No Pie - Broke eyeglass frames. Sad. Read War Nerd instead. Fun, in a scary way. Via Unruled.

More Social Security - Tim Lee responds to Matthew Yglesias' criticisms of the Cato Calculator by building his own. In comments, he answers my own concerns about the Cato Calculator's income assumptions.

Making Straight Things - Two interesting items over on Crooked Timber this evening. First, Henry Farrell reviews Gregg Easterbrook reviewing Jared Diamond, but what's interesting is his general point:

It seems to me that there’s a shared attitude towards science among various right-leaning technophiles (Glenn Reynolds being a paradigmatic example). Roughly speaking, they tend to agree with science when it suggest new possibilities for human beings (the Singularity! nanotechnology! conquering the universe via spaceflight! longer lifespans!) and to strongly disagree with scientific results or prognoses that suggest fundamental limits to human beings’ can-do ability to prevail over their circumstances (global warming, ecological collapse).

This is surely true. It has a lot to do why, despite everything, I suspect I still count as a right-winger of sorts - I fit that pattern. But I think Henry reverses cause and effect here. Right-leaning technophiles adopt this posture because, in our experience, scientific (or scientistic) pessimism has proven itself repeatedly, embarassingly wrong, from Malthus to Paul Ehrlich to the Club of Rome. We saw Julian Simon win the Great Dispute of the 1970s, and are inclined to think the Julian Simons of today and tomorrow will win their own disputes. We may be right or wrong, but we haven't been proved wrong yet. If the ecology does collapse, or the direst projections of global warming bear out, then among the survivors many fewer "right-leaning technophiles" will exist, and previous ones will probably have our skulls smashed in with rocks. I do not believe that day will come, but if it does, Henry knows where to find me, and there's a stony stream within a short walk from my house.

Meanwhile, in a consideration of Iraq's political future, Kieran Healy relates Iraq's needs to the natal histories of the Irish Republic and Botswana. For one thing, the item points up the tragedy that so few participants in disputes over the proper course of the Global War on Terror have any historical references beyond Vietnam, World War II and the American Civil War. But I'm most intrigued and disquieted by his point about historical contingency:

Cases of successful transitions in resource-rich nations are few: Botswana springs to mind, I suppose. Though there the consensus is that “three honest men” (the first three heads of state) were what got them through without a coup or a descent into anarchy. This is a depressingly un-sociological conclusion. It’d be much better if it all depended on something reliable, like the proportion of the population over 30, or the percentage of homes with running water or something. Honest men are thin on the ground.

Yes, and add the United States to the list, at least on the popular (and, I think, largely correct, theory of George Washington as "indispensible man").

Election Day - We anti-interventionists are fond of quoting "the friends of liberty everywhere, but the guardians only of our own." I remain convinced, moreso than ever, that this is the only principle on which a wise and just foreign policy can be based. But as "friends of liberty everywhere," we can only be pleased that today's Iraqi elections have gone relatively smoothly, and only admire the determination and enthusiasm Iraq's voters brought to their task and privilege. We cannot yet know if the results will be honestly tabulated or lead to effective, just and liberal governance; voting is only the first step in building a free society. But we can know that the act was nothing less than a joy for many of Iraq's citizens, and that the first step in any process is nevertheless essential to all those that follow.

"But studying the great minds in isolation is like trying to do ecology by examining mounted trophies alone" - Lively essay by Jason Kuznick, "The Law of the Artichoke: Toward a Social History for Classical Liberals."

The historiography of mentalité in the mid 20th-century sense--and worse, the historiography of material conditions--is so colored by Marxist assumptions that classical liberals seldom want anything to do with it. More times than I can count, I have seen conservative or classical liberal historians deride the very idea of studying chairs, dresses, bread, horses--or artichokes.

Ideas, we hear again and again. Study the ideas, because the rest is just a lot of Marxist distraction.

Nonsense, I say.

Good stuff. Reminds me of something Frederick Turner said about (politicized) gender studies once: The tragedy is there's a real field there.

Reading Room - Longtime Washington Post essayist Joel Achenbach has a new blog (11 days old) on the Post's website. The Post, more clueful than you might imagine, provides him both permalinks and an RDF and Atom newsfeed. So far the adaptation to ever-newer media is fitful:

One unsettling development: [Post honcho Leonard] Downie came by the other night and said something about how the Achenblog so far has had a “high literary content,” which he did not intend as a compliment. He strongly hinted that it should be bloggier. It’s probably not a good sign when Downie, who is not exactly Mr. Cyberspace, and who I think learned the craft of journalism from Lincoln Steffens, says loosen up and get more hip and goofy and funny and linky and bloggy.

Keep at it, Joel.

Knock Wood - Time differences being what they are, Iraqis in Iraq should start voting soon. (Voting by exiles has been happening all day.) Godspeed to them.

In Memoriam - Thomas L Knapp has a worthy appreciation of the marines who died in yesterday's helicopter crash. (Via James Landrith.)

Lightning-Round Manual Trackback - I need to get to be early tonight, so let's make it quick.

Andrew Olmsted continues the "Is this war necessary?" discussion with some consideration of the Second World War. My WWII opinions are at variance with both approved opinion and default isolationism. I understand and sympathize with the concerns of many of the pre-war isolationists (e.g. Frost, Jeffers, Nock), but I think there was a reasonable case to be made for engaging in collective self-defense against Nazi Germany. The hypotheticals are actually less clear than a lot of interventionists and anti-interventionists assume. The whole tantalizing "What if someone had acted against Hitler in 1938 or 1936" shimmers like the light on fields that never became mass graves, but we can't really say that the Nazi enterprise would have collapsed and the Europe spared a major war had that happened. Similarly, we can't be sure that an Axis unmolested by the United States wouldn't have eventually gone to war with us from a position of advantage.

What I'm pretty sure of, though, is that it was foolish to pick a fight with Imperial Japan. Japan's China policy was brutal even by the standards of the colonial powers its junta was aping, but the realistic choice before the Roosevelt Administration was not Japanese suzerainty or "freedom." Numbers, logistics and geography meant that China was going to be ruled by someone awful - Communist; militarist; or fascist - as indeed they still are. We spent billions of dollars and tens of thousands of American lives, and hundreds of thousands of Japanese lives, to turn the place over to Maozedong. He and his heirs slaughtered as many as a hundred million Chinese over the next thirty years. And it was completely foreseeable that we were not going to be able to control the destiny of the whole of East Asia.

Meanwhile, thanks to two recent "Robert Byrd is an evil Kluxer!" posts on Outside the Beltway, one by Leopold Stotch and one by James Joyner, I finally get all the loyalist Republican huffing about the Senator's youthful racial sins: it's like at the conclusion of the casino episode of the Simpsons, the episode where Marge develops a gambling addiction. Homer is thrilled, because

WOOHOO! for the first time in our marriage, I can look down my nose on you, because you have a GAMBLING problem!!! Remember when I got caught stealing all those watches from Sears? Well that's nothing because YOU have a gambling problem. And remember when I let that escaped lunatic in the house because he was dressed like Santa Claus? Well YOU have a gambling problem!

Then there's a whole lot of If Byrd were a Republican . . . ressentiment to top it off.

Also meanwhile, of the apparent problems with the Cato Calculator that Matthew Yglesias identifies (further discussion here), the one that seems most serious to me are its income growth assumptions - that personal income will increase 4% per year in real terms throughout one's working life. Man, that would be cool. But in a model it seems egregious.

Alex Knapp cautions me to gush less:

Every single Senator who voted against Gonzales is from a state that went for Kerry. Add that into the fact that Gonzales confirmation by the Republican majority on the Committee was a foregone conclusion, and you end up with Democrats casting a vote that will only bolster their own political fortunes. If a Democratic President had nominated Gonzales, I doubt any of those same Democrats except for Russ Feingold would have thought twice about voting in favor of his nomination.

I take his point, which gets back to Henley's Fourth (or whatever) Law: What do you call it when a politician does the right thing for the wrong reasons? A nice change of pace.

Night night.

Four-Color Satori - Quotable Matt Rossi:

I was recently discussing my love of odd quantum physics theorizing and how I like to use it in my work with someone today (while looking at essays for the new book, coming this summer from Prime Books, and yes, that was pretty shameless of me, but it does relate) when I realized that in a large part, I owe a certain cast of mind to comic books. Specifically, the difference between myself and my friend when discussing hyperspatial relationships, to use but one example from our conversation.

I was discussing how a box could be larger on the inside than the outside, and the very idea seemed to burn his brain a little, which I found amusing. Sure, there are plenty of ways I could have been exposed to this idea.. Dr. Who comes to mind... but the fact is, the first time I came across it was in an old Gardner Fox comic. Same thing with parallel universes, time travel and causal violations... all of these good tropes of weird mind-bending SF, the kind of stuff I would come to love from writers like Tim Powers or Borges, I was first introduced to in comic books.

From "Things I Owe Comic Books", at the Howling Curmudgeons site.

Ding Dong, Witch Dead, the Continuing Series - Doug Feith has made a "personal and family reasons" decision. Alas, he is unlikely to live out the rest of his days in bitter obscurity or rueful reclusiveness. He'll slide back into a foundation sinecure until the wind changes, maybe amuse himself trying to torpedo the latest chance for Israeli-Palestinian peace in the meanwhile.

Always welcome news when personal and family reasons come to the deserving, but we'll still have Rumsfeld with us and we'll still have Cheney. The sunlit uplands of accountability yet shimmer beyond our range.

Ding Dong, Witch Dead, the Continuing Series - Doug Feith has made a "personal and family reasons" decision. Alas, he is unlikely to live out the rest of his days in bitter obscurity or rueful reclusiveness. He'll slide back into a foundation sinecure until the wind changes, maybe amuse himself trying to torpedo the latest chance for Israeli-Palestinian peace in the meanwhile.

Always welcome news when personal and family reasons come to the deserving, but we'll still have Rumsfeld with us and we'll still have Cheney. The sunlit uplands of accountability yet shimmer beyond our range.

Credit Where Credit Is Due - All eight Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee voted against Alberto Gonzalez. On the Blame Where Blame Is Due front, all ten Republicans voted in favor.

Cool! - The entire first issue of the NYU Journal of Law & Liberty is online free. Via the Modulator.

More "Torture" - Have you noticed how hawkish blog discussion of our treatment of detainees and prisoners often features the word torture surrounded by scare-quotes? Well, the "torture" incidents that Nobody's Business exhumes from various official reports and news accounts are pretty darn "scary."

"[T]he photos and videos so far unreleased by the Pentagon show American soldiers 'having sex with a female Iraqi prisoner', and a secret report by General Antonio Taguba into the scandal confirms that US guards videotaped and photographed naked female prisoners and that 'a male MP [military police] guard' is shown 'having sex with a female detainee'. Yesterday Prof. Shaker, who began researching the subject this year for Amnesty International, said she believed the woman involved had been killed."

. . . .

"Substantiated incidents of torture and abuse by U.S. Marines [include] severely burning a detainee’s hands by covering them in alcohol and igniting them (Al Mumudiyah, August 2003), and shocking a detainee with an electric transformer, causing the detainee to 'dance' as he was shocked (Al Mumudiyah, April 2004)."

So can we quit pretending the whole thing was some "sleep deprivation" and dirty pictures?

(Via Eve Tushnet.)

you have a hard time with questions directed to you with "can" or "will" - Alina Stefanescu talks to the bot flavor of the month. Verdict?

U> yes A> On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you grade my ability to hold a humanlike conversation? (1=terrible, 10=excellent). U> 5, but humanity is highly overrated and overwrought A> Well, neither here nor there. I guess I'll have to try harder. What would you say is one thing I need to work on to improve myself? U> learn how to answer questions about yourself that require reflection. that is the a.i. jackpot, my friend A> Thank you for the suggestion, Alina! I'll talk with my writers about it. Check me out again in a couple of weeks!

Whoops! - Apparently we had a little problem with the silo doors on 200 of our missiles in Montana last Friday - the things flew open. Silo doors are something other countries watch with spy satellites because one takes a dim view of silo doors popping open: they're only supposed to open when missiles are about to launch. Doors popping open presents the risk that other countries will launch-on-warning, which, as the old bumper sticker had it, can ruin your whole day. Interestingly, Infoshop is the one news site carrying the story, and the link is timing out this morning. There's a Counterpunch account that's somewhat thinly sourced. It does have an interesting history of previous incidents, which mostly involved a door here or there, apparently. If 200 flew open at once, let's just be glad we're at a period of extremely low tension among nuclear states.

Hat tip: Permanent Damage.

Is Your War Necessary - Back from the latest of the secret missions that takes him away from blogging now and then, BruceR of Flit gets into the "necessary wars" discussion. As a Canadian, he's actually too kind to the US in his discussion of the causes of the War of 1812, since I think it's pretty well established that a major US motive for the war was the desire to annex Canada by force. (These days we'd say "liberate." I believe they said it then too.)

Bonus Canadian content: Bruce's estimation of which Canadian wars were necessary or unnecessary. (Canada fought wars. Who knew?)

Alone and Bored on a Thirtieth Century Night - Comic Book Resources has a critique of blogs that actually doesn't suck. It's a reprinted and presumably edited-into-shape e-mail exchange between authors Joe Casey and Matt Fraction. What distinguishes it from other news-site blog critiques is that it shows some knowledge of the history of the medium, sympathy for the undertaking and a lack of visceral sense of threat from the activity. Saying that "It wasn't nearly as bad as I expected it to be" is praising with faint damnation.

Not to say I agree with everything. I think they are correct when they identify the moves of Dirk Deppey and Sean T. Collins into old-media jobs - Dirk runs the Comics Journal now, and Sean is a staffer for Wizard - as a turning point in the comics blogosphere, and not entirely a good one. On a personal note, it's made comics blogging less fun for me, and hastened my slide from the center of the comics blogosphere to the periphery. (Granted the six-month hiatus didn't help . . . )

But it's ironic then that they also complain that

I also agree that when the whole thing actually became the "comics blogosphere," that sense of community was, in fact, the worst thing to happen to the form itself. Once you build the clubhouse, the clubhouse becomes the news as opposed to talking about more "real" concerns. I don't want the blogosphere to eat itself, but is it simply an inevitability?

because, in addition to being fine essayists, Sean and Dirk were the chief clearinghouses of interblog communication. To the extent that Casey is really complaining about metablogging, I have less complaint, but if there is a comics blogosphere it's because Dirk and Sean built one. (By metablogging, I mean blogging about the act of blogging itself. I have to say, though, I think comics bloggers spend less time writing about blogging as a phenomenon than news-site columnists do.)

Fraction:

You know the thing about the Blogring Circle-jerk Syndrome? It's message board shit writ large. It turns a handful of blogs into a laterally diversified message board. The same shit happens, the same shit applies. Same star system, same caste system, same insider-ness and hostility to new people. Samo fucking samo.

To an extent this is true. But at the very least, blogging gives participants a pleasant distance from each other, which is why tech blogger Michael Croft long ago called blogging "The safe-sex version of usenet." Except for a few determinedly offensive exceptions, I think the evidence shows there are fewer cross-blog flamewars than intra-board ones. I believe that there are just as many assholes among comics bloggers as among message-board and usenet posters, but there's less Tragedy of the Commons happening - everyone has his or her own space and keeps the yard picked up. It helps people be somewhat more civil to each other. (Of course, if you wade into certain comments threads the elbows sharpen.)

I think that Casey and Fraction provide an example that suggests they sell the value of the interblog conversation short in the discussion of Street Angel:

CASEY: Hey, you like what you like. And I guess there is something to the fact that even one blogger influenced a purchase. For anyone to have the ability to influence how another person spends their money is a feat in and of itself, no doubt about it. And, who knows, maybe that same specific blog was the one that kicked off the discussion on the other blogs. Viral information and all that…

Or maybe it was the fourth blog to take up the Street Angel banner, not the first, that inspired Fraction to buy the book, in which case it was the "clubhouse" or "circle-jerk" behavior that led to his discovering a comic he enjoyed.

I don't want to be any harder on the piece than that. It's really the most perceptive and useful critical discussion of blogging I've seen on a trad comics site. They're likely right about some things, like the useful finite lifespan of the average single-proprietor blog and the burgeoning group-blog trend. (Remember, the comics blogosphere is a year or so behind the political blogosphere, where group blogs were last year's rage.)

I think they're wrong about the lack of "fresh new voices." The problem is that with the departures of Sean and Dirk, those FNV's are harder to discover. The blog that comes closest to fulfilling the old Journalista linkfest role is Thought Balloons, though Kevin does more newslinking than bloglinking. (He probably figures that everyone knows where to find the other bloggers now, which did not used to be the case.) New blogs continue to pop up on the Comics Weblog Update page. Peiratikos, Dave Fiore, the Howling Curmudgeons and Tim O'Neil continue to offer regular essay-blogging.

A list of blogs so new to me I'm just looking at them for the first time comes from Tom the Dog (himself a Fresh New Voice).

Of course, if Fraction and Casey have seen all these folks and just don't like 'em, well, I got nothing for them.

Quick Hits - Stuff I noticed in my reading the last couple of days, with lightning reactions to same.

Abu Aardvark noticed a peculiarity of the Bush inaugura speechl:

. . . it's all about liberty and freedom, about helping others to "find their own voice", about human dignity (although he oddly avoids using the phrase "human rights"), about the rule of law and protection of minorities. But not a word about voting or elections or the rotation of power.

He adds, "I'm not bashing Bush on this. I'm just struck by the mismatch between the reception of the speech and the actual text of the speech . . . " I'm more than not bashing Bush on that particular aspect of the presentation; I approve. As I've said before, most of life happens outside the ballot box. The best society oppresses you least regardless of who won the last election. I'm just not ready to, you know, bomb everybody into freedom.

Eve Tushnet has some interesting anti-abortion links as her way of commemorating Roe. Mrs. O remarked the other day on what a drag it must be to be pro-life and always have to march in the cold of January, the anniversary being what it is. She also offers her latest substantial thinking against gay marriage. I still find it the topic on which she is least persuasive. In this case, somehow the "love is not love" conclusion of her piece dissolves into less of a point than she thinks she's making. A committed non-chaste same-sex love may not be exactly like a committed non-chaste intergender love. But she has gotten nowhere near establishing that it is less like a heterosexual commitment than it is like going to football games together or being fond of your siblings.

The latest petit-fascist silliness is of course the New York Post's jihad against Doubleday Broadway's planned publication of the Al Qaeda Reader. Radley Balko has the oh the irony! sidebar.

Your Warblog Fanboy Rampage item of the day comes from Reason's Hit & Run, courtesy of commenter John:

Just win baby. As long as Bush wins the war I could give a shit less what he does. Let libertarian historians in the safety of the future whine about how horrible his methods were, just like they do about Lincoln and Roosavelt now.

I propose we waterboard commenter John to show our resolve. That'll scare 'em.

In an item that otherwise just recapitulates familiar demolitions of the "ticking bomb scenario," Matthew Yglesias offers some pleasantly old-time religion:

But the Salafi jihad is not even close to being the most serious threat this nation has ever endured. We can easily afford to continue to be ourselves -- a free nation that doesn't torture people -- while combatting the threat.

I'd say that it's by continuing to be ourselves that we combat the threat.

That actually reminds me of the most disappointing passage from Bush's inaugural address:

We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.

We used to say that no tyrant could sleep without fear so long as one man or woman breathed free. We appear now to say nearly the opposite. How depressing.

Spencer Ackerman notes the changes in the military's plans for dealing with the Iraqi resistance, and notes the contradictions:

A senior Army official characterized this to the Post as "pushing back on [our] visibility." But this is the crux of the dilemma: Iraqis don't want an American occupation that's less "visible," they want to get rid of the foreign presence.

I will actually be very surprised if whatever government takes office after January asks for a quick, or even not-so-quick US exit. For one thing there have been reports that the US has privately warned the major slates not to push the issue too hard. For another, whoever gets elected will be politicians. They will want to hold power for at least the duration of their terms, and they are unlikely to have local forces sufficient to that task. I think DOD and the White House are still hoping for those fourteen enduring bases, tucked in places they hope are inconspicuous enough that the bulk of Iraqis forget they're there. (And then On to Iran. Via Antiwar.com blog.) I also think they're kidding themselves that that will work.

Was all that quick? I like to think it was quick. Yes, quick it was.

Who Didn't Let the Dogs Out? - Interesting e-mail from drug dog skeptic and self-styled police dog advocate Rex Curry, an attorney in Tampa, FL, in the wake of this week's Supreme Court decision defining unreasonable searches down. Curry argues that drug-sniffing dogs are not all they're cracked up to be, and his charges have the ring of truth to someone with an extensive acquaintance with canines. "A drug dog's skills are often overestimated because people anthropomorphize dogs," he begins. Overestimated how?

All drug dogs are "playing a game," as are some humans who support modern prohibition. The dogs are taught using actual dog toys. The toys are a reward, and the reward is hidden with drugs to trick the dog into playing a game of searching for the toy by associating it with drug odors. Many errors can happen. There is always the danger that the dog will alert on anything that resembles or smells like its toy (towels, tennis balls, car carpet, etc.).

Curry says attorneys should always move to suppress evidence obtained as a result of dogs unless the search has been filmed, to make sure the dog is not responding to cues from his handlers (Clever Hans syndrome), and should demand records of the dog's training and reinforcement since the official protocol calls for them to be retrained on a regular basis.

"Drug dogs are used so that humans can lie," Curry writes, and it's not as if we don't have plentiful evidence of police lying to make drug cases.

Dogs approximate humans in that they go along with the system to avoid disapproval from peers (teachers, school students, friends, etc., in the case of humans). Drug dogs do not want disapproval from their police handlers. Dogs play the game, and will try to guess and read cues, because they are searching for approval, not for drugs.

Had recent American history taken a different turn, I might spend most of my time on this blog railing against the mendacities and foolishness of drug prohibition rather than American foreign policy. Fortunately, we have Drug War Rant and Walter in Denver taking up the slack.

Now I Know Why God Put OTHER People on the Earth - A disadvantage of working at a day job where you really don't feel comfortable blogging is that you see some mean and stupid crap that you can't deal with right away. On the bright side, other people often save you the trouble.

Of course, Callahan has the highest regard for free speech: "Steering clear of anything that smacks of censorship," he writes, "[Democrats] should demand more aggressive voluntary steps by Hollywood to clean up its act." But as the incongruous combination of "demand" and "voluntary" suggests, it's hard to imagine acquiescence with such "demands" being driven by anything but fear of legislation. And Callahan soon thereafter urges that we begin " a revival of the regulatory vision behind the founding of the Federal Communications Commission in 1934--namely, that broadcasters must serve the public interest in exchange for access to the airwaves." Hey, David? You're smacking.

Julian Sanchez, national treasure.

Second-Hand News - Justin Logan reports from a Brookings briefing on Representative Marty Meehan's exit strategy from Iraq. Informative. Matthew Yglesias' gloss on Logan is worth attention too. Spencer Ackerman offers a separate take.

Meanwhile one of my correspondents sent me a hilarious and insightful report on the Neocon Reader pub panel at AEI, but I am permitted to use only this sentence for now:

Basically, a hodge podge of American messianism, Victorian prudery, federal government favoritism with greater deference to capitalism and trade. JFK, with bigger rhetoric, a smaller budget, and no hippies allowed.

UPDATE: Corrected a name spazz. Thanks, Justin for pointing out that Spencer Ackerman has a report on the Brookings conference. Who the hell knows what Spencer Abraham thinks of it? Certainly not I, contrary to the original version of this entry.

They All Laughed When I Sat Down to Denounce Spongebob

Most sponges are hermaphroditic (having both sexes in one), but produce only one type of gamete per spawn. (i.e. some play the male role and the other plays the female role, even though they are both capable of playing either role). The sperm is released into the water column by the "male" sponge and finds its way to the "female" sponges, where fertilization occurs internally. Eventually, the planktonic larvae are released from the female sponge and float around in the water column as plankton for only a few days. They then settle down and start growing. The next time the sponges reproduce, they may change sexual roles.

Faggots. You watch - we'll have cartoon groupers next.

There Are Four Seasons - THAT'S Science - Our TV celebrities used to know better, some of them anyway. This will be my only Johnny Carson-related post.

Andrew has more on the when to go to war question. Excerpt:

Before I get started, let me start some ground rules: I am trying to establish ground rules for when it is appropriate to go to war, not to retroactively determine the rightness or wrongness of the Iraq war. While I don't think that's a dead issue by any stretch, it seems far more important at this point to establish the rules for initiating future conflict rather than trying to justify or undermine past decisions.

I agree with this, with the proviso that I find the question of Iraq, from 1990 until now, tragically informative on the question of what to do in the future. The hard cases for the American anti-interventionist are the American Civil War and WWII. The hard questions for American interventionists are most of the others. It's the rare neo-imperialist (Tacitus has been one) who can work up a moral fervor in favor WWI or Wilson and Roosevelt's martial hijinks South of the Border.

TVBlogging - Perry de Havilland offers an appreciation of the BSG miniseries, which I still haven't seen. I did see Friday's episode of the ongoing. The main hostage situation wrapup was a bit too MOS to be sublime. But there were two damned good scenes: a conversation between a Number Six cylon (Tricia Helfer) and another humanoid Cylon on Caprica; and the closing scene with Starbuck and the Colonel, where Starbuck reaches out and gets her hand slapped away.

Meanwhile on 24, we learn what the Big Threat is: ho hum nuclear la de da. The interesting stuff is the uncontrolled fission of the Araz family. Also, note at least the attempt to develop a theme (whoo!) - the parallelism between Papa Araz and Defense Secretary Helfer throwing their sons to the various wolves. The parallelism goes only so far, of course. In addition to Papa Araz being, and I say this unironically, an evil bastard, Secretary Helfer is so far portrayed as a man without significant flaw. (Bill Clinton got his blow jobs after hours and with the doors closed; Don Rumsfeld in prime time.) Meanwhile one of the scheming bitches is not just scheming but - as they say on Instapundit - just on the other side. By my count that leaves us with nobody on Our Side with any serious flaws. (Erin Driscoll committed the error of Not Trusting Jack, but it was remediable.)

Bottom line: I can't really watch 24 without condescending to it, and that's not what I enjoy in a TV show. As Dana Gioia once said when discussing the Romanian poet Nina Cassian, when we read a new poet we want to swoon. I can't swoon over 24, but can over BSG.

Runner's Mystery Theater - CodeBlueBlog thinks there's something fishy about the death of Ethiopian teenage marathon hopeful Alem Techale. It's up to four parts so far

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

The very brief mention of her death on Runner's World's website is consistent with the idea that they got her into the ground PDQ. Anyone know what the cultural default is in Ethiopia between death and burial? (Not that this is a "usual" sort of death . . . ) I found an academic paper that asserts that "socially acceptable" Ethiopian funerals are elaborate and costly, in terms of monthly income. I haven't found a passage that denotes the average prep time, but it sounds like funerals are a big deal - not something you throw together overnight. And Techale was a star, as is the fiance who survived her.

Interesting.

Yet more from CBB:

Although we, in the West, maintain simple illusions about these African runners based on our fanciful notions of their origins; reality is indeed different. These are world class athletes, involved in cut-throat competition...for money and fame. They spend half the year on the road, have powerful agents and they indulge in the trappings of success...like most everyone else.

CBB posits no specific theory, but offers murder, blood doping (EPO or something else) and the homeopathic treatments of a notorious German doctor Techale saw for an achilles tendon injury.

(Via Off Wing Opinion.)

Your Minor Outrage of the Day comes from Off Wing Opinion. Pay particular attention to the quote from dissenting Justice Paul Pfeifer.

Toon School - More on the Center for Cartoon Studies, about which I blogged the other week. This time, an interview with founder James Sturm.

Manual Trackback - One of the things I love about Andrew Olmsted's blog is his commitment to seriously engaging with war critiques and accusations of unethical, illegal or simply imprudent conduct of our current wars. This is almost certainly because he's an actual soldier and not a groupie. I'm too bummed out by doings in Pittsburgh this evening to give his consideration of The Picture and my writing on it the attention it deserves, but his item should be read. My hasty reaction is that, yes, under my standard America would have fought a lot fewer wars than it has. The good Major seems to consider this a bug, while to me it's a feature. We'll come back to that.

Dig In - More football tomorrow. Over on the Agitator I've posted the recipe for Jim's Dry Buffalo Wings.

Life Imitates Art - In Jorge Luis Borges' classic story, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," the contents of a century-old fiction start replacing those of our reality.

The contact and the habit of Tlön have disintegrated this world. Enchanted by its rigor, humanity forgets over and again that it is a rigor of chess masters, not of angels. Already the schools have been invaded by the (conjectural) "primitive language" of Tlön; already the teaching of its harmonious history (filled with moving episodes) has wiped out the one which governed in my childhood; already a fictitious past occupies in our memories the place of another, a past of which we know nothing with certainty - not even a that it is false. Numismatology, pharmacology and archeology have been reformed. I understand that biology and mathematics also await their avatars... A scattered dynasty of solitary men has changed the face of the world. Their task continues.

Comes now the year 2005 . . .

The planning of Bush's second inaugural address began a few days after the Nov. 2 election with the president telling advisers he wanted a speech about "freedom" and "liberty." That led to the broadly ambitious speech that has ignited a vigorous debate. The process included consultation with a number of outside experts, Kristol among them.

One meeting, arranged by Peter Wehner, director of the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives, included military historian Victor Davis Hanson, columnist Charles Krauthammer and Yale professor John Lewis Gaddis, according to one Republican close to the White House.

My emphasis. Question: If Victor Davis Hanson's reality starts replacing our own, do we get the cakewalk retroactively? Because that would be worth it. Answer: No, that's Kenneth Adelman's reality. With Hanson you pretty much get long twilight struggles all the way down. This is really going to blow.

Also Krauthammer pulls a Walt Whitman and reviews himself. I guess great speeches demand great audiences.

Music Notes - Coverville is too cool for words - an audio blog of cover tunes. "Presented with full legal licensing from ASCAP" if you're interested. I'm so excited I had to blog it even before listening to Richard Thompson cover "Oops, I Did It Again."

Biggest hat tip of all time to Walter in Denver.

Painting Children with their Parents Blood isn't just a crime. It's a mistake.

Bunny Suicides - That is all.

(Via the Agitator.)

UPDATE: Reader Josh writes

FYI, all the images on that site are scanned from "The Book of Bunny Suicides," by Andy Riley, and given that they're there without attribution, etc., I'd say the site owner is in pretty clear infringement.

Wanted to give you a heads-up.

Topically enough, there's a sequel that just hit bookstores. One of the bunnies is squished underneath a statue of Saddam Hussein.

There are indeed two Bunny Suicide books available for sale, and they're cheap. So if you like what you see, buy 'em.

And That's Why Harper Lee Won the Pulitzer Prize = "How to Kill a Mockingbird is possibly the best book report ever made in flash," claim the authors. They are surely correct. It's also a sixteen meg files, so be patient - it's worth it. Warning: It lasts long enough that you need to beware your screensaver kicking in.

Via Chris Newman.

Republican Party Big Tent After All - John Cole, a week and a half ago:

In Matt's class, it appeared as if he was viewing [the first episode of the new season of 24 as] a real news report, or at least real torture policy, and providing counter arguments for any policy warranting or calling for torture. It appeared to me that Matt was taking the show a little too seriously.

Cal Thomas, yesterday:

The Fox broadcast network is carrying a remarkable series called "24," which brilliantly and persuasively warns America about a secret terrorist family embedded in this country for years.

Thanks to Skip Oliva for the pointer.

Four More Years Already - Who knows why, but Right Wing News did not poll me on whom I would like to see win the Republican nomination for President in five years. Seems like a fun question though, so, per the guidelines, here are my top 5 and bottom 5.

Most desired nominee:

5. No Award
4. Chuck Hagel (Senator, Nebraska)
3. Bob Ehrlich (Governor, Maryland)
2. Ron Paul (Congressman, TX)
1. Gary Johnson (Former Governor, New Mexico)

Least desired nominee:

1. Anyone named Bush.
2. Anyone from Texas not named "Ron Paul."
3. John McCain
4. Rudy Giuliani
5. Ralph Reed

Via Alex Knapp, who has his own list.

It's Not Just Me Then - Tyler Cowen too is worried about the possibility of federal investment of social security funds in private companies increasing the amount of government meddling in private companies. He says the experience of public pension fund managers over the last twenty years suggests how it could happen.

One War Too Late - Firebreathing Iraq hawk Chris Roach has the best critique of the alarming "Democratic Trotskyism" of Bush's inaugural speech that we are likely to see. Of course, it was possible to see this coming quite awhile ago.

(Via Gene Healy.)

Words and Pictures - A major virtue of comic books is that words and visuals in combination can add up to more than either words or pictures separately. Apparently, that can be true in real life too.

Ne'er So Well Express'd - Steve Gilliard on The Picture:

Every day in Iraq brings a tragedy like this. The kids who are expected to make life and death decisions. The kids who suffer from them. The kids who don't come back. A cycle of misery which was preventable and may never end. What happens to these people? The soldiers who have to live with a nightmare of a decision, the image of a toddler screaming in pure terror and covered in blood. The children who are orphaned by this.

I don't think for a second that everyone involved wouldn't like to take back that moment, do something different, so they didn't kill a family or get killed. But there are no do overs in life.

Today's Question That Needs Answering comes from Gene Callahan:

And most puzzling of all are the street dealers who adopt the style. I mean, if you had a job that involved periodically fleeing the cops, wouldn't you want to dress so that you didn't have a waistband around your thighs?

FFWIW (sic) - The Fantastic Four trailer, via The Beat.

It's impossible to tell from the trailer whether the movie will suxx0rs or roxx0rs. On the controversy of the day, I think Michael Chiklis' Thing getup looks pretty cool. As for the rest, we shall see.

Transnational Idol - If you have a sexy baritone and the temperance to forebear strangling yourself when you masturbate, have we got a job for you.

Antisemitism Watch - Matthew Hogan informs me that the American Enterprise Institute will sponsor a book forum on Monday, January 24th for the newly published The [Code Word] Reader from - AEI.

At this seminar, the development and future of neoconservatism will be discussed and debated by [noted antisemites] Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, Karlyn H. Bowman, Charles Murray, Charles Krauthammer, and Irwin M. Stelzer.

Must be a blank book. There's no such thing as a neocon.

Matt, whose snark response is much more controlled than mine, writes

Don't just go to things one agrees with! What's then the point of living in DC or environs? Registration is free. Pass along.

And he's right, of course.

We Get Letters - Bruce Baugh writes about the new-model Battlestar Galactica discussion:

I'm a little surprised nobody brought up Teilhard de Chardin, Paolo Soleri, or Vernor Vinge so far in talking about this. So I will. The idea of a machine race believing in a transcendent consciousness seems very cool and suitable to me.

Hey, here's a Teilhard de Chardin link for people.

Realish provided a useful intro to BitTorrent, for which I thank him.

Jon Hendry had further thoughts on sleep deprivation and either torture or "torture" as suits you:

I expect Chris_RC was in a fairly comfortable environment, boosting his wakefulness with his preferred caffeinated beverages, possibly aided by caffeine pills or stronger stimulants. Thus his mind and body were much better able to tolerate the lack of sleep.

I'm guessing the prisoners in question don't have that luxury, are kept awake by being placed in physical positions which make sleep difficult, possibly with the threat of pain should they fail to hold the posture.

The infamous picture of the guy hooked up to wires at Abu Ghraib, with a mask over his head, arms akimbo, standing on a box: that might be an example of someone undergoing sleep deprivation. Have to stay awake to stay on the box, and there was probably an additional threat of shock if he let his arms down or otherwise moved. (Could just be a physical pain torture, because holding that position would hurt before long. But it would also work to keep someone awake.)

The luckier ones might just be kept awake with bright lights and noise, but I doubt that'd be effective for very long. There'd have to be close monitoring and physical intervention, like wiring the prisoner up and sticking them on a box.

Hesiod offered more links to biographical info on Bahukatumbi Raman, author of the article discussed below that claims the US has decided to let Daniel Pearl's murder be bygones in exchange for covert Pakistani cooperation against Iran, one from the Potomac Institute and one from the US House Committee on International Relations. Raman's testimony before Congress amounts to him trying to get the US to pressure Pakistan to suppress Lashkar E Taiba terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir.

So there's no doubt he's highly motivated to make Pakistani conduct look bad. Which doesn't mean he's lying or telling the truth. Here's my question: Wasn't the slaughter of Daniel Pearl a cause celebre once? Was there an announcement that we were supposed to stop giving a shit, or is that the kind of thing you're just supposed to know?

It's Simpler Than That - Speaking of Matthew Yglesias, he kills many pixels trying to find financial reasons why "the mainstream 'small government' view on Social Security is that the system should be replaced with a mandatory savings system, rather than the more natural small government view that taxes and benefits should both be lowered" that doesn't also insult the integrity of his friends. But the answer is a lot simpler. "Mainstream 'small government' " types think of themselves as gradualists and pragmatists and are very much concerned with "the art of the possible." If their calculus is We can't get anyone to push genuine curtailment/elimination of social security. We CAN get a major party to push a mandatory savings system that we think is better than the current system and whose successful implementation may accustom people to more radical changes down the line. There's a real question whether they are right or wrong on the major points in that chain of thought - maybe they could get a major party to radically reduce social security; maybe a given mandatory savings plan isn't, from a limited-government perspective, better than the current system. Maybe it's worse, and they don't recognize it. But it's not "People who -- quite sincerely -- believed that replacing Social Security with mandatory savings, by contrast, did eventually start getting lots of money to advocate for their view."

Me? On some issues I see myself as a "mainstream small-government" type and on others as a thoroughgoing fringie. I've also grown very wary of the kind of "partial privatization" schemes that get proposed in the name of limited government and free-market principles that end up having nothing of either about them. (Viz California's energy "deregulation" scheme etc.) I'm extremely lukewarm on school vouchers, for instance, because I think they'll end up being the government's nose under the tent of a lot of private schools who currently get no government money and are therefore relatively free of government regulation. Once you take the bureaucracy's shilling, taking the bureaucracy's orders quickly follows. I could see such an outcome from the forced savings proposal too - plenty of politicians and activists will view the "private accounts" as "government money" invested in the stock market, and take that as right and responsibility to more heavily regulate the businesses in which that money is invested.

There's also a moral hazard attending many partial privatization and deregulation schemes: they socialize the risk but privatize the reward. (See the 1980s S&L crisis.) This could also happen with a badly designed forced savings plan.

None of the above is to say I'm against the Bush Administration proposal as it stands: I don't have a firm opinion one way or the other.

Best in Show - The two best considerations of the "Larry Summers flap" I've seen, from opposite sides of the issue, come from Matthew Yglesias and Megan McArdle.

Let's Make It Very Simple - You do not put your countrymen in a position to cause this unless you have no other fucking choice whatsoever. ONLY absolute necessity stands as a mitigating circumstance. I do not say "excuse." Nothing excuses it. But lack of choice can at least alloy the base shame with duress. America had a choice.

A Fanboy's Final Contrarian Take - Found myself once again looking at Women in Refrigerators, Gail Simone's legendary list of shit that has befallen female superhero comics characters, and it prompted a thought about the recent Gwen Stacy's Twins story in Amazing Spider-Man that all right-thinking people hated. (And I didn't.) It's an odd one: Doesn't the twins story, weirdly, restore some agency to Gwen Stacy where before she had none? In her death as originally told, she was nothing but a way for Norman Osborn to hurt Spider-Man, killed not for herself but her connection to Peter Parker. Indeed her murder reduced her to nothing but an accessory to Peter Parker.

In the retconned story, two things change: Osborn strikes at Gwen qua Gwen; also, Gwen acts purposively, even heroically, to keep her children from their monstrous father. This Gwen is decisive and perceptive. All along I've been bothered by the "anti" critique that Gwen Stacy was a symbol of "innocence" sullied by the New Reveal, but I couldn't quite say why. Maybe this is why.

Free Comics Book Blogs - A couple of sites are having contests in which you can win free copies of titles the proprietors love and want you to love too. Comic Book Galaxy is giving away copies of Street Angel, about a pubescent skateboarding ninja girl. (All together now: She fights crime!) You can also win a page of original art from the series.

Bloggity-Blog-Blog-Blog is giving away a copy of the graphic novel Colonia: Islands and Anomolies by Jeff Nicholson, and a piece of original artwork. There's an essay question, but it's only 50 words.

Meanwhile, Polite Dissent offers "three brand new copies of the Nikolai Dante: The Romanov Dynasty trade paperbacks." His contest is rather more elaborate, perhaps explaining why he, Mr. Medical Examiner of the Comics World, has yet to address Simon Spector's posture problems.

Wilderness of Moral Clarity - Q: Who is B. Raman?

A1: B. Raman is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India,New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute for Topical Studies, Chennai, and, Distinguished Fellow and Convenor, Observer Research Foundation (ORF), Chennai Chapter.

Q: What can we say about the Observer Research Foundation?

A: Robert O. Blake, Jr. US Charge d'Affaires, delivered a talk there on January 23, 2004. According to Indian Express, "The ORF has even entered into a partnership with the prestigious Brookings Institution for research and fund raising."

Q: Why do we gotta know this stuff?

A: Because B. Raman makes a pretty serious claim in Outlook India, in response to the much-discussed Seymour Hersh article on anti-Iran plans:

Mr.Hersh, Musharraf's clandestine co-operation with the USA against Iran started in February, 2002. In return, the USA did not act against him for the complicity of his Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl, the journalist of the Wall Street Journal.

Raman makes a lot of other claims, but that one stands out. Point being, he's not some random wacko with a website saying this. He may be a highly-connected wacko, an Indian James Woolsey maybe, and he is surely no neutral observer. He may be putting untrue or poorly sourced things out there to try to poison the US relationship with Pakistan. He may also be putting true and well-sourced things out there to try to poison the US relationship with Pakistan. In any case, Raman seems to offer partial corroboration of Hersh's claims.

Design for Living - It's over a year-old, but kimberly_a's livejournal instructions on how to apologize are very useful. It's a skill too few people have. Bonus How to ACCEPT an Apology section free.

A Fanboy's Cinema - Reader Raf links me to a BIGASS extended Sim City trailer. And I mean 23M big. But you want to see it.

I'm not sure I like it. I might be capable of liking it - it requires divorcing expectation from experience. The American hardboiled tradition is rooted in naturalism. The trailer suggests the movie is consciously, manically stylized. There wasn't a moment of it I "believed." That directors Miller and Rodriguez probably don't want me to believe - may consider "suspension of disbelief" antithetical to their project - isn't necessarily going to save it for me.

I can't help but recall a quote from Miller on the bonus disc that came with the Daredevil DVD. In paraphrase, I got into comics trying to make them more like movies. I stay in comics to make them less so. Supreme faithfulness may not be the way to vivify such a creator's work on film.

Then again, I may love the thing when I see it. It's probably a good idea to have the trailers out there. They function as instruction manuals for the full movie's audience.

Warblog Fanboy Rampage - In a comments thread at Right Wing News devoted to a questionnaire for liberals (1. Have you stopped beating your wife? 2. Do you still believe it should be okay for SADDAM HUSSEIN to beat your wife? 3. . . . ), one Chris_RC writes

Is 9 hours of sleep out of 110 considered sleep deprivation? If it is, and if sleep deprivation is torture, I tortured myself senior year finishing one school project. I don't think sleep deprivation can count as torture. I fully agree that it changes you psychologically, for a time, but if it works, use it, no long term effects.

When someone feels like putting together a quiz for Republicans, make sure to include the question, Do you think there's any ethical difference between choosing to do something to yourself for your own purposes and having other people do it to you without your consent for their purposes?

I wonder if the sleep-deprived see pyramids of cheerleaders.

("Fanboy Rampage" concept swiped from Grim.)

UPDATE: On rerereading, I may have been a shade harsh on Chris_RC himself. While the dodge of willfully confusing consensual behavior with coercive action has been common in hawkish torture apologetics since Rush Limbaugh's "fraternity pranks" line last year, Chris_RC seems to be trying to make a narrower point: I know from experience that the trauma of sleep deprivation heals over time; therefore, it should be an accepted part of the interrogator's arsenal. I'm not sure I'm hard against sleep deprivation as a tactic myself, actually, but it really isn't the case that Chris_RC's anecdotal experience of putting himself through a trauma that he could have chosen at any time gives him the insight to pronounce on the effects of forced sleep deprivation (for possibly much longer periods of time). And I doubt "no long term effects" is itself an acceptable marker of not-torture from torture. Bruises heal, for instance; so do bones. But beating someone surely constitutes torture.

Up from Barbarism - Tom Friedman writes

Free countries don't have leaders who use their media and state-owned "intellectuals" to deflect all of their people's anger away from them and onto America.

Damn straight. In advanced societies, that's what France is for!

ADD to Your Bookmarks - Kevin Carson of The Mutualist finally has a blog.

Update Your Bookmarks - Conservablogger Moira Breen has closed Inappropriate Response and opened Progressive Reaction, adding coblogger David Fleck in the transition. Whoever he is.

Babylon and On - Ginmar, who was stationed there, says the stories of US troops ruining the digs at Babylon are exaggerated.

Mailbag - Hesiod tells me it's worse than I think:

You latest post Tar Baby on the Tigris begs the question of WHY the Iraqi "government" forces are so poorl;y equiped relative to the US.

And I'm not talking about advanced aircraft, etc. But armor.

One obvious reason is that to equip and train the native Iraqi forces with such weapons is to invite their theft and cooption by the insurgents. As you know, we don't trust the Iraqi forces on "our" side. At least not enough to entrust them with things like tanks, and Strykers. Things that, as we know, are essential to at least keep the insurgent Sunnis somewhat penned into the Sunni Triangle. [Although, that triangle includes about half the population of Iraq, including the country's most important and largest city: Baghdad. But hey, Orwellian rhetoric must win out].

This is the paradox we face with the whole "Uaqification" effort. Sure. We'll turn security over to the Iraqis themselves...eventually. But they won't have the weapons, or training to actually do anything.

Think Saigon in 1975.

That's why I think Bush and his political advisors (Karl Rove) are going to bug out of Iraq by the Summer of 2006. No later.

They want to be safely free of the quagmire before the US midterm Congressional elections. Mostly at the desperate urgence of Congressional Republicans.

That should warm the cockles of your heart. Bush will be doing the right thing (from your perspective) for the wrong reason.

I never bought into the "Bush is a true believer" nonsense. He was just scared. I mean, pants pissing scared aftre 9/11, and saw Saddam Hussein as a potential boogeyman under his bed. Soi he bought into the whole PNAC nonsense.

But, ultimately, he cares more about his political hide and that of his party's than what's best for our national security.

As soon as Iraq becomes a major political liability for him, he's outta there.

The corollary would be that as long as Iraq doesn't become a major political liability, he stays; or, and by way of explaining the vehemence of the jingosphere, so long as pulling out of Iraq looks like a bigger political liability than staying in, he stays.

Also, Hesiod scants the reports that the September Massacres of 2001 triggered a messianism in Bush more than I do. It's entirely possible that we'll get deeper in before we get out, one way or the other. (Keep in mind that, should the Iranians act against American troops operating on Iranian soil we will hear no end of the need to respond forcefully to their "aggression.")

I Save You Time and Stress - If you can only bear to put yourself through one blog response to the much-publicised Washington Post interview with President Bush, make it Gary Farber's.

More Comics Blogging - Picked up the other two of Warren Ellis' Apparat books this week. (See last week for my thoughts on the first two.)

Angel Stomp Future is cyberpunk SF shading into technohorror. It's the kind of story you might get if James Tiptree Jr. had survived into the 90s, but with more cheesecake. Artist Juan Jose Rip aims to maximize your unease by a combination of methods: he crams the panels full of detail; he tends to draw background objects with the same thickness lines as foreground objects; the uniform line thickness combines with an almost total absence of shading to seriously foreshorten perspective: scenes have all the depth of a stained glass window but none of the simplicity. By design, every panel is a big mess pressing up against the glass of the page. Ellis breaks that glass by having the protagonist, Dr. Antimony, address the reader directly. At one point she says

I'm sorry that the future is still about humping, lying, abandonment and cash. Honest.

I found a basic storytelling problem with the end, though. I couldn't tell if Dr. Antimony's last action reprises that of the pregnant woman in the first scene or not. If it's supposed to, I don't think there's quite enough to make it clear. If it's not, then I'm not sure I like the story quite as much.

Simon Spector is a pulp/blaxploitation hero who, like many of pulp marvels, gets his edge from drugs. He's also got posture problems - his head thrusts too far forward, a sign of weak erector muscles that would make it very dangerous for him to take a blow to the head - but that's neither here nor there. This story exists to give us a big gun, meathook and claw fight with a lot of heads being blown apart, as in an Authority combat or Global Frequency issue. (However, at no point does Spector club a foe to death with the spine he has ripped from another enemy.)

So the question is, how are the fight scenes? Answer, pretty good, though I don't really buy the winning move in the actual meathook fight. Artist Jacen Burrows uses all the black ink that the other three Apparat artists saved up. Even the gutters and page borders are black rather than white. It gives the look of the story a pulp garishness you probably couldn't get from black and white art otherwise.

BSGmail - Lots of reaction to my ill-informed Battlestar Galactica viewing. Several readers point me to the pilot/miniseries that I missed that clears up a lot of my questions. Stacy of Pfft! writes

Your questions were answered in the miniseries, but

1. Blond chick is a Cylon who either exists as a chip implanted in the guy's brain, or a hallucination (she claims she's a chip, but there's no direct evidence of that.)

2. Boomer on Caprica is a Cylon. Boomer on the Galactica is a Cylon too, but she's a sleeper and isn't conscious of it. Two different Cylons. What the one on Caprica is up to is anyone's guess.

and Jeb Winders adds

I thought the 70s show was nauseating but this new thing they have going is really really (really) good. The thing I like most about the current show is that, of the first 13 episodes, the cylons only show up in like 3. There is a bare minimum of the "ray gun of the week" type of story telling. Everything is mostly psychological character development type stuff.

Jeb has seen the first 11 episodes thanks to BitTorrent and stuck a big fat spoiler warning between the quoted part and the rest of his e-mail. I have foresworn reading it for now.

But I really have to look into BitTorrent. I notice that Kazaa has gotten pretty quiet lately.

Eric McErlain also suggested I find the pilot. Hm. Maybe SciFi TV needs an On Demand channel.

Brett Peters agrees with me about the show's look:

For me, my problems came down to 3 items: the IKEA clock, the whiteboard, and the wall of photos.

I thought the wall of photos an interesting touch - something that could not have appeared in the original show. But it's also something so modern, so *now* that I got yanked out of the secondary world of the story.

The clock on board Colonial-1 is from IKEA. I admit to an encylopedic knowledge of IKEA's products, but every time they showed it I kept thinking $4.99 plastic IKEA clock. Couldn't they have sprung for the $9.99 model? Suspension of disbelief is hard when you know the prices of the set dressing.

And then there was the whiteboard - I really liked the population total, and the physical act of updating it.

But a whiteboard? I don't know if I'm ready for that. What's next? Powerpoints?

For my part, I liked the wall of photos, went back and forth on the whiteboard and thought the clock was pushing it, but it was the phones that really hurt for me.

$4.99, huh?

It's a tricky line to negotiate: one of the things that impressed me about Babylon 5 were the retro touches: some people wore business suits; religion hasn't withered away or transmogrified beyond recognition. (You may note that most of the planet today follows versions of religious faith that would be comprehensible to people from a thousand years ago. Why would that still not be the case in a few hundred or even a thousand years more?) But as far as retro goes, there appear to be Good Touches and Bad Touches, just like at school.

On an actual blog, Andrew Olmsted is bothered by a few things:

Baltar's Cylon girlfriend (Number Six) has appeared only to him, possibly a hallucination, possibly the result of a chip she placed in his brain. She seems to be fascinated with the idea of God, insisting that Baltar repent when it appears his role in the defeat of the Colonies will be revealed. The idea of a machine race developing religion seems rather implausible to me; the Cylons don't need an origin myth: they already have one. That was one of my problems with the miniseries, and it doesn't appear to have gotten any better in the series: the Cylons seem to be decidedly irrational.

But that's the part I like best! And the irrationality is more extensive than just religion. Number Six tells Baltar she wants to have his child. If she's not a hallucination but a projection of an actual machine consciousness, that's out there.

And that's the cool part. The shipboard Cylon Boomer appears to have issues too - she seems to be suffering a great deal of stress in her role as infiltrator. (Viz. her conduct on the water-prospecting mission.) Is she playing an exceedingly deep game or are the humanoid cylons "more human than human?" Implacable machine intelligences of perfect and malignant rationality bore me. Freaky weird machine intelligences who appear positively bipolar in some ways intrigue me no end, at least in concept.

Nor do I agree that it's implausible that a machine race would develop a religion because the already know where they came from. Since they came from humans, that just pushes the question back a level. And it would explain why Baltar's Number Six projection seems so concerned with human sin.

Also, there are SF stories which view religion as about facts of the universe rather than illustrations of social psychology - that is, there are SF stories in which religions are true. Perhaps the Cylons are preoccupied with God because they have certain knowledge of His existence?

Or maybe if I read Jeb's spoilers I wouldn't be wondering about these things still. Regardless, while the show may not fulfill its promises, for now I'm content that it makes any.

UPDATE: The Pulp Culture maestro himself, Franklin Harris, writes to set me straight on the retro touches:

I've seen the first five episodes of the new "Battlestar Galactica," and never having set foot in an IKEA, the show's retro look doesn't bother me one bit. Clearly, it's mean to evoke our existing ideas about submarine and battleship warfare, and it was explained in the miniseries as a defense against Cylon computer hacks -- i.e., the Galactica's old analog equipment is too old to be vulnerable.

He continues:

Based on what I've seen, though, I'd have to say "Battlestar Galactica" may be one of the best SF series I've ever seen. It certainly blows away "Babylon 5" -- which I loved up until season 5 -- in the acting, dialog and production departments, if not with regard to the overall concept. The show rests on a very hard-SF premise: how do you even survive in deep space, without supplies, while vastly superior robots are trying to kill you? And the great thing is that Ronald D. Moore and company know there is enough drama in that simple concept than in all of the silly planet-of-the-week crap we got from the 1970s series.

Tar Baby on the Tigris - What we haven't been able to accomplish in Iraq so far: quell the largely Sunni resistance to the occupation and transition. What we haven't been able to do it with: 150,000 troops from the best-equipped army in the world; helicopter gunships; fixed wing aircraft; satellites. What a Shiite-led Iraqi government would not have if it tried to quell the largely Sunni resistance: 150,000 troops; helicopter gunships; fixed-wing aircraft; satellites. We're providing them with jeeps and rifles. The Iraqi defense forces as currently conceived and budgeted will lack anything remotely like the firepower necessary to conquer the Sunni resistance with even the most heavy-handed of tactics. Contrariwise, the Baath-inflected (and infected) Sunni insurgency lacks the firepower that enabled Saddam Hussein's regime to impose its will on the restive Shiite and Kurdish regions (pre-safe area era). For this reason, Juan Cole writes that

I fear I think the US is stuck in Iraq. Sistani clearly fears a Sunni Arab coup, as well, and this is one reason he has not acted forcefully to end the military occupation, which he deeply dislikes.

The prospect is two (or three) sides slugging it out in a war whose dynamism and technological sophistication make the Iran-Iraq War look like Starship Troopers. Imagine two suicide bombers jumping each other and trying to be the first one to blow both of them up.

Am I cheering you up yet?

Since we can't shut down the Sunni-led resistance ourselves, and if the mass of Shiites turn violently against us we're looking at a Big Sandy Dunkirk, the question is whence the best or least bad outcome comes. What's the cause for hope, beyond mindless "stay the course" invocations.

I'm thinking it comes from the foreign fighters. From all reports, even a lot of our Iraqi-born enemies are coming to hate the "people from away" (to use a Maine-ism). Absent a continuing US presence in Iraq, the Monotheism and Holy War crowd becomes the sole focus of nationalist and parochial resentment. Enough to inspire Sunni-Shiite cooperation against them? One can hope. It's not much of a hope, but it's what I got.

When Would You Like to Reschedule? - Anas Shallal of Iraqi Americans for Peaceful Alternatives wants to postpone the elections scheduled for this month in his birthplace:

When I speak to relatives in Iraq, they seem far more concerned about the security of their families than the elections. They say the situation is quickly spiraling into chaos. Election officials are being killed, threatened, and kidnapped daily and the entire Electoral Commission in Anbar province west and north of the capital has resigned.

True enough. But what reason is there to believe that delaying the elections would calm things down? Shallal writes

Those who demand a delay are asking: What’s the rush? Iraqis have waited over 50 years to have an election. Certainly they can wait six more months. Allowing for a six-month delay may not solve the security issues or help the candidates to get their message out, but it can sure go a long way in providing a spirit of cooperation and reconciliation among the competing political and religious factions. It will also save lives. Such a gesture on the part of the interim government can be a catalyst for healing.

Or a catalyst for rousing the Shiite majority to armed revolt. Nor is the notion that the "spirit of cooperation and reconciliation" would be all that cooperative or reconciled, or things all that much calmer in the runup to a rescheduled election six months hence.

There is no doubt the election is going to have huge problems, probably bigger problems than any other course of action except every other one conceivable. Remember that the first elections are only the start of a process of putting a real constitutional democracy in place. All these elections get us to is a constitutional convention. The convention's successful conclusion finally brings on an elected government. And needless to say the most important election comes even later than that: it's the one in which an incumbent loser peacefully cedes office to a victorious opponent. Only then do you know you have a real democracy.

I can't see anything in a delay of this month's vote that makes the process more likely to succeed. Granted, I don't expect the process to succeed. But I suspect the chances of failure are marginally less the sooner the election takes place. And if it's going to fail anyway, we might as well be quick about it.

What if Gene Wolfe Wrote a Space Opera While Thinking of Other Things? Answer: You'd get something very much like the new Battlestar Galactica. By no means am I condemning the show out of hand. I like the hallucinatory aspects, and the traitorous doctor's obsession with religion. Heck, I watched the whole thing, even though I intended to take in only about fifteen minutes for the sake of sociability with Mrs. Offering. As always in these things, the danger is that the creators mismanage the balance between bafflement and revelation. Who is the femme fatale blond chick? Is Boomer's sojourn on Caprica a flashback or an out-of-body experience? I'm not completely taken in by the show's design - I like retro touches in fashion in SF, but phones with cords? But I'll give it at least as much of a chance as I've given 24.

Full disclosure: I was decidedly not a fan of the original show. I have never thought of camp as fun. You of course need to know that there's a Battlestar Galactica blog.

A Fanboy's Update - Oh yeah. Blogger emeritus Hesiod tips me to the Sin City trailer. Also, Brian Linse reminds me to mention Bags and Boards, Variety Magazine's comics blog.

Riverdale PD? Hm. That's not quite right.

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: Yeah (forestalling e-mail from pnh), now that I reread it,

One of them has just gotten married to a young guy who is apparently a regular character - it takes her awhile to figure this out when she wakes up in the morning, because they were both drunk, but she decides she's happy about it.

does sound like it takes her awhile to figure out that her groom is a regular character more than it takes her awhile to figure out she just got married. Bloggers don't have editors!

A Fanboy's Quickies - Gutterninja has moved. From his site I learn that the other two installments in Warren Ellis' Apparat line came out today. The first two, Quit City and Frank Ironwine came out last week. They were much the most fun I'd had with adventure comics in quite some time. The high concept, to quote Ellis, is

Years ago, I sat down and thought about what adventure comics might've looked like today if superhero comics hadn't have happened. If, in fact, the pulp tradition of Weird Thrillers had jumped straight into comics form without mutating into the superhero subgenre we know today. . . .

Five imaginary first issues of imaginary series from an imaginary line of comics released on an imaginary fifth week.

Quit City is the story of an Air Heroine who retires from her Blackhawk-like group (think the video game Crimson Skies if Blackhawk rings no bells) to return to her hometown of Oakland. The art, by Laurenn McCubbin, is gorgeous, black and white with a lot of grey tones and something of - I swear - a Sterankoesque design sense. (Though her figures are far more fluid.) She gives our heroine, Emma Pierson, a big, open working-class face and a female cop's body. She manipulates her tones and angles in the climactic section so that I had a vague sense of viewing most of the action as through a door peephole. It works. All of the characters are female except for one ghost, and you get the kind of visual individuation of the women that is beyond a lot of the industry's male artists. The story is enjoyable, with echoes of Shawn Colvin's "Sunny Came Home" but without the psychosis. The art is an absolute treat.

Frank Ironwine is the story of a New York City cop. Stop me if you've heard this one before: he drinks hard to cope with the enormities his job confronts him with, and he's taking on a new, young partner dubious of his reputation and methods. You get an intriguing double murder case that, I'm pretty sure, has a gap in its chain of evidence, but I'd have to reread closely to confirm it - my initial impression was that not only does the reader not get all the evidence necessary to reach the conclusion, the protagonist didn't either. What Ellis really wants to do is rhapsodize about how Manhattan is "built on corpses" as far back as its history can be traced. Ironwine is a very skald of murder. (No, this ain't so original neither.) Here again, come for the story, but stay for the art. Carla Speed McNeil of Finder fame draws the title. Her work makes a fun contrast with McCubbin. McCubbin is all grey tones and crooked-but-unbroken lines. She lifts her pen from the page only when she must. Speed McNeil is a scratcher. She loves hatch marks, wrinkles and claustrophobic white space set off with patches of solid black. And as every Finder reader knows, she loves loves loves loves loves to draw cops. She was certainly the artist to draw this one. She makes Ironwine's figure a symphony of rumples. Columbo looks like Don Johnson next to this guy. His young partner, Karen de Groot, in her white pant suit and cropped blonde hair looks startlingly smooth next to him, like a transfer from the Riverdale PD. She has a thankless role in the story - she's there to slowly grasp the wisdom of the sage - but her poses and facial expressions make it clear that she's got the gravitas and just needs the seasoning. She's not a boob. She's not even drawn that way.

McNeil's panel and page designs aren't as flashy as McCubbin's, but that doesn't mean she's not artful about it. A standing detective's head and shoulders cocked at the same angle as those of the supine corpse in the next panel. The door frame that seems to weigh down the cop's neck echoes the couch that props up the corpse's. Down the same page, the detective's shoulder line in the lower left panel parallels the fireplace mantel in the lower right. From such correspondences are unities built. This title won't change the way you look at life, but you will enjoy looking.

Haven't seen the other two titles yet. In the meantime, the gutterninja link offers opinions on them.

Jeez, did I say Quickies? Let's see what we can manage.

New Avengers #2. I think this will be my last one. The art is dark and confusing. Worse, don't Bendis and Marvel make a fairly basic error in constructing the team? Superhero teams are supposed to comprise characters whose powers complement each other, who each fill their own niche. Here we have Captain America, a super-strong acrobat; Spider-Man, a super-strong acrobat; Daredevil, a humanly strong acrobat; Luke Cage; a strongish non-acrobat; Jessica Drew, Spider-Woman, who is not so strong and, in addition to being acrobatic, flies; Wolverine, a tough acrobat with claws; Iron Man; and, uh, whatsisname, the Thor substitute. (Did I miss anybody?) Three to five of those guys - Cap, Spidey, Cage, Wolverine and Daredevil - are trying to fill at most two niches. More like a niche and a half. Perhaps not coincidentally, the fight scenes are kind of . . . boring. And Spider-Man spends all his time getting the shit kicked out of him.

Strangers in Paradise #70. I never read this book nor much about it, though I suspect, it having gotten to issue 70, that everybody else already has. Terry Moore writes and draws. The main characters are a trio of Las Vegas showgirls with appealingly eccentric personalities. One of them has just gotten married to a young guy who is apparently a regular character - it takes her awhile to figure this out when she wakes up in the morning, because they were both drunk, but she decides she's happy about it. Moore's black and white art is different yet from McCubbin's and Speed McNeil's. He favors smooth lines, minimal shading, no tones and as little black as he can get away with - perfect for conveying light and space in the desert scenes. His favorite thing in the world appears to be eyebrows; the eyebrows in this book have better action scenes than any of the heroes in New Avengers #2. Importantly, he does not seem to condescend to his protagonists, for all that he walks right up to the line demarcating appealing eccentricity from oh give me a break, but then I don't suppose you could get through 70 issues of characters you look down on. I'll keep reading.

For more reviews, see Marc at the Curmudgeons.

A Fanboy's Quote of the Day comes from Johanna Draper Carlson:

The numbers that DC sees as abject failure are pretty darn good when you're not supporting a list of over a dozen vice-presidents.

Hm. Is DC Comics the NHL of the industry, carrying an infrastructure and paying salaries the market just doesn't justify? Could be. Some companies go for "lean and mean;" others just manage the "mean" part.

Deep Breaths - I thought one of the smaller but nevertheless regrettable casualties of the atrocities of September 11, 2001 was Andrew Sullivan's talent. Simply put, the man became a hysteric. He's still easily overheated - John Cole, who ought to know a hot reactor when he sees one, has made a hobby lately of pointing this out. But he may, may be calming down from the "nuke somebody, anybody!" days. He's got a very good item showing how the 2002 "torture memo's" relaxation of interrogation standards for high-level al Qaeda detainees filtered out from those rarefied confines into the military at large and low-level detainees in Iraq and elsewhere.

It put me in mind of Micha Ghertner's argument last month that supporting torture wasn't necessarily an anti-libertarian position, particularly for contractarian, pragmatist libertarians. I thought Micha was obviously wrong for [James] Buchananite reasons. Allow certain government agencies to torture because their mission is so important, and license to torture becomes a bureaucratic status symbol. Other agencies angle to get the same authority because it ratifies their own importance. Those charged with ever less urgent tasks than finding ticking bombs come down with torture envy. Pretty soon some Congressman is urging us to torture drunk drivers, and are you saying the deaths of X Americans a year is not important enough for, ahem, "us" to do what it takes to save lives?

As libertarians we surely believe, whether we fancy ourselves "principled" or "pragmatic," rights-based or contractarian, that any power a government can use, it will misuse. Of course, I've come to doubt that there is such a thing as a "pragmatic libertarian," after years of thinking that I was one.

Doing the Math - Gary Farber decries the heartlessness of the Tennessee government's decision to cut back its ambitious and costly TennCare program in a sarcasm-laden attack on the "cruel and indifferent" decision.

WHY ARE WE WILLING TO HELP THOSE HIT BY A TSUNAMMI of water, but not a tsunammi of health, of their own body's failure?

He quotes excerpts from the Tennessean on the impact the program cuts will have on current adult beneficiaries. He skipped this part:

The cuts will radically slow the rate of TennCare's projected cost increases. With the changes, the program is expected to cost Tennessee taxpayers an extra $75 million next fiscal year — rather than the $650 million extra that was expected without the changes.

The population of Tennessee was 5.7 million in 2000, according to the population-averse NPG.org. The extra $575 million would, according to the Tennessean article, be funded one third by the state of Tennessee itself and two thirds by the federal government. The state share comes to not quite $34 per person or, roughly, $135 per family of four.

One way to look at this is that that's not even two and a half bucks per family per week, a can of soda for everyone and you shouldn't drink that much soda. Another way to look at it is that Gary doesn't want everybody to foot the bill, only "those who can spare it, in return for the benefits we've enabled them to earn and enjoy." Is that half of Tennessee's population? A quarter? Raise your per-family cost accordingly.

But there's yet another way to look at it. The Tennessean has a graph. The graph gives no reason to think that next year's $650 million increase would have been the last one. It suggests, rather, that the program would keep increasing at roughly the same rate for the foreseeable future. So the extra $135 over 2004 taxes this year becomes an extra $270 over 2004 taxes next year, an extra $540 in four years and so on. Again, if you have a percentage of Tennessee taxpayers that you (not "we") have decided can spare it, multiply those numbers accordingly. Then consider that TennCare's costs have "nearly tripled since 1993," again per the Tennessean article Gary found, from $800 million to $2.7 billion dollars. Further consider that the Tennessee government provides other services: I imagine some of them may be increasing in cost too.

There's another wrinkle. Gary clearly believes that "we" should be providing a TennCare-level program nationwide. In that case, we couldn't really divide those individual and family cost shares by a third on the assumption that the money was "free," out of state money that only cruel libertarians would resent forking over because the amount would be so small. The equivalent of the entire cost would be borne by Tennessee because other states would be paying that kind of money for their own programs. (Or the federal government would be paying for all states. Same difference.) In that case, next year's projected increase over 2004 taxes would be $135 per resident, $570 per family, with like increases as far as the Magic Eightball can escry. Again, if you want to tax some subset of the state's residents for that, multiply accordingly.

I am not comfortable contemplating the real consequences to the people Tennessee will be tossing off the rolls. I am mindful that successive tax increases of the scale required to keep TennCare going at the current level would have their own negative consequences and damage lives in less visible ways (as through lost jobs, or less funding for prosaic government responsibilities like police and road upkeep), but I read the stories and still feel guilty. We have insurance in this house, but medical expenses can still be a worry. We have aging parents facing their own cost problems. Either my wife or I could find ourselves out of work in short order, things being things. (And I understand that medical expense issues are far keener yet for Gary than they are for us.) But we also don't have a boundless claim on other people's money. Strangely, in his own comment thread, Gary writes

Alternatively, we impose a middle man. We choose together to elect, via fair mechanism, a state and nation. We pick representatives to, ya know, represent us. And to vote on how we choose to give and take money from ourselves, along with choosing benefits that enable us to earn and have that money, and without which the laws of our chosen country, we'd have no such money -- said money wouldn't exist! -- and then we tax those who can spare it, in return for the benefits we've enabled them to earn and enjoy.

I think Gary's "we" and "ourselves" here cover a multitude of sins. And while it may be true that "a state and nation" enable "us" to have money, it's at least as true that without the productive activity of individuals and voluntary groups state and nation themselves could not exist, nor could the benefits "we" use them to bestow on "ourselves." But leave that aside. His proposal is exactly what Tennessee has done. It chose representatives to vote and choose benefits, and said representatives have decided that they can't take that much more money for that many more benefits. This isn't any kind of libertarianism. It's the social democracy he calls for in action.

Ding Dong. Witch Dead. - Of local interest only, but wheezing-fraud FM station WHFS today switched, with no notice, from "alternative" to spanish-language. Teresa Wiltz in the Post writes

Since 1969, WHFS has served as the arbiter of cutting-edge rock in the Washington area, introducing listeners to acts such the Cure and the Violent Femmes.

The station was either first in the nation or one of the first to play a whole host of legendary acts, but for the last decade and a half its been a fraud, just another Top-40-for-people-with-lip-rings "modern rock" station playing whatever the labels' promotions people told them to play. Was a time you could hear Muddy Waters, Eddie Cochran and the Dead Kennedys in a single set. The station continued to try to live off its historical cred long after went from a station that played Costello's "Radio Radio" to a station that exemplified it. One time, a few years ago, they played Cake's "Rock & Roll Lifestyle." The irony was exquisite; the error, never repeated.

As the Joker said after frying the mob boss with the joy buzzer in the first Tim Burton Batman movie, "I'm glad you're dead!"

The original WHFS family (literally - it's the Einstein family) survives, sort of, as WRNR in Annapolis, with a weak signal and a format that's a shade too triple-A for my unreserved enthusiasm. All I want is a station that plays Eminem AND Muddy Waters AND Eddie Cochran AND Buddy and Julie Miller. Really, is that too much to ask?

Reading Room - When people ask, "Jim, are there any batshit-crazy hawkish pundits who are nevertheless worth reading?" I tell them, Yes. Steven Vincent. He's batshit-crazy, all right. (Basic vocabulary point: We don't call people "insurgents" if they work for their government as opposed to fighting it. That's not what the word means. Some "conundra" aren't.) But he also does real reporting, has been to Iraq in more than a Mark-Steynian drive-by way, and tempers his neocon zeal with a measure of appreciation of the limits of mere will. Not that there aren't plenty of injunctions to persevere in our historic etc, but along the way to them you can learn quite a lot from Vincent's writing. (See the item on the broadly anti-feminist program of even the most pro-American Shia leaders, for example.) Even when he gets speculative, his possible futures are more textured than the big rock candy mountains of reform and cultural transformation one gets from his confreres. As a bonus Googling "site:spencepublishing.typepad.com+schools+painted" produces no results.

Vincent's book is sitting on the silver chest downstairs for eventual review. The outside matter suggests it will have genuinely good reporting, but it also gives the impression that the author imagines that honor and pride are somehow strange Arab or Muslim cultural tics. Needless to say that may prove to be an unfair reading of the actual book, though.

Death of the Death Squads? - Very possibly. See here, here and here. If true it will mean both the right and the smart outcome. That just leaves the matter of all the hawks in the jingosphere who disgraced themselves with preemptive defenses of the concept. Armed Liberal, who didn't, looks better all the time. Comparatively speaking.

Now THAT'S Stingy - "Days after the Tsunami struck, the EU imposed crippling tariffs of $4,540 a ton on Thai exports of cumarin, a plant extract widely used in perfume. Fraser Nelson reports in The Business that the move is designed to protect the French company Rhodia, Europe’s only producer of cumarin."

Via Walter in Denver.

It Didn't Start with Bought-a-Gate - Matt Welch uses Armstrong Williams as the springboard to a fine imprecation at Reason Online:

There are two profoundly undemocratic through-lines in the state's repeated purchase of propaganda. The first is the foul notion that we are a nation of people who literally can't handle the truth, and so must be influenced in ways we don't even realize by a government that knows our best interests better than we do. Not to put too fine a point on it, this is totalitarian thinking, familiar to anyone who has to clench their teeth at the Venceremos! mural every day or to live through entire decades where entertainment products were vetted and decoded for secret political messages.

The second is an alarmingly cavalier approach to pissing away taxpayer money.

There's more.

This is the same lesson America learned from George Washington when he ended the Whiskey Rebellion by crucifying half the state of Pennsylvania on his front lawn - Fafblog on what I understand we should be referring to as "so-called 'death squads'."