Two Slogans - Exchanging e-mails with various people about the upcoming protests, I found myself thinking about two superficially similar slogans I saw at the last march:

PEACE IS PATRIOTIC

PATRIOT(S) FOR PEACE

I think the latter is much better. It's the difference between "The fact that I am for peace means I am a patriot" (and if that were automatically true, Micah Holmquist would feel compelled to join AVOT . . . ), and "I am a patriot AND I am for peace." The first implies that patriotism is a secondary effect of being for peace, plus it is the mirror image of the hawkish canard that only war supporters can be patriots. The latter makes patriotism basic, not epiphenomenal.

I'm sticking with PEACE NOW, SOCIALISM NEVER for my next sign, as promised, but I'd love to see more "Patriots for Peace" signs this time.

Dueling Eery Prescience - Justin Raimondo again predicts, as he has more than once recently, that "the evidence that the rush to war has slowed to a veritable crawl is rapidly proliferating to a state of near certainty." He gives all kinds of reasons why this is so. Is he right? In one sense, no, since we've been at war with Iraq since 1991 (as I've noted before). In the more narrow sense of "war" - "Making Mark Steyn much, much happier" - which is the sense Justin is using, well, maybe.

I continue to see the political calculation going as follows:

1. A substantial sector of the GOP elite wants war very badly. The media portion of that sector has been issuing veiled threats to rebel if they don't get what they want.

2. Most of the GOP base wants to take Saddam out, if not so intently. After all, the magazines they read say Saddam is a bad man.

3. A much smaller sector of the GOP elite has expressed reservations against a military conquest of Iraq. But it has not been making veiled threats to rebel if it doesn't get what it wants. Dick Armey and Chuck Hagel will not find a peacenik John McCain to run against Bush in the '04 primaries.

Bottom line, according to me, remains: The domestic political consequences to Bush of not conquering Iraq are substantial. The domestic benefits of not conquering Iraq are far less certain. Therefore: war.

Justin and I can't both be right. My instinct is to root for Justin. But my definition of an intellectual is "someone who would rather be right than happy."

UPDATE: There was a silly omission in the first version of this piece. The corrected text reads "The domestic benefits of not conquering Iraq are far less certain." The word "not" was omitted in the earlier edition.

Filterific! - I have in my in-box e-mails with the subject headers "Bosnian Prostitutes" and "Balkan Sex Slavery." And it's not spam either. More this weekend as a follow-up to last week's stories.

Quotable

One day, you get a headline that reads, "No 'Smoking Guns' So Far, U.N. Is Told." The next, you get one that reads, "US convinced Iraq has banned weapons." Eventually, the Bush Administration starts to sound like Captain Queeg babbling about stolen strawberries in The Caine Mutiny.

Franklin Harris.

Drip Drip Drip - Arianna Huffington is paying for ads saying that SUVs fund terror. It's an idea that has been kicking around the liberal portion of the blogosphere for more than a year now. Radley Balko runs the actual numbers for us.

Separated at Birth? - Gene Healy finds the secret Glenn Reynolds-Al Gore connection.

Fake Guns - First Michael Bellisiles. Now, from the entire other side of the gun debate, John Lott? Apparently James Lindgren, whose findings demolished the "scholarship" underpinning Bellisiles' claim that guns were rare in early America, set out to verify a claim behind Lott's famous More Guns, Less Crime study. Lindgren says it didn't go so well. The issue in question is Lott's evolving claim that surveys establish that, 98% of the time, defensive uses of guns do not even involve firing them - merely brandishing the weapon is sufficient. That makes strong intuitive sense, but Lott's claim was not based on reasoning from intuition but on supposed survey data.

Lindgren tracks Lott's shifting account of who did the survey when. At various times Lott attributed it to named national polling organizations and fellow scholar Gary Kleck, before eventually saying that the data came from a survey he himself conducted in spring 1997.

According to Lott, he lost all of his data on his hard drive when it crashed in June of 1997.

This is eerily similar to the flood that Michael Bellisile's said destroyed his probate data. And there's more:

As for obtaining direct, rather than circumstantial, evidence that the study was done, I did not fare as well as might be expected. Lott called me and told me the following:

1. Lott had no funding for the project; he paid for expenses himself.
2. The survey was done by phone by several University of Chicago undergraduate volunteers in their junior or senior years in 1997, so there are no financial employee records.
3. The calling was done by the undergraduates from their own phones. Periodically, they would bring over their phone bills and Lott would reimburse them out of his own pocket--either in cash or by check. Asked whether he retained his checks, Lott said that he destroyed them after 3 years.
4. Lott does not remember the names of any of the undergraduates who did the calling for him.
5. Lott had no discussions with any samplers about his sampling design.
6. Lott did not weight his sample for household size [as is standardly done, thus rendering his results too heavily influenced by small households].
7. For his list from which to draw the sample, Lott used a commercially available CD-ROM with names on it. He does not remember where he got it or now have the CD. I have not looked into what sorts of CD-ROMs were available in early 1997 with phone numbers on them.
8. Lott does not remember how he drew his sample from the CD-ROM.
9. Lott does not have a copy of the survey instrument and doesn't remember the wording of the questions, though he was probing defensive uses in more detail than other studies. He ended with a very few demographic questions.
10. Lott weighted his respondents by demographic information taken from his main national study in More Guns, Less Crime.
11. In his book More Guns, Less Crime, Lott had planned to include a chapter on the 1997 study, a chapter that he had not yet written, but decided not to do so after the data loss. He did not end up publishing the 1997 study itself, just referring to it many times, including a sentence about it in the second edition of More Guns, Less Crime.
12. Lott thinks that he did not retain any of the tally sheets, though he is not certain. He reported being told on two days notice to empty his Yale office and having to throw out boxes of things that he could not fit in his car, boxes that might have included tally sheets or other evidence of the 1997 study.

Lindgren finds this unusual, writing:

As I posted in September, all evidence of a study with 2,400 respondents does not just disappear when a computer crashes. Having done one large survey (about half the size of John Lott's) and several smaller surveys, I can attest that it is an enormous undertaking. Typically, there is funding, employees who did the survey, financial records on the employees, financial records on the mailing or telephoning, the survey instrument, completed surveys or tally sheets, a list of everyone in the sample, records on who responded and who declined to participate, and so on. While all of these things might not be preserved in every study, some of them would almost always be retained or recoverable.

Lindgren is not yet willing to presume that Lott fabricated his survey results. He is urging Lott and the University of Chicago to conduct an e-mail survey of Chicago grads from the classes of '97 and '98. He believes that if two e-mails fail to turn up a single respondent who remembers conducting the survey, then the presumption should be that it did not occur.

This issue presents a special challenge to those of us who support gun rights, many of whom have cited Lott's work either informally or formally. I see a handful of obvious tasks before us:

1. Follow the evidence where it leads.
2. Give the Lott case the same prominence in our various venues that we gave the Bellisiles case, however it comes out.
3. Begin systematically testing Lott's other data.
4. Get funding to conduct a real, valid survey on defensive gun use. Again, it stands to reason that most people fire their guns only as a last resort. But we can not currently use Lott's work as proof of this. We need a real survey that proves or refutes the claim - I predict it would bear it out. But not that it would reflect well on John Lott.

(Link via Julian Sanchez.)

UPDATE: John Lott responds.

I Swear I Will Not Make a Habit of linking to this kind of thing. Honest. (Link via Instapundit.)

Money or Nothing - A lot of bloggers have pointed people to the class action settlement with Big Record Weasel for price-fixing. I'm told though, that not only is the maximum individual payout $20, but if they get enough respondents they don't have to pay anything.

Details here:

The cash paid by the Defendants, after the payment of attorneys' fees, litigation and Settlement administration costs, shall be distributed to consumers who purchased Music Products. The number of claims filed will determine the actual amount of the individual refund but will not exceed $20.00 per claimant. If the number of claims filed would result in refunds of less than $5.00 per claimant, there will be no cash distribution to individual consumers. Rather, the cash portion of the Settlement shall be distributed to not-for-profit, charitable, governmental or public entities to be used for music-related purposes or programs for the benefit of consumers who purchased Music Products.

There are also non-cash considerations, $75M in compact discs, which is the entire overstock of Michael Jackson's Invincible.

Nip and Tuck? - Your Talking Dog continues to follow the Israeli election, reporting today that polls place Labor much, much closer to Likud in expected parliamentary seats (proportional representation list voting) than anyone imagined possible two months ago. The poll suggests Likud 27, Labor 24. I see one big reason not to get excited yet (or dismayed, if you subscribe to Commentary): "right wing demurral effect." As Colby Cosh and others have pointed out, in almost every free election anywhere, the rightist candidate does several percent better in the actual election than in the pre-election polls. (USA2000 is one of the few exceptions.)

If the Israeli polls get up to Labor 27, Likud 24, I'd still suspect that Likud would pull out a squeaker. But the campaign isn't over yet.

Another Advantage: Unqualified Offerings! Item - Remember, months ago, when I applied the cutesy headline "The War. On Drugs." to an item I filched from Flit about the Air Force feeding speed to the pilots of our sophisticated, deadly and expensive combat aircraft? Well, for the benefit of those unlucky enough not to be longtime UO readers, MSNBC finally got around to cracking the same joke today.

Meanwhile . . . votes have been rolling in for the "Bomb Salam" poll, so you may want to check the results again. So far early February and late February are neck and neck. Both far outpace the other options (later or never).

Salam's thesis is that the US won't attack during the Haj, since it means more than a million pissed off extra muslims in Saudi Arabia. The reason this was not a problem last time was that the anti-Saddam coalition contained several Arab countries. This time it will contain Kuwait and some very successful sandbars off the Arabian coast.

Time to Talk Turkey - Another story about apparent Turkish ambivalence about allowing US troops to open a "northern front" in the anticipated next phase of the Gulf War (1990-present), from the New York Times:

Senior American officials said today that they were increasingly concerned that they were running out of time to persuade Turkey to permit the deployment of American ground troops in case of a war with Iraq.

"From the military planning standpoint, we have just about reached the critical mass point for a yes or no from Turkey," said a senior United States official who is familiar with American preparations.

What's the holdup? Democracy! (We're for that, remember?)

Yet more than a month after Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz visited Turkey seeking approval to deploy the American forces, public opinion in Turkey remains overwhelmingly against the war, and Turkey's new government has repeatedly taken the position that it would be politically difficult to accommodate a major deployment of American ground troops.

Could there be anything else? Maybe . . .

Washington also wants to stabilize the Kurdish areas in northern Iraq to preclude any confrontation between the Turkish military and Kurdish forces.

Maybe Turkey doesn't want such a confrontation precluded.

The Times article notes

American officials said today that they can conduct a successful attack to oust Mr. Hussein without access to land bases in Turkey. But they acknowledge that such an attack would be, as one ranking official put it, "harder and uglier."

But more US and Iraqi casualties are no skin off Turkey's nose. Meantime, more chaos gives Turkey more of an excuse to seize the oil fields and facilities around Kurdish Mosul and Kirkuk. They may hope that the US will react to such a move by glaring angrily and then giving Turkey money to go away. Or maybe it's as simple as the Turks not wanting a war. Or maybe this is all night and fog and Turkey is already on board.

Peace in the Valley - I've been exchanging e-mails with reader Nell Lancaster about the antiwar efforts of her group in Lexington, VA. They had an organizing meeting scheduled for last night and Nell was nervous about turnout. She was hoping for about three dozen people and afraid she wouldn't get it. (She lives in the Shenandoah Valley near the Virginia Military Institute.) I asked her to let me know how the meeting went, and she did.

Well, we were blown away. Seventy-some people showed up, the majority not previously on our contact list, and with some excellent ideas for local activity. We filled the Presbyterian Church hall, which looked cavernous when we first set up the chairs (25-30, on the basis of the old organizer adage that having to set up more makes any meeting look more successful. It's a good trick, but not if you underestimate by a factor of two..)

Rockbridge County will be sending at least 25 and maybe a busful of people up to the DC demo. As one of my L.A. solidarity compas used to say: STOKE!!

The theme that ran through the small group I facilitated is how worried people are about the future of this country -- both fear of terror reprisals and shame at the face we're putting to the world via this war.

Several people afterwards expressed appreciation for the overall tone, which was resolutely broad, non-partisan, patriotic. It would be mighty hard to dismiss this group as Saddam-loving America-haters...

But there is so much work ahead. Gaaah! Still, far better than if we'd only attracted the usual suspects; if we can follow up with everyone quickly, there'll be many more hands to carry the load.

I'm a little sorry to hear that so much of the crowd was motivated by what Nell describes as fear, since I prefer to leave fear to the hawks. We doves should act out of sober concern! Yes, that's it! I am sober! I am concerned! Take that!

Where was I? Oh yeah. Nell's group is really smart. Remember, they're in a strongl military area. Here's a list of their local actions planned, from a previous e-mail:

The packets have volunteer cards that we hope to extract from everyone before they go, with lots of boxes to check off if they're so inclined: Washington demo, Jan 18 demo in Charlottesville, local vigil in event of full-out war, letter-writing network, outreach to area church members, health kits to Iraqi civilians (AFSC project), support to families of local servicemembers.

I really like the last. It's the right thing to do, and it's good politics too. But most encouraging is that the newcomers are finding the organizers tone "resolutely broad, non-partisan, patriotic." It will have to be.

Night and Fog, or Just Fog? - The Telegraph says Britain is urging the United States to hold the war until this fall, "to give weapons inspectors more time to provide clear evidence of new violations by Saddam Hussein." In the same article it reminds us that

The tensions were highlighted on Tuesday when Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, publicly rebuked Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, for playing down the chances of war.

(Meanwhile, Airstrip One has read British PM Tony Blair claiming that

Britain was America's "closest ally" and that this position of support allowed us to engage in "constructive criticism" with the hyperpower.)

And the Washington Post's Karl Vick reports that

Concerned about public opinion, Turkish politicians are waffling on earlier expressions of support for U.S. war plans against Iraq, dimming prospects for opening a northern front against President Saddam Hussein, according to diplomats and analysts.

Meanwhile the Washington Times reports that

The United States is deploying troops fast enough to allow President Bush to order an invasion of Iraq next month, U.S. officials and military analysts say.

and back in October, William Kristol wrote

So when the president seems to equivocate about whether war is inevitable, when he holds out hope for inspections, when he talks about giving peace one last chance, when he seems to invite coups and rebellions while implying this might prevent an American occupation, supporters of the president's policy shouldn't worry that he is losing focus or retreating from the moral and strategic clarity of the past six weeks . . . Victory in war, over the next few weeks or months, will require using the fog of war -- creating that fog -- to keep Hussein off balance, wishful and confused.

Well, interesting times.

Wrong Place, Wrong Time - Beth Chaplin of Mutated Monkeys has been following up on the sad story of Jose Morales. Jose Morales stopped to make a payphone call in Virginia last October and was immediately arrested by the sniper task force. While they found he had nothing to do with the sniper spree, they did deport him, since he was in the US illegally. Beth writes

In general, I don't think that it's wrong to enforce immigration regulations.

but she notes some extenuating circumstances in Sr. Morales' case, not least that he went deeply into debt to his own "John Muhammad" (a smuggling broker) to get him into the United States. If you are of a mind to visit charity on Jose Morales, Beth has arranged with the Washington Post reporter covering the story to get donations to him. The address is in Beth's item.

On the Scene - A reader in a position to know things writes in response to "Humanitarian Intervention and After," about the Balkan trade in sex slaves and its relation to war and "peacekeeping." I've edited it to minimize details about my correspondent:

I recently moved to Macedonia and was interested to read your Jan. 3 piece on the people trafficking issues here. I feel like a complete idiot, but I hang out at the Irish Pub all the time and see these women and their "minders" probably every weekend night I'm there (don't recall on the weeknights). I always thought it was weird that all those hot women were sitting around in a circle not talking with one short ugly guy keeping them company. But the guys always gave me ugly looks and I just figured it was another one of those Balkan anomalies (why all the attractive women here end up with ugly guys) and got back to my beer . . .

Fact of the matter is, it ain't so much the American soldiers using these women, it's the contractors for the American companies supporting KFOR that are coming down here and creating issues. As for soldiers of other nationalities, I don't know and won't comment . . . Also, I know for a fact that the Macedonian government is working to fight trafficking (perhaps some prodding by outside parties has been involved) but stymied by the fact that the people traffickers have a lot more money than the police forces do. Anyway, it's a big issue and not on the back burner as far the [US] State Department is concerned.

I don't doubt this last. And I'm grateful to my reader for sharing his insights. What we're left with at the end is still outsiders with spare cash in a (post) war zone. The "more money" that the traffickers have is your tax dollars at work. (And Germany's tax euros, and those of France . . . ) The slavers are there because KFOR is there. War always distorts sex, both during and after. It brings prostitution and camp following, and where it doesn't bring those things, it brings rape. This was as true during the Allied invasion and occupation of Germany as it was at Salamanca, as it is in the Balkans and as it shall be in Mesopotamia. (Some few cultures, like those of Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, seem already to have distorted sex so much as to be immune.)

It's structural. Matthew Yglesias, responding to my initial piece, wonders, "Is this some kind of metaphysical necessity, or is it just that we need to give some thought to finding a solution." Matthew's a smart guy, but in this sentence I see the liberal conviction that there must be something we can do, because there's always something we can do. Ironically there is: get out. And don't do this anymore. Matthew also writes that I "conveniently ignore the fact that before the peacekeepers arrived there was plenty of mass rape to go around, and their were local militias, etc. to serve as the customer base for prostitution rings, etc." but while there was some rape - again, because there was war - the purchasing power of local militias in a poor region just doesn't come up to NATO standards. Local militias were not importing women from other countries to enslave, which is what has happened since NATO stepped in and declared that, if anyone was going to ethnically-cleanse Kosovo, it was going to be the KLA. (Not just all the Serbs, but all the gypsys and non-Serb Slavs too.)

Later he asks, "Is the current situation really worse than the one that would have prevailed had NATO never intervened or just worse than some ideal other way?" This is a stunningly low standard of success. As written, the sentence suggests that intervention doesn't even have to improve a preexisting situation to be justified. The post-intervention - which is bombs and bullets and destroyed commuter trains - situation just has to be arguably no worse than the pre-intervention scenario.

That won't do. Matthew relates all this to something he calls "the libertarianism of fear." I should have preferred to call it "the libertarianism of disgust," myself.

Spree Graphs - It's been awhile! A couple of developments:

The Lonewacko finds a New York Times article about the Antigua task force report that suggests that Una James bound her son, John Lee Malvo, over to John Muhammad as collateral - to ensure she would pay Muhammad for the forged documents that got her into the United States. So said James' ex-husband Jeremiah Neal of Fort Myers, FL. Loyal readers may remember that news reports suggest that Neal wasn't such a nice husband.

The Antigua Sun story says that the task force report absolves the island nation's Passport Office of wrongdoing and - recommends "that the leadership of the passport office be changed." This is to "dispel all suspicions, no matter how unfounded, of wrongdoing in the Passport Office."

“Cpl. Burke and Cpl. Lewis were on duty at St. John’s Police Station on the morning of the 13 March 2001. Muhammad was in their custody. Cpl. Burke was noted in the diary as off duty for reasons of ill health at 11:39 a.m and at 11:40 a.m Cpl. Lewis noted that Muhammad “Whyte Russell” “walked out” of the station. A suspicious sequence of events and an obvious gross lack of security,” the report stated.

Suspicious is a good word for it.

The taskforce also said no evidence was found to link Muhammad with terrorist activity in Antigua.

but that's probably not going to impress anyone.

The Sun also reports that "bacchanal broke out" at the task force press conference. The disputant Keithley Nedd, sometimes identified as "Kithlyn Nedd," is a former housemate of Muhammad's who leveled the most explosive charges of Passport Office corruption last fall.

Pause for a brief Q&A . . .

Q: Does it totally rock that you can sit in Silver Spring of a January evening and effortlessly find out the latest in the Antigua Sun?

A: Yeah, it sure does.

Q: This kind of realization comes on one at the oddest times, doesn't it?

A: Yeah, it sure does.

Glenn Reynolds deconstructs a sniper-related Washington Monthly headline.

WTOP reports that "false witness" Matthew Dowdy pled no contest to obstruction of justice for making up a story about seeing a man kill Linda Franklin on October 14th. (Link via duckboy & company.)

Finally, the New York Times reports

Investigators have said that most of the information they have collected points to Mr. Malvo as the gunman in most, if not all, of the shootings where there is evidence pointing toward either man.

Heavy Whether, The Continuing Series - Glenn Reynolds weighs in (yeah, I suck sometimes - but you knew that) on the benefits of strength training in particular. He also quotes failed diet guru Binkley of Bloom County. Jane Galt offers another helping of fat talk, including the latest from the Framingham Study, a longitudinal health survey that has been going on for decades now. And the whole thing has scared Joy and Rob of As We See It into starting a workout blog.

Yesterday's Ideas Today! - It's cruel to twit Alan Bock about his column today, since I admire him, but he's produced Advantage: The Talking Dog! and Advantage: Unqualified Offerings! items in a single column. He writes:

If I were a super-rich philanthropist with an interest in international affairs – someone like George Soros or Ted Turner – I might just consider establishing a luxurious, hyper-secure Club Med for dictators that would offer some of the world's political thugs a lifetime of luxurious leisure, with plenty of educational and recreational opportunities, in exchange for giving up power. Maybe a chain of them.

Which your TD first suggested last August. Bock's article also contains the refutation of the "Club Med for Dictators" idea, too:

Those who insisted on detaining Chile's former dictator Augusto Pinochet on a trip to Britain, who insisted on bringing Serbia's Milosevic before something remotely resembling a trial, or who believed that an international criminal court would be just a dandy way to deal with injustice that crosses or defies borders, may have done us a disservice. Because of the precedents and examples they are setting they just might have made it more difficult to get nasty dictators out of power.

which echoes what I wrote in response to the Talking Dog's idea . . . last August.

Moral? Read Unqualified Offerings and The Talking Dog as soon as you can, every morning. I'm not saying we'll increase your earning power and enable you to know true love for the first time in your life. But I'm not saying we won't. either.

Old School - North Korea says sanctions would be an act of war. I believe this was once a universally-understood principle. At some point, they made the mysterious transition to a favor. History: pretty funny sometimes.

Blogwatch Auxiiary - Around and about . . .

Salam Pax has a reader's poll on the musical question, "When Will I Be Bombed?"

Eve Tushnet continues her war on Santa Claus.

Bruce Baugh is nothing if not ambitious in his goal for the new year.

Hot Buttered Death links to a site that demonstrates that William Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare's plays. The domain is not www.dealwithit.com, but you can't have everything. Plus the usual Hot Buttered Death high weirdness.

Procrastination corrects my Pakistani geography. Also, stuff on US abductions of foreigners (start here and skip down) and more.

Airstrip One wonders why the Blair Government is jerking Israel around. Also, another reply to Perry De Havilland's case for intervention, to go with the Gene Callahan essay I cited yesterday.

War of the Kurdish Suppression Watch - Turkey has made its next move. (The first was announcing that it would violently thwart any attempt to set up an independent Kurdish state; the second was deploying troops on its border to turn back any refugees.) I published the details on No War Blog this morning.

Just as an Advantage: Unqualified Offerings! reminder, this site has been tracking the slow-motion screw-job on the Kurds since last summer.

A Soft Answer - If you thought libertarian disputes had to be nasty, think again: Gene Callahan responds to Perry de Havilland of Samizdata on the question of foreign intervention.

I think that de Havilland's argument is typical of many libertarian interventionists, and since he seems to be an intelligent fellow, and the libertarian split between the interventionists and non-interventionists is an important issue in libertarianism today, I believe his argument is worth examining in some detail.

Recommended. Could this item herald an era of (largely) civil disputation among libertarians? Nah. But it makes a nice change of pace.

Excuses, Excuses - So on the bad news/good news front, the bad news is that I am losing my job, as I feared back in November, but the good news is that I have my current job for another four months. So I have to pay more attention to my resume than my weblog until my resume is revised. That means

o I can't permit myself to tear apart the tissue of falsehoods and false hopes in this article on the Administration's plans for "democracy in Iraq." (Link via Antiwar.com.)

o No time yet for a piece to be called "PC and Neo-PC," though you can get a head start on it by reading Justin Raimondo's column from last Friday about the latest neocon absurdity. (They claim they don't exist, and if you say they do, you're a bigot.)

o Derek James takes on The Million Mom War in an article that merits a serious response. He's wrong, I think (of course I do!), but not frivolously wrong.

o Independently, reader Peter Caress e-mails that "I've always been annoyed by your "Million Mom War" analysis, so I'm writing you this quick note explaining my reasons for annoyance." You just can't beat that for an opening. It too, back burner.

o Meanwhile, Jane Galt's comment thread about diet, obesity and the body mass index has some nuggets among the wash. (One of the signal accomplishments of Jane's blog, now shared with another, is that it inspires a better class of blog comment than most sites.) I want to read this New Republic article that attempts to debunk the BMI, but - resume first.

o Speaking of dieting, reader Mike Kozlowski says there's a better way than weekly weighing to deal with scales:

The in-retrospect-obvious solution to this (which I found in an interesting piece called "The Hacker's Diet") is to use a moving or weighted average to smooth out the noise level and to clearly indicate long-term trends while still gathering daily data . . .

This is a more foolproof approach than the weekly weigh-in, because weight can easily vary by a couple of pounds, depending on a whole bunch of factors (like how much water you drank the night before) that have no real impact on your true weight. So, if you lose two pounds a week, and measure yourself weekly, you might wrongly think that you didn't lose any weight at all on some week; whereas with this system, you'd have daily confirmation that you were still trending downward.

He refers interested readers to this link for the details. Mike keeps a book log too.

The Lesions of History - Ginger Stampley responds to some things Glenn Reynolds and I wrote about my "Brief History of the Future." She begins, "Warning: historical snarkiness ahead," and concludes

History can provide some useful, but incomplete, analogies. Its predictive value for specific situations is almost nil.

She might have added that it is less than nil for those whose sense of "history" goes no further back than the Munich Agreement of 1938, as appears to be the case with many internet pundits. Between warning and conclusion comes a lengthy comparison of the Whig and Marxist approaches to history.

Coda: In her subsequent item, Ginger writes

I was thinking about how to explain what’s wrong with the Whig approach to history in short words, and I think this comes pretty close: it’s analogous to Inteligent Design.

I wonder if it isn't more analogous to the Anthropic Principle.

Accident? Coincidence? Conspiracy? - It's as if Mr. Jimmy made a New Year's Resolution to update Objectionable Content more often.

Runoff Results - No, not election runoffs! What does that have to do with anything? This US Geological Survey site - link from alert reader Herman Yam - lets you track the effect of this wet, snowy winter on Maryland stream levels. I'm especially interested in flows at the Patuxent River station near Unity, MD and Seneca Creek at Dawsonville, as well as flows on the North Branch of the Potomac in Western MD. You undoubtedly have your own favorite Maryland streams whose flows concern you.

Disappointments: No graphs of flow rates over years, that I see, just over days, and they've got at least thirty years of data. Also, in the "Good Enough for Government Work" department, Herman notes that the big squishy middle of the color code system for comparing stream flow to the median is a range from 25th-74th percentile! That's a pretty big middle!

Anyway, all of central Maryland is experiencing flows above the squishy middle. There are a lot of theoretically median flows (seasonally-adjusted) in Western Maryland, but I don't think Western Maryland was experiencing anything like the drought the rest of the state has suffered the last few years.

Happy Monday After New Year's - Everybody back to work! Some of us have been working straight through, mind you, but it's been quiet without the rest of you.

Note: If you can get back to the office without getting back on the roads, your feat will be much appreciated.

Meantime, the DC area picked up more snow yesterday - three and a half inches when 1-2" were predicted. This is already our snowiest winter in years. I checked with fishing-oriented reader Herman Yam, who has contacts, and he confirms my sense that water levels around here are better than they've been in two years. Bodes well for spring stream fishing.

And for those of you who don't read blogs when you're away from the office (my stat server has missed you) plenty of material since Christmas week, Scroll down, hit the archives, make yourself at home.

Red Meat Alert for your old school bloggers. Town Hall columnist Bruce Bartlett says blogs are "something that happened last year." He also writes that "most are purely personal and of no special interest . . . "

The Elements of Internet Style - When it gets written, if it hasn't been already, it will need to deal with questions like "Which of the following is best?"

Jane Galt defends obesity guidelines in this interesting post.

Jane Galt defends obesity guidelines in this interesting post.

Jane Galt defends obesity guidelines in this interesting post.

Jane Galt defends obesity guidelines in this interesting post.

Jane Galt defends obesity guidelines in an interesting post.

Jane Galt defends obesity guidelines in an interesting post.

Jane Galt defends obesity guidelines in an interesting post.

Jane Galt defends obesity guidelines in an interesting post.

Jane Galt defends obesity guidelines in an interesting post.

Jane Galt defends obesity guidelines.

Jane Galt defends obesity guidelines.

Jane Galt defends obesity guidelines.

Jane Galt defends obesity guidelines.

Jane Galt defends obesity guidelines.

UPDATE: Kate Nepveu writes

You missed what I think is obvious:

Jane Galt defends obesity guidelines in this interesting post.

Topic & forum both in the hyperlink, which is what people's eyes are drawn to. Possibly I'd link the name too.

Me, I wouldn't do it that way for some reason having vaguely to do with caesurae.

Heavy Whether II - Jane Galt defends obesity guidelines in this interesting post. It does contain a puzzling reference to an "enjoyable vegetarian diet." Perhaps Jane is using one of those software programs that string unrelated words together.

Priorities - Nell Lancaster e-mails about my list of government-shrinking priorities, below. I said I'd die content if just my top three were taken care of. Nell writes:

Wow! So would I, and I've never thought I was a libertarian at all . . .

Actually, by all rights I should be a liberal interventionist, but everything I've learned throughout my life about the actual effects of U.S. intervention (and often the actual motives for it) has made it impossible for me to support 99% of it. Re point 2, there are signs of hope in the most unexpected places (e.g., the more conservative of the two little weekly papers here just editorialized in favor of legalizing in order to take the profit out... )

I had the impulse to write during the Trent Lott business to respond to your post about segregationists having used some libertarian principles as "philosophical shields." When I read that, I realized the extent to which my reaction to those ideas has always been colored by the fact that in my youth, in my corner of the world, statements of support for those principles were code for the things I hated. It wasn't until the last decade that I encountered anyone committed to those ideas who really wasn't using them in that way, and not untill the last two years that I realized that there really are such things as "left" libertarians.

Of course, I'm still a right winger! But you get the idea. Nell concludes, "May we all live long enough to see point 3 realized . . . ," meaning, the elimination of corporate welfare. On the overriding importance of corporate welfare, I'm guided especially by the thinking of David Kopel, who wrote this puckish NRO essay about the libertarian case for Ralph Nader back in 2000. Excerpt:

But there are two important issues in which the Greens are starkly different in principle — not just in degree — from the Republocrats. The first of these is corporate welfare, which the Greens adamantly oppose — and which the supposedly "radical" Republicans in Congress and the supposedly "populist" Clinton/Gore administration have boosted to record levels.

The best way to increase the size of government is to increase the number of people who are directly dependent on it. Political genius Franklin Roosevelt knew this when he created Social Security. Clinton and Gore likewise know that when they call for "a hundred thousand new [fill in the type of government employees]" they are calling for a hundred thousand more families directly dependent on the federal government.

The most important reason why most American big businesses have been missing in action from the fight for smaller government is because many big corporations make more money from corporate welfare than they could save from smaller government. When we take big business off the dole, we remove the most powerful political force that supports a complex federal tax code with taxes that are too high for most people, but which can be jerry-rigged with "tax credits" and the like for businesses with good lobbyists. Get rid of corporate welfare, and you'll find a lot more corporations willing to stand up for liberty.

The regulatory state and big business have been coopting each other since the last railroad ties got hammered down at the close of the nineteenth century. I once read a paleocon magazine (one of the wilder) refer to it as the alliance of "the red guards and the dark suits." The implicit bargain:Lefties can visit all the social engineering attempts they want on regular folks so long as big business gets its subsidies and price supports and tariffs.

Kopel also liked Nader's position on drugs, by the by:

Nader also differs dramatically from Gore and Bush in his forthright opposition to the failed drug war. Gore prattles about "privacy" and "choice," but his Department of Justice killed California writer Peter McWilliams, by preventing McWilliams, who had AIDS, from using marijuana in compliance with California law, in order to keep his AIDS medications down.

Me, I held my nose and voted for Harry Browne. But Kopel made a good case.

Cheap Trick - According to the Washington Times:

Montgomery County police said yesterday that they will use tens of thousands of tips from the October sniper hunt to track down those who violate Maryland gun laws.

Montgomery County police will pursue this data unrelated to the sniper case with "a task force of county and state police officers, as well as federal agents of the Secret Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms." Other jurisdictions are pursuing tips too, though less ardently:

Still, Virginia police officials in the commonwealth will work much differently on this issue compared with Montgomery or Prince George's counties because Maryland gun laws are "far more restrictive," said John Ritter, an Arlington County police detective.

Glenn Reynolds writes

This is sure to produce less cooperation in the future. And it explains why so many gun owners don't trust the authorities: They've seen things used as excuses for anti-gun sweeps in the past.

which has it right. I am having to ask myself, "What if the police got a tip that someone had a body in their house during the sniper investigation?" It wouldn't be related to the spree killings, obviously, but I wouldn't want the police to ignore it. So what's the problem?

A big problem is that the laws themselves are bad. Another is that this kind of bait and switch can easily get out of hand. And a lot of those tips are going to be wrong, misinformed or malicious. No doubt quite a few legal gun owners got reported because they have neighbors who assume any gun must be illegitimate. (We are talking about Montgomery County, after all.)

Heavy Whether (sic) - Mary Kay writes about fat cities, fat people and fat lies:

I don't have time right now to check either the magazine's or the CDC's definition of obesity. But that is equally problemmatic. One of the dirty little secrets of obesity research is that most such things are funded by the diet industry, so guess what. According to all height and weight tables I've ever seen, I'm at least 60 pounds overweight. While I could stand to lose a few pounds, it's way less than 60 to where I look best. These people lie through their teeth.

The CDC defines obese as a Body Mass Index of 30+, which I was at as recently as November. (216 pounds Thanksgiving Day, 204 pounds New Year's Day. I shudder to think what I was at the beginning of November, when I gave up sugared and caffienated beverages and processed starches. At that time I was afraid to weigh myself.) The CDC also defines "overweight" as a BMI of 25+. The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute has an online BMI calculator. The official range for Normal Weight for my height, 5'11", runs from 133 to 178 pounds. At 133 I would look like I just escaped from Andersonville. (NIH includes a very short list of limitations on the BMI on their explanatory page.) However, I weighed between 160 and 170 through most of my twenties. I could feel pretty darn good at 175. I was absolutely fat, as opposed to overweight, just two months ago.

New York Press' John Ellis is trying to lose weight too and decided to post his weight to his blog every day as a goad. I have no standing to critique the weight-loss strategies of others but my problem with his plan is not the public posting but the daily weighing. Daily weighing tends to mean lots of days with no positive feedback because the needle doesn't move much and weight fluctuates. I'm restricting myself to weekly weigh-ins (plus holidays), however much I'm tempted to jump on the scale.