrom collects current statements by liberals in support of Philip Agee. No fun for anybody, but at least I'm not the one who has to read all the liberals.]

You Like Me, You Really Like Me! - Chad Orzel says I've written "the worst item header since this [Plame Game] broke." (I'd like to thank the academy . . . ) But he's a liberal.

Unqualified Offerings Gets Results! - No, Clifford May hasn't told us who his anonymous source on Valerie Plame's occupation was, but Alan David Doane has accepted that it's not that hard to run a weblog and started a pure-blog successor to his defunct Comic Book Galaxy site. Among other things, it looks like the new edition will leave him feeling freer to blog on non-comics topics when the mood takes him.

Even the Sane Can Be Crazy Sometimes - One weakness in Tom Maguire's coverage of Plame Game - he's way too quick to accept Robert Novak's self-serving assertion that the CIA spokesperson didn't try very hard to get him not to help his sources betray Valerie Plame. Novak has a clear interest in denigrating the effort made to warn him off the story, and we're getting less his account of the facts here than his purported judgment. ("It was a very weak request.")

Bruce Rolston points out that once Novak brought the name to the Agency, the CIA's options were mostly bad. The one they chose, per Bruce's convincing case, was the best one they had. It just didn't work. The actual factual assertion in Novak's account that "They said if her name was printed, it might be difficult if she was traveling abroad, and they said they would prefer I didn't use her name," seems like good enough reason, since Novak has to know that headquarters people do travel.

TTFN - Gonna read some comics. Will blog in the next day or two about how they provide crucial insight into the dynamics of the Plame Blame scandal and provide further evidence that Clifford May is a silly, silly man. Meanwhile, the sanest blogging on Plame Game is coming from two sources: on the left, Mark Kleiman; from the right, Tom Maguire - far saner than the giddy if hopefully vivacious outbursts you'll find here. I've concentrated primarily on the counter-dumbass beat. They've been providing more comprehensive coverage - judicious but opinionated.

Which reminds me - anyone nostalgic for the good old days of gnawing fear and serial murder in our Capital region is invited to check out the UO archives from last October. Proudest moment: I believe I was the first person, in big media or small, to declare that the handwriting on the published ransom note must have been that of John Lee Malvo rather than John Muhammad.

We, uh, won't bring up the white van.

The Art of Football - Actual search result that brought someone to this site:

collage football playbooks

Yeah the funny search engine results post is a blogger cliche, but it's not about Valerie Plame!

Over to You, Cliff! - Reader Jonathan Hendry points me to a TNR online debate between Spencer Ackerman and Clifford May. Jonathan notes that

TNR's guy Ackerman went first. May responded, in a way that made it clear he either didn't read Ackerman's post, or else he has no more talking points than were in his original column. Ackerman mentioned the 'everybody knows her' thing, then May's 'response' just restated his original claim almost verbatim as if Ackerman hadn't seen it yet.

But I was more interested in this part, by May about the "six journalists" who got thte calls in July:

I know reporters protect their sources--but should they even protect criminals or those with criminal intent?

Exactly, Cliff! So tell us:

Which "someone who formerly worked in the government" told you, in the first half of July 2003, that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA?

I asked last night, but since I now know that you agree with me on the gravity of this matter, I'm asking again. "supplanter-at-highclearing.com," as stated to the left there. I promise to get the word out for you.

Freeze State Project - Couldn't we have picked somewhere warm?

Stop Covering for Your Anonymous Source! - I mean NRO's Clifford May, author of the silly "No biggie, everybody knew Valerie Plame worked for the CIA" article that has become one of the sacred texts of the Administration's defenders. Yes, I've kicked this dog before, but I'm feeling ornery.

Pause just for a second to ponder another aspect of May's credulity. (Or is it disingenuousness?) May says 'What also might be worth asking: "Who didn't know?" ' that Plame worked for the CIA.

When you read his column, the entire basis for the rhetorical question is:

One guy told May that Plame was a CIA operative. One guy:

That wasn't news to me. I had been told that — but not by anyone working in the White House. Rather, I learned it from someone who formerly worked in the government and he mentioned it in an offhand manner, leading me to infer it was something that insiders were well aware of.

That's it. One guy. After that he heads out for "Joseph Wilson is a BAAAD man" territory At no point does May claim to have heard of Plame's job from so much as a single other person. Nor does he tell us in just what capacity his one guy "formerly worked in the government."

Hesiod thinks May's source is Richard Perle. That would be fun. But who knows?

Oh right - Clifford May knows! So, Clifford May: your anonymous source may have committed a felony by disclosing the identity of a covert intelligence officer. A key question is, per statute, whether his security clearance meant that he was authorized to know Plame's function. The public and the Justice Department need to know who your source is - the Justice Department so it can consider prosecuting him, or finding the person who told him, the public so we can judge "Who didn't know?" Because we can't tell from your article.

One more fact that can be pulled, wriggling, from May's column:

On July 14, Robert Novak wrote a column in the Post and other newspapers naming Mr. Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA operative.

That wasn't news to me. I had been told that . . .

There's that word again - operative. May does not say that his source called May "just an analyst" or an overt employee. May repeats Novak's original word. He not only doesn't correct it - his phrasing is tantamount to independent confirmation that the leakers and reporters knew that Plame was a clandestine CIA employee.

Good thing the conservative media has more than one reporter!

Explainer Explains - From Slate:

Why is it such a big deal that someone outed Valerie Plame? For starters, it's a felony. And Plame was also reportedly a NOC with years of experience investigating weapons of mass destruction. If this is true, her discovery could compromise intelligence operations she was involved with around the world, which would explain why she maintained her nonofficial cover even when she was back in the United States. "Hard target" countries like China and North Korea often keep records of every known meeting between Americans and their scientists and officials. Almost certainly, those lists would have been frantically reviewed when Plame's identity was revealed, and any sources she recruited could have been exposed.

Yes, it's silly to have to link this, but with all the blather among the apologist about all the ways Plame's burning wasn't important, it's crucial to remind people - it's important. Pay particular attention to the passage about why Plame's cover remained important even if she had had her last overseas assignment.

Plame! I Want to Live Forever! - The "confused" declare their stupefaction that "senior administration officials" would try to get back at a "non-entity" like Joseph Wilson in such a crude and, they sort of admit, inappropriate way. It doesn't strike me as that confusing, and yet there's a chance that the official Unqualified Offerings motto comes into play here:

That's not nearly paranoid enough. My alternate theory is worse.

Recall the bureaucratic atmosphere of early summer. I wrote about it in June, during the time of recriminations about the quality of the intelligence used to make the case for war:

Note also that the leaks from Anglosphere intelligence officials are coming fast and furious these days, in Britain and here. It's dangerous business for politicians to try to set up intelligence agencies as fall guys. Intelligence agencies know things. And they care more about their own political health than yours. Didn't Watergate start to go sour on Nixon when the White House tried to scapegoat the CIA?

The Blair people and the Bush people were muttering, not so sotto voce, that yes, there may have been some over-estimates in the stuff those darn intelligence agencies handed them. SOTU. "16 words." "CIA Approved!" The intelligence people responded with I'm not taking the rap for this one! - not for attribution, mind you.

And in early July, Joseph Wilson's op-ed about the Niger trip appears.

Now, if you're in the "with us or against us" crowd at the White House, might you not conclude that Wilson's column was as much a CIA "assignment" as Wilson's original trip? From your perspective, the CIA sent Wilson to Niger; it can just as easily request, on the quiet, that he let the world know about that trip a year and a half later.

In that context, the burning of Plame looks less like a dig at Wilson than a counterstrike on CIA itself - or, if you will, a shot across the bow of George Tenet. We can really make life hell for you people - not nebulous "possible whistleblowers" but the Agency itself and its management. Of course, you do this by making it harder for the Agency to do its job, which is, you know, collecting intelligence, tracking nuclear, biological and chemical weapons and stuff like that. The alternate theory makes the leakers look much worse somehow. I do not endorse it myself yet. But maybe it's less "confusing."

Virtually Norman - Norman is a Norwegian company that has, per an infected friend's recommendation, better information and curative re the Swen virus than the big American firms. Swen comes to you in the form of an e-mail from "Microsoft," complete with trademarked Microsoft graphics, which tells you that attached is a critical security patch that fixes blahblahblah holes etc. I can't give you the exact wording because, on receiving the e-mail, I reflected on why "Microsoft" would be e-mailing me security patches instead of pinging the Automatic Updates taskbar feature like it has for every single previous security patch. After reflecting I did a properties check on the e-mail return addy, deleted the e-mail and emptied my Deleted Items folder.

Swen strikes me as particularly obnoxious since the creator(s) can't even pretend to be "exposing flaws in the operating system." All they're doing is taking advantage of less suspicious users. To those who would say that this too is a valuable lesson, I reply a) if it were so valuable, people would pay you to teach them, and they're not; b) all the fancy computer stuff that power users have is made possible because the user community extends so far beyond the cognoscenti. Without the people you're implicitly deriding by sending Swen around there wouldn't be the economies of scale that makes the internet as we know it and hardware as we enjoy it possible. So, like, fuck you guys.