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?

I'd class this with the damn good questions. Somewhere on Brink Lindsey's long-defunct blog, he apparently posted a What could make me change my mind item. I'm not sure whether it was more focused on the war's justification or its progress, though. Glenn Reynolds had a March 20, 2003 article on his MSNBC blog that set out different levels of victory conditions. However, MSNBC's archives seem to go back only so far as September.

Me, I need to think about it. Presumably I should disentangle "What would convince you the war was wise" from "What would convince you we've obtained a good result?" But here's a first cut:

o Sunsetting of the PATRIOT Act;
o Tabling of the VICTORY Act;
o A severe narrowing of Executive latitude in declaring "enemy combatants";
o A restoration of habeas corpus for terror suspects apprehended in the United States, including an acknowledgement of civilian court jurisdiction;
o Some similar civil liberties stuff I forget right now.

But this stuff has nothing to do with the situation in Iraq! you say.

That's not what we were told. The neolibertarians, most famously Glenn Reynolds, but others too, justified their support for war by saying that we needed to aggressively pursue the enemy (by whatever definition) abroad to avoid panic-induced repression at home. They have spent far more energy the last two years advocating the administration's wars than fighting the administration's internal-security measures. For the war to be a success on their own terms, we need to see a loosening of the controls already in place. We are starting to see exactly the sorts of alarming "mission creep" in PATRIOT Act provisions and Department of Homeland Security purviews that critics feared from the start. To quote hawk god Christopher Hitchens from December 2001:

As an immigrant with a green card, I find that my American wife and American children will not insure me against a secret arrest, against undisclosed evidence, against a verdict with no appeal, or against my execution in a secret ceremony. (As the New Yorker puts it this week, the above procedure is so secret that it may, in theory, already have occurred.)

When all of the above changes for the better, the libertarian-minded hawks will have at least prima facie justification to claim success.

Ne'er So Well Express'd - Avedon Carol had the most impressive response I saw to Naomi Wolf's porn plaint. Unfortunately she buried most of it in the comments to Matt Yglesias's post on the subject, and while Matt is a fine human being and an entertaining writer, his blog comments lack permalinks, so rather than make you scroll down I'm going to exhume Avedon's contributions for you. Part the first:

I'm completely amazed at Wolf's apparent belief that the average college-age woman was ever brimming with sexual confidence.

What we were generally brimming with was the conviction that guys were generally trying to nail anything female, and that's why they were trying to nail us, even though we weren't that pretty, our breasts were too small or too big, our asses were huge, our hair was crap, etc.

Yeah, the same women that guys thought "knew what they were doing" to them never imagined that anyone thought they looked particularly good. Mostly they assumed that with that zit, that ass, that hair, those guys would never ask them out once/again/whatever. And 90% of what they did they were doing because they thought they had to in order to be considered desirable.

Young women have always been insecure about men and the fact that men really are trying to get into our pants doesn't change that because we are convinced it's not personal.

And we can whine all we want about Playboy, but we aren't really comparing ourselves with the Playmates, we're comparing ourselves with fashion models, who are much thinner and even more heavily airbrushed and made-up than porn models. Thank god most guys prefer porn models to fashion models - most of them look considerably more human, and considerably more female.

Men, of course, get less obnoxious as they get older, and that is probably what Ms. Wolf is noticing. Men in their 40s are not just looking to get laid, so they don't try to back you into a corner as fast.

And then men think you look fantastic and wish to hell they could make you stop whining about your big ass and your hair and whatever. (I sometimes think what men really like about porn is that it's so refreshing to see a woman just get undressed and not say something like, "Is my ass too big?")

I'm 51. I don't do what's expected of me and I don't do anything I don't want to do and men - including men who are young enough to be my own offspring - still hit on me. I don't know why they don't hit on Wolf, but she looks more conventionally "pretty" than I do and she's more than a decade younger so it can't be looks and youth alone. Maybe it's that I don't run around trying to make up reasons why porn is bad.

Or maybe they are hitting on her and they're just too subtle for her to notice, or she is still too screwed up to know when to take it personally, or some other dumb girl reason. Or maybe she just intimidates the hell out of them. God knows it can't be because they're not interested in real women, because they sure as hell are, and I still get reminders of that every time I walk out of the house.

Part the second:

One hopes that once one is past one's teens one begins to realize that being "well-hung" has nothing to do with it. Good god, how smart do you have to be to know that teenage girls generally decide whether they are that interested in a guy before they have any idea how well he is hung - and they don't want to hear about it from you, either.

Sheesh.

Well-funded doesn't usually have all that much to do with it, either. Brushing your hair and standing up straight is a much more valued quality.

But of course, guys have stupid ideas of what girls are looking for, and girls have stupid ideas of what guys are looking for, and this was true long before any of us were looking at any porn.

And anyway, how do you explain the fact that guys aren't the only people who fantasize rape? It's not as if we can't get any. Double-sheesh

And a reminder that Wendy McElroy has put the entire text of her book on the subject online. There's a chapter on a survey she conducted among sex workers that suffers from all the problems of self-selection and sample size that she rightly finds in a lot of surveys relied on by porn critics. But the chapters where she is playing philosopher and reporter rather than social scientist are first-rate.

The Nays Have It - A few more votes came through in favor of MORE . . . links and extended entries, but the tally still ran decisively against. And since I never much liked them myself, they're history. We're back on the original plan for this site: you come to the main index page here, you get it all. If you're sure you don't want it all, you have two options:

Comics fans who want to avoid politics can bookmark the Fanboy's Notes index page.

Comics non-fans and anti-fans can bookmark the Fanboy-Free index page.

Hm, Not Bad - Memo to Atrios: Uppity Negro says he's trumped both of us on quoting from Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. But I'm inclined to rule him ineligible, since it's far from clear he was quoting it in the context of the War. (The War being allegedly still only a possibility at the time of his original post.)

But it's always cool to quote Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, so I salute him, and Atrios too.

And Now for Something Completely Different - Reader mail on other topics!

Tom Scudder wrote in about The Decline of Shock at naughty pictures of famous (or obscure) women:

On the other hand, a lot of things that would have gotten no response 40 years ago now shock and outrage people. Seen any AMOS & ANDY marathons on Nickelodeon lately?

Some of those grand old entertainments really can be offensive, even to a crusty right-winger like me. (I can't recall seeing Amos&Andy, so have nothing to say on that show specifically.) Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan books really are racist. In one of the early ones he makes a point of telling us that Tarzan esteemed the blacks of the jungle as lower than the animals therein. Now, he really loved the animals, but Burroughs was still not praising with faint damnation. The Tarzan books are a lot of fun to read if you bracket that stuff off, but its easier for someone like me, who isn't the target of Burroughs' bigotry, to do that.

Brad DeLong cries foul:

You are not allowed to say that you had a big problem with Keegan's History of Warfare, and not tell us what it is!

What if I don't remember? Okay, it's not quite that bad, but it's been something on the order of eight years since I read the thing, so I can't summon up a lot of supporting details. (Cue chorus: So what else is new!) But basically, Keegan's theme is that "Clauswitz was wrong." War is not the continuation of politics by other means. Rather, warfare is a cultural expression, and its forms are largely determined by the cultural imperatives of the waging country.

The first thing to say is that "Warfare is a cultural expression" and "War is the continuation of politics by other means" are not necessarily mutually-exclusive statements. So Keegan set out, if I recall correctly, to show that when cultural and political imperatives conflict, culture trumps politics. My feeling was that he failed to make his case. Culture and politics can be slippery terms. For most every case studied, it seemed to me that he was either arbitrarily reclassing a political factor as a cultural one, or that he was ignoring some fairly obvious political constraint that cut against the ones he acknowledged.

But don't ask me to prove that in a weekend as I don't own the book.

Finally, Kevin Carson wrote in about Wednesday morning's frugality-movement item, and Charles "How to Survive without a Salary" Long in particular:

Long makes the mistake of confusing the "market" with the cash nexus, or with a vulgar "economic man" model of human behavior. In reality, all the market is is a non-coercive environment for free exchange, voluntary cooperation, and otherwise peacefully pursuing one's own values, whatever they are. As Karl Hess said thirty years ago, libertarianism is a people's movement. And it has as much, if not more, room for cooperatives, community technology, neighborhood government, and mutual aid, as it does for corporations.

I couldn't have put it better myself.

Jim You Ignorant Slut - Not all the reaction today was to my firewood. Chad Orzel has a reaction to my reaction to his reaction to my SUV article. The Spectator itself has one letter so far and maybe more to come. Looks like you'll have to scroll down until the Spectator's webmaster redoes the letters page with permalinks for each missive. Look for "Having Pull" by W.F. Whitelaw on 11/14. It's at the top now and probably through the weekend. After that, who knows.

Mike Kozlowski takes the anti side:

I'm late to the critical party, but since none of the "liberal"
critiques of your article swayed you, here's why you, as a libertarian,
should be anti-SUV:

SUVs represent a tragedy of the commons. In car-on-car collisions with modern cars, the most significant determinant of fatalities is weight. If two small cars crash, there's a certain base percentage of either driver getting killed (alas, I'm too lazy to look up the real numbers); but when a big car hits a small car, there's a much smaller chance that the big car driver dies, and a much greater chance that the small car driver dies.

So, for safety reasons, you want to have a big car for yourself -- because the safety benefits of that big car accrue to you, but the safety costs of that big car are borne by other people (specifically, the people you're crashing into). This is a classic example of the sorts of situations where even libertarians acknowledge that markets fail and regulation needs to step in.

Without regulation or other intervention, this situation goes nowhere pleasant: As more people get big cars, the people in little cars are increasingly at risk of getting in a fatal crash, so their incentive to get a big car goes up; eventually, it becomes insanely dangerous not to get a big car (for certain values of "big", we're already there -- can you imagine driving one of those tiny Euro-cars on American highways? People with Mini Coopers must have nerves of steel).

Worse yet, big-on-big collisions are worse than small-on-small collisions, since there's a lot more energy involved in decelerating massive amounts of weight than in smaller amounts, so even if everyone gets the big SUV, they're all less safe than if they'd all gotten small cars. Which I suppose also makes it a prisoner's dilemma...

So if you ignore all the environmental hoopla (which, oh yeah, is another situation where the costs fall mostly on other people rather the purchaser, and therefore the sort of thing that market libertarians should in principle already be in favor of regulating) and concentrate only on the safety issue, you've still got solid grounds for regulation.

Or hell, if you don't like regulation, just think about it in ethical terms. You're risking other people's lives to make your own life safer; that's immoral in just about any system (Kantians would say it's inconsistent with the Categorial Imperative, utilitarians would say that the world's better off if you don't buy the SUV), so even if it's not forbidden, a moral preson wouldn't buy an SUV in the absence of a really compelling (non-safety) reason.

I can assent to some of this in a general way. Theoretically, if anyone has a vehicle that is sturdier or heavier than anyone else's, SUV or not, that person is throwing costs onto others, though, in Mike's model. As mentioned before, I do not myself own an SUV. We have a beat-up old Volvo 940 Turbo, which drinks gas like Mia Hamm swigs Gatorade, and a slightly older Ford Escort, which is not a subcompact but which I could probably tear apart with my bare hands if I had to squeeze it through a door. The Volvo is beloved of suburban liberals - I used to joke that I got it free when I joined the Gore campaign - and touted for its "safety." But in a collision with my other car, the Volvo's passengers would come out ahead at the expense of the people in the Escort. The Volvo is heavy and definitely takes longer to stop than lighter cars. It's an expensive car if you don't buy it 10 years down the line, so its safety is not available to many consumers.

But nobody is out there agitating against late-model Volvos. Pursued to its end, Mike's logic would demand that everybody be required to buy an equally safe/unsafe car. I can't see pursuing it to its end. On the other hand, I recognize that, with an SUV, it's not just the weight but the higher suspension that tells in a collision. On the other other hand, this is true of pickups and other heavy vehicles.

It's worth noting that there are libertarians that hate SUVs, most prominently Virginia Postrel.

Jonathan Pearse writes

Interesting that this argument should have drawn some criticisms from over at Crooked Timber. But then perhaps some are bugged by what I think is a broader point, namely that those folk who fork out for a big vehicle like a four-wheel drive SUV or who work out in a gym pumping iron are trying to enhance their self reliance skills across the board. It is about a certain way of approaching life in general.

Individualistic-minded folk like SUVs and keep-fit for self-reliance reasons. Having a car that can take you where you want in all kinds of conditions, including the odd snow blizzard, is all part of saying, "I am able to be in control of my life. I am not at the mercy of others or over-dependent on them". And perhaps this explains why a certain type of collectivist dislikes SUVs so much. All their bleating about the Greenhouse Effect and safety is a smokescreen, in my opinion, for their broader support of the "victim culture". This may be a bit harsh on some SUV critics but I think the point is valid.

At the moment I live smack in the middle of London, use public rapid-transit transport 99 percent of the time and occasionally rent out a car. But one of these days, when I move out in to sub-topia, that will have to change. Bring on the big car!

Shane Mullen forwarded me an e-mail he also sent to the Spectator:

Sorry, I don't buy it. Mr. Henley's justification of suburbia's SUV obsession (Muscle Cars, 11/13/03) is a weak case. The main complaint by SUV critics is that there is too much power in the vehicles, and not enough fuel efficiency. Mr. Henley proceeds to ignore this argument and discuss all-wheel drive and towing capacity. Even these arguments are weak. SUV's aren't the only vehicles with all-wheel drive, many vehicles are all wheel drive and have engines with 20+ MPG efficiencies (e.g. Subarus, Audis, Volvos). SUV's are also not the only class of vehicles that can tow large loads (e.g. diesel powered VWs). Plus, towing is a torque-related spec, not horsepower-related spec. Most critics of SUVs ask for emission standards and fuel efficiency requirements to be raised. You can have all the desired features consumers want in an SUV (high torque, all-wheel drive, storage space) and make it a lot more palatable to the greenies/safety conscious (lower bumpers, low emissions, high fuel efficiency). They wouldn't even know the difference.

Summing up, since we've about beaten the topic into the ground now:

1) I don't argue that everyone needs an SUV.
2) SUVs have some capabilities that people might really need, not necessarily every day, but with predicible regularity or irregularity.
3) For those people, the marginal cost of filling that need - in money and time - may be less than the marginal cost of having an SUV as their second (or first) car.
4) You will not necessarily be able to tell who those people are when you see them on their ride home or in the parking lot at the mall.

Pink Pistol - Also from Michael Schaffner, whose fine books you should buy, read and treasure, a magnificent historical find.

Michael comments:

Say you're a lonely clerk in the Attorney General's office in 1870. You spend your days at work fiddling with the fifth edition of your only book of poems and your evenings trolling the streets of downtown DC looking for a few good men.

But what do you do if one of those bad bad boys you try to pick up really IS a bad one.

Well, if your name is Walt Whitman, you reach for your trusty Sharps Four-Barrel Large Frame Derringer with its patented .30 rimfire cartridges and watch that sucker drop to his knees faster than you can say, "Thank you, sailor!"

The photo comes to you courtesy of The American Rifleman.

Jonathan Rauch and Walter Olsen would be proud, I like to think.

I'm a Lumberjack, am I Okay? - The hot topic in today's mail is my . . . wood. Too soft? Too hot? Too full of foulness? Readers size up the situation below.

When we left our story, Tom Krause had suggested that all my work on the post-Isabel deadfall had been wasted, because pine was a poor wood for burning and locust a dangerous one. He follows up with:

Yes, I think the will still give you problems even when aged. The pine will go up like kindling (uh, in fact, I think most kindling is pine) and is not worth the trouble of burning. In addition to the intense heat, you will be getting up every five minutes to put on another log. Plus, I don't think the creosote issue goes away. Locust is just bad, bad, bad. Notice how heavy and dense the wood is? That's because its chock full of harmful compounds and chemicals. It was used in the past for fence posts, etc., because it would not rot. In fact, locust is not really a tree but a legume. Is it possible to glue the trees back together and re-deposit same on your neighbor's yard? Of course, please confirm the above information with an arborist, etc. Perhaps best bet is to have a tree service come over and wood chip it and haul it off. Your neighbor should kick in a majority of the money for costs he would have incurred anyway. You should chip in some also as a societal penalty for being a silly ol' city boy who owns a chain saw.

Okay, Loyal Readers. Clearly some of you are starting to write your letters with eye toward how they'll look on the weblog. I'm not sure how I feel about that.

But Tom has his critics! Man of letters Michael Schaffner writes

FWIW, I've burned both pine and locust in my woodstove, as well as beech, maple, oak (red and white), cherry, mulberry, and holly. I use what's available, but I'm aware of the differences. Pine is frowned on because it's a soft wood, which means it burns quickly and does produce a lot of creosote. So keep your chimney clean. If locust burns too hot for you, burn less.

I use my woodstove several times a week in winter and brush it out once a year. You should probably have your chimney inspected and regularly cleaned no matter what you burn. A cracked flue can cost over a thousand bucks to replace. A chimney fire can bring your house down.

Michael Gillum writes

Split locust is money in the bank. Locust is the best of all common fire woods, because it is the most dense. Because of its density, it takes a long time to season and needs to be split more finely. Don't use it until it is really, really dry. I've used tons of it in a small stove where creosote has to be carefully monitored.

So you see the conflict here. Maybe I should show my wood around the neighborhood and see what everyone thinks of it.

Hand, Bush, Wherever - This week's Bad Timing Award goes to John Keegan, whose sunny interview with Donald Rumsfeld in the Daily Telegraph ran the day after news broke of the alarming CIA estimate endorsed by Rumsfeld's man-on-the-scene, Paul Bremer. Keegan's article is premised on the theory that if you really want to know what's going on somewhere, find the most official and partisan voice 8,000 miles away.

I should state that I've liked most of Keegan's books, though I had a big problem with his History of Warfare that doesn't bear going into just now. And we can find some interesting things in his article if we unpack it.

The first striking thing is what we might call RSN Syndrome (as in Real Soon Now). In this and other "good news" articles, close reading often reveals that the real good news is in the predictions rather than the present circumstances. So we read that right away that

Donald Rumsfeld, the US Secretary of Defence, believes that Saddam Hussein is alive and hiding somewhere in Iraq. He also believes that he will be found by the coalition forces.

That's great that he believes that. After the deaths of Uday and Qusay every warblogger on the internet believed that Saddam would be in the dock or on a slab in very short order. Nothing would please me more than to wake up one morning and find that Saddam had been taken alive. Though I would rather have him alive than dead, surely the opposite of the Administration's priorities, even his death would be a relief. A death that sticks, not like all the others so far.

But it ain't happened yet. More:

Mr Rumsfeld read me a series of reports, from the American regional commands, summarising progress achieved: terrorists apprehended, weapons recovered, explosives destroyed. The totals were impressive.

Good news in itself, if eerily similar to the sorts of progress reports we get from the War on Drugs. We've seized [X] kilos, umpty-ump dollars and arrested [Y] smugglers! There are probably fewer rocket-propelled grenades in the world than coca plants, but surely not by much. As Rumsfeld himself pointed out in another context, the question is whether we're destroying arms and enemies faster than the replacement rate (and whether we're driving up the replacement rate too), and as Rumsfeld also pointed out, we lack metrics to determine this. Didn't Keegan get the (literal) memo? Doesn't it occur to him to match what he's hearing from Rumsfeld now with what he already knows to be Rumsfeld's thinking?

More

Despite daily reports of American casualties, he was dismissive of the danger to coalition forces. Within the context of the total security situation, he sees the level of violence as bearable and believes that the trend of terrorist activity is downward.

And what does he base this belief on? There are more attacks per day now than there were over the summer and the death rate is higher. How is that a downward trend? Rumsfeld is either applying a very idiosyncratic meaning to the word "trend," or - he's speaking speculatively again, as in We believe the trend will be downward very soon.

He foresees a reduction of the size of the coalition force, now largely American but with a big British element, over the coming months. That will be achieved by the introduction of other forces from outside. He particularly hopes for a Pakistani division.

Oh my god. Even Juan Cole has finally recognized that division-sized contributions from other countries are not forthcoming. Rumsfeld himself showed more sense on this issue just a couple of months ago. If he really thinks he's going to get a whole division from Pakistan (with all the security problems that would entail) he's truly in dreamland. And yes, you can throw this statement back in my face if it happens.

Note the key word here, though: "hopes." Again and again, the "good news" turns out to follow words like hopes and soon, in this and other articles. The administration and its supporters have been hoping into one hand, though, since May, and the other one has been filling up much faster.

More:

Economically, the outlook is strongly positive. Electricity supply actually exceeds pre-war levels, with an output of 4,400 megawatts per day in October, as against 3,300 in January. Oil production is returning to pre-war levels, at nearly 2,200 million barrels per day in October, as against 2,500 million barrels before the war.

Riverbend, this week:

I have to post this fast. The electrical situation has been hellish today. There's no schedule… in our area the electricity is on 30 minutes for every two hours of no electricity.

As to the oil, I'll mention that Iraq's prewar oil production levels represent a performance degraded by a dozen years of sanctions, legal limits on production by UN sanctions and such smuggling arrangements as the regime was able to make. Being close to pre-war production levels is nothing remotely approaching an achievement. Comparisons of present oil production (and present predictions of future production) with prior predictions by the CPA and the Administration are left as an exercise for the reader.

Socially, the country has returned to normal. More than 3.6 million children are in primary school and 1.5 million in secondary school.

The schools again! For crying out loud, people, Iraq always had schools! They were closed during the bombing phase of the invasion. They reopened in May with the end of the invasion phase of the war and closed for summer vacation. Schools being open in the fall in any country in the world is "What do you want, a cookie?" stuff.

University registrations have increased from 63,000 before the war to 97,000. Healthcare is at pre-war levels and is improving rapidly, because of greatly increased spending, estimated to be at 26 times pre-war levels. Doctors' salaries are eight times higher and vaccination and drug distribution programmes have also been greatly increased.

"Health care is at prewar levels," which were degraded by a dozen years of sanctions. ("Improving rapidly" is more soon talk. Maybe so, maybe no for now.) I have some questions about what "pre-war levels" they are using for comparison - immediate pre-invasion numbers that would have been suppressed by war prep or something more like apples to apples? - but there is no doubt that some of this represents good news. How liberal though to be couching your health care pep talk in terms of spending levels rather than patient outcomes. Would someone remind me, this administration is supposed to be conservative how?

Mr Rumsfeld was also keen to emphasise the degree of progress made in introducing democratic institutions into Iraq, not only at the national but also the local level. All Iraqis are now represented in a series of provincial councils. The councils are at present appointed, but the intention is that they should be elected in the near future.

Really, if I take that one apart for you it would represent an insult to your own critical intelligence. (Yes, you in the back. "Presently appointed!" "Intention!" "Near future!" The real good news is what we're wishing! Excellent, Grasshopper. You are ready to leave this place.)

What might the real future be? Perhaps it lies in Keegan's explanation of the differential levels of unrest between the British and American zones:

While the Americans, for reasons connected with their own past, seek to solve the Iraqi problem by encouraging the development of democracy, the British, with their long experience of colonial campaigning and their recent exposure to Irish terrorism, take a more pragmatic attitude.

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.

Divide and conquer. Rule by coopting the "big men" and give the BMs a long leash to impose their own will on the locals. Carrot and stick. There are some who say that Iraqis are incapable of building democratic institutions . . .

The sunny, imperial close of Keegan's article - It's just like Kipling now! - is a reminder of what sensible people are fighting against.

Meet the New Boss - Wesley Clark supports a constitutional amendment "that would make it illegal to desecrate the American flag by burning or other means," according to a NYT report on Clark's address to a gathering of veterans in Manchester, NH. This is either an incredibly cynical stance or an appallingly sincere one.

I read what I considered the last word on flag burning years ago in my Usenet days. It went something like this: "Of course flag burning is speech. It sends a message. Right now the message is, I'm a jerk with a pack of matches. Pass a law against it, though, and the message becomes When in the course of human events . . . "

But This Really Hurts - Tom Krause writes

In the [Spectator] essay you stated you cut down, sectioned and split a locust tree and pine tree for burning in your fireplace. Yikes!!!! I cannot speak of the pine but I would presume it would not make very good firewood. However, based on personal experience and the advice of a wise relative, do not burn locust in your fireplace. It gets too hot and produces too much creosote and other nasty stuff. Seriously, I would not burn either pine or locust (but especially locust). You are asking for a flue fire, perhaps not now but in the future and/or cracked firebrick. I am totally serious about this. Really.

Well shit. Shit shit shit. Gonna have to camp more, so I can burn all that locust outside. Locust and pine aren't even good barbecue wood.

Guess I'll toss everything back over the fence!

(Note to readers: I was indeed polite enough to thank Tom via e-mail. I didn't just curse a lot.)

Honk Honk - Lots of reaction to the Spectator article, and I'm grateful for all of it, even the (largely friendly) criticisms. All I have to do now is convince my editor that the traffic is due to the author and not to the obvious hot-button nature of the topic. Otherwise my next article will have to be a ringing defense of using assault weapons to perform partial-birth abortions, and where can I go after that?

Which reminds me that, years ago, a Yale Press rep and I spent some time trying to top the political correctness quotient of Lethal Weapon II's drug-dealing South African government officials, with an eye toward the yet-to-be-made Lethal Weapon III. We settled, as I recall, on Chinese generals burning homeless people to power a machine designed to destroy the ozone layer. (This was within a year or so of the Tienanmen Square massacre.)

But wait - didn't I have a topic? Oh yes. A defense of SUVs and attacks on defenses of SUVs. See generally critical comment threads (and posts) at MatthewYglesias.com and Crooked Timber (but see Nick Weininger at Matt's and Mikhel on CT), and more in that vein from Chad Orzel. Chad goes wrong in a classic "liberal scientist" way - imagining that he can calculate the "legitimate need" of someone who is not him with the precision that he might calculate the strength of a magnetic field.

That's a common thread among the complaining comments. The other is the argument that the supposed danger of the vehicles to other drivers trumps any possible benefit that may accrue to their owners. The safety issue was outside the scope of my article. I'm presently agnostic on the matter, but I would want to see handling comparisons with minivans, pickups and wagons, not coupes.

Roger Simon notes that hybrid gas-electric SUVs are coming, including a Toyota Highlander. (Link via Glenn Reynolds.)

Brendan Huhn, that libertarian rabble-rouser, has a favorable reaction.

Some reader mail on the topic. Peter Gookins writes

A car - or truck, or chain saw, or lawn mower - is a tool. Tools are designed to not only accomplish work but perform as force multipliers for humans. They're productivity enhancers. Consider cutting trees with a two man buck saw versus a garden-variety chain saw. My experience is that one guy with a chain saw can whip 8-10 guys with buck saws.

As you pointed out, one doesn't necessarily need to own an SUV (or a chain saw, or whatever), assuming that such an implement can be obtained and utlized when necessary. What's not considered, however, is the human cost associated with such actions. Your rent-the-SUV example leaves out the time and effort necessary to arrange for the rental, get someone to take you to to the rental place, pick it up, check it over to make sure the last user didn't trash something that will leave you stranded, return it when done, etc. While you're doing this, what else of equal or greater value doesn't get done?

The real issue is "total cost of the delta;" the difference between the TOTAL cost of special-situation use scenarios (renting an SUV) vs the TOTAL cost of a smaller car that won't do what an SUV (or pickup) does AND the cost of the time required to execute those special-situation scenarios, which includes other time-value tasks not completed (not to mention those value-add tasks that don't ever get done because of the hassle factor associated with special-situation usage or the unavailability of the tool when you need it). I'm betting that the total value of the equation is pretty close.

Something else that was outside the scope of my article: if you're a parent of a small child, in your thirties or forties, with a back that's starting to go - which is to say, if you're most parents in your thirties or forties - it is one hell of a lot easier to strap a child into a high-carriage vehicle like an SUV or minivan than into a standard sedan. That is definitely worth something.

Interesting recurring thread in some of the criticism: a certain insouciance about shelling out money and a lack of regard for any DIY ethic. From Crooked Timber commenter Nick:

It’s a bollocks comparison, of course.

Once a year, you might have a problem with your water pipes; which means you should train as a plumber. Three or four times a year, you may have car problems (or more often, if you own an SUV, the build quality being rubbish); which means you should train as a mechanic.

Well actually, yeah, most of us would be better off if we learned some plumbing. And everyone who drives would do well to take at least an introductory auto mechanics course. My lack of familiarity with plumbing, carpentry and auto repair is something I regret. Yesterday I discussed frugality-movement books. All of them stress the value of learning to handle your own repairs and projects. But frugality seems well outside the concerns of some commenters. Nick again:

If you need muscle occasionally, you hire it; you don’t spend six months in preparation.

Okay then! We have people for that! If we have the money for them when we need it. And can get the people quickly. And get no satisfaction out of being able to actually handle things ourselves.

The realtor who sold us our house told us her husband's favorite witticism:

"Do you know what's the greatest labor-saving device ever invented? Money."

It instantly occurred to me that the reverse was equally true.

Anyway, like I said, I thank everyone who picked up on the article, but especially Kieran Healy of Crooked Timber, because he also included two links to the weblog, which should do wonders for my modest ranking in the various blog standings.

Hunkering Down - Kevin Drum has found a fascinating, and depressing indicator that the good times will not be rolling just yet - news from Wal-Mart on how actual customers are behaving. Wal-Mart knows not only how much people are spending, but what they're buying ("the cheapest items in any given category") and when ("around the receipt of their paychecks, indicating liquidity issues"):

The retailer -- which taps directly into the psyche of the U.S. consumer -- gave a downbeat economic outlook that contrasted with reams of recent data, and bluntly suggested that many of its shoppers are barely making ends meet.

Crap. Crap crap crap. I am not one of those people who gets all sour and resentful when everybody's raking it in like in The Go-Go 80s and the (remove hat, moment of silence) Tech Boom. I don't worry that people in such times are neglecting their spiritual sides and debasing themselves in shallow, materialistic excess. That stuff can't come back soon enough for my tastes. And apparently it won't.

Foods Touch Item - In yesterday's review of Queen & Country: Operation Blackwall, I complained that

In this age of the Hilton sisters and topless photos of everyone from High Society to Walton Mountain, the prospect of het sex vids of a rich girl going public are supposed to give her father 80 million dollars worth of pause.

What should appear today on Reason's site than a Nick Gillespie essay noting just how little shock and outrage "the sorts of displays that were simply unimaginable 40 years ago" occasion any more.

Breezy - Actually windy. Power is down various places and cable internet was down for awhile too. Service is back up but v e r y s l o w . I may give up in frustration before I get to all the reaction to the Specator piece. Darn. There are developments on the liberal hawk front to cover too. Double darn.

Return of the Liberal Hawk? - My partisan Democrat buddy Hesiod notes the early signs of a predictible phenomenon - abandonment of the Bush Administration by the national greatness wing of the Republican Party:

So far, fire has been concentrated on the Pentagon, or rather, Donald Rumsfeld.

Like Niccolo Machiavelli trying to worm his way into the good graces of the Medici's, William Kristol conspicuously avoids criticizing the President for the current policy screw ups (as he sees them) in Iraq.

Now I've long noted the potential for the neos to decide to wreck GWB's reelection prospects. You could see signs of it as early as late 2001, when writers like Russ Smith of the New York Press and Andrew Sullivan would mention, in asides, that of course George Bush would not deserve reelection if Saddam Hussein were still in power come 2004. The question since has been one of coalition politics - would the Weekly Standard/NRO types accept the half-loaf of Saddam's dethronement in place of the generations-long war of transformation in "six or seven countries" that is their heart's desire?

I think it could still go either way, depending on Administration signals. Karl Rove's reported "No war in '04" is not necessarily "No war in '05." The neos waited a dozen years for Gulf War Phase II. They may decide they can wait a dozen months for Gulf War Phase III.

But what about the Democrats? With so many of the candidates and their allied pundits insisting that We just want to do the job right, and with their rhetoric emphasizing less the folly of the decision to invade and more the Bush Administration's "incompetence" in carrying out the post-conquest occupation, there will be a strong temptation for Dem partisans to try what amounts to a right flanking maneuver - join the neos in attacking the administration's "irresolution"; attack it for drawing down forces "instead of doing the job right"; accusing Bush of "abandoning Iraq for political reasons." That is, for the sake of their own short-term political advantage, the Dems may lock themselves into rhetoric that yokes the country more tightly to the Grand Project yet.

It's not hard to see the temptations. Politically, the course at least appears to inoculate the Democratic candidate on national security issues. ("We're not just as tough, we're tougher!") And it plays into a weakness of Democratic Party temperament. As noted here before, whatever else war is, it's a massive government program. That goes double for reconstructing their society, just like we did with Germany and Japan. A liberal viewing the current travails in Iraq may think, What a dumb idea this was, but is also prone to imagine that This could work, if only . . .

Tacking right of the Bush Administration by the Democratic candidates and intelligentsia would have several dire effects, not just for the country but for the Dems themselves. First, the Democrats might actually win the election. This is not in itself the bad part, from the Democratic perspective. But the gung-ho rhetoric would lock the new Administration in a bind - pursue an ever-more ruinous escalation of the war, as your rhetoric implies; or, end up pulling out yourselves, and get attacked not just for "weakness" but for dishonesty. Or the Bush Administration could win, in which case liberal embrace of "staying the course" during the campaign undercuts any attempt Dems might make to resist the wider war that is still on the table. Democrats were too willing to concede that "of course Saddam Hussein is a threat to the United States" during the prewar debate, fatally weakening such fitful opposition to the war as they mounted.

Lastly, it may not even take that long for the tactic to backfire. The Bush campaign are neither dumb nor slow. They will see Democratic attacks on attempts to at least partially disengage from Iraq - which is simply leaving the place to be run by Iraqis - for what it is, cover. Once "even my opponent agrees" that there must be no pullout, the Administration is free to shift policy again, confident that the opposition offers nothing that speaks to the country's growing unease and war-weariness.

Explaining Myself - Presumably some number of people will be clicking through from the Spectator site today and discovering that I have some very unkind things to say about Our President and, especially, His War. What, you will be wondering, is the Spectator allowing America-hating leftists to write for it now?

To the best of my knowledge, no. I love this country with a passion and count myself, most days, as a right-winger. I am a staunch lower-case republican - much moreso than a lower-case democrat. I also find little in the way of lower-case republican virtue in the present upper-case Republican Administration. I believe its signature characteristic is vainglory in international affairs and cynicism domestically. As weblogger Brooke Oberwetter puts it, "It isn’t just that President Bush’s spending is too high. It is outrageously high, as in, instilling rage." As to the course the Administration's national security policy has taken, I find it an appalling combination of grandiosity and fear. Strong words, I realize. The thinking behind them, my reasons for finding Bush Administration policy bereft of republican virtue is probably best laid out in the following pieces from the archives:

o The Million Mom War.
o There's Your Trouble, the Continuing Series.
o Weapons of Some Destruction.
o More in Sorrow than in Anger Post.
o The Barber of Beirut.

Those kind enough to read the above links may wonder that their tone is less . . . biting than more recent items, with more equanimity and sweetness. I confess I got exasperated, then bitter. Fellow right-wingers can perhaps understand how it feels, standing athwart history and watching the damn thing roll heedlessly past.

And I Didn't Even Have to Diss Bill Clinton - My article, "Muscle Cars," now available at the American Spectator website. It's a fitness blog item! It's a defense of SUVs! It's a fitness blog item! It's a defense of SUVs! It's a fitness blog item and a defense of SUVs!

Comics Review: New Queen & Country Book - Oni Press finally got out the next Queen&Country collection. Q&C is Greg Rucka's espionage comic, inspired by the best TV series ever, The Sandbaggers, a Yorkshire Television production from the late 70s with awful sound and great stories.

The new volume collects Operation Blackwall, a story of industrial espionage and sexual blackmail. The art this time around is by Jason Alexander. Alexander does some interesting layouts and I like his compositions. As for rendering, he's one of these artists who is reluctant to lift his pen/pencil from the page, not unlike very early Howard Chaykin. He's prone to spiky, thin males too - at times I couldn't shake the impression that Morpheus had left the Dreaming and joined MI6.

As for the plot, I had some trouble granting its basic probability. (I believe the following to be spoiler-free.) French and British companies are competing for a contract with the communications firm of a parvenu Brit, and the French are losing. Using his connections, the French industrialist gets his government's domestic security spooks, the DGSE, to blackmail the man by videotaping his daughter in a hotel room with her "lover," actually a DGSE agent (not officer) who has led her astray. At one point she gives him a b1ow ;ob. There may be a little butt sex involved too, though my French was not up to certainty on that score. (Four years of high school french for nothing.)

And That's it. The DGSE videotape the man's single, heterosexual daughter having heterosexual sex with a heterosexual man. In a hotel. In this age of the Hilton sisters and topless photos of everyone from High Society to Walton Mountain, the prospect of het sex vids of a rich girl going public are supposed to give her father 80 million dollars worth of pause.

Maybe it's just me, but I had a hard time buying the premise. And once the industrialist uses his connections to get the SIS "Minders" involved, problems continue. It's so easy for Minder Tara Chase to find the fake/real "lover" that it feels like cheating. And if one were to buy the plausibility of the blackmail scheme, it would be hard to see how Tara's supposed solution to the problem is any solution at all.

The thing here is that, for better or worse, Rucka has very little interest in the plot of record except as a way to throw light on protagonist Tara Chase, "Minder Two." Tara is an old school chum of the blackmailed girl and has been having an illicit affair with young Minder Three, whom she does not love but who has it bad for her. She's mad at herself for using the lad and recognizes, though she won't say so, a certain parallel between her and the DGSE's boy toy. He's an ugly mirror she holds up to her nature before smashing. The story of Tara and Ed is well told. Worth the whole book? For Queen & Country fans, yes. The thing is only $8.95, after all, and no doubt will have repercussions in future storylines. (Don't tell me what's going on in the periodical, dammit!) It's a comedown from the earlier volumes, though.

The Good Life - One of those lifestyle tips articles that is alternately useful, obvious, embarrassing and, one hopes, occasionally tongue-in-chek: "9 ways to look rich but live cheap." I was always a big Tightwad Gazette guy - slavish devotion to that book probably let me eek out one more year as an at-home dad than I would have been able to otherwise. This particular article is a bot more oriented toward "gracious living" than frugality per se.

("Want to attend a benefit for the Lauri Strauss Leukemia Foundation, featuring performances by Liza Minelli and the New York Pops at schmancy Carnegie Hall?" Actually, I'd rather die, thank you.)

For hard core frugality, get How to Survive without a Salary, by Charles Long. Long's book is fascinating, marred by a simple misunderstanding of what he's really doing. He advocates an absolute pecuniousness - never buy new what you can buy used; never buy used what you can get free; always wait to see if you can do without or substitute. Eat what's in season etc. All well and good, and it opens you up to some sensible creativity. (After a wind storm a few years ago, I learned what an eight-hour chainsaw rental would set me back, and realized I could buy a used chainsaw at a pawn shop for the same money. So I did the latter.) Long's mistake is to characterize his philosophy as "rejecting the values of the market." (Gazette author Daczyczyn is prone to this characterization too.) But Long is actually radically participating in the market - he is simply, like the rest of us, setting what he will and won't pay for what. And his choices provide a net benefit to other consumers by exerting a small, downward pressure on even the prices of new things. By pursuing his values - freedom from a certain kind of drudgery; preferring personal effort to convenience - he lowers aggregate demand. And the spirit of his book is downright entrepreneurial - one of the most entertaining sections of the book is his account of a trip across Australia, financed on an as-you-go basis by a kind of junkyard arbitrage, picking up and reselling everything from fresh fish to used tires as he goes. The part with the grouper would give partisans of the regulatory state nightmares.

Housekeeping Again - Thanks to reader Darius Bacon for pointing out that the New Crew links were messed up. Fixed now. Go visit them all. (The joys of being wired on decongestants in the middle of the night.)

Annals of Media Bias - Apparently the Bush-hating media has convinced Paul Bremer that things aren't going so good over there. He must not be following the links from Instapundit.com.

Alternate theory: He wanted to come to Blogarama V.5 but got the date wrong. (Cue liberals insisting that President Gore, by working with the UN, would have made sure all his officials knew the date for Blogarama V.5.)

Imitation Tech Blog Post - I'm trying out OpenOffice 1.1 this week. It's the open source version of StarOffice and supports MS Office 2000 file formats. It lacks a relational database, but offers spreadsheet, word processor and - ick! - presentation production. (It claims data access tools that will let you work with external databases.) I finished off an article in the word processor today and it went pretty smoothly. I am already close to liking it better than Word - certainly header/footer management is easier.

The spreadsheet seems to be missing an elementary fill function I'd hate to do without - in Excel, you can double-click the square "handle" on the bottom left of the selected cell and fill down as far as there is data in the column to the left. I use that function all day. (At the office, I live in Access and commute to Excel.) So I'm by no means sold on the spreadsheet.

OpenOffice has a very big bonus feature, though. It will save files to .pdf format. I just tossed a couple of pictures into my document, clicked the "Export to PDF" button on the toolbar, and opened my document in Acrobat Reader 6.0. Perfect. That's cool and useful.

This is Sports Center with - TMQ?!?! - Good news: Tuesday Morning Quarterback returns, on the Football Outsiders site! (Link via Off Wing Opinion.) More good news. Football Outsiders is not graphics-heavy, so there is less cheerleader talk than during the ESPN days.

Less good news: Football Outsiders is a hardcore fan site. TMQ was greatest as a Slate feature - football geekery for the generalist. More less good news: Football Outsiders doesn't play well with Mozilla Firebird.

Formatting for the new era: On FO, the comment section directly follows the article.

UPDATE: Football Outsiders is TMQ's temporary home. Deals are in the works.

The Vote So Far is running strongly against "MORE . . . " links. (And reader Madeline Ferwerda says "[Nate's] character, BTW, looks cool-- I want to be in a game with him.") If there's a silent majority out there in favor of "MORE . . . ", it should take this opportunity to make itself heard over the next day. (The real silent majority probably doesn't care. But don't write in to tell me - that would be too depressing.)

Veterans Day - Be mindful of the sacrifices made by those who have served in the country's armed forces and are serving now. And remember that this holiday was born in celebration of a wasteful war's end.

Schticky Situation - Human Liberty has become Ask Brendan, with a new URL.

We Get Letters - Nate Bruinooge writes

Your recent addition of flavored feeds has meant little to me, since I read everything on your blog. But for that very reason I would like to officially register a complaint about your addition of "MORE" links to get to the full content of some of your entries. You are not alone in using them and they annoy me in plenty of other places as well. I can't speak for blogreaders as a whole, but for me, those links definitely make me read less of those blogs than I would otherwise. The bother of the extra click is definitely larger than the bother of scrolling down past something I don't plan on reading.

Hey Nate! Just for that I'm going to kill your character!

Just kidding. Ironically, I don't like "MORE . . . " entries myself. It felt odd to be using them. What's more, they seem to screw up item permalinks. If anyone else has any strong feelings one way or the other, I'd love to hear them.

Eric of Off-Wing Opinion sure knows the magic phrases to use in an e-mail: "Needless to say, you're right" about Madden and going for it on fourth down. He continues "I've undergone a conversion of sorts since I made that post 14 months ago." The results of that conversion can be found here. His site looks like a damned fine sports blog, by the way.

I'll mention that the report about the Madden game pushed an old button of mine. Was a time when I was a big fan of Sierra's now-dead Front Page Sports: Football Pro series, and prime mover of a project that got a lot of positive response from the user community. In the course of trying to make the game do what the developer claimed that it already did, we determined that the sim's alleged "realism" was actually a congeries of cheats designed to hold down scoring.

Julie R. Herbert writes

Actually Clinton said the he “did not have sexual relations with that woman.” “Sexual relations” is a legal term of art meaning “sexual intercourse,” i.e., coitus. A careful listener knew from the beginning what he was and was not denying.

This is surely true. Which by itself makes it clear that Clinton must have been aiming his denials at "careless listeners." Which makes me think of the current warhawk group hug, which consists of insisting that The President never promised the Iraq war would be easy. And indeed, you can find pro forma statements by Dubya and others in his administration to the effect that we have much to do and it will take time and so on. Those statements were set cheek by jowl with others insisting that we will be welcomed as liberators, talk by administration allies of cakewalks and so on. One searches in vain for pre-war cautions by the President and his aides that "We'll have a couple of nice photo ops involving statues early on but six months out we'll be losing soldiers in bunches and be reduced to intoning darkly about failures of nerve."

Recall the shock that greeted Tom Friedman when he went on Oprah last winter and mentioned that, oh, we'll be in Iraq for decades, and it becomes pretty clear that Bush too was pursuing both a careful listener and a careless listener track.

Weekly Fitness Blog Item - No measurements this week as I did not take the scale on this weekend's cub scout camping trip. Still around 163 pounds, though, just like last week. And we finally have Before and After pictures this week.

(Note: Glen Engel-Cox only took the photo at left because the Navy requested it.)

I managed only one cardio session, one weightlifting session and one two-mile walk this week, and continued to eat promiscuously. Since I haven't had my physical yet, I really can't be knocking off for the winter. I still have to win the physical, dammit! (Note to this site's female readers. Men think of everything as a competition. Even hearing tests.)

Fitness blog congratulations go out to your Talking Dog, who completed the New York Marathon at a pace only four minutes off his thirty-nine-year-old man time. He also tips readers to the book, Marathoning for Mortals. I'm certain I could not presently complete a marathon. Since I need a new fitness goal to shoot for now that I've made my weight, I might add that one.

Now, the pictures!

This picture was taken by Michael Croft on his and Ginger Stampley's honeymoon, outside the Hard Times Cafe in Old Town, Alexandria. Offering Boy was just shy of four years old then. NB: I got fatter after this picture was taken.

Take that, Michael Fumento! Glen Engel-Cox took this picture last Saturday in the Crystal City Marriott, at Blogarama V.5.

That's all for this week. Until next Sunday, eat right and get plenty of exercise! Or something.

Dear Brendan - How did I miss adding Brendan Huhn's Human Liberty to the New Crew list this month? I think it's the fact that he's been talking about moving his blog to a new service. But the advice letters you need to read keep coming in the meantime, including "I think my son is gay" and "My buddy tells me I'm stupid and that's the only reason I like [Wesley] Clark."

The Outrage of Last Week - High school principal calls in cops and dogs for an armed drug raid on his own student body - the whole school, not even a specific suspected set of users or dealers. Glenn Reynolds puts it best:

The traditional American remedy for such official overreaching, back when the Constitution was adopted, was tarring and feathering. Perhaps this "originalist" approach should be revived. If that had been my kid on the floor, I'd be sorely tempted.

followed by Perry deHavilland:

How this incident has not resulted in angry mobs in the streets throwing rocks is beyond me. What does it take to really piss these people off?

(Hat tip: Walter in Denver.)

Old Time Religion - Maybe you're like me in that, thanks to the Bush Administration, you just don't hate liberals as much as you used to. If you'd like to get back to your roots, though, just check out the comment thread to Atrios's advertisement of Arthur Silber's financial problems. Nothing like spittle-flecked fury at the suffering of a decent man to ignite a little hostility. (Atrios himself is a mensch about the matter, and commenter Leah A demonstrates the clear-eyed compassion that many liberals merely imagine they possess.)

Let's review:

Arthur takes substantial responsibility for his own situation. He acknowledges that he made a decision to join the working poor when he decided to pursue work as a full-time writer. (Asimov's First Law: Keep your day job.)

Arthur and the rest of LA's working poor are getting screwed by government. The lengthy transit strike is a public employee union and local government at loggerheads. The working poor are the ones who suffer, and it is their supposed guardians, government, that are perpetuating their plight.

The local government has actively thwarted non-governmental alternatives to the system they can't be bothered to make function:

Several other policy changes would also help protect LA's bus-riders from future strike-caused service shutdowns. Repealing the city's ancient anti-jitney law would permit New York-style jitney vans to ply major thoroughfares offering an alternative to MTA bus service. Flexible, entrepreneurial jitney vans typically charge about the same as bus fare--but require no taxpayer subsidy. Thousands of them serve mostly immigrant riders every day in Miami and New York.

That's from a Reason Public Policy Institute position paper of September 2000, which noted that "This week's strike is the seventh bus drivers' strike against MTA or its predecessor in 28 years. That's an average of one strike every four years." Add in the current strike and you've got 8 in thirty-one years, so they're keeping the average up.

Read the whole paper, in which greedy, selfish, Social Darwinist libertarians worry that

Most of the victims are low-income people without cars, who depend on mass transit for commuting and shopping. Most of the strikers earn middle-class salaries three or four times those of the typical bus rider.

Several of Atrios's commenters invoke the sainted "safety net." People! The LA transit system is supposed to be part of that "safety net." And what a wonderful job the Metropolitan Transit Authority is doing by it!

A further point by Leah A:

Even if Mr Silber was of a mind to avail himself of a piece of the so-called safety net, unless he's a senior citizen, he will find precious few resources. Welfare is not an option for a single male, unless they are indigent, which means he can't even own a computer.

Arthur Silber said, I have this trouble. Here are the parts that are my fault, here are the parts that aren't. Here are the consequences. If you've found any value in what I've done, I'd be grateful for any contribution you care to make. Since one of those consequences is that Arthur can't blog for the time being, and since financial help by his readers would help him return to blogging, there is even a tacit quid pro quo involved. In other words, even by interpretations of Objectivism which Arthur himself rejects, there is nothing of hyporisy in his plea. Rather there is a request for an exchange of value for value. I don't fault anyone for not donating to Arthur's cause. I'm a little short myself right through here. But "compassionate" liberals might take more interest in pressing their cherished government to fulfill its (self-arrogated) obligations than in kicking a good man when he's down.

Charity Begins at Blog - Help Arthur Silber if you can. The LA transit strike has left him high, dry and unable to earn a living.

This is Sports Center with Unqualified Offerings - The Redskins won a game today but there will be commentators trying to punish them for it - actually, color commentator Daryl "Moose" Johnston already did. With just under five minutes to go in the game, facing fourth and a foot at their own 25, Steve Spurrier had the Redskins go for it. Failing would have left Seattle with the ball in field goal range with a good shot at a touchdown. Even though the gamble worked, Johnston said as others will say, you can't lose sight of the fact that it was a bad decision.

In fact, it was a jaw-droppingly good decision, as readers of the indispensible Hidden Game of Football, by Carroll, Palmer and Thorn have known for years:

In other words, any time a team is faced with a fourth-and-1 or even fourth-and-2, it should go for the first down (except in obvious situations where time remaining and score make a field goal mandatory). Actually, this applies even to punting, but the coach who will call for a run in a close game with fourth-and-2 at his own 10 has never been born. Statistically, we can demonstrate that a team would come out ahead, but we can't factor in a coach's ulcers.

I won't go through the math - get the book for that - but Carroll et al apply "field position theory" to the problem, and factor in the chances of converting short-yardage plays. (CliffsNotes: Kicking a field goal with less than 6 yards to go for a first down always represents a failure of nerve rather than wisdom. Punting on very short yardage is pointless even if you're backed up.)

Johnston and announcing partner Dick Stockton made much of a failed attempt at fourth-and-one at their own thirty called by Barry Switzer against Philadelphia when he was coaching the Cowboys a few years ago. That's what we call an anecdote. It's not dispositive, and the Redskins have now given us a countervailing anecdote anyway.

The Redskins made a good decision and it paid off. (The specific play call, a delay run, may have left something to be desired.) Had they punted, Seattle would have had good to excellent field goal position and a chance to chew up most of the rest of the clock on their way to a touchdown or field goal. That would have put Washington in a two-minute drill, with Seattle free to play pass only and ignore the run. Had Washington missed, Seattle would probably have gotten their touchdown or field goal, but left much more time on the clock for the Skins to come back. As it was, they converted and may have enjoyed a certain boost in morale from doing so. You can argue with results, but not this time.

UPDATE: Virginia Postrel has been here too. Eric of Off Wing Opinion demurred, but his argument is weak. ("Madden made sure his programmers corrected" the game logic relating to fourth down, per Eric. But Eric gives no reason to believe that Madden didn't simply arbitrarily build a faulty conventional wisdom into his software.)

Here's the paper Postrel and Eric were working from. (Link is pdf.) It postdates Carroll, Palmer and Thorn by 15 years.

Housekeeping II, Now with MORE Technology or, What's a Semi-Comics Blogger to Do?

More changes so that you, the reader, get no more Jim Henley than you need. I already pointed out the new RSS feeds for Only Comics (A Fanboy's Notes) and No Comics (Fanboy-Free). I've also made some changes for those of you who, like me, don't use newsreaders.

Everything continues to be posted to one blog, Unqualified Offerings. But you can now choose the view.

The Main Index - this page. All items appear here - politics, comics, culture, fitness, dear diary, gossip, whatever pops into my prematurely (so I insist) grey head to publish. Starting this week, Fanboy's Notes and Fitness items will be published using MovableType's Extended Entry function. If the post is of any length whatsoever, most of it will be hidden on the main page. If you click "MORE" you get the whole thing on the archive page. The index page is for readers who want at least the option to read everything. It's easier to scroll past the comics and weight loss items going forward, but there's enough there that, if it grabs you, you won't miss it.

A Fanboy's Notes index page - The new structure of the main page is a sop to the site's non-comics-oriented legacy readership. This page is for comics/geek material readers who don't want to wade through a lot of political complaints. It's the last 15 Fanboy's Notes items displayed in their entirety.

Fanboy-Free index page - If it galls you to even have to see the beginning of a comics post, this view will preserve you from that tribulation. Note that some items will be coded as both "Fanboy's Notes" and "Main" - I think of them as "Foods Touch items" - and they will appear here.

Fair and Balanced Housekeeping! - Time once again to update the Unqualified Offerings blogroll. October's New Crew has been scattered to the appropriate sections of the permanent blogroll, and a dozen new links added.

Near and dear to my heart are the libertarians. Overlawyered is Walter Olsen's great chronicle of absurdity and excess in the legal system; HotLiberty dares to ask the question, "Can a young CATO refugee find happiness and sanity the country's flaccid appendage, Florida?" Pre-CATO refugee Brooke Oberwetter provides commentary with an emphasis on local DC issues for OberNews.

Our liberals this month are Pandagon and Oliver Willis. Both have achieved an eminence beyond my ability to further burnish - file these links under Long Overdue.

File under A Style All Their Own both Chrissy Rockwell of A Fine Idea at the Time and Anton Sherwood of the decidedly old-school . . . muttered the ogre. Defense Tech is Noah Shachtman's chronicle of national security news.

The Intermittent, Trickle of Consciousness and Immediacy are comics&culture blogs. Intermittent is quite new, while Immediacy claims archive as far back as July 1990. (B-but! Mickey Kaus invented blogging in 1999!)

Our sole conservative hawk addition is Outside the Beltway. I keep looking.

Stupid Flies! The Continuing Series - From MSNBC this morning:

Nov. 8 — The U.S. Embassy in Saudi Arabia closed all its missions on Saturday - a working day in the gulf - after what the United States said was credible information terrorists were about to carry out attacks. Meantime, U.S. officials, citing new intelligence indicating a threat similar to the one that preceded the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, told NBC News that al-Qaida terrorists could soon use cargo planes to strike targets in the United States.

Clearly our enemies need to read Andrew Sullivan more. Or less. I can't say, really.

Wait Just a Minute There - The buzz today is that "HE DIDN'T HAVE SEX WITH THAT WOMAN AFTER ALL!" because, at least in New Hampshire, Oral sex is not adultery.

The brief summaries I've heard describe the court as ruling that homosexual sex isn't adultery, but that's only half the story: The court specifically said that "Homosexuals and heterosexuals engaging in the same acts are treated the same because our interpretation of the term 'adultery' excludes all non-coital sex acts, whether between persons of the same or opposite gender."

writes Eugene Volokh about a New Hampshire Supreme Court ruling. But hang on. Bill Clinton didn't say "I did not have adultery with that woman, Ms. Lewinski." (Nor did he say, and anyway, we were in New Hampshire, so never mind. But that's neither here nor there.) He said s-e-x. And the court refers to "non-coital" acts as sex acts. Now Clinton apparently also said that oral sex wasn't cheating. Here the New Hampshire Court seems to back him up. As to what the Court's wife might think, the Volokh Conspiracy and Kevin Drum are silent.

(Butt sex doesn't count either! Whee! Did the Free State Project people sense that this ruling was coming? Is this going to mean more libertarians moving, or more libertarian spouses forbidding them to move?)

Take One - Agitator Man Group member Nick Weininger offers "The Case for Cutting and Running" today. Nick is a good writer, but I'd like to see his case strengthened some.

First, what does "cutting and running" mean in this context?

by which I mean: staying just long enough to finally find and kill Saddam, then ending the "nation-building" effort in Iraq, drawing down forces there to much lower levels, and redirecting overall military strategy back to fighting al-Qaeda-- is the best of the (admittedly awful) options. It would save us loads of blood and treasure, get us out of a corrupt, doomed business, and set us on the road back to non-interventionism, a road we've got to get back on for the long term anyway.

Okay, get Saddam and get out. I instinctively support this policy over either "Get out regardless" or "Build a beacon of democracy, or what passes for it, in the middle east." Simply put, I feel guilty about leaving Saddam out there with a good chance to regain his job and visit retribution on all those Iraqis who have tipped their anti-Saddam hand since April. I think of what could happen to Salam, or Riverbend, or the Salams and Riverbends I'm not even aware of, and I quail.

This position is not without its dangers, though, particularly if you're paranoid enough. (If the administration wants to stay in Iraq, but has declared that it will leave once it captures Saddam, it has a disincentive to capture Saddam.) But it beats the Democratic and Republican versions of "Do the job right," which assumes the job can be done. (A bad assumption.)

Like I said, I've hardly begun to formulate my own case for why and how. So it's a bit cheeky of me to tear into Nick's, but it's a sympathetic tearing into! He frames his case as a rebuttal to the three most common arguments for "staying the course."

1. We owe it to the Iraqis to reconstruct their country, since we bombed and invaded them in the first place. For one thing, the whole idea of national obligations reeks of collectivism. Individuals owe things to other individuals; nations owe nothing to nations. In particular, those of us who opposed the war from the beginning don't owe it to anyone to be taxed to pay for the consequences of others' folly.

This is by far his worst argument. Ironically, "nations owe nothing to nations" is akin to the "Samizdatist case" for the war - that tyrannical nations do not merit the protections of sovereignty inherent in the Westphalian nation-state system and free(ish) nations may do with them as they will. I think they're wrong too. Nation-states are facts - social facts, but facts all the same. If you toss out the concept of mutual obligations among nations, I think you end up with far more mayhem among nations, which would be very bad for individuals. We libertarians are antiwar because we expect that war will, in general, abridge liberty, and fewer obligations between nations means more war.

But let's say nations don't owe other nations anything. Can nations owe individuals? Be very careful about saying no. It's hard to square "no" with the Bill of Rights, substantive due process and a whole bunch of other things on which we rightly insist.

We very much want to say a government has obligations to its own citizens. So the remaining question is, can a government have obligations to the citizens of other nations? Does Mexico have a negative obligation to not bomb Texas? I'd say so. If Mexico does bomb Texas, does it have a positive obligation to make good on that harm? I find it hard to say that the United States government, which has disarranged the lives of individual Iraqis in a thousand ways, some good, some bad, has no obligation to them. The question of what that obligation is, how it may be prudently and well-discharged, and what concerns may trump it are open, and beyond the scope of this post. But they are real enough, however hazy in outline.

2. If we pull out of Iraq, it will become a haven for terrorists. Maybe so. But what the heck is it now, then? Given the ease with which various insurgent fighters are apparently able to move around, it's hard to see what good the occupation is doing on that score.

This argument is getting there. But here is where there is a very limited sense in which "flypaper theory" is true. Not the mad version that all the world's terrorists will obligingly flock to Iraq and busy themselves with attacking our troops. But a weaker version in which the ones who do flock to Iraq have to deal with our forces. The concern over leaving a "terrorist haven" is that it will become a place from which terrorists can plan strikes on US targets here and abroad, and that an unfriendly Iraqi government will have more incentive than ever to connive at that.

To be fair, Nick favors the Afghanistan model - keeping special forces in Iraq to root out al Qaeda activity - but I wouldn't call this non-intervention. We are talking highly mobile strike teams able to kick ass and take names throughout the country. Kicking ass and taking names breeds humiliation and humiliation, not poverty, breeds terrorism. Kicking ass and taking names means the US reserves major extraterritorial privileges in "post-occupation" Iraq - quite enough to inflame Iraqi-nationalist, Arab-nationalist and muslim sentiment.

I favor "cutting and running" because then the foreign jihadis get all the native resentment - we're no longer around to inspire it. An Iraqi goverment may well do a better job of clearing out the Islamist Foreign Legion than we can.

3. Pulling out of Iraq will embolden our enemies by demonstrating to them our lack of resolve. This is a very good argument for hunting down and killing Saddam Hussein. It's an even better argument for hunting down and killing Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar (remember them?) It's not a good argument for staying on in an adventure of the sort that tends to make us enemies in the first place, and draws off resources from the aforementioned hunting down and killing.

I largely agree with Nick's section 3. A minor irony of hawkish rhetoric is the Bin Laden himself says Beirut and Somalia showed we're weak weak weak argument - ironic because Bin Laden and his sympathizers say lots of things, such as how they hated the Iraqi sanctions regime, our policy toward the Palestinians and our military presence in Saudi Arabia. Somehow this one thing (about American resolve) that Bin Laden says out of all of them is the one we're supposed to credit. And it just happens to be the one that points toward more war rather than less. How 'bout that.

Still "a right-wing peacenik knows that there's something to the problem of 'rewarding terrorism' by pulling out after, and visibly in response to, attacks," wrote, um, me, about two weeks after this blog began. (I wrote about the problem most directly last fall.)

But the hawks push the insane version of the insight. We should never have pulled out of Beirut or Mogadishu! Oh, what should we have done instead? Stayed the course! And? And prevailed! Over whom, exactly? Our enemies! Mohammad Farah Aideed and Hezbollah and, um, whoever else was in Beirut back then. There were others, I think. And how would we have done this? More troops! More bombs! More resolve! And this would have solved things how? We would not accept failure!

Oh.

And as Nick, to his credit, points out, "all options suck right now." Cut and run sucks less, but there's lots more to say about why and how than I've managed to say so far.

Unqualified Offerings Looks on the Bright Side - So there won't be any Turkish troops either. (To go with the Indian, Bengladeshi and Pakistani troops that will not be patrolling Iraq.) Okay, I told you (and you in particular) that there was no bonanza of foreign deployments awaiting a UN resolution. But that's not the point. The point is, it's a good sign that there won't be any Turkish troops. Because the Iraqis didn't want any and the US actually heeded them. This is not only far better conduct than I feared, it's smarter than I could have hoped. We are, in terms of force structure, screwed. But less so than we would have been otherwise, because the extra division of Turkish troops would have brought more than a division's worth of trouble with it.

Not at All - Sean Collins recommends the latest from Christopher Hitchens and, in a shot across the Unqualified Bow, wonders (rhetorically?) if I consider Hitchens "one of those national greatness types" like the odious (to me, anyway) David Brooks.

No, I don't. (I know it's no fun to burn down a perfectly good straw man just because it got dressed in your clothes and you don't relish the confusion, but sometimes I'm no fun.) I think Hitchens' essay is full of bluster and silliness, and consider his counsel on this matter unwise. But what separates Hitchens from Brooks is that Hitchens is not writing to excuse and even encourage US human rights abuses. You find no hint in his article of apologia or urging for "brutal measures" or "atrocities" that will, from the compost of the passive voice, "inevitably" bloom. Hitchens has as long a record of excoriating American "brutal measures" as Brooks does of excusing them.

I blame Hitchens for naivete, and I take naivete very seriously. Because Brooks is right that what Hitchens wants entails what Brooks condones and implicitly desires - our "brutal measures" and "atrocities." But Hitchens is a work in progress and he may yet get it right.

The Bad Lieutenant - Tacitus has a starkly personal memoir of his time in the army, trying to cope with command, clinical depression and a culture unsympathetic to the idea of clinical depression at the same time. Superbly written. He imagines, wrongly, that it somehow invalidates the "chickenhawk" critique of certain war enthusiasts who are not him nor could be if they tried. But that's a minor matter. The essay is not to be missed.

Quickie Comics Blogging - Stuff I bought and didn't buy this week . . .

Palomar just wasn't in the budget this week. I'd crave it even without Alan David Doane's recommendation, though, and I did at least hold a copy in my hand. Gorgeous package.

Alias 28 - If Brian Michael Bendis knew how to end a story he would rule the world. Actually the series ends effectively. The Deus Ex Marvel Girl that concludes the Killgrave arc, less so.

Empire 4 - I enjoy this and can't wait until the protagonists all die horribly. This issue makes a start.

Supreme Power 4 - in which it develops that artist Gary Frank is not so good at fight scenes. Once upon a time this would have made it impossible for one to make a living drawing superhero comics. Times have changed. I don't really like the new Nighthawk costume. All in all, this issue is off the mark set by the first three.

1602 3 - borrowed. Ironically given my decision to drop the series, I found the third issue not so dire as the previous two.

Arrowsmith 4 - Carlos Pacheco. He's good. The story continues to be inventive in a dozen little ways. The art I could look at all day. The hand of the author weighs just a little heavier this issue on the gallant-hopes-versus-horrid-experience irony, Great War species. But a book I'll continue to look forward to.

Formerly Known as the Justice League - The Mary Marvel bits are funny. But with the exception of the second issue, this just isn't as much fun as it was the first time around. Boy, that was fun though.

New X-men: Assault on Weapon_Plus TPB - Dang, something big is in the offing, that's for sure! I hope Xorn can help Jean and Hank heal Emma Frost! He's probably my favorite character of the series! Why are you looking at me funny!?

Looking Backward - Of the various Democratic complaints about the "stolen election of 2000," the one I hands down found hardest to credit was the baseless claim that all those people in Palm Beach County couldn't possibly have meant to vote for Pat Buchanan. The argument rested on sloppy generalization - "Palm Beach County is home to many Jewish retirees, therefore all residents of Palm Beach County must be Jewish retirees, and Pat Buchanan is the reincarnation of Goebbels himself, therefore he couldn't have gotten any votes." As it happens, I've been to Palm Beach County, and it's like any place else in Florida - west of US1 and East of the Tamiami Trail and you're in cracker country.

Regardless. Tonight I'm reading a Hot Liberty report on Dick Armey's book tour stop in Palm Beach County, and come across this:

2. Palm Beach Republicans are an ugly bunch. I mean this mostly looks-wise, but a few questions were surprisingly xenophobic, bordering on the Buchananesque. Really, with all that is happening right now, why should half of the questions be about immigration?

The connection is left as an exercise for the reader.

(Jim's official position on Florida 2000 archived here.)

I Love the Nightlife - Ban the Ban is a grassroots DC group fighting a proposed ordinance that would ban smoking in all DC restaurants and bars, regardless of the wishes of their owners and patrons. It's pretty obvious that anyone who wants to open a nonsmoking bar, club or restaurant may do so. This is about force.

By the way, this is not an "astroturf" organization. It's run by actual DC residents, mostly libertarian, whom I've met. (Yes, the "hilariously in-group sourcing" crowd!)

UPDATE: Joanne McNeil writes to inform me:

Thanks for the link! But despite the blog line up, we aren't "mostly
libertarian." Nearly half of the members of Ban the Ban are registered Green.

Noted, but if they haven't slept on Gene Healy's couch, they don't matter.

Word! - One of my poet pals sent around this passage from "The Excellency of the English Tongue," by Sir Richard Carew, who died November 6, 1620:

Againe, for expressing our passions, our interiections are very apt and forcible: as findeinge ourselues some-what agreeued, wee cry Ah ; yf more deeply, Oh ; when we pittie, alas; when wee bemone, Alacke; neither of them soe effeminate as the Italyane Deh or the French hélas. In detestation wee saye Phy, as if there withall wee should spitt ; in attention, Haa ; i[n] calling, whowp ; in hallow-inge, wahahowe: all which (in my eare) seeme to be deriued from the very natures of those seuerall affections.

What can one add to that but, Fuckiin' A!

Actually, It's a Perfectly Good Reason - As you know, a characteristic, quadrennial ritual of our republic is upon us: breathless speculation, in the face of logic and what is now a lengthy history, that one of the major political parties is heading for a brokered convention. Kevin Drum, who has links to the latest incarnation of the popular (among reporters) delusion, writes

I've been discounting this possibility myself, but mostly based on the lazy reasoning that it hasn't happened for 50 years, so it's probably not going to happen this year either.

Hey, lazy is effort enough when the answer is within reach! We don't just have a historical record extending back half a century. We have our knowledge of the causes of that history. Long primary campaigns and divided conventions are not in the perceived interest of the eventual nominee. They lead to hurt feelings among activists and late starts on the general campaign. They delay the all-important tacking to the center. I believe they have financial implications too - money spent early (fighting a difficult primary campaign) is money that can't be spent late.

So, bad for the winner, no matter who the winner is. That means that it's bad for the apparat too. The apparat wants to win for all kinds of reasons - they believe in their party's ideology, to the extent that it has one; they stand to incur a great deal of blame for any loss (like, of, allowing a brokered convention situation to develop); and they got their positions because they are competitive people.

The above also makes a brokered convention bad for the losers. Because the holdouts can expect the faithful to glare accusingly at them too, when it all goes south because of the problems adduced two paragraphs ago. The holdouts also believe in their party's ideology. You may think the competitiveness factor cuts in the opposite direction for them as for the apparat, but you'd be wrong. The losers have a future, or would like to. They might see themselves in the winner's cabinet or they might see themselves mounting the winner's podium four years hence - either way, they have an incentive not to drag out what the smart money begins to insist is a fruitless campaign.

"Brokering" never went away exactly. It's just as front-loaded as the primary schedule. You still concede defeat and release your delegates, usually with an endorsement of Some Other Guy. But you sure as hell don't wait until convention week to do it. That would earn you nothing but trouble, and that won't change, even with increased granularity in primary delegate-awarding.

Ooh, Look! Invisible Hand! - Useful article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution today, based on a new Bureau of Labor Statistics survey:

The comparisons -- available in the federal government's latest annual compensation survey -- seem to defy logic. But experts say that's because people overestimate the role that local cost of living factors play in determining wages.

The fact is, they say, supply and demand in a particular profession and the strength of labor unions in a city weigh just as heavily in what people are paid.

Footloose readers may wish to check the survey itself to find the income-maximizing locale for their vocation. (Link via Outside the Beltway.)

And Where It Stops, Nobody Knows - "In an interview with 13 News Wednesday night at a Grand Valley State speaking engagement, Nugent put his odds of running for Governor at 50/50." So says the website of WZZM 13.

Mmory Lane - Two years ago in Unqualified Offerings:

Among the reasons we don't know more, one stands out: The perpetrators don't want us to know more. bin Laden himself denied any role initially, though his subsequent public statements amount to a tacit admission of guilt. The National Greatness types insist that Iraq must be behind the attacks because, because - well, they hate us! The Hashemite Restoration crowd (Unqualified Offerings is in the junior auxiliary) think that prominent Saudis are at the very least accessories after the fact. Paranoid ravings on this very website imply that bin Laden might be anything up to and including a secret operative of the Saudi government. And Mustafa "Blood Libel" Tlass maintains it must be the Israelis because everyone Mustafa Tlass knows is a dipshit and complicated stuff is beyond them.

From "Wilderness of Mirrors."

One year ago in Unqualified Offerings:

In down moods, I wonder if we've already seen our last "free and fair elections." The combination of zeal and suspicion you can see today on partisan websites reeks of decadence - reeks, really, of the Imperial. And there's that word again.

From "One Man, One Vote, One Last Time?"

Worthy Cause - Teresa Nielsen Hayden fried her hard drive. She's put up a tip jar for those interested in helping to defray the data recovery costs. In return you get a fascinating Way We Live Now meditation on how it feels to lose your electronic history, followed by an informative comment thread about preventing and repairing such disasters. Also, the following music jokes, which Teresa herself told me this very weekend. (For the full story on that, see Glen Engel-Cox and Chad Orzel.)

Q: What's the rarest sentence in the english language?
A: Isn't that the banjo player's Porsche?

Q: What do you say to a banjo player in a three-piece suit?
A: Will the defendent please rise?

Q: What does it mean when a drummer drools out of both sides of his mouth?
A: The stage is level.

Three bassists walk past a bar.
It could happen.

Teresa has a lot more good jokes like that on her hard drive, and she'll share them with you if only.

Comics Mailbag - Late last month, I suggested that the problem of repetitive material when serial stories are collected into paperback could be solved by a trick the publishing industry calls "editing." Jesse Walker wrote in to say that

If you look at the old Pogo collections, you'll see that Walt Kelly did exactly that. Lose a panel here, add one there, and presto -- a series of strips becomes a novel.

Jean Lansford writes in to correct my memory about eerie precursors of the War on Terror in bronze-age Marvel Comics. Did the Mandrill drop several floors of the WTC on the crowd in a mid-seventies issue of Daredevil? Not quite:

I'm fairly certain it was the radio tower atop the Empire State Building. Confirmation will have to wait until after this cold departs. I just don't have the energy to go through my unmarked comic boxes right now.

Jean, you can save yourself the trouble. I am absolutely convinced you are right, now that you remind me.

Time to Sing Kumbayah - Donald Luskin and Atrios have made up. This is genuinely good news, though it may have cost me, personally, 75 bucks. Not that I am bitter.

(Okay: I was in consultation with the editor of an online publication about an article. Heaven knows if he'll still want one, and his e-mail box is full anyway.)

Terrorism and Tyranny - Via Arthur, the transcript of James Bovard's Booknotes appearance.

It's the System - The hell of it is, it is the system. You know all the controversies you read about on other blogs, like who misquoted whom, and how so-and-so is or isn't the menace/poltroon his/my enemies say he is? I read those and generally find that the debunkers have a good case. The quote was sliced crooked or interpreted tendentiously. So-and-so is not so bad as his critics say. It's all been about psyching up the team before the big game. This holds regardless of party for most cases.

The problem is that structurally we've gone substantially wrong. Arthur Silber makes this point in regard to the recent CPI/Iraqi contracting brouhaha.

By the way, Arthur and Chris Matthew Sciabarra, two men who have together substantially raised my previously low regard for Objectivists, have joined the Liberty and Power group blog.

Is There an Echo in Here? - John Hawkins of Right Wing News continues his impressive series of interviews. This week, it's crashing bore Michael Medved. Blahblahblah. "Losertarians." Blahblahblah.

Don't miss it.

Piling On - Slacktivist on Brooks:

This is moral cowardice masquerading as bravado. Brooks, while attempting unconvincingly to adopt an air of macho, "hard-headed realism," is clearly terrified and desperate. He is so wide-eyed with terror that he has soiled himself -- ethically if not literally.

Contains links to revealing interviews with Israeli Army officers suffering the burden of their own Brookses.

Some Sons of Bitches Are More Equal Than Others and David Brooks wants us to be the equalest sons-of-bitches ever. His New York Times column today contains a lot of standard-issue propaganda maneuvers - invoke the atrocities of the enemy to get an emotional reaction, intone solemnly that we must "stay the course" and so on. Ah, but what course? The one that takes us from here

Um Haydar was a 25-year-old Iraqi woman whose husband displeased Saddam Hussein's government. After he fled the country in 2000, some members of the Fedayeen Saddam grabbed her from her home and brought her out on the street. There, in front of her children and mother-in-law, two men grabbed her arms while another pulled her head back and beheaded her. Baath Party officials watched the murder, put her head in a plastic bag and took away her children

to here:

It's not that we can't accept casualties. History shows that Americans are willing to make sacrifices. The real doubts come when we see ourselves inflicting them. What will happen to the national mood when the news programs start broadcasting images of the brutal measures our own troops will have to adopt? Inevitably, there will be atrocities that will cause many good-hearted people to defect from the cause. They will be tempted to have us retreat into the paradise of our own innocence.

Atrocities like beheading a woman in front of her children and mother-in-law to send a message to all our real and potential opponents? Of course not. We are not low-tech like that. And we never, never discuss specifics in advance. We will keep the talk at the abstract level of "atrocities" and "brutal measures." When the specifics occur, we'll file them under media bias.

Let me be perfectly clear: We are not as bad as Saddam Hussein. But we could be if we work at it. The David Brookses of the world want us to work at it. All the while they will insist that, somehow, no matter what "brutal measures" we have to adopt we will ourselves remain irreproachable. Anything else would be "moral equivalence," and we can't have that because we decide.

Here is the thing you must understand about David Brooks and Max Boot and William Kristol and the whole "national greatness" gang. The "brutal measures" are not regrettable means to a noble end. They are a noble end. The national greatness types have been bemoaning America's supposed softness and urging it to toughen up since the mid-1990s. The war on terror has simply been their opportunity to sell a preexisting product. That product is, chiefly, your sons and daughters, brothers, sisters and schoolmates shooting foreigners. Some of the foreigners shot may indeed be our enemies. Others may be the sons and daughters, brothers, sisters or schoolmates or our enemies. Or at least standing somewhere in the vicinity of where our enemies are or have been or may think about being. No matter. The real enemy is "decadence," which is their word for liberty.

We are not as bad as Saddam Hussein. But should we become so, David Brooks will be there to approve our conduct and to damn its critics. And David Brooks is doing his bit to move us as far Saddamward as possible. He'd have made a fine Ba'athist, at least in the high life days.

Success Has a Thousand Fathers but according to Alan Framm of Associated Press, "only a handful of senators appeared" for the voice vote on the $87B Iraq-Afghanistan funding bill.

[West Virginia Senator Robert] Byrd was the only one to say "Nay."

The Modulator places the exact count of Senators on the floor for the voice vote at 5, four Republicans plus Byrd. Not sure where he gets the number but it's consistent with Framm's "handful."

Is this any way to run a railroadempirelight unto the nations of the world?

Foods Touch Item - My God. We're almost up to enough libertarians who want to write about comics to start a group blog. Link via Franklin Harris, who would of course be our third.

I was thinking of writing something about the current Fantastic Four storyline myself, given how it plays with the problems of benevolent hegemony. It's a critique of neo-imperialism and of the Ellis/Millar Authority at the same time. ("IT'S WIDESCREEN, AUTHORITATIVE." FF#60.)

Reading Around the Comics Blogosphere - In less than a month, the comics blogosphere has exploded. It is now officially bigger than I can keep up with. It reminds me of the sudden growth of the political blogosphere just about two years ago. Since I'm a fitful comics blogger at best, I expect to become even more peripheral to the action than I have been, and I want to apologize to all the people I miss linking. Anyway, stuff . . .

Dirk Deppey and retailer Brian Hibbs had an important colloquy about the industry and what it can and can't hope for from the bookstore market. Hibbs' cautions strike me as consistent with what I remember about the retail book market. Dirk makes a good point when he argues that, given the weakness of the default channel, publishers would be crazy not to try to get as much as possible out of the bookstore opportunity, especially those publishers whose material ill fits the Direct Market's prejudices.

Sean Collins weighs in on two controversies that the undersigned Mr. Semi-Comics Blogger has barely followed. He sounds pretty reasonable. I always liked Black Lightning. There's a connection here to Dirk's points about the Direct Market. Not only should there be black superheroes, but they should do well. Black Americans are disproportionately victimized by crime; black kids face a magnified version of the "power anxiety" that afflicts white kids. The success of "black interest" books in the 1990s proved that there is an eager audience of black readers out there. I was out of the hobby during the heyday of Milestone Comics, but I wonder if they didn't make a mistake yoking themselves to DC's distribution operation. Whoever wants to sell black supherero comics will probably need to build his own distribution channel from scratch.

Ultimate Neilalien. Your favorite palindrome returns his nominally Dr. Strange-oriented weblog to its roots with a lengthy report on - Dr. Strange. Specifically his recent appearances in various Marvel titles.

Anthologies Worth Reading. New reviews from Johanna Draper Carlson.

I hardly know what to say. The Comics Burrito reports on a fathers' rights protest in Britain where men are dressing up as superheroes and staging sit-ins in high places. This should provide a pretty good test of that "no such thing as bad publicity" maxim, for comics publishers and fathers' rights groups.

Reading Around - Ginger Stampley needs a job. So does my blogchild, Michael Croft. If you need a technical writer (Ginger) or a QA/CM guy (Michael), they would be solid choices. And they'll relocate for the right offer(s). To the best of my knowledge, you do not have to hire them as a set, but may simply pick the one you like better.

Diana Moon notes some conceptual problems involving the name "Instapundit" and a sudden aversion to "day-to-day events" that don't happen to be Maureen Dowd columns.

A Real Fixer-Upper - Want "constructive suggestions" from a peacenik? Justin Raimondo points to Iraq's 1932 and 1958 constitutions as serviceable founding documents for a new Iraqi state. (Recall that we keep hearing Iraq needs one of those before we can leave.) I've started the 1932 document, "DECLARATION OF THE KINGDOM OF IRAQ," but nothing to report yet.

Speaking of Justin Raimondo, in the marginal notes to the same column he reports that "my forthcoming book, The Terror Enigma: 9/11 and the Israeli Connection" is due out this month. It had better have a lot more new information than this Sunday Herald article on alleged Israeli espionage activity in the vicinity of the 9/11 hijackers or I'll consider it a waste of perfectly good pulp. The Herald has some new reporting of a minor sort - they found the witness who phoned in the tip on the famous United Moving van, for instance - but mostly rehashes previously reported tidbits. Those who argue that Israeli intelligence had foreknowledge of the hijack plot and declined to warn the US (the extent of Justin's argument - he does not claim that "Israel did it") still have some might-be's and no must-have-been. So far I see no reason to change my previously expressed views on the subject. (See also here.)

I can sign off on the quoted passage from Matthew Barganier's latest column without reservation:

Are we going to be part of the problem, or part of the solution?

Well, if "problem" means "opposition to imperial lunacy," then I, for one, plan to be part of it. That the hawks want us to ignore the proof while we're drowning in the pudding is understandable. The war was not won by defeating the Iraqi army; if anything, the war has gotten worse since it "ended." Spring's boasts have soured as fall's bodies and bills arrive on American doorsteps. But the hawks need to divorce the war from the occupation in order to save their meaningless victory from its awful consequences. So they call for bipartisanship, they implore us to think of the future, they upbraid the obstructionists, they do everything but explain how today is not the tomorrow we once warned them about.

Don't be fooled. The war debate rages on because Iraq is just the beginning. Enlist in the Bush corps now – even for the noblest of reasons – and, like many reservists, you'll be in for more than you ever imagined.

More proof of media bias. Hesiod reports that rebels fired on a second Chinook yesterday but missed it. So why isn't the Bush-hating media running front-page stories about that helicopter, and all the helicopters that didn't get shot down yesterday, huh? Huh?

Atrios takes a break from his busy schedule of slagging Gregg Easterbrook to run an informative letter from author and veteran Christian Bauman. See also his already-famous "Cher item" from last week.

Daniel Drezner says there's less than meets the eye to the recent Center for Public Integrity report on patterns in Iraqi contracting.

NaGNoWriMo - As you may have heard, it's National Novel Writing Month:

The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over talent and craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It's all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

I'm going to participate, dammit, with a twist: I'm going to write a graphic novel. The script for one, I mean. I am no artist. I'd love someone to draw the story I have in mind - hell, I'd love someone to publish it and make me piles of money, but first things first. (Just don't tell Dirk Deppey it's about a, well, a, uh, superhero.)

Here's the bright side for you, loyal readers. Unlike other blog participants, I will not be putting my output online. So you're safe. Bruce Baugh is putting his output online, but he's a professional novelist already. I will post occasional brief progress reports, but that's it.

Anger, Sorrow - The poor bastards were heading off on leave. 16 dead, 20 wounded as of tonight. This was a helicopter crash caused by an exploding projectile, so you can just imagine what "wounded" means.

Weekly Fitness Blog Item - Too partied out between last night and this morning to write much. Perhaps not coincidentally, weight this morning was 163 and waise size 32.75". Both number represent an increase from last week. I only made one cardio session last week, plus a couple of 2-mile walks, and no weight training. This holiday must come to an end. Oh, on the minor irony front, I ended up having no occasion to wear a Halloween costume. We'll get 'em next year.

More next week.

Housekeeping, Coping with Schizophrenia Edition - Two tweaks so far this weekend. This site now has a simple if invisible category system. The diet and exercise items go in Fitness; the comics, gaming and SF get classed under A Fanboy's Notes; and everything else (your standard political diary stuff) falls under Main.

The blog is for writing about what interests me, but I realize it is read by political junkies with no interest in comics, comics fans who would rather not wade through a lot of politics, people who could care less what I weigh and people who, strange as it may seem, eagerly follow my writings on health and exercise. (Just among libertarians, Jesse Walker keeps up with the comics posts but skips the fitness items; Radley Balko and Gene Healy do the opposite.)

Step One in giving the people no more Jim Henley than they require is new RSS feeds, for those who use syndicators.

A Fanboy's Notes (RDF)
A Fanboy's Notes (XML) - Your comics-blogging (and ancillary geekdom) newsfeed in your choice of versions.

Fanboy-Free (RDF)
Fanboy-Free (XML) - recent Main and Fitness items.

You can still syndicate the whole magilla if you're Ginger Stampley or Eve Tushnet. Choose one of the "Everything" feeds from the sidebar.

Minor tweaks to the index page are forthcoming for those who don't use newsreaders. (I still don't myself.)

Blogarama V.5 Reminder - Tonight! See here for details.

Ooh! Ooh! Call on Me! - Calpundit has a reader who gets to ask a question, to be submitted in advance, at Tuesday's Democratic presidential debate in Boston. Said reader asked Kevin to canvas his audience for possible questions. Here's mine:

Is there an existing government program, subsidy, agency, tax or fee that you feel should be eliminated outright? Name it.

Just one. That's all I ask. (Inspired by a conversation the other night with Gene Healy.)

There's Your Trouble, Redux - Brooke Oberwetter patiently explains to the Doyenne of Conservative Blog Comedy how on earth libertarians could reject George Bush and in some cases even, horrors!, consider voting for a Democrat like Howard Dean. Well, eventually she gets patient. Just a taste:

Emily’s frustration with the libertarians stems from her apparently total inability to comprehend that the things that are the most important to her aren’t the most important to everyone else. Her arguments read like the diary of a high school cheerleader who has just been dumped by the captain of the chess team, unwilling to believe that someone like him wouldn’t want her.

No, Brooke's piece is not all snark either. The bulk of it is serious and lucid. ("It isn’t just that President Bush’s spending is too high. It is outrageously high, as in, instilling rage.") There is still no chance I will myself be voting for Howard Dean, and an even smaller one that it would matter whether I did. (Maryland is a reliably Democratic state in presidential politics.) But I continue to believe that this is an excellent election for "lesser of two evils" libertarians to recalibrate their meters.