Not Again - More boring "mostly law enforcement and intelligence stuff" this weekend:

LONDON (AP) - British Airways (BAB) and Air France on Saturday announced the cancellation of seven flights to and from the United States because of security concerns.

BA canceled four flights between Heathrow Airport and Washington on Sunday and Monday and one from Heathrow to Miami on Sunday. Air France canceled two Paris-to-Washington flights. There are no plans to raise the terror alert in the United States because of the latest threats, Homeland Security Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said.

1) What the heck is with these terrorist guys? Saddam was captured. We're safer now. Or do they hate America, like Howard Dean does?

2) Hey, maybe the "War on Terror" is mostly a matter of intelligence, law enforcement and international cooperation.

3) I thought France was our enemy now.

4) All kidding aside, American civilians in the US are not any safer since Saddam Hussein was captured; the threat of terrorism is real but geographically diffuse, while war is about geographic concentration of force - it will have a role, but there's a real limit to what it can accomplish.

The Mirror War for the UO Vote - A bizarre, unwitting, inverse campaign to make me love John Kerry ramps up this weekend. First, Bird Dog, the Joey Bishop of the Tacitus Rat Pack, offers three reasons for me to like Kerry, intended as criticisms of him:

o He's been attacked by UO bete noires Max Boot and David Brooks
o He has "scant legislative achievements," which is, frankly, the most a libertarian can hope for from a Democrat
o He told Tom Brokaw that

[t]he war on terror is less--it is occasionally military, and it will be, and it will continue to be for a long time. And we will need the best-trained and the most well-equipped and the most capable military, such as we have today.

But it's primarily an intelligence and law enforcement operation that requires cooperation around the world--the very thing this administration is worst at.

which seems the purest common sense.

Then Matthew Yglesias tries to ruin things by defending Kerry, writing

I wouldn't want to say that there are no differences between the foreign policy views of Bush and his opponents, but at this point, they really aren't very big.

And Hesiod boasts that Kerry has "received the endorsement of one of Michigan's most powerful and activist Unions - The Michigan Education Association."

Oy.

Coming this Weekend - Watchmen-blogging roundup, including more e-mail and a Watchmen blogwatch. Consideration of this week's Now They Tell Us - Reuel Marc Gerecht's Weekly Standard article on Ayatollah Sistani and the caltrops strewn along the road to the democratic revolution. BruceR of Flit picks up on concerns that

a Sistani-blessed Iraqi state will likely have no choice but to repress the Kurds, if only to keep the neighbours happy. And so, in a few years from now, we'll likely come full circle. Perhaps the lack of chemical weapons at the Battle of Halabja (2007) will be a small blessing to some.

But what about the Gurlzzz?? Remember, only a few weeks ago, it turned out we had sallied forth to stop the oppression of Muslim women? Now, Iran Jr. Welcome to the real freaking world, warbloggers. You'll miss Victor Davis Hanson, I realize. But everybody gets dragged back here sooner or later.

What's After the Light at the End of the Tunnel? - Another tunnel. There have been some reports in the last week quoting US commanders as saying that they were close to "turning the corner" in defeating the resistance. These reports have recurred every couple of months since the summer. (Before that, you may recall, the story was that to call what was happening in Iraq a "resistance" was a wild exaggeration.)

Comes today's report that

Violence by insurgents in Iraq will escalate in the run-up to a handover of sovereignty, according to the top US general in the region.

General John Abizaid, head of US Central Command covering Iraq and Afghanistan, said Islamic militants and Baathists were the main threat.

"There are an awful lot of people that don't want an Iraqi sovereign entity... to emerge," he said.

Now let's be clear: after the capture of Saddam, some people predicted there would be a "spasm" of increased violence, a kind of last stand before the resistance petered out. Despite the rise in US combat deaths since Saddam was arrested, it's too soon to say that's not what's happening. But there seem to be an awful lot of corners to turn.

What the Future Holds - Thanks to the net.sorcery of Neilalien, you, yes you, can now divine the future via the legendary Orb of Aggamotto.

Annals of Overanalyzing - Is it just me, or is the CNN article on the newly-discovered Van Gogh condolence letter really jumping to conclusions? Here's the situation:

Historians have long speculated that Van Gogh was a "replacement child" for his parents, who lost an infant boy at birth on March 30, 1852. They named the stillborn child Vincent. One year later to the day, another boy was born whom they also named Vincent. He grew up to become a world-renowned artist. Very little is actually known about the family tragedy or how it affected Van Gogh as a child or an adult. Until now. This newly-found condolence note was written to Hermanus Gijsbertus Tersteeg after his 3-month-old daughter died. Tersteeg was the manager of an art gallery in The Hague where Van Gogh had previously worked. The letter was written in black ink on two sides of a single page and included lengthy quotations from the Bible. The long missive reads much like a sermon--at the time, Van Gogh was preparing to study theology--and broke just about every etiquette rule of the day for such notes, which were typically brief with a few well-chosen, comforting words.

And here's how the article reports some Van Gogh scholars interpreting the letter:

But there is one thing about the letter that has stunned experts: the passionless tone. It is this tone--bereft of much feeling--that seems to contradict theories by some of Van Gogh's biographers that he may have suffered from alienation as a "replacement child," reports Reuters. "There has been much speculation about the effect this event must have had on Vincent--the inevitable trauma of being the 'replacement child' and the influence this supposedly had on the development of his personality," Jansen and two colleagues wrote in a paper published by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam in which the letter is now on display. They concluded, "There is nothing to indicate that Van Gogh dwelled excessively on the event; on the contrary, he attaches to it no personal emotion or recollection."

Hey, maybe he didn't. But I don't think you can tell that from the tone of this letter, which, after all, "broke just about every etiquette rule of the day for such notes." Is the note so unusual for its time because Van Gogh was rude, ignorant of convention, or moved by the similarity of plights? Is his tone "passionless" because replacement child status really didn't bother him, or because he deliberately mastered his emotions? I don't know, and if you read the little bit of what the scholars actually say that is quoted, they don't seem to either. Their paper merely notes that the letter can't be said to prove anxiety on Van Gogh's part. The uncredited article author then turns that into "seems to contradict." Someone needs to lend someone an ear.

More Devils in the Details - Couple of weeks ago I wrote about the surprisingly modest goals for the size of the new Iraqi military:

How is Iraq supposed to defend itself in that neighborhood with 40,000 soldiers and a bunch of guys with binoculars and jeeps? It's not. The numbers indicate the plan, and the plan is for Iraq to remain a ward of the United States for the foreseeable future. Alternatively, the plan is to similarly demilitarize Iran and Syria by force and trust the better angels of the Turkish nature. When you hear people learnedly assuring that the national greatness folks have lost favor, you have 40,000 reasons to believe otherwise.

Loyal Reader Nell Lancaster did some digging:

Devilish details indeed. I've been trying to find even a scrap of information about the command structure and leadership of the various "security forces", particularly the police and army. My research skills aren't good enough for me to decide that the information doesn't exist, and if it's out there it's probably not accessible online. But my guess is that even a determined, experienced, credentialed mainstream reporter would have trouble getting at the relevant facts. Dana Priest, I'm counting on you.

But, since we're paying for it, I'd like to know. The only addition to the Brookings chart (for which all info seems to come from the same State/DoD documents) is from a CPA press release in mid-December announcing hazardous pay increases to the various security forces. This was in reaction to the mass resignation of a big chunk of the first batallion in the new army in early December.

That press release lists bunches of security forces I had no idea existed, and more than the Brookings study follows. Questions arise: Are the various specific security details like the oil police, water, elec, and firemen subsumed in the "facilities protection service", or is the FPS an additional entitity? What ministries do these forces serve under? What's the deal with 'civil defense corps'? My best guesses in the 'chart' below; entries without question marks based on the CPA info.

Bunches of jails, 350 or so, have been (re)opened, and that makes sense from the standpoint of getting a handle on ordinary crime, but no way should the numbers of corrections officials be counted into overall security numbers. Oil police, maybe.

The extremely slow progress in boosting the army vs. the ballooning of other forces has plenty of non-sinister explanations, but also makes it clear that there is no way the Iraqi army will be THE Iraqi Army before sometime in 2020, at this rate. And, as you say, given the goal vs. neighbors' armies, probably never. Several news reports I googled while collecting info on the security forces contained phrases like "coalition forces, which are expected to remain in Iraq for years to come." Oh, why not? We're in 130 countries already, and we never seem to leave any place once we set up our quonset huts...

Iraqi security orgs goals / current (mid-Jan 2004)

Police 71,000 / 67,200
Civil defense corps 40,000 / 17,600
Army 40,000 / 1,100
Border patrol 25,700 / 20,300
Facilities protection services 50,000 / 97,200 (ballooned by 30K Oct, 10K Nov, 30K Dec)
(Min of Interior)

-Firemen (Min. of Interior)
-Electricity police (Min. of Interior)

-Oil police (Oil Min?)
-Water resources police (? Min)
-Ministry of finance security (Finance Min?)
-Iraqi media network security (? Min)
-Corrections officers (would have thought this was Min. of Interior?)
Surely corrections guys aren't part of 'facilities protection services'?

Total 226,700 / 203,400 (165,300 Dec 2003)

I personally don't see the Facilities Protection Services standint athwart the Iranian hordes, nor the police - it's not their job. Be interesting to find just how well-equipped and trained they expect the border patrol and civil defense corps to be.

Meanwhile, official confirmation of the implications of the Op-Chart military force goals has begun to appear:

WASHINGTON - The U.S. Army's top general said Wednesday he is planning for the possibility that the Army may be required to keep tens of thousands of soldiers in Iraq through 2006.

Trickster at Tacitus has found more, from "Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, who is in charge of the U.S. program to build the new Iraqi army":

Current plans call for the U.S.-led coalition to train three light infantry divisions in the coming months. But `this is a tough neighborhood and three light infantry division do not provide, and will not provide, the end-state defensive requirement for the Iraqi ground forces - it never was intended to be so,' he said.

Eaton said about half of the armed forces must have tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and artillery backed by attack helicopters, air defense artillery and interceptor aircraft. `An extraordinarily complex affair, and it is expensive,' he said.

As Trickster puts it:

Ah, yes. The expensive part. If we're actually going to remove our forces from Iraq in three to five years, how much is this new armored Iraqi Army going to cost--and who exactly is going to pay for it?

Shhh. . . . Ask that after November.

And don't expect that 2006 date to stick either. It'll slip. But it's all worth it because . . . what's today's reason?

I Wanna Hold Your Hand - Your one-note blog joke of the day. If the author can sustain it, it will be, in its way, an impressive feat.

Weapons of Some Destruction Redux - At first I wondered if there was an echo around here, but Independent Institute honcho David Theroux assures me that "We also have been talking about this for years." Point of discussion? Ivan Eland's latest column, with the catchy title, "Weapons of Mass Destruction Are Overrated as a Threat to America." I like my title better, but read the Eland article.

Meanwhile, Hesiod takes out after the official administration position that "the prewar intelligence was faulty." And Leonard of Unruled has some follow-up thoughts from last night on unspectacular terror attacks and why the US itself has been largely free of them so far.

It Takes a Comics Blogger - No less a personage than the legendary Neilalien has fixed this site's problem with text selection in Internet Explorer for me. Neil: You. Da. Man. As of now, IE users can select as much or as little text as they want. The new problem introduced is that the two columns don't line up perfectly in all browsers - including my browser of choice. I'll work on that as time permits.

I had better become the most quoted blogger on the internet now.

Lengthy digression on my hatred for Internet Explorer belayed because of a scheduling conflict.

Instant Blogwatch - Mr. Jimmy has posted the rare update to Objectionable Content, this one about David Kay, employed until recently by the US government. Traditionally, a new OC post is followed by six more weeks of winter.

Walter in Denver offers the Drug War Clock, where you can watch your tax dollars at work.

Gary Farber comments on the much-linked "ribs dialogue" between President Bush and a reporter. "It belatedly occurs to me that I was unconsciously "hearing" an echo of the SNL/John Belushi "cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger" sketch in the back of my head when I read the dialogue."

And Sean Collins wonders "Do you think all this brown-nosing [re my recent Watch-blogging] will convince him to blog his thoughts on Jones's Incredible Hulk and Morales's Captain America?" Answer: Sure! Not today, but maybe tomorrow.

Sean by the way, is the latest blogger you can help financially. Details.

Weird Science - Matthew Barganier offers a history in quotes of John Ashcroft's repeated expressions of concern over "evil chemistry and evil biology."

Your Surprisingly Work-Safe Link of the Day - http://www.cummingfirst.com/organ.html.

Via the Agitator.

Failing to Report the GOOD News from Iraq - Today's culprits, Knight-Ridder reporters Hannah Allam and Tom Lasseter:

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Whispers of "revolution" are growing louder in Baghdad this month at teahouses, public protests and tribal meetings as Iraqis point to the past as an omen for the future.

Iraqis remember 1920 as one of the most glorious moments in modern history, one followed by nearly eight decades of tumult. The bloody rebellion against British rule that year is memorialized in schoolbooks, monuments and mass-produced tapestries that hang in living rooms.

Now, many say there's an uncanny similarity with today: unpopular foreign occupiers, unelected governing bodies and unhappy residents eager for self-determination. The result could be another bloody uprising.

I say we charge the bastards for painting all their schools.

UPDATE: On the other hand, Palestinian intellectual Fawaz Turki, writing in Arab News, recants his prior opposition.

Mission Accomplished Just removed a bunch of typos and a few solecisms from the week's posts. God I suck sometimes. Somewhat better now. Tomorrow: more stuff about stuff.

Be Careful What You Wish For - I think Matthew Yglesias is, to coin a phrase, eerily prescient regarding the much-discussed conservative disenchantment with George W. Bush's presidency.

The upshot is going to be a really ugly campaign, grounded more in efforts to motivate Republicans by fear and loathing of the opposition than admiration for the GOP. You see this a lot already in the rightwing press where the ratio of Democrat-bashing to Bush-praising has been very high for a long time.

Yeah. That's what we have to look forward to, all right.

Who Watches the Watchmail? - It turns out that, after chili recipes and cover songs, Watchmen is one of the biggest mail-generatin' topics out there. So here we go . . .

Justin Slotman writes

JIM!

I always thought the pirate comic was just an idea of what a comic book would look like in a world where superheroes actually existed: all horror and bleak irony. The reverse of our world with the grim daily life and (at the time) bright 'n' colorful superheroes in the comic books. Something Moore would like putting in there, where beneath an outward perfection all this horribleness still finds a way to bubble up.

I'm sure you're aware that Watchmen vs. Dark Knight Returns is one of _the_ Comic Geek Great Debates. What do you lean towards? I tend toward Dark Knight, as it's a lot more energetic and still carries that force to this day. Watchmen, on the other hand, has for me gotten more lifeless over the years--all those symmetries make it seem mechanical to me. Plus, like another 80s comic with a high body count that was highly praised at the time--Batman: The Cult--it relies too much on the final shock in New York to convince you that something of importance has gone on in the previous 300 (or whatever) pages. Dark Knight Returns, on the other hand, is over the top from cover to cover and doesn't rely on any single event to get its point across.

Justin Justin Justin. That "the pirate comic was just an idea of what a comic book would look like in a world where superheroes actually existed" interpretation is so twenty years ago. Look, you don't need to devote that many pages to a particular pirate comic story if that's all you're trying to show. No, it's too elaborately worked into the flow of the action in the main story to be "just" anything.

But while we're on the topic, does anybody else have trouble buying the idea that a few pugnacious athletes in tights and dominos would kill reader interest in superhero comics? I mean, killed deader than it is in our time. Remember that the back matter about comics-writer Shea and pirate comics locates the fall of the superhero comic with the rise of the Minutemen. Makes no sense. Like saying a world with real crime would have no crime comics and a world with real love, none that publish romance stories. I guess since we have Latin American immigrants, Love and Rockets doesn't exist.

As for Dark Knight versus Watchmen, I'd gotta read Dark Knight again, and even then I might not want to choose.

Adam Clay Teter writes

1.) I have the softcover version of Watchmen. I bought it less than six months ago, but I couldn't find a print date. In my copy, Dr. Manhattan's speech before going to kill Rorschach is also in white instead of blue. If it's a misprint it's a brilliant one that has been carried through to the other editions.

2.) I found your comment that Watchmen "as with many leftist critiques of the Cold War the Soviet Union is strangely invisible" to be interesting for two reasons. Mostly, I'm a leftist myself (most would say "far leftist") and my initial reaction to Watchmen was that it was a critique of the left from the right. Veidt is clearly one of those on the far left who would be willing to do anything at all to avert war. Rorschach, on the other hand, is clearly of the right wing and is also clearly the story's ultimate hero. I thought that his final words about "one more body in the foundations" was a particularly telling comment about many leftist's view of what it takes to achieve peace. More than that, I saw it as a comment on the Soviet Union's bloody purge policies.

I'm not sure if it's fair to call Watchmen a leftist or a rightist work, though, as Moore is clearly and publicly an anarchist. I imagine that he would object to Veidt's government-like meddling in world affairs as much as he would the U.S./Soviet conflict. Just a thought.

Me, I think Moore sees both the despicable and admirable aspects of Rorshach and regards him, mostly, with fascinated horror. But respect. (Rorshach is damned clever, and can be droll.) I think it's a deliberate irony that Kovacs turns out to be right about so much that is going on.

As for the word balloon, I just bestirred myself to look at my copy of Watchmen 12 in periodical format. There too the word balloons in question are white.

D'Jyou Watch the Watchmen? Get it? D'jou Watch? Jew? - With sincere apologies to Alvie Singer. Reader Rich Puchalsky quickly picked up the baton I passed when I wrote

Walter "Rorschach" Kovacs, devotee of bigoted right-wing publications, is clearly Jewish. (So, less clearly, is Dan "NiteOwl" Dreiberg.) Discuss.

And discuss he did, but first. At one point, he asked, "it's worth asking what makes you think that Kovacs and Dreiberg are Jewish. Just their last names?"

And the answer is no, not just their last names. In the case of Daniel Dreiberg, I'm also taking his first name into account. If he were Matthew Dreiberg, or had some other obviously Christian first name, I'd class him with the gentiles. As it is, I'm less sure about him than Rorschach. In the case of Rorschach, not only is he a man named Kovacs who grew up in "a tenement" and worked in the garment industry, his mother's name was, for a time, Glick.

On with the analysis, which Rich offered in two parts. Part the first:

OK. I vaguely remember a historical survey that showed that Jews, in the 20th century were overrepresented in the ranks of activists in *all* political movements. In other words, not only were there a societally overrepresentative number of Communist Jews, there were also an unusual number of Fascists (at least until Fascism became clearly identified with anti-Semitism) and every other political system in between. So it wouldn't be that unusual to find a strongly believing right-wing Jew.

If you accept as true that "Jews tend to be unusually interested in politics", the next question is to ask why. I've heard two main explanations. The first is that something in Jewish culture encourages this. The second is that Jewish marginality encourages it -- that Jews, throughout most of the 20th century, were in societies that discriminated against them, and that naturally they looked for alternative social arrangements. The second of these appears more likely for Walter Kovacs. If I remember his backstory correctly, he grew up with an absentee father and prostitute mother, and there likely wasn't much cultural transmission of Jewishness. However, he is definitely an archetypal marginal figure.

It's worth noting that Judaism has an extensive religious social justice tradition, the strongest of any religion that I've encountered (Christianity incorporates it via the prophets in the Old Testament, but the New Testament weakens it). Dreiberg and Kovacs are the only two superheroes in Watchmen that appear to be primarily motivated by an interest in justice. (Veidt is a megalomaniac, the Comedian a nihilist, the Silk Spectre self-interested, Dr. Manhattan disinterested, and many of the earlier heroes in it either for psychosexual purposes or because they like authoritarian social control). They are the only two who end up making a real choice to confront Veidt at the end.

Part the Second gets very, very interesting:

Hmm. Watchman is so 20th century, and if I had to divide 20th century Judaism into two traditions, I think they'd be religious and secular. Neither one of these characters is religiously Jewish in any discernable form. And a common element in most Jewish traditions is that they're communal, which pretty much leaves out lone vigilantes. I guess that Dreiberg's romanticization of superheroes as knights working together might be a dim reflection of that tradition.

I think that the closest approach to Jewish tradition in Watchmen is Kovac's final confrontation with Dr. Manhattan. Dr. Manhattan is, symbolically, God -- Moore confirms this by his odd mention, later on, of Dr. Manhattan's plans to create human life. Kovacs is the righteous man who demands or negotiates justice from God, a common figure in Jewish tradition. Here's where my knowledge fails, because I can't think offhand of which of the many possible religious figures comes closest to this particular story.

Perhaps it could be seen as a sort of cruelly twisted variant of Job. Kovacs is captured, has what he values (his mask) taken away, is wounded on the approach to Veidt's hideout, and finally is defeated. He is left bitterly complaining about the injustice of what has happened -- and is assured by people who are much smarter and who operate on a much larger scale than he does that the apparent injustice is really part of a necessary plan. But in the end, there is no restitution and new life for him, only destruction. It may be significant that what he leaves is a *book*. If the end of his story is inverted, and God does not give in before human righteousness, than the value of the book (which contains truth, and is therefore symbolically holy) is inverted as well, becoming an implement of destruction.

In a follow-up e-mail, Rich added one more idea:

I just thought of the traditional figure that was eluding me earlier when I was trying to think of which Kovacs was closest to. It's Jeremiah. (Issued many warnings that if the people didn't become righteous, they were headed for destruction and exile, imprisoned, God treats him really badly (according to his own complaints), left a book).

And there you have it!

Mailblog - Rather than update Unruled, Leonard Dickens spends his time e-mailing other bloggers. Hey, no biggie, I like Leonard and I like e-mail too. He writes about the weekend's piece about the (possibly) Incredible Shrinking Terrorist Threat. First:

Actually I would say that both [sick Arab political culture and hatred of American foreign policy], along with the key additions of patriotism, religious fervor and pan-Arabism are breeding the trickle of terrorists, along with the resentful but largely uninterested masses. But was there ever any doubt but that the numbers were small? Muslims are normal people, just like people everywhere. Look at Operation Rescue's numbers compared to those pro-life, and then compare those to the number of actually violent people.

True. The blogosphere is full of people who speak fairly broadly about the ravening Arab hordes. But I agree with Leonard.

Second, I wondered if maybe interventionists and anti-interventionists both needed to place less stress on the threat of terrorism as support for our case. Leonard again:

I think in both cases what people worried about is not large numbers of small events, ala Israel - though that is bad enough. Rather we are worried about rare big events. Like 9/11 itself, or, say, nuking Baltimore. That's the event that I worry about. And that's where isolationism and "invade the world" differ sharply. The neocons and their supporters believe that by invading and threatening we can prevent anyone unsavory from getting a bomb. Ever. Which is a fool's hope in the long run, IMO. Whereas I regard the libertarian side as the realists: "they" are going to get a bomb, sooner or later (and we can hope and work for later, but it will happen). The question then becomes, what are "they" going to do with it? Isolationism makes us not a target.

I agree with this too. But there's a genuine puzzle - why don't America's terrorist enemies apply the "Israel model" to strikes against the US? Is it because they don't think it will do any good, or because they don't have the resources to mount a sustained campaign?

Sean Collins writes on the same topic:

You may well be right about al Qaeda's capabilities in the States, but I'm not sure it's wise to draw the conclusion that such killers aren't being produced. They are, and though they don't appear able to do a lot of killing in the U.S., they're certainly making up for it in Turkey, Iraq, Palestine, Israel, Russia, Algeria, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, etc. That Muslim terrorists seem only able to act in countries with majority-Muslim or large-minority-Muslim populations is kind of heartening, but I'm sure it won't surprise you to learn that I don't think we should be content with that and leave them alone from now on.

Heaven knows we haven't left them alone to this point. Would they even know what to do with themselves if we did?

Clumsy topic transition. Way back like a week or so ago, I carped that the Iraq War had achieved its real objective of preventing any conservative challenge to Dubya in the Republican Primaries or any serious third-party challenge from the right. Godless Capitalist of Gene Expression writes

you said that "if there is a significant third party candidacy, it will be from disaffected liberals rather than disaffected conservatives".

i disagree. you underestimate the anger over this immigration amnesty, which is a disaster. more here

He could be right. Immigration doesn't bother me, so I may insufficiently appreciate the issue's salience for other conservatives. Note: Godless adds

btw, i agree with you now re: iraq and the neocons. i believed wmd would be there and didn't realize how crazy the neocons *were* until after the fact.

Cool! Now I just have to bag Tacitus, Glenn Reynolds and Sean Collins and my work here is done.

And Zizka wrote in about that hot-button issue, political bias in acadamia:

I think that college presidents most often are drawn from people who studied "Administration." You can call this a liberal art if you want, but not in front of me. My second alma mater (Portland State University) has many, many masters programs, perhaps 10-15, called " * Management" or "* Administration" or the like, designed to train the people one or two steps higher up than the engineers, teachers, nurses, doctors, policemen, civil servants, etc., who do the actual work. These are autonomous fields. On the one hand, the best teacher / salesman / policeman / engineer night be the worst manager. On the other hand, though, making the program autonomous means that the hands-on people can end up being managed by others who have only a glancing second-hand knowledge of the work being done. (If people in these programs come from the field they could be good programs; but if people specialize in them from the beginning -- and there's no reason not to, because managers always get paid better -- the practical components will end up being though of as "requirements" to be minimally satisfied for certification purposes.) I think that those are the places that libertarians should look to locate their enemies. The liberal arts / humanities are pitiful survivors and most students ignore that stuff. When you're talking to any management person (including business management) and find them repeatedly failing to hear what you're saying, seemingly deliberately, it's because they've been trained to do so, and they think that they're being professional, and that you are merely showing your ignorance and naivete. (As professionals of course, they will *never* come out and say that, though they *will*.sneer at you). Politically I'm a liberal but when I face that kind of thing I feel about the same way I bet you do (i.e., postal. -- wait, I didn't say that).

PS: I think that you underestimate the degree of political indoctrination in tech and science programs. I can think of examples from geology (mining connection), veterinary (Oregon State specifically) , forestry (of course), and engineering. To say nothing of economics and business.

Okay, that get's us back through about ten days worth of in-box. I've still got mail from the sixth through the seventeenth to process before I dare call the situation managed.

Truth Commission - Democracy Now tangles with Wesley Clark over Kosovo and other matters. My affinity is with Democracy Now here, but Clark gives nearly as well as he gets. Until he gets to the commuter train incident. After that it's all downhill.

Warning - I have either been infected with the latest worm that's going around, or my Supplanter address is the victim of sophisticated mail spoofing. I'm inclined toward the latter view right now, but, let me be clear:

I have not sent you an e-mail with no text, a vague subject header like "Hello" and an unsolicited attachment. If you get such an e-mail, nuke it.

They Do the Work, So I Don't Have To - Bruce Rolston is on the Con Coughlin beat now. My previous Con items are here, here and here. The last is of the most immediate relevance to Bruce's item.

Literature of Ethics Blogging - Brandon Thomas offers the attitude comics creators should take towards the "waiting for the trade" phenomenon. Don't like it? Don't whine. Make it fricking impossible for the reader to bear waiting:

These titles should be jumping with so much electricity that they DEMAND to be purchased in monthly form. Don't take this the wrong way, but if you're sitting back and waiting to read my book in trade form seven months down the line, I'm gonna make your comic buying existence miserable. My intent is to create such a noticeable buzz about what is going on in that book, that your friends, that your message boards, that your own mother, cannot stop talking about it. I will create a situation in which choosing to ignore this title implies that you do not like comics. You're going to wait for the trade? That's what the fuck you think.

That's the spirit! Just write and draw books no one can bear to pass up. To that end, Loyal Reader, I give you: Daredevil #56. Bendis and Maleev return. Matt Murdock is the new Kingpin of Hell's Kitchen. It works for him and for the neighborhood. It doesn't work for various friends of his, various law enforcement agencies or various crooks. Now, because this is a Bendis-written book, there is a lot of what Brandon Thomas characterizes as "this guy is talking, and that guy's talking, and she's talking too." But Bendis also fits Thomas' vision of the future:

Decompressed storytelling will comprise a small segment of the larger whole, relegated to the writers that do it best.

I couldn't imagine waiting six months for Bendis Daredevil. Hell, I barely got through the interminable David Mack intermission as it was. Buy buy buy. Buy it to see Dr. Strange in t-shirt and shades. Buy it to see Matt Murdock's "devil"-ish goatee. Buy it for the set-piece confrontation between Matt and the delegation of superheroes-in-mufti that come to see him, including Peter Parker's peroration on moving to Pittsburgh - "this guy is talking, and that guy's talking" and every word of it kicks definitive ass. And yes, Bendis' Daredevil is the literature of ethics at its peak.

Meanwhile, there's the problem of otherwise fine works exceeding a Stupid Threshold that makes them insupportable despite their admirable qualities. This week's villain is Darwyn Cooke's highly-praised New Frontier from DC. New Frontier reimagines DC continuity from the close of the Second World War through the coming of the Silver Age. The first issue takes us from 1945 through the end of the Korean War. And it's at that end where the book crosses the stupid threshold.

There's this fighter pilot in the USAF named Hal Jordan. And, his commander tells us in the official report that provides the captions to the Jordan arc, USAF pilot Hal Jordan has one admittedly controversial quirk: he refuses to kill anybody.

Omygodjustfuckingspareme.

If you're going to write war stories, have the goddamn balls to acknowledge that killing people is what the participants in a war do. No, New Frontier is not pitched as a hyper-naturalistic story, but the combination of things we're required to swallow - that someone who joins the Air Force refuses to kill; that the Air Force lets him join anyway and invests the umpty-ump dollars required to train this dilettante; that his commander acknowledges Jordan's idiosyncratic attitude toward the basic responsibility of a fighter pilot (to shoot down enemy planes) - is gag-worthy.

And it gets worse. Because the narrative makes clear that what Jordan does do is engage in flight maneuvers designed to bring enemy plans into the sights of his squadron mates, so they can kill them.

So Darwyn Cooke's Hal Jordan is a chickenshit. Not a physical coward by any means. But a moral one, one who participates in acts requiring others to do what he himself will not. He lacks the guts to either follow through on the implications of his own code, abjure violence and take the role of a conscientious objector, or to commit himself to the ethic of the vocation he himself has chosen. He's not principled but squeamish.

How am I supposed to take this character seriously as a hero? How am I supposed to take the setting seriously as a world? If I were the sort of person who throws books across the room, this comic would have gone flapping into the wall like some newsprint bat. Yes, it's fantasy, it's a superhero story, but it's a superhero story with obvious pretensions to saying something about history and politics. HUAC plays a role. The promotional material promises us examinations of (naturally) racism and sexism in 1950s America. Somewhere among Cooke, his editors and DC management, someone made a desperately bad eshetic decision. If the rest of New Frontier is flawless, this misstep will still drag the routine down. And there's no reason to think more such howlers aren't coming.

UPDATE: I am well aware of studies that show that squeamishness (not to mention raw fear) among military personnel can be a major phenomenon; frex, the WWII study where it turned out that, of an entire platoon of GIs who charged a hill, only two discharged their rifles. And I have also read that, when it comes to fighter pilots specifically, a small minority of pilots traditionally account for the vast majority of kills. During the Kosovo War, there were widespread reports of Italian bomber pilots dropping their loads in the Adriatic rather than on their targets. I'm sure there have been and will continue to be soldiers in militaries throughout the world who decline to kill. What we're talking about here is something very different: a soldier explicitly refusing to kill - coming right out and telling his superiors and peers that he won't do it. That's what carries the Jordan story across the Stupid Threshold and throws it on the Stupid Bed for its Wedding Night of Stupid Bliss.

On the Hustings - Obviously the blog of an anti-government extremist is not the place to come for primary blogging, which is what people seem to be into now, but you might enjoy Diana Moon's firsthand report of canvassing in New Hampshire - I did. Takes me back to my own experience volunteering for John Anderson in 1980. (With my kindergarten class! Maybe they'll buy that!) I remember that not only was Manchester a hell of failed industrialism, but so was some coastal city or other. That was the year I learned, to my surprise, how many Francophones live in New Hampshire's cities - a lot. The word was that the Larouche people were going around to their apartments with absentee ballots and having them fill the things out on the spot. Oh yeah, that was when I learned about Lyndon Larouche. I remember a couple of us stopping in a Larouche storefront and surveying the literature.

"This one's my favorite," said an acolyte of a book called Will the Soviet Union Win in the 1980s? Inside, a lot of examples of the "bar graph school of military analysis" - here's a blue bar showing the number of US tanks and a red bar for the number of Russian tanks and, shit! we're doomed!

Basically, Larouche shared an approach to Soviet Studies with Time magazine.

Somehow John Anderson did not win. Fear my enthusiasm, politicians! It has been almost universally deadly to your hopes, the sole exception being Bill Clinton in 1992. (O Ancient of Days.)

Diana also has another entry in her series on Al Sharpton. She's right about Sharpton. The man has blood on his hands. He has no chance of getting the nomination, and these days, serves chiefly as yet more proof of how wrong Fitzgerald was about that "no second acts in American lives" business. But to see him treated with respect - welcomed to the debate stage and paid deference as if he were not a thoroughgoing villain - rankles.

Possible Interruption Update - Thanks to the good people at Hosting Matters, the service interruption I feared and mentioned the other day will not occur. You get uninterrupted whatever it is we do here. I can't stress enough how happy I've been with HM since switching last year, especially compared to my previous host, by the way.

I Watches the Watchmen II - Finished the whole thing. What jumps out:

The last chapter, which I remembered in insufficent detail, tends to bear out the "Eve theory" of the pirate comic more than my alternative.

Also, something suddenly seems very important about the last page: When Seymour reaches for the "crank file" containing Rorchach's journal, it is by no means clear that he will select the journal for publication. He might select something else, leaving Veidt's secret safe - for now. We don't know.

And this is itself a criticism of Veidt's Cunning Plan: We don't know. The morality of Veidt killing "half New York" is predicated on absolute certainty of nuclear war otherwise happening, and absolute certainty of it not happening if the VCP succeeds. Moore doesn't need to show that the secret definitely gets out to give the lie to Veidt's justifications. All he has to do is reestablish the primacy of uncertainty.

Some things worth noting about the decisions heroes make in the aftermath of Veidt's massacre - they are decisions made in the aftermath of Veidt's massacre. The deaths are a fait accompli, as Laurie herself notes. Dreiberg and Juspeczek are not deciding whether to approve the plan itself, but what is the best course of action now that it's happened, and now that early indications are that it is achieving its goals.

Rorscach demands that Dr. Manhattan kill him. The fact that I can see all kinds of reasons why he would do this - from simple rage and death wish to himself not wanting to succeed in exposing Veidt's plan, despite his sense of duty to do so - speaks well of the work.

Here's a helluva note: in the hardcover collections I own, Dr. Manhattan's speech to Silk Spectre and NiteOwl in Ozymandias' presence immediately prior to following Rorshach outside and murdering him is presented in white word balloons, like those of the other humans, rather than the blue ones characteristic of his speech. I believe these are the only white Dr. Manhattan word balloons in the entire novel. Production lapse, or deliberate signification?

God how I hate Veidt. I hated him even at the time, before the collapse of the Soviet Union and end of the Cold War entered the ultimate judgment on his grandiose and narcissistic enterprise.

It's Not as if He Didn't Warn Us at the Time Dept. - Reread the mock Daniel Dreiberg article on owls. Tell me that it can't be read as Moore's own caution about the limits of Watchmen's approach to superheroes. Then get real.

Along that line, isn't it past time to stop discussing Watchmen as a work of hyper-realism? It is anything but. It is elaborately and artificially architected, from the way the "chorus characters" all collect by the newsstand immediately prior to the irruption of Veidt's monster to the various set-piece speeches that Eve notes to the impossibly swift international responses in the wake of Veidt's atrocity that indicate his plan is, on the functional level, succeeding. Publications like The New Frontiersman certainly existed in the 1980s and exist still, but no publication with TNF's frank racism managed the level of attention TNF gets in the mass media - it's as if the statements and creators of the Spotlight or the Thunderbolt regularly provided fodder for network news. (Note that Watchmen's world is enough like ours that African-Americans can be respected professionals in an integrated workforce.) Yes, there is a lot of naturalistic dialogue, but there is quite a lot - most everything out of the mouth of Bernard, the newsvendor - that is theatrical in execution and intent. Moore and Gibbons deploy naturalism for effect and discard it as readily.

Oh the Irony: Walter "Rorschach" Kovacs, devotee of bigoted right-wing publications, is clearly Jewish. (So, less clearly, is Dan "NiteOwl" Dreiberg.) Discuss.

Finally, needless to say, Watchmen fits my "literature of ethics" precept. It is therefore officially okay to like it.

Previous installments: Revealed at Last! Who DOES Watch the Watchmen!

I Watches the Watchmen.

Time to Play What If - A few things that may fit together:

Via mansizedtarget, the stirring statement of U.S. District Judge William Young sentencing shoe-bomber Richard Reid. Here is the merest taste:

In a very real sense Trooper Santigo had it right when you first were taken off that plane and into custody and you wondered where the press and where the TV crews were and he said you're no big deal. You're no big deal. . . .

Next, Calpundit on the Bush Administration's approach to the War on Terror:

This is not a garden variety partisan policy dispute. It's war, and if George Bush considered it to be truly serious he would have done everything he could to build a bipartisan consensus and wide public support for his actions. But he didn't.

And an old Gene Healy item from early 2003. It has aged well:

If AQ had a deep bench, like Hamas, the big event could happen a lot more frequently. If the country were riddled with sleeper cells, we'd see airliners downed, malls blown up, school buses hijacked, and Muhammed-and-Malvo-style sniper attacks on a monthly basis. If AQ had a lot of members/associates in-country, the panicked atmosphere of late 2001 would continue unabated. And very quickly, we'd have national gun registration, Total Information Awareness, widespread use of military tribunals and, yes, internment camps.

But it's becoming increasingly difficult to avoid concluding there aren't that many of them.

In other words, what if, perversely, Kevin Drum is not only right that the Bush Administration does not consider the the terrorist threat to be "truly serious," what if the Bush Administration is, objectively, right about that? What happened in September 2001 was certainly a serious, outrageous and vile event, but was it a repeatable one?

I have no idea. I don't know what combination of zealous international efforts against AQ abroad, stepped -up security at home and simple inadequacy on Al Qaeda's part explains the absence of further spectacular attacks on American soil. It might even be a function of time horizons. After all, almost a decade passed between WTC I and WTC II. On that basis alone, the post-2001 quiet can't be counted as an American success or an Al Qaeda failure. File under Insufficient Data.

But suppose Manhattan had been struck by an earthquake that killed 3,000 people, and the President and his political supporters insisted on dedicating hundreds of billions of dollars, the bulk of the nation's attention and influence to "An End to Earthquakes"? The analogy is far from precise, but I wonder.

I'm not saying we should have had no response to the September massacres, or a purely law-enforcement response. Particularly at the time, it was worth acting on the possibility and even likelihood that more atrocities of that scope were possible, planned and even imminent. As time moves on, though, it may make sense to reevaluate. At the very least, Gene Healy's suggestion that there are not massive numbers of Arabs and Muslims intending to commit violence against the United States in our own country seems more and more likely to be true. This seems to present problems for two theories, one of which I haven't held and one of which I have: 1) That serious sickness in Arab political culture is breeding massive numbers of anti-American terror warriors, and therefore we need an expansive effort to change Arab political culture by force; 2) Hatred of American foreign policy is breeding massive numbers of anti-American terror warriors, and therefore we need to curtail our interventionism in the Middle East. It would appear that one or the other or both are breeding small numbers of anti-American terror warriors. And it appears that maybe, just maybe, both the "reconstructionists" and the anti-interventionists have placed more stress on the threat of terrorism as a justification for our preferred policies than the argument will bear.

It IS About Oil - After Saturday's item in which I wondered if the "Miles Ignotus" 1975 Harper's article about seizing Saudi Arabia's oil fields mightn't have been more of a US bluff than a serious policy proposal, reader Duane Griffin and Hesiod each sent links to articles tending to establish that the seizure was a plan in earnest. See the Washington Post and Salt Lake Tribune.

Hesiod adds

Not being a fan of either the Neocons or Kissinger, I'd say that this had a lot more to do with strategic security and realpolitiks than with PNAC-style grand illusions.

Seems likely. And Kissinger ended up building a very profitable relationship with Saudi Arabia in after years.

It's Not About Oil - Gas, a buck sixty-one at the off-brand stations this weekend. Jeez. Could we make it about the oil after all? I see by the Saban Center Iraq Index that we're still pumping less oil out of Iraq than the pre-war levels (link is pdf). On the bright side, production is up 20% since October. (Check out the Ministry of Oil's goal for December 2004, though - it's hitting Saban's figure for pre-war production. Oy.)

I Watches the Watchmen -I am indeed rereading Watchmen. Of course, the first thing that jumps out on re-reading is the very first page, where Rorschach, in his journal, avows that, when the time comes, and degraded New York begs him to save them, he will say, "No." And of course the time comes and they don't know to beg and he does try.

What strikes me about the style of the book: quite a number of the transitions walk right up to the edge of facile, the sequential-art equivalent of what screenwriters call "on-the-nose" dialogue. This is the esthetic downside of the preoccupation with puns and twinning that Eve identified.

What strikes me about the substance: Here's how you solve "the problem of the superhero story in the post-Watchmen era" - don't worry about it so much. I've reread five issues so far and I'm more convinced than ever: Watchmen is not a story about "what superheroes would really be like." It's a story about Cold War America. The "masks" are the way they are because that approach lets Moore dramatize his anxieties about US politics and culture. Hey, don't believe me. Believe Alan Moore. Here's the actual text of his "bad mood of fifteen years ago" remark:

The apocalyptic bleakness of comics over the past 15 years sometimes seems odd to me, because it's like that was a bad mood that I was in 15 years ago. It was the 1980s, we'd got this insane right-wing voter fear running the country, and I was in a bad mood, politically and socially and in most other ways. So that tended to reflect in my work. But it was a genuine bad mood, and it was mine.

No wonder he has spent so much post-Watchmen time developing more benign takes on the genre - he wasn't trying to "deconstruct superheroes" in the first place.

Watchmen is barely the first word in thinking seriously about superheroes. For one thing, there's only one "superhero" in it, meaning, only one character with superhuman powers. Everyone else is a masked vigilante with no more powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men than you or I have. "Hollis Mason" tells us in his memoir that you had to be pretty off the wall to dress up in a costume and fight crime, which is surely true for us regular folks. But is it as true for someone who can fly, or fire beams from their hands? Watchmen won't tell us. It doesn't care. The only guy who can fly and shoot beams from his hands wears no mask at all.

As Moore suggests, the problem is less what's left of the superhero story after Watchmen than too many creators "still working out the ramifications of me being a bit grumpy 15 years ago."

As a way forward, I suggest reading Tagore Smith's recent item about volunteer firemen. Watchmen can't explain why volunteer firemen do what they do. (It's not trying to.) Neither can Tagore, but he'd sure like to know:

What I'd like to do is ask a few firemen: what could possibly make them think that it was worthwhile to risk their own lives to save others. This isn't a question of bravery, per se- I have run into an inferno to find my own cats (I have been in more than one fire). What I want to know is what is it that makes you run into a fire, if you don't even know one individual that might be in there. It takes no bravery to save what you love. It takes a lot of bravery to save what you don't personally care about, if that salvation comes at risk of your life.

I'd like to say more about the imnplications of that idea - but in the end I am really afraid of them. Maybe some other time.

The entire item contains Tagore's account (pieced together from sources) of how he was thrown out of a burning building as an infant and - I ruin the ending for you - caught. Very much worth your time.

Actually, Tagore is asking about firemen in general. I'm specifying volunteer firemen because doing so eliminates one obvious motive: Hey, it's a living. And of course the core question, "what could possibly make them think that it was worthwhile to risk their own lives to save others," can be spun and flipped in a number of important ways. From Why do firemen do what they do? to Why don't the rest of us do what they do? to Why shouldn't the rest of us do what they do? and even What right do we have not to do what they do? To me, superheroes become an interesting way of addressing these questions. I would argue that, if science fiction is the literature of ideas, the superhero story is the literature of ethics. Or say, rather, it should be. As "literature" need not mean frowny-faced drudgery I would even say the formulation holds for kids' superhero books.

The core question of the superhero story might be phrased as What do we owe other people? The problem is that comics have typically answered the question before they've barely asked it: "With great power must come great responsibility!" Really? Are you sure about that? And how much is "great," anyway? What part of my life can I keep back for myself?

You may have noticed that these questions are salient whether you wear tights or not. They apply to you. Because most of us, certainly most of us in the developed world, have more power, wealth or wherewithal than somebody. Certainly almost everybody reading this blog item could, in principle, quit their present jobs and work pro bono for an African AIDS clinic while subsisting on donated food, or maintain a couple of homeless people instead of taking vacation, or - join the Volunteer Fire Department. Depending on your politics, you may believe that people like yourself or people like Bill Gates really do owe some non-trivial portion of time, wealth, influence or attention to - something or someone. The poor, the ill, the frightened, alienated, the "doomed, damned and despised" as Jesse Jackson once put it.

And having had the thought, you've got more problems. Which will it be, first of all - the poor, the ill or the frightened? Just how should you help them? And when, if ever, do you get off-duty?

Fantasy provides external analogs of internal conflicts, and the subtype of fantasy about superheros is a way of externalizing questions of duty, community and self. How should the powerful behave? (Most Americans are, in global-historical terms, "the powerful" in one aspect or another.) And there is still, almost twenty years after Watchmen, a global political dimension to this. Because the question of what responsibilities impinge on the powerful has everything to do with the position of "hyperpower America" in the present world situation. There are bad moods and good moods yet to have with masked men and women.

Thanks to Eve Tushnet and Johanna Draper Carlson for conversations at SPX and after about versions of the above. And see Peiratikos on Watchmen. Excerpt:

Not only masked vigilantes and big blue superguys threaten the world with their attempts to impose a moral meaning or pattern. Adrian Veidt, Dr. Manhattan, Rorschach, Dan and Laurie, Nixon, all have an asymmetrical power relationship with the rest of the people in the world - I mean, they're potentially better equipped than others to create and manipulate patterns of meaning in the world. Veidt and Nixon are especially similar, in that they both choose methods of acheiving their goals which kill millions of people.

UPDATE: Doh! Added actual link to Tagore Smith. Hurm.

A Fanboy's Instant Blogwatch - Liberal political blogger Abu Aardvark offers a rueful appreciation/regret about the conclusion of Cerebus.

Weekly Fitness Blog Item - Sandy Szwarc has a piece attacking the recent WHO proposals on "Globesity." I am temperamentally and ideologically inclined to skepticism about anything WHO does, and about coercive public health approaches to nutrition and weight management. So I wish I hadn't had prior problems with the work of Szwarc and I wish the new article weren't so link-poor - lots of footnotes to papers you can't read. It was summaries of studies at variance with what they actually said that got Szwarc in trouble with me in the first place, it's a major issue.

Loyal Fitness Blog Item Reader Dave Lull sends a related link to a New York Times guest editorial on the same subject from the other side, by food fascists Kelly D Brownell and Marion Nestle.

Now I'll say this: I'm persuaded that limiting "free sugar" intake is a good idea. And near as I can tell, there's no way WHO's recommendations could be binding on any sovereign country. "Plaintiffs" lawyers might use them to support one of the ongoing or planned class action suits against various food industry sectors, but that's a problem of American legal culture, not necessarily a problem with the science. You can make a case that what we're seeing in response to the WHO report is good old fashioned "state capitalism" aka "rent-seeking" - the sweetener industry fears lost sales and calls on government to save it from the market.

In other fitness blogs. Shawn Fumo writes about weight problems in popular manga series. No he doesn't either! That's a joke, son! Shawn picks up on my misgivings about the profusion of "low-carb products" and ties it to a discussion of advertising I don't completely agree with. (The people who want to sell you "low carb maple syrup" are trying to make money, yes. But so are the people who sell you Granny Smiths and raspberries. As for the four-bladed razor, don't knock it till you've tried it! Me, I haven't, but if too few people find value in it for the manufacturer to make money it'll be gone soon enough. Note: Shawn gratifyingly refers to last week's fitness blog item as "a pretty interesting entry." So there, critics! (Okay, I love you guys too.)

One day I will write a single post incorporating comic books, obesity and the problems of interventionist foreign policy. Then I will retire. I mean, I'm getting clobbered by Tacitus and Drezner in the Drysdale voting anyway.

Bruce Baugh, down two more pounds.

Marathon Prep This Week.

1. Sent the Talking Dog a thank-you e-mail for the training books he sent me.

2. There is no number 2.

Actually, I did a little sprinting this week just because it's been so goddam cold there were times I didn't want to walk. I have seen some people out on the trails and sidewalks during the current frigid spell. I admire those crazy people.

Plus, Zack Ajmal of Procrastination offered his ideas and a link to the ExRx marathon training schedule. Zack's advice includes, "Also, do run in a shorter race (5K/10K/half-marathon) or two before the marathon," which certainly sounds like a good idea. I almost ran my first 5K last fall but had some kind of scheduling conflict.

Vital signs: Weight 161, waist 33", resting pulse around 60. The weight is down five pounds from last week, which means only that I'm still bouncing between 161 and 166 from week to week. The waist represents something of an improvement over recent bloating, and the pulse is heading back down. You know there's a theory that a human heart works for a certain number of "reps," right, and that the slower your pulse rate the longer it takes you to use them up? Just mentioning. More next week.

Looking Over the Fence of the Rez if not actually off it:Tacitus.

Now we must ask ourselves what's best for the party in November '04. It's not necessarily electoral success. If the President wins reelection this fall, then the elements of the party that feel free to ignore core conservative principles have won. Victory is, after all, the ultimate validation. And defeat is the ultimate rebuke: is that the level of rebuke we need to get the party leadership back on the principled path? I don't mean to indulge in a repudiation of political pragmatism and enter the realm of the tiresome zealots one meets at CPAC: but I do think we need to examine whether the pendulum has swung too far. There is a separability between the conservative cause and the Republican party, but let's be honest and admit that one without the other is essentially impotent. Our current course means that split is, I think, coming sooner or later, to the detriment of both. I'm willing to take a pretty big hit to head that off.

Revealed at Last! Who DOES Watch the Watchmen? - Eve Tushnet does, in a justly-lauded essay on the Shakespearian method to the classic Moore-Gibbons miniseries. If you ever read Watchmen, this essay is well worth your time.

Big Yes! moment: "The superhero stuff has gotten the most attention, but in my opinion the infusion of existential questions into the murder-mystery tropes is more crucial to the book."

Biggest Maybe... moment. Eve has a plausible take on the thematic importance of the pirate comic interludes:

The pirate comic is a story of despair as a self-fulfilling prophecy: The castaway assumes that the black freighter's crew has devastated his hometown, and so he himself causes the carnage he feared. Veidt assumes that without his hideously gory intervention, the world will end, and so he himself causes the book's greatest destruction. I am pretty sure that part of the point of the pirate comic is to suggest that Veidt is wrong, that his deadly plan was not the only way to prevent World War Three.

Like I said, plausible. But another possibility has to be considered: the castaway stands not for Veidt but for America, and the "auto-genic carnage" (to coin a phrase), for the logical outcome of America's Cold War national security policies. If that's the case, the valence of the interpolation changes radically. Now, something to consider: Eve talks about the "realism" of the world of the Watchmen, its tangibility. So, let us recall that the pirate comic exists within that world, being read by a kid in that world, and it was perforce authored in that world too. It's a horror comic. So, which anxiety are writer and/or artist likelier to have that motivates the tale, an anxiety about a retired superhero's secret plan or an anxiety about a country's nuclear policy?

Note that this doesn't settle the issue. The pirate comic can easily mean one thing to its (notional) creators and another thing entirely to us. It can mean both things. Eve's entire essay is about the twinnings, near-symmetries and false symmetries of Watchmen's architecture.

For what it's worth, I always thought that, with the end-matter mock-essay "Dr. Manhattan: Super Powers and the Super Powers," Moore did just a little too good a job of mimicking an academic Soviet apologist. Watchmen is - I state the crushingly obvious - only about superheroes to the extent necessary to be about America, and as with many leftist critiques of the Cold War the Soviet Union is strangely invisible. But it's been years since I read the book and who knows if I will think the same when I reread it. And it's here in front of me as I type, and reread it, thanks to Eve's inspiration, is what I'm going to do right away.

(John Jakala provides, like me, but footnotes to Tushnet, but they're good footnotes. Check it out.)

Wilderness of Magazine Archives - You know how a lot of magazine websites hold their newsstand content back from web publication for a bit? Harper's website just got up to 1975. Link via Polytropos, who offers a pretty good recap of what is, for such a comparative whelp, ancient history. I think he might be missing one possible angle though.

As Nate notes, the article appeared in Harper's March, 1975 issue under the pseudonym "Miles Ignotus" (Latin: "Unknown Soldier") and advocated seizing the Saudi oilfields. I recall a similar article in Playboy sometime between 1975 and 1978. Or was it Penthouse? Clearly, I read it for the articles - I just don't remember which one I read. But where was I? Oh yeah, the US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, James Akins, attacked the article in a television interview, saying that the author was "either a madman, a criminal, or an agent of the Soviet Union."

Actually, Nate points out that the best available evidence is that it was Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

(So Akins got two out of three! And some of your firebreathing conservatives always did think Henry the K was working for the Kremlin! But I'm losing the thread again.)

Okay, Nate talks about the practicality and the ethics of the "Ignotus Plan":

Anyway. It's an interesting read, especially because a matter-of-fact policy argument that's so brutally aggressive would never fly today. We're left with the question of whether, in those smoke-filled back rooms, the architects of America's current foreign policy look back on assessments like Ignotus' with chagrin or with nostalgia.

Here's the possibility I think he's missing: what if the article was the plan? That is, what if the point wasn't to advocate seizing the Saudi oil fields, but to be seen to do so - to send a Kissingerian message about not pushing the US too far? If that were the case, you would want the Saudis to be able to figure out who the real author was, and you'd sacrifice Akins (who got fired about a month after the interview). Might be worth following Akins' future fortunes to see how soft a post-ambassadorial landing he made. There may not really have been a desire to seize the oilfields at all, for all the reasons Akins and Nate, from their positions thirty years apart, rehearse. But there probably was a desire to make the Saudis think we might seize them, or that we could one day be pushed to it. If Ignotus really was Kissinger, that strikes me as the most likely explanation.

It's an Honor Just to be Nominated II - Thanks to everyone whose vote made this site a finalist for a "Drysdale" (best non-liberal blog). Now whoever gets the most votes among the finalists will win the award. Apparently you vote by simply posting a comment to the Drysdale finalists item saying who you want to win.

Just mentioning.

Fair Warning - There's an outside chance that this site will have a bit of a service interruption some time over the next couple of days. It could be down as much as a week. Or not.

Shoot if You Must this Old Grey Head - Paging Barbara Fritchie - they're after the Stars and Stripes again:

So the Pentagon is basically telling us that the reason Stars and Stripes exists - to provide a real newspaper to troops during wartime - is just too gosh darned expensive to fund. And we're talking about just a few million dollars here, piss in a pot for the Pentagon's bloated budgets. It's not about money. It's totally political. It's about trying to kill Stars and Stripes.

As the article points out, "this comes just a few months after our survey of the troops got front page play in the Washington Post and was a huge embarrassment to the Pentagon."

Will Wonders Never Cease - Christopher Deliso quotes Derrida on terrorism and I find myself seeing the old French bastard's point. Derrida suggests that "One day it might be said: 'September 11' - those were the ('good') old days of the last war. Things were still of the order of the gigantic: visible and enormous!"

Now, you may be thinking, at first blush, not another European intellectual aestheticizing the brutality of the September Massacres! Spare me! But that is not what Derrida is doing at all, as his next statement makes clear:

...(however) nanotechnologies of all sorts are so much more powerful and invisible, uncontrollable, capable of creeping in everywhere. They are the micrological rivals of microbes and bacteria. Yet our unconscious is already aware of this; it knows it, and that's what's scary."

In other words, Derrida fears the passing of an era when the scope of a terrorist act was at least comprehensible. Because there is no real "End to Evil," the day is coming when the threats to the West will be everything from rogue nanotech to designer viruses. I would add that there is no reason to think enemy "rogue states" will play a substantial role in fostering such terrorism. They will mostly be incapable of producing the bleeding-edge weapons terrorists will wish to wield. No, as with the September Massacres, the terrorists will succeed by commandeering our own productions and turning them against us. This may happen by outright theft, as with the planes used against New York City and Washington DC, or suborning cooperation from disaffected members of our military-industrial complex. Of course, disaffected members of our military-industrial complex may cut out the middleman and engage in terror themselves, as may have happened with the still-unsolved anthrax attacks.

Against this real, major and long-term threat, we've erected - distraction. It's as if the goal was to keep ourselves so busy there would be no time for darker and larger thoughts about the scope of our danger. As Deliso puts it:

The US government knows it too, but admitting as much would not reassure the people. Therefore it must substitute the old enemy, and the old war - a specific villain (Saddam) in a fixed place (Iraq) - for the inescapable reality that the rules have been changed. Without an Iraq War thrown into the mix, and without the media whipped up into a subsequent frenzy, the government would have had to publicly confront the unpleasant reality of the new world disorder on two fronts: first, an historical one (the disastrous results of a policy of massive global intervention); and second, the philosophical one (the reality that the "war on terror" is a farce due to terrorism's very non-territorial and globalized nature).

I've previously considered some of the implications of the present situation and the situation to come in "A Brief History of the Future." And is even a single Presidential candidate discussing the larger problem? Not that I've heard.

Let's Play What If? - The Financial Times story on Ahmed Chalabi's joining the call for early elections in Iraq contains the following passage:

US officials have said direct elections cannot be held without an accurate census and voter registration, which could take months or years.

Okay, here's the game. It's January 2003. Saddam Hussein agrees to "free and fair elections" but allows that it will take "months or years" to complete "an accurate and voter registration."

What is the Bush Administration's response?

Department of Priorities II - Self-styled freelance journalist and activist Eric Smith sent around a press release about his theory that the US has already captured Osama Bin Laden and the Bush Administration is waiting to announce the news at a politically propitious time. I see no reason to believe that that has happened, and little reason to believe that it wouldn't. Conspiracy theory? Sure, but there are plenty of those to go around on all sides. But one particular passage struck me as a perfect summary of a particular kind of left-liberal mindset:

The consequences of surrender will be incalculable: one by one, like dominos, institutions we cherish will fall -- environmental laws, social security, independent media, healthy advocacy groups, assistance for the unemployed, impoverished and disenfranchised -- and, foremost, the right to choose our leaders.

Transfer payments, regulation and "health advocacy groups." (Eat more fiber!) Those are the big things that come to Mr. Smith's mind. Not habeas corpus, "extraordinary rendition," revocation of citizenship, or that Bill of Rights stuff. And again the misconception that "foremost" is "the right to choose our leaders" when foremost is the right to be free of "our leaders" in broad areas of our lives. It's the Bush Administration's dogged assault on this real "foremost" right that marks it as a menace.

Bet he's in trouble with someone for leaving abortion off his list, though.

Department of Priorities

As you can see from that Globe and Mail piece, the Canadian press continues to be all over this story despite the search on and threatened arrest of Juliet O'Neill (which seems to be totally backfiring). The American press, which might well have stronger legal protections than any country in the world, runs wire stories about Arar's lawsuit on page 17. The White House, as far as I can tell, has not been asked about the case once. But God knows we needed 48 hours of hand-wringing over Howard Dean's Iowa caucus speech.

Katherine at Obsidian Wings. (Who else would it be?)

I Forget, is Two a Trend? - Another conservative blogger writes to complain about something I wrote. Kevin Holtsberry e-mails

I think your post about small government conservatives was a bit disingenuious. The very next sentence after the paragraph you quote is: "The major programmatic fault of the speech is also that of his presidency: There was too much spending." Combine this with the fact that the paragraph above says "most" makes your point rather unfair. It may be true that small government conservatives have little voice in the Republican Party but NR's editorial doesn't prove your point, hence the two cheer thing.

Well, I don't think I was disingenuous at all, oddly enough. There's a lot more to "small-government conservatism" than spending. There's federalism, there's constitutionalism, there's separation of powers. There's the notion that government should shy from social engineering. Everything in the paragraph I quoted shows the President contravening those principles and NR cheering him for it. (PATRIOT Act, funding for marriage promotion, butting into state control of schools - drug testing - and marriage laws, federal abstinence education. "Here's today's movie, Health Class. See Joe not putting his dick in Jane? Do just like Joe.") I notice that NR's editors don't even manage to sound as upset about spending as John Cole. (I like John Cole, but I think we can all agree he's a partisan Republican.)

If small government conservatism were just about spending, the combination of SOTU and the NR editorial would still establish that 1) the president has nothing for SGCs; and 2) NR's dismay at this is minor. But small government conservatism is about federalism, constitutionalism and the sense that there are things the government shouldn't mess with. It's not the same as libertarianism by any means - a small government conservative may be just fine with a local school board instituting drug testing - but the belief in federal limits is, or used to be, a core conviction of a sizable swath of the Republican Party. Those folks have been abandoned at best and at worst betrayed.

Responsible Mail - The item about hawkish responsibility for Iraqi outcomes in general and Tacitus' responsibility in particular drew several e-mail responses, not least from Tacitus himself:

Re: "For the benefit of those keeping score at home, yes, this is the same Tacitus who argued (if that's the word) that those of us who marched in an ANSWER-organized antiwar rally gave off penumbras and emanations that made us personally responsible for starvation in North Korea and a bunch of other stuff including, I believe, dutch elm blight."

Wow. I never argued that at all. I said you lent your legitimacy to a pro-Stalinist organization (damning enough in itself); not that you were "personally responsible for starvation in North Korea." I'm really surprised you'd resort to this sort of dishonest statement. It's worthy of....well, Kieran Healy.

As for my "minimizing" the dangers of shari'a, that's refuted in the comments to the post you link to, and discussed here as well. . Short version is that saying that I minimize it is baseless. The comparison of shari'a vs. Ba'athist law was made by others to whom I was responding -- as a read of Kip's original post should have made clear.

Finally, since I know you read this thread (which is merely one of many) from a while back -- I would assume that the charge that I simply do not pay attention to the actions and shortcomings of the leadership would not be hurled in my direction.

I don't mind policy disagreements, as you know -- in fact, I am moving closer to your position these days in any case -- but I do think this post of yours was pretty egregiously misrepresenting.

There are a few issues to disentangle here. First, on the matter of International ANSWER and penumbras and emanations I'll plead not dishonesty but memory - I certainly didn't reread the original. I just did reread it (some days this job isn't worth it) and I concede Tacitus' point about what he was actually saying. My bad.

Re minimizing the dangers of Sharia. In retrospect, I may not have placed sufficient weight on the italicised (by me) phrase in the passage below:

Presumably Iraqi women would have been better off under the constant threat of outright execution or rape at the Mukhabarat's hands; now, horrors, they must face Islamic law! I'm facetious here -- Islamic law is pretty bad, and it's definitely unjust to make a population live under it. (Not sure the family law part is as bad as a murderous police state, though.)

but in toto, it still seems coy to me - 1. Introduce comparison. 2. Disavow comparison. 3. Wonder if comparison doesn't after all have something to it. I doubt I'm the only one for whom the disavowel got lost. I appreciate the clarification. I've seen the unclarified version from a lot of hawkish commentators in the wake of the Sharia story, though, so I'll point my original response to the Sharia-Saddamism comparison wholly at them.

On the issue of the shortcomings of the leadership and Tac's attention to same, my problem is that the item he cites dates from late June. I still think that rather late in the game, given the Wolfowitz testimony of late February alone.

Rereading my article, I wish I had left the ANSWER stuff out of it and had managed a sunnier tone. And as I said in the update to that post, my argument with Tacitus is as nothing compared to my argument with the Bush Administration, or even with most other hawks. But I stand by more core critique:

The critique does not assume "total foreknowledge of all events and consequences." It simply assumes, correctly, that intentions are not enough - your responsibility extends not just to the desired but to the likely and foreseeable results of your actions. You can be responsible for bad outcomes even if you did not foresee them if you should have foreseen them.

Among stronger criticisms of Tacitus than I am comfortable making, Richard Puchalsky's e-mail makes a point about "total foreknowledge":

[Tacitus] must have had strong suspicions that it might happen or he wouldn't have been warning about it for months, as he points out in his own defense.

Sean Collins e-mail re Sharia isn't as bad as Saddam justifications should be understood, in light of Tacitus' clarifications, to apply to apologists who are not Tacitus:

I mean, isn't that the whole point of the new hawkishness: that tyranny, terrorism and theocracy are ALWAYS unacceptable, no matter who's using them? That's certainly why I got on board--I was ashamed of fifty years of "he's a bastard, but he's OUR bastard" foreign policy.

To say "sharia's bad, I guess, but hey, Saddam's gone!" is to miss the entire point of going into Iraq in the first place.

The kid's got a good heart. I hope one day he'll see the distinction between "fighting fascism" and fighting fascism on behalf of other fascists, which is so often what we end up doing.

As Opposed To . . . ? - Ronald Bailey has a good piece on HSAs at Reason's site, but has unwittingly activated one of my tics:

Because health spending in the United States soared by 9.3 percent in 2002, the largest increase in 11 years, according to a report from U.S. Health and Human Services officials in the journal Health Affairs. (The total spending was $1.6 trillion, around $5,440 for every man, woman, and child in the nation.) Health care expenditures now account for about 15 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product.

My instant reaction is, So? We spend a lot on health care. Health care is good. The ideas behind health care are

1) You don't die as soon as you would have otherwise.
2) You get better from illness or injury.

Those sound like pretty valuable outcomes. Value attracts spending dollars. What's a better use of your money - not dying as soon as you would have otherwise, or one of the cool new TVs we have now? You can't watch TV when you're dead. One of the reasons health care costs have gone up is that there are ever newer and cleverer ways to not die so soon, and those ways cost money.

Don't get me wrong. There may be all kinds of problems with the way we're spending our health care dollars, starting with the fact that our system is based on "insurance" that is less insurance as such than a system of service contracts. Instead of pooling risks, group health "insurance" as it exists pools certainties. And because it's tied so tightly to employment, it makes things harder for the unemployed, the self-employed and even businesses than things need to be. Moving to a model of HSAs and genuine insurance (pooling risk), may alleviate the flaws of the present system. But the mere fact that health care spending is a certain proportion of GNP, or rising at a certain rate faster than inflation is itself no proof of a problem.

(Note: I'm mostly just echoing something Mickey Kaus said years ago.)

Do Not Adjust Your Set - The site may look momentarily weird as you check in tonight. Some of the "under the hood" changes are billowing up through the seams of the hood from time to time. I'm trying like hell to fix the text selection problem in Internet Explorer but not, so far, having much luck at it.

However, for diehard NS4 users for whom I broke the main page, I've added an NS4 index page. I may not be the most popular blogger out there, but I surely have the most indexes.

UPDATE: The text selection problem still defeats me. I give up for the evening. People who are dying to quote from Unqualified Offerings can still

o View | Source in IE
o Just select and go in Opera or any version of Mozilla

Still working on the problem.

Do You Not Exist or Do You Just Not Count? - Small-government conservatives, I mean. Take a look at National Review's unsigned "Two Cheers for the Speech" editorial:

There was something in the speech for most conservatives. Law-and-order conservatives learned that the president is prepared to defend the Patriot Act during the campaign. Free-market conservatives got a renewed call for making the tax cuts permanent, beefed-up health savings accounts, tort reform, and - above all - continued support for personal accounts in Social Security. Social conservatives got increased funding for abstinence education, drug testing in the schools, rhetoric against steroid abuse by athletes, and, perhaps most important, some presidential support for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.

Small-government conservatives are certainly "free-market conservatives" too, but once you get past tax cuts, HSAs and rhetorical nods in directions the administration has no intent of actually going (tort and social security reform), Bush's SOTU address has less than nothing for you. It is useful of National Review to point out, if only by omission, the complete elimination of limited government as a Republican Party principle.

That About Sums It Up - Peter David explains why I can't watch American Idol.

Some of these people, the moment they open their mouth, it's clear they don't know an E flat from a Salt Flat. Why then in God's name would the producers send them up the line? Only one answer comes to mind: Knowing these people are horrendous, they send them before the three judges and the TV camera specifically so they can humiliate themselves on national TV. I'm not sure why I never realized that before, but that has to be the case. 'Wow, this guy is so awful, we've got to share him with America." Seems kind of--oh, what's the word--cruel.

Also, they seem to go for the sorts of bombastic pop singers that keep Diane Warren in business. But the cruelty thing is the real problem.

"See, They Return, One and by One - Andrew David Chamberlain is back with the sort of simultaneously philosophical, economically rigorous and plain funky libertarian blogging that you can't get here. See "METROSEXUALS, KARL MARX, AND MAKING OUT IN THE BACK SEAT" among others.

Stray SOTU Stuff - Most useful SOTU commentary I've seen so far . . .

Gene Healy with a contrarian take on the "steroids in sports" passage."

Kevin Drum has your metric system for you, right here and here.

Related to the second Drum link, Electrolite vamps on Smoking gun-related activity program initiatives.

Tacitus asks, "What about the role of athletic supplements in marriage? What about activist judges who defy the will of the people who want athetic supplements? What about marrying your athletic supplements?" and other stuff. (Scroll up and down.)

Also from Tacitus, and this is important:

Is there any question that the Patriot Act reauthorization is meant to play the same role in the '04 cycle as the Homeland Security bill did in '02? Not too classy.

Bush's SOTU speeches have been useful because they really have heralded the way he has tried to govern (viz. the Axis of Evil speech where Bush fully incorporated the doctrine of "preemptive" "defense".) If there was any remaining doubt that under Bush's leadership, the Republicans have become an authoritarian party, this speech removes it. Small-government conservatives, libertarians and traditionalists can no longer imagine that Bush's Republican Party is somewhat wrongheaded. It is an outright menace.

New Republic Writer Jim Henley is how I'd like to be referred to from now on. After all, I sold them a single article back in 1993. In Andrew Sullivan's world (scroll down to "FIFTH COLUMN WATCH"), ever publishing a single article with a venue makes you a "[that venue] writer," and - hey how about that - Andrew Sullivan was TNR's editor when my article was published.

Maybe I'll get new business cards.

Tired - The Swedish Mobile acted up in a major way today. I got home late and am way too tired to deal with SOTU, Iowa, superhero thoughts, Captain America thoughts or the, you know, massive demonstrations in Iraq. So you'll have to look elsewhere for stuff to read. For instance, Katherine at Obsidian Wings has finished her series on Maher "The US sent me to Canada and all I got was this lousy two years of unending hell" Arar. (Scroll up from the bottom. Memo to Katherine: scrolling up and reading down at the same time sucks. Better to have a header post with links to all 13 installments that the reader can keep coming back to.)

Annals of Cheek - From an op-ed in the NYT by Lebanese law professor and author Chibli Mallat:

The way forward, then, is simple. The 10 members of the governing council whom I met with agree on this: the council, as a national unity government, should be unconditionally recognized as in charge of Iraq's destiny, with the support of the United States-led coalition and whoever else wishes to join in a democratic course of reconstruction.

As such, the council would be deemed the official interim government of Iraq - making the United States plan to select a national assembly by July 1 unnecessary. The council would be empowered to draft a constitution and set the parameters for what a new government would look like and when and how it would be elected.

Pretty amazing. Mallat talked to ten politicians, all of whom agreed that it made a great deal of sense that the organization in which they held power should be maintained, strengthened and perpetuated. I don't doubt that his reporting of their sentiment is accurate.

(Via Hit and Run.)

Actually It IS Your Responsibility - kip at Long Story Short Pier blames the hawks for the IGC's imposition of Sharia. ("Blame" is a word that, like "firetruck" starts with F and ends with -UCK, right?)Tacitus calls his argument "ridiculous":

The logic of the critique above is ridiculous, as it assumes total foreknowledge of all events and consequences.. One might as well blame Abraham Lincoln for the Klan and Jim Crow. Had he only not invaded! The fact is that I've been discussing, warning, fulminating, and exhorting on the need to confront and ward off Shi'a theocrats in Iraq for long months now.

For the benefit of those keeping score at home, yes, this is the same Tacitus who argued (if that's the word) that those of us who marched in an ANSWER-organized antiwar rally gave off penumbras and emanations that made us personally responsible for starvation in North Korea and a bunch of other stuff including, I believe, dutch elm blight.

But that's not the point. The point is, Tacitus is wrong on every count. The critique does not assume "total foreknowledge of all events and consequences." It simply assumes, correctly, that intentions are not enough - your responsibility extends not just to the desired but to the likely and foreseeable results of your actions. You can be responsible for bad outcomes even if you did not foresee them if you should have foreseen them. Conservatives have no problem recognizing this truth when it comes to domestic policy. When liberals desire benign outcome X, but the policy they implement results in dire consequence Y, conservatives blame liberals, and rightly. We hold alcoholics to account for the gap between intentions and results. I meant to take the kids to the park but I lost track of time. *Hic!

In the case of Tacitus specifically, it's all well and good that he's been discussing, warning and so on for long months now. What he should have been doing for long months before that is reading his goddam Hayek, particularly the part in The Road to Serfdom about where the enthusiasm for central planning comes from. One of these days I'll dig out the exact quote - it becomes more relevant by the day. But in paraphrase, large diverse coalitions will form in favor of central planning because the constituent members of the coalition each favor some specific policy that central planning would enable. The problem is that the various policies favored by the various factions tend to be incompatible - so once the planning regime comes, many, many people find themselves disappointed.

The Iraq war and occupation have been run by people stupider and more venal than Tacitus, who is neither stupid nor venal. But as a citizen he had a responsibility to see the actual decision makers for who they were. The minute that Paul Wolfowitz stated that Iraq lacked the sort of ethnic and sectarian strife that plagued the Balkans, Tacitus and every other intelligent hawk should have thrown the replay flag. Upon review, the principled hawks needed to realize they were being asked to back a war led by clowns. The incumbent duty strikes me as obvious.

One other matter. Echoing comments I've seen by other hawks, Tacitus minimizes the Sharia decree by comparing it to the horrors of the previous regime:

Presumably Iraqi women would have been better off under the constant threat of outright execution or rape at the Mukhabarat's hands; now, horrors, they must face Islamic law! I'm facetious here -- Islamic law is pretty bad, and it's definitely unjust to make a population live under it. (Not sure the family law part is as bad as a murderous police state, though.)

It's not that there's nothing to this argument, but there are two problems: 1) it's true that, in principle, every Iraqi woman was at risk for arbitrary execution or rape at the hands of the Hussein regime. But from the perspective of an Iraqi woman rather than an armchair theoretician, it's a question of odds. What were the chances of any given Iraqi woman would be arbitrarily executed or raped? What are the chances that a given Iraqi woman will fall foul of Sharia in the new domestic code? If the second odds are substantially greater than the first, then Iraqi women really may feel they are worse off. That's not for me to say, of course, but it's not for Tacitus to say either. 2) It has yet to be established how much better than the Hussein regime future Iraqi governments will be. It would be fatuous to say that Iraq has seen its last massacre, arbitrary detention or extrajudicial execution.

UPDATE: You know, rereading the above, it spends too much time on Tacitus and not enough time on the US goverment. The real responsibility lies with the latter.

Bridging the Generation Gap - More gaming news from the weekend: we took the plunge and bought Offering Boy his first Yu-gi-oh! cards - two starter decks, so that he and I could play each other. I have stayed away from collectible card games until now, and avoided encouraging OB in that direction too - the last thing I want to be doing is driving him to tournaments on Saturdays and explaining why I won't shell out for $5 booster packs. But he started playing with schoolfriends this week and clearly enjoyed it and hey, like his dad is going to forbid him to play games.

Anyway, having now played several games, I understand why kids play collectible card games - they can read the goddam cards. That puts them ahead of me, unless I squint. If the light's bad? Forget it.

Kind of fun, though. I realize Yu-gi-oh is far from the most sophisticated CCG out there, and I can see the little tricks in the rules that are meant to encourage you to BUY MORE CARDS. But like I said: fun.

Welcome Interstate Managers - RealOne is streaming the most recent Fountains of Wayne album this month. I had liked the single, "Stacey's Mom," a lot, but what it didn't prepare me for was how beautiful this album is. Many songs have a reflective quality and a lyricism I didn't expect. "Valley Winter Song" is my favorite. "All Kinds of Time" is a stunner - a lush, stirring ballad about - football. No really. Lots of funny, trippy stuff too, a nice country pastiche, and a couple of guitar-pop rockers, but it's the ballads that make this CD a revelation. Two thumbs up. They're both mine, but I'm making an effort here.

Happy Martin Luther King Day - Spent the afternoon with Nate "Polytropos" Bruinooge and gaming buddy Classic Dave playing Paul Czege's My Life with Master. It turns out that the game deserves its substantial reputation. Very easy to pick up; the mechanics are simple but intricate and certainly enable the players to produce "gothic style" stories together. At ten bucks it's a steal. I could say that the games' themes of domination, accomodation and resistance are appropriate to the holiday, but really, we were just taking advantage of the day off. For actual appropriate to the holiday material, Sean Collins has posted the entire text of the 1963 speech at the Lincoln Memorial. I admire King's politics while having no use for his economics. But more than anything I'm in awe of his courage. MLK Day is the holiday that demands that each of us be that much braver than we're comfortable being.

This is Sports Center with Unqualified Offerings - Sincere condolences to hoosier Radley Balko after today's Indianapolis-New England game. I was pulling for you. But congrats to Charles Dodgson, whose Pats really are a nice team, though their continued success risks more "face down individualism" from his state's senior senator, which would suck. And to Atrios, diehard Eagles booster, neener neener neener from your NFC East neighbor.

I'll be rooting for the Pats in the Super Bowl, but not rooting against Carolina. I like them, and Steven Davis still has my heart. But I almost always root for the AFC team if the Redskins aren't playing. Predictions? Are you kidding?

UPDATE: Adam at Throwing Things offers the Five Stages of Eagles Grief, which I found immensely cheering. Also, the Curse of William Penn.

Best Wishes - So I thought to check to see if Our Man Deeds (aka "John Galt") had anything on today's big explosion at the too-well-named Assassin's Gate entrance to the CPA's Green Zone. He didn't. Then I got to worrying.

"We have indications that some of those that were killed were American citizens, U.S. contractors," Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said during a news conference in Baghdad. "We believe the current number at two. We're waiting for firmer confirmation."

Which description fits John Galt (among many other people). I hope he's okay. And I regret all the Iraqis killed in the attack too.

Sigh. The Sydney Morning Herald notes that "A suicide driver detonated a powerful car bomb outside the main gate to the headquarters compound of the US-led coalition yesterday, killing at least 25 people and wounding about 130, as the United States prepared to ask the United Nations to play a far greater role in Iraq." There may well be a relation. The pattern of past spectacular attacks is that they've acted to discourage UN and other international involvement in the occupation.

Meanwhile, in John Galt's most recent available message we see all the frustrations to which the social engineer is heir. The Shi'a aren't playing ball. The IGC's sharia thing threatens the rule of law. Will "John Galt" ever connect what he finds himself doing with what his namesake had to say about grandiose state schemes? I hope he is well and whole and will have the time to decide such a question is worth pondering.

(SMH link via Counterspin.)

Dept. of Interesting Stray Finds - While researching the previous item I happened upon an interesting Ha'aretz article about Israeli government leaks to the press.

In most cases a leak relates to the start of contacts with some Arabs, and after the leak, the contacts are usually broken. There is scarcely any doubt that the leak is aimed at thwarting the contacts and even smearing those Israelis trying to nurture connections with the Arab side.

There is also a message here to the Arab side - the person with whom they are making contact is not someone who can keep a secret, and he is best avoided. In many cases, this has succeeded. The Arab side is put off because it has realized that on the Israeli side there is usually someone - not necessarily the person with whom they are talking - who will leak what is going on.

The news peg is recent leaks about preliminary contacts between the government of Syria's Bashar Assad and the government of Israel. It chronicles the cycle of contacts, leaks and ruptures in loving detail. Worth reading.

Dept. of On the Other Hand - Diana Moon finds a Guardian article suggesting that, pace the Reuters piece I linked earlier, Libya's nuke program was surprisingly far along. The article is about Libya's centrifuge purchases, and a reported seizure of a German ship by the Italians last October that was carrying 1,000 complete centrifuges to Tripoli. Plot twist at the end:

While US government sources have claimed that the seizure persuaded Col Gadafy to do his deal with Washington and London, diplomats and analysts closely following the nuclear trade are convinced that the ship was impounded because of information provided by the Libyans.

According to this version circulating in Vienna, headquarters of the IAEA, Col Gadafy told the CIA about the shipment as a goodwill gesture to convince the Americans and the British that he was committed to the deal being negotiated.

Two things about the Guardian story give me pause: 1) British press! 2) I trolled Google News for contemporaneous stories on the October shipment seizure and found nothing. I class it among the counter-intuitive things that nobody made a big deal of it at the time. But the point is, Libya's nuke program may have been a bigger deal than I've been suggesting. Or it may not have. You know.

Weekly Fitness Blog Item - As announced last week, personal data appears at the end of the weekly fitness blog item going henceforth, not the beginning.

That Didn't Take Long Dept. - In, perhaps, less time than the American food industry ruined the low-fat diet concept, it is quickly doing the like for low carb diets. In the former case, doctors and the government said "reduce your fat intake." Before you knew it, the "Snackwell's phenomenon" inundated us with untold "low-fat" junk food, laden with sugar and more than up to the task of ruining your lipid and insulin levels and packing on the pounds. I notice just this month that, with the newfound respectability of controlled-carbohydrate diets, including studies that seem to show that, at the very least, controlled-carb diets are no less effective than low-fat diets for losing weight and controlling cholesterol, there is suddenly a profusion of low-carb product, a lot of it junk food. (In some cases it is simply that previously-existing low-carb foods and snacks are finally hitting mass distribution channels .)

Just last year, if you wanted to do a "low-carb diet", you pretty much ate

Meat, Poultry and Fish
Vegetables
Salad Oils
and eventually, nuts and berries and certain fruits.

You recognised that if you indulged in a beer or french fries or pizza you were cheating. Now all of those and more are readily available, if expensive, in "low-carb" versions. Some of them are, like Snackwells et al, high-calorie and not so good for you. (And a lot of them, like the candy bars, taste like crap.)

The thing is, under the old low-carb diet plan, if you favored unsaturated fats over saturated then you were mostly putting Good Things in your body. Despite the myths, Robert Atkins himself warned that, no, you couldn't really eat a whole steak every day, that things like bacon and sausage should be occasional foods because of the nitrates and other dubious ingredients and that "delicious" low-carb alternatives to popular high-carb foods were not to be confused with staples. Nutritionists might quibble about the proportions of what you were eating, but they wouldn't yell, "Stop eating vegetables!" Now increasing numbers of people will decide that low-carb dieting means controlled-carb candy bars and pancakes etc. etc. etc.

It was fun while it lasted.

The Subway commercials for their Atkins-friendly wraps are cute, and really, a whole-wheat wrap instead of a fluffy white bun is a good idea. But the bacon alone means it should be an occasional rather than every day item.

On the other hand, I got a kick out of my local supermarket today, which had a hand-lettered "Excellent for Low-Carb Diets" sign on the buffalo wing sauce shelf. Ain't it the truth! Buffalo wings were a staple of my strictest-compliance Atkins period. The Buffalo Wing Diet. (Ever ask the waitress for double celery? I have.)

In other fitness blogs. Bunch of stuff this week. Gene Healy has an "Imitation Diet Blog Post", with a link to Jeff "Hot Liberty" Kiely's review of Diet Rite Tangerine soda. It's bravura. (I hate their cola, though.)

Gene also links to Tyler Cowen's precis of Discover Magazine's distillation of " an extensive Harvard study, started in 1976," which I thought might be the Framingham Nurses Heart Study, but may not be. They are very hard on the USDA's "support the American grain and dairy industries" food pyramid. The book is Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating.

Bruce Baugh is down two more pounds, and shares his plans for the next phase of his project.

Meanwhile, Sandy Szwarc has part two of her TechCentralStation series. I was hard on part one last week. One of my complaints gets addressed in the second installment:

Oftentimes, weight loss is not attributable as much to exercise but to calorie restrictive diets and such weight loss is rarely long-term. But many researchers maintain regular exercise can be an important part of maintaining a stable weight and "tends to reduce risk of the weight gain that often accompanies aging," according to Blair.

Which was what I said. Szwarc's major purpose is to encourage exercise for reasons of health rather than weight alone. I can't gainsay the effort. I haven't clicked through all her links this time around to see if she's overselling her case, which is that the benefits of exercise outweigh the benefits of weight loss on pretty much every front you care to fight - heart attack risk, blood pressure, lipid levels, you name it.

So much for the public-spirited portion of this week's entry.

What I dd to "prepare" for a marathon this week.

Walked a mile. (Whee!)
Lifted weights.
Read the intro and first chapter of Marathoning for Mortals in Borders on my lunch hour.

I think it's fair to say we're still in the very early stages of marathon training.

Vital signs: Weight 166, up four pounds from last week, still in the 161-166 range within which it's been fluctuating since October. Waist still around 33.5". Resting pulse back down around 60.

Pick on Calpundit Mail - Disagreeing with the substance of UO's recent "Pick on Calpundit Night" was reader - Kevin Drum. Go figure! I criticised Kevin's arguments about the proper scope of self-government and his interpretation of a study of political donation patterns by educators. Kevin writes

Since you don't have comments, just a couple of quick reactions:

1. I think you took my use of the word "generation" a little too literally. I just generally meant that people alive today rule themselves, not people who have been dead for 200 years. And the opposite of strict constructionism is not no rules at all. The constitution provides useful guidelines and helps to institutionalize a certain amount of inertia. That's fine. However, institutionalizing in toto the beliefs of men long dead isn't.

There's a good middle ground here. I suspect it will come as no surprise that I think that middle ground is the most useful place to be.

2. The donation data isn't a perfect proxy, but it's still pretty good data and indicates that universities aren't leftist monoliths. And I imagine that business schools *do* tend toward free market conservatism, which is every bit as political as anything in the humanities. Besides, I'd like to see some decent evidence that lefty profs advocate leftyness in the classroom. I suspect there's a lot less of it than conservatives imagine.

As for administrators, I don't think they come mostly from the ranks of the humanities. I don't have any evidence of this, just personal experience, so I could be wrong. However, I think that the liberal cast of many universities actually comes far more from the students than anywhere else, which is hardly surprising. What else would you expect from a bunch of smart 18-year-olds? But they get over it.

I still think "generations" and "rule themselves" are generalizations that contain the sorts of assumptions that positively beg unpacking, which is why I tried to unpack them. From my perspective, to speak of a cohort "ruling themselves" is almost always to misspeak, "democracy" or no, for the reasons I stated in my original item.

Kevin added an addendum in a second e-mail:

I forgot: the fact that the constitution is so hard to amend is exactly why I think strict constructionism is so flawed. Since it's nearly impossible to amend, there *have* to be other ways of making fundamental changes.

(Besides, I think I remember reading that the founders didn't really expect the amendment process to be quite so hard. Guess they screwed up on that one.)

The latter I never heard or read. As to the former, fundamental cultural changes are possible through social processes. Fundamental changes to the structure of government, or to the structure of the political economy, should be hard. During the debate over ClintonCare, for instance, Daniel Patrick Moynihan said that it was the kind of sweeping change that one should not want enacted by narrow partisan margins. That Congress and the Courts have gone along with such fundamental changes as the administrative law court system and enabling legislation (laws that empower executive bodies to make what amounts to law, rather than making law themselves) is the great scandal of the modern age.

I can see why this doesn't bother managerialist liberals so much: the changes have been friendly to the managerialist liberal agenda - not just substantively (more and wider regulation), but philosophically (increasing the scope of the purview of politics). And I can see why a liberal considers this to be "a good middle ground." It's a darn comfortable place for them! But not for me.

Chad Orzel wrote in about the politics of academia argument. I wrote that, if campus conservatives and libertarians were concentrated in "nonpolitical" departments like engineering, as Kevin suggested, and liberals and leftists predominated in "political" departments like history and humanities and in the administration, then we could still meaningfully speak of college politics as skewing left. Chad writes

The narrow, literal interpretation is certainly true-- the politics of the people involved has no effect on the content of specific courses. But if you think the content of a college education is defined entirely by what goes on in the classroom, you're mistaken. Even the academic part of a college education has a large out-of-class component.

Politics plays basically no role in setting the course content, true, but I have no doubt that the majors in the department have a pretty solid idea where my political sympathies lie, and also those of the rest of the professors in the department. We interact with students before and after class, crack jokes during lectures, and make small talk at various department functions-- all of those things help convey our thoughts on issues of the day.

Does that amount to political indoctrination of the type that the nuttier right-wing commentators accuse English departments of? No. (Of course, English departments don't engage in the sort of brainwashing that the nuttier right-wing commentators accuse them of, so maybe that's a bad example...) Does it have an effect? You'd be crazy to think otherwise.

Education in a specific academic discipline is not just a matter of conveying specific bits on information from faculty to student-- there's a mindset that goes along with that information. It's no accident that most physicist tend to think in similar ways-- part of the training in the discipline is an informal sort of indoctrination in the way that physicists look at the world. Some of that indoctrination comes through discussing politics with faculty (or overhearing faculty discussing politics), and the mindset that results ends up affecting the way physicists approach political issues.

(Chicken. Egg. Oyako donburi.)

So, I don't think you can write off more political slants among more technical departments as unimportant coincidence-- these things do have an effect, through the syllabus or otherwise.

I wrote back that the difference was that in the humanities, your ability to regurgitate your professor's political views could determine your grade. Chad responded that he considered that less obtrusive than the softer bias in nonpolitical departments. There we'll have to disagree.

He also wrote about the issue of self-government and constitutional flexibility:

They made it so hard to amend precisely to allow each generation to govern itself, free of strict constraints forced into law by previous generations. Things like, say, a flag-burning amendment, or an anti-gay-marriage amendment. Those things should be hard to force into the Constitution, because they're damnably difficult for future generations to get rid of.

But they also made it hard to forbid flag-burning legislatively, no? What's the phrase, "To govern is to choose?" That's surely true. But it needs to be extended a little: To govern is to choose - for everyone. Whether they like it or not.

Ginger Stampley offers a minor clarification of her use of the "talking stick" idea:

I believe you are in error in suggesting that I use the talking stick as a metaphor for politics. The talking stick originally comes from a meeting model that is applicable to political meetings; I merely applied it to my game, which was in dire need of a control method to ensure that certain players weren't getting overlooked.

My political talk philosophy is a lot closer to "anybody can talk, but I don't have to listen", which is not really the talking stick model. The talking stick plan makes you listen to the person who has it.

I appreciate the clarification. The fact that it comes from a meeting model applicable to political meetings convinces me that it is indeed a valid metaphor for liberal conceptions of "self-government," but clearly the application was mine and not Ginger's.

Happy Mailblog Day! - They play football, we play catchup. Today is the day for responding to reader mail on which I've been unconscionably sitting this month. (And maybe last month too.) Let's start with Matt Taylor who wrote in about gay marriage. I wrote last month, anent the arguments of certain anti-gay-marriage conservatives like Maggie Gallagher and Eve Tushnet that there was no "individual right" to marriage, that that was beside the point - there was still an equal protection issue. Matt writes:

On whether same-sex marriage is an issue of individual rights or equal treatment, Jim Henley wrote:

"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.'"

I disagree that marriage is not an issue of individual rights. Jim's argument assumes that the US constitution is the ultimate authority on rights, but historically that document has not recognized all the rights that are generally accepted today. For example, the right of women and non-whites to vote were only recognized in later amendments.

Consider that, if the Federal Marriage Amendment were passed, then later repealed, the repealing amendment might contain language like this:

"The right to civil marriage shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex, sexual identity or sexual orientation."

It seems to me that human rights enumerated in law should derive from some broader philosophical framework, so that we have some basis for arguing how the law should be made more just. Many Christians would likely suggest that the Bible is the proper source of this framework; however, non-Christians like me, and Christians who belive in a secular state, would prefer a more universal, logically-grounded approach, whether it be libertarian, communitarian, or some other philosophical system.

Personally, I believe that marriage should not be considered something people are given by the government, but rather something they decide to do as individual couples. Banning same-sex marriage restricts the freedom of gay people to enter marriage contracts, and therefore violates their fundamental rights.

Take this analogy: if states refused to recognize changes of residence for non-white persons, it would violate both equal protection and individual rights. Equal protection is violated because the benefits of residency (voting, social services, etc.) are denied to a class of people, but individual rights are also violated because freedom to move from state to state is restricted.

The very thought of a government-issued "interstate relocation license" strikes me as an obvious violation of rights, even if it were issued without any discrimination against particular classes of people. That we don't view a state-issued "marriage license" the same way is just a historical accident.

For more responses to my equal protection argument, see the archives of the Marriage Debate Blog, where my original item was cross-posted. Start with the aptly-named Ogre and work up.

Mission Accomplished - Tracking polls in Iowa and New Hampshire show tightening races, but the more important poll is the one they don't need to take - the one for the Republican candidates. That's because there's only one, and that, loyal readers is probably the major reason we put the exclamation point on twelve years of low-level war in Iraq. The Imperial wing of the Republican Party made it known beginning in Fall 2001 that they would revolt if Saddam Hussein were still ruling Iraq. "If the President retreats from that stance, he'll be correctly judged a failure and won't even deserve renomination in the 2004 presidential contest," wrote Russ Smith of the New York Press. Don't think that I imagine that Russ Smith is himself the Kingmaker of the Republican Party, but he stands for people who are. The threat, always quiet, sometimes couched in "Don't worry, we know the President is committed" terms, was real and, I think, heeded at the Karl Rove-Andrew Card level.

And everyone went home happy. The benevolent hegemonists got their war and the President got the trouble-free primary neither Bush pere nor Bob Dole got to enjoy. If there's a significant third-party candidacy, it will be for disaffected liberals rather than disaffected conservatives.

Back in November, the Talking Dog sent the following e-mail (Yes, this is all about cleaning out my in-box!):

I had an interesting discussion with a friend yesterday concerning conversations he had with an unnamed member of the Defense Policy Board (unnamed only because I forgot who it is and am too lazy to look it up-- but its not Perle or Kissinger or one of the usual well-known cabal members). My friend told me last November/December that I could expect this war no matter what, no matter how vociferous protests were-- because the insiders, like the DPB guy, believed that Saddam was just this side of having a nuke, and had to be stopped.

I told him I thought that was preposterous or at least very unlikely, but that we were going to have the war anyway, based on the fact that we'd shipped between 1/3 and 1/2 of our active military to the Persian Gulf or forward deployment FOR the Gulf, i.e., the decision was already made-- justification to come later. And the rest is history...

Now, of course, my friend asked me my opinion, and I said I thought the DPB and company were smart enough to know that the "Saddam having nukes" bullshit was already bullshit at the time, but in order to sell it, had to tell everybody they knew that Saddam was getting a nuke, Saddam was getting a nuke, Saddam was getting a nuke, while actually being privy to the truth. Part of this was my own theory that if they really believed it, they wouldn't have waited so damned long (for political benefit) when the risk of waiting was so potentially catastrophic.

My friend disagreed-- and said he might be more comfortable if, in fact, it were a simple matter of our national governing cabal being that EVIL; he is more worried that, in fact, they DIDN'T know they were full of shit, and that, in fact, our national govering cabal is actually as stupid as it is behaving. So-- I'm not sure. If the cabal really IS that stupid, then it would certainly explain an awful lot of other policies. Like... our entire war and occupation...

Well, I guess that's the answer: would we prefer our national governance to be manned by the evil, or the stupid? Right now, we seem to have a lot of both...

From the Is This a Great Country or What? Files - The Columbus Sixman Gay Football League.

I always liked the idea of six-man football. The six-man football scenes in Starship Troopers were the only parts of that movie I enjoyed. I still want to see a seven-man game, with three ineligible receivers on the line, a quarterback and three eligible receivers in the backfield. Free motion for the backfield like in the Canadian game. Play it either on an 80-yard six-man outdoor field or a 50-yard Arena League field.

A Fanboy's Metric System - Retailer Brian Hibbs does an impressive job of making the case against Marvel's "no reprints" policy using their own sales figures in his first new Tilting at Windmills column. He gets around the limitations of the Diamond and iCV2 lists by going straight to the Statement of Ownership boxes in Marvel comics from 2000 and 2004. The numbers seem to indicate that Marvel's per-issue sales at the tale end of a bust were higher than during the current recovery. Now he's not able to control for a lot of variables - editorial changes etc. - but the numbers sure mean something. Three of the four titles that posted per-issue sales gains had obvious movie help. (The fourth is Captain America, about which more anon.) Despite two movies, both Uncanny X-men and New X-men have suffered 20% readership declines over the last four years.

Something ain't working. By themselves, the figures can't tell us whether it's No Reprints, writing for the trade, the focus on producing stories for readers like, well, me, or simply the decline in outlets (the shrinking number of direct-market retailers). Of course, the decline in outlets may itself be an outcome of the other factors. On quick falsification test would be to put together a comparable table for DC titles from 2000-2004, since DC has made many of the same editorial choices but does reprint, aggressively. Hibbs' column looks like it will provoke a lot of thought and discussion, though. I look forward to future installments.

UPDATE: Brian Hibbs informs me that DC does not send subscription copies second-class mail and thus doesn't have to file Statements of Ownership. So we're left with data that clearly indicates that Marvel has a problem, but doesn't establish the cause of that problem. The no-reprint policy is a plausible explanation but not a definitive one.

Technical Bulletin - Playing with "under the hood" aspects of the style sheet this weekend. As of now and going forward, the site is no longer Netscape 4.x-friendly. There are a number of fine non-IE alternatives to NS4.x.

UO will probably have some strange visual aspects from time to time this weekend while I tinker, but the end result should look the same as always.

Product Placement - Gene Weingarten in the Sunday Post Magazine, brought to you a day early because I care about you as a person:

As you know, I have in the past unfairly poked fun at marketing people, merely because so many of them are opportunistic, lying hacks. So I thought for a change I would make amends today by helping them publicly celebrate their great good fortune.

That’s why I am talking to Steve Peckham, marketing spokesperson for S.C. Johnson & Son, which makes Raid bug spray.

Me: As you know, a can of Raid was one of the many fine products found in Saddam Hussein’s hideout. I was wondering if you guys are planning a marketing campaign around that. You know, maybe, “Raid: The REAL Weapon of Mass Destruction!” Or, “Whether you are vermin, or are just plagued by them . . .”

Steve: We cannot confirm it was our product.

Me: I beg your pardon?

Steve: We are unable to confirm it was our product, so we don’t want to discuss the situation.

Me: I’m looking at a photograph of the products, as they were found in Saddam’s rat hole. Here it is.

Steve: Without having the can in hand, we cannot confirm it was ours.

Me: Try this view.

Steve: We’re not going to talk about the situation.

Me: But . . .

Steve: I’m trying to get ready for a big, huge meeting here.

And there's more, including conversations with reps from Palmolive, Mars Candy and Lipton.

It's a Crazy Idea, but It Just Might Work - Modest proposals dept.:

But what comics and music don't see is that a form of salvation lies before them in the guise of a very simple trade: a trade of business models.

from Marc at the Comics Waiting Room. His argument is detailed and substantial and seems pretty sensible. For music buffs and comics geeks both, plus anyone with an interest in adaptive business models.

What's That Down Among the Details, Jim? - That would be the Devil, loyal reader, right where you'd expect to find him.

If I had to nominate one single "most significant number" from the Saban Center's Iraq Index, it would be this one:

Iraqi Security Forces on Duty: Army: Stated Goal: 40,000.

We also state a goal for a 25,700-person border patrol.

Now, we may indeed reconstruct Iraq, but we won't be able to move it. It will still be next to Iran, its enemy since before Herodotus began earnestly copying down tall tales; Syria, an authoritarian state with whom Iraqi relations have blown hot and cold; and Turkey, which keeps asserting a right to barge in should Iraq's Kurds get too uppity, as defined by Turkey. Iran and Syria have a half million and 300,000 men under arms, respectively. Turkey has another half-million-strong army.

How is Iraq supposed to defend itself in that neighborhood with 40,000 soldiers and a bunch of guys with binoculars and jeeps? It's not. The numbers indicate the plan, and the plan is for Iraq to remain a ward of the United States for the foreseeable future. Alternatively, the plan is to similarly demilitarize Iran and Syria by force and trust the better angels of the Turkish nature. When you hear people learnedly assuring that the national greatness folks have lost favor, you have 40,000 reasons to believe otherwise.

This is Sports Center with Unqualified Offerings - Wow. The NFL has actually hired two black guys out of six coaches this offseason. Only one of them - Dennis Green - is a retread and therefore "safe." And a chance for a third depending on what Oakland does. Right now the league's count of black coaches stands at an all-time high of five, and could hit six.

No doubt the NFL's minor affirmative action provisions play a role. (It being a voluntary program adopted by the organization itself I have no problem with that.) Even more than that, though, NFL owners are notorious copycats. The Bengals hired Marvin Lewis and it paid off. So the aging white men who run franchises get to thinking, Hey! Maybe we should try one of those black coaches too! (Because only the absolute creme de la creme of black coordinators have been able to get a sniff at a head coaching job up til now, black coaches as a group outperform white coaches as a group.) By such fits and starts do any durable revolutions happen. About time.

Poetry Thursday - My friend Frederick Pollack brought out a poem tonight that was remarkably appropriate to recent discussion here. I immediately asked to "publish" it, and he agreed. Here is hiis poem:

To a Liberal Who Addressed a Panel of Neocons

You shouldn't fret because they didn't listen,
replied to your points by repeating theirs, packed
the room with their own, the moderator
particularly hostile. The point of
debate is truth, that of truth, power;
if one has power one can skip the rest.
And power must manifest itself
at every point, otherwise it is less;
the point especially holds if one has little.

Look at it from their point of view, and feel
compassion, which for you
is the point: they must sit in conclaves
with grown men who weep
for fetuses, wish to expand Israel
to bring the Second Coming, and pray before deals.
Large doglike men, rich as setters,
sad-eyed as beagles, volatile as pitbulls,
who sometimes pat them clumsily on the head.

Think nothing of it; mould your dismay
(one can't say anger) into a brightly-colored
rhombus, like an educational toy.
The fighters overflying
the city are beautiful, their pilots civilized
enough. Remember: it isn't the tail, but
the mind that wags the dog
from its well-informed though awkward

position above the shit.

© 2004 by Frederick Pollack

The Other Casualties, Again - Kevin Maroney e-mails an All Things Considered link that pegs the "wounded or sickened so badly that they had to be shipped home for medical treatment" figure at 9,000.

UPDATE: In Iraq, I mean. You know.

Winter Wonderland - The Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy hosts a half-day conference on "The American Imperium" at Swarthmore College, Monday January 26.Quondam UOadjunct scholar Leon Hadar is one of the panelists. I just might take a day off from work and go.

Dog Bites Man - Human Events defends Rush Limbaugh against the media. The author's promotional e-mail informs me that "Over the weekend, Rush's site praised the article as "superb" and "great" . . .

FWIW, to coin a phrase.

No Surprise There - There's considerable doubt about just how advanced a nuclear-weapons program Libya had. As I suggested last month, this looks like the mother of all win-win situations - Libya got to trade a bird in the bush (not even two birds in the bush) for an end to sanctions. The US and UK got to declare a victory on the non-proliferation front. Everyone goes home happy.

The Real Issue Was Never WMD - It's whether Billy the Kid faked his own death with the help of Sherrif Pat Garrett. They're going to do some DNA testing of a man who died in the 1950s claiming to be Billy. If the Florida legislature doesn't stop them, I suppose.

Best Non-Libertarians in a Libertarian Role, 2005: Early Nominations

Matthew Yglesias on federal marriage promotion and his proposed alternative, the Federal Dating Service. ("There should be bipartisan appeal since funding and implementing the program would involve putting the government in your bedroom and your pocketbook - what's not to like?")

Dave Intermittent on the Moon/Mars mission: "the question remains: why do we need a national rallying point? Why is it the job of the government to give us one?" Money quote:

I supported Bush in 2000 because I thought that Gore had the greater messianic tendencies. Funny how things work out, isn't it?

Katherine at Obsidian Wings for her multipart series on Maher Arar's all-expenses-paid trip to Syria.

Picking up from Katherine's series, Henry Farrell of Crooked Timber on "Transgovernmental networks":

Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote a highly relevant paper on the problems that they pose for democratic legitimacy. They've grown vastly more important - and more troubling in their implications - since then. Accountability disappears into a maze of shadowy relations between states - it becomes impossible to figure out who is to blame for any particular decision, and whom to hold responsible.

And NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof in defense of sweatshops. (Via the Agitator.)

Lit'ry Corner - Aaron Haspel on - surprise! - Yvor Winters. Very good piece of work, even if one remains unpersuaded that Winters was the ne plus ultra of 20th century poet/critics.

Focus Like a Laser Beam on a Single Flit Item is what you should do. It has several important links.

Newish Conservatives - Diana Moon has more on neocons, Earl Shorris and such, including the bracing line, "Jim is right about one thing." (Some readers surely reckon that as an improvement over my usual hit rate.) I'm mulling over a "How and When Neoconservatism Went Bad" item. Diana's piece is useful reading in the meantime.

Elsewhere, she comments on Iraq's newest sign of progress - Sharia law, discussed last night:

I wonder if this will open up cracks in the ranks of the faithful, one of whom still thinks (last I read her) that Baghdad is rapidly transforming into the Prague of the Middle East. Pardon me, but I don't think that Prague ever had Shari'a.

Marbury vs. Diamond Distribution - Glen Engel-Cox judiciously reviews the Comic Book Reader's Bill of Rights version 1.0.

A Plague on Both Our Houses, Kind Of - Doves like me said there was no evidence of operational cooperation between Saddam Hussein's regime and Al Qaeda, but that a US invasion of Iraq might provide the impetus for such cooperation to start. Silly, paranoid doves. Apparently, even after the resistance phase of the war began,

Saddam Hussein warned his Iraqi supporters to be wary of joining forces with foreign Arab fighters entering Iraq to battle American troops, according to a document found with the former Iraqi leader when he was captured, Bush administration officials said Tuesday.

writes James Risen in the Washington Post. Well, what's up with that?

Officials said Mr. Hussein apparently believed that the foreign Arabs, eager for a holy war against the West, had a different agenda from the Baathists, who were eager for their own return to power in Baghdad. As a result, he wanted his supporters to be careful about becoming close allies with the jihadists, officials familiar with the document said.

Ah. Disparate interests. Natural antagonists. Got it.

Of course, if doves look silly and paranoid because war didn't push Al Qaeda and Saddam together, hawks look even sillier for arguing that they were bosom buddies beforehand. (James Woolsey, I am looking at you.)

Non-Hostile Gunshot Wounds is a phrase that comes up over and over in the list of US war dead in Iraq. ABC News explains:

Suicide has become such a pressing issue that the Army sent an assessment team to Iraq late last year to see if anything more could be done to prevent troops from killing themselves. The Army also began offering more counseling to returning troops after several soldiers at Fort Bragg, N.C., killed their wives and themselves after returning home from the war.

I must say, though, that to this layman's eyes the rate doesn't look vastly higher compared to army life normally.

That's a suicide rate for soldiers in Iraq of about 13.5 per 100,000, Winkenwerder said. In 2002, the Army reported an overall suicide rate of 11.1 per 100,000.

The overall suicide rate nationwide during 2001 was 10.7 per 100,000, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Okay, it's 20% over the Army norm. That's not good, but I expected it to be higher.

On the other hand, the same article notes

Meanwhile, about 2,500 soldiers who have returned from the war on terrorism are having to wait for medical care at bases in the United States, said Dr. William Winkenwerder, assistant secretary of defense for health affairs. The problem of troops on "medical extension" is likely to get worse as the Pentagon rotates hundreds of thousands of troops into and out of Iraq this spring, he said.

That doesn't sound so good.

I wonder if the most significant casualty number is really the wounded figure. Counted various ways to various totals, the number is approaching 10,000, if you toss in the illnesses and accidents that, historically, do get reckoned among an Army's losses. 500 dead is not a significant portion of a 125,000-strong force. But 10,000 may be on the edge of putting a bite in operations.

The Bright Side of the Metric System - Last month I said that the new Iraqi currency would provide an important political test of the reconstruction. A lot of libertarians don't like fiat money, but say this for it: because it's based entirely on the say-so of the issuing government, its value provides a handy referendum on that government.

So it's worth noting that the new dinar is doing very well against the dollar, as both Salam and Raed note. I can't think of any reason why this would be considered bad news for the CPA or IGC. Salam in particular has newsy links on the matter.

That Was Fast - AFP has the family law change and protest story in English. Via Salam Pax, who comments:

So first they slip in the bit about turning Iraq into a federal state without asking the Iraqis and now this. Me thinks the GC is taking on more than what it is supposed to do.

PDQ we should start hearing from the hawks that "this war was never really about women's rights in the Arab world." On the bright side, they'll be right.

Dept. of Developing . . . - Juan Cole, who reads Arabic, writes that the Baghdad-London paper az-Zaman reports that the IGC has scrapped the Iraqi civil code in favor of religious law for each faith community in the country. That occasioned demonstrations by Iraqi women's groups:

Women activists representing 80 women's organizations (including the female Interim Minister of Public Works!) gathered at Firdaws Square in downtown Baghdad to protest the IGC decree, issued three days ago. Minister of Public Works Nasreen Barwari complained to az-Zaman about the lack of "transparency" and of "democratic consultation" in the promulgation of the decree by the IGC. Protesters carried placards with phrases like "No to discrimination, No to differentiating women and men in our New Iraq." and "We reject Decree 137, which sanctifies religious communalism." Activist Zakiyah Khalifah complained that the law would weaken Iraqi families.

There appears to be nothing on this in the English-language media. If the story checks out, it augurs a disaster for Iraq's women and will give the lie to much hawkish rhetoric, which has stressed our need to wage an expansive war in the Arab/Muslim world for, among other reasons, the sake of women's freedom.

If it doesn't check out, as you were. For what it's worth, Sgt. Stryker's Iraq Newspaper Stories blogroll lists az-Zaman in the "unbiased" section. Keep an eye out.

The Downside of Blogging is that now and then you have to put enormous effort into re-establishing perfectly obvious truths. Take this Atrios post about the argument that, by running as an "outsider" taking on the establishment, Howard Dean is somehow "running against his own party." What's bizarre about this argument is that, according to Atrios, it's being made by James Carville and Paul Begala. That's right, the guys who got Bill Clinton into the White House in 1992 by running him as an outsider taking on the Democratic Party establishment.

So Atrios pulls numerous citations together documenting what everyone with a lick of sense and a functioning long-term memory should already know. The hell of it is, he had to - or someone had to. But, in the words of kids in classrooms everywhere, why do we gotta waste time with this stuff?

Index of Something or Other - The other day, I mentioned the 2004 Index of Economic Freedom, and promised to come back to the subject after I'd had a chance to study it. I still haven't had that chance, but at Halfway Down the Danube, blogger Douglas gives its Romania coverage what-for. HDTD is a pretty liberal outfit, but Douglas' criticisms touch much less on ideology than method. He finds the reporting on Romania technically sloppy, and wonders what that portends for the other 180-odd countries included.

Sometimes a Belly Laugh is Worth a Thousand Syllogisms, the Continuing Series - Dave Intermittent on a current pseudo-controversy:

Presumably, Glenn intends to suggest that this shows desperation on the part of Clark; or that the "natural" Clark is not what the candidates want. And one or the both of these might be in fact correct. But let's not kid ourselves: Clark is not the only politician to worry about PR, or to alter themselves or their message in response to PR concerns. Are we really to think that President Bush doesn't worry about the way people see him? Are we really sure that his appearance isn't stage managed? Really? The RNC employs all those pollsters and spindoctors just to keep them off the streets? It's the Republican version of midnight basketball?

There's more.

And speaking of pseudo-controversies, Cathy Young gives the furor (get it? ha ha!) over comparisons to Hitler way more attention than it's worth at Reason Online.

How about a belated New Year's resolution for 2004? No more Nazi or Hitler analogies to describe policies or politicians you dislike.

Oh, that'll happen.

Gene Healy Can Relax - I'm not a cornerstone of the comics blogosphere. That's fair, actually. The people actually cited blog about comics far more regularly and comprehensively than I do. In the course of very little time over the fall, said blogosphere exploded, Stephen J. Gouldlike, into a profusion of excellent sites. They set a standard we mere dilettantes of comics blogging can't match.

Fight the Power!- So what is it with the petit bourgeois particularism about how "As a comic book reader, you have the right to expect that the people who create the comics you read will be treated ethically and compensated properly for their effort by their publishers" in the so-called Comic Book Reader's Bill of Rights? What about the workers? The tradesmen at the printer? The women in the ink plant? The truckers who make the deliveries? The cleaning crews in the buildings of the comics companies? What about the interns? Surely fans have a "right to expect" that all of these people are getting a living wage, health insurance and two weeks vacation a year.

Smash the comic book oligarchs! All power to the soviets!

I note that the current CBRBOR is officially "version 1.0." The next version damn well better include our right to have our comics produced in an environmentally sound manner. Also, we should get hugs. Hugs are nice. So are blow jobs! And for the female reader - more hugs!

Speaking of Former Ex-Bloggers Kelly Jane Torrance, once the butt of jokes throughout - well, Colby Cosh's site for her seasonal posting rate, is blogging rather more frequently these days. Check out the item that launches from TV ads for a "Queens of Country" compilation into a meditation on how the "tyranny of the beautiful is even spreading to fields in which you barely see the artist." Then just go up and down from there.

Mac Daddies and Mommies - More on the Great Mac iThis and iThat controversy from former ex-blogger Jeremy Scharlack and Ginger Stampley. Ginger refuses to call anyone a Nazi over this. Dammit, someone has to.

Go Phish - Anent the post below, an entire website keeps track of "Phishing attacks" -

the mass distribution of 'spoofed' e-mail messages with return addresses, links, and branding which appear to come from banks, insurance agencies, retailers or credit card companies. These fraudulent messages are designed to fool the recipients into divulging personal authentication data such as account usernames and passwords, credit card numbers, social security numbers, etc. Because these emails look "official", up to 20% of recipients may respond to them, resulting in financial losses, identity theft, and other fraudulent activity.

Via the Modulator.

Fraud Alert - There's an e-mail going around, purportedly from Paypal, that looks transparently bogus. The sender's address shows as "donotreply@paypal.com", but the full header indicates that this supposedly official communication comes from a hotmail account ("o9e237l9@hotmail.com"). Supposedly "Paypal" wants you to install software from an attachment and run it. As if. Here's the full text with headers. Don't be fooled:

-------- Original Message --------
From: - Tue Jan 13 07:36:25 2004
X-UIDL: 65f7adc0cccfc460e4e42fc789b9ed98
X-Mozilla-Status: 1201
X-Mozilla-Status2: 00000000
Return-path:
Envelope-to: supplanter@highclearing.com
Delivery-date: Tue, 13 Jan 2004 02:56:02 -0500
Received: from [211.189.202.76] (helo=211.189.202.76) by
medea.hmdnsgroup.com with smtp (Exim 4.24) id 1AgJP6-0007ab-3n for
supplanter@highclearing.com; Tue, 13 Jan 2004 02:56:00 -0500
From: do_not_reply@paypal.com
To: supplanter@highclearing.com
Subject: PAYPAL.COM NEW YEAR OFFER
Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2004 11:00:34 -0500
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
boundary="----=_NextPart_000_0007_01C3D8E9.8B4C9F60"
X-Priority: 3
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2800.1158
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2800.1165
Message-Id:

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I already sent a copy to spoof@paypal.com and abuse@hotmail.com, but since I've had friends fall for these before, I wanted to warn people.

That's the Way You Do It - Avedon Carol has a hard-hitting critique of Colin Powell and "the craven loyalties that have exemplified his entire career." My instinct is to say "he's not that bad," but in the last dozen years on what has he been willing to defy his boss besides gays in the military? Powell was willing to resign over that, but not over a reckless and by no means forthright war policy pushed by people who repeatedly humiliated him. What defense can there be?

Unqualified Offerings Gets Results From The Washington Post - As if! But I do commend the Post for providing a link to the SSI's original "Bounding the War on Terrorism" report from the same page as their article on it. After my complaints of last night, that's a refreshing change. Way to go, Post!

Meanwhile, Julian Sanchez has a theory about why major-media news sites are so lame about linking to original sources:

So what gives? I'm guessing that it's an attempt to hold onto (what's left of) the prestige of print. You're not reading one more web piece, dammit (anyone can post those, after all), but a gen-u-ine published article that just happens to be archived online too. It's time to get over it, guys.

Department of Not Resisting Temptation - Jeffrey Record is not one of my pseudonyms. I have not secretly been commissioned to write analyses for the US Army War College.

It just seems that way. (Temptation not resisted? To link this story, of course. You can get the full report in pdf.)

Meanwhile Diana Moon found a fascinating review of Norman Podhoretz' memoir, Absent Friends, by Professor Albert Lindemann. The review dates from 1999, when it was possible - just - to have a rational discussion of neoconservatism and neoconservatives. Maybe the most interesting passage in the review was this "sauce for the gander" passage:

This kind of graphic, hard-hitting language, the use of such concepts of leftist filth, decadence, and depravity, cannot help but set off certain alarms. Antisemites write like that. Historically, extreme right-wingers have seen Jews as particularly dangerous to a Christian moral order and to social peace; Jews were believed to be destructively dissident, unpatriotic, and unusually prone to sympathy for Communism. Jews were also believed to be heavily involved in such morally damaging activities as the liquor trade, pornography, and prostitution.

In other words, if you squinted, a lot of the early writing of neoconservative intellectuals could look like it was employing antisemitic code. And as Lindemann makes clear, first-generation neocons faced accusations by Jewish leftists of being "bad Jews." Earl Shorris' book about the neoconservatives was called Jews Without Mercy. Jewish leftists accused the neocons of betraying Judaism's progressive tradition.

This was every bit as outrageous as certain second-generation neocons and neocon symps imputing antisemitism to all their critics. The first generation neoconservatives came to reject liberalism for serious reasons. They may have been right, or may have been wrong, but accusing them of letting down the side was shifty and wrongheaded.

Me, I was a neocon symp during the Cold War. My regular reading ran to The New Criterion, Commentary and The American Scholar. I still feel that Cold War-era neoconservatism provided a useful critique of the Soviet Union and its apologists, and was right to highlight some of the hypocrisies among apologists for Israel's less savory enemies. As I've said before, "isolationism" was the last libertarian tenet I adopted. Ten years ago, my foreign policy views would have been indistinguishable from Glenn Reynolds - if Glenn Reynolds had had foreign policy views back then.

In Diana's own commentary, she reminds that "the neoconservative phenomenon wasn't solely concerned with foreign policy issues; important though they may be. Domestic issues, such as crime and deregulation, were very important." That seems to be less true for the second-generation neocons clustered around the Weekly Standard and National Review Online. As David Brooks, Fred Barnes and others have made all too clear, neocons no longer believe that the proper business of conservatives is to restrain the power of the federal government - "big government conservatism" is the order of the day. There is near-uniformity among neocons on some hot-button social issues (cloning, gay marriage, the drug war), but it's in domestic affairs that any of the diversity of views Brooks claims exists among neoconservatives will appear. (Brooks now favors some version of gay marriage.) But a neoconservative who opposes the war in Iraq or Likud dominance of Israeli politics, favors rapprochement with China or a larger role for the UN in international affairs, doubts the wisdom or feasibility of exporting American political culture by force of arms? The mind boggles at the thought. No person who held such views, Gentile or Jew or Phlebas the Phoenician, could get anyone in or outside the movement to agree he was a member. The sole litmus test of neoconservatism has become "benevolent hegemony." Opposition to that is the one impermissible deviationism.

Somewhere in the above is buried the answer to why I never thought of Jewish New Yorker and "Reagan Democrat for all those years" Diana Moon as a neoconservative, even in her hawkish-on-Iraq phase. It has something to do with a sense that, even when she favored the war, she wasn't looking for a project. She wasn't playing a game of Jeopardy where the answer is always "war" and it's just a matter of finding a question to go with it.

But Try Telling That to an Angry Mob - Matthew Barganier wants to get David Brooks fired from the New York Times, or, as he puts it, sent back to the minors. I won't myself be writing the Times, but I won't be lifting a finger to stop anyone else, either.

Equal Time - Peter David tries to clear the air after the recent unpleasantness about comics buyers who "wait for the trade" rather than buying the monthly. I think it's worth noting some of the virtues of David and his new Fallen Angel series: It is, in his terms, "unaligned" - not a Batman book, or Spider-man book, or X-book; it's a new, original character, not a revamp or retread; it's a female lead; it's a female lead with very little cheesecake factor - the chick dresses like Little Red Riding Hood. The issues I've read were entertaining, but even if they weren't, the represent an attempt to offer the superhero comics readership something other than what they're already getting. You gotta respect that. I actually recommend that anyone with even the least curiousity give the series a try.

This doesn't change my opinions on the general topic. From my perspective, the more egregious arguments against the people I've called "waiters" were made not by Peter David himself but by non-pros (or, in the case of John Byrne, unprofessional pros), anyway. David's coinage "Trader Vics" was needlessly inflammatory, and not even funny enough to be worth the inflammation, and fellow pro Nat Gertler had the better arguments as far as how the business can adapt to the new environment. But peace on Peter David, who is clearly trying to provide honest goods for his dollar.

Weekly Fitness Blog Item - 162 pounds. Waist has ballooned to 33.5". Resting pulse: 70. The waistline and pulse are clear evidence of decline from early fall fitness levels. I blame winter, which sends one running to comfort foods.

Policy change: beginning with next week's fitness blog item, personal data will conclude the weekly posts rather than introducing them. Fitness issues - including politics and public health - will come first, followed by workout reports.

Much to talk about this week, including a Tech Central Station article by Sandy Szwarc that questions the value of exercise in weight management. Szwarc cites five different studies, including a meta-analysis and intervention studies that put subjects on various aerobic exercise programs. I won't say there's nothing to her conclusions, because I think we are a long way from anything that could justly be called a science of weight management or even a science of nutrition, but in citing interventions in which people who exercised intensely did not lose appreciable weight, she misses an important point: Americans aren't fat. Americans are fat and getting fatter. We tend to gain weight as we age. If we are fit, we tend to become overweight at the rate of a couple of pounds a year. If we are overweight we tend to become more overweight at the rate of a couple of pounds a year. So someone who exercises, makes no effort to control their eating and loses no weight may well be staying thinner than someone who doesn't exercise and makes no effort to control their eating.

And indeed, if you follow the link to the Midwest Exercise Trial, which unlike other studies Szwarc cites used a control group or at least mentions its results prominently, that's what you see. Szwarc writes of the Midwest Exercise Trial that

While men lost about 5 kg and 3.7% body fat, women gained 0.6 kg of body weight while losing a mere 0.2 kg body fat. It makes for some rather interesting math, noted Gaesser. The women each burned about 138,000 total kcal during those 69 weeks, or about 313,636 kcal per pound of fat!

over the sixteen months of the study. But the authors themselves write

Exercise prevented weight gain in women and produced weight loss in men. Men in the exercise group had significant mean ± SD decreases in weight (5.2 ± 4.7 kg), body mass index (calculated as weight in kilograms divided by the square of height in meters) (1.6 ± 1.4), and fat mass (4.9 ± 4.4 kg) compared with controls. Women in the exercise group maintained baseline weight, body mass index, and fat mass, and controls showed significant mean ± SD increases in body mass index (1.1 ± 2.0), weight (2.9 ± 5.5 kg), and fat mass (2.1 ± 4.8 kg) at 16 months. No significant changes occurred in fat-free mass in either men or women; however, both had significantly reduced visceral fat.

We've discussed the special yuckiness of visceral fat before, but the big thing is the comparison between female exercisers and female controls. While results were highly variable, the female controls gained an average of 6.5# over 16 months, about two thirds of it fat. (Szwarc's somewhat whimsical calculation of "313,636 kcal [of exercise] per pound of fat" is specious. Since calorie intake wasn't controlled for either group, we simply can't make a meaningful calculation.)

Now, I'm being hard on Szwarc here. Let me say right out that I believe exercise in the absence of diet is less effective at reducing weight than the popular imagination holds, and that some of the real benefits of exercise have nothing to do with your body size. Weight training advocates especially argue that diet is more important than exercise in determining weight. Szwarc skips right past diet toward talk of "a genetic component for weight," and concludes by linking to a fat acceptance site. She promises a part two with "other myths about exercise and who's really exercising in our country and who's not." So tune in next week, when I'll probably give part one a more thorough reaction than I've managed so far.

Thanks to reader Dave Lull for tipping me to the article. And see Bill Sherman's take.

Marathon Man. Preparations for my declared goal of running a marathon this year for the week:

Walked three miles. (It's a joke, son! But it's three more miles than I managed over the holidays.)

Read this e-mail from reader Dave Weeden:

I admire your courage in thinking about the Marine Corps Marathon, but your ideas about training are, if I may say so, totally nuts.You don't want to start out by walking anywhere for nine hours. You'll probably give yourself blisters that you mean you can't wear shoes for a fortnight.

Buy some decent running shoes, from a running store if there's one anywhere near you, and run a little.

Start modestly, that is, realistically. You probably know what you can do from the training you have been doing. Running a marathon means running a very long way, for a very long time, longer than any training session, so the actual day will hurt. Know this when you start, because knowing this will keep you going when ten minutes is all you can do and you want to force yourself through to twelve or fifteen. Your body adapts to running. In the first few months of proper training, which means doing an amount which tests, but doesn't kill, you, your stamina will shoot up.

For a marathon, try to run whatever you can at least three times a week. Try to enjoy it, and refuse to let it become a chore. Take it as time to think what you will write next, and private, free time away from work and domestic duties.

There are some half-decent books out there, but publishers tend to churn them out, and I've been running too long to have looked at one for years, so I doubt any I know are still in print. Magazines have ideas which you ought to take with a grain of salt, the way you would anything in print. If you buy any, don't take them as gospel -- keep them in the toilet and use them as inspiration.

One final word, because I've yada-ed too much already, don't blog too much about it until you're sure that it's for you. Climbing down looks really stupid, and most people hate running. I'm one of the odd ones, good luck and so forth.

Too late on the last part! Besides, any man who publishes weekly fitness items on his website is way past being able to avoid looking really stupid. And if I end up bailing, that's just more blog fodder. But some very useful stuff in this e-mail, especially the part about the blisters.

More next week.

How Come Major Media Websites STILL Don't Get the Internet? The Washington Times runs a not-terribly-informative story on the 2004 Index of Economic Freedom put out by the Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal. What's missing? Only a link to the actual goddam study, as usual. This always happens - news sites never bother giving you an easy link to the studies they write about. It's past time for major publications to not only include links to the the original documents in their internet articles, but to print the URL in their dead tree editions. Years past time.

A special shame in this case since the little the WashTimes does reproduce from the study - "The administration of George W. Bush has taken a leadership role in [...] free trade" - is pure comedy gold.

More on the study itself after I give it the once-over.

This Just In - Communism still sucks.

I Hate You and I Wish You Were Dead - Ginger Stampley says Mike Koslowski is a "silly idiot" for his criticism of Apple's new digital media products that I cited Friday.

UPDATE: Patrick Nielsen Hayden is more charitable personally but no less critical. And Koslowski responds to his critics. I won't be happy until somebody compares someone to Hitler.

A Fanboy's Further Ado - In correspondence with Sean Collins about the Marvel Age imprint reworkings of classic Lee/Kirby/Ditko material, I was able to articulate a couple of further thoughts I'd been trying to have. (At least, Sean thought I was able, and he encouraged me to put them on the blog.)

Some of the loudest complainers are people who disdain superhero fanboyism, but by their complaints about messing with the purity of the Silver Age Marvels they sound like nothing so much as their nemeses (superhero fanboys) bitching about some flouting of The Way Things Used to Be. Why, they sound oddly like John Byrne Message Board posters.

Me, I figure if Marvel keeps the Masterworks and the Essentials in print, and credits the original creators in the reworkings, they have nothing to apologize for. And I think you can say more than "if the Marvel Age books attract new readers, they might even seek out the originals," as Sean did. If the Marvel Age books attract new readers, Marvel will eventually try to sell them the originals.

The highlights of comics' Silver Age were a magnificent achievement, but let's not forget they were a magnificent achievement in a commercial medium. Ask yourself, if the Julius Schwartz or Stan Lee of old were calling the shots now, and thought their companies stood a chance to make a buck re-doing their older work, would they make that call? In, to coin a phrase, a New York Minute.

Wow - We haven't gotten to see much professional football in the Washington area the last three years, so it's always a treat when the playoffs come around. Two amazing games, and my teams were 2-0 today. The Carolina-St. Louis game surely proves out the TMQ maxim that "Fortune favors the bold." Mike Martz wimps out at the end of regulation and his team ends up paying the price. He's Norv Turner with better talent to work with. Meanwhile, Bill Belichik solved a tricky little clock management problem at the end of the late game. Do not expect much blogging tomorrow either, when the official UO teams will be Indianapolis and Green Bay.

Let Me Rephrase That - Adventures in unfortunate syntactical construction, by renewed Redskins coach Joe Gibbs:

"And my experience is right now, if somebody is under contract and is a good coach, you're going to have a tough time getting him out of there. It's going to take a stick of dynamite, particularly some place where the coach is very solid."

That sounds painful.

Alternate Histories and Alternative Geographies - In general, I don't bother Victor Davis Hansen and he doesn't bother me. It's a live-and-let-live arrangement made all the simpler by his almost certain, utter lack of knowledge of my existence. But I see he currently has a much-linked column in which he writes

Thirty years ago, during the Yom Kippur War of October 1973, most of the Europeans of the NATO alliance refused over-flight rights to the United States. We had only hours in which to aid Israel from a multifaceted surprise attack and were desperately ferrying tons of supplies to save it from literal extinction. In contrast, many of these same allies allowed the Soviet Union - the supposed common enemy from which thousands of Americans were based in Europe to protect Europeans - to fly over NATO airspace to ensure the Syrians sufficient material to launch and sustain their surprise attack on the Golan.

Does this make any sense on its face? I'm not talking about the refusal of overflight rights to the US effort to resupply Israel. That's well established. It's the other part: "many of these same allies" allowing the Soviet Union "to fly over NATO airspace to ensure the Syrians sufficient material to launch and sustain their surprise attack on the Golan."

I see two little problems here. Look at a map of Europe. Recall that the only NATO allies between the Soviet Union and Syria were Turkey and Greece. It's hard to envision how the Soviets would have needed to fly supplies to Syria over Norway, or Belgium, or West Germany or even Italy. Assuming that both Greece and Turkey allowed Soviet overflights in 1973, that's two NATO allies out of, what, fifteen back then? That hardly strikes me as "many."

And there's another thing. The Soviets were doing this to "to fly over NATO airspace to ensure the Syrians sufficient material to launch and sustain their surprise attack on the Golan." And it was a surprise attack. That's a big reason why the early stages of the Yom Kippur War went so well for the Arabs is that they maintained unusually effective operational security. But by Hansen's own account, the claimed overflights had to happen in advance of the surprise attack. That's the only way you can "ensure . . . sufficient" - ahem - materiel to "launch" same. So the attribution of guilty foreknowledge - the "many . . . allies . . . allowed the Soviet Union . . . to ensure the Syrians . . . [could] launch and sustain their surprise attack on the Golan."

It sure looks like a ridiculous claim: a surprise attack so closely held that only Syria, Egypt, the Soviet Union and many NATO allies knew about it in advance. Be clear: Hanson is not just claiming that "many" allies allowed the Soviet Union to fly arms to Syria, but that they did so knowing that Syria was about to invade Israel. It would be interesting to see any historical evidence that actually backs up Hanson's implausible outburst.

Lacking Polish - From Unmistakable Marks:

I've never edited a movie in my life, never mastered a video DVD, and never even considered making a multi-track music recording. Neither have you, if I might be permitted to play the odds here. By aiming its media tools at creators instead of consumers, Apple is either confusing Jobs' Pixar coworkers and celebrity friends for normal people, or deciding that its long-time 5% market-share is too big.

and more on what he takes to be Apple's wrong turn on digital media.

Deadpan Adventures - Who could resist an item that begins

Two books made their first English appearance in 1973: Dungeons and Dragons, by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, and Speech and Phenomenology, by Jacques Derrida. Let's put these a little closer together...

as Bruce Baugh's does. Not me. See if you can spot the corner of his mouth twitching. It's hard!

Question of the Day comes from Rosemary at Dean's World:

Dean says that there was no "real" middle class tax cut. The reason, as Dean sees it, is because of increases in local property taxes, state university tuition, etc. His solution is to get rid of the Bush tax cuts. I'm not seeing the logic.

Does anyone think that getting rid of the tax cut will result in states lowering property taxes and universities lowering tuition?

I Cannot Teach Him. The Boy Has No Patience. - Will some liberal bloggers please try to get through to Hesiod about why his race-baiting attack on Colin Powell - calling him Stepin' Fetchit, among other things - is so wrong? I failed to get through. I've always liked Hesiod, but this is appalling. Maybe he'll take the objections of a true ideological confrere more seriously.

Zilch. Nada. Nothing. The Sequel. - Kenneth Pollack's article, "Spies, Lies, and Weapons: What Went Wrong," in the current Atlantic is a postmortem on Iraqi WMD intel and its uses by a decidedly interested party. More later on the article itself, but the most striking take on the article that I've seen came from Hit and Run commenter Andrew, a hawk:

The assessment given in the Pollack article appears to be so reasonable that I believe it will probably serve as a platform for any further discussion of the issue. I find that I come away from the article only MORE persuaded of conclusions I had already reached-- and I am sure that others, with different conclusions, will have exactly the same response...AND THEY WILL BE RIGHT.

We will all be right for sticking to conclusions we otherwise find reasonable, because what the article really demonstrates is that intellegence doesn't SETTLE any outstanding policy debate...in fact is scarcely even relevant.

If an issue of importance is out there, and a consequential choice needs to be made, a citizen can come to a sensible conclusion based on the sort of information available to any interested newspaper reader, and he will be as likely to choose correctly as any member of the National Security Council (or the equivalent policy-shaping body in another democratic society).

What Pollack's article demonstrates, is that a modern intellegence apparatus (and no one more than the US) can pile up mounds of data...which don't incontestably support any conclusion. You would be nearly as well off without any of it.

There is lots of data about the stock market. But nobody can call the market short-term, and nobody needs to, long-term (it will go up).

In a way this is reassuring. Debate over foreign policy choices (or any other policy choices) in a modern democracy can proceed among citizens, based mostly on information citizens can reasonably be expected to have.

This strikes me as brilliant and absolutely correct. More than once, among workaday acquaintances, I heard people say, "They must really know something important that they're not telling us about Iraq's arsenal to be so insistent about it." The kindest thing one can say is that that turns out not to have been the case. So even if you're not inclined to say "Never again!" to "preemptive" war, say "Never again" to the notion that mere citizens are less qualified than high officials to decide matters of war and peace. Andrew and I would have made different decisions, but the range of our decisions were no wider than the "expert range," and our basis for our decisions no less sound.

A Fanboy's Ditto - I'd been meaning to offer hesitant demurrals to the apparently universal condemnation of the new Marvel Age manga-sized trade line. For my readers who follow the comics posts here, but don't follow the comics field obsessively, the controversy is this: Marvel is starting a new line of all-ages books, and one of the things they're doing is taking early Silver Age stories and reusing the plots with new dialog and art. e.g. take Stan Lee and Steve Ditko's early Spider-man plots, write new scripts based on them, and illustrate said scripts with contemporary art Marvel believes, rightly or wrongly, to be more likely to appeal to the tastes of contemporary kids than Ditko and Kirby, while acknowledging the original creators in the credits of the new books.

This has been widely considered both idiocy and sacrilege, but didn't strike me as obviously either of those things. Sean Collins is either more industrious or braver than I, and puts together what I consider a very effective case in favor.

UPDATE: Put in an actual link to Sean's essay. I had linked the wrong thing before.

Your Latest Gift Culture Opportunity - Diana Moon writes, somewhat bemusedly, that "I have always thought that asking for money for blogging was like asking for money for knitting yourself a sweater." Of course, when you think about it, if someone knits themselves a really nice sweater, and then wears it, you get to look at the thing. You might enjoy that enough to consider it worth paying something toward it.

That makes the parallel with blogging oddly exact. In the case of Diana's blog, I look at the thing several times a day. And - here's the pitch - she's suddenly less employed than she was earlier this week. So if you admire her sweaters, now is a good time to contribute to the knitting.

A Fanboy's Tristesse - It's something close to official now. Comic fandom's "message board culture" resents comic fandom's blog culture. Someone quotes a UO item on trade paperbacks on Comicon, and someone else doesn't just take issue with my argument - why shouldn't they? - but refers disdainfully to "Hanley and the blogosphere" [sic]. I'm not sure what the source of the general objection is - some combination of Who do they think they are? and Why don't they mix it up with the rest of us? maybe. But it might help to think of us in terms of Michael Croft's suggestion that blogging is "the safe-sex equivalent of Usenet." Good fences make good neighbors, most of the time anyway. We don't get into nearly as many vicious squabbles as message board posters do. At the same time, the comics blogosphere clearly depends on the message board sites, to a considerable extent, for material, and sometimes in, well, a less than generous way (yanking stuff off of message boards for its amusement value).

I guess the point is, we're all assholes, but we're assholes in different ways. Or some of us (the bloggers) are assholes at one remove. Or something. If I had a point in the first place.

Temper Temper - Len Pasquarelli is a good reporter. But his crabby column about Joe Gibbs' return to the Redskins is lazy. He hasn't really got an argument, just a sequence of increasingly strained witticisms. (One of the downsides of the Gibbs return has been football writers trying to sound like they know something about NASCAR. I mean, I don't know anything about NASCAR either, but I can tell when someone's bullshitting their way through the subject, and that's what Pasquarelli is doing.)

In an online chat, the Post's Mark Maske theorizes that " It sounds to me like someone who's mad he didn't know the Redskins were going to hire Joe Gibbs."

Hey, Gibbs could fail! But the man has been in continuous competition, at a championship level, in two different sports over a 25-year period. Betting against him strikes me as risky.

One Step Up, Two Steps Back - Atrios has a message one of his readers got that is attributed to David Brooks, sort of apologizing for his neo-PC column the other day. I am not overly impressed. Brooks writes ""So I was careful not to say that Bush or neocon critics are anti-Semitic. I was careful not to say that all conspiracy theorists are anti-Semitic."

This is true as far as it goes. I would simply add "and careful to imply it."

Peeve: Brooks writes "First, I wasn't saying anything about people who criticize neocons' ideas. The column wasn't about that at all. It was about people who imagine there is a shadowy conspiracy behind Bush policy."

I read a lot of criticisms of neoconservative foreign policy. Been reading them for years, actually, long before the Bush Administration existed. Hey, I've written them! While I occasionally see people who use the word "conspiracy" with regard to the neocon influence on Bush Administration policy, I don't recall actual critics referring to said conspiracy, or Tendency or what-have-you as "shadowy." There is clearly nothing shadowy about prominent national security intellectuals, prominently published in many cases, holding down high-level government jobs and not infrequently making statements to the media. "Shadowy" itself is a word generally inserted into the discussion by those who smear neocon critics, the better to stigmatize them. I googled "neocon shadoy conspiracy" this evening, and a scan of relevant hits on the first two pages shows that the word "shadowy" is almost always used by smearer of neocon critics rather than a neocon critic. Then I googled Antiwar.com specifically. Of the four hits, not one used the word "shadowy" in relation to "neocon conspiracy." Then it was off to The American Conservative. No hits at all.

Googling the same site for simply "neocon conspiracy", the only hit is actually a quote by neoconservative columnist Robert Kagan. Searching the same parameters on Antiwar.com produces 10 pages of hits (imagine!), but none of the ones on the first two pages turn out to be about, well, neocon conspiracies. The word conspiracy is never used to characterize the actions of the neoconservatives in or out of government.

This makes sense. Conspiracies are secret things, and if there's one thing the PNAC, the Weekly Standard and AEI are not, it's secret. Even Richard Perle can't shut his mouth for more than five minutes.

All of which is to say, Brooks is still full of shit. And he hasn't, apparently, apologized for trying to claim that the fact that the PNAC "has a staff of five" means it is somehow without influence. (It's actually seven, plus the Project Directors, plus all the people who signed its Statement of Principles, plus all the people who signed its Second Statement on Postwar Iraq, plus all the other prominent Republican activists, wonks and politicians whose names turn up on PNAC documents.

Brooks' apology has all the sincerity and completeness of Pete Rose's, and deserves the same respect.

It's an Honor Just to be Nominated but it would, I confess, please me no end if Loyal Readers voted for this site in the Best Non-Liberal Blog category in the annual Koufax awards. You just click the link and put in the comments that "Henley's my man!" or something like that. My competitors are all whores and grifters who despise all that is good and decent in the world. It's vital that they be stopped.

Poetry Corner - It's only 2004, but Brooke Oberwetter has already produced a candidate for greatest poem of the century, "Ode to Britney." I laughed, I cried, I was moved.

Patience, My Little Ones - I apologize to people I owe e-mail from this week. It was gaming night. We'll have some good reader mail items in the next day or two.

Nothing. Nada. Zip. - "Iraq's Arsenal Was Only on Paper" writes the Post's Barton Gellman in an authoritative report. On the WMD front, the hawks seem now reduced to two claims:

1) Saddam was eeeeeeeeeeviiiillllllll! Stop asking about this stuff!

2) Saddam tried to bluff the world into thinking he had WMD. He succeeded and got wiped out for his troubles. Where's the problem?

The first is actually the stronger argument., but it simply returns us to familiar should the United States expend blood and treasure toppling foreign tyrants? ground. Had the Administration thought that argument a winner they'd never have bothered pushing the WMD line in the first place.

That leaves us with the second. We are faced with an immediate problem. Saddam's "bluff" consisted, in the main, of insisting his country had no WMDs. He furthered this bluff by having his government spokesmen say the same thing. To this, the hawks reply that these denials were pro forma, and the bluff was proven by his pattern of obstruction of the inspectors. Sticking purely to the post-resolution period, from October 2002 to March 2003, our main evidence for Iraq's non-cooperation with the inspection regime is continual, categorical statements by the Bush Administration, and weaker ones from Hans Blix.

The irony of the hawks choosing Hans Blix for an argument from authority is palpable. As for the Administration's statements, I noticed at the time how reflexive they were - no matter what Iraq did or didn't do, what papers it released or sites it opened up, someone in DC instantly declared that "Iraq is still not cooperating enough." We are faced with this problem: the same administration said, out of various mouths that it believed Iraq had "reconstituted nuclear weapons" (just add water!), that it knew of specific sites full of chemical and biological weapons, that Iraq was hording 20,000 liters of this and 30,000 liters of that, that its human sources had confirmed these facilities manufactured such and such.

We know now that none of those statements about WMD were an accurate reflection of reality. We know in retrospect, and this pisses me off no end, that the statements of one of the worst dictatorships in the world on this issue were more nearly the truth than the statements of our own government officials. So those same officials automatic and largely unspecified statements about "obstruction" are suspect.

And what about those dire warnings of Hans Blix about Iraqi non-cooperation? It makes sense to see these as part of Blix's double game - trying the best he could to keep the Americans sweet on one hand ("Look, I am tough!") and to get the most possible out of the Iraqis ("Hey, you don't deal with me, you deal with them.") It is manifestly the case that Blix's team felt the inspections were worth continuing, and clear that the hawks' derision of Blix for "failing to find any WMD" was unjust. There weren't any to find.

The inspections were, from the Administration's perspective, a charade. Blix said "Nice Doggie" while we gathered rocks. That Blix largely meant "Nice Doggie" made the charade that much better.

Which brings us back to argument 1. Saddam really was evil. And we really did get him. The costs of that deed include not just the dead and the maimed on our side, and the dead and the maimed on theirs, and the couple hundred billions of dollars from buildup through reconstruction. The costs include the Administration's decision to motivate the American people by fear, to perpetrate an official farce (inspections) and to be less truthful about factual matters than one of the most tyrannical governments on earth.

Yes, it was too much to pay, and to continue to pay.

News from Gun-Free Britain - Avedon Carol had a laptop stolen from her house, while she was in it. (The house, not the laptop.) What's worse, it wasn't even her laptop. Help a sister out by donating toward its replacement. The story is told here, here and here. The middle item is especially galling, as it has the most detail on what it takes to bother the police aboutreport a crime these days in Britain.

That's also a cost-cutting measure - instead of sending someone out to the scene of the crime, the way they used to do, they make people come to the station.

That's pretty much the end of even the fiction that police have any particular interest in solving crimes, when they can't even be bothered to come to the crime scene. Here all the police are either writing speeding tickets or buying drugs undercover. Not sure what they do in London.

Trade Me - Glen Engel-Cox takes up the baton in the "(some) comics creators versus trade paperback buyers" dispute. In addition to the personal perspective of someone who would be spending no dollars on comics if it weren't for paperbacks, Glen also has a useful consideration of the business perspective:

However, having made a small study of the business, I know the true reason why Byrne and David are concerned about the loss of the monthlies, because it is in the monthlies that so many creators make their actual money (creators of monthlies are paid by the page, while an original trade would likely be paid for the entire book - at a rate much less of the per page rate of the monthly), and they're afraid of that market disappearing. That is a real concern, but it's their concern, not mine or any other consumer. If the monthly market dies, creators will have to fight for additional payment for those original trades - if they decide to create those, and not, instead, do something else.

There does appear to be a page full of unsquarable circles composing the current economic picture. The readership is mostly interested in familiar characters in stories with a certain level of sophistication and craft. The kinds of stories that the adult superhero fan who constitutes what's left of the market enjoys can't be cranked out Bullpen-style by people writing six books a month and drawing three. (Bryan Michael Bendis is the obvious exception.) But for creators to make a living on historically low workloads means historically high piecework rates, particularly in the absence of an ownership share. (By "historically high," I exclude the late-century bubble. I mean compared to the Golden-thru-Bronze Ages.) Then there's the corporate infrastructure the big companies "have to" support. Then there's the decision of those companies to produce for a developing market (returnable books), while still depending on a declining one. Glen is certainly right that

A market is a market. Even if there's no monthlies, if there's a market for trades, someone is going to produce trades (with or without producing monthlies).

But it may be relatively few peopl who produce them, when it comes to licensed, corporate-owned superhero properties. Many artcomics creators are used to the "advance against royalties and keep your day job" model that is the standard for the vast majority of prose authors. But it will be a rude change for people making page rates. And a lot of very talented people may decide there's a better living in television, animation, design, advertising or, god forbid, telecom.

The hell of it is, I don't begrudge today's creators their living. I just don't owe it to them.

Department of Equal Time, Comicsblogging Division - Bill Sherman praises Craig Thompson's Blankets. Mike Kozlowski buries it.

A Fanboy's Mail - Kevin Maroney reminds me that it was he, not Avram Grumer, who predicted last July that Michael Chabon Presents: The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist would face significant delays. Kevin's actual predicted release date, July 23, 2004. If my source's informant was correct, he'll have nailed it almost exactly. However, Newsarama says it just ain't so.

Due to production delays, Dark Horse has confirmed for Newsarama that Michael Chabon Presents...The Amazing Adventures of The Escapist #1, originally due to be in stores on December 17th is now looking at a release date of February 11th.

Newsarama writer Matthew Brady specifically pooh-poohs the story I heard. I hope he's right and my source is wrong! We won't have long to find out, really. This is a book that was originally announced for October, then solicited for December, then delayed until January. Now the publisher says early February. We shall see.

(Newsarama link via Franklin's Findings.)

Meanwhile, Mary Kay Kare quibbles with my meager regard for Viggo Mortensen's portrayal of Aragorn:

I agree with you about Elijah Wood, but not about Mortenson. He looked very much like my idea of Aragorn and his physicality amazed me. He moved and looked like a vigorous warrior, futhermore one who is both intelligent and thoughtful.

Mary Kay has more of the Rings in blog items titled "The Return of the King" and "Yet More ROTK." Plainly Mary Kay has no truck with some bloggers' need to come up with clever titles for posts! (Or "clever" titles, either.)

Department of Ne'er So Well Express'd

TV phony John Edward's syndicated series, Crossing Over with John Edward, has been canceled after three seasons, proving even Americans can take only so much bullshit.

Franklin Harris.

Annals of Neo-PC - This year, my only interest in people who try to claim that critics of neoconservatism are using anti-Jewish code words is to ridicule them. Our first two objects of derision will be David Brooks and Joel Mowbray. What lying weasels! That is all. (But see Calpundit and Ysglesias for more on Brooks, if you're into that sort of thing.)

Pick on Calpundit Night Continues as we turn to an item on political donations from the education industry:

political donations from the education industry in the current election cycle have favored the Democrats by a margin of 65% to 34%. Since this segment doesn't include teachers' unions and is "dominated by contributions from college and university professors," it's probably a fairly decent proxy for the political leanings of university professors and administrators.

This suggests that about one-third of university academics lean Republican, which hardly gibes with the conservative notion that universities are hotbeds of lefty radicalism, a conclusion they usually come to by examining the affiliations of women's studies and social ecology departments at a few selected universities and mysteriously igoring the law schools and engineering departments.

So, yes, universities lean liberal, and some of them lean very liberal. But many of them don't, and overall they are far from monolithic.

Well this won't do at all.

First, 65-34 is much more "aligned" than the country as a whole. Second, there's nothing "mysterious" about ignoring the engineering departments, science departments and even, to a lesser extent, the business schools. It does not matter what the political leanings are of professors in departments where politics doesn't come up in class, and isn't reflected in the syllabus. The entire engineering department may have its monthly meetings at the Objectivist Center, but that will have small effect on the content of engineering courses. IF liberals are concentrated in departments where politics impinges more directly on the curriculum - history, poli sci, literature - then higher education will indeed take on a "liberal" cast. (Note: a high concentration of conservatives in the law schools would matter for just this reason, though nothing in Kevin's item establishes this as the case.)

Beyond course content is the question of the tenor of campus life. That's set by Administrators. Do most administrations tend to draw from, say, the generally-conservative business department, or the solidly-liberal Ed School? To the extent that liberal-to-radical departments provide the cadres of university administrations, universities will indeed tend toward hotbeds of radicalism. There's a tie-in to the item below this one too: those 34% of faculty who lean Republican are not necessarily as energetic in their focus on campus politics as the 65% that lean Democratic.

All of which is to say, maybe universities aren't hotbeds of lefty radicalism, but the single study of donors cited by Kevin (and Pandagon) demontstrates nothing of the kind.

Well, That Would Suck - Least Dispensible Weblog proprietor Kevin Drum is talking crazy talk, in an item about the limits of "original intent" in constitutional interpretation:

Each generation is responsible for governing itself. I suspect that this was the real original intent of the framers.

Um, then they made the Constitution so hard to amend why?

The bigger problem is that Kevin's formulation exemplifies the deep problem with American liberalism. It sounds noble enough, but falls apart on inspection, and the way it falls apart is the point. First the obvious: no "generation" governs itself. At any time, about five generations are alive. One of them is too young to have any say whatsoever. Each of the others has almost certainly been formed in ways distinctly different from the others - Boomers, their parents, Gen Xers, Millenials, we cuspers who fit between the boomers and Generation X proper - none of these generations will "govern itself." Just imagine what would happen if one tried. Some members of one will be governing some members of the others. The older generations will have a distinct power advantage. To the extent that Kevin means for the Republic to be made anew with each "generation," the several generations, each with distinct ideas of the good life and potentially vast disagreements about the nature of the good society, turn life into continual ferment and strife. No generation or even country "governs itself." Some people govern other people. Democracy is a way in which some groups impose their will on other groups. It is in theory more fluid than other ways of arranging power. In theory, all of us are on the winning team for some issues some of the time. And in theory and, frequently, practice, it is less violent and paradoxically more stable than more rigid allocations of actual rulership.

But without limits on the society's ability to re-form itself, democracy, representative or otherwise, would be quite intolerable for most people. That's because, in untrammelled democracy, nobody ever shuts up. Victory goes, not to the big battalions, but to the big mouths. A system in which "everybody has a voice" in practice favors the people with the most energy for debate and organization, and the people with the greatest interest in running other people's lives. (You can see the purest example of this in the typical Homeowners' Association.)

This is what liberals seem to love most of all - life as continual campaign, the elevation of Voice over Exit. In fact, Exit is right out. Ginger Stampley speaks approvingly of "the talking stick" and how everybody gets their turn with it. I've always thought this was a perfect metaphor for the liberal valorization of Voice. (Note: the only examples of the phrase in Ginger's archive apply specifically to gaming. While I believe she has used it in reference to politics also, I'll take responsibility for the political application of the metaphor.) It's an appealing image, of fairness, orderly discussion, consensus.

But it is, unmodified, dire. Because not everyone is equally good with the stick. And not everyone wants to talk all the time, and not everyone wants to have to, in principle, defend every aspect of their lives from social sanction. Some people have way less interest in politics than others. The problem with politics is that, because it is the arena of force, the people who do have a huge interest in it can make you care. I have a buddy who feels that the Cold War was largely a jobs program for engineers. That's as may be, but it's at least as true that the managerial state is a jobs program for the high school Poli Sci Club.

The only way to make political life tolerable, then, is to severely limit the scope of politics. This doesn't necessarily mean reducing government to libertarian proportions, but it does mean limiting the fluidity of a country's political arrangements over time. This is what Constitutionalism tries to do, and pace Kevin, is clearly what it was intended to do.

That Constitutionalism has failed to achieve its goals is a matter for another time.

A Fanboy's Strange Bedfellows - Arch-foes Peter David and John Byrne separately decry the "wait for the trade mentality" which leads many of us to pass on buying monthly comics in anticipation of getting the storyline in paperback form when it's collected. The argument is that the waiters depress sales of midlist-and-lower series, leading to a) the series' cancellation, and b) a decision by the publisher to forego trade paperback publication for those titles anyway. Byrne actually suggests that

Next time you run into someone who says he is "waiting for the trade" be sure to bombard him with as many SPOILERS as you can think of, from having read the books as they come out. Maybe that will help banish yet another thing driving nails into the coffin of this industry.

The idea is to shame the waiter into buying his damned monthly comics, apparently, rather than to convince him that this hobby just has too many assholes in it and he should leave it entirely. That John Byrne, he thinks outside the box.

In the Comicon thread, Johanna Draper Carlson stands up, as politely as possible, for the common sense idea that the consumer's only obligation is to spend her money on what pleases her.

This turns out to be a surprisingly hard sell.

I've seen this before - it comes with spending a lifetime in fringe pursuits. For instance, in the early 1990s, I used OS/2. I loved OS/2 in many ways, and I actually needed it - it was the only PC operating system that supported long filenames back then. I was a poet, and the last thing I wanted was to manage a hard drive of hundreds of poems, each in several versions, every one of those hundreds of files limited to 8-character names. As a bonus, OS/2 pushed object-orientation in directions Windows still hasn't managed. Just today at work, I was in Explorer looking at a text file and the Access database file in which it belonged. So I tried dragging the text file icon onto the database icon to see if it would start Access and kick off the text file import routine. Nothing doing!

Well, why the hell not, huh? But I can tell I'm drifting a bit. The point is, I spent a fair amount of time in Compuserve's OS/2 fora, aka World OS/2 Headquarters. And at some point, a booster made the argument that yes, all good "supporters" of the operating system would buy promising software packages even if they didn't really need them - OS/2 boosters had a duty to show developers that there was a "market" for OS/2 apps.

Of course we were demonstrating nothing of the kind, quite the opposite. The argument itself proved that OS/2 was an operating system for hobbyists and nothing more. I said to myself, "OS/2 boosterism has reached its decadent phase." (Okay, I didn't just say it to myself.) It was clear what was happening. The biggest "supporters" were IT guys who had bet big opportunity costs on OS/2 and bet wrong. All those certification programs, the hours with the API and the config files, all going to waste before their eyes. They had taken a wrong career turn and it wasn't just going to cost them money - they were going to take a "face hit" among their fellow geeks who had bet Windows and won. In such circumstances it became very difficult for them to separate other people's duty from their own self-interest.

The standout posts of the Comicon thread are by Nat Gertler. (There are no standout posts in the Newsarama thread.) Gertler, an actual publisher, doesn't just own up to his own responsibility to run his business, he refutes the argument that "if the monthly isn't selling, the publisher has no way of knowing that a trade would do better." Highlight:

I will bet far more on to-the-point anecdotal evidence than on less relevant hard numbers, and for hard numbers I would look at a wider array of things than the sales for a single book. The numbers that a monthly has been selling is not a direct dictation of how many copies the TPB will sell. In fact, the information that I get back from asking retailers actually is harder numbers for the eventual sales. When I survey retailers, asking "if I were to issue book X, how many would you order?" that gives me far better information to work with. I also look at how similar books are selling. When I consider publishing a work like Alice (reprinting an adaptation of Alice's Adventures In Wonderland that was serialized in The Dreamery years ago), the sales figures for The Dreamery are of little use to me. The news that the all-ages female-friendly Electric Girl TPBs have sold 10,000 copies each is far more useful (and that's a sales volume one could not have predicted that number from the pamphlet sales), as is news from retailers that librarians are looking specifically for comic adaptations of well-known literature.

It's certainly a tricky time for the market. The major publishers are having their books written so that they are most enjoyable reading several issues worth of story in a single sitting (when they are enjoyable at all). To the extent that they still expect readers to buy the stories in sub-optimal form they are naive. To the extent that publishers or creators feel it is the readers' duty to buy the stories in sub-optimal form the industry is, as I say, decadent.

And maybe not so bright, either. Marvel creates an entire new line, Tsunami, to appeal to the manga audience of teenagers, including girls. They don't do any significant branding with the imprint - the logo looks so much like the regular Marvel logo that it was only this last weekend I really noticed that, yeah, there's a sort of wave behind the stylized "M." Aside from occasionally cartoonier covers, the Tsunami book on the shelf looks like any other Marvel comic. (Compare the differentiation between DC's Vertigo covers, Cartoon Network books and DC's mainline imprint.) They put these titles, intended to reach new audiences, in front of the old one - the direct-market retail shops. They fill the titles with the same five-part decompressed storylines that comprise the core Marvel line. When the books do poorly in the direct-market, they cancel the monthlies and the trade paperbacks too, even though the trade paperbacks were supposed to be the point of the line, and success in the direct market was supposed to be beside the point.

In other words, they did everything they could possibly do wrong, wrong.

All the "support" in the world can't compensate for business decisions like that, which amounts to a failure to ask the "Gertler questions." So here's some "support" for you. Gertler's company, About Comics, has its website here. Check them out.

UPDATE: See also Franklin Harris, Grotesque Anatomy.

Call That Good News? - Comics bloggery is all happy to read that Daniel Clowes has announced he'll produce an expanded version of Ice Haven, the story that comprises the entirety of Eightball #22.

Well I am not so sanguine. You don't fuck with perfection. Would you consider it good news to learn that Ernest Hemingway intended to flesh out "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place"? That Jane Austen was adding material to Pride and Prejudice? That Chuck Austen was going to have Havok pee up two bodies for Iceman?

Look, I think Daniel Clowes is a genius. But Eightball #22, "Ice Haven", is perfect. There's only one direction to go from perfect, and it ain't up.

Weekly Fitness Blog Item - 161 pounds. That's five fewer than last week's figure, but that's not necessarily so great. Last week's weight was inflated by illness in ways that don't bear dwelling on, and to the extent this week's figure represents any genuine loss of body weight, I fear it came out of muscle mass rather than fat. The good news is that I got in my first real weight workout of the year tonight, so we should have things well in hand soon.

Current weight regimen: For each muscle group, 3 sets of 12 reps, as follows:

1. Exercise A, with about half maximum weight.
2. Exercise A, with the max I can lift 12 times.
3. Exercise B, with some doable load between the loads in 1 and 2.

So for example, tonight's chest routine was

1. Dumbbell bench press, 12 reps at 15 pounds.
2. Dumbbell bench press, 12 reps at 30 pounds.
3. Dumbbell flyes, 12 reps at 20 pounds.

Rep length about 3-5 seconds positive, same negative.

I got sick of Body-for-Life's six-set routines last summer. They just took too darn long to do. But I liked the idea of a warmup set, and I liked the idea of hitting each muscle group with two exercises. So I made up the current "system." I have the option of trading weight for reps later, but this is very doable.

Strange Blogiversary. This site's prototype fitness blog item appeared one year ago tomorrow. Weight that day, 216 pounds.

Goals for 2004. Repeating some New Year's Resolution material here: run a marathon, if medically cleared. Stay in size 30 slacks all year. Keep resting pulse below 50. Get cholesterol in healthy range by any means necessary, including drugs. (I haven't had a test since the summer, but I have one scheduled next month.)

Why a marathon? Because it's hard, and there's relatively few people who can/will do it, but it's within my plausible competence. I have had to accept over the past year that, while I am fitter than ever, I am still a klutz. I can get stronger, I can get faster, but what I haven't gotten is a whit more graceful. This pains me no end, but it's life.

You don't have to be graceful to run a marathon.

Steps taken so far? I have exchanged several e-mails with the Talking Dog. Hey, he is a marathoner! And his first idea - that he and I file a joint entry in the Marine Corps Marathon here this fall, is to my liking. All that's left is the, you know, training.

I see a couple of ways to attack the problem, basically from either end.

1. Walk 26.2 miles. Should take about 9 hours. Next week, intersperse some running intervals over the same course. Total time to complete should drop slightly. Keep increasing the proportion of running each week until you complete the course in the time desired, say 4.5 hours.

2. Walk X hours, where X is the amount of time in which you want to complete the marathon course. Next week, intersperse some running intervals into your X hours. Distance covered should increase slightly. Keep increasing the proportion of runnning each week until you cover 26.2 miles.

In either case, add shorter aerobic sessions and weight training between the big weekly training bouts.

2 seems marginally more practical, since 9 hours is an awful lot of time to budget if you have a family, and frankly, I think it would take me weeks of training until I could even walk 9 hours, let alone run some of that time. Maybe start at 2 and shift to 1 at some later time (like when you can complete the course in 6 hours).

Why will I continue to lift weights and do high-intensity aerobics instead of focusing on pure marathon prep? 1. Because I think of a marathon as an indicator of one aspect of fitness, not fitness entire. 2. I have a notion that good general fitness levels, including upper-body fitness, may be useful, even though distance runners at least traditionally scanted upper body exercise ("runner's physique"). For all I know the pendulum long since swung away from leg-only training among people who actually pay attention to this sort of thing.

What could blow the whole deal? My knees and back. A very early step is a planned visit to my orthopedist.

Project for this week: actually start to learn something about the subject. Your TD recommends Marathoning for Mortals, which I hope to pick up this week.

In other fitness blogs. Bruce Baugh recalls past experiences with hitting the weight loss wall and plans ways to bust through this time.

The Revolution of Frowns - Juan Cole has a useful recap of progress toward the Islamic Republic of Iraq in the Basra area. Historian John Keegan alerted us to the Brits' enthusiasm for letting local "Big Men" get on with the business of ordering things to their liking a few months ago. Cole's article can be seen as an illustration of what that entails: Christian liquor merchants bombed out of business or killed; musicians and sellers of music beaten and otherwise intimidated; jobs handed out on the basis of ethnicity and proximity to someone with juice.

The other day I wrote of the likelihood that Iraq ends up as "Egypt II," but there's another model on offer also: Kosovo II. In Kosovo, NATO brayed about fighting for pluralism, tolerance and coexistence before, during and even after the war. But what they actually did was put themselves at the disposal of the most extreme and violent elements among the Kosovars. Under NATO's nose, the KLA and its allies spent the postwar period driving off ethnic Serbs, Roma and other non-Albanian residents. This is the real reason why the occupation of Kosovo was so much "quieter" than the Iraqi occupation has been - NATO gave the most dangerous faction pretty much everything it wanted.

That hasn't been an option with the Ba'athists who have, apparently, predominated in the resistance to date. But it could easily "work" with the Shi'ites. Let them have their way, let them have their payback, let them dominate the other factions as they like behind the merest scrim of due process. Call it "democracy" because the word covers a multitude of sins. This appears to be what the British are already doing and it's very possibly what the US will settle on soon, or has already settled. The Tribunes have already begun preparing the domestic ground for this politically. Tom Friedman assured us a few weeks ago that the Islamic Republic of Iraq was coming, and that was not such a bad thing, no not really. (Via Letter from Gotham, who found another source for the plan too.) Jim Hoagland has worked the same angle from the other direction - Friedman's task has been to burnish the Shi'ites. Hoagland has taken it upon himself to demonize the Sunnis. Hoagland has been arguing lately that "the" problem in Iraq is not just ex-Ba'athists but the Sunni Arabs as a whole. "They" have constituted a favored class and "they" want to hang on to their privileges and until "they" accept that a newer more equitable era is upon us, "they" will continue to be the enemies of progress. Hoagland's argument has been taken up here and there by others. That it comes from the mouths of American white men is simply bravura.

The arguments will make a nice metric, though (as it were), for just how much a lie we are giving to the rhetoric that justified the war. This too will be like Kosovo, where the answer became: an utter lie, thank you. Keep an eye on how widely the administration and its epigones draw the "circle of shame." As it progresses from Saddam to his government to "Ba'athists" and beyond to "Sunni Arabs," it crosses from realms of genuine responsibility into realms of convenience and, at some point, libel. The purpose will be, as always, to justify the unjustifiable, and to obscure the knowledge that we were "fighting fascism" on behalf of - another fascism. That's what we did in Kosovo. If the regime of the British Zone spreads to the rest of Iraq, it will mean that that's what we did there too.

Your Liberty and Power News for the Week - Franklin Harris is the new guest blogger at L and P. Gene Healy is still crossposting there too, apparently. Maybe Franklin has to toss him out bodily or something. Anyway, a lively place is Liberty and Power, is the theme of this item.

A Fanboy's Second-Hand News - Someone I was talking to today who had lunch with Someone at Dark Horse Comics this week tells me that the Dark Horse person conveyed the news that "they will be lucky" if MICHAEL CHABON PRESENTS: THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF THE ESCAPIST #1 ships "six months from now." The book was scheduled for last month. Apparently lawyers are involved, though the details on that aspect of things were hazy.

Drat. But Avram Grumer predicted this months ago.

Some Tolkienblogging - Diana Moon tipped me to Peter Bradshaw's review of Return of the King in the Guardian, which makes some fallacious arguments, chief among them that the movie needed "more Saruman" and that the movie/s scanted "the cost of war" because all the principles (save Boromir) survive to the end.

But there we are. Without Saruman, it's not good versus evil. It's good versus... a sort of swarming amorphous danger.

I confess I found the review to be twaddle. Bradshaw can't seem to recognize a cost of war other than death. But the whole series is about just how high the cost of war is even in the absence of death. Okay, "about" is too strong a word. But what the movies are great at, particularly the first one, is showing how it hurts to be Frodo. Jackson is terrific at conveying physical pain, and physical pain is what proves Frodo's heroism. (Jackson's Fellowship is a symphony of pain.) Then there's the "Lost Generation" riff among the four hobbits at the end of the movie.

Movie reviewers are prone to specific kinds of idiocy, genus "living with the curse of sophistication," to quote a resonant line of Elvis Costello. Faced with a genre movie, they want a certain amount of reassurance - specifically, to be assured that the material is somewhere comfortably below them. They want familiar tropes as badly as the most naive fanboy, and one of the tropes they hunger for is an energetic, scene-chewing villain. Then they can say "So-and-so steals the movie" and not have to think overmuch. Viz. the first Batman movie and Jack Nicholson. Where, by the way, you can only imagine Jack Nicholson steals the movie if your monkey eye is easily distracted by shiny things. Michael Keaton's study in How to Be Good Though Angry makes that movie, not Nicholson's hammery.

More Saruman would have been a distraction, because the Saga isn't about Evil, it's about Good. Tolkien clearly believes, like CS Lewis, that Evil as such is not so interesting. But temptation to evil, to power, that's a whole other thing. So is the temptation to evade responsibility. So the costs of war. Tolkien, unlike most movie critics, finds Good more interesting than Evil, and Jackson clearly accepts that. There's no attempt to explore Sauron's "point of view." There's nothing to explore. And Saruman is just a guy who decides to get with what he expects to be the winning team - a guy with his eye on the main chance.

The reason Gollum gets so much more screen time is that the temptation to Good makes him interesting. Were that element of his character lacking, he'd be a mere collection of mannerisms. This is where I think the Inklings were most right philosophically: Evil is dull; Good - real Good - is not.

The reviewer is also suspect in calling Christopher Lee one of only two good acting jobs in the series. Lee is nice, but I didn't find him especially compelling. He's just a bad guy. McKellen is great, really great. The other two standout performances are Sean Astin and Andy Serkis. Sean Bean probably makes this list too. I would give "well dones" to Rhys-Davies, the Merry and Pippin guys, Bernard Hill (Theoden) and Miranda Otto (Eowyn).

Elijah Wood and Viggo Mortensen each have their inadequacies, and those are big holes. Wood has a face that is not just too unformed but apparently unformable. Mortensen may simply have been handed a script in which the inner conflict over whether to take up his birthright is scanted in favor of other threads. I think Billy Boyd, who played Pippin, stood a much better chance of nailing the aspects of Frodo that Wood couldn't convey. Diana has believed, and still does occasionally, that Sean Bean would have made a better Aragorn than Mortensen. Bean does seem to have some dynamism that Mortensen at least does not show.

On first viewing, I liked RotK least of the three movies, so maybe it's strange to jump down a reviewer's throat for criticising it, but it bothers me when people write damfool things.

Happy New Metric System - Time was I had other material than Iraqi electricity production. Now the CPA and I are trapped in an unending series of bulletins reminiscent of reporting on the 1930s Soviet Union. The beguiling thing about power production is that the numbers are unitary, among the few data that are promptly and well reported by the CPA to the public, and just say "infrastructure!" like almost nothing else. ("Electricity + De-Ba'athification = Democracy!" for all you superannuated Sovietologists out there. Oh right. You guys are working for the CPA.)

You hear about salaries, you wonder about inflation. You hear about paint jobs in schools, you wonder why anyone is boring you with that crap. You hear about electricity, you figure it's gotta mean something.

It's also the first December benchmark to "close," thanks to the CPA's excellent "Daily Power Production and Distribution" page. (The only useful section of the english-language site - I hope Arabic speakers get more use from theirs.)

To the numbers themselves: December ended on an upswing. The seven-day average peak output on December 31st was 3,641 - that's five percent higher than the December 1 figure (3,453), and slightly higher than the average for all reported time back to early August (3,538). Still nowhere close to the salad days of October, which the CPA relives on its electricity welcome page the way Redskins fans nurture themselves on memories of the Gibbs Years, but the last seven days of the month run

3,311
3,310
3,380
3,467
3,495
3,586
3,641

That's the moving 7-day average, which climbs 10%.

Here is a very simple table showing peak output (7-day ave) on the last day of every recorded month so far:

August:3,451
September: 3,932
October: 3,824
November: 3,506
December: 3,641

On the way back up, but climbing more slowly than it fell. And as a reminder, the Iraqi Ministry of Electricity's own estimate of Iraq's needs is 7,000Mw.

In Baghdad itself the situation looks rather better. The seven-day average peak output on December 31: 1,414. That's actually the third highest day since August 10, and the only two better numbers (October 10 and 11) were 1,417 and 1,425. December 31's peak output for that day alone (unaveraged, 1,585Mw) was Baghdad's single best day since recording begins August 4. It was just a good week all around for Baghdad power. Here are the last seven days UNaveraged peak output numbers:

1,385
1,075
1,480
1,500
1,520
1,350
1,585

The thing to keep in mind is that Baghdad's average daily number since August 4 is 1,235. Zeyad at Healing Iraq, who is plainly trying to horn in on my action, did his own powerblogging this week, and explains the improvement as due to . . . various repairs, mainly of sabatoged lines.

I look forward to the day when there are Iraqi blogs who post about nothing but electricity production. (Cue Folk Implosion: "There's no tellin' what we'll do when we're free!")

Here's the month-end table for Baghdad (we're back to seven-day averages):

August: 1,237
September: 1,312
October: 1,231
November: 1,231
December: 1,414

That's a 15% improvement over the month, after basically no movement prior. The CPA/Ministry of Electricity's stated goal for October 2003, per the Saban Center Iraq Index at Brookings, was 2,500Mw. The MOE does not give a Baghdad-specific "need" counterpart to go with the 7,000Mw figure for the whole country. We can try a SWAG based on the current output ratio. Baghdad currently gets about 1/3 of Iraq's total juice, so that would give a "need" figure of 2,500Mw. That can't be right, though, since that's what Brookings gives as the pre-war figure for Baghdad, and longtime readers of Where is Raed know that Baghdad power was iffy even in late 2002. At that time, Baghdad was getting 60% of Iraq's juice. Assume that the rest of the country was really power-starved, and say Baghdad needs 40% to half the total power in the country, and you get a Baghdad need figure of between 3,000 and 3,500Mw.

So, bottom line? Power output in the country as a whole and Baghdad specifically improves from its November trough. Power output in both categories is still well below prewar levels, which were degraded by preparation for invasion and a dozen years of sanctions.

Wasn't that fun? We'll do more metrics as the December figures come in.

This Doesn't Even Rise to Burying the Lede - The Reuters article on the coming troop rotation in Iraq concentrates on the "giant logistics chore complicated by concerns about opportunistic attacks targeting Americans as they arrive or depart." But the hot speculation is how the US will use the transition time:

Officials said each arriving unit is due to have a period of at least weeks to work alongside the departing unit to transfer knowledge of the terrain, culture and enemy.

They've also said, in other stories, that the Pentagon will take advantage of the time that US force levels are basically doubled to really ramp up offensive operations against the insurgency. Did Reuters miss those leaks or did they rightly discount them? Check back in three to four months.

Wait! Check back before then! Revisit this issue in three to four months.

I Am Almanac! - Anent the "Almanac Alert," Ginger Stampley writes that "Jim Henley . . . should know better." She compares the baleful "planespotting case" a couple of years ago in Greece. And Hal O'Brien e-mails

What worries me is just how vaguely everything is worded. "Suspicious annotations". "Apparent surveillance". Apparent to whom? Suspicious to whom? Deduced how?

As to AP statement about getting a copy and verifying it, my take on that is, "We thought it was a hoax, too. Then we got a copy of the memo. Hoo-whee."

This is just more of the same from this Administration. "If you check out too many library books (and we decide how many are too many), we'll pull your library records. If you use an almanac, we'll brand you a terrorist." Next thing they'll be saying anyone who uses a Statistical Abstract to verify the laughingstock of some of their stranger statements is a traitor.

This Administration continues to push the idea that there is a body of knowledge that should only be known to a governmental mandarinate, and that even the *desire* for that knowledge is somehow suspicious.

I would take this back to Bruce Schneier's set of 5 questions that are the backbone of his recent book, "Beyond Fear":

* "What assets are you trying to protect?" If we take the Administration at its word, it would be Any Terrorist Target. Woo.

* "What are the risks to these assets?" Again, at face value, Any Possible Terrorist Attack. Also, again, woo.

* "How well does the security solution mitigate those risks?" Ah, here we go.

Not a damn bit.

When was the last time you heard of the Israelis seizing almanacs from the Palestinians? Or, how much would arresting people with almanacs have stopped the 11 Sept attacks at all? Or, how about that guy who was caught at the US/Canadian border on the way to LAX?

* "What other risks does the security solution cause?" One more erosion of free speech, free press, unreasonable searches and seizures, and anti-intellectual bigotry in general. Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln loved the play...

* "What costs and trade-offs does the security solution impose?" So, there you are, a beat cop... And you're now supposed to monitor whether people have almanacs, rather than, oh, say, are committing crimes? Basically, to enforce this thing properly would take more resources than we have available. Especially given how useless it is to actually stopping terrorism. Releasing it without resources, on the other hand, just makes the Administration more laughable, and makes the public more likely to think they're yelling "Wolf! the next something real *does* comes along.

In other words, in one way, yes, you're right, it's completely trivial and useless. But the measure's very triviality and uselessness just makes it all the more appalling. Instead of actually working on stopping terrorism, these bozos want to punish reading, and make curiosity "suspicious".

They may be right. I'd caution Hal, though, that this appears to be less an "Administration" edict than an FBI one. The FBI as an institution sucks today, sucks last year, sucked in the previous administration, sucked in the one before that, has sucked since its founding and will continue to suck when our sun has bloated up like a big dead fish on the Beach of Time. Al Gore's FBI would issue the Almanac order because, in a real sense, "Al Gore's FBI" would not exist.

But the fact that it's so hard to separate the merits of the order itself from the merits of the institutions that will (mis)use it indicates that I should conced the point.

Curses Foiled Again - Casey Lartigue desmystifies the magical thinking of Post columnist Courtland Milloy, re the Washington Redskins' "curse."

Department of Separating Ideology from Esthetics - The lyrics to Willie Nelson's new peace anthem are pretty darn lame. I haven't heard the music, but it would have to be damn good to save the thing.

Traffic and Laughter - I don't usually do traffic-related items - it ill befits the lower-medium time/upper-small time blogger - but December was a ridiculously good month. Site readership had been growing at about 10% a month for the last several, but visits blew past November's total in three weeks. The previous best-of month was March 2003 - you may recall there was a war then. December actually topped it, especially surprising given the usual effect of holidays on readership. Thanks to every loyal reader, and referrers too.

Top dozen referrers, in order:

Atrios
Where is Raed
Electrolite
Counterspin
Crooked Timber
Calpundit
Journalista
Instapundit
Winds of Change
Agitator
Eve Tushnet
Matthew Yglesias

Happy New Year - My competitive blogging advantage on this day is that I don't drink, so I can steal a march on my fellows. My competitive disadvantage is I'm feeling kind of lazy, and the batch of new pills my doctor prescribed me yesterday have left me a bit woozy.

Last year's resolutions: Sell some articles (made a start); Stop the war (oh well); Be prompter about e-mail (qualified failure).

This year's resolutions: Sell more writing, including to new markets; Stay in 30" slacks all year; Run a marathon, if medically cleared; Read more non-political blogs; Finish the graphic novel this month; Complete and test a game design by end of year; Do for the family finances what I did for the Unqualified Waistline, but without the equivalent of fitness blogging.