Yet More Stray Iraqi Thoughts - The anti-Soviet resistance in Afghanistan didn't start gaining military traction until it got its hands on Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, which it could use to shoot down Soviet Hind helicopters. It also eventually got serviceable TOW antitank weapons too, and could directly attack Soviet armor. It got those things, of course, from us.

Happily for us, the Iraqi resistances (foreign, Sunni, Sadrist) so far lack good anti-helicopter and anti-armor weapons. (RPGs don't cut it.) This either means they are NOT getting significant foreign support, or the foreign support figures that provisioning such things would tip its hand in a way it dare not currently do. So long as that situation continues, American casualties will remain manageable and we'll be able to sieze (if not hold) any patch of ground we take a fancy to. If that situation changes, the balance of power changes concomitantly.

(I take it for granted that if Iraqi resistance groups had such weapons they would use them. They've used everything else they can get their hands on.)

Two other things seem likely: 1. The Sunni-region insurgents seem to have had access to substantial Saddam-era weapons stores. That suggests that the terrifying "threat to the whole region" that was Baathist Iraq was itself essentially bereft of working man-portable antitank and anti-aircraft weapons by the time Gulf War Phase III rolled around in March 2003. 2. If anti-American forces in Iraq do suddenly come into possession of man-portable anti-vehicle weapons, it will suggest that Someone outside Iraq has decided it's worth a major effort to take the Americans down or at least bleed the hell out of them. It would be a major risk for any non-nuclear power to take.

More Stray Iraq Thoughts - One of the reasons commonly given for the impossibility of petitioning Iraq along ethnic/sectarian lines is that it would leave the Sunni section a landlocked, oil-free wasteland, a kind of surlier Jordan. I think "Sunnaq" would have a more arable land than Jordan, and there are plenty of theorists who view oil wealth as something of a political curse, but that doesn't mean Sunnaq would want to do without. But if the will were otherwise there, it should be possible to give Kurdaq the oil fields around either Kirkuk or Mosul and Sunnaq the ones around Mosul or Kirkuk. Both cities and regions are contested, so "each gets one" is an imaginable compromise.

That just leaves a few other nagging problems, like Iraq's Sunnis not wanting to give away everything else in partition, the Kurds wanting "the whole schmear" (Mosul AND Kirkuk), the thoroughgoing ethnic intermingling in Baghdad (largest Kurdish population in Iraq, IIRC) and the apparent lack of enthusiasm for partition among the vast majority of Iraqis. Oh well.

Firefox Mania GoesToo Far - EggOn! "Firefox extension for cooking the perfect egg." Via Brett Peters, naturally enough.

Home Away from Home Dept. - Today's Agitator guest worker item wonders about the possibly changing face of paleolibertarianism.

Stray Iraq Thoughts - The latest "liberation strategy appears to be Codename: "Fuck the Sunni." (See Krauthammer and Ignatius. Both are well wired into official views, and reliable transmitters of same, for current values of "official.") You can find more rabid versions of the sentiment if you look, and it's not hard to understand why: the Sunni-specific resistance to the post-invasion occupation of Iraq has caused the lion's share of US casualties and done the most to ruin the victory parades. Plus, Fuck the Sunni offers either the quickest exit strategy or the surest route to a continued presence (enduring bases) in the country. Keep the dominant Shiites sweet and you can get out sooner OR stay longer.

From what I can tell, if the question is "Who cast the first stone, Sunni Iraqi or Shiite Iraqi," the answer is Sunni Iraqi. From that perspective the cynic might say They've got it coming. If you change the question to Sunni Iraqi versus America, the answer becomes decidedly less clear - I can't remember the last time I saw an Iraqi jet over American airspace or had to pass through an Iraqi checkpoint. Sunni attempts to roll back any of our Central American interventions in the 1980s escaped my notice.

From a practical perspective, Fuck the Sunni seems to amount to this: we have a problem with terroristic Sunni-inflected radicalism. A material number of Sunni Arabs (with a smattering of non-Arabs) hates us enough to go out of their way to do us harm, to uproot their lives and dedicate their every waking moment to planning and inflicting mayhem on us. Our medium-term response to this looks like it will be choosing a particular Sunni community with no immediate connection to such mayhem and upending it. This doesn't seem brutal enough to cow Sunni radicalism into compliance. Nor does it seem calculated to take the edge off that hatred. It's as if the good fairy saw Little Bunny Foo Foo picking up the field mice to bop them on the head and decided to deal with it by kicking the shit out of an entirely different rabbit. Not necessarily the nicest rabbit in the forest, but another bunny nevertheless.

UPDATE: Point being, when the good fairy clobbers a non-Foo Foo bunny, it doesn't stop Bunny Foo Foo's depredations among the mice. And chances are it pisses off a bunch of the other rabbits. But it's a bad analogy in some ways. It would be more precise if there were a Bunny Fa Fa who attacked the Good Fairy, and in response the Good Fairy clobbers Bunny Foo Foo instead. You get the idea. But maybe reading mimi smartypants (and I for one can't wait for the post-Thanksgiving entry) is rubbing off on me in strange ways.

Look Over There - I do a bit of sportsblogging on the Agitator. Tonight's topic: those Joe Gibbs "retiring because of his health" rumors: accident? coincidence? conspiracy?

Plus, yet more Hitherby Dragons-related linkblogging.

Time Passages - April, an American serviceman (Wash Post):

"I hope we don't get to the point where we are so jaded we start rolling down the streets in tanks and shooting at everything that moves," said Capt. Chris Chown. "If you start to lose that sense of humanity, you've lost your mission."

November, an American serviceman (Knight-Ridder):

One guy talked about guard duty in Kosovo one day and getting angry about being there, in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of nothing. He saw a mentally ill child who always came to the gate, asking for candy. The soldier told him to come over, and then he punched him as hard as he could, over and over, just to see if the kid would come back the next day. When he did, the soldier beat him again, laughing.

After that story, Laird told the soldier he was a coward and an ass.

More, from the same article:

Spc. James Barney, who drove the Bradley that carried Sims' body, stood by the vehicle outside, talking to himself. "We need to just finish it, level the whole damn city," he said. "I'm tired of this place, I'm tired of this shit."

More:

"Being in our track and smelling him — I'm glad I never saw his face," Ward said of Sims.

On his way out, Laird turned and said he'd been thinking about his son.

"I don't want my boy to know his daddy's a killer," he said. With that, he picked up his gun and walked out the door.

More:

More bullets flew by, and the mortar rounds grew closer. Capt. Kirk Mayfield, of the recon team, yelled, "Everyone behind the truck."

Standing next to his Humvee, Mayfield screamed for U.S. mortar strikes on the five-man team. After the ensuing rumble, a voice called over the radio: "Can I get a battle damage assessment?"

"An assessment?" the reply came. "There is no more building."

More:

"F------ Hajji," he muttered, using grunt slang for Iraqis.

What's the penalty for asking too much of people?

UPDATE: From a reader letter to Flit:

It's seems an odd exchange. Then once inside, Sites tells the lieutenant that these men were the wounded from the day before. The officer goes outside to radio in a report and the now-famous event then unfolds... but even though significant time unfolds in Sites' narrative after the firing of that additional shot, the lieutenant doesn't reappear -- despite presumably being close enough to have heard the shot and be able to tell it was from inside the mosque.

Best Weblog Period Goes to Dogs - It's true. I will be guestblogging at the Agitator for a bit along with some other sharp folks - once I get a password. Blogging will not cease here, nor will I cross-post. I will post notices here when there's new content there and vice verse. My plan is to do very little warblogging there - it'll be the softer side of moi, mostly. Particularly I hope to keep up Radley's tradition of sportsblogging and keeping up with the War on Pleasure. Expect roughly a post or more a day here and a post or so a day there (exclusive of pointers) through the holidays.

Dept. of Modest Proposals - Glen Whitman has one to combat overzealous, revenue-driven property evaluations by state assessors:

So here’s my proposal: Any property owner whose property is subject to a tax based on a government-assessed valuation should have the option to force the government to purchase the property at, say, 97% of the assessed value. This would give the state a strong incentive not to overvalue property, since whenever it did so, it could be faced with the losing proposition of buying at above-market value and then selling at actual-market value.

Why 97%? Read the original to find out why Glen Whitman merits the designation "smart ass."

Would Knight-Ridder Please Buy a Paper in Washington? Because their reporting still beats the pants off everyone else covering Iraq. Read this heartbreakingly good embed journal by reporter Tom Lasseter from the Fallujah battle.

(Hat tip: Gary Farber.)

Thought for the Day - The easiest kind of sycophant to be would have to be clam-follower.

Guy vs. Spy - Kevin Drum has a useful summary of how to deal with a spyware infestation. I'll note that, while it's painfully obvious I don't set the Official Libertarian Line on, well, anything, someone who causes software to install itself on your machine wtihout permission, and to take active measures to prevent removal, up to and including crashing your system when you try to uninstall it, has committed fraud. Fraud is a civil and criminal offense. Grab book. Throw.

Liberal Self-Parody Watch - Eschaton guest-blogger Hecate is exactly the annoying sort of liberal that Eschaton proprietor Atrios says hardly exist. Skim here and here (I won't insist that you read) to see.

Happy Thanksgiving - War has got me in a mood today, but a wonderful family dinner has lifted it enough that I'll spare you for at least a day. See last year's entry for holiday cheer. See Hitherby Dragons today if you too are in a mood, and see no point in fighting it.

I for One Never Doubted It

Thus, democracy may exist in a range of taxa and does not require advanced cognitive capacity.

Conradt and Roper, Group Decision-Making in Animals, quoted by Crooked Timber.

Notice - I have no idea what's really going on in Ukraine. Frankly, I doubt you do either.

Sauce for the Gander - Not content to leave asshole tactics to MEMRI, CAIR has filed multiple libel notices against David Frum and others.

Girl knows how to milk it - Why bring yourself down reading political blogs when you could be enjoying a top-notch diarist like Mimi Smartypants instead? Mimi produces more or less weekly entries - discursive ones that repay the time spent reading them. I'm a little concerned that she devotes so much ire to the children's television show, Maisy, while seemingly ignoring the larger issue that Theodore Tugboat is the single creepiest television program ever, but the Abyss stares also into you, you know? Self-preservation is a key parenting skill. As it was, I called Mrs. Offering in to read the Maisy entry. The regular reader gets digressions on the popularity of anal sex, pointers to a band that uses C64s and Ataris to make music and other cool stuff. Since our author dresses her kid in Che Guevara t-shirts, she might be horrified to pick up a recommendation from a libertarian weblog, but the internets are big and strange.

Via snarkout.

BOGGLE - I'd be fascinated to see any refutation of the factual claims Michael Ewens and Arthur Silber have found about draconian IP laws imposed on Iraqi farmers, who, on plausible readings of the source documents, "will be forced to use plant seeds from specific US companies, effectively banning the farmers from using their own seeds." From the little reading I've done, the sensible resistance to adopting GM foods in the third world has been less about the "frankenfoods" aspect and more about fear of getting caught in onerous contracts with the patent holders. I've seen claims asserted by certain agribusinesses that amounted to a right to sue you if their pollen so much as wafted over your fields, causing their genetic material to end up in your next crop. Wow, I thought on reading those stories, botanical colonialism. It at least appears that, in Iraq, we're mating botanical colonialism with colonialism pure.

UPDATE: Tex points out via e-mail that I originally wrote atypo: "found about draconian IP laws imposed on Iraqi darmers . . . " That passage should read "dound about draconian IP laws imposed on Iraqi farmers . . . " Unqualified Offerings regrets the error.

Liberals for Tort Reform - Hm. I'd say Juan Cole, Eschaton and Henry Farrell are good candidates.

What We've Come To - Daniel Radosh on the latest cultural outrage.

My Life and Roleplaying was the name of a column in the long-gone Different Worlds magazine from game publisher Chaosium, in which gaming industry people chronicled their association with the hobby. I won't put you through that, but as a fun change of pace, here's a current 15-question meme about a hobby I've enjoyed on and off for 25 years.

1. What is the first RPG you ever played?
White-box Dungeons and Dragons, freshman spring, college. These were the early chapbook-format pamphlets (three of them). We used the Greyhawk supplement, which was also a chapbook, cream cover with purple titling. The art in all pamphlets was execrable.

2. What RPG do you currently play most often?
We just finished a year-plus campaign with the already-cancelled Marvel Universe Roleplaying Game.

3. What is the best system you’ve played?
No award. I like MURPG a great deal. I'm fond of Nobilis and Amber. But there's no single system, considered strictly as a set of rules, for which I have an unqualified preference.

4. What is the best system you’ve run?
Either the James Bond 007 Adventure Game, the original DC Heroes RPG from Mayfair Games, or MURPG.

5. Would you consider yourself an: Elitist/ Min-Maxer/ Rules Lawyer?
I suppose I'm an elitist of sorts. Put it this way, when the usual suspects on gaming sites complain that systems I enjoy and games I like to play are "elitist," my response is "Fine. If I agree that I'm an elitist will you go away and let me have fun?"

6. If you could recommend a new RPG which would you recommend? Why?
Trollbabe by Ron Edwards, because it does such a great job explaining how it should be played. This is a surprisingly-neglected aspect of game writing. Trollbabe is not a "joke game," by the way, or any kind of parody. I would even defy anyone to play it that way.

7. How often do you play?
"Weekly," for married parent values of weekly.

8. What sort of characters do you play? Leader? Follower? Comic Relief? Roll-Player/ Role-Player?
I tend to play characters that look like comic relief on the surface but (hopefully) turn out to be rather more substantial. OR the kind of outsider who fancies himself sagacious. If you read a bunch of Ross MacDonald novels when you're 21, they'll stick with you.

9. What is your favorite Genre for RPGs?
I confess: Superheroes!

10. What Genres have you played in?
Fantasy, SF, superhero, spy, pulp, horror, gothic, "hidden world," Amber (a genre all its own). Completely missed the Vampire phenomenon.

11. Do you prefer to play or GM? Do you do both?
I do both. I think I prefer to play.

12. Do you like religion in your games?
Sure.

13. Do you have taboo subjects in your games or is everything “fair game”?
Rape, I think. Willful cruelty to children. I would not enjoy playing or GMing a sustained "evil" campaign.

14. Have you developed your own RPG before?
No, but I think I can claim the honor of major contributions to the "Amberway" sytem-bundle. And I'm toying with ideas for a Sapphire&Steel RPG.

15. Have you ever been published in the Gaming Industry? If so…what?
Around 1981 I sold a contribution to the Ship's Locker section of GDW's Journal of the Traveller's Aid Society. I made five dollars in 1981 money for that.

(Cf. Ginger, Matt Snyder et al.)

The Law of Conservation of Personality Cults - Weirdly synchronous with the item below, it develops that

...With the reports of Mr. Kim's portraits being removed from some public buildings and news of military defections, outside analysts are speculating that the personality cult around "Dear Leader" is being curbed, either to advance painful economic reforms or to head off a military coup fomented by China.

Via Just One Minute.

Back in the USSA - There are two bright sides to the story and image I'm sending you to: 1) Isn't it a tribute to the American system that even our agitprop is largely done by volunteers? 2) At least we don't have to sit through a bunch of parades. Or worse, stand. Let's face it, parades suck.

(Via Flagrancy to Reason.)

The Call of Patriotism - Diana reminds me that, with the holidays coming around again, it's a good time to make donations to Operation Uplink, which provides phone cards to military personnel. Tens of thousands of our troops will be spending another Christmas in war zones this year. Phone cards are also the number one request at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Don't Go Getting Excited - The Boston Globe article cited below is a dark lining wrapped in a silver cloud. Of course hawks are starting to proclaim that our problem has been way too many troops in Iraq rather than way too few. This is less about understanding than desire. At least some of them want to invade Iran (and Syria, and Saudi Arabia, and Lebanon, and . . . ). Militarily that means finding some ground forces to do it with. Politically it means selling the idea that we won't be walking into another Iraqlike occupation. Solution: promote the idea that our problems in Iraq come from too many troops. Declare that we won't make that mistake again. Once we've broken and bought Iran we'll have a tiny, unobtrusive occupation force whose convoys no Persian would ever notice long enough to think about bombing. It will be, dare they say it? a cakewalk. As a side bonus, Rumsfeld loyalists get to argue that the Old Man was right about this military reform stuff after all. Mil reform doesn't suffer the fatal flaw of being insufficient to the task of policing our gains. Policing our gains is the source of our post-conquest problems. Everybody wins!

I'm certain it would horrify Cato author Chris Preble for his work to be used thusly, but I suspect that's some of its appeal to the blood and thunder crowd. They're not chastened. No no no.

And the Bad TIming Award Goes To . . . - Ryan Sager has been writing a lot lately about how libertarians need to get "serious" abouf foreign policy, by which he means enjoy bombing people more. Justin Logan expends the patience on him that I no longer have. But I noticed an interesting juxtaposition in my reading today. First, Sager, offering an example of the sort of frivolity that marginalizes libertarians with "the rest of the Republican Party":

* This June, Cato published the book, "Exiting Iraq." The book calls for a withdrawal date from Iraq of -- wait for it -- Jan. 31, 2005. (That's a little over two months from now.)

Next, Bryan Bender of the Boston Globe:

"I have seen a metamorphosis," said Robert Pfaltzgraff, president of the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis in Cambridge and a vocal supporter of Bush's Iraq policy, referring to debate both inside and outside the halls of government. "We should not be there with a large force. We should be there with a force that begins to quickly diminish."

Few specialists are calling for a complete pullout. They say the United States must first finish training Iraqi forces and use its military might to buy Iraqi authorities breathing space against the insurgency.

Still, a report completed over the summer calling for a complete pullout next year has struck a chord.

Do tell. And what report might that be?

"The end of the foreign occupation will seriously undermine the terrorists' claims that their acts of violence against Iraqis are somehow serving the interests of Iraq," according to "Exiting Iraq," published by the conservative-leaning Cato Institute. Moreover, "The occupation is counterproductive in the fight against radical Islamic terrorists and actually increases support for Osama bin Laden in Muslim communities not previously disposed to support his radical interpretation of Islam.

Sounds - what's the word I'm looking for? - serious!

We are the marines, not the army, so we encourage debate - Great and very sympathetic article about a marine encampment south of Baghdad, from - The Independent.

On the Radar - Fight to Survive, which is either, a) the blog of a dissident US soldier serving in Iraq and cruising for an Article 88 charge; or, b) a well-wrought fiction with curious anachronistic references to "bazookas" and such that gives the game away. So far this evening two different serving soldiers have given me two different provisional answers. Dee. Vell. Oh. Ping. Read the Fallujah account, just in case.

(Also via Tex. Having a vigilance committee on your ass has its upside.)

But the Walls of Their Schools Look Fresh and Colorful - Just the other day a Republican loyalist on Yglesias' blog was complaining that the "If it bleeds it leads" ethos of the major media meant it ignored a whole host of questions relating to the larger picture in Iraq. One piece of the larger picture ain't pretty:

BAGHDAD -- Acute malnutrition among young children in Iraq has nearly doubled since the United States led an invasion of the country 20 months ago, according to surveys by the United Nations, aid agencies and the interim Iraqi government.

After the rate of acute malnutrition among children younger than 5 steadily declined to 4 percent two years ago, it shot up to 7.7 percent this year, according to a study conducted by Iraq's Health Ministry in cooperation with Norway's Institute for Applied International Studies and the U.N. Development Program. The new figure translates to roughly 400,000 Iraqi children suffering from "wasting," a condition characterized by chronic diarrhea and dangerous deficiencies of protein.

That's the beginning of the Post account. More:

Iraqi health officials like to surprise visitors by pointing out that the nutrition issue facing young Iraqis a generation ago was obesity. Malnutrition, they say, appeared in the early 1990s with U.N. trade sanctions championed by Washington to punish the government led by President Saddam Hussein for invading Kuwait in 1990.

International aid efforts and the U.N. oil-for-food program helped reduce the ruinous impact of sanctions, and the rate of acute malnutrition among the youngest Iraqis gradually dropped from a peak of 11 percent in 1996 to 4 percent in 2002.

In other words, even with Saddam Hussein looting the oil-for-food program, which there's an outside chance you've read about in the pro-war media, the program, under which "3.4 billion barrels of Iraqi oil valued at about $65 billion were exported . . . between December 1996 and 20 March 2003" was measurably improving the lives of Iraq's inhabitants. And in the eighteen months since we broke and bought the place, per the Post, "Iraq's child malnutrition rate now roughly equals that of Burundi, a central African nation torn by more than a decade of war. It is far higher than rates in Uganda and Haiti."

Haiti. Haitian levels of malnutrition in Iraq are an aspiration for the era of benevolent hegemony, a shining dream toward which we might aspire. As Madeline Albright once said, America sees farther than other nations. From Baghdad to Burundi for sure.

Sarin Wrap - Tex e-mails me a link to a Captain's Quarters thread on the recent "sarin gas discovery" in Fallujah, which has, as its final update:

Even more smart readers in comments now pretty much agree that these are testers of one sort or another, probably dating back into the 80s, and not deployable sarin. As Peyton said, it does get one wondering why they felt the need to retain these testers.

Call me crazy, but if I were the despot of a country whose three biggest enemies (Iran, Israel and the United States in this case) were all known possessors of chemical weapons, and if I'd fought a war in which one of them (Iran) had used chemical weapons against me in the last twenty years (okay, I kinda used them too), I'd probably keep the odd test kit around myself. But maybe I missed my calling, and would be a better despot than a lot of these other crackpots if I only had the get up and go.

Letter from Kevin Sites who is so going on the next blogroll update, to the marine unit he was embedded with:

It's time you to have the facts from me, in my own words, about what I saw -- without imposing on that Marine -- guilt or innocence or anything in between. I want you to read my account and make up your own minds about whether you think what I did was right or wrong. All the other armchair analysts don't mean a damn to me.

Fascinating stuff. A gripping narrative that becomes a bit self-dramatizing in the last couple paragraphs.

Via Antiwar.com blog, which earlier had a wrapup of petty-fascist online gangstomping of Sites in the usual outlets.

Claim Letters - The long-awaited (and whodathunkit?) insurance e-mail roundup. Boy did I learn a lot. I still have some questions, if I can remember them when I get through these. Since there's so much mail, I'll do something I don't usually do with reader mail which is heavily excerpt some of it. I trust my correspondents will let me know if I do violence to the sense of their points.

A couple of different readers tell me I misunderstand where the profit comes from in the insurance business. As Spencer England put it:

The point you are missing is investment returns. I worked as a P&C insurance company economist for 10 years and during that time they never made a profit on the insurance side of the business. Actually, it is very rare for any P&C company to make a profit on the insurance side of the business. Rather they make their profits on the lags in the cash flow. For the typical P&C company there is about a 3 year tail,or lag between the time premiums are collected and the time they are paid out in insurance settlements. They make their returns and profits by investing that cash. Moreover, the amount of insurance you can write is a function of your capital. If you have $1 million in capital you can write $10 million in policies -- the actual multipliers vary by state and type.

Christopher Connelly adds

That is why a young Warren Buffets goal was to make enough cash to buy an insurance company, so he'd have a huge pool of money to play with.

Tim Worstall adds

I have occasionally seen it stated that profitability on the pure underwriting is evidence of an uncompetetive market.

Meanwhile, Professor Daniel Davies of Crooked Timber University argues that what I called "the pooling of certainties" - such as having to pay predictible costs for my blood pressure medication - is no such thing:

It is a risk from an actuary's point of view. The downside risk is that the medicine will work and you will survive expensively for a hundred years. The upside risk is that you might get run over by a bus tomorrow, preferably having just mailed off your check for a year's premium.

It was calculated by the Faculty of Actuaries a few years ago (I've annoyingly lost the ref. but the new scholar's google might come up trumps) that for the general case, even if you had all possible information about someone's medical conditions, you would reduce the risks of writing life and critical illness on that person by only about 20%.

He further adds that "This is why, given everything we know about medicine today, about 95% of British life assurance is still written on standard terms," which is probably the most hopeful thing I've read yet, since it suggests that the pool fragmentation potential of "adverse selection" (as discussed by Charles Dodgson recently) may be smaller than a lot of us fear.

And Eric Kidd offers a kind of game theory reason why a young, healthy person would want to join a pool where his premiums are subsidizing payouts to broken-down old farts like Yr Corrspndnt:

I'm young, I'm healthy, and I have no pre-existing conditions. I want health insurance mostly because I might suffer an expensive, long-term injury. But if I suffer such an injury--and then change jobs at any point--your scheme would leave me uninsured. So without risk pooling and an obligation to pay for on-going conditions, health insurance is pretty useless product. If the insurers want me to buy, I'm going to insist that you receive your medications (assuming you had insurance at 24, of course), because that suggests to me that I'm buying a useful product. And this is speaking strictly as a rational, selfish consumer.

This is interesting, and not just because I didn't know I had a "scheme." It strikes me as a reasonable consumer perspective. I wonder how universal it is.

Which might be the time to mention Nick Confessore's recent proposal that the Democratic Party start offering health insurance to its members. One of the advantages of Confessore's proposal is that I am pretty sure the Democratic Party would be allowed to do it. In my sinful late youth I, for reasons I'd rather not go into, took and passed the Maryland State Life and Health Insurance Whatever Certification exam. (I never did anything with it.) But in the course of doing so I learned of a really fucked-up restriction in the definition of an eligible group for the purposes of getting group rates on health insurance: The group may not have been formed for the purposes of obtaining group medical coverage. The Little Sisters of the Poor can't start a Poor People's Benevolent Association so that its members can get discounts. Oh, and that's another thing: it's against the law for an insurance agent or broker to offer discounts on premiums as an incentive to sign up. The libertarian in me thinks that there's a lot of insurance law we could usefully eliminate if affordable coverage for the maximum percentage of the population is our goal.

But, clearly, the Democratic Party exists for purposes other than getting group rates on medical insurance, though this is not a good month to say for certain just what those purposes are. So ConfessoreCorp is in the clear legally.

Yet More Firefox Blogging - Wow. Steve Cook of Snarkout wrote me an American Heritage Dictionary search plugin and told me how to install it. It works great. He's going to submit it to Mozdev, but in the meantime, you can dowload it from UO. Once you download it, unzip it to your SearchPlugins directory. In Windows, its a subfolder of the "\Mozilla Firefox" directory in your Program Files folder. I'm told that in Mac OS/X it's in "/Application/Firefox.app". Happy etymologizing!

Meanwhile, Brock Sides commends to me the Ultrabar instead of the Google toolbar, while Zack Ajmal points me to the Google toolbar's successor, PRGoogleToolbar. Mark Dooley finds another version of the Google toolbar for me too. Decisions, decisions.

Outsourcing Casualties - Phil Carter reports on the first hard numbers we can attach to government contractor casualties in Iraq. Unnamed in the Bloomberg report he cites are Blackwater Security or other PMCs. I wonder if their dead are included in the totals. The Bloomberg article says there are 60,000 civilian contractors in Iraq, so really, your odds of making it back alive are pretty good. Not that I'd presume to give you career advice.

It is hard to express the primal delight that fills the robots as they play the latest games - You really, really need to be reading Hitherby Dragons every day.

Crimes and Mistakes - Matthew Barganier e-mails me pretty convincing evidence that US troops definitely used phosphorus against insurgents in Fallujah, including text from the SF Chronicle and pictures from the International Herald Tribune. That doesn't support the accusations in the Jihad Unspun article, in which the alleged witness described completely different agents and wound patterns. But my heart sank on reading the following passage in the Chronicle article:

Soldiers with the Army's 1st Infantry Division made their way to the southeastern part of the city, a neighborhood of factories and warehouses where they expected to find guerrillas waiting for them. Instead, the district was relatively quiet, though the units reported being fired on by women and children armed with assault rifles.

Anything's possible, but this reads like a suspiciously convenient preemptive excuse for any female and/or juvenile corpses that turn up afterwards. (The article dates from November 10.) It's inconsistent with the military's later decision to allow women and children to leave the city while turning the men back (which was itself, as I've argued already, criminal and stupid). It reeks of propaganda.

Let me be clear: I didn't dismiss the Jihad Unspun story because I believe our military has conducted itself like angels. I dismissed the Jihad Unspun story because it seems grossly inconsistent with what we know. Offensive use of chemical weapons is a big hairy deal. The military is not going to send US troops into a chemical battlefield without gear. I suspect there would be detectible protocols followed all the way up the logistical chain.

(Wild card: the "sarin discovery" story.)

UPDATE: Explananda writes two things I agree with: 1) "If phosphorus doesn't count, we might ask ourselves whether our categories aren't a bit self-serving." [Hm. Ya think?.] 2) "But since the U.S. is in fact using chemical weapons [phosphorus and a successor to napalm that we know of], and has used them, in Iraq, it's not hard to see why people might be inclined to believe them."

More Conspiracy Theories - This one's all me. That incident in Detroit last night with the beer-throwing fan and Ron Artest? Setup. Artest paid the guy to do it. He wanted to get suspended so he could promote his album like he'd asked all along. Remember, you read it here first. Because everyone else has too much sense of responsibility.

(Inspired by Catallarchy.)

And Rumors of War - An anonymous Iraqi physician tells Panorama radio that US troops used chemical weapons in Fallujah, according to Jihad Unspun:

Observers agree on one thing- Americans decided to use chemical weapons after they failed to defeat the Mujahideen in Fallujah - both a cowardly and inhumane act. The Mujahideen inflicted heavy losses on the US forces in al-Fallujah prompting the Americans to employ chemical weapons for the first time since the fall of Baghdad. Reports have been received that US forces used chemical weapons in the al-Jawlan, ash-Shuhada', and al-Jubayl neighborhoods and again last night in al-Jubayl neighborhood.

Uh, sure. A week and more of media-soaked action with no American troops wearing protective gear, but they made heavy use of some unidentified lethal agent anyway because that's the devil-may-care attitude that made this country great. I'm wondering if this rumor is floating around Iraq, though. Rumors are an important telltale of social attitudes. Years ago, I read Henry Louis Gates explaining various rumors current in the black community, like the Church's Fried Chicken rumor and the Liz Claiborne myth. Gates said, in paraphrase, urban African-Americans aren't frightened because they believe rumors; they believe the rumors becuase they're frightened.

(Via Avedon's Other Weblog.)

The Last to Know - Thanks to following a meme I got from Zack Ajmal, I just discovered eHow. Cool! If somhow I found it ahead of you, know that it has instructions for doing most things you could want to do. I just found a primer on fixing our bathroom floor, for instance. (Via The Livejournal of zdashamber.)

Shuffle to Judgment - I'm coming to the story of the marine who shot the unarmed wounded man in the Fallujah mosque late. Buggieboy has the best explanation of why the shooting was probably not a war crime. To me the crime was the command decision to send adult males attempting to leave Fallujah back into the city. Both the humane and the prudential thing to do would have been to intern them for examination then and there, rather than doing it several days later if they were lucky enough to survive. That decision was made well above the pay grade of the marine in the mosque. Behind that crime and other crimes, the worse mistake: putting American troops into a situation where every adult male must be regarded as a presumptive enemy - that is, invading Iraq in the first place.

The political damage exists regardless of the military justification. Muslims in Iraq and elsewhere aren't going to make the effort to see things from Buggieboy's perspective. Red State Iraq sees one of their own, helpless, getting blown away by an outsider. The comment-thread analog at Little (Muslim-)Green Soccer Balls will be humming with outrage. I'll bet you the marine who tapped that wounded man is a pretty good guy, and that the memory of what he did will wake him from many a sleep in the coming decades. If his night fits disturbed the sleep of George Bush, DIck Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Doug Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, the staff of the Weekly Standard and the board of the American Enterprise Institute there would at least be bitter consolation. But it won't. For such as they, a man like that marine is material. He is a casualty of their war as sure as any coffin cargo or concussion case. I'm sure they feel "regret," but a keener pang would attend the loss of a fly to a snag in Jackson Hole.

Other war business: A few days ago, Diana Moon e-mailed me that

It looks like your conjecture that Fallujah was hyped isn't correct. It's based on the notion that Fallujah wasn't a difficult fight. I think it was hell, even if there weren't 5K insurgents.

Diana is largely right, I think. Depending on how much you trust the casualty numbers, a lot more insurgents stayed to fight than I expected. The most recent figures I saw were 1,000 dead and 1,000 prisoners. I think some of the corpses may have "joined the resistance" upon death, and some of the 1,000 may have simply been surviving males caught in the sweep. But it could be that there were as many as 2,000 insurgents in the city during the combat. In advance, I expected no more than half that.

In that sense, I was clearly wrong. On another level, Too Soon to Tell. If the number fighting that stayed was high, was the number that fled even higher than estimated beforehand? Instead of 5,000 insurgents in pre-assault Fallujah, were there 8,000? Beats me. My other claim was that taking Fallujah would not cripple the insurgency. This puts me in contradiction to General Sattler, and we'll see who was more correct in time.

Who Knew? - Write about insurance, get tons of interesting, informative e-mail. Roundup tomorrow.

Hey, Degenerates! - Why are you reading this depraved weblog? Nate e-mails:

I'm at a Panera near Dulles airport, where I have to pick someone up later this afternoon. Paneras are great because of the free wifi, but there are downsides. Got this message when trying to visit UO:

This site is blocked by the SonicWALL Content Filter Service.

URL: http://www.highclearing.com/

Reason for restriction: Forbidden Category "Adult/Mature Content"

I presume your pornblog is maintained under a pseudonym?

I shouldn't have done that shower scene with Terrell Owens. Oh well. There's always cabl - oh shit!

Not Enough Wrinkles - Atrios puts on his economist hat and sets out to explain insurance, with, based on the caliber of the explanations so far, way more disdain for his ideological adversaries than is warranted. The first item explains the principles of "insurance classic" (fire, auto and such), and saves health insurance for a second go-round. The major problem with the first is a relentless demand-side focus that will come back to bedevil him, and liberal approaches to the question of health insurance generally, in the second item. Simply put, profit is nowhere to be found:

So, consider something like fire insurance. Every year there's a 10% chance that your house burns down and you lose $100,000 and a 90% chance you don't. Because you don't like the uncertainty, you're willing to pay some amount to remove that uncertainty from your life. Since an insurance company can bundle up a large number of people, as long as fires are uncorrelated events (no entire blocks burning down), the law of large numbers ensures that the total losses (equal to total insurance payouts) are essentially predictable. That is, the insurance would pay out an average of $10,000 per policy per year.An actuarially fair policy would have an insurance premium precisely equal to the expected (average) loss, or $10,000 per year, and a competitive insurance market would result in a price of just about that.

Well let's see how an insurance company with 100 customers does here:

Income: 100 x 10,000 = 1 million dollars per year
Outflow: 10 x 100,000 = 1 million dollars per year

We've eliminated not just profit but even overhead. There's no money to pay for administering the program, which even a nonprofit or government insurance program would need. As for the other kind - an actual business - go ahead, invest your 401K in this one. I dare you.

Now I don't want to overstate my case. Atrios probably thinks he's tucked away a little for the providers somewhere between "a competitive insurance market" and "just about that." Economic theory does say that profit should progressively vanish as markets mature. In the real world, though, it has to be worth it to provide a service, and the profit margin of an ongoing industry has a functional floor not too far below what you can get on a passbook savings account down at the bank.

I think the problem is lying in the weeds of his initial post on health insurance, where he misses the real problem of such insurance as it exists in the United States. Insurance classic is about the pooling of risk. Contemporary health insurance is that, but it's also the pooling of certainties. Example: I was diagnosed with essential hypertension when I was 25 years old, and I've been on blood pressure medication ever since. That guarantees several hundred dollars in drug costs and a couple hundred more in office visits per year for someone. Most of it is paid by whichever insurance company I have. The law requires them to do this, even though it is in no way a risk - it's a damn sure thing. Contemporary medical "insurance" is more like a service contract you would buy for your car than a classic risk management vehicle.

The money has to come from somewhere. Let's imagine a system where I pay my own insurance premiums all by myself. For it to be worth the insurance company covering me, my premiums have to exceed (to provide profit) the actuarial risks that impinge on me, plus the certain expenses of my existing conditions. For there to be a profit to them on covering my blood pressure, I have to be paying them more than I would pay out of pocket, which is a bad deal for me.

So what can make covering my blood pressure medication worth it to the insurance company and me? Free money! Put "free" in sneer quotes, please. My employers pay more of my premiums than I do. That's money that could be going straight to me, but for oddities of the tax code. There is another important source: my fellow employees. The healthier employees are paying to cover not just their own risks but my certainties.

There's one further trick to this, but I've got to go to work. In the meantime, let me suggest that a Rawlslike "veil of ignorance" exists in classic insurance that is only artificially mandated in contemporary medical insurance. Much depends, in political terms, on it staying in place.

QUICK UPDATE: Michael Croft points out, via e-mail, that I'm ignoring volume purchasing power in the certainty-pooling aspect of medical insurance. (And after chiding Atrios for skipping over stuff.) It's an important point, though I don't think it vanishes the ethical "free money" issue to the extent Michael suggests. More tonight.

Imitation Tech Blog Item - I ended up saving my profile, uninstalling all versions of Firefox and reinstalling from scratch. Then I discovered I'd saved the wrong profile, so I lost a lot of bookmarks and such. Still, I have Firefox 1.0 up and running, and thanks to two readers, including Dave Meyer and another who wishes to remain anonymous, I've switched to Sage as my RSS utility. Sage has a very cool Discover Feeds feature. (It's not perfect, missing Major Olmsted's site feed among others.) And it successfully parses more feeds than RSS Panel, which I used with Firefox 0.8.

Now if only someone with pull in the Firefox community would get someone to make a searchbar plugin for the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, the only American-English dictionary worth using.

Also, I really really really really miss a working Google toolbar. Someone write in and tell me it's there and I just didn't find it. (It not being listed with, you know, the search tools.) I especially miss the way you could just click on your search terms in the toolbar to do a Find in Page once you'd chosen a search result. But the loss of one-button site search rankles too.

Two impassioned defenses of current-model hybrid cars have come my way. Kate Nepveu:

Articles like this make me roll my eyes. I have a Toyota Prius, 2003 model--the older version. Yeah, of course they get less than the EPA mileage--*every* car gets less than its EPA mileage. I get about 45-48 MPG, depending on the season, which is entirely reasonable considering the EPA's combined estimate of 48. And I notice that the article doesn't talk about the reduced emissions from not running the engine all the time (plus whatever other tech they employ).

Yes, I believe if you do the numbers, you don't quite make up for the extra cost of the hybrid system in the gas savings. I knew that, and I didn't buy the car for the gas savings--yes, it's nice, but I bought it because it had really low emissions and it was damn cool, so I could feel virtuous and geeky at the same time. I think that's a perfectly good reason to get a car.

Madeline Ferwerda:

The hybrid article you point to is almost unalloyed hooey. Its patent lack of logic licks the boots of the lazy corruption "oh, well, this new thing isn't perfect, so I'm perfectly fine to do nothing at all."

My only car is a hybrid, I did a bunch of research on hybrids and other cars before buying it, and I hang out in hybrid forums. I know magnitudes more than Bob Elton about hybrids, and I'll point out a few places where he's full of it:

"...the difference [hybrid to non-hybrid fuel economy] is nowhere near as great as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) numbers suggest." Bob says this is because the electric-only EPA "city" numbers skew the average--he offers no explanation of how it is that the gas/electric "highway" numbers still whoop the ass of any gas-only car. Nor does he seem to have the foggiest hint of a clue that Honda hybrids are an entirely different engine than Toyota/Ford hybrids--Hondas never run on electric only.

"Fuel needed to recharge the battery" my eye. The battery recharges mostly when the car is braking—using fuel energy that gas-only cars are just throwing away.

And no doubt we'll all be shocked one day to find video footage of EPA techs frozenly stepping out of a gas-only car, teeth chattering as they gleefully congratulate each other on another efficiency rating scotched by unauthorized AC use.

Cutting to the chase: Not getting EPA numbers on your car's gas mileage? Duh. You'll note that after every car encounters the real world the hybrids are still on top.

Then Bob goes on a tangent about how if car manufacturers were going to apply to a gas-only car all the expensive engineering and careful materials choices that aid the hybrid's efficiency, it still wouldn't be as good as the hybrid. Gee, let's hold our breath for that to happen.

Bob's point about the metal in hybrid batteries? I invite you to look down the road 20 years to when oil is at $100 a barrel. Which of today's cars will be abandoned by the wayside? The hundreds of thousands of 15 mpg hulks of metal, or the thousands of 50 mpg hybrids? Talk about your criminal wastes of resources.

His point about hybrids being unsafe to people cutting them open is possible, though in the Insight at least the powerlines have been designed with that in mind, running though the center bottom of the car where they're least likely to be sliced or damaged. His point about mechanics being in danger is ludicrous.

"So, if the hybrid’s mileage advantage is minimal..." Go on, Bob, name me other cars on the market that compete. I'll be right here. Meanwhile, you suggest walking. Well, I'll lay it to you: who do you think is more likely to walk and bicycle? The person with the hybrid, or the person with the SUV?

And, frankly, he can just stop dissing the Stanley Steamer. Steam engines were the most efficient around, the fastest cars in the world. They lost out to mass production and simpler startup procedures. And those electric cars he disses? When the manufacturers came around to collect the test batch and crush them into cubes a couple years back, the people leasing them begged and bribed to keep them. No dice--America is too easily distracted chasing the hydrogen fuel-cell pie in the sky to attend to the pie lying at its very feet.

A key point here seems to be recharging the battery with waste energy from the brakes.

On Second Thought - Gas prices being what they are, Mrs. Offering and I have looked longingly at higher-priced gas-electric hybrids. The Auto journalist Bob Elton suggests they may not be All That after all. Just one perspective, but a sobering one.

(Via Marginal Revolution.)

Reverse Paypal Button - How about if I offer everyone in America money to shut up about Nicolette Sheridan and Terrell Owens on Monday Night Football already!!!!! It's two days later, people! The whole inane brouhaha makes me feel so, so - European somehow.

The irony is I just spent half an hour listening to Doc Walker and Al Koken discussing the issue - and other outlets have framed it this was too - as a matter of the NFL using sex to sell football, when it was actually ABC using football to sell sex (ginning up viewers for Desperate Housewives). What is this country coming to when we can't even get our citizens to pay attention to sex without dangling sports in front of them?

What am I Doing UP at this Hour? - Science! Offering Boy really wanted to see the Leonid meteor shower even though it was a school/work night and an off year. I made a silent bargain: I'd pretend to try to wake him, intending to sleep through the night. If HE woke ME, he by gollum deserved to see the meteor shower. And that's what happened. Tonight's reminder while trying to find the Frost passage about how

. . . Every child should have the memory
Of at least one long-after-bedtime walk.

"The Fear" is a damn scary poem that just refuses to pack itself back into its box when it's over.

UPDATE: Memory Lane Dept.: This blog's first-ever Leonid encounter.

Evil Shakespeare Overlord A pretty good list: THE THINGS I WILL NOT DO WHEN I DIRECT A SHAKESPEARE PRODUCTION, ON STAGE OR FILM.

30. As much as I enjoy his films, I will not steal from Kenneth Branagh. It's not like people won't notice. 33. Also, I will not require Caliban to hump Stephano's leg while telling him about Miranda, no matter how big a laugh it will get. 36. Keanu Reeves will not be allowed near the production. 37. I will not pantomime every image employed in the text in concert with its recitation under the assumption that it's the only way the dumb audience could possibly understand Elizabethan text. 71. People playing human (non-elf/fairy/spirit) characters will not be made to wear costumes that sparkle unless there is a good reason for it. 77. I will not make my cast simulate slow motion. 92. I will not project a PowerPoint slideshow onto a large screen above and behind the actors, ever, for any reason, no matter what.

Lots more where those came from.

Annals of Rejected Travel Promo Themes - "What Happens in a Greyhound Bus Station Men's Room, Stays in a Greyhound Bus Station Mens Room."

Blogging is Light while I work on a writing project. Also I had to work this weekend at my day job. To keep yourself busy, read an amazing ginmar entry, "What you read" - not just because it paints a hopeful enough picture of Iraqi-American interaction in the South of the country to make one think we might really get out of the place some day not too badly off, but because it's just, like much of ginmar's work, a damn good piece of writing. Excerpt:

This is such an ancient country. Parts of it along the rivers seem almost primeieval, with the ten foot rushes and the fan-shaped palm trees. You expect to see a dinosaur, especially at sunset, when the earth is black and the sky is gold.

Like Making Candles Out of Ear Wax? - I don't know if trying to find a home for libertarians in the Democratic Party is really like those radio commercials for home insulation where the tale of some amusing eccentric precedes the tagline "Think that's a waste of energy?" but it might be. I promised myself after last week's reassessment that I'd write a "Not Abandoning Libertarianism" item, the upshot of which is this:

I oppose both torture and high marginal tax rates. But that doesn't mean I abominate them both in the same degree. Forced to choose between a Party that favors torture and opposes high marginal tax rates, and a Party that opposes torture and favors high marginal tax rates, I'll take the latter, thank you. (And hope that the former wins the occasional tax rate battle.) I am speaking synechdotally here. I am not sure, however, that by the time the Democratic Party gets done reassessing the Lessons of Campaign 2004 that that will be the choice on offer. So I'm in wait and see mode.

In the meantime, there's a blog of, by and for Libertarians - excuse me! libertarians - trying to work within the Democratic Party, and there's the Democratic Freedom Caucus, and maybe it's roomate too. I kid! Check them out.

(Via Where HipHop and Libertarianism Meet.)

Sentence First . . . - I followed the Peterson trial just enough to know that I agree with John Cole's take.

Fallujah Twice - It's only to be expected that the various sets of numbers floating around about the Fallujah battle don't add up. Fog of war. AFP/Xinhuanet report that Iraqi national security advisor Qassim Dawood says "more than 1,000" rebels have been killed and about 200 detained. Meanwhile, Ryan Scarborough in the Washington Times quotes US officials who suspect that there may have been fewer than 1,000 rebels in the city at the time the attack began. The other day Sheikh al-Janabi was probably dead. As of today he has probably escaped. The city is "completely occupied" but not "completely subdued." I believe it may contain a cat who is half dead.

Meanwhile, AP reports that

Hundreds of men trying to flee the assault on Fallujah have been turned back by U.S. troops following orders to allow only women, children and the elderly to leave.

The military says it has received reports warning that insurgents will drop their weapons and mingle with refugees to avoid being killed or captured by advancing American troops.

I take their point. But just how they plan to solve the problem is under-explained:

Army Col. Michael Formica, who leads forces isolating Fallujah, admits the rule sounds "callous." But he insists it's is key to the mission's success.

"Tell them 'Stay in your houses, stay away from windows and stay off the roof and you'll live through Fallujah,'" Formica, of the 1st Cavalry Division's 2nd Brigade, told his battalion commanders in a radio conference call Wednesday night.

But if that works for innocent men, isn't it too an option for the insurgents? Slip away from their positions, drop their weapons, stay away from windows and appear as much a civilian as any unarmed man trying to walk past a checkpoint. The Army hasn't solved the problem of distinguishing combatants from civilian men, IF it intends to let any men currently in Fallujah survive. It has simply made it less likely that any noncombatant men who made it as far as the checkpoint will live through the weekend.

If the US intends to imprison all surviving males, or detain and vet them (for however long), it could simply start by detaining every man who comes to a checkpoint, rather than sending them back into the maw. Keep in mind that any genuine anti-American male sent back into the city becomes an immediate incremental increase in danger to American soldiers and marines. He can take up a gun again and shoot someone. We'll leave aside the possibility that a noncombatant male sent back into the city becomes radicalized and, pending the survival promised by Colonel Formica, joins the resistance himself, becoming a danger to American troops down the line. That's fuzzy, wooly-headed dove talk, and it presumes that any men live at all.

Once the battle ends, military officials say all surviving military-age men can expect to be tested for explosive residue, catalogued, checked against insurgent databases and interrogated about ties with the guerrillas.

None of which requires sending them back into the city. The best possible construction to put on the checkpoint policy is elusive.

Postscript: By using the term "insurgents" in this and other items, I am, according to Tex, "participat[ing] in the Orwellian propaganda of the Bush administration." I thought you should know.

Imitation Tech Blog Item - Upgraded to Firefox 1.0 from 0.8 finally. Hurm. Extensions I lived by (RSS Panel and Google Toolbar) haven't been upgraded to work with 1.0 yet. The available newsreader extension, Habari Xenu, doesn't have a fetch command that I can find and won't even sort my titles alphabetically. Weirdly, if I click on a bookmark from the bookmarks menu, nothing happens. This last may have something to do with having the betas installed on my machine, though the FAQ stated that so long as I disabled old extensions and exited completely before installing 1.0, I shouldn't have any problem. Also, another little thing that makes it just that much more annoying to use. If you clicked inside the address field of the beta toolbar once, it highlighted the entire URL. That was nice because then you could just type over it. Click once in the address field for 1.0, and you place a cursor within the URL. You have to bother to highlight the entire address with the mouse to type over it. Bother.

Hand-Stitched Trackback - Flit, Matthew Yglesias, Alan Sullivan and Matt Welch have at this site, at least in passing.

Cut Out the Middleman - Teresa Nielsen Hayden hips readers to something really cool. Via eBay, westerners can prder new custom-made garments direct from tailors on the subcontinent. Higher margins for them and better deals for you. I imagine that this is just the beginning of the kinds of direct trade opportunities that will be possible via eBay and other online outlets. She offers a report card on three vendors and explains how to find them using eBay's search function.

Blah Blah Blah - Am I required by blogger law to say something about Yasser Arafat? Okay, fuck Yasser Arafat. He got the chance to make the same jump from violent revolutionary to statesman that Nelson Mandela and other erstwhile terrorists took, and he never quite got up the nerve. I realize the Israelis dealt the Palestinian Authority cards from a stacked deck. But Arafat was too interested in feathering his own nest and hewing to the path of least resistance to lead. He gained an incredible opportunity through what I consider to be despicable means. "He cared more about his status than his people" should go on his monument in the West Bank.

Imperial Habeas - Michael "Anonymous" Scheuer has slipped free the surly bonds of the CIA bureaucracy and will be speaking freely, I learn from Justin Logan. Fireworks are promised. It's surely a case of getting out while the getting's good, and I expect to read very soon on every single hawkish blog in existence that Scheuer's personal shortcomings turn out to have been directly responsible for the success of the September 2001 atrocities. Still, good times. Okay, not good good times. But you know.

PG Night Continues at Unqualified Offerings - Get a load of the graphic on the front page of the DC Hashing website. No, I had no idea what "hashing" is until I followed a link to a Primer on the topic. Short version: a bunch of people chase one other person. Then they drink.

Maybe they don't always wait on the drinking. If this sounds like your idea of a good time, find a hashing organization near you. Cause if you just start drinking and chasing random people, there'll be trouble.

(Thanks to Courtney Knapp for the tip.)

Smack My Country Officer Up - This World Bank PDF contains the phrase "pimp training" but it's apparently not as bad as it sounds. Kidding aside, there's a genuine ethical dilemma in the concept, which is whether it's worth working with a criminal and frequently predatory class of men if it will help reduce the spread of sexually-transmitted diseases. I don't like pimps. I believe they exist only where man and women who engage in sex work are put outside the law, either by statute or by the less formal disregard of courts which refuse to enforce their contracts. There's an argument to be made that public health officers can't afford to wait around for societies to legalize prostitution while the fight the spread of HIV, but I suspect close commerce with pimps would tend to give health professionals that icky feeling. Maybe that's why the only World Bank-listed pimp training test dates from 1996.

Fallujah Once, Shame on YOU - To the surprise of people who don't read this weblog

U.S. and Iraqi forces established control over more than 70 percent of Fallujah on Wednesday, U.S. commanders said, and troops described encountering only small pockets of resistance as they pushed through a city that they likened to a ghost town.

"It's a lot lighter than we expected," said Staff Sgt. Jimmy Amyett, 24, of the 1st Infantry Division's Fox Troop, 4th Cavalry. When his unit first moved into Fallujah, he said, "we thought the city would explode on us."

reports the Washington Post today. Well, I told you so.

But I wonder if I got something wrong too. My suspicion last week was that most guerrillas were withdrawing from Fallujah in advance of a heavily hyped assault. A better question is, were they all there in the first place? Was Fallujah really the geographical nerve center and quartermaster's store of the insurgency, packed to the gills with foreign and Iraqi fighters, like we've been reading all these months? Or was Fallujah just another trouble spot that got hyped into Death Star status by the media and the military? If so, were the brass and Washington believing bad intelligence, or were they consciously fostering an anti-insurgency of symbolism? That is, was Fallujah another in a long line of Things But For Which Everything Would Be Swell (Saddam, Sadr, Zarqawi, The Sunni Triangle)?

I can easily believe that the publicity organs of the government would try to reduce the public locus of their intractable problems to one Evil HQ. I can even believe that they'd put out advance warnings of Vietnam-level casualties ahead of time to make an easy victory look like a smashing triumph and great relief. But I can also believe that sincerely motivated leaders could be taken in by confirmation bias and poor information. There have been hints throughout the occupation that our intelligence on the resistance is as poor as our intelligence on pre-invasion Iraq itself. And I don't want to believe that Our Rulers would willingly incur the publicity costs of blasting the city to flinders for the triumph of a phony "offensive." I'm even still willing to believe that a lot of guerrillas really were in Fallujah but ducked out before the battle, as you'd expect. What I'm long past believing is that the so-called professionals have a great deal more insight into such topics than the rest of us.

Now I Understand - Mad Science explains Michael Ledeen:

While many of us in the reality-based community just assume that most problems within the Bush administration are caused by the bat-shit crazy things they do and say. Michael points out that there are some members of the administration that are not technically bat-shit crazy and therein lies the problem. The Bush administration is bogged down in a self imposed morass created by its continued tolerance of memberes who are "Bat-shit Crazy In Name Only" (Bat-shit CINOs for short).

But is Ledeen sincere, or is it simply that his Iranian Masters figure that even more bat-shit craziness from the Bush Administration maximizes their own power?

Hm. What if "Mad Science," with all of one blog post to his name, is ALSO working for the Iranians? Not that there's any proof, mind you, for either him/her OR Michael Ledeen. That's why internment is such a valuable national security tool. It gives us the time to make sure.

Squaring Accounts - Max Sawicky says the work experience to cry Nonsense! at suddenly popular claims that the red states are all tax sponges. And The Glittering Eye finds that even such numbers that are out there are inconclusive. Maybe liberal commentators will stop pissing off Ginger Stampley.

Oh. My. God. Just Oh. My. God. - Wait till the red states get a load of this. (Via . . . muttered the ogre. And after it's all over, spoil your fun here and here.)

I'm Too Sexy for my Foreign Policy - Sometimes you've just got to let the throbbing cock of benevolent hegemony slip free of the crotch-binding pants of sanity:

The important thing now, of course, is not simply to acknowledge past achievements, but to build upon them. This will require, among other things:

o The reduction in detail of Fallujah and other safe havens utilized by freedom's enemies in Iraq - a necessary precondition not only to holding elections there next year, but to the establishment of institutions essential to a functioning and stable democracy;

o Regime change - one way or another - in Iran and North Korea, the only hope for preventing these remaining "Axis of Evil" states from fully realizing their terrorist and nuclear ambitions;

o Providing the substantially increased resources needed to re-equip a transforming military and rebuild human-intelligence capabilities (minus, if at all possible, the sorts of intelligence "reforms" contemplated pre-election that would make matters worse on this and other scores) while we fight World War IV;

o Providing, to the fullest extent possible, for the protection of our homeland - including the adoption of sensible policies on securing our borders and contending with illegal aliens, and by deploying effective missile defenses at sea and in space, as well as ashore;

o Keeping faith with Israel, whose destruction remains a priority for the same people who want to destroy us (and for the same reasons - i.e., our shared, "moral values") - especially in the face of Yasser Arafat's demise and the inevitable, post-election pressure to "solve" the Mideast problem by forcing the Israelis to abandon defensible boundaries;

o Contending with the underlying dynamic that made France and Germany so problematic in the first term: namely, their willingness to make common cause with our enemies for profit, and their desire to employ a united Europe and its new constitution - as well as other international institutions and mechanisms - to thwart the expansion and application of American power where deemed necessary by Washington;

o Adapting appropriate strategies for contending with China's increasingly fascistic trade and military policies, Vladimir Putin's accelerating authoritarianism at home and aggressiveness toward the former Soviet republics, the worldwide spread of Islamofascism, and the emergence of a number of aggressively anti-American regimes in Latin America.

These items do not represent some sort of neocon "imperialist" game plan.

Good thing he told us! That's Frank Gaffney, ladies and gentlemen. He'll be here all - four years. Shit.

Fun with Exit Polls - Mindles H. Dreck has an interesting item about confirmation bias in reading the election returns, and it's true enough, but it goes further, I think, than he suggests. Not just bitter Democrats but evangelical poobahs are convinced that the white conservative Christian vote put Bush over the top last Tuesday. Warbloggers are convinced it was the War on Terra, since if you add the "terrorism" and "Iraq" segments of the "most crucial issue" segments of the exit polls you get the single biggest bloc of votes for grabs, or maybe that strikes them as the crucial fact because they're warbloggers. I myself e-mailed Alex Knapp Saturday night with a good-natured "I just about have you!" after doing some easy math on the Ohio and Pennsylvania exit polls. Then I looked at Florida and it argued against my own thesis. (Briefly, Kerry lost Ohio and won Pennsylvania. The percentage of voters naming Terrorism and Iraq their top issue was higher in Pennsylvania than in Ohio. Guess what was lower. Yup: Moral Values. But then Florida has Terrorism/Iraq at 41% and Values in between Ohio and PA and Bush wins it. So it's a bit of a muddle.)

Meanwhile, Mrs. Offering is mad at me because I'm not giving Business enough credit. The Prosperity Project helped employers convey their views of which candidates were "pro-business" at both state and national levels. Industry groups are anxious not to get cheated out of credit (login: bugmenot69/Beranek) for their own get-out-the-vote efforts. The reason I am in dutch is that while I see some impressive inputs by business - the Prosperity Project has stats on the number of webpages viewed and absentee ballots requested and so on - I haven't seen any solid proof of outputs. Secret ballots being what they are, about all we have to go on are exit polls, and the exit polls indicate that if you combine the "Economy/Jobs" voters with the "Taxes" voters, Kerry wins those categories handily.

It's indisputible that the biggest change in exit poll categories from 2000 is the jump from a "World Affairs" most-crucial-issue score of 12% to a 2004 Iraq/Terror score of 34%. What originally followed was a lengthy excursion into comparative arithmetic, but I've sinec realized I need to check a key assumption behind it first, so we'll belay that for now. Instead, I'll suggest just a peak into the Abyss. The list of seven (the Top Seven?) Most Crucial Issues changed subatantially between 2000 and 2004. And a lot more people came out to vote. At the Presidential level, the result was . . . not much change. All of three (?) states ended up flipping between Republican and Democratic candidate. 9/11 Changed Everything - except for the other 47 states. It may be that we're looking at things from the wrong end. Maybe people don't decide to vote Republican because of Terrorism, Taxes or Moral Values, and don't decide to vote Democrat because of Iraq, Jobs or Education. Maybe people decide to declare a concern about Terrorism or Taxes or Moral Values because they're Republicans, and likewise for Democrats and Iraq, Jobs and Education. The game changes but not the teams.

More Anon.

Bringing Iraqis Together - Diana Moon hips readers to a brief but fascinating account of the al-Janabi clan from the Scotsman.

The principle tribe in the area is the al-Janabi, whose leader, Sheikh Abdallah al-Janabi, is one of the hard-line leaders of Fallujah, the de facto capital of the insurgency.

In May, Sheikh al-Janabi proclaimed Islamic sharia law in Fallujah, and ordered the public flogging of sellers of indecent video discs. [UO: Did he ever play baseball? (Login: highclearing/highclearing.)]

. . .

The Sheikh's brother, Adnan al-Janabi, is a present minister of state in the present Iraqi Interim Government, and was a member of the National Assembly during Saddam's era.

Meanwhile, via Antiwar.com's blog, I see that we're playing black ops games in advance of the Fallujah assault:

NEAR FALLUJA, Iraq (CNN) -- A company commander of the Iraqi security forces who received a full briefing on the expected Falluja assault is missing from a military base where U.S. and Iraqi troops are preparing for the possible operation.

. . .

Marines say the captain's disappearance won't alter the tactics or timing of the Falluja operation.

Wonder if the insurgents will buy it.

One thing I'm trying to get is the actual mix in the "10,000 US and Iraqi troops" preparing to attack, but no luck.

Department of Strategic Point-Not-Getting - Radley Balko observes that the political party controlling all branches of our government can now realize its burning desires to limit same. You'll believe a man can write an entire column with a straight face.

Whack-a-Mole - The Australian quotes a US Marine surgeon warning that the casualty toll from the incipient Fallujah Assault (codenamed Operation: Here We Go Again) "would reach levels not seen since the Vietnam War." I wouldn't be so sure.

This assault was telegraphed well in advance. As a reminder, we are fighting a guerrilla war. Guerrillas are not in the business of sitting around waiting for long-telegraphed assaults. I'm not saying there are no insurgent forces in the city any more, but I'll bet a lot of them are long gone. Are there some left? Surely. I expect that some number of guerrillas will fight and die; others will fight and slip away. The city is "surrounded" by US marines and Iraqi provisional government troops. So the way out for the stragglers will be to suborn enough units of the Iraqi forces - money, nationalism, kinship ties and threats are all possible approaches - to clear enough frontage for an escape. Meanwhile the US will be blasting the houses, factories and . . . hospitals where the insurgents used to be. Not to say those buildings will be empty, but any occupants will be mere Sunni Muslims of whatever age, and therefore only provisionally entitled to consideration.

Not long after that, it will be time for our next decisive victory in Samarra. From the last article cited, Associated Press:

U.S. and Iraqi forces seized control of Samarra last month and since then, Iraqi officials have pointed to the city as an example of how the Americans and the Baghdad government can restore order in restive towns and cities from the insurgents.

I believe the Iraqi officials are, in the strictest sense, correct.

So Much for That - No libertarian growth strategies have proven effective, but I think the election may prove the definitive repudiation of the strategy of so-called "paleo-libertarianism." Paleolibs like Lew Rockwell argued that libertarians should concentrate on winning over disenchanted conservatives, particularly heartland and southern ones, by convincing them that the solution to their values-based abhorrence of the federal government was the radical reduction or elimination of its power. This led them to make all sorts of sympathetic Confederacy chic noises, to refer to God a lot, to sign on fruitbat ex-mercs from apartheid-era southern Africa as writers and to hammer bicoastal elites with the fervor of former journeyman major-league pitchers (login: highclearing/highclearing).

But instead of smashing the state, those middle-American worthies have decided to take it over instead. They'd much rather boss the shit out of blue-staters than settle for any "leave us alone" jibjab. But the biggest, most interesting and maybe most dispiriting repudiation of paleolibertarianism deals with the war. To their credit, the paleolibertarians are resolutely anti-empire. The same thing apparently can not be said of the objects of their affection. At the very least, The Real America^TM returned to office the architect of the most ambitious American military project in decades. They are either okay with it, or, if people like Alex Knapp are right, ardently in favor. It's especially significant, and I'm still processing its import, that rural, red-state whites are one of the demographic groups on which the human cost of the war falls most heavily (urban blacks and hispanics being the other two). Hearltand isolationism is dead. This seems, by the way, to speak to the extent to which our present "grand" "strategy" is solely the responsibility of "a cabal of neoconservative intellectuals."

Standing Offers - Tweaked by Belle's essay, I'm reminded that I made generous offers to both the Dems and Republicans well before the election. Dems:

let the Dems put as much real energy into getting rid of big government they supposedly don't like as adding big government they do. Campaign on ending the drug war and mean it. Dismantle corporate welfare instead of engaging in it. Restore the personal income tax exemption to its level in 1948 dollars while eliminating all or most itemized deductions. Promise to repeal all or most of the USA-PATRIOT Act, the RAVE Act and the DMCA. Stand as firmly for free trade as Clinton did.

Repubs:

(Paraphrasing.) Clean house of the "benevolent hegemony" crowd, starting with Dick Cheney. Get rid of the Ashcroftians too. Drop efforts to kill the PATRIOT Act sunset provisions, throttle the VICTORY Act. Fast-track the Iraqi transition. Cut spending. Kill the tariffs and farm subsidies from the first Bush term. Invite the leaders who walked out of the Cancun trade talks over Western hypocrisy to the White House and work with them. Real federalism: kill any federal marraige initiiative and turn drug policy over to the states; announce the desire to return abotion policy to the states too. Kill corporate welfare. Restore the personal income tax exemption to its level in 1948 dollars while eliminating all or most itemized deductions. Convene a commission with the aim of trimming the Federal Register by one third, chaired by former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson.

Still waiting!

Reading List - It's a taking stock weekend hereabouts. Stuff that's going into the hopper, sparking varying degrees of insight, hope, despair and annoyance:

Bruce Baugh, Abandoning Libertarianism
Jonathan Wilde, Hypothetical Answer on Political Parties
Belle Waring, I Heart Libertarians
Kip Manley, the company kept, including the comment thread
Lex Gibson, Misunderestimation (via Dave Tepper)
Tim Burke, Moral Values, Divided Universalisms and Class War
Jesse Walker, Culture Bores
Will Wilkinson, Taking Pluralism Seriously
Walter in Denver, Libertarian Voting Guide
Amy Phillips, Don't Blame Me, I Voted for Kodos
Matthew Yglesias, Shadow Government

Testie, Testie - Inaugural run of wBloggar editing tool. Zempt development appears to be dead, nd that weird bug where the app disappears when minimized, taking any content with it, has cost me two posts this week. So far I'm finding the type size in the editing window to be annoyingly tiny. But the thing sure does seem to have bells and whistles. If you can read this, it works.

Curiously, Wordpress does not seem to be directly supported, which is something to think about as I contemplate site upgrades.

Note to Self - Get trackback working. In the meantime, check out various responses-slash-criticisms of recent items here by

Nate Bruinooge and Alex Knapp
Kieran Healy and John Holbo
Franklin Harris (via)
Alan Sullivan
Chad Orzel and The Poor Man

I Hope the SNACKS are Good at the Blog Conference - Alex Knapp writes

Look, gay marriage was mentioned, but it was totally ancillary to the campaign. Both candidates were against gay marriage and said so. Maybe I've just been slipped in here from a parallel universe, but in the campaign I watched, the central issues were terrorism and the war in Iraq. I guarantee you that a majority of people who voted for Bush voted on those issues, not gay marriage.

I don't want to pick on Alex personally; I think there's a larger point here. Alex is surely correct that the "campaign [he] watched" was not about "moral values." I suspect that, like the rest of us who do this, Alex followed the campaign on TV and - blogs! Plus the internet sites of major metropolitan newspapers. That's the campaign I watched too.

And meanwhile, unknown to Alex and me and Glenn Reynolds and Kevin Drum and most operatives of the Democratic Party, the important campaign was the one we were barely watching at all. This one was taking place in "low church" pews and the basements of Catholic Churches; on Christian radio and among prayer groups. It was a ground-level meatspace operation that may have left cybernetic traces, but not where we, the vaunted blogosphere, were looking. Very occasionally it appeared before us, but as an oddity. The President refers, seemingly out of the blue, to the Dred Scott decision in the second (third?) debate. It goes unremarked by Glenn Reynolds and Alex and - me. I did see some liberal bloggers either express amused puzzlement and get educated by commenters as to its sub rosa meaning or figure it out for themselves, but I didn't see any of them grasping the import of it at the time. (Same here!) The whole operation aiming to physically convey bodies to discrete spots in public buildings, full of an enthusiasm opaque to Technorati. You could go so far as to say it was supposed to go unnoticed in such places, so as not to scare off people like Alex Knapp.

Close elections are won or lost at the margins. From what I can tell, the real story of this campaign was the Democratic Party's effort to mobilize black voters angry about the Unpleasantness in 2000 versus the Republicans' effort to pull the famous four million white evangelicals out of Karl Rove's pocket. The Republicans won.

And (this is what we really care about) it had nothing, nothing to do with The Blogosphere. The blogosphere had no clue. (This is why it's no personal slight on Alex.) This goes for the big pro-Bush sites AND the pro-Kerry sites. (Shall we call it the Main Stream Blogosphere, or "MSB?") This wasn't "The Year of the Blogger" at all. It was the year the Blogger saw himself and mistook the vision for the election. If there's any justice, the upcoming conference will end early and we can all go for drinks.

Lord, Make Me the Kind of Person Nancy Pelosi Thinks I Am - I lost a big ol' item last night calling qualified bullshit on the suddenly popular notion that liberals need to come up with "a plausible spiel on morality," essentially dressing their existing beliefs in the language of religion so as to reach Christians who currently vote Republican. (While not explicitly stated, we are talking white Christians here. Obviously the Dems reach black Christians just fine.) See Kieran Healy, Amy Sullivan, Eszter Hargittai and Amy Sullivan. Among other things, this will raise conservative-Christian comfort levels with liberal politicians and make liberal policies attractive in the terms with which said voters view the world.

This is naive and even condescending. Conservative, values-minded Christians aren't looking for validation. They're looking for specific policy outcomes that their strongly-held beliefs entail - among them, the prohibition of abortion and the marginalization and if possible elimination of homosexuality. They are not empty urns waiting to be filled with liberal policies dissolved in honeyed words about faith.

Consider Bill Clinton. He was great at dressing his policies in the language of evangelical Christianity. But as his policies and biography diverged from conservative-Christian limits, white religious turned savagely against him. It's not the poetry, it's the prose. Contrariwise, Bush and Rove's faith talk may be every bit the "spiel" Kieran Healy says it is. Doesn't matter. The question for evangelicals and what Sullivan calls "religious moderates" isn't the sincerity of politicians, it's whether those politicians deliver on their issues. In the case of the Bush Administration, on issues like stem cells and gay marriage, that seems to be happening. For that reason, Bush and his party incur electoral rewards.

Reasons to Be, Uh, No - Radley sounds a similar note to the final paragraph of the item below this one:

I'm afraid that this election might have been a repudiation of libertarianism, though obviously not an explicit one. Seems to me that Bush voters last night voted for Ashcroftian morality, aggressive foreign policy, and were generally unconcerned about the massive spending and expansion of government that took place under Bush's watch. Given that his strongest supporters were seniors, the prescription drug benefit probably helped him more than it hurt him.

And Dave Intermittent e-mails to complain that even my half-hearted attempts at optimism are too little . . . reality-based:

The notion that Bush could yet pay a political price for his fuck-ups seems to be at odds with reality, in which any failure is either ignored, spun off as a success (Nukes in Iran? Rope a Dope, Baby!), blamed on the media, or written off as a Democratic plot, I dont see it. Barring of course, something truly catastrophic; and of course, we've already had something truly catastrophic during his term, and it helps him. Go figure. What really chills me though, is the emerging Democratic consensus: that they need to be able to compete on the "morality" issue. Wonderful; Republicans turn into Democrats on spending, Democrats into Republicans on morality and we get two parties both of which are determined to spend us into the ground while simultaneously mucking about in our private lives. We've somehow found a way to combine the worst traits of both parties: Excelsior! It's the Composite Superman of politics.

Cheer me up, why don't you? FInding a fanboy angle, Dave suggests "this is a good time to look under the couch for change to send the CBLDF." Radley comes closest to a consoling thought in his close:

Of course, that doesn't mean that's what most of the country feels, or that it's what Bush should actually do. It just means that's what the most motivated people feel. 51% of the people who voted last night were generally in tune with the big-government, Great America, neoconservative worldview.

The problem is that in politics, what the most motivated people feel tells. The Rs have now been rewarded for being the party of Ashcroft and Rumsfeld. They would probably suffer electorally for trying to move away from that. It's who they are now. This election proves that the voters of Ashcroftica can have a massively larger effect at the electoral margin than we can, period. You (the Republican Party) simply could not turn out a couple of million "extra" libertarian voters if you decided you needed them.

More than ever we'll have, on one hand, a "conservative" party with a weak commitment to a circumscribed notion of economic liberty and an active hostility to civil liberties, and on the other a "liberal party" with a weak commitment to a circumscribed notion of civil liberties and an active hostility toward market freedom. It is, as you say, very very bad.

Be of Good Cheer - At least I get to keep my liberal readership. I already alienated all the conservatives. A Kerry presidency would have swiftly reduced me to two dozen libertarians I know at parties and sundry indulgent friends.

What? It's not all about me? Well if that's your attitude, the only thing I have for you is that the Bush Administration will not be able to get out the door before its irremediable clusterfucks . . . fuck clusters. Or whatever. Iraq is not fixable. When it goes definitively kablooey, its architects will not be safely tucked away in their ranches and sinecures, able to tut-tut that if only we had stayed the course . . . Plus we are reminded once again of the genius of HL "Democracy is the theory that the people know what they want and deserve to get it - good and hard" Mencken.

The downside? Oh, little things, like returning to office the government that

*asserted that the executive can unilaterally and unreviewably strip any citizen of citizenship and declare any non-citizen an "enemy combatant" without rights;
*argued in its work papers that the President is not bound by either domestic or international laws of war because - he's the President! and it's a war!

Also, it appears that the Republicans will have won thanks to their direst characteristics, reifying of the national security state and codifying the moral outlook of a particular slice of Christendom into law. And the Democrats will have lost thanks to their equivocal