Unqualified Successes 2003 - It's that time of year, as it has been twice before. Once again: new categories are asterisked; repeat categories will list previous winners in parentheses; the Unqualified Successes are not blog awards as such - while some awards go to blogs, others don't, and you should assume I love you even if you're not mentioned, assuming you blog and your name is not Roger Simon. By any measure, it's been a good year for this site, and I thank loyal readers and attentive fellow bloggers for making it so. Congratulations to Mrs. Offering, our only three-time winner. Without further ado!
Least Dispensible Weblog - Calpundit (2001, 2002: Instapundit.com)
Hawk of the Year - Charles Paul Freund (2002: Perry de Havilland; 2001: Christopher Hitchens)
Dove of the Year - Jay Bookman, Atlanta Journal-Constitution (2002: Amram Mitzna; 2001: Alan Bock)
"Turning Japanese" Award for the Best Case of the Vapors, Legacy Media Division - Peggy Noonan (2002: Everyone convinced that the Washington Snipers must be Al Qaeda operatives; 2001: Andrew Sullivan)
*"Turning Japanese" Award for the Best Case of the Vapors, Blog Division - Adam Yoshida
Best Non-Libertarian in a Libertarian Role - Michael Kinsley (2002: The Talking Dog; 2001: Mickey Kaus)
Best Libertarian in a Neoconservative Role - Glenn Reynolds (2002: Brink Lindsay; 2001: Glenn Reynolds)
Best Meme Insertion - No Award (2002: "Chickenhawk"; 2001: "Our Good Friends, the Saudis")
Best Libertarians in a Libertarian Role - Hit and Run (2002: Julian Sanchez; 2001: Samizdata)
Least Annoying Liberal - Matthew Yglesias (2002: Patrick Nielsen Hayden; 2001: Ginger Stampley)
War is the Health of the State Award, Federal Division - The FBI (2002: George W. Bush; 2001: John Ashcroft)
*War is the Health of the State Award, State Division - The California Anti-Terrorism Information Center
*War is the Health of the State Award, Wannabe Division - Howard "Compare That to What We're Spending in Iraq" Dean
War is the Health of the State Award, If You Can Call This Health, International Division - Yasser Arafat (2002: Ariel Sharon)
*War is the Health of - Oh! Me! - Richard Perle
War May Not Be the Health of MY State Award - Pervez Musharraf (2002: Hamid Karzai)
Jumped the Shark Award - Flypaper Theory (2002: Anti-Idiotarian)
Blog Trend of the Year - Group blogs (2002: Unretiring)
*Dubious Blog Trend of the Year - Guest blogging
Baleful Blog Trend of the Year - Googlebombing (2002: Public de-linking)
*Healthy Blog Trend of the Year - Iraqi bloggers
*Blog Shame of the Year - The Easterbrook Affair
*There's a Pony in Here Somewhere Award - Tie: David Kay and Stephen F. Hayes
Soup/Food of the Year - Cream of Crab, Jerry's Seafood in Lanham MD (2002: Chili without beans; 2001: Campbell's Chunky Seasoned Beef Rib Roast with Herbs and Potatoes)
Tagline of the Year - "The War on Straw", The Poor Man (2002: "Harabist," Aziz Poonawalla; 2001: "We can fact-check your ass," Ken Layne)
*Brilliant Mistake - Stand Down
*It Was Fun While It Lasted Award - "Libertarians for Dean"
*Ronald Reagan Memorial Award for "Amiable Duncery" - Everyone who claimed to find the Valerie Plame scandal too "confusing"
Special Achievement Award - Salam Pax (2002: Antiwar.com; 2001: The Onion, Attack on America issue)
*The Road Not Taken Award - Jesse Walker, "The Bugs Bunny Option"
Spouse of the Year - Mrs. Offering (2002: Mrs. Offering; 2001: Mrs. Offering)
Unqualified Fanboy Successes 2003 - This blog's split personalities fought over who got to go first, and the comics geek won. Here are my entirely idiosyncratic awards for achievements, dubious and indubitable, from the year in comics (broadly considered).
Least Dispensible Comics Weblog - Journalista
Rant of the Year - Sean Collins on Batman: Hush
Iron Pyrite Award - Craig Thompson, for Blankets
Never Step on the Punchline of a Running Joke Award - Four Color Hell, for publishing new material in the closing days of the year
Speaking of Running Jokes Award, Lifetime Achievement Division - The John Byrne Forum
Comics Blogging Trend of the Year - Comics blogs
Baleful Comics Blogging Trend of the Year - Nasty personal usenet-style squabbles
Virtue Without Moderation is Vice Award - De
com
pres
(see thrilling conclusion of this award in five months)
Best Semi-Comics Blog - Eve Tushnet
Full Disclosure Award to the Source of Most of the Comics I Read But Did Not Buy - Eve Tushnet
Comics Trend of the Year - Manga
Comics Punditry Trend of the Year - Talking about manga, but not reading it
Lifetime Achievement Award, Despite Everything - Dave Sim, for Cerebus
Lifetime Achievement Award, Comics Blogging Division - Neilalien
Blindingly Obvious Be Careful What You Wish For Award - Sic Transit Gloria Jemas
Comics Movie of the Year - Daredevil, dammit, so there
Yeah But What the Hell Can You Do Award - Poor, poor Captain America
Creator Weblog of the Year - Peter David
Dark Phoenix Award, for Rising from the Ashes - Alan David Doane
Year's Biggest Crossover Series - Jesus Castillo blogging
Damn the United States, I Wish I May Never Hear of It Again Award - feeling obligated to buy and read Demon Beast Invasion
Titanic Achievement Award for Sinking the Unsinkable - David Mack, Daredevil 51-55
Il Miglior Fabro - Franklin Harris
A Fanboy's Imitation Tech Blog Item - Sony has Spider-man blog templates. That is way, way, way too cool.
The things you learn because Blogger.com is on the fritz.
Conan the Libertarian - No, not Ah-nold, silly - the real one!
(Which book is worth having, as it is a "pure Howard" collection stripping away the pastiches and reworkings of the Conan saga by L. Sprague de Camp, Lin Carter and others. Some scholarly effort has been lavished on assuring the authenticity of the manuscripts and the introductory and end matter is useful. There will apparently be at least one further volume.)"I found Aquilonia in the grip of a pig like you - one who traced his genealogy for a thousand years. The land was torn with the wars of the barons, and the people cried out under oppression and taxation. Today no Aquilonian noble dares mistreat the humblest of my subjects, and the taxes of the people are lighter than anywhere else in the world."
Robert E. Howard, "The Scarlet Citadel," in The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian.
Department of Follow-Ups - Dirk Deppey revisits his direct-market and Corner Comics stories, responding to reader reactions and elaborating on his theses. Good stuff, though I suspect that his injunction re the direct market amounts to "Like different things!" I was also struck by his list of comics that got him interested in the medium again back in the 1980s:
The Post Brothers books I've seen never did much for me, and I don't think I've heard of Scout. But the others are on my all-time faves list. I'd add William Messner-Loebs' Journey, Dark Knight Returns and Concrete.Cerebus . . . American Flagg!, Love & Rockets, Saga of the Swamp Thing, Scout, Those Annoying Post Brothers and Zot!
Happy Happy - Amygdala is two years old today. Avedon Carol (not her blog) is older. (I am not sure what the conversion rate between "Delany years" and calendar years is.)
Not Dead Yet - Mrs. Offering is something approaching chipper. Offering Boy's fever has broken, though the pediatrician discovered an ear infection of such magnitude that he warned us it might "explode." (The infection, not the ear.) The Littlest Offering is also fever-free, finally, and was well enough to play with her cousin and buy Mary Janes today for church. Have bought for her, that is. I am still slightly feverish, clogged and drugged, with a secondary infection in my sinuses. This cold pretty much killed my ambitions for Christmas vacation. I haven't been able to concentrate long enough to do any of the writing projects on my plate. Drat. Thanks to everyone who conveyed good wishes.
Tomorrow: This site's annual awards. It's a tradition as soon as it happens a third time!
Guilty Guilty Guilty! (Your Doonesbury nostalgia trip for today.) John Ashcroft's decision to recuse himself from the Plame Game investigation sure is interesting. We should consider the outside possibility that the "evidence recently developed in the inquiry" is so favorable to Administration higher-ups that Ashcroft wants the coming exoneration to appear all the more definitive.
Okay, that's enough of that.
Pet peeve. The headline characterizes the case as a "leak probe." But while parts is parts, leaks is not leaks. I'll be a lot happier when I see headlines about "burning of covert officer probe."
Stuff I Can't Get Worked Up About, the Continuing Series - The "Almanac Alert." The idea that the police are supposed to be on the lookout for people carrying almanacs is funny, out of context. But the actual directive, apparently, provides explicit context:
I read this as saying that, if a bunch of other things are suspicious, and the suspicious character has an almanac, the almanac is worth paying attention to. That strikes me as . . . reasonable.The FBI noted that use of almanacs or maps may be innocent, "the product of legitimate recreational or commercial activities." But it warned that when combined with suspicious behavior -- such as apparent surveillance -- a person with an almanac "may point to possible terrorist planning."
I suppose there will be idiot cops out there who ignore the context of the memo, which is bad.
Speaking of which, the article also says "The Associated Press obtained a copy of the bulletin this week and verified its authenticity." Okay, how about entering the internet age and putting the full text of the memo online! It's not 1993 any more, associated press. It's not even 2003 in a couple more days.
Category Confusion - Eve Tushnet is still trying to to talk about Same Sex Marriage in terms of whether marriage is a "right." But talk of rights as such is a red herring when it comes to gay marriage. The real issue is an equal protection argument, not an individual rights one.
There is no constitutional "right" to food stamps. Food stamps could be ended tomorrow legislatively, and no one could say Boo, from a legal perspective. However, the equal protection clause makes it clear that, if you do have a food stamp program, it's constitutionally forbidden to have food stamps for "everyone but Jews." State denial of state benefits to "suspect classes" has to pass a "strict scrutiny" test. The State clearly confers benefits on couples by recognizing their marriages. The State clearly denies those benefits to gay couples. That is a clear invitation to strict scrutiny. I believe strict scrutiny is passed by finding a "compelling state interest" in the exclusion. I disbelieve that gay marriage opponents have found anything even close to a compelling state interest in their hodgepodge of arguments so far, as I've said before.
Anyway, my only response to the question "Is marriage a right?" is "That's not the question."
A stray thought: I am pro-choice on abortion. I am pro-gay marriage. Eve is pro-life on abortion and anti-gay marriage. I find Eve's writing on the subject of abortion much more compelling than her writing on gay marriage. I am not sure (and I mean that sincerely) whether this has more to do with me or her.
Empty Calories Between Their Ears - I meant to link to the terrific article Kelly Jane Torrance wrote about her time among the food fascists on Sunday, but missed. So read it now.
How Sick is Sick? - Last night in dreams compounded of equal parts fever and decongestants, I planned a series of children's books starring "Cut Fuckwise, the Brain Counter" (tagline: "He Counts Brains!"). I'm sure we're all dying to read those. I certainly won't be subbing them in for the Rainbow Horse stories I am enjoined to make up each night as part of The Littlest Offering's bedtime routine. (Helpful hint: When making up children's stories on the fly, there is never a bad time to insert a talking bird.)
All kinds of stuff I'd like to blog about and write about and I just can't summon the concentration. So here are some things to keep you amused while I chug some NyQuil.
Julian Sanchez and Timothy Sandefur are in a colloquy about mall culture and whether there's a proper libertarian reaction to it - or even a Proper Reaction All Decent People Should Have. Julian thinks he's got an esthetic and ethical objection to malls. I think he's just a guy:
Pause for this site's liberal readers to digest the news that Ayn Rand liked the idea of buying gifts for people. Okay, where were we? Ah yes. Julian is a man, and single, so I don't think he quite gets malls yet. Shopping is a muscle, and generally, women keep their shopping muscle better toned than men do. They work out all year so they're ready for the Big Game. Women I have known love to shop for themselves, and love to buy stuff, but they also, generally, always have a track in their mind observing, recording and matching up what they're seeing with a gift list in their head. Window shopping in August prepares them for earnest shopping in December - and that's the ones who haven't wrapped up their Christmas purchases before Halloween. (Have you ever heard a guy say, "I'm done with my Christmas shopping" in early November?)And don't malls run counter to one of the things Rand (rightly enough) liked about Christmas? The practice of exchanging gifts is most meaningful when you've thought about the recipient, gotten halfway into his head, and come up with something that the other person would like, but (ideally) might not have thought to get for himself. The choice of the gift is a statement about the relationship.
Now, I guess you can do that at a mall. But generally, if I'm at the mall in the days before Christmas, it's because I've gotten lazy and I'm wandering around hoping that something will jump out at me for all the various people I've got to get something for. It's tailor made for the generic gift-giving-as-formality that Rand seemed not to like so much.
Shopping is gatherer culture without bugs and thorns. It can be done to self-destructive excess, just like any other worthwhile pursuit, but like other abusable pleasures - food, sex, intoxicants - it is one of life's goods. If you're into that. I'm not, really, but I'm a guy.
Meanwhile, lots of people have had a crack at yesterday's Washington Post article about how the Administration has scaled back it's grander ambitions for Iraqi society to match the sovereignty handover deadline of next July 1. Among other things, the sweeping privatization program that so appalled liberals last summer is stillborn. A few things about the article that jumped out at me:
o As a libertarian I'm all for privatization, but against interventionist foreign policy. So what do I think? Non-interventionism wins here, on practical grounds. I don't want capitalism to suffer the stigma of Alien Imposition in Iraqi minds. The Third World put itself through political-economic hell for decades by associating free markets with colonialism (ironic in that the European empire's were the last gasp of mercantilism - if we can imagine for a minute that mercantilism is a thing of the past). That led many postcolonial countries on a left turn into socialism and kleptocracy.
o And come to think of it, that's basically what we're going to get in Iraq! Follow the lines of Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran's inquiry to their vanishing point and what you see there looks a lot like Egypt II, maybe without the unified culture. You'll have a nominally-democratic kleptocracy running state-owned businesses badly, with high unemployment and simmering revolutionary discontent. A comparison of the number of Egyptians in Al Qaeda with the number of Iraqis (pre-Gulf War Phase II) is left as an exercise for the reader. Best of all, we'll be paying for it - in addition to the Summer's $87 billion, the hundred-odd billion spent in preparation and prosecution of the invasion phase of the war, and the billions we'll be spending on the troops we intend to keep garrisoned in Iraq after the civil handover, you just know that, as with Egypt, we'll be sending our anointed crooks a few billion a year for as many years as there are columns in Excel. Your tax dollars at work.
o Chandrasekaran mentions, in an aside, that the Iraqi airport is still closed to commercial traffic (because of security concerns). An inability to secure the airspace around Baghdad International can not have been on anyone's prewar list of victory conditions.
o Chandrasekeran also pegs Iraq's unemployment rate at 60%, even with continued over-employment at state-owned enterprises, whch is ten points over Brookings' October rate of 50%. But I'm not sure that Chandrasekaran is working from up-to-the-minute data here.
o Finally, if you've supported the Administration because it "stands up to terrorism," stop kidding yourself. As the Post article reminds us, the accelerated schedule was itself a response to the wave of increasing attacks throughout the fall. And the CPA and Iraqi ministries curtailed the privatization program partly in response to the assassination of a cooking-oil company manager who was planning to restructure his enterprise. If you were one of those "No More Beiruts" people, you are looking at a slow-motion Beirut right now.
Andrew Olmsted has a useful consideration of the Army's latest stop-loss orders. Andrew's solution is to expand the Army. I say, before we do that, let's pull all remaining troops out of Europe and Korea and anywhere else we've stranded them (Haiti?).
Kevin Drum said something curious the other day, about the neoconservatives:
Now, is Islamic fundamentalism really a bigger problem than the Cold War was? Certainly the Cold War had a minimal gentlemanly aspect to it that the Islamists haven't copied - the Soviets and their clients never attacked Americans in our own territory. And Islamism is in some ways less tractable than State Communism, which was bound to at least the forms of the nation-state system and circumscribed by the nuclear balance of terror. Still, the Soviets were an existential threat in a way that Iraq certainly was not, and even Al Qaeda is not unless we choose to let it be so. We came way to close to thermonuclear exchanges in 1963, 1972 and the early 1980s (around the time of the KAL 007 shootdown). We lost 50,000 lives in Vietnam, 40,000 in Korea and hundreds more in Central American battles we weren't supposed to talk about. You might say, the dead in Vietnam and Korea weren't civilians like the dead in New York City. That's true as far as it goes, but most of the dead would have been civilians but for the draft. Compare the fiscal costs of the cold war with the bill for the War on Terror and it's no contest. Then consider that we're fighting the WoT like idiots - we could be getting more mileage out of a cheaper, more focused effort against Al Qaeda.After all, this is the same group that spent much of the 70s and 80s so intent on interpreting everything as part of a war of civilizations between the West and a resurgent communism that they ignored - or in some cases actively encouraged - the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East. (Remember Afghanistan and Iran-Contra?) The very single-mindedness that neocons are famous for blinded them to the fact that they were contributing to the rise of an even bigger problem, one that had nothing at all to do with communism.
Now I could be wrong about some of the above. For one thing, we might be witnessing the death throes of the nation-state concept. Al Qaeda may herald an age in which states can no longer perform their most basic function: securing their own territory and citizens from foreign attackers. But for the time being I think Kevin overreached in his criticisms.
Diana Moon has tons of great stuff. So does Gary Farber. They'll keep you busy.
Daniel Drezner is guest-blogging at AndrewSullivan.com, which is reason to actually read AndrewSullivan.com.
Max Sawicky has more on the uncanny convergence in Democratic and Republican plans for Iraq. cf. me.
Polytropos is your headquarters for Return of the King blogging. See "Is Peter Jackson Insane?" and his spoiler-rich review. (It turns out Bruce Willis is actually dead.)
And so am I, and everyone else in this house, or would be if we had our wish. Curse this undoubtedly Islamofascist virus. More when I regain my will to live. For now I have an appointment with a dark green liquid.
Weekly Fitness Blog Item - 166 pounds, which means I have to lose one by next Sunday to meet my interim holiday goal (165 or less). Pfagh. Our whole house is laid up with colds, so exercise is not on.
Your Blogger Holiday Meal Menus Bonus Section. Bruce Baugh and Walter in Denver published their menus. Both look yummy. Here at Unqualified World Headquarters we had rib roast (on sale for $7/pound!), sauteed mushrooms and peas.
More - actually, less I hope - next week.
What Might Make Me Vote for Bush After All despite never having voted for a Republican Presidential candidate in my life? The juvenile "Googlebombing" trend among liberal bloggers. (Et tu, Matt?) Is that really more important than the Administration's baleful record on fiscal and martial prudence? Don't tempt me.
Happy Anniversary - Two years ago in Unqualified Offerings:
From "Thinking Like a Terrorist."If the plan before September was to provoke a US response, bring down the Musharraf government and, if possible, make off with one or more Pakistani nukes in the confusion, the plan has not yet failed.
Today, in The Dawn:
Interestingly a Times of India editorial argues that the recent assassination attempts have come because Musharraf's domestic position is more secure than ever.The minister was of the view that the recent attempts on the president's life were not aimed at sabotaging the peace initiative taken by Pakistan with India and the Saarc summit scheduled to be held in Islamabad from Jan 4, 2004. He, however, said the attacks were made in reaction to President Musharraf's pragmatic stand on war against terrorism.
"Those who wanted to impose their own ideology in the country are obviously unhappy with the government's policies," he added.
I'm still inclined to the view that the Bush Administration has handled Pakistan almost as well as it could. The big faux pas was reneging on the textile import pledges (link is PDF). That was stupid and cruel, but apparently not a back-breaker.
In November 2001, the great Pakistani liberal, columnist Kamran Shafi, finding himself in the odd position of defending Pervez Musharraf, speculated that "the stark choice given our General" was "probably accompanied by hints about the exact map coordinates of where our bums were hidden" ("bums" being Shafi's derogatory slang for Pakistan's nukes).
I sure hope we still have those coordinates. That's the real war and has been for two years now.
Here We Go A'Caroling - Eric of Off Wing Opinion has a list of his favorite "non-traditional" Christmas songs. ("Non-traditional?" What's the Yuletide without at least one listen to the Waitresses' "Christmas Rapping?") In addition to his nominees, I'd plump for "The Saint Stephen's Day Murders," by Elvis Costello and the Chieftains, and, though they probably don't count as non-traditional, the live version of "Away in a Manger" by Buddy and Julie Miller, and T-Bone Burnett and Sam Phillips' rendition of "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen." These last two may require some, ahem, effort on your part to acquire.
Two Down, One to Go - Blogging has been light while Mrs. Offering and I prepare for Return of the King tomorrow. Christmas night was for the extended-edition DVD of Fellowship. Tonight we gave our new copy of the extended-edition Two Towers its maiden viewing.
We're ready.
Knock Me Over With A Feather - It being a holiday, I don't want to rock your world or anything. I don't think this British Journalism Review article confirming, among other things, Telegraph scribe Con Coughlin's ties to British Intelligence will do that. The report is careful to describe Coughlin as a conscientious reporter who tries to confirm what he's given. It's worth remembering that in his famous article on the "twofer memo" he stated outright that he couldn't confirm its authenticity. However, the BJR article about Coughlin's involvement in a 1995 lawsuit makes it clear that he misrepresented the source of info passed onto him by MI6, attributing claims about Muammar Gadafi's son's involvement in a counterfeiting scam to a "British banking official" when he had personally received it from "officers of MI6, who, it transpired, had been supplying Coughlin with material for years."
BJR is upset that there isn't more of a legal firewall between British Intelligence and the British press, as there is in the United States. Of the three forms of manipulation cited in the article (intelligence services recruiting journalists for intelligence work, intelligence officers posing as journalists to write articles under false names and planting stories - possibly false ones - on willing reporters who disguise the source), the first two are illegal here. The last seems impossible to prevent, though, except by universally-conscientious behavior among intelligence bureaucracies and reporters.
That'll happen.
Last point: do not imagine that these shenanigans only happen with Tory papers. Kim Philby worked for the Observer. The point of black propaganda is not just to obscure its origin but, if possible, make it look like it comes from a hostile source. So if anything, a Western intelligence service would rather plant its stories with a left wing paper. There were certainly stories that appeared in the Guardipendent during the runup to the invasion that made me wonder.
At the borders, the relationship of the press to intelligence services can be a tricky business. Intelligence officers can be important sources of real news. An ironclad "never use anything you get from a spook" rule would be absurd. But reporters have to be alert to the possibility of being played, and readers have to develop a sense of which reporters seem to be obvious shills. So, ahem, do bloggers.
(Thanks to Hesiod for the tip.)
Merry Christmas to All - Had my annual evening in church, singing beautiful songs whose truth I do not credit, with feeling. I love Christmas, the secular and the religious aspects of it. The Incarnation is a compelling story - one well worth organizing civilizations around, even if, like me, you don't believe a word of it. For God so loved the world, he gave his only begotten Son . . .
It's powerful. Awesome in the true sense. What it says about responsibility, empathy and sacrifice chastens us regardless of its facticity.
I remember what it felt like when I finally realized that the Gospels had a literary unity, even in their multiplex versions, that "laid him in a manger" (a place where food goes) foreshadowed the Easter story ("This is my body. Eat."). Christ the Shepherd and Jesus, fodder for the sheep. Then there are the notions that would probably count as heresies if entertained by a believing Christian - the Incarnation as God's "walking a mile in humanity's mocassins" before condemning it en masse to perdition, and relenting because the experience taught Him that perfect righteousness was too much to expect from his Creation. God's sacrifice of his Son as atonement for the injunction laid on Abraham.
As if. The phrase is dismissive these days, which is too bad. It was a perfectly respectable school of theology.
Loyal Readers, Merry Christmas to those of you who celebrate the holiday. And whether you celebrate or not, Peace on Earth, Good Will toward Men. I know, I know: "In whom He Is pleased." May the world go as if He is pleased with you.
Housekeeping (Blogkeeping?) - Past time to rotate the New Crew. The last batch have been ushered into their permanent homes on the UO blogroll and a dozen fresh links have been added for your enjoyment. Ask Brendan is a fellow DC libertarian, best known for his frequently hilarious advice letters. Unmistakable Marks is a liberal politics and culture blog. Off Wing Opinion specializes in sports, especially hockey. Obsidian Wings is a fine new group blog, graduates of the Tacitus School for Guest Bloggers. The Kolkata Libertarian covers politics and economics, here and on the Subcontinent, from a free-market perspective. shonk is an eclectic, philosophy-minded libertarian blog in the tradition of Julian Sanchez and Will Wilkinson, if kids like that can be said to constitute a tradition - in internet time, I think they can. Brad DeLong is a die-hard liberal economist who has been blogging for dog-years now. Haggai's Place is dovish, liberal, well-written and nicely-designed. Hey, that's three out of four! Oxblog and the Volokh Conspiracy are the Teen Titans and the JLA of neolibertarianism, respectively. Gallimaufry is the new blog of longtime Loyal Reader (and SF mafiosa) Mary Kay Kare. And speaking of SF, radical novelist Ken MacLeod blogs at The Early Days of a Better Nation. For some reason I think of him as a kind of post-Trotskyite Jesse Walker. They seem to share the same lively interest and - dare I say - affection, for political fringes well apart from their own doilies. As it were.
Welcome all. Since I was so late getting the latest batch posted, I'll leave them up until the last week in January.
Deep Breaths - Yes, the Mirror story about the Bush-Blair rift sure looks juicy. But I caution my fellow doves, and Bush Administration opponents, not to make too much of it yet. So far this is a story that has appeared in a single British newspaper, and we all know how far you can trust British newspapers. This could well be the British Left's answer to Con Coughlin.
Tis the Season! - In what will surely count as a tradition, December 31 brings the third annual Unqualified Successes, this site's annual awards presentation. Congrats to our 2001 and 2002 winners. This year I'm taking nominations. I can't promise I'm using nominations, but if you have a candidate for the repeat categories or an idea for a new category, by all means send it. Presently there is an embarrassment of riches when it comes to the "Turning Japanese" Award for (let's call them) sissyhawks. Contrariwise, Hawk of the Year looks mighty hard to fill from here. (It's supposed to be an encomium. Really.)
I caution fellow bloggers that, while some awards have gone to bloggers in the past and some will surely go to bloggers this time, the Unqualified Successes are not blog awards per se. (After all, what have blog awards and Unqualified Offerings ever had to do with each other?) So please don't be offended if your greatness goes unaccountably unacknowledged.
My Year in Comics I - Look, were I to do a "Best Comics of the Year" it would mark me as an utter fraud. I simply have not read widely enough to be qualified to put together anything like a credible list. And if anything I'm aiming to read more narrowly in the future - that is to say, dropping titles I don't enjoy. There are surely more enjoyable comics than I know exist, and that's going to remain true. Beyond that, I spent a good bit of this year in catch-up mode anyway. A lot of what was new to me was old hat to everyone else. So what follows is my 2003 highlights rather than the industry's.
Faves
Daredevil, by Bendis and Maleev. This title was one I read in the car before driving away from the shop. Say that superhero comics have become the narrow obsession of a fringe group of aging adult fans. This comic is the best at being that thing, and surely, whatever else you think the industry should be doing, there is room for one such book. I read: all this year's Bendis and Maleev monthlies and all the collections back to the start of their run. Marvel gets points off for dragging us through that tedious David Mack Echo storyline - or at least it was tedious when I stopped reading it - to round out the year. And Bendis is not great at ending stories. Getting to the end is guaranteed exhilaration, though, if you go for that stuff (crime drama, superheroics, ethical conundrums), and I go for that stuff.
Finder, by Carla Speed McNeil. Superb anthropological science fiction and terrific storytelling. The current sequence, The Rescuers, two issues along now, has the Lindbergh Baby kidnapping case as its seed. Its first issue impelled me to get as much of the rest of the series as possible, and I believe I have only two issues to go yet. Her masterpiece is the first, two-volume story, Sin-Eater. Successor volume King of the Cats lacks Sin-Eater's emotional force but is solid anthropological SF. Talisman didn't grab me. But Dream Sequence I liked nearly as much as Sin-Eater. Worth noting how good Speed McNeil is at writing about men - all kinds of them, young, old, edjicated, rustic, urbane, gay, straight. No discovery this year made me happier than Finder.
Eightball #22, by Daniel Clowes - This is like two years old or something, right? It's still the most recent issue of Daniel Clowes' "periodical" though, still pretty available, and damnably impressive. Imagine a David Lynch movie with a soul. I learned an awful lot about storytelling from this one comic.
Fantastic Four, by Waid and Weiringo (or Porter) - Unfortunately the Authoritative Action sequence seems to be getting away from author Mark Waid. It's entirely possible that the thing was conceived as an awkward "swan song" arc when he thought he was going to be leaving the book, and then he found himself stuck making it work. But until now the Waid/Weiringo run on FF has been the best of the other kind of contemporary superhero book - the kind Daredevil isn't. Waid writes good family, and that's what makes Fantastic Four go, during those periods when it is, in fact, going.
Arrowsmith, Kurt Busiek and Carlos Pacheco - Swords and sorcery above the trenches of an alternate-history Great War. I like the story, which is filled with nice touches. I love the art, by Carolos Pacheco, whose page compositions are pointfully clever and whose line has a winning grace. After Clowes, Pacheco probably did more to enrich my appreciation of comics as a medium than any other artist this year. There is still time for this book to make a horribly wrong turn into cheapness, but it hasn't happened yet.
Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth, by Warren Ellis and John Cassaday - Just a damned wonderful one-shot, in which, basically, Batman tries to charge past three investigators in an alley. Sometimes that's all you need, especially if the three investigators are the Planetary team, the alley extends through multiple dimensions and it's every version of Batman in the canon doing the charging. A real Planetary story. A great Batman story. If Warren Ellis phoned this one in, he had a hell of a good connection. And John Cassaday's art is gorgeous. Mrs. Offering does not read superhero comics and she loved this book.
Lady Constantine, by Andy Diggle and Goran Sudzuka - another favorite of Mrs. O's. Lusty supernatural derring-do in 18th-Century England and points north. Mrs. O wants more, and so do I.
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol. II, by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill - This was Mr. Hyde's series, really, a perverse thing that concluded with rough grandeur. I found the end matter text a slog and early stopped slogging. But the part with the pictures I liked a lot.
Dicks and Deedees: A Love and Rockets Book, by Jaime Hernandez - I'd been away from LnR for all the years I wasn't reading comics and wasn't sure where to jump back in when I started reading again. So this book was my first Jaime Hernandez since sometime shortly after The Death of Speedy. I loved this book. I love that Hernandez didn't freeze himself or his characters in time or age.
Better stop there or I'll have produced a Top 10 despite myself. (Alias.) Not so good stuff of 2003 coming soon.
That Said, There is GOOD Criticism Too and it comes from Bruce Baugh. His apologia for Frank Miller and Lynne Varley's The Dark Knight Strikes Again is important for more than what it says about that particular work.
Don't Be A Silly GIRL - OR Boy - Ginger Stampley and Sean Collins whack the Caryn James-Lord of the Rings pinata. And Sean Collins finds plenty more stupid critics in his entire series on the topic, including one that, well, just look at the fellow who hates the fact that the movies are a trilogy:
I remember, years ago, the poet and critic David Slavitt writing that something had made him realize anew just how dumb most movie critics are. But that "one-volume edition" business is magically dumb.Whitty feels a reporter's need to dig deeper.
Gee, you think?Of course, Tolkien set the stage himself as novelist, with his original triple-volume epic.
But even that was eventually issued in a one-volume edition.
Speaking of Libya - Something was tickling my memory, and sure enough, as recently as October, Ariel Sharon was complaining that "Libya is diligently attempting to acquire nuclear know-how with help and support from North Korea and Pakistan."
So, what are the odds that Ariel Sharon did not know, in October, that the US and Britain were well down the road to negotiating Libya's nuke program away? Pretty darn low, I would think.
Manners from Heaven - As a libertarian blogger, I get publicity e-mails from the Independent Institute every day, most of which go unused. But today's Ivan Eland column on the minor triumph over Quentin Crisp lookalike Muammar Qaddafi is pretty useful. Excerpt:
Is this version of events the certain, complete and true interpretation? It is at the very least a counter-narrative as plausible as the one the hawks are putting out. The Libyan case is a stronger argument for patient, multilateral diplomacy and international law than even I, crusty Don't Tread on Me-er that I am, am completely comfortable with.Although the imminent U.S. invasion may have prompted Qaddafi's feelers to bargain away his weapons efforts, Qaddafi has been trying to mend fences with the United States and the West for a decade. Five years ago, he turned over two Libyans for trial in the terrorist bombing of flight Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988; recently, he agreed to pay reparations for the incident. British Prime Minister Tony Blair admitted that Qaddafi's disarmament initiative arose from the success of those negotiations. Also, for several years Libya has eschewed terrorist attacks. And it is probably no coincidence that negotiations to end Libyan unconventional weapons programs accelerated only after the United States agreed to allow the United Nations to end economic sanctions against Libya. Qaddafi most likely wanted to see some gains from his years of efforts to reconcile with the West before he made any more concessions.
The standard Qaddafi narrative has been, "Ever since the US bombed Qaddafi during the Reagan Administration, Qaddafi, afraid for his life and his rule, has been quiet." But that's not quite the case. The Lockerbie bombing, for which Libya has formally acknowledged responsibility, took place after the 1986 bombing. It is said to have been in retaliation for that bombing.
You may have trouble remembering our bombing of Tripoli in response to Lockerbie, much less our conquest of the country and deposition of the funny, vicious little man who ruled it. (Funny strange, as they say, not funny ha-ha.) And yet, a combination of sanctions, diplomatic isolation, police work and (I can hardly believe I am writing this) international law, compelled Qaddafi to give up his agents for trial, accept national blame for the atrocity and go on an extended begging campaign to get back in the world's good graces. The nine-months formal, secret negotiation over Libya's nuclear program looks much less like a sudden departure than the culmination of a pre-existing dynamic.
It will, of course, be interesting to learn the details of just what Libya's nuclear weapons program amounted too. The guess here is: not much.
Coda: Kevin Drum spots an important passage in the Post's coverage.
The End of All Our Wanderings shall be to return to where we began, and go Ohmigaaaaawwwwwd! Yes, the web really did look like Deja Vu ("the web as we remember it") portrays it. (Link via ooO, via WordPress.) Actually, it was not quite as spiffy. (I did my own retro design page for an RPG character site a couple of years ago.)
Let me stress that having actually surfed the web page where you could see if the coffee pot was full or not does not make me any kind of non-newbie. No. It's having used a gopher client that makes me a non-newbie. And if you're saying to yourself, "What the hell is a gopher client?" you'll never be a non-newbie. Says me! Me!
Are Women Stupid? - Of course not. You can't make such a sweeping generalization from one dumb article by a chick, any more than the author of that dumb article can sensibly conclude that "what the chick flick is to men, this trilogy is to women - or at least to a large secret society of us for whom the series is no more than a geek-fest, a technologically impressive but soulless endurance contest." She knows! She didn't like it, and she found a woman at her office who went because her boyfriend wanted to see it.
Anyway, here is the point at which I stopped reading:
Imagine! A Return of the King in which Samwise Gamgee is the most touching figure! It's as if Peter Jackson had read the book or something!The characterizations are so haphazard that the most touching figure is not the heroic hobbit Frodo or even Aragorn, technically human but more a fairy-tale king than a man. It is Frodo's sidekick, Sam, who will literally follow Frodo into fire. Sam is played so well by Sean Astin that this affectingly loyal hobbit seems the most human figure on screen.
Okay, I'll shut up now. I see the movie next Saturday night. More after that.
Weekly Fitness Blog Item - 164 pounds, waist under 33", pants subjectively tighter. Sorry to miss last week's fitness blog item (yes - someone did notice). Numbers were the same as this week. Given the total pig I have become, that's pretty amazing. (Lunch at the legendary Jerry's Seafood in Lanham MD on Friday, and still 164 pounds.)
Need. To. Exercise. Feeling weaker now and less fit.
Catching up on some links: A Gallup poll determined that 2/3 of men and almost half of women are overweight or obese. However, only half of overweight men think it would be a good idea if they dieted, against two-thirds of overweight women. (Thinking, of course, != doing.)
Here is your fiber-pimping link for the week. The fact that, even though I am eating more calories and processed carbs than I have in a year, and exercising less than I have in a year, I'm still not bloating up like a pufferfish (so far) may have something to do with the fact that, all that notwithstanding, I'm still getting a goodly amount of fiber. I like Granny Smith apples a lot, and eat a couple every day. That's 10 grams of fiber right there, plus a slice or two of whole wheat bread, a couple handfuls of nuts and (too few) other veggie/fruits.But here's the scary part: Gallup says that even if we all reached that ideal weight, fully 37 percent of us would still be overweight and fully 4 percent would be obese.
From the Department of You Probably Already Figured This Out: "Beer bellies" aren't really caused by beer.
Me, I don't drink beer. (I'm a teatotaller actually. Much cheaper to eat out that way.) But this story is presented as a public service.The bottom line: If you're putting on weight around the middle, chances are you can't blame it on just beer. The real culprits may be the fatty or very high-calorie foods that go so well with a brew. Go easy on the chips, sugar-coated beer nuts, and pizza. If you can control the urge to snack, you're likely to find you can enjoy a beer or two a day without having to loosen your belt.
In other fitness blogs: Bruce Baugh and his mom are planning an Atkins-friendly Christmas dinner. With any luck he'll share the menu details in time for next week's report. He reports that his weight loss is "stalled," but I consider "stalled" in the run-up to Christmas to be a victory.
In other other fitness blogs: Nothin'. Looks like some other people have either shut down their regimens or stopped writing about it. Can I take a hint? Hell, no! See you next week.
Who'da Thunk It - Nick Gillespie suggests that it's suddenly the Republicans who can't come up with a politically-safe stance on gay marriage.
Call Me Wish Mail - A couple of early reactions to the Spectator piece on Democrats, Iraq and the "international community." Martial e-mails
Leaving aside the question of the ideological makeup of the CPA, it strikes me that there's definitely something to this concern. But how much responsibility is the CPA still supposed to have after July 2004? Note to self: Get up to speed on today's grand-strategic plan.Because we are in Iraq, and because both parties are going to keep us there, then it behooves us to at least try to do a good job. I know you have your well-founded suspicions that our government simply cannot succeed, and I agree that the current process has some built in defects. However, there are ways to do the job better, most of which, as you allude, include Iraqis doing the work.
Which isn't going to happen. Which is going to lead to more violence. Which is going to lead to failure. Which is going to annoy me. Damn.
In any case, I've thought of another built-in defect which is going to cause all sorts of trouble when Bush loses. The CPA is staffed by ideologues and Republican party climbers. The new Prez will need to change the staff almost completely (and most of them will probably resign anyway; no brownie points under the Dems) and whatever institutional memory exists will be taking the next flight out. Thus, (a) a fair amount of wheel reinvention with (b) several of the same old mistakes and wrong-turns, and (c) an Iraqi power structure that knows it can stall because there will always be another set of elections in the US.
And that isn't even taking into account how a Republican Congress will greet requests for funding.
So, either the Democrats need a really, really, really new strategy or they - and we - will be up to waist deep and still sinking in the big sandy.
Loyal Reader Nell Lancaster:
Nell makes some good points here, and some others. Among the others, the certainty that "Dean or Clark is not going to have the destructive internal war between State/CIA and Defense." Most administrations have internal wars between State and Defense, or State and the NSC. The CIA usually comes down between the two parties but closer to State. The Democratic Party has its Nation wing and its New Republic wing, its Vances versus its Bzrzezinskis, its Albrights versus its Christophers.Technically true [that "whatever Democrat might occupy the White House next year will have agreed in principle with the "preemptive war" doctrine"], but you know there's a real difference. The Dem administration of Dean or Clark is not going to have the destructive internal war between State/CIA and Defense (or experts and ideologues, as Josh Marshall has it). There isn't going to be any strong voice for PNAC adventures (though I'd be less equivocal about that if Dean's chief fundraiser hadn't been the director of AIPAC).
There isn't going to be the insane missile defense / space war push that has been Rumsfeld's project for 25 years. As a corporate boondoggle *and* poisoner of international relations missile defense has no equal.
I hope and expect Anthony Zinni will take a high-level position in the next admin, and if so he will work to undo the damage that Rumsfeld's "transformation" and the Iraq war are inflicting on the forces and reserves.
And a Dean or Clark admin will not mount constant assaults on civil liberties or flout and express open contempt for internationally agreed-on norms of behavior. I'm fully aware of the horrible damage the Clinton crew did with their "anti-terrorism" bills. But don't you honestly fear (or, um, have sober concerns about) the corrosive effects of another term of the current crowd on the state of American liberty and democracy? The equating of criticism with treason, the consistent pushing of the Big Lie (fusing Iraq with Islamic terror), the encouragement of the hard Christian right [Gen. Boykin is not just not fired from his political appointment, he's *in charge of Task Force 121*].... I could go on but don't need to -- you can supply as many or more examples yourself.
Should Bush pay a political price for the damage he's done to this country? How else can he be held accountable? Impeachment will be impossible and wouldn't be the best choice even if that weren't so.
I plan to be organizing from Wednesday, November 5 on to influence the next administration to get the hell out of Iraq. But if that admin is Bush again, I worry seriously about where that internal conflict will take us. I don't have that same worry with Dean or Clark.
The appeals court rulings are a wonderful breather, aren't they? But the real battle is to prevent Congress from legalizing the same abuses. The likes of Hillary Clinton don't inspire optimism in that regard. {God, I loathe her, as much as some Republicans do. It's just that I don't obsess about her.} I hope that a left-right alliance can stave off such a prospect and roll back the PATRIOT damage. That's hope based on actual optimism-generating events, not wishful-thinking-as-plan....
Would a Democratic Administration lack "any strong voice for PNAC adventures." Maybe. Maybe we get more Haitis and Kosovos instead of Iraqs. However. A Democratic Administration would also likely lack a strong voice against PNAC adventures.
Let's consider the role of the Clinton Administration in our current predicament.
Properly considered, the Gulf War lasted 12 years from Winter 1991 to Winter 1993. Forget "Gulf War I" and "Gulf War II" - there was an effort to clear Iraqi troops from Kuwait that lasted for 6 weeks, an effort to depose Saddam Hussein without invading Iraq that lasted 12 years, and an effort to depose Saddam Hussein by invading Iraq that lasted nine months. I'm prepared to declare that very personal war over as of last Sunday. What we're doing now probably counts as a new one.
Eight of the twelve years of that war occurred under a Democratic President. For all of those years an executive finding authorizing lethal force against the ruler of Iraq was in effect. For all of those eight years we enforced no-fly zones which had among their aims to make Saddam Hussein look so ineffectual that nationalistic Iraqi generals would take him out.
George H.W. Bush started the engine and George W. Bush drove the thing home, but Bill Clinton kept the seat warm. Clinton found it politically useful to keep the heat on Iraq. His Administration's rhetoric so thoroughly aped that of the hawks that to this day, faced with some charge that "Bush lied" or "The White House exaggerated the threat from Saddam Hussein" hawks will cite Clintonian statements about supposed Iraqi weapons or declared Iraqi threats.
I fear that that is the best we can expect from a Democratic administration - a lull while the Best and the Brightest Mark II repair to their think tanks and journals and hone their rhetoric for the next go-round, and the whole time, a Democratic President and his national security team making oddly-similar noises.
All that said. "Should Bush pay a political price for the damage he's done to this country? How else can he be held accountable?"
Sure. I laid out the conditions that would lead me to think otherwise two months ago. Looking over my handy checklist, I see that the President is 0.5-for-7 so far. That's why I suggest, at the end of the article, that right wing doves should vote for a third-party candidate rather than Bush. The practical effect of recommending that conservatives and libertarians not vote for the Republican is to favor the Democrat, whoever it may be. That, though, is the extent of my enthusiasm.
A Fanboy's Labor-Saving Device - Everything you need to know about the reliability of Time.com's Andrew Arnold as a "comix" critic is that on his usual-suspects Top 10 of the year, Craig Thompson's Blankets gets the top spot. As if. Even early booster ADD eventually saw through this one.
Revealed: The Kevin Drum-American Spectator Connection - So the other week in a typically lively Calpundit comments thread, someone averred that the Democrats had "better ideas" about dealing with Iraq. I asked what those were, got the expected answer and explained why I didn't find it very compelling. Then I decided there was an article in it. "Wish Globally" is the result. I wonder if Daniel Drezner's correspondents ran out of energy already.
To Each Its Proper Function - Gene Healy has an important new policy analysis cautioning against the growing tendency to use the US military in domestic law enforcement work. As Jesse Walker said some time ago, we're a country that has been busy turning out police into soldiers and our soldiers into police. Bad business at both ends.
Slate on Alan Moore - Not much to disagree with in this attempt at an even-handed appraisal of comics scribe Alan Moore's ouevre. He even forebore to kick Moore around for his godawful post-nuclear attack graphic novel whose name escapes me. (Note to double-semi-comics bloggers: I know "comics scribe Alan Moore" sounds twee in our circles, but I have to clarify who the guy is for this site's non-comics readers.)
They Got the Weed and They Got the Taxis - Daniel Davies bursts my bubble about mellowed-out machine gun makers by pointing to Jamaica, a place with plenty of ganja and plenty of weapons. And plenty of kleptocracy and other tsuris too, but he recalls to my mind a truism of "intoxication studies":
And the context, as I recall, includes cultural expectations too. For instance, a culture that "expects" drunks to be belligerent will have more belligerent drunks than a country that expects them to be mopey.One of the few things we do know about people's behaviour on drugs is that it’s very context-dependent and influenced by their state of mind at the time of taking them.
But bigger problems than the drugs Jamaicans use are the ones that pass through - as a transshipment point between South America and the US, it's as much a victim of drug prohibition as any American city or chemotherapy patient. And some of its most dangerous guns are the ones in the hands of its police. As you might expect, most of Jamaica's murders not committed by police are committed with illegal firearms. We also deport a lot of violent Jamaicans back to the island, and "According to the [Associated Press] report, in Jamaica, one out of every 106 males over the age of 15 is now a criminal deportee from the United States." There's not enough ganja in the world to mellow all that bad news out.
The Sun Will Come Out Samarra - We need to bring the troops home because I'm scraping the absolute bottom of the barrel for headlines now. Anyway, the Army has clearly decided to try to take back control of Samarra this week. Somewhere recently I read a claim that Samarra's clans were actually fierce rivals of the Tikriti clans, but I can't find the reference now. If true, it may say something about the nature of the resistance that Samarra is such a problem area. Then again it may not. And I might have misread.
Now THIS Is a Victory - Two, actually. The Second Circuit circumscribes the Executives "enemy combatant" discretion, and the Ninth Circuit shines the light of habeas corpus on Gitmo. I think the Ninth Circuit should let them grow their own pot too, though even I draw the line at permitting them to construct machine guns.
Congratulations to Randy Barnett of the Volokh Conspiracy. Other bloggers bitch about the prohibition on medical marijuana. Barnett did something about it - won a case before the 9th Circuit of the US Court of Appeals. Better yet, he won it on Commerce Clause grounds. That's a double whammy for freedom. You can read his recap of the case.
So apparently, the current state of Commerce Clause jurisprudence is this: you can't grow your own wheat without federal permission, but you can grow your own pot. I'd find that even more consoling if I did drugs.
McFreedom speculated last month, before the appeals decision, that
which is too bad because if someone's of a mind to make himself a machinegun I'd like him to be nice and mellow afterwards. See also his speculations on the implications of Stewart for the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. I tend to think, though, that filesharers have something pot growers don't - a large, well-connected lobby to complain about them.This brings to mind an intriguing future in which machine guns may be owned by ordinary citizens - if self manufactured - and in which marijuana may be grown by ordinary citizens. Since states would still be free to outlaw these activities (barring any Supreme Court decision applying the 2nd to the states via the 14th, of course), I rather suspect that there would be states in which one could grow marijuana (granted a gift of seeds from a passing stranger), and states in which one could make a machine gun, but very few states in which one could do both.
Tis the Season - Care packages for the troops via USO. Packages are $25 a pop, you can donate online and include a special message.
What He Said - Sean Collins, ladies and gentlemen, on Strom Thurmond:
About sums it up.[T]o him, black people may not have been good enough to go to the same schools or eat at the same counters or drink from the same water fountains and probably even to vote, if that were possible, but they were good enough to fuck and then discard.
The D-Word - Oh by the way, Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province has officially adopted Sharia Law.
Ooh, democracy! And it's true, they held a vote, and the bigger team won. The smaller team now may not charge interest, must teach more Koranic instruction in schools, cover its wicked wicked cheekbones if it is female, and all that.The provincial government dismisses such arguments along with the charge it is overseeing the creeping Talebanisation of North West Frontier Province.
"The Taleban were totally different," says the provincial law minister, Zafar Azam. "They were uneducated and revolutionary. We are doing things though through democracy."
I really regret the way we toss the term "democracy" around in our foreign policy rhetoric. It gives people the idea that the most important thing in politics is voting. But the most important thing in politics is freedom. The American model is not "democracy," it's constitutionally-limited government with a democratic component (even still). Far, far more important than the fact that Americans get to vote is the large category of things on which Americans don't get to vote. Locking up people who write bad things, jailing people for worshipping the wrong gods, compelling self-incriminating testimony in criminal cases, issuing bills of attainder and other items on an admittedly shrinking list. Even here, it's shameful that people can vote to prohibit behaviors that a sane country would call "making an honest living." But we had the idea right. Then we go an screw up explaining it to everyone else.
"Democracy," circumscribed, appears to be an indispensible component of the free society package. But it is not itself freedom and our evangelists could make that clearer. If they believe it. If they don't they should tell us, so we can better use our circumscribed votes next time they come up for election.
We're Jammin'! Jammin'! Jammin' Straight From Al-LAH! - Hesiod e-mails an interesting link re the Musharraf assassination attempt. The BBC reports that "officials say" that a radio jamming device in Musharraf's motorcade "may have blocked the signal to the remote-controlled bomb" that blew up after his entourage crossed a bridge in Rawalpindi. Could be. As Hesiod notes, it's the kind of thing you'd think the Pakistani Government would want to keep to itself, unless that Hindustan Times conspiracy theory article struck a nerve.
The Democratic Capitalist Revolution Comes to Iraq - Raed (not Salam) gets a leaflet :
Over to you, Samazdata!THREE to TEN years behind bars, is what I'll get if "they" got me buying petrol from the "black market"!!!! I was reading this leaflet printed and distributed last week with my eyes opened .. opened very much .. this way >> OO
YEARS? not DAYS?
Ladies and gentlemen , you either wait for 6 hours in the gas station queue, wondering how to keep theifs and bullets away from your cars, or you'll enjoy our prisons of freedom for the rest of your life.
quote>
Imitation Tech Blog Item - The previous item was the first one I've published through Movable Type's editor in weeks. Zempt is just too damn convenient to bother logging into MT itself any more. The downside of this is that I'm late updating the blogroll, which is not fair to the nice people at Obsidian Wings or any of the other blogs on deck for the New Crew. The one downside to Zempt is that it will let you paste text containing smart quotes, em-dashes and other characters it can't handle if those characters appeared in the text you copied. Then it chokes on the upload and you have to hunt them down and replace them. Very occasionally, like tonight, I can't find them all and just open MT and copy the item over.
Personal to Matthew Barganier: I have a strict rule against "reciprocal links." However, if the Antiwar.com blog adds UO to its links list, I'm willing to favor it with a permanent link, come January, from the original libertarian anti-interventionist weblog - all in the spirit of fellowship.
Metric System Interim Report - In the item linked below, Andrew Olmsted writes
So how is the Op-Chart update likely to look next month? Up and down, with chances for some more ups.U.S. forces in Iraq should stop handing out enemy casualty figures. The enemy will know when we've given him a pasting, and the removal of the focus on kill ratios and body counts will encourage more focus on the metrics that can help us win the war in Iraq, like the number of people will access to potable water and electricity.
One obvious improvement will be the "Baathists Still at Large" line since, while Saddam's "people" are still in bondage, so is he. That's a big one.
Trends are also good, so far this month, on US Troops Killed, Hostile Fire. We are back to a "one-a-day" rate after the awful pace of November. Absent some more helicopter kills or a truck bomb in the Green Zone, we can expect to come in well below November's record total. And November doesn't count, Op-Chartwise, because the Op-Chart table only shows every second month. (See Antiwar.com's daily tracking report.)
A curious feature of that tracking report, by the way, is deaths from "non-hostile gunshot wounds." These might be accidents, but some could be suicides too. There is also always the question of which fatal vehicle accidents were actually caused by drivers attempting to avoid an attack.
Antiwar.com doesn't track non-US coalition casualties with the same detail as American casualties, so I can't give you any updates there. I have an impression that Iraqi security-force deaths (military and police) are way up, possibly reflecting a change in emphasis on the part of the guerrillas, but I have no numbers to back that up. Let's wait and see.
The CPA does not provide street crime figures on its website, or oil production or unemployment numbers. It still updates those electricity figures every day, though, and bless them for it. (Though, uh, they're still showing October pictures and charts on their electricity welcome page.)
So, what's up with electricity? The news is all bad. The nationwide seven-day average peak production stands at 3,234 Megawatts. That's below the Op-Chart compilers' pre-war figure of 3600. It's 1200 below the brief high reached on October 11, and less than half what the Iraq's Ministry of Electricity estimates as Iraq's full needs (7,000). That's from the electricity welcome page, as is the undated statement that
The 7-day average for Baghdad, which by the way you have to calculate yourself, is 1,191. It was 1196 on August 7 (first day CPA provides), 1237 on August 31, 1312 on September 30 and 1231 on the last day of November. In between it bounces from brief lows in the 800s to even briefer highs just over 1400.The MOE is preparing for fall maintenance, when power production will be reduced in the short term. Power plants were shutting down units according to a schedule designed to end before winter’s cooler months, when electricity demand for residential heating increases.
Power situation: not good.
Oil production and export: According to Brookings' Saban Center, proximate source of the original Op-Chart metrics, Iraq's November oil production was 2.1mbbl/day, essentially unchanged from October. Remember that November doesn't count, though. There are no in-progress December numbers. (The Saban Center data is frustratingly incomplete, which is itself a metric - when getting good data from Iraq becomes a routine matter, that will be one of the most important signs of progress yet.)
Fuel available to the population numbers look bad, which jibes with the reports of gas lines. Diesel, Kerosene, Gasoline/Benzene and LPG (like "liquid natural gas," but not natural) weekly averages for December so far are all down from November. All of them except kerosene are way down from October. (Kerosene availability is slightly up.)
Now if this week's successes against the current insurgency continue, an improved security situation could start all the metrics trending upward. As it is, the security news is better than it's been and the economic news worse.
Too Late! - I used all my good Samarra titles already. So I'll just send you to Andrew Olmsted for the latest.
Much Better - I didn't look at Daniel Drezner's paper, but his critique of yesterday's speech is Dean-bashing done right.
Give Me a Break - So I finish my article about the inadequacies of the Democratic candidates' Iraq policies, including Howard Dean, and now David Brooks tries to get me to like Dean more:
I'm not big on many "global institutions." If I never hear "Kyoto" again it'll be too soon. But "international alliances worked together to choke off funds for terrorists" - that sounds pretty darn good. Meanwhile, per Brooks, what's supposed to be great about George Bush is the unceasing grandiloquence of his rhetoric. Because "conservatism" is all about massive transformational projects.Dean did not argue that the U.S. should aggressively promote democracy in the Middle East and around the world.
Instead, he emphasized that the U.S. should strive to strengthen global institutions. He argued that the war on terror would be won when international alliances worked together to choke off funds for terrorists and enforce a global arms control regime to keep nuclear, chemical and biological materials away from terror groups.
Dean is not a modern-day Woodrow Wilson. He is not a mushy idealist who dreams of a world government. Instead, he spoke of international institutions as if they were big versions of the National Governors Association, as places where pragmatic leaders can go to leverage their own resources and solve problems.
It's For The Family! - Wrapping up the final edit on my forthcoming Spectator piece on what passes for the Democratic alternative on Iraq, I figured I ought to check Howard Dean's big foreign policy address today to make sure there are no surprises that would throw off the article. And dammit, it's not worth [Spectator article rate censored] to put myself through this.
The whole point of becoming a libertarian is to save time that would otherwise be spent reading major-party position papers. What have I done?
Department of SNARF! - From PhotoDude:
UPDATE: And get your new talking points at Big Picnic.And this is where I proceeded to get tickled: "When asked 'How are you?' said the official, Saddam responded, 'I am sad because my people are in bondage.' When offered a glass of water by his interrogators, Saddam replied, 'If I drink water I will have to go to the bathroom and how can I use the bathroom when my people are in bondage?'"
And in a flash, a quote from Martin Mull came to mind: "You know why so many men 'nickname' their penis? Because they don't want all the important decisions in life being made by a complete stranger." And I wondered if that's what Saddam named his: "My People." "I am sad because My People are in bondage. My People want to be free. How can I go to the bathroom when My People are in bondage? Mark my words, My People will rise up against you, or perhaps that cute Corporal over there."
A Work E-Mail Exchange from today.
Him: Did you see the news last week? Mathematicians found the biggest prime number ever. It's too long to type, though, so I can't send it to you.
Me: Just send me the factors. I'll multiply it out myself.
This has been your unbelievably nerdy blog item for December.
Power to Tax Indeed Power to Destroy - Corner Comics surrenders. The owner couldn't afford to continue the fight, especially with the New Year's deadline looming. "The power of the blogosphere" was no match for the Forces of Darkness - if only the IRS agent a) were somewhat well-known; and b) committed a verbal gaffe. Then we'd have his ass on a plate with hash browns. It's what we're good at.
Dirk Deppey has the details in a superb investigation into the issues at stake here - essentially, Corner Comics became another front in the IRS's never-ending war against cash-based accounting. In fact, Sean Collins observes that Dirk's web operation has single-handedly put his magazine's print news division in the shade. His reporting on Corner Comics deserves to be read well beyond comics circles. (The comicsphere's gain is the larger internet's loss. Were Dirk's purview not limited by his occupational mission, his gifts as a reporter and a critic would be more widely-recognized. His biggest failing - not infrequently disagreeing with me - would remain, but this turns out to be no bar to blog stardom.)
Laura "Tegan" Gjovaag confirms Dirk's account of the issues at stake.
Publications will be destroyed because of this. Stories shredded. Pleasure reduced. Accrue that, why don't you?
First, Roll Your Tinfoil into a Cone - It didn't take long for the conspiracy talk to start swirling in the wake of the weekend's events. No, not Mrs. Offering's standout performance getting the emergency room to pay attention to newly-asthmatic Offering Boy - everybody recognizes that for the unimpeachable achievement in mothering that it was. Rather, Hindustan Times reports that "highly placed sources in Islamabad say that [Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf] may have engineered" the failed assassination attempt against him "to retain Washington's support as key ally in the war against terror and to strengthen his hold on power." That's an interesting word, "may." I don't dismiss the possibility out of hand. One report said that, according to Musharraf's own statement, the "near-miss" was off by "just half a minute or one minute." At Presidential motorcade speed, that's a nice safe distance. If "Flypaper Theory" really worked and these clowns came to Iraq, they'd blow up Kuwait. (Musharraf link via a skeptical Instapundit.)
Meanwhile, what would momentous events in the Middle East be without Zionist conspiracy theories - in this case, a conspiracy theory by Zionists. Debka is claiming that "these seven anomalies point to one conclusion: Saddam Hussein was not in hiding; he was a prisoner."
Not an American prisoner, mind you, but the prisoner of a group of Iraqis who had been negotiating with the US for the reward money since shortly after Saddam's November 16 tape. Debka being Debka, the whole thing is clear proof that the Sharon government needs to give up its accomodating ways and kick some ass. (Hat tip: Hesiod, who connects the Debka story with the curious Rep. Roy LaHood interview two weeks ago.)
I won't believe a word until I hear it from Con Coughlin.
Toon In, Turn On - Good article by Jesse Walker in the Baltimore Sun about the politics of popular adult cartoons. Covers the Simpsons, King of the Hill and South Park. What's good about it is that, unlike some other critics, Jesse doesn't imagine that all three shows comport perfectly with his world view.
Who Lost Russia Mail - Reader Greg Pearson has a different reading of the history than my own (original UO text italicized):
Continuing with this site's (very recent) tradition of hard-hitting reader interviews, I followed up with a question:This is actually a subject I know something about. In the late 90s, I worked for an organization that specialized in Russia. Among my other duties, I spent an hour or three every day reading news reports from Russia and the surrounding countries: everything from poor translations of local papers to international news agencies to U.S. government propaganda (Radio Free Europe, in other words). We concentrated specifically on political, military, and law enforcement news.
Where did Putinism come from? Answer: from Chechnya.
I think you have that exactly backwards. The second Chechen war came from Putinism, not the other way around. The first Chechen war led to Putinism only in the sense that Saddam Hussein led to National Greatness Conservatism. In both cases, the point was to have a war, not to have any specific war. If it hadn't been Chechnya (Iraq), it would have been somewhere else (Syria).By 1998, it was clear that Yeltsin was going to be stepping down as President in the fairly near future. The big score in Russian politics was to become his chosen successor. For the next two years, the Russian government looked like the Italian one: They went through a Prime Minister, at most, every six months. The new PM was inevitably Yeltsin's golden boy and his likely successor. Until, suddenly, he was forced out of office and became an instant political has been. This was probably partly due to Yeltsin's fear that a clear and strong successor would force him from office before he was ready to go and partly due to maneuvering for power among various factions in the Kremlin.
The last of these Prime Ministers of the month was Putin. He'd learned from what happened to his immediate predecessors. Eschewing the typical government strategy of setting up your friends to loot the state oil companies, he turned his energy to starting a war in Chechnya. The point wasn't that there was a great deal of popular outrage at Chechnya or that things were particularly bad there, it was simply that he figured that nobody would dare dump the PM during a war, especially not if he was prosecuting it vigorously. That led to crackdowns in Chechnya, which led to the Moscow apartment bombings (maybe by Chechens, maybe by Putin, maybe by the mob, maybe by Saddam
Hussein), which led to the second Chechen War. And, lo and behold, crushing the evil separatists is popular. The public thinks that continuity of strong leadership is important in wartime. And Yeltsin resigns and names Putin his chosen successor. Funny how that works.The Yeltsin government, which for all its flaws had many liberal-
in-the-European-sense ministers...I think this is just basically not true. I don't think there was a significant liberal-in-the-European-sense faction in the Russian government since the of Grigor Yavlinksy's term as Prime Minister in the early 90s. Probably the best back-of-the-envelope way of judging the influence of the liberals in Russia is to track the size of the Yabloko party in Parliament and the number and importance of the cabinet positions held by it's members. I leave that as an exercise for the reader, but you won't find the numbers as encouraging as the Clinton administration would have liked you
to believe.
I take Greg's point, but sometimes the distinction between "quiet" and peace is important - such as in Iraq, where, whatever the twelve-year intermission between land combat was, it was not, with its sanctions, coup-fostering and 34,000 bombing runs a year, peace. Still, Greg's reminder is important. It isn't just that pointless wars can advance the fortunes of political creeps. Creeps can also advance pointless wars to improve their fortunes.So Chechnya was quiet for a time between the first war and the second? My memory played tricks on me.
Quiet is a relative term, of course. The provincial government paid lip service to being part of Russia and not much more. The central government actually had very little control of the province. There were occasional bouts of separatist guerilla/terrorist activity (most notably the raid on a Russian hospital in 199...7?) and a general low-level insurgency. The whole place was run by gangsters of one form or another.But that doesn't make it horribly different from other Central Asian Russian provinces (see particularly Daghestan and North Ossetia; one or the other of which would probably would have been the target of Putinism if Chechnya didn't exist). Chechnya was worse. But the Chechen government basically had a live and let live accommodation with the Feds. The Russian military made the occasional desultory raid on the guerillas in response to the worst of the provocations, but mostly they only paid lip service to fighting them. Things there sucked, but nobody really cared until Russian politics required a war.
There's Your Trouble, Continued - Diana Moon explains why Iraq's Shi'ites haven't expressed more gratitude to the US for getting rid of Saddam. It makes a lot of sense.
Share the Joy - Laura "Tegan" Gjovaag sings. Tacitus celebrates the success of 4ID while moderating his hopes for any substantial lessening of the insurgency. Juan Cole recalls Saddam's crimes and, like Tacitus, doubts the impact on the insurgency. Contrariwise, Josh Chafetz of Oxblog has the optimistic view. David Post, on Volokh, takes the press to task for "some powerful need to pretend that we understand the world much, much better than we do or can that overwhelms our reason -- at least, that's my current theory." Hey, it's mine too. Last word to Gene Healy:
[I]t's always a good day when you see a murderous, once-mighty tyrant looking like a bedraggled drunk rousted from the bus station. I hope we turn him over to the Iraqis and they hang him high. And I hope this improves our chances for a rapid and dignified exit. Maybe now we can work on capturing that other guy.
Joy to the World - Celebrate the capture of Saddam with the perfect Auden poem, recalled to us by Nick Weininger of the Agitator.
He's Baaaaaaaaaack! - The aptly named Con Coughlin, that is, who so amused us with the Statement of Lieutenant-Colonel al-Dabbagh last week. This time he has a twofer. First
That's from a "handwritten memo, a copy of which has been obtained exclusively by the Telegraph," dated July 21, 2001. Hey, it could be true!Iraq's coalition government claims that it has uncovered documentary proof that Mohammed Atta, the al-Qaeda mastermind of the September 11 attacks against the US, was trained in Baghdad by Abu Nidal, the notorious Palestinian terrorist.
And how convenient that the exact same memo contains a second section
How fortunate for us that Iraqi intelligence thought, two years ago, to provide a single document establishing Saddam's connection to September 11, and the authenticity of the "Niger story." (Pity the poor hawks who have been pushing a "Bush never said Niger" line for months, and must now pirhouette on that matter.)which is headed "Niger Shipment", [which] contains a report about an unspecified shipment - believed to be uranium - that it says has been transported to Iraq via Libya and Syria.
There are a couple of little problems, like, for instance, the fact that
o The entire validation of the memo we have is a statement by "Dr Ayad Allawi, a member of Iraq's ruling seven-man Presidential Committee"
o The Telegraph reported in August 2002 that
The author of that story? Hey, guess. (Hat tip: Pandagon.)Abu Nidal, the Palestinian terrorist, was murdered on the orders of Saddam Hussein after refusing to train al-Qa'eda fighters based in Iraq, The Telegraph can reveal.
Now, you may be saying, The memo dates from 2001, and Abu Nidal was murdered in 2002. So where's the contradiction. By doing so, you're saying that Abu Nidal was okay with training Al Qaeda terrorists for Saddam in Summer 2001, but not okay doing so in Summer 2002. There's the further problem of whether Abu Nidal was even in Iraq in Summer 2001. Con's older report declares that
Jane's also reported thatAccording to reports received from Iraqi opposition groups, Abu Nidal had been in Baghdad for months as Saddam's personal guest, and was being treated for a mild form of skin cancer.
Nidal backed Kuwait during the 1991 war.A senior Iraqi official said on 20 August that Abu Nidal, who had returned to Iraq several months earlier bearing a false Yemeni passport and was placed under house arrest, killed himself after Iraqi agents accused him of conspiring with anti-Iraqi forces, including Kuwait [and Saudi Arabia]
The point is, "several months ago" from August 2002 does not seem likely to extend as far back as July 2001. Nidal appears to have been in Baghdad in 2000 and again in 2002. He may or may not have even been in Baghdad in 2001 to have that stunning change of heart. ("I have trained an Al Qaeda operative for the biggest terror strike in history"/"I won't train Al Qaeda operatives".)
Like I said, it could be true. Maybe Nidal was in Baghdad in July 2001. Maybe Mohammad Atta was too. Maybe there was something a hard case like Atta could only learn from Abu Nidal, and maybe Nidal taught it to him that summer.
But it would be foolish, given his track record, to accept that on Con's say-so. Oh, and the original "Niger memo" from British intelligence covered events in the late 1990s. They're slow shippers in Niger.
(Telegraph link via - of course! - Instapundit.)
Dangling Modifiers Are Not Our Friends - From the current version of the MSNBC report on Saddam's capture:
Get me rewrite!From hiding, U.S. commanders have said Saddam played some role in the anti-U.S. resistance that has killed hundreds of soldiers and civilians in Iraq.
Well, Now - Take a couple of days off to: discover your son has asthma; run a million errands, and; sleep like the dead; and they go and make news on you. The nerve.
The capture of Saddam is better than I hoped, as I figured the US government would prefer dead to alive. It removes my biggest qualm about an early withdrawal - that if we pulled out with Saddam free, he could crawl back into power and put the hammer down on anyone who showed the slightest pleasure in his downfall. And what comes out of any interrogation and trial could be grimly entertaining: Mick Jagger's boardroom scene in performance ("Gentlemen, you aaaaaaaallllllll work for me!"), the denouement of Goodfellas ("Everywhere we went, somebody had their hand out").
We will now learn much. Will Saddam's capture break the back of the armed resistance? MSNBC reports Army commanders saying that it appeared Saddam played "some role" in directing resistance activities. But according to CNN:
which does not necessarily sound like the mastermind of a guerrilla war. Given that early reports are always wrong, there's no point in teasing definitive conclusions from the little we think we know.Maj. Gen. Raymond Odierno, the commander of the 4th Infantry in Tikrit, said that Saddam was armed with a pistol, but was "very disoriented," and did not resist U.S. forces.
The soldiers found Saddam hiding in what they called a "spider hole," six-to-eight feet deep, equipped with a rudimentary ventilation system and camouflaged with bricks and dirt.
If the coalition can get Saddam to issue a statement calling on the guerrillas to lay down their weapons, will they do so? Coming at it from the other angle, will the obvious relief among Iraqis at Saddam's capture translate into more cooperation against any resistance that remains? Hawks have long argued that fear of Saddam's return was the big dampener on ordinary Iraqis' willingness to embrace the occupation, the transition and the anti-insurgent effort. We should find out how true that is over the next several months. Some doves, meanwhile, have claimed that only fear of Saddam's return kept Iraqis from being more anti-coalition than they have been. We'll find out how right they were too. And of course there is much yet to learn about weapons programs and Al Qaeda ties or the lack of such things.
We have a better chance now to meet some of our stated goals in Iraq.
From the standpoint of yesterday, Saddam's capture is wonderful news. From the standpoint of a year ago, it is a sigh of relief well down the road of a wrong turn. Saddam Hussein was one of the world's bigger bastards and deserves whatever is coming to him. That statement remains independent of the wisdom of the US undertaking to give it.
The Power to Tax is the Power to Destroy Update - Developments in the Corner Comics case I wrote about last night. Laura Gjovaag has a full, detailed report from shop owner Paige Gifford. It's long. If there's a single key passage, it's this one:
Inventory is not inventory. And because it hasn't sold - which means it has earned Corner Comics no income - it must be taxed.So he and his manager are saying that even though the law states that I do not have to recognize inventory because I make less than 1 million a year, they are interpreting the law THE WAY THEY WANT TO in order to benefit them. They are saying that since the 48k worth of inventory sitting in my store is "dead inventory" and has not sold, that it is not considered inventory so it goes into another category all together. Since it goes into another category it turns around and becomes an asset to the store as "supplies" or something (it's all legal tax talk crap...) so it goes back into inventory and therefore is taxable at the end of the fiscal year.
Dirk Deppey issues a call to action. Read it. He's right. This is important. The issue goes beyond the abuse of one woman, one small business owner, by the government. This case has the power to put most of the country's comic book stores, and most of the country's used book stores, out of business. It probably has implications for second-hand stores of all kinds, which means it poses a huge danger to readers and consumers. You and I will have fewer choices and the ones left to you will cost you more.
The quote that adorns the subject heading comes from Daniel Webster and Chief Justice John Marshall, by the way.
With any luck, I'll have updates to this item throughout the day.
UPDATE: Jesse Walker writing in Hit and Run: "if the law really is what the IRS claims it is, that would just be another reason to hate the IRS."
God Save the Republic - I've been reading the transcript of Tuesday night's "debate" (pitting the Democratic candidates for President against Ted Koppel). The actual policy discussion starts somewhere on page three of the Post's transcript and sticks pretty closely to Iraq until page 5. (They're long pages.) What a bunch of maroons! I mean, really! I don't mean in comparison with President Bush, I mean on an absolute scale. One of these people or George W. Bush will be running the country for four years starting in 2005. We are, as John Kerry might put it, f_____ no matter what. I'll try to stick whatever reactions don't make it into the article on the blog in a couple of days.
Busy writing another article for the Spectator. Blogging will be light for awhile..
The Power to Tax is the Power to Destroy, Continued - Laura "Tegan" Gjovaag reports on IRS abuse of her friendly neighborhood comic store.
Inventory taxes are already an outrage (a change in inventory tax liability did a great deal to ruin book publisher backstock vitality in my lifetime), but this is an outrage taken to extremes, unless the report is grossly inaccurate. Read the last quoted sentence again:The owner of my local comic shop, Paige Gifford, was approached by the IRS in March for a "compliance audit". The brand-spankin new agent they had put on her case didn't believe she could make a living selling comics. Once she was able to prove that she was in compliance, and not selling something on the side, and that yes, she did make a living selling comic books, the agent went after her inventory. He said that he knew how much baseball cards are worth, and so old comics must be worth a lot of money. He estimated how much her backstock was worth (based on his own bizarre calculation). He then told her that she hadn't paid taxes on her inventory, and that she owed $14,000 in taxes. She's a small business owner. $14,000 is a lot of money.
So she got some help. At times the thing seemed almost resolved. But the IRS is determined to run her out of business. Within the last week she was told that she cannot have any backstock of comics. She has to destroy her backstock - shred or burn every comic book - by December 31st in order to get out of the debt. And she needs a receipt to prove that she destroyed the comics. Otherwise, she owes the IRS $14,000, and will owe the IRS an inventory tax every year from here on out. Even though her lawyer and accountant are convinced that she's completely in compliance with every pertainable law.
The point is, these people are unlikely to be advising her for free. It does not matter that the IRS agent is probably wrong on the law and the ruling will probably be reversed at some point. What matters is that, since last Spring, Paige Gifford has had to deal with this nonsense - deal with it financially, intellectually and emotionally. The familiar regulatory coupling of arrogance and ignorance has forced her to take attention from her proper concerns - her business and her life - and focus them on trying to straighten out interlopers as clueless as they are powerful.Even though her lawyer and accountant are convinced that she's completely in compliance with every pertainable law.
The Folly of "Humanitarian" War, 9,567 in a Series - Canada's National Post reports that
Actually, that's a fair description of Kosovo before the war too (just add anti-Albanian violence by the greater Serb presence into the mix), and has certainly been true since the early days of the "peace." The War for the KLA has been put to some bizarre propaganda uses by both Republicans and Democrats during Gulf War Phase II. Democrats have compared how leading Republicans opposed the earlier war to Republican reaction to criticism of the current one. When not doing that they've held up the WFTKLA as a shining example of the multilateral competence the Bush Administration lacks. Republicans have criticised Democrats for opposing war against Saddam Hussein while supporting one against Slobodan Milosevic, who posed not even the theoretical threat to the United States that Iraq posed. Some hawks have even echoed the criticism of Republican opposition to war in 1999, calling it shameful. By so doing, they hope to delegitimize Democratic opposition to the fact or manner of current events.Kosovo has deteriorated into a hotbed of organized crime, anti-Serb violence and al-Qaeda sympathizers, say security officials and Balkan experts.
In fact, the Republican opponents of 1999 were right, and we can only wish that the Democrats of 2002-2003 had their guts. (It was not enough guts, mind you. The Repubs could have used their congressional majority to stop the war, but did not.) The War for the KLA was patently illegal, begun by the President not just without congressional approval but in open defiance of Congress. Post-war Kosovo has been superficially quieter than Iraq, but only because NATO tacitly supported the agenda of the most extremist elements among the Albanians - winking at the ethnic cleansing of Serbs, Roma and others from Kosovo. It some ways, it's as if the US went into Iraq, holed up in a couple of bases and let the Badr Brigade have its way with the Sunnis. As for multilateralism, Southern Europe despised Bill Clinton for Kosovo and the allies were balky during it. (There were widespread reports that Italian pilots so opposed the war that the dropped their bombloads on empty space.) The Kosovo War was every bit the cruel farce the Iraq War has become, maybe moreso.
(Via Tacitus.)
Comics Blogwatch - Today's happy exception to the old saw that it's easier to slam memorably than to praise vividly: Eve Tushnet's comics recommendations for non-comics readers. Wonderfully evocative. Of the things I've read, she makes me slap my head and say That's it! That's what's great about it! Of the things I haven't, she makes me say, Man, I gotta read that. On Love and Rockets: "Imagine how you felt when you heard that first punk record, then the second one, and it was like a whole world of people insane the way you were just opened up. Then imagine if someone remembered that feeling and grew up anyway." The Watchmen accolade is "Cultural Criticism in the Mighty Tushnet Manner!"
Also, How do people get into comics (as readers): one woman's confession.
Your Economic Refresher Course for the Day
from Andrew Olmsted.50 years ago nobody worked as a computer programmer, yet today there are literally millions of them. 50 years from now, there will millions of new jobs that we haven't even thought of yet.
Smash Your Television - My God. According to this Atrios summary of the latest Democratic Primary debate, it took moderator Ted Koppel 19 questions to actually inquire about someone's policies rather than the horse race. Not that it necessarily matters what candidates say their policies are, but you can see why some of us just spend the evening blogging rather than watching this crap.
Who Lost Russia? - The Russians did, obviously. But how did they lose it? Where did Putinism come from? Answer: from Chechnya. The Yeltsin government, which for all its flaws had many liberal-in-the-European-sense ministers, insisted on prosecuting a cruel and unwinnable war to keep people in a country to which they no longer wished to belong. The war went badly, as it had to. The government persisted, comparing itself to Lincoln. "Chechnya is part of Russia!" they said. "It must stay part of Russia." Liberals countenanced illiberal brutalities, which didn't work for them and haven't worked for their successors. They feared a nationalist backlash, but by granting nationalist premises they ensured it. Putin rode in on a wave of war rage. It is doubtful he will willingly ride back out.
I'm just saying.
Smiling and Crying - You can too. Open RealOne Player. Click Music | Rock. Scroll down for the video of Bruce Springsteen doing a live version of "Mary's Place." (You can get to the video from VH1, but I can't resize the video in their player.) I attempted to convey the greatness of this song a couple of Augusts ago. Reading the last sentence of that item ("I look forward to the day I won't be too choked up to sing along"), I see I'm still not there.
911 - Chief Wiggles needs advice and organizational cachet. If his informant's story is on the level, someone out there may be able to save the lives of four Iraqi girls. You can e-mail his webmaster if your organization is able and willing to sponsor the sisters. I realize that the Chief's informant could be speaking untruly, but at the very least the story is possible and warrants exploration if you're in a position to help.
Certain obvious political implications will not be belabored at this time.
Tech Blog/Political Blog Item Crossover! - Jeff Taylor of Reason observes that the FBI wants to know everything that's in our computers while knowing relatively little of what's in their own.
Reappointment in Samarra - The Financial Times checks in one week later. (Link via Antiwar.com.)
On the evidence of the text that follows, the topic sentence is putting it rather gently.A week after a vicious firefight in the streets of Samarra, in which US forces claim to have killed 54 guerrilla fighters, it was unclear on Sunday who really controlled the town.
The hell of it is, pulling out of Samarra makes a certain amount of sense. The alternative is the beatings will continue until morale improves plan, and we're already doing rather enough of that elsewhere. And it provides an interesting laboratory in self-government. In the absence of the "stabilizing presence" of US troops and the Iraqi army, will Samarra descend into a "bloodbath" or not? Samarra is officially part of the Sunni Triangle, but it apparently contains a Shia holy site. Desultory attempts to find an ethnic breakdown for the city/province proved fruitless.At the one remaining US military compound in the city, US soldiers on Sunday refused to leave their sand-bagged bunkers to meet a western visitor at the gate. "It's dangerous here! Go away!" yelled one. Two other such US compounds within Samarra have been vacated in the past three weeks.
US-paid Iraqi troops of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps (ICDC) have not entered the town since one of their number was killed on Saturday, shot by enraged mourners after his squad crossed paths with a funeral procession for a man slain in last week's shoot-out.
The ICDC men guard checkpoints outside the town. They wear green balaclavas so locals cannot recognise them.
The downside is, this is how it went in Lebanon. By the time of the marine barracks bombing, our troops were doing nothing in Beirut except flying a flag out by the airport. We waded in, performed a genuine humanitarian service for the Palestinian refugees, stayed to pick sides in Lebanon's civil war and realized, at length, that we could not accomplish anything. So we pulled back but did not leave because we had to show our resolve. Our error wasn't pulling out after the bombing of the marine barracks, it was not pulling out before.
Covers Update at the bottom of last night's post. Why did I do it that way?
Because I'm fresh out of clever titles for the topic.
Short and Sweet - Glenn Reynolds says most of what needs to be said about the latest of the war's hissing sissies (cowards who, like one of Niven's Puppeteer's , lash out in terror rather than curling into a mewling ball):
And he's right to find the parallel in (pre-Presidential campaign) Sharptonism. (Sharptonism had less sweepingly national power than Yoshida-ism would if it got going, but that was small consolation to the immigrant merchants in Sharptonism's cross-hairs.) One other thing. A key difference between mere authoritarianism and fascism is that fascism attempts, like other revolutionary movements, to energize a mass base. Fascist leaders don't just want to rule, they want you to love it, to insist on it. So when Adam Yoshida urges that war supporters shout at strangers in the streets, ruin businesses they feel are not with the program, cut off friends for their disagreement with current policy, he is being a fascist even if neither the governments of the US or Canada are. As we have been told over and over again, it is not "censorship" when radio stations blacklist the Dixie Chicks for their political views or listeners demand that they do so. But it is a fascist impulse.I'd call it an unAmerican idea, but in fact we did things like this in the Civil War, and in World Wars I and II. But it's wrong.
Sound Advice for Writers from Rebecca Sean Borgstrom:
And she does.It's important not to introduce a dancing army of Popes into your writing without a bit of backstory.
* Where did the dancing Popes come from?
* Why are they an army?
* To what sinister purpose and uses are such forces put?So I guess I have to explain.
Foods Touch Item - Salam Pax reads the autobiographical comic Persepolis, by Iranian expatriot Marjane Satrapani:
Perhaps they were each told that the other side only understood "force, pride and saving face."It is too scary how much we have in common, Iraqis and Iranians I mean. The hate campaigns which were directed towards each other seem to have had the same effect on Iranians as on us, and the same methods were used.
He also has some gossip on the Great Lost Iraqi Census Proposal and a first-hand account of the Baghdad electrical situation.
The Topic That Will Not Die - More covers! Glen Engel-Cox! Kangaroo Jack! Eve Tushnet! (From last summer, but reflagged just now.) Kesher Talk (from the same time frame). Smarty-pants Diana Moon says "covers" are the norm in classical music," which is like, squaresville, Daddio. She also slyly hints that "Black Magic Woman" was written not by Carlos Santana but by Fleetwood Mac's Peter Green.
We Get Letters! Both Michael Hall and Jesse Walker wrote in to say Dirk Deppey is a silly, silly man who doesn't know who wrote songs. Michael Hall:
That's about right, and speaking of covers, it's a longtime daydream of mine to be called up on stage to sing that song with Elvis Costello. Does that make any sense? No it does not. Other Costello-related fantasy? To find myself in the same Irish pub, where Costello is playing snooker. I ask - dumb Americanlike - why the pool table has all these extra little red balls on it. Then to his astonishment, I make him sweat through a tough match. The major impediments to this particular fantasy are that: Costello no longer lives in Ireland; he apparently doesn't enjoy hanging around pubs; and I play snooker like hell.Feel free to collect the smarty-pants points I've earned by noting that Bob Dylan didn't write that song: It's performed by Stealers Wheel and credited to "Rafferty/Egan."
People think it's from Bob Dylan because they mishear the announcer played by Steve Wright in "Reservoir Dogs," who refers to the song as a "Dylanesque pop bubblegum classic."
Anton Sherwood writes that he likes
I thought "Pictures of Matchstick Men" was a Slickee Boys original. Shows what I know."Pictures of Matchstick Men" (Status Quo) by Camper Van Beethoven
"Black Dog" by Dread Zeppelin
Okay, so what are some really really lame covers? I nominate:
1. 10,000 Maniacs, "Because the Night" (B. Springsteen/P. Smith) - this excrescence from a live "Unplugged" CD proves, definitively, that the politically correct know nothing of passion. Natalie Merchant sings it like warmup music for voice class. Number one on the bad covers chart with a bullet. Except for "Verdi Cries," which is about an emotion Merchant does understand, a forgettable career. Oh, and in answer to the natural question: Patti Smith's, of course. Smith's is better than Springsteen's. (UPDATE: THIS ITEM EDITED FOR CLARITY AND SPELLING.)
2. Kate Bush, "Rocket Man" (Elton John) - talk about your histrionics. The speedometer needle on my old car occasionally develops a mind of its own and swings through 30-mile per hour arcs quite independent of the actual speed of the car. So Kate Bush's performance and this song's emotional core.
3. Sarah McLachlan, "Solsbury Hill" (Peter Gabriel) - somewhere out there in music-trading space, you might find a copy of this file whose title includes the description "(Live - Fussy)" Who added that to the filename? I ain't saying.
4. Cowboy Junkies, "Sweet Jane" (Velvet Underground) - Someone did not get that it's the evil mothers who will tell you that life is just made out of dirt. All of the songs listed here are bad. This one is a betrayal.
5. Dolly Parton, "Stairway to Heaven" (Led Zeppelin) - I'm not kdding! This really exists! And no amount of bluegrass chops or postirony excuses it. Yes, I gave this a good 20-second listen in Borders once. I'm just about over it.
6. Ron Sexsmith, "Every Day I Write the Book" (Elvis Costello) - Sexsmith strips away the - well, the fun stuff. Leaves us with a dirge. Gosh, how surprising that Ron Sexsmith would do that!
7. Jane's Addiction, "Sympathy for the Devil" (Rolling Stones) - This manages to combine the worst features of choices 1 and 2 - it sounds like someone on smack doing warmup for voice class. You'll believe in the previously oxymoronic concept of rote caterwauling. David Byrne does a superior version from the same tour that became his live concert film. (He was, apparently, too cheap to pay the royalties including it in the film would have cost, but it's out there.)
8. Hank Williams III - "Atlantic City" (Bruce Springsteen) - You know, this should really be number two. And a close number two. I avoided listening to this again until just now. God damn you, loyal readers. God damn you all.
9. I'll leave this one blank. I'll probably think of some later.
UPDATE 12/9/03: The hits just keep on coming. Jesse Walker posts his top ten. Ginger Stampley has new and old entries. Chad Orzel weighs in. Franklin Harris lists his top . . . one. My Back Pages has a 60s-centric list, which makes sense for a blog called My Back Pages. But hey, Hendrix's "All Along the Watchtower" really does kick ass. And Jeff Taylor of Reason e-mails his faves:
"Da Ya Think I'm Sexy?" -- Revolting Cocks
"freddie's dead" - fishbone
"satisfaction" - devo
"by the time I get to Phoenix" -- Isaac Hayes
"orgasmatron" -- sepultura
"iron man" -- busta rhymes
Every Couple of Years Like Clockwork - another "defining terrorism down" story. This time around, it's the Denver Post.. (Via Hit and Run.) Last time around, January 2002, it was the Saint Petersburg Times. Via - why, that would be - me! Who said, at the time:
Guess I don't have to take that one back.They told us the snoop-friendly provisions of [the USA-PATRIOT Act] were narrowly tailored to a specific threat: "terrorism." But federal law enforcement has enormous leeway in how they classify any given alleged offense. Which makes the tailoring "relaxed fit."
More Cover Stories from Crooked Timber. I since listened to the Cat Power version of "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction." Initial reaction: eh. But it was late and I was keeping the sound down and web-surfing at the same time, so I can't be said to have given it a fair shot yet.
Now I know that this site still has conservative readers, however grudging. Don't any of my fellow righties love covers too?
Also, reader mail continues to arrive on the subject and I'll run more tonight.
It's an Art Form - The funny photo caption, and not many people are actually that good at it. But Norbizness is.
Weekly Fitness Blog Item - 163 pounds, waist still under 33" but pants feeling subjectively tighter. Ate like a pig and did not exercise. 63 pounds below my Thanksgiving 2002 weight.
For the last 10 years or so, the pattern has been that I gain ten pounds over the winter and lose five of it next Spring and Summer. Obviously, I broke that pattern last year. The key is to avoid the ten pound gain this year. We shall see.
Thought for the Day - Our government repeatedly tells us two things in re Iraq:
1) The US military does everything in its power to minimize civilian casualties.
2) The US military does not track civilian casualties.
It's a management truism that you can't manage what you don't measure.
Cover Me - Everybody likes talking about covers. Matthew Yglesias does. Atrios does. And: advantage: perfectly cromulent blog!
E-mailers love covers too. Michael Croft follows up on the Hooters' "cover" of "Time After Time."
Dirk Deppey loves covers. He writes in:We are cover song fiends ourselves and you may hear more from Ginger or myself or both of us shortly. Just a note on Bruce Baugh's mention of the Hooters--Rob Hyman co-wrote Time After Time with Cyndi Lauper and arranged it with fellow Hooter Eric Bazilian. Lauper described The Hooters as "My band before I had a band."
This is the blog that asks the tough questions, so I immediately went into interview mode:Covers, eh? For the longest time, I've been collecting bluegrass/hard-country covers of rock and pop songs. Some of my favorites:
The Meat Purveyors - "Round and Round" (Ratt),
from the album "Sweet in the Pants"
With a lot of bluegrass covers, I'm impressed by how much better the songs sound when rearranged for fiddles, mandolins and the like. Bluegrass by its very nature requires serious musical chops, after all. In this case, it's the fact that the singers are women are women which seals the deal; this version kicks total ass.Dale Ann Bradley - "Stuck in the Middle with You" (Bob Dylan),
from the album "Old Southern Porches"
See above. I've never been much of a Dylan fan, but this song gains something with the conversion to bluegrass.The Austin Lounge Lizards - "Brain Damage" (Pink Floyd),
from the album "Lizard Vision"
These guys skirt the edge of comedy-band status with their own music, but this one pushes it over the edge; what keeps it good is their excellent musicianship, and the fact that they play the song blisteringly fast (and relatively straight-faced). Who'd of thought Roger Waters could be improved with a banjo?Flaco Jimenez with Dwight Yoakum - "Carmelita" (Warren Zevon),
from the album "Partners"
This one probably shouldn't work, in the same way that Art of Noise's cover of the Prince song "Kiss" with Tom Jones shouldn't have worked. It does, though -- in fact, I'd rank this version above the original.Country Dick Montana - "Karma Chameleon" (Culture Club),
from the EP "The Home Of Country Dick Montana"
Played for laughs, of course, and it does the job admirably. I mean, it's almost conceptual humor: Country Dick Montana sings a cover of "Karma Chameleon." What's not to love?Andy Prieboy - "Whole Lotta Love" (Led Zeppelin),
from the EP "Montezuma Was a Man of Faith"
Okay, this one's an outright ringer, but I still love it. Prieboy was the guy recruited to fill the suicide slot left when Stan Ridgway left '80s new-wave band Wall of Voodoo, where he replaced Stan's country twang with an ironic sense of Vaudeville. It didn't work, and WoV soon faded away, but Prieboy went on to record a couple of solo albums. Like the last one, this cover is definitely played for laughs, with the Zep classic given a bluegrass-ish retooling for mandolin and piano. Prieboy's currently trying to build up steam for a musical he's written, "White Trash Wins Lotto: The W. Axl Rose Story."
I'd sort of agree re Hayseed Dixie, though I know little of bluegrass. On the AC/DC covers album, the first two songs, "Highway to Hell" and "You Shook Me All Night Long" are pretty darn fun. After that, the joke just peters out.Did you leave Hayseed Dixie off the list by accident or design?
Huh, I'd never heard of 'em. Having now listened to the samples on their website, though, I suspect I would've left 'em off by design. The thing about bluegrass is that there's a serious "throwdown" factor involved -- if you don't have the chops to throw down, it's painfully obvious early on. Hayseed Dixie seem to have one midtempo song in them, and it doesn't seem to be a very polished one. Compare them to, say, Del McCoury or the Lizards, and you hear the difference pretty quick. Mind you, I'm going by 45-second samples here, so there could be something I'm missing.
The band I'm currently searching for more of? The original four-woman incarnation of the Dixie Chicks; specifically, their amazing second album, "Thank Heavens for Dale Evans." I have a dub on cassette, but I know there was a CD minted before they lost two members, hired a replacement singer, signed the Kneepads-For-Nashville contract and quietly deleted their back catalog...
Julian's test that a cover should offer something wholly new in its approach to a song probably leaves out on of my nominations, Alejandro Escovedo's version of Mott the Hoople's "I Wish I Was Your Mother." But that cello! I didn't list Those Darn Accordians' rendition of Elvis Costello's "Pump It Up," which has a certain novelty value. I also didn't list Costello's live cover of U2's "Please" from a Kennedy Center Celtic/American Country concert a few years ago, but it easily passes Julian's test. In fact, I would rate the U2 studio version as Nothing Much and the live Costello rendition as Stunning. (Donal Lunny plays bosouki on the song. You might be able to find a video clip of this somewhere, as PBS broadcast the concert in its entirety.)
I will continue to "cover the covers" issue like it was a poorly reported battle of ambiguous outcome in a distant land!
Pull the Other One - Hilarious wish-fulfillment fantasy in the Telegraph this morning, in which deliciously-named reporter Con Coughlin finds the source for the famous "45-minute" claim in the British WMD dossier - Lieutenant-Colonel al-Dabbagh. Lieutenant-Colonel al-Dabbagh is full of - information. For instance:
Get me out of Iraq where I've been inexplicably de-Ba'athified, and where it sucks anyway, and I'll be happy to come to London!"I admire Mr Blair because he made Iraq secure from Saddam. If Saddam's people kill me for saying this, I do not mind. I have done my duty to my country and we have got rid of Saddam.
"And if the British Government wants me to come to London to tell the truth about Saddam's secret weapons programme, I am ready to help in any way I can."
Hey, I'll bet. al-Dabbagh assures us that the 45-minute claim is
Only those ex-Ba'athist insurgents have kept the Bad Things from being found so far, because those ex-Ba'athist insurgents have them hidden away somewhere while they, um, attack coalition forces and collaborators with everything except chemical and biological weapons because, I don't know, it wouldn't be sporting or something."200 per cent accurate!" he exclaimed. "And forget 45 minutes. We could have fired them within half an hour."
But wait, there's more!
From the knife to nuclear weapons! Wow. And it never occurs to al-Dabbagh that maybe, just maybe, six months before the war he was being played. ("I had two Ba'athist officials watching me 24 hours a day.")According to Lt Col al-Dabbagh, it was at about this time that he and other senior commanders were informed that Saddam intended to deploy his WMD arsenal to defend the country against an American-led attack. At a meeting that took place six months before the war, one of Saddam's senior officials told a group of Iraqi air defence commanders that they had many weapons that could be used to attack the US and UK.
"They told us that they [coalition troops] cannot pass across Iraq because we will use everything, from the knife to nuclear weapons, to defend ourselves," said Lt Col al-Dabbagh.
At this juncture Lt Col al-Dabbagh was commanding one of four air-defence units based in the western desert, and managed to smuggle a detailed map of Saddam's troop deployments along Iraq's border with Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia back to the INA's south London headquarters.
"It was very difficult to get this information out," he told me. "The Ba'athists never trusted the military, and as a senior officer I had two Ba'athist officials watching me 24 hours a day."
And then:
Noted. AndThe weapons themselves were finally deployed at his own unit towards the end of last year. "They arrived in boxes marked 'Made in Iraq' and looked like something you fired with a rocket-propelled grenade," Lt Col al-Dabbagh explained.
All places we've been in, out, over, around and through in detail, and if we haven't been, I want a tax rebate. AndAccording to information he learnt subsequently from his military colleagues, the weapons were made at factories at Habbaniyah, al-Nahrawan, Nabbai and al-Latifia.
You know, there was an awful lot of Fedayeen and Special Republican Guard units in civilian clothes driving toward coalition forces and firing weapons, including rocket-propelled grenades. Quite a bit of that still goes on today. How is it that these guys keep reaching into the wrong ammo box?Saddam's officials also gave elaborate instructions on how to use the weapons. Because of their limited range, those responsible for firing them were to dress in civilian clothes and drive in civilian vehicles with yellow number plates.
"Each military unit was given two four-wheel drive Isuzu cars," said Lt Col al-Dabbagh. "We were not allowed to use them and they had to be kept in good condition." If the war reached a critical stage and Iraq's forces were in danger of being overrun, then designated officers would be given the task of driving the vehicles towards coalition positions and firing the weapons.
But Fedayeen and SRG units did fight, many of them, in their civilian clothes and their civilian trucks. Some of them fight still. And none of them did or do so with chemical or biological weapons, let alone nukes. But wait, there's more:He believes that the only reason these weapons were not used during Operation Iraqi Freedom last spring is that the bulk of the Iraqi army refused to fight for Saddam.
Wow. al-Dabbagh was present for the one time all the Fedayeen in Iraq tried to use biological or chemical warheads, let alone "nukes." And they happened to be the nicest Fedayeen in Iraq too, since, you may recall, all the others were ruthlessly deploying human shields and endangering or killing Iraqi civilians to get at coalition troops. They set off car bombs that take out a dozen Iraqis for every American and yet these guys - apparently the only Fedayeen who even thought about using their "secret" weapons, were a couple of old softies. I'll bet their bonus check was a little light on Eid al-Fitr this year!He did, however, see a group of Fedayeen attempt to use one of the warheads against an American position on the outskirts of Baghdad on April 6. "They were going to use this weapon, but then they realised that they would kill lots of Iraqis who did not have masks, so they put them in their cars and drove off."
Actually we have quite a lot of them in custody and they all say the opposite of what Lieutenant-Colonel al-Dabbagh has to say. (And what is it with Lieutenant Colonels anyway? Are they the official Bullshit Officers in every army? If Andrew Olmsted gets promoted again, should we start ignoring his blog?) But if we are to believe al-Dabbagh, then"All the people who worked on these weapons have either escaped or disappeared. Only when Saddam is captured will these people talk openly about these weapons. Then they will reveal where they are."
o there were massive quantities of chemical and biological weapons deployed to front-line units.
o the bulk of the Iraqi Army disintegrated, but enough units kept good discipline to spirit every single unit of battlefield special weapons away, despite our overrunning massive quantities of ordinary ordnance.
o those same spiriters, who we are told form the backbone of the insurgency, have kept the special weapons hidden, despite the fact that
o the special weapons can be fired by a couple of people from the back of a truck
o a couple people firing from the back of a truck is a fair description of how the insurgency spends the bulk of its time.
Uh.
Huh.
It could be true. And anthrax monkeys might fly out my butt.
(Link via Instapundit, naturally.)
Labor-Saving Device Item - I was going to write about Representative Jim Gibbons spending your money to ease his conscience, but Radley Balko did it for me. I was going to write something about the President's plan "to boldly go where....um....we already went." But Radley Balko did it for me. Quick kibitzing: in the Gibbons piece, Radley concludes
Yeah. Stick more frogs in the goddamn drain. That'll show him.I'm thinking we ought to do something. I'm just not sure what.
Any ideas?
Comics Blogging - Been a long time since I did any reviews. Let's change that, shall we?
First, stuff I got free from Toiler:
JLA/Avengers 1 & 2 - worth what I paid. I should mention that to this day I have fond memories of the first two Marvel/DC crossovers, Superman/Spider-man and Batman/Hulk. The second was a tour de force, actually, as writer and artist Len Wein and Herb Trimpe took a commercially-mandated pairing and made something magical from it. Joker + Shaper of Worlds = Inspired. And the sheer kindness of Bruce Wayne toward Bruce Banner was wonderful.
The conceit of the early crossovers was that the Marvel and DC heroes inhabited the same world but just hadn't happened to run into each other before. In those days, the Marvel heroes all lived in New York City while DC heroes stuck to the classic fictional habitats. In the first crossover, Clark Kent and Lois Lane happen to come to Manhattan for a convention, and who should they run into but Peter Parker. Peter and Lois know and admire each other's work. In the second, Bruce Banner's wanderings take him to Gotham. No multiversal muss, no cosmic fuss. And with relatively few characters involved the creators were free to make, you know, a story.
In the ungainly cast-of-thousands extravaganza that is the current crossover, the best the dedicated fanboy can hope for is that the quips will be fresh and the right people win the fights. (Superman is stronger than Thor. Check.) On the quip front there is only disappointment. The fights? They get these about right. Thank God Busiek and Perez didn't have to work under "everything has to end in a tie for commercial reasons" along with every other mandate and self-imposed limitation they labor under.
Now, say what you will about the series' shallowness and seeming lack of inspiration, one thing it ain't is "decompressed." Stuff happens, and then more stuff happens. It is crammed with action. The decompression backlash has been in full swing among fans and writers, and since the term has often been synonymous with "padded" it's easy to see why. But tell me, fellow fanboys: is this what you want instead?
1602 #4 - I did not feel cheated out of Toiler's money.
Stuff I paid for:
Big Clay Pot by Scott Mills, whose minicomic, Cells, I liked a great deal. Big Clay Pot is about a Korean immigrant girl who comes to Japan around 200 BC and takes up with an elderly Japanese man who has lost his wife. She's a klutz. The story is . . . nice. I plan to reread it to see if I develop a stronger reaction. Sometime.
Captain America 21 - I - gulp - liked it. Which is not to say "loved." Chris Bachalo draws. His style really brought out the feral nature of Wolverine in New X-Men. Here it really brings out the - feral nature of Steve Rogers. Maybe not what was indicated. And this is just the wrong character for the Marvel Knights design treatment - the black page backgrounds and Photoshop-Rembrandt "colors" just don't shout Captain America! somehow. But the story. I kind of liked it. The idea is apparently to plunge right back into contemporary political themes but with, you know, good writing this time. Writer Robert Morales could presumably screw it up in subsequent issues, but I'm going to give him that chance. Also, Cap uses a firearm, maybe for the first time since Steranko days. I'm all for that - he's Captain America, dammit! Guns 'R' Us!
But it's not just that Cap busting caps gives me a libertarian frisson. It is that the gun-hating respecter-of-all-life default superhero ethic sits poorly on the character. He was created to be a super soldier. And the Golden Age character made occasional-to-frequent use of firearms, to the best of my knowledge. It's entirely reasonable that any man comes home from a war wanting to have no more truck with killing, but for much of Captain America's modern history he's been an official government operative. Note: he declines to fire a rifle in this issue. But what he does do usefully complicates his character.
Empire 5 - Speaking of decompression, there's a two-page sequence in this book that shows the technique at its best. Power corrupts, people. Absolute power? Shiiiiit.
Conan 0 - What makes this extended preview issue work is the way writer Busiek plays against the type of the foppish Arabian Prince. Dark Horse and Busiek tell us that the book will stick to the Howard Conan with their own interpolations in continuity replacing the Lin Carter/L. Sprague DeCamp additions, but they already fail the "Ron Edwards Test" of Howard purity. ("Conan wore a shirt.") Worth trying a couple of issues, though.
Ultimates 12 - In the space of a single issue, I can finally really see why Franklin Harris despises this book. Last issue (if you can remember that far), there was grandeur and nobility. This issue is pure meanness. Particularly it features American soldiers doing a pointlessly despicable thing (pushing an American child for no reason). In the political items I've written quite a bit about crummy things American soldiers are doing these days, but those men are under particular kinds of stress not of their making and having entirely human reactions to it. Many other countries' troops would acquit themselves rather less well. In the comic, the circumstances that drive "occupational arrogance" in Iraq don't obtain. With a lighter touch, as in Bendis' Ultimate Six, the ways in which the Ultimates team allows itself to be used by the government can be effectively disquieting. Here it just pisses me off. I was really looking forward to this issue until I actually got it. (See Fanboy Rampage.)
Supreme Power 5 - Hooray for free enterprise! Marketers find the Whizzer/Flash figure, the "Atlanta Blur," while the government is still convinced he's a myth. They sign him up for all sorts of product endorsement deals. You know what would be really cool? If the Blur, Stanley Stewart, got rich on his endorsements, followed through on his desire to be a hero and accomplished a lot of good for people at the same time. Odds of getting such a story from Hollywood liberal J. Michael Straczynski in this determinedly grim book? Is it just me, or is Stanley Stewart's appearance modelled on Kobe Bryant? That's an answer, son, not a question.
Stuff I read for free in Borders:
Incredible Hulk TPBs 2-5 - I'd been avoiding these, but I liked them pretty well when I got around to them. The problem with conspiracy storylines is balancing tease and revelation. X-Files and Twin Peaks failed at that for my taste and I eventually gave both of them up. I think it helps to approach these Hulk stories in big bunches all at once - I'm not at all sure I'd have enjoyed getting this in dribs and drabs over two years. What I like though, is the sheer decency of Bruce Banner, and the strides he's making (is allowed to make) in coping with his curse. I'll enjoy it until it's retconned back to formula.
Things I didn't bother finishing even though I was reading it free at Borders:
Daredevil 54 - Make it stop!
Second thoughts:
Alias 26 - or was it 27. You know, the last issue. So Jessica Jones is pregnant by Luke Cage? They did it once in the first issue. It was even a big deal later that that was the one time they did it. But the first issue's art and captions strongly implied, without coming right out and saying it, that Luke and Jessica were having butt sex. And now she's pregnant? Maybe that's why it took two years for her to conceive - Luke's little soldiers had to swim all the way back around and finish their mission. They can do that? That's what I call Power, Man!
Your Tax Dollars at Work if you happen to be Italian. UNESCO of all organizations
according to Ha'aretz. Good for them. If reports are accurate the new Library of Alexandria has included the Protocols in their holy books of Judaism display. The goal of building the new Library was to recall the glory of the one destroyed early in the first millenium under disputed circumstances. According to the Ha'aretz report, the Italian government is the chief financial backer of the new Library, and the Simon Wiesenthal Center has 'called on Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi to condition continued Italian funding of the library on the removal of the "Protocols" from display, removal of the library's director and public condemnation by the library of what it called the "pernicious nature" of the book.'plans to issue a public denunciation of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," dismissed by historians as a forgery to discredit Jews, amid criticism that the book had gone on display in Egypt and that an official there had made anti-Semitic remarks about it, The Associated Press has learned.
DIana Moon found a useful short history of the Protocols.
Egypt is the second-largest recipient of American foreign aid after Israel if you don't count Iraq.
Covers Up - Bruce Baugh and Julian Sanchez e-mailed lists of their favorite cover songs. Bruce's list:
Julian's list:KMFDM, "Material Girl". It's on the album Virgin Voices, and it's just ridiculously funny.
The Aquabats, "Love Without Anger". Well, of COURSE Devo should be covered salsa-style. Why didn't I ever think of that?
More seriously, Silverbeam, "Where the Streets Have No Names". An altogether beautiful rendering; makes the tribute album We Will Follow worth getting.
Laether Strip, "The Carnival is Over". The Dead Can Dance original is pretty creepy, but this really pulls out all the stops. Wow.
Ofra Haza, "Open your Love to Me". Makes it sound like Madonna was always meant to be Middle Eastern pop.
Holly Cole, "I Just Saw a Face". I've got little use for the original. Maybe the Beatles should have been torch singers.
Hooters, "Time After Time" and "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds". That rockin' mandolin sound really worked for those songs.
I think I inexplicably left the Ramone's version of the 60s Spider-man cartoon theme song off my list.. . . on the all-time list of rad covers, you have to include The Gourds version of "Gin and Juice" (snoop dog), Shonen Knife's "Top of the World" (The Carpenters) and Built to Spill's take on "White Man in the Hammersmith Palais" (The Clash). The whole "Schoolhouse Rock Rocks" album is pretty damn good as well. And for pure kitch value, of course, the long-reigning champ is William Shatner's "Mr. Tambourine Man"
Far be it from me to suggest that you try to hunt some of these up on the internet. Caring media conglomerates, operating in an environment of government-mandated spectrum scarcity, are surely playing these songs on a radio station near you.
Quotation Marks - Gary Farber finds an article in which a US Army Captain informs us that "The only thing they [Arabs] understand is force - force, pride and saving face." How fortunate for us! Apparently, since pride and saving face are so important to the, well, let's just call them wogs, shall we? the key to success in Iraq is to grind down their pride and make saving face impossible by surrounding their towns with razor wire, requiring passes to move around and demolishing the homes of whoever our famously effective intelligence operations tell us is closer to the Iraqi resistance than Kevin Bacon. Hey, that should work! A couple of thoughts:
1) Maybe it's a coincidence, but doesn't it seem like everybody on the planet has enemies who, they tell us, only understand force? Do we all have the same enemy or something? Because if we do, it should be easy to gang up on the bastards.
2) Let's say Captain Brown is right. If the Arabs only understand force, then wasn't the notion that we'd "free" them and help them found a democratic society kind of . . . stupid?
The same article has another great quote:
Fear, violence and money for projects. That cluster of political values has a name. Strangely, though, it's getting applied to those who oppose the occupation. Go figure. But then, as the great contemporary isolationist Bill Kaufmann has written, it's always the people who object to killing foreigners who get called xenophobes. The same principle seems to apply to the word "fascist" now. Oppose "fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects" and you're on your way to the Nuremburg Rally."With a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them," Colonel Sassaman said.
Please Sir, Can I Have Samarra? - Batting cleanup at this point:
BruceR of Flit suggests that the wildly-exaggerated initial accounts of what transpired bear strong resemblances to similar problems with field reports of North America's Indian Wars. There is something very disquieting about the comparison.
Andrew Olmsted's summing up post disagrees with mine on some key points. For instance, he still accepts the "large attacking force" version of events while I'm inclined to doubt it. Keep in mind when it comes to this purely military disagreement that he is Major Olmsted and I am Accounting Analyst Henley.
Justin Raimondo devoted his Wednesday column to the Samarra action. Much of it amounts to a pretty good summary of events for those who - who can say why? - missed my analysis of Sunday-Tuesday. But there's an inspired bit of Googling in which Justin tracks the history of Colonel Frederick Rudesheim's statements to the press from April until now.
This is a technique that could be useful for establishing a narrative of the occupation. It's often a few soldiers that reporters return to again and again.
Hesiod found an Independent article (reprinted on khilafah.com) in which David Hackworth vouches for the authenticity of the anonymous solder who filed the first skeptical insider report .
Speaking of Off-Topic Blog Items - Scott at Off-Wing Opinion, a sports blog, writes about bad recent song covers, with some good ones in an appendix. Me, I love covers. And live covers even more. During the heyday of Napster, I made finding covers a specialty. Heck, I made finding covers of "The Weight" a specialty. (I think I found about six.) A handful of the most-treasured:
Elvis Costello - "Hide Your Love Away" (Beatles)
Steve Earle (with Buddy Miller) - "Sweet Virginia" (Rolling Stones)
David Byrne - "Rocking in the Free World" (Neil Young)
Buddy and Julie Miller - "Keep Your Distance" (Richard Thompson)
Joe Jackson - "King of the World" (Steely Dan)
Alejandro Escovedo - "I Wish I Was Your Mother" (Mott the Hoople)
Johnny Cash - "Hurt" (NIN)
Richard & Teddy Thompson - "Persuasion" (Crowded House)
Bruce Springsteen - "Not Fade Away/Gloria" (Buddy Holly/Them)
Flaming Lips - "After the Gold Rush" (Neil Young)
Steve Earle - "Breed" (Nirvana)
Graham Parker - "I Want You Back" (Jackson Five)
Peter Gabriel - "Ain't That Peculiar" (Marvin Gaye)
Alejandro Escovedo - "I Wanna Be Your Dog" (Iggy Pop)
Looking for a Virgin gamer. After my 20' by 20' Room items on getting new people to roleplay, I thought I should put my money where my mouth is and do it. My colleagues and I are looking for one curious newbie in the DC area, Wednesday December 10 for sure, with further sessions possible if you decide you like that sort of thing. The long-term opportunity is a superhero game, so it helps if you are or were at one time a comics reader.
Mr. Bill and I are also looking for one person, virgin or otherwise, to try Ron Edwards' Trollbabe RPG this Wednesday. The game title sounds cheesy but the game is not. Trollbabe is a story-oriented fantasy RPG.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled bitching about politics.
Coming Attractions this weekend on Unqualified Offerings - lots of mailbag items. The inbox is getting out of control again. The next New Crew list for the blogroll. Some comics stuff maybe. Plus whatever I end up blogging about instead.
Peace Movement? - Geneva Accords blogging from Diana Moon and Steven Weiss (with actual reporting). I'm sure Diana is correct that
I don't follow these things nearly as closely as Diana and Steven Weiss do, but I'm pretty sure Diana is right, and I see only one solution to the "right of return" issue, and have for some time. Let's ask the Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts what that solution might be:Khalidi said that the refugees were the issue, and can't be finessed away. I agree, but under protest. Which is to say: I've been insisting all along, before the Oslo Accords, before anything, that the refugee issue is the existential breaking point. It's the torch that could burn the house down.
Buy them off. The actual dispossessed of '48 and '56, or their first-generation survivors. Pay the actual people who lost actual homes and businesses and land. Pay them real money - value plus interest, not the pittance we eventually drizzled onto the residents of Manzanar et al. Pay it - my libertarian brothers will be aghast - out of the United States Treasury. We are already sinking billions annually into the Middle East with no end in sight unless the Israeli-Palestinian issue somehow settles. If buying out the right of return can end our enmeshment, it will be a bargain - a hell of a lot cheaper than invading and reconstructing "six or seven" different countries.Money, the long green,
cash, stash, rhino, jack
or just plain dough.Chock it up, fork it over,
shell it out.
A lot of Palestinian "leaders" will hate the idea, because it's money that goes to people who aren't them and the continuing grievance is their continuing relevance - take it away and they are nothing. A lot of Israeli apologists will hate it too, since it amounts to an admission of original sin in Israel's founding. And there was. But no country was birthed with clean hands. It's not as if the eventual Palestinian state will result from immaculate conception either. As Diana says, "We're sitting on 10,000 destroyed Native American villages and no one wants to knock down buildings over that!" Which is true. It be a fine thing to better that performance, though.
Plus Ca Change? - UO is not your site for keeping track of developments in Franco-American discord, I freely admit. But the trailing edge has an interesting item about tensions over Afghan policy . . .
A Fanboy's Blogwatch - Hey, Rebecca Sean Borgstrom has a blog. The designer of one of my favorite roleplaying games, Nobilis, has been running Hitherby Dragons since September of this year. The vast majority of entries are microfiction that will appeal to the fans of the "florilegia" in the Nobilis rulebook sidebars. See "Thoughts on Lovecraft and Gladiator" for an example.
Page Boys - Couple of e-mails on DC vs. Marvel page counts from people who know what they're talking about. Sean Sheer writes:
This is in line with the e-mail from even-more informed Brian Pearce:having worked in ad sales at a tw-owned cable network... and in publishing for hearst magazines... i would hazard that dc probably has a better ad sales team than marvel... i really don't think it has anything to with their being owend by tw.
ginger writes about package deals... and while they do happen, they really are not that common, and the advertisers that do them usually are the super huge big budget advertisers like auto manufacturers, beauty and fragrance, and packaged goods. the type of advertisers you see in comics are not those big budget advertisers. mostly you see video game manufacturers. this month in a dcu comic you see 16 different ads (not pages; 16 different ads--some of them are double page spreads--of those 16 ads, 14 are video games. (of course you see exceptions... like the campbells soup ad in dc comics this month.... ) the comic book reading demo and the video game demo are almost identical.
also the people you see advertising in comics are DEFINITELY NOT the same people advertising in time warner magazines ... even TV and film properties are not commonly seen in comics. and despite the big marketing budgets you see attached to films, it has been my experience that, generally speaking, the film industry would not be interested in the very small, very defined advertising niche that comics represent. i mean, just glance at this week's entertainment weekly and a dcu comic: they SHARE NO COMMON ADS. not one.
i really truly think it's just because dc has a better sales team.
Having gotten such a source on the line, I went into interview mode. Results:From past experience (I worked at DC as an Art Director for over ten years), I can tell you that the reason for DC's success in paid advertising is that they have very, *very* aggressively pursued it. The company has a very strong sales staff out pursuing paid advertising, custom comics (comics produced by DC for outside clients), and product tie-ins (like fast food premiums), and it's considered to be a very important source of revenue.
I think part of DC's success with this is the range of material they publish...compared to Marvel, anyway. Marvel doesn't really have an equivalent to VERTIGO, or the all-ages kids titles, or MAD Magazine (which started to carry paid ads about two years ago) that give DC a wider range of demographics.
Contrary to one of your correspondent's assumptions, as far as I know, ads for DC's books are *not* sold as part of a package deal with any of the Time Inc. magazines. It always surprises people to hear this, but as far as the corporate heirarchy is concerned, DC is just a small division of Warner Brothers, and isn't really even considered to be in the publishing business. There's little or no connection between DC (and MAD Magazine) and the other periodicals published by Time Inc.
And there you have it - at least until someone interviews a "spokesman for the resistance."To the best of your knowledge are the page rates comparable between the two companies?
I honestly couldn't say. (Though I'd be curious to know, myself.)
Lastly, it's my understanding that ad pages is a prime - if not the prime - measure of success in the glossy periodical world. Is it as appropriate a metric for comics too?
I don't think so. If there were a bigger business in paid advertising among more publishers and a larger audience for comics, it might become a more important measure. Among comics fans, I find many don't seem to have a good grasp of how the business works to begin with, so they don't tend to pay much attention to who buys ad space and why that might be important in the long term.
I don't know about Marvel; but for DC it's another way to supplement the weak revenue that periodical publishing tends to bring in (along with Licensing, Collected Editions, and Retail Products). In at least one case I think it's meant the difference between a book being cancelled or continued; IMPULSE would have ended sooner had it not been for the Nautica deal, and the paid insert.
I think, when all is said and done, DC has the advantage of more attractive demographics, which are often as important or even more important than big numbers.
UPDATE: Reader Mike Sullivan, who wonders why I keep going on about this stuff, points me to Marvel's rate card for ads. It can be hard to read. Mike tried to find a DC card online but couldn't, which only makes sense somehow. Hey, maybe I'll call them Monday.
Why do I keep going on about this? Because the first goal of any insurgency is to drive a wedge between foreigner and indigene. Wait, that's the other thread. Mostly I'm just curious. Mike thinks DC must just charge vastly less than Marvel and there's no reason to explore further. But some of us like to update our blog more than three times a year, so we have a hunger for material.
Samarra and Samarra and Samarra - Scooped by Hesiod on my own story! Oh the ignominy!
Here's the thing, while I was out gaming and having fun and not blogging last night, I kept thinking more and more about the whole robbery angle, and that question about why you wouldn't hit the bank rather than an armored convoy if you've got 60 well-armed fighters you're coordinating. And darnit, for sixty attackers, I like to think that our side could take down a good number of them, if not 54. That is, things were inclining me to doubt not just the total of dead attackers but the total of live ones.
Then Hesiod found a Middle-East Online interview with a purported spokesman for a group claiming credit for the Samarra ambush. And
The spokesman also denies robbery was a motive for the attack, saying "If we'd wanted to take the money, we could have attacked the bank whenever we wanted to, without the need to take on the Americans."SAMARRA, Iraq - A man describing himself as a resistance spokesman Tuesday rejected US reports of 54 insurgents killed in intense exchanges with US troops here, saying just two militants had died, both of whom were among eight civilians reported killed.
"We had two killed in the attack," the man told French journalist Pierre Barbancey, correspondent for the French communist party daily L'Humanite.
. . .
In all just 12 people took part in Sunday's ambush in Samarra, not the 64 or more spoken of by the Americans, said the spokesman, who talked to the journalist unarmed in a private home in the city.
"When the convoy entered the town, four groups of three people each took up position to attack it," he said.
Here's the infuriating thing: this version of events makes more sense than anything we've heard from our own government on the matter. It explains why there weren't more bodies - because there weren't that many attackers. It explains why most of the recovered dead seemed to be civilians - odds would favor that. It explains why the attack wasn't terribly successful - in tight quarters, from ambush, with decent weapons, five dozen attackers should have been able to do more damage. I'm not ready to endorse it as the definitive version of events, but it seems to make more sense than the other available accounts.
It has its bad news/good news implications, naturally. In this version of events, the bad news is that relatively few guerrillas were able to provoke a massive reaction that has further estranged locals and occupier - the main goal of an early-stage guerrilla resistance, remember. The good news: everything you heard earlier in the week about how the Samarra ambush with its 60-man attack showed the increasing sophistication and capability of the resistance? You can forget that stuff for now.
Hesiod's item culls several other reports.
A Fanboy's Puzzled Notes - Near as I can tell, Marvel has the top-selling monthly comics and higher aggregate sales of monthly comics - at least if you go by the various direct-market sales charts out there. So why is DC kicking Marvel's ass on the page count and ad page fronts? I checked last week's comics - DC: 22 story pages, 16 ad pages; Marvel 20-21 story pages, 10 ad pages. And a higher proportion of the Marvel ads seemed to be house ads or ads for licensed Marvel product. Several DC comics came with a short insert, and the insert included a couple of pages of additional ads.
Are DC's rates that much lower? Do their comics have a sales penetration not reflected in the Diamond numbers? Or is this something new Marvel publisher Dan Buckley might better concentrate on than blue-pencilling fight scenes in The Ultimates?
UPDATE: Ginger Stampley e-mails a plausible theory:
and adds later thatDC is probably benefiting from "synergy" with other Time Warner properties. Package sales of ads to Time Warner magazines that include ads in DC comics would give DC access more and better advertisers, whether or not the sales/demographics of the comics themselves were that attractive. If you were buying ads and you could get a better rate on buying in Entertainment Weekly by having an ad in the comics, wouldn't you?
which all makes sense. It shows the magnitude of the commercial advantage that DC ritually squanders.Michael also pointed out that DC tends to do more derivative comics from TV
and movies, which would bring in better advertising, and that some of the
advertisements you see may be for Time Warner TV shows and movies. TW gets
a sweetheart deal on the ads, and DC gets a better ad bed, making it more
attractive than Marvel as a place to buy ads.What it boils down to is that DC is simply in a better position to sell ads.
"Hahahahahaha. How delightfully witty you are, HIGHCLEARING.COM" says Catherine Zeta-Jones. Kind of. Via Crooked Timber.
If Only I Posted Blurbs I'd sure as hell use the praise kindly bestowed by Fantastic Planet
He's only talking about the early Samarra posts, but the whole point of blurbs is to abuse the intended meaning. (Other favorite alt-universe UO blurb: "Of course Jim Henley was all over this story months ago, and did you listen?" from Patrick Nielsen Hayden.)It's sort of beautiful, like the complex intricacies of a multi-faceted diamond club that's bashing your head in.
Metric System Update - Sadly, No kept after the Iraqi electrical power story and Uggabugga made a graph . SN reminds that "When electricity production equaled (and then exceeded) pre-war levels in October, the Coalition Provisional Authority was quick to trumpet this as proof that, however slowly, things are getting better."
The CPA has its own tables and graphs available for download, and I made my own graphs from their data for comparison.
The data show that we stopped meeting that standard (pre-war levels) after about October 12. From then until today, power output declines to August levels, both in the country as a whole and in Baghdad proper. Now, an exercise for the reader with Excel. Open the CPA's official report for December 2 (daily updates available). Now open the version I've just done with reformatted graphs of the CPA's own data. See both the "Peak Generation" and "Baghdad Power" tabs. Decide which set of graphs tells the truer story.
I made the following changes:
1. Added in data from August 7-October 6 that the CPA dropped.
2. Narrowed the graph widths.
Were I producing a report for an executive summary, I'd consider the CPA's version inadequate. The wide picture and lack of early data obscures the story, which is "Power goes up. Power goes back down." And if I were the executive and noticed that my analysts hadn't updated the graph on their "front page" since Mid-November, I'd wonder if they were hiding something.
UPDATE: Earlier version of this post suggested that Uggabugga had simply copied a CPA graph rather than making his own from CPA data.
SAM I Am - Bruce Rolston is your man for analysis of the recent SAM attack at Baghdad Airport. He's got links, analysis, and analysis. I'd love to see him dig into the Samarra reports too, but I probably confused him with Aaron Allston in e-mail the other day, so why should he do me any favors?
It's Not Low Profile If You Just Weren't Looking - Hesiod writes about exiled Iraqi nuclear scientist Imad Khadduri, who says now and said before the war that Iraq had no current nuclear program and that even its 1980s-era program was a farce. Some critics have apparently "wondered" why Khadduri is only now coming forward. Hesiod points out, with characteristic effervescence:
"Emergence from a low profile," MY ASS!
I was one of a number of people who HIGHLIGHTED Khadduri's claims BEFORE the war started. This was back in JANUARY! And Khadduri, himself, gave interviews to the Toronto Star and the BBC.
Disjointment in Samarra - Really, I'm almost over my obsession with this topic. But there are some interesting angles here, and some tentative conclusions. Of the latter, here's my current theory of What Really Happened:
Our guys got ambushed by a pretty big force.
Our guys fought them off in a running firefight and got the hell out of town, killing somewhere between 2 and two dozen guerrillas, probably closer to the former.
Our guys made liberal use of their ordnance, taking down some civilians in the process, but this was not their aim.
Our guys tossed a bunch of numbers around in true fog-of-war fashion when debriefed that did not receive the appropriate analysis before being publicised.
The brass hyped it for the happy news value.
It is material that the guerrillas did not win. The money is not in their hands. It is material that they were able to mount this operation, Iron Hammer notwithstanding. It is material that the people in Samarra hate our guts.
Now to the angles. A lot of them have to do with the robbery aspect. Here is what I don't get: if your only interest is the money, why not rob the bank? Think of it: 60 guys with guns and explosives against a stationary target that, whatever guards it has, surely has less than the convoy delivering the money. Wouldn't you like your chances of getting in and getting away before the Americans and such Iraqi police as were nearby could get to the scene? So, the possibilities are
1) There's something I'm missing (e.g. "two teams of 30 attackers" is a wild exaggeration - or something else);
2) The guerrillas are fucking morons;
3) The guerrillas are trying things that _seem interesting_ because they have the leisure to do so - that is, they have the time and the personnel to take a flyer on "Let's see if we can take down an armored convoy";
4) The whole thing was a diversionary stunt, and while it was going on, the guerrillas were acquiring needed cash by quite some other method (possibly the same sources who tipped them to the convoy).
3 and 4 are bad for us, 3 worst of all. Come to think of it, if the Americans already figured out that 4 was the case, it would give them an additional reason to hype the battle - "Iraqis Purloin Coalition Cash by Subtle Means" is not a story you want out there.
Now, the Shape of Things to Come: The old Saddam dinars expire on January 15. After that they are not legal tender in New Iraq. But that's a political decision. Hard-currency libertarians hate fiat money - I'm not one - but fiat money is an important social fact. If you can get someone to take pieces of paper with pictures on it in exchange for stuff somebody wants, you have scored a political triumph. We are, after all, changing the dinar for political reasons. It's one more way to say "Saddam is contemptible history."
Here's the thing. We're also setting up a test for ourselves. Because the opposition may try to circulate Saddam dinars after the deadline. If they succeed in getting people to take old bills in the new year, it will be a measure of their success. If they can't, it will be a measure of ours.
Samarra This Stuff - Gary Farber e-mailed that he does recall reports of "uniformed fedayeen." Curiously, the more recent reports seem to drop "uniforms" in favor of dressed like - which mostly seems a matter of white or black scarves across the face.
Andrew Olmsted had a follow-up this morning and will hopefully add more. And speaking of the early reports always being wrong, I erred last night when I referred to him as Captain Olmsted. In a show of good sense, the Army has promoted him since he started blogging. The self-deprecating and good-humored way in which he informed me, though, couldn't help but call to mind a passage early in Ross Thomas' last novel. An old Army acquaintance/rival comes to call on the protagonist, informing him in the process that he's now Colonel Acquaintance/Rival?
"Colonel?" the hero replies. "But the Army would never - but of course it would. Congratulations."
This joke is for entertainment purposes only and to remind you to read Ross Thomas. Particularly all the Democrats who keep coming round - he was the great liberal suspense author. Start with The Fools In Town Are On Our Side, Briarpatch and Chinaman's Chance. After that you can't go wrong with Out on the Rim and The Seersucker Whipsaw. I can just imagine the savage fun the man could have had with contemporary material.
Your Samarra Links for the Day - Juan Cole got a skeptical e-mail from a former Green Beret. Excerpt:
We'll know soon enough. David Hackworth got an e-mail too, purporting to be from a US combat commander in the action. The report is anonymous and could conceivably be a fake. I asked Major Olmsted to give it the sniff test. He replies, "Obviously I can't speak to the accuracy, but the use of jargon seems pretty accurate to me. It sounds as if it was written by a soldier." Taking the report, provisionally, as genuine, it confirms a number of my suspicions and contains an important new fact - or at least it seems important to me:Are we back to kiting body counts? Are we back to "If it's dead and it's gook, it's VC"?
Okay, we knew it was carrying dinars. But I hadn't seen any reports that it was carrying dollars. That would make that particular truck a very, very tempting target. More:Samara was not a supply convoy as reported, but was carrying large amounts of new Iraqi currency to stock local Iraqi banks and US greenbacks used to pay for goods and services the US forces need to accomplish their missions in Iraq.
"A Combat Leader" is full of good cheer ("Iraqi Rebel Guerilla Units elements still retain the ability to conduct synchronized operations despite the massive overwhelming firepower "Iron Hammer" offensive this month") and bad news:When we received the first incoming rounds, all I could think of was how the hell did the Iraqis (most of these attackers being criminals, not insurgents) find out about this shipment? This was not broadcast on the local news, but Iraqi police knew about it. Bing, Bing Bing, You do the math.
ACL thinks that's bad:Hack, most of the casualties were civilians, not insurgents or criminals as being reported. During the ambushes the tanks, brads and armored HUMVEES hosed down houses, buildings, and cars while using reflexive fire against the attackers. One of the precepts of "Iron Hammer" is to use an Iron Fist when dealing with the insurgents. As the division spokesman is telling the press, we are responding with overwhelming firepower and are taking the fight to the enemy. The response to these well coordinated ambushes was as a one would expect. The convoy continued to move, shooting at ANY target that appeared to be a threat. RPG fire from a house, the tank destroys the house with main gun fire and hoses the area down with 7.62 and 50cal MG fire. Rifle fire from an alley, the brads fire up the alley and fire up the surrounding buildings with 7.62mm and 25mm HE rounds. This was actually a rolling firefight through the entire town.
The ROE under "Iron Fist" is such that the US soldiers are to consider buildings, homes, cars to be hostile if enemy fire is received from them (regardless of who else is inside. It seems too many of us this is more an act of desperation, rather than a well thought out tactic. We really don't know if we kill anyone, because we don't stick around to find out.
Hesiod e-mailed a Los Angeles Times article by John Daniszewski containing some of that "lots more reporting" I suggested there was to do yet.This is a great attitude for a combat commander to have when fighting an armored force on force, but Colonel Rudesheim is not trained in Counterinsurgency and my soldiers are taking the heat. We drive around in convoys, blast the hell out of the area, break down doors and search buildings; but the guerillas continue to attacks us. It does not take a George Patton to see we are using the wrong tactics against these people. We cannot realistically expect that Stability and Support Operations will defeat this insurgency.
As one would expect from using our overwhelming firepower, much of Samarra is fairly well shot up. The tanks and brads rolled over parked cars and fired up buildings where we believed the enemy was. This must be expected considering the field of vision is limited in an armored vehicle and while the crews are protected, they also will use recon by fire to suppress the enemy. Not all the people in this town were hostile, but we did see many people firing from rooftops or alleys that looked like average civilians, not the Feddayeen reported in the press. I even saw Iraqi people throwing stones at us, I told my soldiers to hold their fire unless they could identify a real weapon, but I still can't understand why somebody would throw a stone at a tank, in the middle of a firefight.
Highlights:
o The battle "unfolded over a four-hour period," not the twenty minutes in the early reports.
o Daniszewski quotes an Abrams commander saying "small children were used as spotters by the insurgents." This is bad news however you interpret it: either the guerrillas have that much sway over Samarra that they can induce/compel that kind of cooperation, or our troops are stressed to the point of seeing things or Daniszewski can't get quotes right. I'm betting against the last one.
o The brass at 1st Armored believe "there's central financial control and central communications" of the efforts.
o The army reports five non-life-threatening injuries to its own folks. Cole's correspondent parses the phrasing to mean some casualties were seriously maimed.
o Samarra is a destination for Shiite pilgrims. I'm not sure what the Sunni/Shiite breakdown of the local population is. A "low-level struggle has been taking place" between pro-Hussein and pro-coalition forces in the city.
o Do We Control Samarra? Update: No. Apparently not.
o The Iraqi guards at the main entrance to the town wear ski masks so as not to "be recognized by fellow townsmen"Until six weeks ago, U.S. forces were headquartered near the city's main entrance. But after daily mortar attacks that killed two GIs, they pulled out to a more secure desert base about three miles away that boasts long, unobstructed views. Day-to-day security in the city has been turned over to the new Iraqi police and a U.S.-created Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, but their grip on Samarra appears tenuous.
o There have been other attacks on cash convoys. This makes sense, since those old Saddam dinars become illegal tender after January 15. The guerrillas need cash.
o Department of Coalition of the Willing: The guys actually delivering the money were Fijians, mostly former military men. They get high marks from soldiers interviewed for carrying on with their deliveries under fire. Don't scoff. My friends' dads who served in World War II had nothing but admiration for the "Seabees" of the Construction Battalions who built runways and landing zones and earthworks under fire in the Pacific. It takes guts to shoot back at someone rather than running away under fire. It takes balls of steel to run a backhoe when someone's trying to kill you. These Fijians are like that.
o Two sentences that go together so badly they frustrate the hell out of me: "On Monday, the city seemed remarkably unscathed. Many buildings were scarred by bullets and mortar rounds, and about a dozen cars were burned, including one parked in front of the Golden Shrine." Look, John. We're trying to figure out what the hell happened Sunday. If you could be just a little clearer exactly how you mean it that "[m]any buildings were scarred" and that "he city seemed remarkably unscathed" it would be a great help.
The mystery, which borders on solving a mathematics equation, further deepened with Gonsalves' report. According to him, a total of 60 militants, divided into two groups, attacked two convoys escorting new Iraqi currency to banks in the city. Another four assailants in a BMW attacked a separate engineering convoy. If the US troops killed 46 and captured 11 of them, only three of the survivors would have been left to pick up the corpses.Where have I heard that before? AFP has more reporting from the scene, too:
The only corpses at the city's hospital were those of ordinary civilians, including two elderly Iranian pilgrims and a child.What about my conclusion that the reporting demonstrates our lack of control in Samarra and probably other places?
Lieutenant Joseph Marcee, who took part in Sunday's combat, said he saw several of the attackers lying dead on the ground. "There was no time to pick up the bodies. We were receiving fire from other locations," he said. Sergeant Nicholas Mullen, who fired rounds from an Abrams tank Sunday, offered yet another explanation for the army's inability to locate the corpses. "We don't stick around," he said.I'm now pretty comfortable with the following conclusion: the Army brass or their civilian bosses made a political decision to puff the ambush up into something it was not because they wanted a happy headline running at the end of the bloodiest month of the occupation phase of the war. It worked, too.
Can Can? - Perhaps the strangest request for Loyal Reader Help yet. I had an interesting exchange of e-mails with Kevin Maroney about yesterday's item on the war on obesity (aka the fitness blog item). Here's the upshot: I have a clear memory of reading a can of regular soda (Pepsi) last month which listed a "serving size" of 8 ounces and "servings per container: 1.5." Kevin insisted that his cans said "serving size one can" and I checked my boss's soda can Coke) at work today and it said "serving size one can." But I'm sure that last month's can said it contained 1.5 servings, because I was making the point to someone that you had to take that kind of thing into account when reading nutrition labels.
Am I nuts here? Or can someone confirm that soda can labels have undergone a recent change?
It's Not Just You, Kevin - Even the Liberal Calpundit is right. I ran retail stores for 14 years. The day after Thanksgiving was never "the biggest shopping day of the year." The biggest shopping day of the year was always, as Kevin says, the Saturday before Christmas.
Now, here's a UO shopping tip: if you must shop, shop late. Not in the season, late in the day. The stores extend their hours to 11 or midnight. God knows some probably extend them longer. But the crowds really thin down after the 10.
Remember, we are a full service blog here.
But Wait! There's More! - I'm sorry I'm not as quick on the uptake as some other bloggers, Loyal Readers. I was proofing the post below and that Telegraph excerpt smacked me on the back of the head and said "Hey, dumbass!"
Let's add it up. "Two teams of up to 30 Fedayeen." That's somewhere south of 60 guerrillas.The attacks lasted less than 20 minutes, with troops rapidly supported by four Apache attack helicopters. The US military said that two teams of up to 30 fedayeen were involved.
Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, a US military spokesman, said one person was detained.
Asked about the bodies of the 54 militants said to have been killed, he said: "I would suspect that the enemy would have carried them away and brought them back to where their initial base was."
54 dead militants. That's a kill ratio of 90%. That's absurd for a running firefight in an urban setting, which is what this was. (Again, I'm correctible on this.) I'm pretty sure that an attacking force should generally "break" at the 30% casualty level if not before.
But worst of all: "Up to 60" minus 54 is - six. Tops. Brigadier General Kimmitt is telling us that 6 guys carried off 54 bodies. General Kimmitt is full of shit. Or else the reporting on this is really bad. Or both.
"Crackpot" Mail - Randolph Fritz writes about last night's item:
There's an important point here: "sober" defenders of the administration (any administration) admonish us not to be "hysterical" because, whatever we're complaining about, it's not as bad as the depradations in actual totalitarian countries. Therefore we must be reasonable. But I figure the object is to not become as bad as actual totalitarian countries. And the time to do that is this side of totalitarianism. Now is precisely the time for hysteria because, should we reach a state when even our critics concede that "Now it really is bad" we'll be past the point of being able to do much about it. Their own hysteria, like Gorky's, will come too late."Everything dubious turns out to be much worse than initially reported." Chris Hitchens made the same observation in *The Trial of Henry Kissenger*, did you know?
One doesn't have to be a crackpot to know the history of authoritarians in the USA, and to realize that USers have done monstrous things in the past, and are probably still capable of them. (Think of John Ashcroft, who has ridden to national power on the backs of Klansmen and their fellow travellers.) To believe these things are possible before one knows them to be done takes...I'm not quite sure what. I guess one has to reject one's own belief in the moral qualities of politics before one believes. Often people only come to the realization that such things are possible through engagement in tragedy--that was the way it happenned with Orwell & the anti-Stalinists.
One reader wonders whether we should apply "crackpot theory" to yesterday's Samarra battle. Taking note of the "massacre test" - he expresses suspicion about the reported ratio of dead to wounded:
The same reader notes that Matt Hogan's "massacre test" appears to be "validated in a British Medical Journal study by the Red Cross in UK done studying most modern wars. Dead to wounded were in the 1 to 2-3 range." When you start seeing substantially more dead than wounded, you start to suspect you're looking at murder rather than battle. It's not easy to kill people, as this blog noted early in its existence.I've now heard reports of troops crushing cars and hospital workers dead. Building explosions from non-aerial attacks typically leave wounded. Sounds to me more like a few sputtering ambushes and some sustained resistance followed by soldiers going apeshit on the town. The same feeling -- these reports do turn out worse so often and those numbers 0 dead one side 50 dead the other in ground ambush; 50 dead 18 wounded -- it's a funny number.
Hope I'm wrong ...
There are some odd and noteworthy things about the Samarra action. The US reports that many of the attackers were "wearing uniforms of the pro-Saddam Fedayeen fighters." I can't recall previous reports of guerrilla attacks that specified the guerrillas wore Fedayeen uniforms. That doesn't mean the guerrillas didn't, and I may well have missed the reports. But let's say I didn't miss any reports (please e-mail if I did). In that case, one does wonder why all of a sudden the government hastens to inform us about the uniforms. Especially when during the invasion phase of the war their statements stressed that the Saddam Fedayeen didn't usually wear uniforms. Remember those days? It's a curious reversal of enemy practice and allied emphasis. One that could be explained, it must be stressed, by politics - the Fedayeen may have dressed up for effect, an affect they ruined by getting their sadistic little asses kicked. (Apparently. See below.)
So, "uniformed Fedayeen": odd but not probative.
The US also states that the ambush was an attempted bank heist:
You don't figure the CPA puts the schedule of their currency deliveries into their daily briefings. You assume that that kind of thing is a secret. So if the attack really was an attempt to steal the currency, that means the guerrillas have some pretty good intelligence on what we're doing. We either haven't purged enough dead-enders or we're making more of them as we go."It was a co-ordinated attack... on a convoy... delivering a significant amount of Iraqi currency," US Colonel Fredrick Rudesheim told reporters.
Okay, am I saying the Samarra action was a massacre or not? I'm not. I can explain away the KIA/WIA ratio: Here's a thought: If I'm wounded and I can avoid any place the Americans would noitce me - whether I'm an insurgent or a civilian - I'm avoiding that place. I slip back to my cell and get treated clandestinely; I drag myself home and pay a discreet visit to the family doctor. Because if I'm wounded, then I'm presumptively an enemy of the Americans, and that can let me and my relatives in for a whole lot of trouble. And I have the habits of a lifetime's secrecy.
Thus, wounded numbers depressed by wounded behavior. If it turned out those 18 were seriously wounded - no walkers, basically - that would strengthen the case.
But it gets stranger. Here is the report of even the right-wing Telegraph:
Where the hell do "estimates" of 46, subsequently raised to 54, come from? Answer: out of one's ass. Period. "Somewhere upwards of 40" is an estimate. "Around 4 dozen or so" is an estimate. 46-no-54 is, in the absence of stiffening corpses laid out in front of you, horseshit. I would think. Maybe Captain Olmsted will set me straight on this one. He has the qualifications to do so.It was impossible to reconcile the two versions of the battle. The US military acknowledged that the death toll was estimated - rather than confirmed - on the debriefings of soldiers and no bodies had been collected.
But wait - there's more! Also from the Telegraph:
They can do that? Seriously, let's take General Kimmitt's statement at face value.Here's what it means:The attacks lasted less than 20 minutes, with troops rapidly supported by four Apache attack helicopters. The US military said that two teams of up to 30 fedayeen were involved.
Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, a US military spokesman, said one person was detained.
Asked about the bodies of the 54 militants said to have been killed, he said: "I would suspect that the enemy would have carried them away and brought them back to where their initial base was."
We don't control Samarra.
If we can't be absolutely god damn sure of how many people were killed, it means we were not able to secure the area after the battle, helicopter gunships with fancy electronic sights or no. We collected no bodies. Likeliest explanation: we couldn't. We delivered the money to the banks and got the hell out of town.
So I think a couple of things. 1) On the evidence so far, the Iraqi story - that the death toll was much lower than the offiical American reports - is more true than the American story. 2) There is a lot of reporting yet to come on this one.
Lastly, the Telegraph article includes a Turning the Corner Watch Update:
Balance the attackers' increasing sophistication against the fact that - so far as we can determine - they failed. Big time. No American deaths. No Iraqi money. But December's just starting.Captain Andy Deponai, whose tank was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG), said: "Up to now you've seen a progression. Initially, it was hit and run, single RPG shots on patrols, then they started doing volley fire, multiple RPG ambushes, and now this is the first well co-ordinated one.
"Here it seems they had the training to stand and fight."
Please Stay on the Line - Gary Farber e-mails actual facts about the survey call discussed in the first of today's items:
Gary adds "If an ostensible poll turns into a sales pitch, people merely have to complain, and if a tape of such a call can be obtained, the FTC will fine the callers precisely as they would any other violater of the do-not-call act."I've done that survey. I don't mean I was called. I mean I was working last year for a pollster doing surveys, mostly political, and we did precisely that one for Comcast. I made that call a couple of hundred times. It was the only non-political job we did (the firm did no selling whatever at any time; it was all polling and surveying).
And I can therefore vouch absolutely that while I understand someone getting the impression it was leading up to being an ad, and that several questions might walk the border, it was not an ad. There was no provision being made for taking orders. There was no sales pitch. It was, in fact, a survey to determine what sorts of service customers might want, what they were willing or unwilling to pay for, and what knowledge they had of services currently available. Nor was any information recorded on who the individual was; it was all statistical. I fully grant that some of that walks the borders of being an ad. Certainly the question "were you aware that you can have such &such service for such a price? Do you feel that is: a) too much; b) too little; c) just about right?" can be argued as being across the line.
But I'm not sure how a better borderline could be devised. Banning all survey dealing with commercial products might possibly do it, and might pass muster. But it would make for a fairly trivial difference. Commercial surveys would shave the phrase of the question a bit more. This wouldn't make a practical difference in being called. Ultimately, if people don't want to be called by strangers, they should use Caller ID and screen calls. Invidual action, rather than government nannyism. Strange argument? As for Poly's closing remarks and fears, he need not; such a call would be flat illegal.
Me, I prefer the good old days when they had to pay you.
Gary, by the way, is blogging up a storm lately. Those who stopped checking Amygdala during his last hiatus have a lot of catching up to do. Like that's a chore or something.
Department of Congratulations - Huzzahs go out to two of my favorite bloggers and two of my favorite people - that's not four folks but two folks. Jesse Walker got married last week to the wonderful R. And congratulations-in-progress go to Nate "Polytropos" Bruinooge, who is in the process of becoming a father this very evening. He and Mrs. Polytropos are at the hospital and, well, yes, he is blogging. He somewhat sheepishly reports that "And now she's napping again after getting an epidural, and lo and behold I found a phone jack I could dial in from with the laptop, so now I can post a couple of entries (coming right up)." Keep checking in for further updates.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED UPDATE: Elanora Willow Bruinooge is here.
Law of Unintended Consequences Watch - Polytropos reminds us that the Do Not Call registry has an exception for "surveys," an exception that appears to mean the sales calls we get will be . . . a lot longer than the ones we used to get.