Cue Lee Greenwood - TalkLeft picks up an ABC News report that, well, this:

According to Time, activities leading toward release of the 140 prisoners have accelerated since the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. It said U.S. officials had concluded some detainees were kidnapped for reward money offered for al Qaeda and Taliban fighters.

Whoops! So now what, huh?

Slated for release were "the easiest 20 percent" of detainees, a military official told the magazine. It did not identify its source, who said the military was waiting for "a politically propitious time to release them."

As Talkleft itself notes "It took the U.S. over two years to figure out that up to 20% of these detainees were total innocents? During which time they were kept in cages without access to families or lawyers?"

A strong implication here is that only the Supreme Court's interest has prompted any real movement - the sort of judicial oversight that the Administration has fought and continues to fight.

The pattern is clear: everything dubious turns out to be much worse than initially reported. Oh, and there's always someone telling you it's actually much better. By the time the truth comes out they're busy defending something else. Even Viet Dinh, culpable in drafting much of the PATRIOT Act, has developed qualms. We're told today that some colonel fired a gun in the air near a prisoner to scare him and next month that he had the prisoner beaten and put a bullet into the ground by his head. We learn that arresting relatives of suspects "to pressure them to surrender" is a routine policy in Iraq. We're told one month that most of Iraq is not just quiet but friendly and the next month, in one of those quiet friendly parts, crowds drag American bodies through the street. We're told that there's no guerrilla war, then that there is a guerrilla war but we've turned the corner, then we notice that fatal casualties among our soldiers have grown exponentially for seven months and more (but we're turning the corner again). That power will soon be back to normal in Baghdad, then that power will soon be back to normal in Baghdad and then, that power will soon be back to normal in Baghdad. We're told that Iraq's oil will pay for the reconstruction, then that we must spend billions on Iraq's oil industry itself. We preen about our national virtue, then pause to contemplate "politically propitious times" to release the innocent. We excuse sins in ourselves we punish in others.

Go read the real crackpots. They've been more right than I was.

Weekly Fitness Blog Item - 161 pounds, 32.5" waist. Strangely for a holiday week, that's three pounds below last Sunday, but like I said, the actual number has been bouncing around within a four-pound range. There was a typo in last week's waist figure too - it should have read "32.75," not 34.75.

Goal for the holidays: Stay under 165 pounds through New Year's. I'll need a goal for next year after that. I'm toying with the idea of - gulp - a marathon in the fall.

In the news - Progress on the "Americans Can't Multiply Act of 2004":

The food label on grocery store products needs an overhaul so it will be more useful to consumers struggling to control their weight, several nutrition experts say.

For instance, a 20-ounce bottle of Mountain Dew might have a line on the nutrition facts panel that tells dieters it contains 275 calories. Currently it says 110 calories for an 8-ounce serving.

Because no American should have to multiply by 2.5. (Insert libertarian rant about public schools here.)

More:

''For instance, it works for a 3-ounce or a 5-ounce bag of chips where somebody might eat the whole thing,'' says Michael Jacobson of the Center for 'Science' in the 'Public' 'Interest', a Washington, D.C., consumer group. ''For a jar of peanut butter, it doesn't make sense. There will have to be some judgments on when it will be appropriate.''

And we will make those judgments! We! Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!

Ahem. Scare quotes in the quoted text were mine.

I should state right out that I read the food labels on practically everything - it is a "massive government program" of which I make shameless use. But given that food label regulations have coincided pretty closely with the much-discussed rise in American obesity, the program is a little short of beneficial outcomes.

More:

But not everyone is sure this change would prompt people to eat less. Some research shows that once people choose what food they are going to eat, they pay very little attention to how much they are consuming, says Brian Wansink, a professor of nutritional science and marketing at University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign.

In one study, Wansink found total calories listed on labels did not reduce how much people ate. But people did reduce their intake if the label said they'd have to walk two miles to burn off calories contained in the package or that they'd gain one-sixteenth of a pound if they ate it all.

Interesting. An otherwise quiet fitness week. See you in seven.

NaGNoWriMo Update - Did I finish the graphic novel? Not hardly. Am I done with the graphic novel, as in ready to set it aside? Not remotely. As I suspected, I had to start writing it to figure out what I had. Now I know. I know where it's going and, more or less, how it will get there. Bill intends to have thumbnail sketches of the first chapter this week - cool!

The comics script is a strangely bifurcated medium. You write part of it for the world (the lines of dialogue, any captions and thought balloons) and the rest of it for one guy - the artist. (I have no editor to consider at this stage.) He'll be bringing the thing to visual life, so you need to make sure he knows where you're coming from. Basically, all that "show, don't tell" stuff goes out the window - I have to explain not just what should be happening, but why. That way Bill can showdon'ttell the reader. It's as if you were sending a director your stage play and cover letter, but the cover letter was spliced into the stage play. Interesting and strange.

Note: the script is neither "Marvel style" plot-summary-first nor, quite, "full script," though it's closer to the latter. In true full-script, the writer explains what he wants to see in every panel of every page. My script goes down to the page level but not the panel level. I feel compelled to write "by pages." But I figure Bill, as an artist, is better equipped than I to decide how best to convey the action within a page.

Mark my words: the whole script will be done by New Year's at the latest.

Metrics System Redux - Here's a measurement I missed until now on Chief Wiggles' blog - size of the "green zone."

I was relieved to see the green zone expanded back to its original size as the 14th of July Bridge was closed again, after being opened for only a few weeks. The two bombings of the Rasheed Hotel forced the issue I am sure.

Apparently we are expanding the protective cordon around our HQ, at some cost, I imagine, to Baghdadis ability to get on with their business. A bridge closing in a major city is a serious matter.

Our Man Deeds - Have just discovered the newish Deeds blog by a CPA employee in Iraq. I highly recommend it. I will confess to reading quite a bit of it "against the grain" - I think it needs to be - but it's a useful addition to your "perspectives collection" and it has some hard news tucked in there. For instance, remember the army officer court-martialed for scaring a prisoner by firing his pistol into the air? Turns out there was rather more to it than that:

The prisoner refused to talk. The initial story was that the LTC fired his weapon into the air two times to scare the guy and it worked.

Well, that's not quite what happened. The LTC allowed two of his guys, a private who was the LTC's driver and another guy, to beat the crap out of the prisoner. But the two guys testified they didn't hit the Iraqi as hard as they could have.

Then, the LTC told the Iraqi he was going to kill him, took him outside, put his head in the sand and shot the sand right next to the guy's head. That worked and he talked.

The proprietor has adopted the pseudonym "John Galt." I wonder how it feels to be the sort of person to take that name and find oneself in the middle of this kind of thing:

For example, we need ID cards, like our drivers' licenses, for our 50K+ Facilities Protection Service (FPS) guards, and the 65K+ Iraqi Police. (The list continues but we'll start with these individuals.) We need to buy the machines that are used to make the cards, which requires that we obtain the funds to pay for the machines. Can't use Iraqi money per CPA mandate. So, we have to use CPA money. That will take at least 90 days to process. Okay, working on that.

Now, how many machines do we need? Someone must call the FPS to find out exactly how many guards are located where. FPS doesn't have permanent offices from which a quick report with the information can be generated.

How do we call them? Use cell phones. We just got 100 cell phones and are trying to link up with the appropriate Iraqis to hand them out.

Before handing them out, however, FPS wants us to make sure they have authority to do so, in writing, from their Ministry of Interior (MoI). Okay--but MoI needs a policy decision made by the CPA Senior Advisor to the MoI. All right, another step.

And this step must go through all 25 CPA Senior Advisors for approval and comment. (Okay, I "cheated" and did this before the ID card requirement was an issue.)

Now I have to wait to get it signed. And wait. While we are waiting, the foreign embassies tell us they want their guards to get cards first, and they want special uniforms for them.

The above consumed three long, hard days, interspersed with lunch, supper, sleep, mortars and sleep.

A is A if you can get the forms signed, apparently.

His scathing criticism of the "donkey attack" is pretty funny. And it's hard not to like a guy who can write the entry wondering where Monday went.

I highly recommend all those who consider themselves "libertarian" or inclined that way to zip to the bottom of the page and read the entries from the beginning, the tortuous path by which Galt managed to even get to Baghdad.

Note: "Galt's" wife posts occasional entries too. My interest in them is primarily psychological.

Red Meat or Sacred Cow? - Shorter Jim Henley: Term limits, phooey. Longer Jim Henley: "The Term Limits Illusion?" at Liberty & Power.

Time's Up - There's been sufficient time spent appreciating the President's gesture in visiting a group of American troops in Baghdad yesterday. Analysis may commence. Juan Cole is a good place to start. Excerpt:

Instead, the President had to sneak in and out of Iraq for a quick and dirty photo op, clearly in fear of his life if the news of his visit had leaked. He did not even get time to eat a meal with the troops. He was there for two hours. He did not dare meet with ordinary Iraqis, with the people he had conquered (liberated).

Offstage, the real Iraq carried on. Guerrillas attacked a military convoy on the main highway to the west of Baghdad, near Abu Ghraib. The wire services said, that an AP cameraman filmed "two abandoned military trucks with their cabs burning fiercely as dozens of townspeople looted tires and other vehicle parts." Guerrillas in Mosul shot an Iraqi police sergeant to death.

There's a lot of bitterness in Cole's item (though not so much about Hillary Clinton), but there is a real sense in which the manner of the President's trip underlines just how far we are from the hawks' pre-war dreams of success. Approaching Baghdad airport in the tight, SAM-avoiding spiral all planes must take when landing there does not constitute being "hailed as liberators."

As for the speech itself, here's an excerpt:

You are defeating the terrorists here in Iraq, so that we don’t have to face them in our own country.

George Bush, meet Matt Labash of the Weekly Standard:

Now, the most fashionable pre-fab rationalization to use when the news isn't going as swimmingly as we want it to, is to select a place in Iraq, then a corresponding place in America. If the two places start with the same letter, all the better. Next, state baldly that no matter how lousy things are going, you'd rather fight the terrorists / Baathists / whoever-it-is-we're-fighting in the first location, rather than the second. Lastly, sit back with a self-satisfied smile, as if that settles the matter.

The President Went to Iraq and All I Got was this peevish resentment that it upstaged Hillary Clinton. Criminy, Hesiod, give it a rest. It's a holiday!

By the way, you might want to look into President Clinton's 1999 trip to Greece. Actually, all Democratic partisans prone to romanticize the Clinton Administration's "multilateral" diplomatic success might do well to reacquaint themselves with that history. It's not just Bush Administration apologists who have lost track of what went on back then.

Trypto-fanned - A transfer of stuffing has been effected. I am zonked. The usual wonderful holiday dinner with my sister's family, and the kids unusually behaved. Thankful for:

La Familia Offering, ESPECIALLY Mrs. Offering.
Certain physical constants which, if their values fell outside a narrow range, would preempt life as we know it.
Particles and fields of force.
The poetry of Frost and Stevens.
Comic books.
Roleplaying games.
Loyal readers.
Voluntary association, personal or commercial.
The Constitution.
People who remember what it says.
My good health, my wife's good health and my kids.
Vaccines.
Everyone who remembers what the country was supposed to be.
The impulse towards kindness.
Bartleby.com
Poetic meter.
Running water.
Fagles' translations of Homer.
"Up the Junction" by Squeeze.
The internet, goddammit.
The Imagination.
Friendship.
Fish.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Hear Hear - Kudos to President Bush for making a risky landing at Baghdad International Airport to spend Thanksgiving with some of our troops in theater. There's a lot more one can say about the trip as reported, but the first thing to be said - Good for you, Mr. President - deserves to stand alone.

Travesty - Literary critic Hugh Kenner is dead. (Via Electrolite.) That is a travesty. So is a famous computer program Kenner wrote - Kenner being, to the best of my knowledge, the only renowned scholar of modernism who was also a regular columnist for Byte magazine. Travesty is a text-transformation algorithm that makes new strings from old, based on a few simple parameters. The first version I used, which I got from poet Henry Taylor, ran from a DOS command line. Taylor used it to make one poem. Jackson Mac Low made an entire book using it.

Naturally, Travesty is now available as a web applet. It works all too well on blog entries. Here's one of mine. Give it a try yourself.

More good news from Iraqi allies, according attacks on U.S. base and daughter of a top Iraq say they have certain know, in bother wife and this. The point is not to try to make sense of a top aide to ousted Iraq: We've been here before. And what do you know, in both the fullest reprint of the AP story, when the Washington Times about al-Douri: U.S. forces and their Iraq: We've been here before. And what do you the fullest reprint of the point is not to try to make sense of his movements and cannot be a Lieutenant Colonel any major role in league with him and daughter of Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, a top aide to ousted Iraqi general appeared in front of the Iraqi fugitive suspected of masterminding to an early-November, the Washington Times about al-Douri, a top Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, is dying attacks against coalition forces for this story. There's current wave of a fugitive: BAGHDAD — Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri were taken interesting to sources in Iraq say they're in orchestrating to sources for "closies." We've been promoted.") I'll spare you knowledge of his movement to try to make sense of a top Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, is dying of leukemia and this. The point is not be playing attacks against coalition forces. A military spokesman says the AP story in the town of Samarra, north of Baghdad. That's they're in orchestrating the fullest reprint of the U.S. base and their Iraq say they're in league with him al-Douri were taken intent.

Travesty can be set for degrees of "garbledness." The above is "Least Garbled." At Most Garbled, you get more coinages and gibberish:

More is nothered anot there top Iraqi general and has been in Iraq saide the of making Octobe a story, which sense wonderested they're good news familiar with his on orces a to is on Glober of Baghdad. And thing attactic wonder 30 story, why, which seems the the point and have arrent Colonel David Hogg milition Globe try the July in for Saddition onel vaguely regimes against coalitive.

My favorite Travesty coinage was "endiscriming," which has stuck with me for over a decade. Mid-garbled gives you fewer coinages, but odder sentences than least garbled:

More good news from Iraqi fugitive suspected of attacks, the U.S. for this movember 30 story, which seems to that Hogg is video file.) More good news front of masterminding any more, according sources familiar wife and the fullest report. "The point of a fugitive: U.S. base and daughter of Baghdad. That's the Boston Globe story, when the July incident wave certain knowledge of attacks one town of the Iraqi general appeared in Iraqi general appeared in orchestrating to feel vaguely report that we're just going forces familitary spokesman says their Iraqi fugitive: U.S. for this. The point is behind that we're doing for this movember 30 story turned up an early-Novement wave certain knowledge of Samarra, north of the outrage. But Googling October WorldNetDaily reprint is a report. "The taken interested Iraqi general appeared that we're doing any more, according for "closies." We've arrested of a top Iraq say the Washington Times about al-Douri: BAGHDAD — Izzat Ibrahim al-Dour

The results of running good writing through Travesty, as opposed to blog posts, can be striking, but that is left as an exercise for the reader.

Imitation Tech Blog Item - Andrew C. Brown, author of The Darwin Wars, e-mails that he maintains a page of useful OpenOffice macros. As he recognized, one of his macros, which cycles through header styles, was the key to my style-change problem in OOo Writer. I downloaded his file, copied the header-change macro over, spent 10 minutes subbing my style names for the header styles and assigning the updated submacros to keystrokes, and I can now do exactly what I wanted to do: change paragraph styles on the fly from the keyboard as I write. This will simplify script production tremendously.

Meanwhile, MT/Typepad client Zempt report: I like it. I've had a couple of posts crap out on uploading - once because en-dashes somehow snuck in where hyphens should be, once for a reason I never did determine. Weirdest of all, sometimes it just doesn't start. I double-click the desktop or click the Start menu icon and . . . nothing. I'm typing this very entry into MT's web interface for that reason. This is what comes of using version 0.3 of something, I suppose. The good news is that these are graceful failures. The failed post texts were still there for me to fix or copy. The failed starts are cured by an eventual reboot.

Oh, and Andrew C. Brown has a blog. Check it out.

The Death of Criticism - Polytropos has an excellent review of the extended-edition Two Towers DVD. But I think the worst contribution Tolkein scholarship was that of soul-singer Sam Cooke. "Don't know much about the French-eyed Took," Cooke avers, but this obscure relatiion on Frodo's mother's side was hardly central to the saga even if Cooke did know something.

Appointment in Samarra - Little new information on the arrest of the wife and daughter of Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri yesterday. The most substantial reporting comes from AP's Jim Gomez, who writes

MacDonald gave no details on why the wife and daughter were seized, but American forces have frequently arrested relatives of fugitives to interrogate them on their family member's whereabouts and as a way of putting pressure on the men to surrender. [My emphasis]

The media director of the Amnesty International USA, Alistair Hodgett, questioned the tactic, saying if the women were arrested to pressure al-Douri to turn himself in, they were being used as “bargaining chips.”

“At a minimum, the U.S. should clarify on what legal basis (they) ... have been detained. If the purpose of their arrest is to exert pressure on Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri and force his surrender, then it is cause for grave concern,” Hodgett said in a statement.

The New York Post rewrites the lede of the Gomez story ("GIS SEIZE FAMILY AS BAIT FOR TOP GOON") in gung-ho fashion - "American troops hunting for a top Saddam Hussein deputy who's masterminding anti-U.S. attacks arrested his wife and daughter in an apparent attempt to pressure his surrender." - but it's pretty clear their certainty on the mix of "pressure" and information-gathering in American motives is unearned.

Sean Collins says my problem is that I don't give our troops enough credit. Andrew Olmsted, a veteran, finds the practice disquieting, and on the edge of altering his judgments on the prudence and virtue of the entire war. If Gomez is correct, rather than sloppy, when he states that American troops "frequently" detain relatives "as a way of putting pressure on the men to surrender," then we have a policy of taking hostages. It's that simple. I find the moral, legal and practical objections to such a policy compelling.

The Other Casualties - On Stand Down, I have a piece about a new Army News report on the high incidence of brain injuries among our wounded in Iraq.

Don't Know Much About History - Glenn Reynolds has an odd "response" to a Julian Sanchez report on the shuttering of al-Arabiya's Baghdad office:

I also don't recall a lot of complaining when, under Clinton, we shut down pro-Milosevic TV stations in Yugoslavia. But that, I suppose, was different. Somehow.

Well, let's see. According to a contemporaneous article in the Guardian::

In a statement yesterday, the [International Federation of Journalists] condemned the attack, warning that it could lead to reprisals against independent journalists who have been campaigning against controls imposed by the Milosevic regime. 'We have been trying to trace journalists who have gone missing or been detained by the Serb authorities. Their plight is made ever more perilous by this latest strike,' it said.

John Foster, general secretary of the National Union of Journalists described the attack as 'barbarity'. He added: 'Killing journalists does not stop censorship, it only brings more repression.' Peter Almond, chairman of the Defence Correspondents' Association, expressed 'considerable disquiet', particularly in the light of Mr Shea's assurance to the IFJ.

In Geneva, the European Broadcasting Union, which groups the main stations in and around Europe, said the Belgrade television centre had been used to transmit news reports by international as well as local media. 'We do not see how the suppression of news sources can serve any useful purpose,' the EBU's president, Albert Scharf, said.

The Guardian also reports that

At a heated press briefing at the Ministry of Defence, Clare Short, the international development secretary, said: 'This is a war, this is a serious conflict, untold horrors are being done. The propaganda machine is prolonging the war and it's a legitimate target.'

So if it was a "heated press conference" I guess some people were upset!

FAIR, a liberal pressure group if ever there was one, listed the bombing of Belgrade State TV among the "war crimes" it accused NATO of perpetrating.

Here's one for you: a snarky, obviously critical contemporaneous reference to the bombing from - Reason Express. Given that it's a Reason item that occasioned Glenn's carping, this seems relevant.

The leftist Indymedia condemned not just the TV station bombing but the entire war.

NewsHour did a point-counterpoint in which Robert Leavitt, associate director of the New York University's Center for War, Peace and the News Media, argued that "[First:] This is not a military target, no matter what NATO says. The second is that it really creates a very dangerous precedent with regard to freedom of the press."

We wouldn't want to leave out Justin Raimondo now, would we?

And that's just some quick Googling of a four-year-old incident, enough to show that "the usual suspects" - reporters' organizations, human rights groups, libertarian publications, academics and left-wing activists - were all over the attacks on Serb TV at the time.

This was not a secret back then, either. I have very clear memories of the war opposition and war criticism that took place back then. Were Julian old enough in 1999 to have his own e-mail account, I have no doubt he personally would have left complaints around the internet too. The surprise is Glenn Reynolds' seeming ignorance of this history.

Glenn writes, in his sole reference to Julian's brief item, "It seems, at any rate, a bit simplistic to cast this as a simple press-freedom issue." Maybe it's just me, but what seems simplistic is basing your every reaction to current events on whether or not Bill Clinton got an adequately hard time about something at the close of the last century.

Besides, I thought simplistic was good.

(Julian weighs in too.)

Cyber-Terror Watch - The traitors appear to have hacked the Weekly Standard site. There's even a subtle "chickenhawk" dig:

The second thing to remember, for most of the people declaring where they'd rather fight the terrorists, is that they are not personally doing much of the fighting. Who's to say if you were coming up on the 11th month of your deployment in a hostile country where the natives, instead of showing gratitude, showed you the business-end of an RPG-launcher, that you might not enjoy fighting the terrorists in a place where you could claim home-field advantage, have a warm bed, a cold beer, and the occasional conjugal visit from a woman whose name you could pronounce.

(Via Max Sawicky.)

Poetry Wednesday - Sasha Volokh has published quite a nice translation of an Akhmatova poem.

Imitation Tech Blog Item - Kevin Brennan writes

You can assign keyboard shortcuts to text styles in both MS Word (at least Word XP; I don't have earlier versions handy so can't check) and in TextMaker (a nice lightweight word processor that I like because I can use it on both my laptop and on my Pocket PC. I did a quick Google search on the topic and apparently it isn't possible in OOo Writer 1.1 but it may be in 2.0. I have no idea when that's coming out, though.

I've been working with OpenOffice for about a month now at home and in general I'm finding that it has a lot of niggling annoyances compared to MS Office, but on the other hand said annoyances are less than the annoyance of trying to keep MS Office up to date (and shelling out the cash to upgrade every 18 months, that or find my home version become slowly obsolete).

First off, does it rock to have readers who will try to find this stuff out for you? Yes it does. Second, I see to my horror that Textmaker . . . costs . . . money. Only $49.95, mind you. (There's a thirty-day trial version.) Mostly, though, I'm posting this as an excuse to try out Zempt, a Windows MovableType/Typepad client that Ginger Stampley tipped me to. Solves the "browser ate my post" problem and lets you connect to multiple blogs on multiple servers. Theoretically, I can set Zempt up to post to all Highclearing.com blogs including UO, Stand Down and 20' by 20' Room too. And it's free.

Collective Responsibility Watch - More good news from Iraq: We've arrested another wife and daughter of a fugitive:

U.S. forces in Iraq say they have arrested the wife and daughter of a top Iraqi fugitive suspected of masterminding attacks against coalition forces. A military spokesman says the wife and daughter of Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri were taken into custody Tuesday in the town of Samarra, north of Baghdad.

That's the Boston Globe story, which seems to be the fullest reprint of the AP story. There's currently little additional information on why, when the husband is suspected of masterminding attacks, the wife and daughter are arrested. Perhaps they're in league with him and have certain knowledge of his movements and malign intent. Nobody's bothered to issue a statement to that effect, though. Perhaps we're just going for "closies." We've been here before.

And what do you know, in both the July incident and this one, it's 4ID making the pickups. I wonder if Lt. Colonel David Hogg is behind this one too. (Actually, Hogg might not be a Lieutenant Colonel any more, according to an early-November WorldNetDaily report. "The tactic worked, and the Iraqi general appeared in front of the U.S. base and surrendered. Puckett said there is a report that Hogg has been promoted.")

I'll spare you the outrage. But Googling sources for this story turned up an interesting October 30 story in the Washington Times about al-Douri:

BAGHDAD — Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, a top aide to ousted Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, is dying of leukemia and cannot be playing any major role in orchestrating the current wave of attacks on U.S.-led coalition forces and their Iraqi allies, according to sources familiar with the old regime's functioning.

Remember, the point is not to try to make sense of all this. The point is to feel vaguely reassured that we're doing something. Anything else would be treason. (Link is video file.)

Labor-Saving Device Alert - You don't need to put a lot of effort into refuting Jonah Goldberg's lame attempt to steal F.A. Hayek for conservatives. Julian Sanchez has already done it for you. Dang but those fish corpses look messy in that barrel, though.

Ne'er So Well-Express'd - Gene Healy sums it up:

This, then, is the legacy of unified Republican government: a tragically unnecessary war, an expanded entitlement state that eats its young, and a whole lot of stuff named after Ronald Reagan.

I think he should have called the item in question "A Dime's Worth of Difference," though, for reasons that will be obvious once you read it.

Poetry Corner - This entry from Poetry Daily the other day is actually pretty good. The trick with the commas makes the poem. That the poem already makes a certain amount of sense to me is bittersweet; the certainty that it will make more sense as time goes on, bittersweeter. That's a word. Look, there it is at the end of the last sentence.

Imitation Tech Blog Item - So I'm fulfilling my NaGNoWriMo commitment this week, and writing my manuscript in the OpenOffice Writer module. There's a lot to like about it. But here's a big thing not to like. Near as I can tell, I can't attach text styles to keyboard shortcuts. Formatting a comics script involves (in my case) cycling among four styles. It would really rock if I didn't need the mouse for this. It really sucks that it seems I do.

No, I don't know if I could do this in Word. No, I'm not going to check now. Bloggers don't do research, remember?

I'm a Joiner, Cont. - Bryant Durrell of Population: One instigated a new group blog devoted to roleplaying games, and invited me to join. I join Bryan, Ginger Stampley and others at 20' by 20' Room. Inaugural post forthcoming in which I compare non-gamers to Hitler. (Kidding!) Mission statement excerpt:

Roleplaying games are really interesting.

From that sentence, all else flows.

I'm also the latest guest-blogger at Liberty & Power the next two weeks. As Liberty & Power is home to real "noted libertarians" this is quite an honor. Inaugural post forthcoming there too. I have to sit in my thoughtful spot first.

The Clues Return to Neolibertariana, the Continuing Series - Even the Volokh Conspiracy people are grumbling about the spendthrift ways of the Bush Administration. David Bernstein writes

Compassionate conservatism" seems to have turned out to be a replay of the Nixon strategy of buying off every conceivable interest group that is capable of being bought off by a Republican admnistration, while using social issues and conservative rhetoric to appease the Republican masses. Nixon, at least, had the excuse of governing in an era when liberalism was at its apex, and with the constraints imposed by the other two branches of government, dominated by liberal Democrats. What is George Bush's excuse?

and Randy Barnett seconds the motion. Unfortunately for them, they are prisoners of Volokh-standard foreign policy illusions and therefore probably stuck.

The Saddest Story of the Month is, um, not this one:

JOHNSON CITY, Tenn. (AP) - A bullet fired in the air during a Ku Klux Klan initiation ceremony came down and struck a participant in the head, critically injuring him, authorities said.

I think these people should hold more meetings. (Via Atrios.)

Best of the Worst Watch - The irony remains: no one bears greater responsibility than Paul Wolfowitz for promulgating the "national" "security" "strategy" of "benevolent" hegemony. But on the question of Israeli-Palestinian relations he is clearly the least insane of the neoconservatives. (Via Amygdala, which has links to non-insane Israeli leaders too. And the latest of the blogosphere's pleas for financial help. I wonder if these are as good an economic indicator as the Walmart data.)

Little Wars - Arnaud de Borchgrave, latter-day conservative dove, has an interesting column about guerrilla war.

On "bloody Sunday" in 1972, the IRA had a total of only 40 men, according to last week's testimony of former IRA commander Martin McGuinness, now a leading Sinn Fein political leader.

de Borchgrave was a hawk's hawk during the Cold War.

On Bad Authority - Bruce Baugh, contra Warren Ellis' two landmark supervillain teamup books for Wildstorm, Stormwatch and the Authority.

Calling on the Power of the Blogosphere - If it's good for anything besides bagging scalps, we must use it to make everyone aware of this story:

If they persist, refer them to Dr. Jeffrey Goldstein at the University of Utrecht. He became a personal hero of mine earlier this month when he revealed the findings from his study on the effects of game playing at the workplace. In short, an hour or so of gaming per day improved both productivity and job satisfaction.

The full article has a few qualifiers which you should deemphasize in your coverage.

Weekly Fitness Blog Item - 164#, 34.75" waist. Weight has actually bounced between 160 and 164 this week. Did a major weight workout Monday, including hellish squats, and some walking. During tonight's football game I worked Heavyhands for most of halftime and all of the third quarter - about an hour, with pump&run in place during commercials.

Current weight routine: modified slow-cadence protocol. Two sets per muscle group. First set 12 reps at about half weight. Second set 12 reps at the most I figure I can lift for around 12 reps. This week's exercises:

Squats (quads, buttockals etc.)
Deadlifts (hamstrings, glutamates, lower back)
Shoulder shrugs (um, shoulders)
Bilateral dumbbell raises (upper back)
Bench press (chest)
Lying triceps extensions (yup - triceps)
Biceps curls (you have to guess this one)
Crunches (abdominals)

In other fitness blogs.

Avram Grumer has stuck with Body-for-Life longer than I managed.

Bruce Baugh is down another pound and getting some walking in.

Jesse Walker is just unclear on the concept.

Glenn Reynolds reports that low-carb dieting has become so trendy that Ruby Tuesday has a low-carb menu. I am of mixed minds on the trend. The Ruby Tuesday menu actually looks very good - meats, fish, green and yellow vegetables. (Warning for the curious: the mashed potato substitute, "creamy mashed cauliflower," is one of the least palatable dishes in any cuisine on earth.) But I also see low-carb sections proliferating in grocery stores, and a fully expect that pretty soon carb control will be in the same position that low-fat regimens have been in for years - a lot of really bad foods with really appealing labels that people will wolf down imagining that they are somehow eating healthy. (Think Snackwell's.)

Don't Know Much About Geography, Continued - Damn Sunni Triangle. You never know where it is any more:

MOSUL, Iraq (Reuters) - Two U.S. soldiers have been killed while their car was stopped in traffic in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. Their bodies were looted by residents angered by U.S. raids in the area, witnesses say.

Reports conflict whether the soldiers were shot dead or had their throats slit.

I suspect the Sunni Triangle meme will be dead by New Year's, joining "It's not a guerrilla war."

Since You Put It That Way - Matthew Yglesias has the only "anti" comment on the "Tech Central Station flap" that makes any sense to me. Dispositive? I wouldn't say so. But telling.

Lesser of Two Evils Watch - It seems pretty obvious that libertarians should be rooting for Democrats to kill the Republican Medicare expansion bill. With any luck, the ill will a successful fight engendered would prevent passage of any prescription drug benefit this term.

So far, they're not doing a very good job. "The [House] vote was 220-215," AP reports. I can't help but think the present Congress, faced with the proposal of a Democratic President, would have voted it down.

All up to the Senate now. Atrios is your source for news on stiffening Senatorial spines. Keep checking for updates.

Over There - Tacitus has an interesting report on an insider's take on Saudi Arabia. It is to say the least contrarian - at least, contrarian to a warblogger zeitgeist that even I have participated in. Needless to say I'm not in a position to judge its accuracy. However, it fits with my sense that the "Saudi Royal Sin" (if one may be so bold) is a ruinous caution, and it jibes with my theory of "the essential conservatism of the planet."

(Q: Hey Jim, if all you're going to do any more is link to your "Barber of Beirut" essay, do you even need a blog? A: Yes. I still read new comics every week.)

Split-Screen Republicanism Watch

"We do the national greatness stuff abroad and the leave us alone stuff at home."

Andrew Sullivan

Patriot Act Expansion Moves Through Congress

The government wants these powers in order to more effectively prosecute the "war on terrorism," although critics warn that, once given these powers, the FBI may use them in cases that are not relevant to terrorism in order to gather evidence against other targets of investigation.

Indeed, recent Senate hearings have covered incidents in which information about individuals was obtained by the FBI through the use of its counter-terrorism powers even though the investigations were directed against what the ACLU called "garden-variety criminals."

The provision not only permits the FBI to seize records from more kinds of businesses; it also forbids businesses from informing their clients about the seizures.

The neolibertarian contention has been not only that we could wage expansive war abroad without further restricting civil liberties at home, but that waging expansive war abroad would prevent further restricting civil liberties at home. The kindest thing one can say, two years along now, is that their case remains unproven.

Freedom Is Untidy - The hawks are right that John F. Burns' New York Times article of 11/16 on the new Iraq is very good. They make too much of one part of it, though:

At the Palestine Hotel, where I was taunted in the last weeks of Mr. Hussein's terror by officials of his information ministry as "the most dangerous man in Iraq" because of my articles about the regime's brutality, some of the same Iraqis, who now work as interpreters for Western news bureaus, caution me against staying in the 16th-floor room I used to inhabit.

(My emphasis.) Porphyrogenitus writes

So our "free press" are so annoyed by and opposed to censorship that they're employing their own minders now that Saddam is no longer able to pay them. And we wonder why the quotes they get from Iraqis - who aren't stupid and do know who worked for the Ba'athist regime - tell the interpreters the things they do, and the interpreters then tell the reporters, who then report back to America in a certain tone.

It would be foolish to say there can't be anything to this, though many minders were probably time-servers, or the sort of sycophants who would be among the quickest to "meet the new boss," and others, being functionaries, will be unknown to the people they meet in their new lives. Some ex-minders probably are loyal to the resistance. Some of the ones who aren't could rationally be mistaken for loyalists by nervous Baghdadis. Even if you don't recognize the loyalist interpreter, he probably has little signs to alert you that he is the Old Order's eyes and ears; and anyway, the first job of the resistance has been making Iraqis fearful of cooperating with the Westerners, so it's rational for locals to approach any interview warily.

There's a problem though. On this theory the negative press, supinely yoking itself to its old masters, is giving us a much bleaker picture than reality warrants. The problem is that the bad press reports largely gibe with the CIA's estimate of the situation and even Paul Bremer's. There are also the numbers, such as they are.

There seem to be two possibilities. One, that minders or no, the news reports are largely correct. Indeed, the pattern since summer has been that this month's outrageous negativism becomes next month's official yes, but. (Remember when it was absurd that the media said we were facing a guerrilla war?) Or, the CIA and CPA are themselves being led astray - faced with the terrible shortage of Arabic language skills, they've had to rely on "minders" of their own - what they learn comes to them filtered through Ba'athist functionaries they've had to turn to simply to function in an Arab country. This is surely the scarier of the two possibilities. Therefore I'm rooting for the first one.

Burns makes one point very clear:

But the random experiences of a week back in the country and among ordinary people I have talked to, by far the most common view has been that for all the American failures, as they see them, a guarantee of greater misery would still be the premature withdrawal of American troops.

After the bombing of the Italian command center, he interviewed members of the crowd on the scene:

"No, no!" one man said. "If the Americans go, it will be chaos everywhere." Another shouted, "There would be a civil war."

"If the Americans, the British or the Italians leave Iraq, we will be handed back to the flunkies of Saddam, the Baathists and Al Qaeda will take over our cities," another man said.

Nobody offered a dissenting view, though many said it would be best if the Americans achieved peace and left as soon as possible. These people, at least, seemed concerned that America should know that the bombers, whoever they were, did not speak for the ordinary citizens of Iraq.

But he also writes

But they can also be hard to please, as the Americans are discovering. The amiability that greets a Westerner almost everywhere outside the Sunni triangle, and even there when American troops are not around, masks a reflex commonly found among people emerging from totalitarian rule: the sense of individual and collective responsibility is numbed, often to the point of passivity. The Iraqis' instinct to blame their rulers for life's hardships, engendered by Mr. Hussein's regime and at the same time silenced by it, is the Americans' burden now.

There is a case to be made that so long as we remain, our presence will give an object to that totalitarian mindset. I remain reluctant to leave with Saddam Hussein at large, but worried that Iraqis want more than we can actually deliver, that they will blame us for failing to meet their unrealistic expectations and we will despise them for their lack of appreciation. Only a fool expects gratitude in international relations. To see one doing just that, scroll to the bottom of this page.

Lesser of Two Evils Watch - Libertarians (sort of) for Dean is keeping a wary eye on Howard Dean's disquieting expression of enthusiasm for "re-regulating" American business. See also Hit & Run and Virginia Postrel.

There is always the possibility that this is "rally the base" talk, to be quietly dropped come Fall 2002. There's also the possibility that it's not. It's a big negative, and Dean's "Stay the Course and Do the Job Right" Iraq policy means he's not a real peace candidate. I could as easily imagine President Dean announcing that he was increasing deployments to Iraq as President Bush. Then there's Dean's (likely stillborn) enthusiasm for raising taxes in a soft economy.

Against all this set Bush's awful spending, trade and national "security" policies, his administrations lousy record on civil liberties and his fair-weather federalism. (I'd mention the technophobia his administration has displayed on issues like cloning, but a Dean Administration could easily go "all Crooked Timber" on us.)

I'm by no means ready to commit my legion of follower (sic) to the Dean Cause. One thing remains with me, though: George W. Bush's administration has asserted or proposed that it be given the following chain of prerogatives:

o To strip enemy combatants of all habeas corpus projections
o To reserve full power to declare any non-citizen apprehended anywhere on earth, including inside the United States, an enemy combatant, with no institutional check on that power and no oversight or review from any other branch of government
o To strip Americans of their citizenship, again without review, oversight or appeal.

The chain of power and the mindset that seeks it are less than very few evils. A key question for Mr. Dean is, Which of these do you repudiate?

Don't Know Much About Geography - Hesiod notes that the borders of the "Sunni Triangle have grown . . . plastic.

I Feel Your Pain - Gene Healy explains the real harm done by Rush Limbaugh's drug use.

People were quick to invoke our last president when Limbaugh equivocated about his legal troubles. But in the passage above--with its faux-profound therapeutic introspection and its brazen presumption that we give a toss--poor Rush has never been more Clintonian.

Me, I worry about the children.

Making Hayes - In what I would have felt sure was a violation of local ordinances, my name has been uttered on Samizdata by my friend Jonathan Pearse, who wishes that I would "do better than just dismiss the Hayes story out of hand." As I wrote to Jonathan this morning:

It's not a matter of dismissing out of hand. Rather:

1) We've been burned before. That is not to say that the Feith memo material can't be both genuine and telling; simply that it is too soon to say so. The pattern heretofore has been: revelation gets trumpeted; revelation dissolves in the glare like ground fog.

2) Much of the Feith memo represents "moving the goal posts." Certainly the Hayes article acts as if THE question is, Were there ever contacts between al Qaeda and Iraq? But this is not the pertinent question. The pertinent question - the one worth going to war over - is, Was Iraq in on the planning and conduct of al Qaeda attacks on American soil? Thus only the latter items on Feith's list are terribly interesting - the ones having to do with facilitating the meeting in the Philippines, the alleged contacts with Mohammad Atta and two other hijackers etc.

3) The DOD statement does matter. "This is not new" means "This is information that has been through the analytical mill" means "Prior statements from the intelligence community and the administration that there was no proof of substantial cooperation between Iraq and al Qaeda have taken this info into account."

Proof that Iraq was in on the September 2001 massacres, or the subsequent anthrax attacks, would justify war. Proof that Iraq played footsie in a general way with al Qaeda in the 1990s would simply make Iraq like a number of other muslim countries we have not bombed. Based on the earlier Feith items, they don't even rise to the level of Pakistan, which let's not forget had ISI people still in Afghanistan a month into the war, let alone the Taliban. It would put them a rung below Saudi Arabia on the AQ buddy list. There's a lot of "Saddam was keen to explore," but no evidence that anything came out of the explanation.

Bottom line: I'm not dismissing the Feith memo, and if the stuff toward the end proves out, it gets us much closer to a casus belli. But just as I don't jump on, say, the NATO takeover rumor or every new report of a US casualty the day it runs, I plan to see how the Hayes article ages before getting too worked up about it. EventualPundit does not sin in haste! I brought the Hayes article up at all because it seemed important to acknowledge its existence.

Contrariwise, the hawks have embarrassed themselves time and again by wetting their pants over "revelations" that have turned out to be nothing of the kind. There's value in a less breathless approach to the latest updates. I'm sure there are instances of doves leaping on congenial stories that didn't hold up too. In such instances the blogosphere looks as farcical as the instant expert segments on the News Hour. The ultimate example of those was the day Flight 800 went down over Long Island. News Hour brought in terrorism experts that very night to tell us What It All Meant. Presumably they did not give their checks back when it turned out that Flight 800 had been done in by a spark in the fuel tanks.

Atlanti-Cyst - The allegedly conservative, supposedly extremely libertarian Bush Administration, not content with a real war, may be ginning up a trade war too. (Via Liberty & Power.)

Down to the Dregs - Virginia Postrel has a plausible explanation for why anti-homosexuality is such a feature of evangelical protestantism:

When I was a kid, evangelical churches disapproved of dancing, of rock music, of working women, of divorce. Now they incorporate all of those elements in their church programs. (They still don't like divorce--who does?--but today's evangelical churches not only have programs for divorced members, they even arrange their buildings' security so non-custodial parents can't swipe the kids.) What's left? Gays. That's why pastors tend to talk so much about them.

Substitute conservatives for "evangelical churches" and pundits for pastors, and I don't think the insight becomes any less true.

She also writes "I only hope that the movement toward gay marriage survives the ensuing backlash" of today's Massachusetts Supreme Court ruling. Me too. But for there to be movement at all, the backlash will have to be borne. That's easy for me to say, since I won't be a target, though.

Gender Studies Tuesday - Reading list:

o A purely infuriating article about the attitudes of successful New York City women who make more than their husbands (via Matthew Yglesias);

o An oddly complementary rant from the American Spectator about stay-at-home moms;

o A powerfully-told true-life tale on Body & Soul. Jeanne d'Arc:

Somewhere in those bits of stories, there's evidence of deep-rooted sexism in this society, and a moral about what constricted opportunity does to women and, indirectly, to men. But it's far from a simple morality play of bad men and suffering women -- although I could easily shape it into that if I wanted to. (My mother's friend wanted to, and did.) It isn't a story about the powerful and the powerless. Looking back on those people's lives, I can't see anyone really having any power.

And some relevant book talk by the same writer.

That's More Like It - Arthur Silber is blogging again. Better yet, it looks like the damnable MTA strike that had vexed him is coming to a close. Arthur notes

And over the next few months, I will definitely be exploring other options for my life in several areas -- so that I don't have to face this kind of calamity again.

Watch it, Arthur, or people will accuse you of being consistent with your beliefs.

Takes Me Awhile Sometimes - I missed an expansion and modification of my "ages of comics" essay by the Lazy Pundit until now. Oops. LP Kevin Shaum's contribution: consider the advent of free web content as another marker of the current (Amber) Age. Makes sense to me.

An Order of Magnitude Fewer Than 20 Questions - John Derbyshire wants to know

1. If "gay marriage" is legalized, will prisoners be able to marry their cell mates? If not, why not?

Ooh, that's a good darn question! If you're in a dorm. And half-stoned. Without a lot of homework due. Or if you're a prisoner, I guess.

2. In many jurisdictions, a marriage can be annulled if it has not been consummated. What, exactly, constitutes "consummation" of a gay marriage?

A demonstration is called for here. Before we can begin, you'll need to remove your head from its customary location.

(Via Calpundit.)

Crackin' Up - James Antle has the latest libertarian/conservative breakup article in the American Conservative. While most of the Gene's Couch crew are namechecked, including me, Antle goes well beyond us for quotes. Since I knew perfectly well these other people are out there, I never took the "incestuous sourcing" complaint about Noah Shachtman's article too seriously.

Antle's article inspires LewRockwell.com blog speculation on a "libertarian crackup" by Marcus Epstein, Karen deCoster and Norman Singleton, who is apparently amazed to discover opposition to war and socialism among writers for Reason Magazine. Um, yeah.

In some ways the "libertarian crackup" happened long ago. Near as I can tell the bad blood between Rockwellians and Postrelians predates the War on Terror and has the bitterness of the blood feud about it.

The LRC blog writers parse libertarians into paleos, neos and left-libertarians. But what about us mesos?

Cat and Mouse - Iraq Today has an interesting story about counter-insurgency operations by the fledgling Iraqi police.

Things to give you pause:

o The police commander of the Salahuddin governorate is a former Iraqi Military Intelligence officer. (Note that in some totalitarian countries, the military intelligence agency has a reputation as being less vile than the political intelligence arm, e.g. Abwehr vs. SS.)

o Official informs media his organization is doing excellent job!

Encouraging things:

o Aljuburi says his force is building solid intelligence on resistance activity in his area.

The bad news is that the number of bombs being found is growing with each day. The good news is that the network of informants that Iraqi police have been building for the last two months is uncovering most of them.

Things to make you go Hm:

In the process, say many who work around him, he's proof that Iraqis are best equipped to secure the country.

Metric System Encore with bonus Op-Chart Addenda.

Now Diana wants everyone to say what they think is "the main problem in Iraq right now." Haggai tells her, apparently by e-mail, that it is "the vacuum that would result if we left."

I'll talk about why I think that's probably not true (that it's the main problem) some other time. For now, let me give my own answer by cribbing from an e-mail to Eve.

My main thesis is that Iraq is a political problem and that the biggest problem is that we are not Iraqi. I don't mean this in a purely moralistic sense. I mean, operationally, we're not from there and they will therefore not necessarily see things the way we do. There are two things I know, or think I know, that overdetermine the course of events in a situation like this. (If I know two things, I can't be a hedgehog I suppose, but I'm not as smart as a fox either. So what am I?)

1) The purpose of a nationalist guerrilla resistance is to split foreign and local. Their job is always aided by what I've called "the essential conservatism of the planet."

2) The most dangerous and unstable time for a repressive society is when it begins to liberalize. In those situations, expectations can easily outstrip progress, leading to bitterness and vioent reaction.

Since those are the only two things I know, I torture every bit of Iraq news into answering the questions, Are we thwarting the enemy's attempt to drive a wedge between our forces and Iraqis (Thing One)? and, Are we keeping ahead of the expectations curve (Thing Two)?

My reading of the NYT Op-Chart is that it is impossible to answer Yes to either question based on the data therein. And some of the data - the geometric increase in US KIAs; the unemployment rate; the electrical situation in Baghdad - seem to slant No-ward. And when we're so obliging to the insurgents as to pull stuff like this, I worry that they're working on their own "Mission Accomplished" banners in their free time.

Events like the an Nasiriyah demo below - especially much bigger ones - would tend to tell against my concerns.

Photo, Shopped? - For the item above (hey, RSS people, it'll be there, just hang on!), I wanted to include a "counter-factual," a bit of news that I would acknowledge as cutting against my concerns. More of this, I would say, would tend to mean I was wrong. So when I saw that Sgt. Stryker had a photo from a pro-Coalition, anti-terror rally in an Nasiriyah, I clicked over to get a look and a link. The picture is credited to Azzaman.

What is up with the shadows in the picture? Is it some lens curvature issue? They seemed very odd on first viewing - the ones on the right side of the lens seem to slant left while the ones on the left side seem to slant right. But it occurs to me that they could all be falling toward a vanishing point somewhere well behind the space between the two signs, and this could be some digital camera or fisheye lens thing I simply haven't encountered before. Any insights appreciated.

UPDATE: It's got to be a camera thing. The sign is a soft sheet, and would have a hard time billowing like that, no? So we're seeing an image warped by the way it is shot.

UPDATE UPDATE: You can't really say, on the basis of this picture, that the demonstration is small. The ranks behind the english-language sign are thin, but it may be that the main body of demonstrators are behind the arabic sign, off to the right of the frame.

UPDATE³: Reader Mike Trettel confirms

Jim, the shadow distortion you see in the photo is a classic result from using a superwide angle or fisheye lens from up close-if you look at the shadow on the left you can see that it's from the photographer. It's also why the sign appears to "wrap" or curve across the frame-it's the same cause but rendered differently. If you project the lines they will go to the center of the photo.

and follows up with:

Yep, as I've heard it said "Cameras don't lie, they just don't tell the truth". I've often though that every photojournalist should be limited to just a 50mm lens (i.e., standard lens closest to the human eye), and that's it. In my case the 24mm wide angle is one of my favorites, it makes everything look so big and small all at the same time. That particular shot looks like 20mm or even a 17mm, it's pretty distorted because the photgrapher was so close to the subject(s). But that's guesswork on my part and it's worth what you paid for it.

Which brings us back to the question of the size of the parade. Was it shot from close up to deemphasize its small size? Or to make the english words on the sign clearer, and the bulk of a large parade is outside the frame? Does it make a difference to our judgment that Azzamman is an Arabic-language paper, and presumably places no premium on pictures of english signs as such?

Zayed of Healing Iraq describes the protests as huge.

Look Over There - Eve Tushnet has rounded up all the latest Iraq-al Qaeda connection controversy commentary so I don't have to. Go there. Hawks sincerely puzzled (as opposed to insincerely puzzled) why non-hawks aren't bowled over by the Feith memo reported on by the Weekly Standard, may gain some insight by substituting "Fisk" for Feith and "BBC" for Weekly Standard.

I will say that, as a man of the right, seeing conservatives and self-styled libertarians advert to claims by Janet Reno's Justice Department makes me sigh heavy as a goth girl in a coffee house.

Oops! Weekly Fitness Blog Item! - It would be cheating to check out yet. Weight 163, waist 32.75". No increase in poundage, but the waist shows slippage. Still in an exercise rut. Blogging too much? Will stop now, run in the morning.

Greeblie blog is trying to encourage his personal trainer to take up blogging. That would mean at least one fitness blogger who knew what he was talking about. Fear: PT checks out Steven Den Beste as suggested. Is instantly cured of the temptation.

Bruce Baugh is trending down again.

The Washington Post Sunday business section has an article about how marketers and designers attempt to accomodate the America's broadening horizons:

Pity Debora Senytka, a design engineer in General Motors' human/vehicle integration department. Her challenge: to create normal-looking vehicles that can accommodate the expanding derrieres of the expanding American without giving up the cup holders and consoles, the built-in DVD screens and air bags that U.S. drivers have come to expect in their vehicles.

. . .

Companies of all kinds are adjusting their designs, measurements, marketing, menus and training in an effort to find ways to prevent, accommodate -- even profit from -- growing waistlines. In fact, as obesity has become an inescapable factor in U.S. culture, it has also become a major force in American business.

But obesity's place in the culture has not been easy for many businesses to deal with. While some embrace it, others are scared of it, and some companies just won't talk about it. That is the typical reaction of American business to any "momentous sea change in the public," said Bobby J. Calder, a marketing professor at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management.

On that cheery note I'll leave loyal fitness blog readers to their devices until next week.

That Ought to Hold the Little Bastards - A weekend's (unplanned) furious blogging comes to an end. Y'all come back now, hear?

This is Sports Center with Unqualified Offerings - Panthers 20, Redskins 17. Sigh. Not a complex story, though:

Steven Davis came up big while his replacement Trung Canidate came up small.

The coaches wasted an entire half on Canidate before going to the far more effective Rock Cartwright. Look guys, I don't care if he's a converted fullback making league minimum - Cartwright is the only player you've got who can run with the football.

Patrick Ramsey was just off today. Throws he usually makes he muffed. Bad timing since the plays were there to be made.

A Fanboy's Capsule Reviews - Stuff I bought and didn't buy recently. (I now have a schedule for picking up Palomar and Sgt. Rock. Big Planet Comics announced a 30% off Thanksgiving Day weekend sale. Yippee!)

Seamonsters & Superheroes - I liked Scott Mills' Cells so much that I started looking for his other work, and this was the cheapest thing available. It's . . . cute. There's a difference between mocking genre conventions and mocking them to effect. However, there are a few sequences where the latter happens. I'm after his more substantial work next.

H-E-R-O 10 - One of the better recent Astro City stories.

Batman: Death and the Maidens - On the one hand, I can feel like we're losing the thread here. On the other, Bruce Wayne's differential experience of his mother and father after drinking Ra's potion has some interest value, and you get Arab bandits with swords.

Ultimate Six 4 - Truth is, I just like everything about this book, even the way there's something downright unlikeable about how Fury and the US government use the Ultimates and how the Ultimates allow themselves to be used. A Bendis crime comic on super-soldier serum.

Fantastic Four 506 - For the length of a genuinely frightening page, it looks like writer Waid is going to foist a sitcom-standard MOS on us. Then he twists the knife. I might argue that FF is the single best superhero comic going. Points off for Nick Fury's sleeveless, weapon-bedecked body suit, though, which makes him look like the newest Village Person, Spy Guy.

Not Buying . . .

Daredevil 53 - Yeah, it's paintings and collage and all sorts of art techniques that go beyond what we usually see in comics. However: 1) Things are supposed to happen in stories; 2) Mack's method is actually somewhat limiting - good for "deranged" viewpoint characters, but incapable of a whole range of tones and effects amenable to boring old cartooning. I would argue, by the way, that the same applies to latter-day Bill Sienkiewicz.

1602 4 - Why buy the cow when you're still only half sold on the milk and you can borrow it from your buddies anyway?

Captain America 20 - Nazis are evil, but so is whoever told Dave Gibbons he could write dialogue. I'm sorry, Sean, I really tried to like it. Also, enough with the freakin' scales, Marvel. I know the Sub-Mariner saved Cap from freezing, but that doesn't mean he has to pay endless tribute by incorporating blue fish hide into his outfit. Even with John Cassaday it sometimes looked like Cap had some kind of condition.

First Santa Claus, then the Easter Bunny and now this.

A Fanboy's Notes: The Next Generation - I've previously written that Offering Boy is all for superheroes, just not for comics. (He loves superheroes in cartoons and computer games.) But this weekend we turned the corner. I took him with me to the comics shop and he happily picked out not just the two most recent Justice League Adventures but a Loony Tunes comic and the latest Power Puff Girls "for [The Littlest Offering]." (In fact, Offering Boy loves PPG as much as any sensible individual of any age, but he did let her read it.) After making our purchases, we headed to McDonalds and each read our own comics over a late lunch - him with Looney Tunes, me with Ultimate Six and Fantastic Four.

The Littlest Offering loves her PPG comic and had me read it to her at bedtime. She's three, and responds primarily to the art. "I could meet the little girl alien chicken," she repeated several times.

The experience crystallized an understanding for me. I don't need to worry about any "mature content" in the comics I buy because Offering Boy shows no interest in reading my comics. I don't think this has anything to do with the storylines being too complex or the words too big. He doesn't even pick them up. I think that, like his younger sister, he's responding first to the package, and something - probably, everything - about the art and design in the mainline books I buy, whether from Marvel, DC, Light Speed or Fantagraphics, communicates "not for me" signals to elementary and pre-school kids. He gravitates to Justice League Adventures and shies from JLA.

I don't know the age at which that flips. As a self-interested adult reader of comics, including superhero comics, it doesn't in itself bother me that kids are put off by the kinds of books I like to read. But it certainly means that if comic book companies want to get the next generation of readers, they need to target them specifically. DC at least has a line of books that aims to do this. Marvel doesn't. Does that make sense for them?

UPDATE: By the way, I should stress that my son has seen DC's line of kids comics before. So his previous lack of interest in comic books did not stem from my showing him the wrong ones. He's had a genuine change of tastes.

A Fanboy's Notes 11/16/03 - Surprising and dismaying conversation with my friendly local comics shop owner, who I stress is one of the ones who knows how to run his business. Summary:

There's too much product coming out. Sales are good but I can't make any money because I have to order too much to keep up.

"It is happening again."

As I Was Saying - One of the hopeful indicators in the NYT "Op-Chart" is the increasing proportion of Iraqis in the overall security structure. I cautioned, though, about the problems rapid expansion of police and army units entail. Now comes Jim Lobe of Inter Press Service:

In just the last two weeks, the number of men under arms has doubled to about 118,000. Under these circumstances, as the Washington Post noted Friday, training is virtually nonexistent, while screening of recruits for Ba'athist sympathies has necessarily also been reduced.

Lobe, deliciously if you're in a bloody frame of mind, references the doubts on this score of the Weekly Standard's William Kristol and Donald Kagan.

Let's keep in mind that some version of the same problems apply to the most gung-ho alternative on the table: recognize that our existing commitments have stretched us too thin; admit that sufficient foreign help is not in the offing; and expand the army from 10 divisions to 12, whether by draft, recruiting inducements or some combination.

First off, the "CBO Hammer" falls in March 2004. It is a physical impossibility to even to turn out two divisions full of men in their pajamas by that point. Expanding the army is not a short-term solution. Rapidly expanding the army means adding two divisions of greenhorns to what has been not just the best-equipped but the best-trained military in the world. It means rushing them into a situation for which they are not prepared, quite possibly one that has deteriorated even from the current level.

It is, in short, no answer to our present manpower problems. It's a solution for "the next Iraq," not the present one. It only makes sense if you intend to continue a program of frequent and massive overseas interventions. And given our recent experience, I think we really need to talk about whether we want to continue following that program.

Who's the Dork Now, Huh? - Find out at Ask Brendan.

How Did I Forget to reference the most devastating "cut & run" item yet, from Charles Dodgson on Thursday? Charles dares to consider that the case for seeing it through may be founded on narcissism - an unexamined conviction that we must surely be a cure for instability rather than a cause. He quotes some reports that suggest quite the opposite.

Return of the Liberal Hawk Watch - Actually, so far it seems to be just Hesiod Theogony, who makes a lengthy argument against Cut & Run.

To my way of thinking, he never does quite disentangle Why George Bush is blameworthy for leading us to this pass from What the United States, as a country, should do now. He never grapples with the "Atriosian" insight that there may be a hard limit on what we can do, and it would be foolish to transgress those limits. (See Kevin B. O'Reilly on "sunk costs.") Hesiod's argument boils down to We must show resolve as much as any Opinion Journal contributor.

And Hesiod, seriously: When you start making analogies with Normandy, it's time to step back and rethink. Come on, pal: deep breath. Yes, the situation is appalling. Yes, we are down to choosing among degrees of failure to some extent. But we need to remain calm and clear-eyed.

Ne'er So Well Express'd Item - Diana Moon reviews Master and Commander:

It was a very ugly scene, shame-inducing. The thought of getting up and singing "The Marseillaise" (a la Casablanca) crossed my mind, but I didn't want to embarass my friend.

Lots more on a movie that she says "was technically spectacular, and emotionally empty."

Blogwatch Weekend Continues now that our long and, so far, little-noted consideration of Iraqi metrics is over.

On the Table - Let's put snark and rancor aside and give "The Chart" (it's really a table) in yesterday's New York Times a look. (Link via Sean T. Collins.) It's been much discussed in the last day or so, and is supposed to show that some important trends in Iraq really are encouraging. When not blogging, I spend a fair amount of time putting together corporate metrics, so let's synergize, shall we?

Warning: long post follows. And since there are tables, spacing may be funny.

First, boo to the New York Times for not providing a bigger graphic linked to the one in the article. What we get is a tricked up "photo" of a printout with some legends hard to read. Fie.

Next, let's consider the limits of this kind of exercise. We are among other things at the mercy of what the writers have chosen to include and chosen to leave out. Consider that trends on "number of political parties" would look very encouraging. "Number of violent anti-American underground movements" might look less so. Neither is available. We don't have month-by-month prewar figures, nor do we have last-year data for the same calendar months. Either would help us get a better handle on what matters, which is what these numbers tell us about the subjective experience of Iraqis. (People don't kill you or cleave to you based on the facts, but upon how they feel about the facts.) Also, to fit the tables into its self-chosen space restrictions, the Times gives us only four data points for each metric - April, June, August and October. In one crucial statistic, Annualized Murder Rate in Baghdad per 100,000 Residents, that decision kills our ability to tell what's going on.

Of all the problems, I most feel the lack of the missing months. But let's see what we can see.

Category	April	June	August	October
Top 55 Ba'athists still at large	40	23	16	15

What we see here is rapid progress early, with a clearance rate that has now slowed to a crawl. I don't find this particularly surprising or dismaying. The early numbers reflect success catching or killing the dumb, the unlucky and the fugitives who figured they could afford to turn themselves in. We're now down to the smart, desperate, touched by fortune and way the hell gone from Iraq already. The only serious failure tucked into the number is that one of the 15 is, well, you know who.

Category	April	June	August	October
Total Ba'athists killed or arrested	500	1000	1000	750

I thought we didn't do body counts any more. This row strikes me as particularly hard to draw any conclusions from. For one thing, I'm not even sure if by "Ba'athists" they mean Ba'athists or "any anti-US forces." Or is it a mix? Does it include former officials rounded up on war crimes who may or may not be involved in the resistance? Islamist foreign legionairres? I have no idea. Is the drop from 1000 to 750 noise? A consequence of having fewer enemies to kill? An indicator that our enemies are getting more elusive? Beats the heck out of me. Are we, to ask the Rumsfeld Question, killing them faster than the replacement rate? I don't know that either. Sorry. The fact that I can't tell is the point. No, really.

Category	April	June	August	October
US troops in Iraq (thousands)	145	146	140	130
Non-US troops in Iraq (thousands)	40	12	16	24
Iraqi security forces (thousands)	0	25	48	85.5
Iraqi security forces by type (police/military/other)	0/0/0	20/0/5	24/0/14	55/.7/29.8

A 10% decline in US troops strength since the end of "major combat operations." At this rate (10% every 7 months), we'd be out of Iraq in just over 5 years, but the one thing we can be sure of is that, one way or another, we will not withdraw troops at a linear rate over the next five years. The overall decline in coalition troop strength is greater - from 186k down to 154k, about 20%. If there's good news in the above numbers, it's this:

o US soldiers make up a decreasing portion of total security resources (US + Coalition + Iraqi).
o Iraqis make up an ever greater proportion of the total security structure.
o Police (Iraqi) are a bigger slice of the pie, and military smaller.
o Iraqi force size is growing at something close to a geometrical, rather than an arithmetic rate. (We'll come back to this.)
o We've doubled the total international contribution since the Occupation began.

Note: I moved some rows around to group Iraqi forces with non-Iraqi forces because it seemed to make the story clearer (the story being, well, "Iraqification"). Taken on its face, this is surely the best news in the report. Can we take it on its face? I have some concerns.

Query: What the hell is "Other?"

Any time you rapidly upsize a police force, you run risks - of lowering standards, of scanting on training, of letting bad apples slip through the background checks. (See Washington DC in the 1990s.) Given CPA limitations on area knowledge and language skills, those risks would seem to be high. But the proof is in the performance:

Category	April	June	August	October
Typical number of daily attacks	5-10	6	15	30
US troops killed, hostile fire	10	15	14	33
US troops killed, non-hostile causes	12	14	22	10
Coalition casualties, non-US	6	0	7	3
Annualized murder rate in Baghdad per 100,000 (Wash DC rate 46/year)	100	135	185	140

Okay, I am not considering this a good news portion of our data. Attacks are increasing at a geometric rate, roughly doubling every two months. US troops killed by hostile fire are trending sharply up even as US troop strength has dropped. The Coalition casualty rate looks like noise. A missing piece of data that would be great to have is deaths of Iraqi security forces in action. We know that, with the helicopter downings, November's US KIA number will exceed October and may double it.

The Baghdad murder rate figures really suffer from the lack of surrounding data. October is sharply down from August, but still above June. We don't yet know if it heralds a downward trend, if August was an outlier, or what. Whichever, the Baghdad murder rate remains four times that of America's murder capital, and Washington DC is something of an outlier itself - even most dangerous US metro areas have a murder rate in the 20s.

The thing is, the casualty and murder numbers problematize the good news on the changes in security force structure. The change in inputs (force structure) looks good, but the accompanying outputs (violence) don't.

We can smooth out our trends somewhat if we reverse the laborious effort by administration spokespeople to separate KIAs from non-combat death. If we combine US hostile fire, non-hostile and Coalition deaths into one number, we get:

April: 28
June: 29
August: 43
October: 46

This tells a smoother story, but an unfortunately clear one - Coalition deaths jump in mid-summer and stay at their higher level. You then need to add about two levels of perspective to that. 1) 46 out of 154k troops is a death rate of .03% per month. That is, needless to say, small in absolute terms. 2) However, guerrillas don't try to win by killing all the occupiers off. Guerrillas kill as a means of driving a wedge of mistrust and insecurity between occupier and occupied. The Times Op-Chart simply lacks data that would let us quantify that phenomenon.

That's the end of the security indicators section of the Op-Chart. In my judgment, the Times authors' claim that "the most accurate long-term outlook is one of guarded optimism" is, on this front, a stretch.

Next comes the shorter section of economic indicators.

Category	April	June	August	October
Unemployment rate	60+%	60+%	50+%	50+%

Pause for a second. Can you even imagine 50% unemployment? Every second person who wants a job unable to find one? US unemployment during the Great Depression peaked in 1933 at 25%. It was above 20% for only three years of the long trough. (See third graph.) That rate was considered so horrifying we, rightly or wrongly, changed our entire political economy forever after. To find unemployment rates that high in this country, you have to go to an indian reservation. We are talking about an entire nation, the size of California as they say, with twice the proportion of unemployed that the United States has ever seen. Now, jobs are a lagging indicator. But that's real lagging.

Category	April	June	August	October
Electricity produced nationwide - megawatts (pre-war level 3600* very hard to read, could be 3300)	0	3200	3300	3900
Electricity produced, Baghdad (pre-war level 2300)	0	700	1280	1250

There appears to be good news and bad news here. The good news comes when you subtract the Baghdad figures from the nationwide numbers to get "Everywhere but Baghdad":

Pre-war: 1300
April: 0
June: 2500
August: 2020
October: 2650

The figures suggest that outside of Baghdad, power production is now double pre-war levels. This is a good thing, because as longtime readers of Where Is Raed know, pre-war power levels in Iraq sucked.

Which brings us to the bad news. Baghdad is 20% of the population, home to Sadr City, the bulk of the country's intelligentsia, the center of US and international media attention, the fulcrum of the "Sunni triangle" and the center of gravity of the occupation. So the situation in Baghdad is

o Pre-war power levels were woefully inadequate;
o We've barely managed half that in the postwar period;
o We're stalled at half the pre-war figure - we've made no meaningful progress for three months.

This part does not inspire cautious optimism either. It represents a huge political problem, and with Baghdad's commercial status, a huge economic one too.

Lastly, oil, or as the hawks like to say, ooooiiiiiiiiiiiiiilllllllll!

Category	April	June	August	October
Oil production Mbbl/day (prewar 2.5)	0	0.7	1.4	2.1
Deisel/kerosene available to Iraqis - MegL/week (no prewar figure)	0	10	16	24

Without a prewar figure for the deisel/kerosene indicator, it's hard to make definite judgments.

As to oil production, I have a hard time seeing the good news. Iraq's prewar production was problematic. (Sanctions starved the industry of spare parts and investment. Iraqis kept the oil pumping, but using techniques that risked permanent damage to their fields. See here and here.) The Coalition seized the fields with minimal damage early in the war - no massive well fires like Kuwait in 1990. The Ministry of Oil building in Baghdad was famously high on the immediate post-invasion protection list. All that and we're still just reaching 2002 levels, let alone Iraq's salad-days high of 3.5 million barrels a day in 1979 (See pdf chart, Production 1958-2002).

We'll pass lightly over the early predictions.

Bottom line on the economic indicators? That unemployment rate is just a killer. The oil production could be worse. We're back up in "oil for food" range, and prior to Oil for Food, Iraq only had four decent years of production since 1980 - the brief interval between the Iran-Iraq War and Gulf War Phase I. The electricity situation is hopeful outside of Baghdad, awful within and not getting better there. Heating and cooking fuel? Beats me. Is the increase enough for the coming winter? Don't know. Is it better or worse than before the war? Don't know.

Are the authors right to say that "the most accurate long-term outlook is one of guarded optimism." I wouldn't say so. I would say that the figures undercut unalloyed pessimism. Alloyed pessimism, in fact, is what they leave me feeling.

Cut and Run, the Continuing Series - Alternate title, Letting Iraqis Run Their Own Country: The Latest Developments.

Nick Weininger responds to my friendly critique, fleshing out some of his earlier points. Don't forget to click the MORE link!

Max Sawicky hits it out of the park, making the case for cut-uh, quickly restoring sovereignty to Iraq, while abusing fellow liberals of some cherished fantasies about "internationalization."

Atrios endorses the Sawicky Program and responds to criticism. I congratulate him on his solid, conservative reasoning.

Juan Cole has a good summary of the current plan. I have to say, few have been harder on the Bush Administration than I have the last year, but I'm hard pressed to argue that the current proposals, borne of desperation as they are, aren't the best of our bad options right now.

Josh Marshall finds a WSJ Editorial (remember "laexaminer/laexaminer"!) that lays out an interesting division of labor. Marshall: "Neocons come up with the harebrained idea. The US Army takes it on the chin. And the CIA, the State Department, the Democrats, miscellaneous foreign moderates and other deviants get saddled with the blame."

For the liberals listed above (pretty much everyone after Nick), a major concern is punishing the Administration that got us into this mess and replacing the malefactors with someone competent. I too feel the pull of accountability, but if I start to think that Bush has actually learned something from getting his hand too close to the stovetop, I might want to keep him where he can make use of his learning. I'm not there yet, but I could be.

Finally, not a blog piece, but very important, historian and biographer J.P. Zmirak makes the case for cutting, running and splitting Iraq up on the way out. I'll come back to this one. It's weakest on the "If we leave we'll encourage terror" objection, but intriguingly strong in other areas.

Your Inside Access - Hate the hassle of registering for online news sites that require it? You may not need to bother. Thanks to Matt Welch and his busy LA Examiner bees, you probably don't have to. I've yet to find a major newspaper site anywhere on the internet that you can't get into using the user/password combo "laexaminer/laexaminer" or "laexaminer@laexaminer.com/laexaminer." Now that's what I call civic journalism.

Thanks for Nothing - Yesterday we were dealing with John Keegan's cheery estimate that the US was becoming increasingly imperial, a la the late British Empire. Among hawks we hear a fair amount lately about what a force for freedom and progress said Empire was. Israeli blogger Imshin lives every day of her life with said Empire's aftermath and seems less sanguine:

I do believe that Israeli democracy, which developed, and actually began to function, during this period, came into being in spite of British rule, and independently of it, and not because of it. The British goal was to keep the natives quiet, while they utilized the land for their own ends, i.e. as a transportation route for Iraqi oil. Beyond that I don’t think they could have cared less. The other side of this was what was happening in Arab society in Palestine during the same period. Arab society remained feudal and tribal, and, for the most part, uneducated. Not only was it completely uninfluenced by any democratic notions; it was actually attracted to European Fascism and Nazism. The British disinterest in interfering with, or influencing, local politics, beyond the bare minimum necessary for keeping the peace, eventually blew up in their faces with the Great Arab Revolt of 1936 – 1939, the real first Intifada. From this we can learn that the British approach in Iraq may not necessarily serve as an insurance for keeping the peace (although Iraq has no Jews to stir things up ;-)).

It makes an instructive comparison with Keegan's close. To repeat:

They recognise that Iraq is still a tribal society and that the key to pacification lies in identifying tribal leaders and other big men, in recognising social divisions that can be exploited, and in using a mixture of stick and carrot to restore and maintain order.

To my surprise, this analysis did not arouse American hostility.

I'm just saying.

Is Occupying Iraq Like Dating Your Sister? or something. Patiently, BruceR of Flit deals yet again with warhawk fantasias about massive German resistance to the allied occupation after World War II.

Instapundit and others continue to defend the Rice-Rumsfeld Werwolf analogy to present-day Iraq, citing some clashes between American soldiers and German youths accusing them of fraternization in the late 1940s.

Note how Glenn Reynolds uses the provocative word "murder" even though it is in no way borne out by the source material he cites, an October 1945 clipping about a street brawl in which apparently no Americans were killed.

There is some evidence that Germans sometimes violently clashed with Americans who were seeing German girls during the occupation. Two things about this worth noting, however: one, that has nothing to do with any kind of organized resistance to the occupation itself, and is in no way analogous to Iraq; I'm sure the American soldiers would wish that the only time they were in danger there was when they were out on a date at night with their new Iraqi girlfriend... Second, what the clips don't make clear is that generally the most violent incidents involved black soldiers dating German women.

Interesting post in more than a point-scoring way.

Tacitus Man Group - Okay, I figured this was coming, but I was also kind of hoping for it. When Tacitus was on his swing through Africa last month (which produced some superb reportage on his part), he left his site in the hands of a team of guest bloggers drawn from among his comment section stalwarts. He came home and kicked them out, as well he should have, since it's called tacitus.org and he's Tacitus and they're not. Now three of them have formed the new group blog, Obsidian Wings, an ideologically diverse site that should, judging from the superb job the contributors did for Tacitus, quickly be one of the most entertaining blogs out there - possibly a multi-daily stop, though at least a daily one.

Meanwhile, Tacitus has taken it into his head to go to Iraq. Read about the possibility and consider financing his trip. There may be no one in blogville we could better send.

It's a Blogwatch Blogwatch Weekend Yeah! - Gonna take some time to catch up mentioning some mentionables I came across this week but was too busy writing about cars and wood to mention. I'm also working on another article and a graphic novel. But saying that blogging will therefore be catch-as-catch-can would be strictly from So What Else Is New, huh?

Metrics from Gotham - It's not just Donald Rumsfeld concerned about a lack of measurable standards for judging the War. Diana Moon is too:

Such is the state now between the pro-war and anti-war forces. They can't even agree on the facts.

So I throw out this question to the blogosphere:

What constitutes an objective standard of success or failure in Iraq?