For the Devil's Dictionary, Next Edition

Neolibertarianism - n. A political philosophy that holds that that government governs best which governs mostly elsewhere.

Shuttle II - Lyrics to the filk song, "Fire in the Sky," by Jordin Kare that Buzz Aldrin recited can be found here. You can also here a performance.

We Get Letters - Jonathan Hendry writes to criticise Colby Cosh's ADHD article:

Evidently he is unaware of, and didn't bother googling for, research showing actual evidence:

A 10-year study by National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) scientists has found that brains of children and adolescents with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) are 3-4 percent smaller than those of children who don't have the disorder – and that medication treatment is not the cause. Indeed, in this first major study to scan previously never-medicated patients, they found "strikingly smaller" white matter volumes in children who had not taken stimulant drugs. Still, the course of brain development in the ADHD patients paralleled that of normal subjects, suggesting that whatever caused the disorder happened earlier.

It's a persuasive article, and if the data hold up it suggests a clear biological marker at the population level. It would still leave us without a means of making a biological diagnosis of ADHD in individuals, but might point the way to one.

Your Talking Dog e-mails about the conviction of Richard Reid:

Nice post on TalkLeft's take on the Richard Reid case, and how the federal court system should be entrusted with terrorist cases because it can work fine on terrorist cases, yada yada yada.

The system worked on Reid- a pretty easy case, with witnesses and everything. The feds got lucky, BTW, that Johnny Walker Lindh decided to take his lumps and a 20-year sentence. In the immediate post 9-11 aftermath, a jury would probably have tried to lynch him, to be sure, but I wondered about the quality of evidence against him. Its unclear to me how Zaccarias Moussaoui will play out, though I'm sure he'll be convicted, and get his life sentence.

But these guys are all different from Padilla and "unlawful combatants" (such as potentially you and I; you still have dibs on the bunk, big guy). These guys are ACTUALLY GUILTY. The federal system is REALLY GOOD at convicting people who are GUILTY. As a Texas prosecutor (with a perfect homicide record of something like 19-0) was fond of saying: a good prosecutor can always get a guilty man convicted; to get an innocent man convicted-- that takes a GREAT prosecutor.

So if our goal is arbitrarily to detain people for political benefit (such as the attorney general's ability to score points as we equate a pathetic Chicago gang-banger with the Rosenbergs when visiting MOSCOW) , the federal courts are JUST TERRIBLE! They require things like probable cause (or, hell, EVIDENCE of ANY KIND), and defendants get, like, CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS, like arraignments and the right to counsel and to confront the evidence against them. Jim, as an attorney myself, I don't have to tell you just how dangerous those things can be in the hands of the wrong people.

So with all due respect, I have to respectfully disagree. If we start giving people that the President wants locked up RIGHTS, the terrorists will have won.

To coin a phrase: Indeed.

Shuttle - Reader Mary Kay Kare has a request related to the following Usenet post:

This was posted to rec.music filk earlier today by Rilla Heslin:

I am still listening to the news, and they just were talking to Buzz Aldrin. He said he wanted to read an excerpt from a song by Dr. Jordan Kare and even spelled Jordan's last name. He read the last (?) verse of Jordan's, "Fire In The Sky, .... and they passed from us to Glory riding Fire In The Sky." And as he read his voice started trembling and he began to cry.

Mary Kay asks:

we'd [the Kare family] desperately like to have a tape? Anyone who could help us out should email me at marykay@kare.ws or Jordin at jtkare@attglobal.net

Glenn Reynolds has a lot of shuttle coverage on Instapundit.com.

Diana Moon has all the response required for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. reporter who ascribed the shuttle crash to "American arrogance."

Patrick Nielsen Hayden has links, including this one to a fine William Gibson meditation.

Mark Evanier writes:

About all I can add is that around 10:00 AM, when I sat down at my computer and saw the awful news, I made a quick tour of major news sites, and then of some of the political message boards and weblogs. I was pleased to see that the latter were not filled with attempts to spin the tragedy as a failing of George W. Bush or William J. Clinton, or of either of their parties, or of a particular political philosophy. Everyone I saw had risen above trying to exploit this tragedy to advance their personal causes.

About 90 minutes later, I surfed through all those sites again, and it was starting.

Caitlin R. Kiernan: " I watched CNN this morning and kept thinking, We're never going to get off this planet. The thought may have been unwarranted. I'm trying to think, instead, about the seven men and women on board."

Halabja Revisited Revisited - Tim Dunlop of The Road to Surfdom has found a preexisting rebuttal to Stephen Pelletiere's argument that it was the Iranians who attacked Halabja with poison gas in March 1988. The rebuttal author, Glen Rangwala, goes through the time sequence and the forensic evidence and concludes

So, in summary, either the atrocity at Halabja was carried out by the Iraqi military against their enemies - with a set of chemical warfare agents that they had a record of use prior to Halabja, and with a proven reputation for using chemical weapons in large amounts against civilians (the mustard gas attacks on Majnun island in September 1984 are estimated to have killed 40,000 people) - or by the Iranians, against their own allies and soldiers in an attack using chemicals that there's no evidence that they ever have had.

I find Rangwala convincing. That said, his own account makes clear that Halabja was a battlefield in the war between Iran and Iraq at the time:

Even that seems unlikely: the PUK captured Halabja on 15 March 1988. They were accompanied by members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard who coordinated PUK actions. The town was fully under PUK/Iranian control 4 hours after they entered the town. The eyewitness testimony collected by Physicians for Human Rights and by British filmmaker Gwynne Roberts, who was in Halabja & captured the attack and aftermath on film, confirms this: the PUK controlled all exits to the town, and were preventing civilians from leaving as they thought that the Iraqis would not spread their artillery bombardment of surrounding areas to the centre of the town if it was fully inhabited (human shields). I find it hard to believe that with Iranian troops in the town for 36 hours before the chemical weapons attacks, the field commanders still thought that Iraqi forces were still in possession of the town.

The actual attack began at nightfall on the 16th, when 8 aircraft dropped chemical bombs; they were followed throughout the night by 14 aircraft sorties, with 7 to 8 planes in each group. Intermittent bombardment continued until the 18th (some reports say the morning of the 19th).

Summary: Iran and its Kurdish military allies capture Halabja on Day One. Iraq attacks with chemical and conventional weapons on Day Two. And the PUK kept the civilians confined as human shields. (That will work against someone like Saddam . . . ) Since it was a chemical attack, it definitely broke the laws of war that the US showed no interest in enforcing at the time. It was brutal and callously indifferent to the civilians present. It's hard to call it genocide, though.

However, the 1988 Anfal campaign against the Kurds bears all the hallmarks of the the sort of savage "pacification" campaign that is tantamount to genocide. Iraq faced a genuine armed insurgency, led by the PUK, but fought it by means familiar from the history of totalitarianism and dire - collective reprisals, relocation camps, the roundup and murder of all able-bodied males in target areas and chemical attacks. (See this Human Rights Watch Report.) It resembles, in fact, nothing so much as the lessons that Vegard Valberg drew from the history of European colonialism and commended the US to follow in this celebrated essay of last September:

You speak of will, of taking countries down and rebuilding them, but are you willing to bomb cities, kill enemies, breaking their objects? Are you willing to accept the massive loss of enemy civilian life? Are you willing to attack large concentrations of civilians, because among them there are many combatants, and indeed many of the civilians become partisans at night? Are you willing to round people up into camps, new villages, relocation camps, and keep them there and relocate them in order to get rid of guerrillas? Are you willing to take advantage of the various rights the Geneva Convention gives you when it comes to dealing with terrorists, spies, and guerrillas? Are you willing to make visible and terrifying examples of the enemy? Are you willing to have Nurnberg trials instead of TV-circus trials, AND to stomach the out roar if you do?

Now remember this, you must be willing to do this after Bush has been replaced, for this will take more than a decade, and you must remember that if you back down or flinch even once most or all of your previous labour will be for naught.

I should note that while Valberg doesn't sound nearly as uncomfortable with "the lessons of history" as I might wish, his essay stands as a clear warning of just what a real campaign to "transform their culture" would entail. On this he is absolutely correct. That it makes a mockery of everything we've always told ourselves the country stands for, and tell ourselves even still, is one more reason I oppose this war.

Subdued is how I feel about news of the space shuttle loss. The rest of it is harder to express, but I'll try.

We belong in space, and the signal accomplishment of the space program (one of the few, alas) has been to normalize our presence there. Most of the time I couldn't tell you whether there's a shuttle on mission or not. Now and then the news media note that this or that foreign astronaut will be his country's first man in space, but for the most part the shuttle program ticks over as unobtrusively as a car engine.

When I learned that the Challenger blew up, I was at 4845 Massachusetts Avenue NW in Washington DC, running a bookstore that no longer exists, halfway along the wooden stairs from the main floor to the stockroom in the basement. A coworker, whose name I recall, got a call from a neighbor and announced the news with anguish. It was morning, and sunny.

Already today I'm certain that I will never remember this morning's terrible news with that vividness. That's an injustice to Rick Husband, William McCool, Michael Anderson, Kalpana Chawla, David Brown, Laurel Clark and Ilan Ramon. To their shades, my apology. But too much has changed since the Challenger days. Space is one more place humans live. Like the highways, the air, the seas, it is a place where we go, and sometimes go wrong. Where there is human purpose, there is accident and loss. Where there is human life, there is death. The sorrow of Columbia is familiar sorrow, ordinary, inescapable. The death of the decent and brave has been long with us and will long remain.

Myths and Legends? - In the New York Times, Stephen C. Pelletiere writes

. . . as the Central Intelligence Agency's senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, and as a professor at the Army War College from 1988 to 2000, I was privy to much of the classified material that flowed through Washington having to do with the Persian Gulf.

and continues:

headed a 1991 Army investigation into how the Iraqis would fight a war against the United States; the classified version of the report went into great detail on the Halabja affair.

This much about the gassing at Halabja we undoubtedly know: it came about in the course of a battle between Iraqis and Iranians. Iraq used chemical weapons to try to kill Iranians who had seized the town, which is in northern Iraq not far from the Iranian border. The Kurdish civilians who died had the misfortune to be caught up in that exchange. But they were not Iraq's main target.

And the story gets murkier: immediately after the battle the United States Defense Intelligence Agency investigated and produced a classified report, which it circulated within the intelligence community on a need-to-know basis. That study asserted that it was Iranian gas that killed the Kurds, not Iraqi gas.

The agency did find that each side used gas against the other in the battle around Halabja. The condition of the dead Kurds' bodies, however, indicated they had been killed with a blood agent — that is, a cyanide-based gas — which Iran was known to use. The Iraqis, who are thought to have used mustard gas in the battle, are not known to have possessed blood agents at the time.

These facts have long been in the public domain but, extraordinarily, as often as the Halabja affair is cited, they are rarely mentioned.

There's much more. Pelletiere is not by any means saying Saddam is a nice guy. Indeed, he writes:

I am not trying to rehabilitate the character of Saddam Hussein. He has much to answer for in the area of human rights abuses. But accusing him of gassing his own people at Halabja as an act of genocide is not correct, because as far as the information we have goes, all of the cases where gas was used involved battles. These were tragedies of war. There may be justifications for invading Iraq, but Halabja is not one of them.

Beyond the question of Halabja, which he seriously problematizes, he speculates intriguingly that Iraq's real treasure is not its oil at all - it's the water.

Analyze That - Earlier this week I wrote about a notorious picture of antisemitic protesters at the Davos Conference in Switzerland. A European reader writes

I think you're partially wrong here.

I don't know if it's the same in the US, but over here in the Netherlands, the golden calf is a symbol of blind greed (the veneration of Mammon and all that) and has nothing whatsoever to do with Jews or Israel (apart from it being a biblical story, of course). As such, it's an obvious symbol for protests against the World Economic Forum (a group of rich bastards blinded by greed etc.).

It's the yellow star "Rumsfeld" is wearing that makes it anti-semitic.

I take my reader's point, though the Golden Calf in conjunction with the yellow star would compound the antisemitism by signifying the canards about money-grubbing, market-manipulating Jewish financiers.

On reviewing the picture, however, it's at least possible that the masked marchers are a separate group from whoever is carrying the Golden Calf. The angle makes it hard to tell, and the Calf is big. That would tend to make the "Calvers" lesser assholes. (Nothing can exculpate the Yellow Star pair.) Against this possibility must be set some visual evidence: a figure to the rear of the Calf carries a wooden club that looks similar to the club "Sharon" carries. That suggests that it's all one big group, no?

Finally, there's an outside chance that "Rumsfeld" is just a moron, and imagines that the yellow star somehow indicts Rumsfeld for antisemitism rather than participating in it. You'd have to be really clueless about symbols and pretty muddleheaded as a thinker, but we are talking about anti-globos. Verdict: Guilty until the guy appears on my door with a plausible account of how I completely misinterpreted his art.

Department of Fabulous Writing - With penetration, care and moral seriousness, Colby Cosh responds to Michael Fumento's New Republic article attempting to debunk ADHD skepticism. I suspect that when most people think of Colby Cosh they think "Funny!" (or "Curling?!?!?!?!") but this essay demonstrates how much more there is to him as a writer and thinker.

TalkLeft on the Richard Reid conviction:

The lesson is this: Our federal courts and our criminal justice system are well equipped to handle terror cases. There is no need to keep the suspects in military custody, cut off from lawyers --or to try them in secret military tribunals. Reid pleaded guilty to all counts and received no promises of leniency or other sentence concessions. Reid had excellent appointed counsel and a U.S. District Court Judge presiding over his case. The proceedings were open to the media and public. Important court filings by both the Prosecution and the Defense were available on the Internet. The Government got the conviction and the life sentence it sought.

Our criminal justice system and federal courts have succeeded in trying and convicting numerous terrorists. Yet the Justice Department is seriously considering dropping its federal case against Zacarias Moussaoui in favor of a military tribunal proceeding. It's not necessary and it's not right. We can't trust in the integrity of a secret proceeding conducted by the military. If we can't trust in the integrity of the proceeding, we can't trust the end result.

Meanwhile, bucking for the 2003 Unqualified Successes award for Best Non-Libertarian in a Libertarian Role, Aziz Poonawalla attempts to drive a stake through the heart of the "SUVs cause terrorism" myth. (Psst!Aziz! check out this Radley Balko analysis!

It Ain't Over - AP reports that "A powerful bomb destroyed a bridge outside the southern Afghan city of Kandahar on Friday, killing 18 people on a bus, a deputy police chief said.

[Deputy police chief] Jan said he believed Afghan soldiers were the target of the explosion, which went off barely half a mile from an Afghan army post. Soldiers from that unit are loyal to Kandahar Governor Gul Agha Sherzai and routinely patrol the area, he said.

The classic guerilla strategy would be to keep pricking at the US's local allies like this until the US has to expose more of its own forces.

A brief account of more rumors of war in Afghanistan can be found on the Hi Pakistan site.

This curious Australian Broadcasting audio report bears the headline "Al Qaeda dropped dirty bomb in Afghanistan: UK intelligence." Well I wondered what they dropped it from in an environment of allied air supremacy, so I listened to the Windows Media audio. Lots of talk about Al Qaeda constructing a dirty bomb from materials supplied by the Taliban in 1999, but nothing about using one.

That this weapon hasn't been recovered lengthens the Things Undone list from when the War on Terror became the War on Saddam Hussein.

Note: the audio report says that MI6's documentation of the Al Qaeda dirty bomb tends to strengthen the Bush Administration's argument that leaving Saddam in power increases the risks of him giving terrorists Bad Things. Given that the report details Al Qaeda getting Bad Things from somewhere else entirely, it seems rather to substantiate the argument that Iraq is the least of our problems, terror weapon-wise.

We Get Letters and sometimes we get them damned fast. Bruce Baugh writes:

Dude, the first 10 issues of Zot! were published in color. I assure of this, as I have some of them. It was after the hiatus that followed that he switched to black and white.

My considered response to Bruce's claim: Oh!

Um, forget what I said earlier. Makes it pretty clear I picked up on Zot! after that hiatus . . .

Christopher Tong writes:

Just so you know, most hydrocarbon powered vehicles (y'know, those that run on diesel and gas) already spew loads of steam into the air.

Furthermore, fuel cell vehicles (which is what I assume you are referring to when you are referring to hydrogen-powered vehicles) don't burn hydrogen... the reaction is rather more controlled than that (http://www.ballard.com has some good info on this stuff). Essentially, energy from a reaction is used to charge a battery which in turn drives a DC motor. The byproduct is water, not steam. I'd be more concerned with ice on the road than steamy cities.

Joining the Collective - Like all the other libertarian bloggers, I'm going to link David Boaz's essay on how to be "pro-choice" for real - because it just rocks.

Speaking of other libertarian bloggers, Julian Sanchez has great analysis of the Presiden't State of the Union address and Jesse Walker has a concise "Neoconservatism for Dummies" overview. And that's all I'm saying about that.

Wilderness of Well-Connected Oil Barons - Patrick Nielsen Hayden says he would like an excuse to be less paranoid. He doesn't have one.

Your Cheap Imperialism Metaphor of the Day Item from the USA Today: "U.S. Coast Guard sending forces to the Gulf." The US coasts themselves are staying put.

Little Miss Understanding - Mrs. Offering called me at work today to find out if it was me who had purchased "Hardcore Movies" via Paypal ($5 - such a deal!) or if someone had hacked my account. (My password is - doh!)

Questioned, she allowed that what it actually said was "Hardcore Mo," then the field cut off. Turns out she was looking at my purchase record for a gaming supplement, Charnel Gods, from Scott Knipe's Gilded Moose Games. Scott, who would probably get my vote for the most innovative roleplaying game designer alive, is given to using Hardcore Moose as an e-mail address/account name. Why? I can only assume he likes to get men in trouble with their wives.

This is your "The problem with bloggers is that they don't have editors" post for the week.

We Get Letters but sometimes we protect the letter-writers by not bringing names into it:

Jim --

>From your quote of Independent --

"...when 1,500 American troops spent eight days trying to winkle out hundreds of Taliban ..."

To winkle them out? How does one winkle? Are we about to winkle Iraq? Is it fun? Can we play with our winkle?

Best,

********

ps -- wait found this:

"WASHINGTON, Jan. 29 (UPI) -- A small number of U.S. troops have been inserted in northern Iraq, Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, confirmed Wednesday."

Does winkling then require insertion? Or can you winkle all by yourself without any inserting?

"We have tracked down al-Qaeda around the world, round up 3000 terrorists, and the rest shall soon be winkled."

I just figured it was a cricket term or something.

It Ain't the Heat . . . - A question I don't know the answer to but would like to:

Say we had hydrogen-powered cars. Spewing steam out of their tailpipes. In a major metro area. At rush hour. In high summer.

What would this mean for local humidity? An insignificant effect? Significant? Sounds like a job for a physics blogger. Or a meteorology blogger? Is there one?

A Fanboy's Notes: Bloggage - Rock Scissors Blog, the group blog featuring Bruce Baugh and other gaming pros, has some interesting stuff on it already, like "Moulin Rouge, Anti-Naturalism, Puppetland and Victoriana." I wish they hadn't picked one of the ugliest available blogger.com templates (an undeservedly popular one at that). And I wish they edited their template so that author names appear at the beginning of the post rather than the end. We did this for Stand Down and I think it's the way to go for multi-author blogs generally. (Samizdata and Asymmetrical Information do it that way too.)

Via the Comics Journal's Journalista blog, I discovered Fetus-X, a culture and pop culture blog by Erik Millikin and Casey Sorrow. They are not into item-specific anchors, but there's a good account of the grotesque Independent cartoon that the Israeli Embassy in London protested posted at 6:17PM on January 29. As I type this it's the top item, but presumably that will change. Also this:

HUTCHINSON [Kansas] -- A 102-year-old Hutchinson High School chant made up of apparent nonsense words was yanked after the school board deemed it potentially offensive.

That's right, students can no longer use "potentially offensive" nonsense words?!

From other items, it looks like Millikin and Sorrow are, well, liberals, but it takes all kinds.

From Fetus-X I discover that Scott McCloud has a blog. McCloud is best known for his books, Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics, but I cherish him for Zot!, a black-and-white comic he wrote and drew in the early 1980s about a twelve-year-old girl (the real hero of the book, though her quasi-boyfriend from an alternate universe, Zot, got to be the title character).

There was one particular splash page at the beginning of one issue that was a work of sheer genius: Jenny is repining in the shallows of a pond, knees and shoulders sticking out of the water, high summer. On the surface of the pond, a reflection of Zot, in the middle of a jacknife dive, boyish, carefree. My description will not capture the delicacy of the composition and may even mislead those who haven't seen the picture: the reflection of Zot on the surface of the water appears between Jenny's legs. What makes this perfect is that the ongoing subtext of the entire series to that point has been the undercurrent of naive romance between two budding adolescents and a sexual tension that does not even recognize itself.

McCloud doesn't believe in item anchors either. (What is it with these comics bloggers?) But at least I learned that there's an online version of Zot! It's in color, but at least it's meant to be in color. (The original book was black and white and drawn to be black and white. The fact that there is a colorized reprint collection of the first ten issues just shows how far the standards of civilization have fallen.)

Finally, Neilalien says "A problem with UO's criticism [of the Bast miniseries] is that it only has legs if you're assuming the Vertigo label really means Adult, or Good.

Administrivia - Hopefully DNS has finally propagated to the lands of all loyal readers. I was still getting the old UO at work as recently as lunchtime yesterday and I got e-mails from a couple of people having similar problems.

One downside of the move is that the stat reports are not so useful. Particularly I haven't found any way to filter my referral list down to the daily level. All I have is an ever-lengthening monthly list. That makes it hard to spot new referers, which means if you have a blog and bust my chops or say nice things about me I may miss the fact. Apologies in advance.

Meanwhile, Back in the JungleMountains - More action in Afghanistan, per the Independent:

American officials told reporters that the fighting in hills near the Pakistan border was their biggest engagement with armed opponents since "Operation Anaconda", when 1,500 American troops spent eight days trying to winkle out hundreds of Taliban and al-Qa'ida fighters from mountain caves in eastern Afghanistan.

The battle yesterday saw the American forces call in B-1 bombers, AC-130 gunships, F-16s and Apache helicopters in an attempt to crush a large band of fighters, who American intelligence analysts believe are loyal to the former Afghan prime minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar – a man who fought in the American-backed mujahedin against the occupying Soviet forces in the 1980s.

Hekmatyar, a nasty piece of work, was not part of the Taliban but is now thought to be allying with them:

There have been reports from United Nations officials that al-Qa'ida and Taliban fighters have set up mobile military training units near the Pakistan border. Other reports suggest that Hekmatyar is organising suicide squads. Matters are further complicated by the depth of anti-American and pro-Taliban sentiment across the border in Pakistan – including within the Pakistani security forces with whom the US is supposed to be jointly waging the "war on terror".

We should probably flood the area with our best troops and - oh.

The Warblogger Drinking Game - This one you can play alone. After your spouse leaves you, you'll have no choice. Rules are simple:

1. Every time a hawkish blogger uses a variant on the word "appeasement," drink.

2. There is no rule number two.

If you don't drink, try

Warblogger Mad Libs - In every article referring to "appeasement," the allies, and Hitler, substitute "Austria-Hungary" for the allies and "Serbia" for Hitler. Change "WWII" to "WWI." Laugh till the pee warms your calves.

War: What It's Not Good For - I've had a nice, questioning e-mail from Godless Capitalist of Gene Expression in my in-box since November. It seemed like a good excuse for reviewing my reasons for opposing the military conquest of Iraq. So I wrote a long "back to first principles" piece and posted it to Stand Down, where I invite you to read it.

Modest Proposal - Gene Healy has a suggestion for the hawks:

I understand people who argue for war with Iraq because they want to (1) liberate Iraqis; and/or (2) help Israel; and/or (3) spread democracy. I think those are illegitimate reasons in a constitutional republic whose governing document speaks of the "common defence" of the United States, and not the general good of the world at large. More important, I think they're damned frivolous reasons for killing American soldiers, innocent Iraqi civilians, and, for that matter, Iraqi conscripts. But I understand the arguments: if these Wilsonian goals are worthwhile to you, invading Iraq is something you might want to do.

But I'm having an increasingly hard time understanding why any rational person would argue that invading Iraq is something we need to do in order to protect the lives, liberty, and property of Americans (you know, the legitimate goals of American foreign policy). Invading Iraq will, in all likelihood, increase our vulnerability to attack . . .

So here's a suggestion for the folks on the other side of this debate. Drop the national security rationale--it won't wash . . . Instead, make your case for war based on goals 1 through 3, above. And argue that the increased risk to Americans--soldiers and civilians--is worth it.

There's more, including a link to an interview with war skeptic Norman Schwarzkopf.

Still the Same Old Story - Right-Wing Voter Effect wins again:

The projections gave Sharon a much greater victory than had been predicted in recent opinion polls, which had foreseen a Likud showing of some 31 seats. With 56 percent of the vote counted, the Likud was on 38 seats, Labor on 20, Shinui on 15, and Shas had 10 seats. Final results are expected at 6 A.M.

Always, always take final pre-election polls and give the "conservative" party a 5-8% boost anywhere on the planet. You'll go wrong only rarely. (USA2000 being the glaring contrapositive.) As I've noted before, it's a conservative world.

Aside: Israeli elections seem more fun than ours somehow. I can't argue that they produce better results though.

More from Ha'aretz:

In the past, right wing governments were stable and have led to dramatic diplomatic moves, Shalom said, pointing to the 1979 Israeli-Egyptian Camp David accords, in which the Likud's Begin signed the nation's first peace treaty with an Arab nation, and Shamir's participation in the landmark 1991 Arab-Israeli talks in Madrid. "Together with the Americans, who are working for change within the Palestinian Authority, we can reach that possibility of peace."

Of course, this is what I told Mrs. Offering when Sharon was elected the first time. However, there is another iron law about to come into play: Whenever the US does something it thinks will tend to piss off the Arab world, it immediately thereafter tilts against Israel at least tactically. That's a big reason those 1991 talks took place at all - the US needed to show "progress" on the Arab-Israeli front after Gulf War Phase I.

So bet on something happening. Just don't bet on its lasting significance. (The 1991 talks accomplished little. The real action was out of sight of everyone, even the United States, in Oslo. And even there . . . )

Hashemite Restoration? - Ha'aretz has a somewhat confusing report about possible Jordanian rule of Iraq on a "temporary" basis. The article reads a little like it went through the Babelfish Hebrew-to-English module - in particular, I'm having trouble quite following this sequence:

According to the estimates of sources in Davos involved in preparations for the war in Iraq, the realistic scenario is that commanders of Iraqi forces will surrender shortly after the U.S.-led attack begins and will come to American military headquarters waving white flags.

The American government will select from among those commanders the leaders of the interim Iraqi government that will rule the country until a more permanent arrangement is found, the sources added.

After an interim period of 2-3 years, they said, if the temporary regime in Iraq asks from the Jordanian monarchy to extend its auspices over Iraq, King Abdallah would likely consider the request favorably. But Jordanian officials examining U.S. overtures on the matter made clear that Abdallah would need to carefully consider the repercussions such a move would have on Jordan's stability.

The sequence seems to be

1. Surrender.
2. Military rule by Iraqis who surrender.
3. Rule by King Abdallah after an Iraqi request.

And yet the article begins

DAVOS, Switzerland - Jordanian King Abdallah would favorably consider an American request to extend the auspices of the monarchy over Iraq for a temporary period after the expected U.S.-led attack on Saddam Hussein's regime, if the Americans ask, according to senior political sources participating in the World Ecnomic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

The article lede indicates an immediate governing role for Abdallah for a period of time. The sequence suggested by the meat of the article is eventual Jordanian rule with no cutoff mentioned.

What does it all mean? The death of newsblogging, basically. For at least a period of time there will be next to no point in linking to "breaking news" because so much of it will be contradictory and disinformative by intent. If I had to guess, the entire Ha'aretz article might come out of "Offeringfish" as:

DAVOS, Switzerland - Jordanian King Abdallah would love to control Iraq's oil wealth, Jordan proper being short of the stuff. He suggested that previous dire warnings from his government about the undesirability of war with Iraq should be considered entirely provisional.

That's based on a reading of the article that suggests that this interregnum idea comes from the Jordanian monarchy rather than the US. It's all "if the Americans ask" with no suggestion that the Americans have asked.

(Link via antiwar.com.)

Oaf Deutsch! Okay, cheap pun. But an old pal of mine, Gregor "Pedro" Gross, has started a blog called "So It Goes." It's in German, and if you'd ever read Pedro's english you'd know why. The blog is largely about . . . stuff in German. German makes me nervous, ever since I searched far and wide to find someone to translate a passage from a scholarly monograph that dealt with one of my poems only to learn - what the author thought of my poem. But if you read German, this recovering Ostlander's blog might be just the thing for you.

UPDATE: Finally fixed the link. Must have been some kind of brain spazz.

More Shock! More Awe! - Your Talking Dog e-mails:

I must say I am in shock and awe at the "operation" by that name. I can only suggest that since Operation "Infinite Justice" was deemed too offensive to the God-fearing Taliban and Al-Qaeda members whom we were bombing the crap out of in Afghanistan, perhaps we can recycle the name for the more worldly and secular Iraqis. Let's face it: "Infinite Justice" is a much cooler name than "Enduring Freedom" or "Shock and Awe" (which will of course generate neither, except possibly that of Christine Amanpour) . . . One must never isunderestimate the Bush Administration and the black and white noise it generates. The Administration's psy-ops people are top-notch. I don't know how they've made Saddam Hussein feel, but they've managed to scare the bejeezus out of me.

Well, God help us all.

Gary Farber weighs in on the relative scale of WWII-era terror bombings compared to present plans.

Dept. of You May Not Be Interested in War, But War is Interested in You - I've become an unwitting pawn in a titanic struggle between Dirk Deppey and Franklin Harris.

Don't Lie Back and Enjoy It - Welcome evidence that the Bush Administration is giving some serious thought to the coming Bioterror Age. Per the London Times

"There is going to be an attack. Whether it is in western Europe, the US, Africa, Asia or wherever, you have got to anticipate that there is going to be a bioterrorism attack and the only way to defend yourself is by getting prepared," said Tommy Thompson, health secretary.

In an interview with the Financial Times, he said the wave of arrests in Britain, France, Spain and Italy, and the uncovering of terrorists' attempts to make the deadly poison ricin, made the issue more urgent. Countries were not doing enough, he said.

Mr Thompson met health ministers and officials from the G20, the leading industrialised and developing countries, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Sunday night to try to step up international efforts in research and vaccine-sharing and agree mutual assistance pacts to support a country that was attacked.

Since the anthrax panic of 2001, the US has increased measures against bioterrorism. Last year it spent $1.1bn (£700m), and is spending $4.5bn this year with a similar amount planned next.

The raw dollars alone don't mean the money is being spent as effectively as possible, of course. The article continues:

It has purchased enough smallpox vaccine for the entire population, stockpiled antibiotics and other drugs at 12 sites within seven hours' reach of any community, and is seeking new vaccines for botulism, haemorrhagic fever viruses, plague and anthrax.

The bad news version of the above is: "We don't have vaccines for a lot of things that might be used. Also, the strategy is to take the initial hit and rush palliatives to the area around the outbreak." There may not be a better plan available, though, as you have to balance the risks of mass vaccinations against the product of the likelihood and lethality of a biological attack. Me, I'm still not sure. The case for mass vaccination is not just that it theoretically protects more people ahead of time but also that it inhibits the spread of any infectious disease among the largely vaccinated population.

Antiwar War - NYT article on tensions between ANSWER/Worker's World Party and the rest of us.

In an interview today, Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, a spokeswoman for Answer, said questions raised about the group's role were "classic McCarthy-era Red-baiting."

"When you select out the Socialists or Marxists," she said, "the point is to demonize and divide and diminish a massive, growing movement."

You've got to love the far left: it's okay to call virtually anyone a fascist, but to call Lenin himself a communist would be "red-baiting."

An article from Jewish Week quotes leaders of various Jewish peace groups taking ANSWER to task for packing the speaker's platform with anti-Israel speakers. Michael Lerner - no Likudnik to say the least - says

“In my view, the organizers of this demonstration have allowed far too many speakers who believe that this war is being done because Israel wants the war, far too few who share my view that this war is not in the best interests either of Israel or of the United States.”

Lerner declined to speak at the January 18 March because the organizers wouldn't give him fifteen minutes to present a more nuanced case than "Israel bad! Palestinians good!" I didn't attend the San Francisco march, but my impression from the DC march was that nobody got more than a couple of minutes to speak. Surely a professional writer and editor could manage to say "This war will be bad for Israel and the US, as many Israelis and Americans realize" in less than two minutes. That would be a real test of ANSWER's bona fides. (And one a lot of us suspect they would fail.)

Those of us who are not communists or obsessively anti-Israel have to hope that United for Peace presents a more ecumenical roster of speakers at its February 15th protests. While the speakers matter little to the marchers, most of whom pay no attention, they do get covered by the media and can reflect badly on the event as a whole.

The tougher issue is how to handle hateful freelance participants, like the assholes in this picture from the Davos protests linked by many bloggers. Beating them with sticks - the protesters, not the bloggers - holds considerable appeal, but it's against the law. Would march organizers who wished to keep people like this out of an event have the authority to eject them?

It seems to me that IF the organizers have the authority to keep counter-protesters out of the event itself, they have the authority to deal with people like the ones in the picture. And the creeps in this picture are expressing obvious antisemitism. The symbolic elements are not specific to the government and state of Israel. The star on Israel's flag is not yellow; the Golden Calf is a religious symbol, not a national one. It would be like incorporating watermelon and nose bones into a demonstration against Robert Mugabe. Vehement criticism of Israel's government as a government is in bounds. "Axis of Evil: Bush Sharon Blair" is legitimate, whether right or wrong. Yellow stars and Golden Calves with money hanging from them are obviously not.

Note: I saw nothing like it at either the October or January marches in Washington DC. ANSWER's website makes no mention of this year's Davos meeting, if Google is to be trusted.

Shock and Jive? - My fellow anti-warriors spent my downtime contemplating "Shock and Awe," a leaked plan to pound Baghdad over the first two days of the war with about 10 times as many cruise missiles as have ever been fired in that time span. Micah Holmquist discusses the plan on his site, while Jerry Brito comments on Stand Down. Here's the CBS News report they're working from.

"You're sitting in Baghdad and all of a sudden you're the general and 30 of your division headquarters have been wiped out. You also take the city down. By that I mean you get rid of their power, water. In 2,3,4,5 days they are physically, emotionally and psychologically exhausted," Ullman tells Martin.

Whoever lives will then, Andrew Card informs us, react with jubilation.

The first thing to be said about Operation Shock and Awe is that it is nothing but a logical extension of the terror-bombing principles used by both sides in World War II - ideas developed by the Nazis and adopted with enthusiasm by the Americans and British. CBS informs us that "In this war 80 percent [of munitions] will be precision guided," which means nothing more than that we'll be hitting civilian targets with precision-guided munitions. ("Power," "water," and whatever doesn't sound quite innocuous enough on first listen to mention to the news media. You can be sure Iraqi media outlets will be hit right away, as Serb outlets were hit in 1999, and that Al Jazeera's facilites will be "accidentally" bombed. Bridges seem a certainty.)

"There will not be a safe place in Baghdad," said one Pentagon official who has been briefed on the plan.

The second thing to say is that it may all be a crock - the "shock and awe" may be intended to come from the leak itself. (Curious, seemingly defensive coda to the CBS article: Statement from CBS News Anchor Dan Rather: "We assure you this report contains no information that the Defense Department thinks could help the Iraqi military.") The powers that be may still be hoping to inspire a coup.

Speaking of coups, the notion is occasioning fear and disgust among many hawks. (Here's an example.) There are a handful of reasons for this.

On the noble side, those who believe that the coming conquest of Iraq will lead to freedom, democracy and something like capitalism worry that a coup will just leave the Iraqi people under the thumb of a different despot, which is true enough. There are hawks for whom talk of liberating Iraq through war is not a smokescreen for other motives. I think these people are naive, but they exist. Meanwhile, your hardcore imperialist, national-greatness types want the occupation as much as they want the war. It's not enough that Saddam go or even that a successor government hand over every weapon bigger than a pellet gun: they want American troops in Iraq to start putting pressure on the rest of the countries on the regime-change list. These latter types might still hope for a coup - they can always announce that coalition troops have to enter Iraq to prevent "chaos." But there's a danger that the French, Russians and Chinese make a quick deal with Saddam's successor and freeze the US and Britain out.

Well, don't believe what you read in the papers.

Imitation Diet Blog Post - 198 this morning, only a pound off last week's number and well within the uncertainty of the scale. Waist about an eighth-inch narrower. Last night my mother took La Familia Offering out for a celebratory dinner (I got that new job I needed) and I decided to splurge - onion petals and cheesecake to go with the steak, salad and mushrooms.

Now for the exercise portion of our program. I discovered a truly affordable strength training regimen: go to Galyan's (or Sports Authority or wherever) and "try out" the dumbbells. I did an entire routine. Granted, I ended up buying a pair of twenty-pounders (which I don't expect to incorporate into my Heavyhands routines!). But it was fun to think about just going from sports store to sports store using their weights for free.

Cost is a big issue for me when it comes to considering fitness regimens. Diana Moon has been booming Superslow, which has also "inspired" a spinoff called Slow Burn. And Glenn Reynolds argues for the importance of weight training. But these things cost real money. I don't have budget room for a health club membership or house space for a home weight station, however low-tech. Heavyhands is cheap! Less than a hundred bucks in weights and a pair of shoes will take you far. I'm eyeing a heart monitor but haven't committed to the purchase yet. (I did pump my twenty-pounders between Galyan's and the parking lot yesterday, but that was only a one-minute walk.)

All that said, my exercise routines were somewhat thrown off by last Saturday's march - my legs were really sore for a couple of days after - and the cold. On the plus side, my work on the stairs at work (five flights) has really been helping my knees - almost no soreness on the descent this last time.

Meanwhile, the Harvard University School of Public Health published an article in JAMA last fall claiming that "A take-home message is that the more the better when it comes to exercise, and that adding weight training to an aerobics routine may be most beneficial of all." So hey, why not incorporate weights in an aerobics routine like Dr. Schwartz said?

Back . . . in the new home of highclearing.com. I switched to Hosting Matters on the advice of Kathy Kinsley. It will be cheaper and more robust than my old host. To celebrate the move I did a clean install of Movable Type 2.51 and reimported all my items into a fresh mySQL database. (I kept the old archive pages so nobody's permalinks would be broken.)

The whole thing took a day longer than I thought it would, largely because the Sapphire Worm attack from Friday-Saturday slowed HM's processing of my credit card and kept Verisign from updating DNS entries until last night. E-mail successfully cut over too - you can still use the "supplanter" address to reach me.