Bosses from Hell at the FBI:

In an effort to ensure that all FBI field offices respond to a war in similar fashion, each office was ordered to send its plans to Washington. After those were reviewed, FBI management sent a plan back to the field offices with a list of things to do, said the official.

"We said, 'These are the ground rules we want to achieve,' so there is consistency," the FBI official said. "It's for any potential terrorism issues that arise."

(From the LA Times.) Maybe it's just me, but if I were working on plans for an FBI field office, I'd wonder why Washington couldn't have sent me my ground rules before I did all that work.

Lots of stuff in the article about possible sources of terror attacks should war come.

A Fanboy's Notes - InQuest Magazine will have a 72-page pullout preview edition of the new Marvel Universe Roleplaying Game in its April issue, which should be on sale this week. Such facts as are known about the game so far sound very promising.

The Evidence is In - Radley Balko put together an entire series of "Ashcroft Sucks" posts. Scroll up from this one to the conclusion:

Seems to me, one could have made one of two conclusions vis-a-vis Ashcroft at the time: either he's a racist, or he's a principled "states' rights conservative," willing to weather the racist label in order to uphold the principles of federalism.

Seems clear to me now that Aschcroft doesn't give two shits about states' rights or federalism (see the five posts below). Seems to me he's hellbent on imposing his morality on the rest of us, the Tenth Amendment be damned.

Draw your own conclusions.

Crude is the only language adequate to discussing the price of crude. I paid $1.83/gallon for gas yesterday. There's a big wooded lot behind our house that belongs to the church around the corner. There are deer there, and possibly some roots and tubers. So instead of driving to the grocery store, we can forage. We have the internet, TV and each other for entertainment. If I can talk the office into letting me telecommute, we could just about ride this out.

Spree Graphs - Item in the Washington City Paper's media column about misreporting of evidence in the sniper case. The thrust of the article is the different approach to making corrections at the Post and the Times. (Thanks to Hesiod for e-mailing the link.)

A Casket of Amontillado - The Institute for Justice has won two more economic liberty cases. In one, the US Court of Appeals affirmed that a Chattanooga minister may indeed sell affordable caskets to his poor parishioners without

a funeral director’s license. To obtain such a license, individuals had to either attend school for two years, apprentice for two years, or a combination of both. During that time, they would have to help embalm 25 bodies and master vast amounts of utterly irrelevant information.

Bad news for a state-protected funeral home cartel that habitually marks up coffins as much as 600%. A twofer for decency and free enterprise.

A federal district court says Virginia vintner Juanita Swedenburg can ship wine directly to customers in New York State, rather than having to sell to (possibly indifferent) in-state wholesalers only.

The Institute for Justice challenged New York’s law under the Commerce Clause. We argued that the power to regulate alcohol given to the states under the 21st Amendment (the amendment that repealed Prohibition) did not give states authority to engage in naked economic protectionism. That principle, while dealing with wine and the 21st Amendment in this case, is one of profound significance to free trade within the United States.

Attorneys for the other side? Princes of Darkness C. Boyden Gray and Robert Bork, among fourteen others - lacking only David Boies to constitute a Legal Axis of Evil.

Discussing the casket case, author Chip Mellor explains the Institute's Cunning Plan:

This licensing scheme was a classic example of laws that arbitrarily limit economic opportunity. It lacked any fit between the asserted goals behind the law—safety and consumer protection—and the licensing requirements supposedly established to achieve the goals. Courts call this the “rational basis test.” IJ’s economic liberty litigation is dedicated to establishing that this fit under the rational basis test must be a tight one. We argue that courts must not merely rubber stamp any economic legislation and defer to legislatures completely. Such abdication of judicial responsibility guarantees that protectionist legislation will proliferate.

For a lot of conservative business interests, "right to work" means no more than "right to get fired by your employer." For libertarians, "right to work" means what it goddam says: the right to employ your talent and resources in peaceful industry for such gain as others choose to pay. State and local laws are full of prohibitions on that kind of dangerous behavior. By taking those laws on, IJ is probably doing more concrete good than any other libertarian institution.

Like We Did in Afghanistan - From Reuters today:

BAGRAM, Afghanistan (Reuters) - Rival commanders squabbling over scrap metal traded mortar fire near the U.S. headquarters in Afghanistan on Thursday after President Hamid Karzai appealed in Washington for subsidies to placate unruly militias. U.S. military spokesman Roger King said the exchange occurred north of Bagram Air Base, for the second time this week.

"There are two sub-unit commanders who both operate north of the base and they are in a dispute over who owes who money and who should have access to the profits generated by some scrap metal," King said.

"They are attempting to settle it with mortars."

Some background:

The latest clash comes after at least six people were killed in fighting between forces from opposing warlords which broke out in the north of the country at the weekend as Karzai was in Japan seeking funds for a program to disarm warlord armies.

Karzai was pledged $51 million but the program is expected to cost nearly three times that.

A warlord who gets X million dollars to disarm and does so is no longer a warlord. He has lost power and status and gotten only money in return. I would imagine the program has the best chance of working if the money goes not to the warlords but directly to his troops. (Warlords already have money if they can afford men and weapons, and the men and weapons afford them a way of getting more money.) You can expect the warlords to resist the program pretty hard, and for it ultimately to have about as much effectiveness as the various "money for guns" programs US cities run from time to time.

In Washington on Wednesday, Karzai asked U.S. senators to support a request that the United States subsidize his budget to allow him to pay 100,000 irregular provincial militiamen.

He said this would be to ensure "they remain well-behaved" until the Japanese-led disarmament drive took off.

That would be money even without disarming.

New Europe = Old Warsaw Pact - Jon Utley of Americans Against Bombing sends a copy of an Investor's Business Daily article by Brian Mitchell that is apparently only available to subscribers. Mitchell goes into great detail about the backgrounds of the leaders of the "Coalition of the Billing" as Matt Hogan calls them. Money quote:

"It's not just that they were Communists - anyone could have been a communist - it's that they were very senior Communists," said John Laughland of the British Helsinki Human Rights Group. "In three or four of the cases, they were actually the Communist bosses in their country."

Examples:

Estonia's President Arnold Ruutel was president of the country's Supreme Soviet.

Lithuania's Primier Algirdas Brazauskas was the first secretary of his country's Communist Party.

Romania's President Ion Iliescu founded Romania's Communist student union. He later served as secretary of the Communist Party's Central Committee.

Bulgaria's President Georgi Parvanov was too young to get far in the Communist Party, until the party changed its name to the Bulgarian Socialist Party in 1990. Parvanov is the first ex-Communist to be president since the end of communism.

Slovakia's President Rudolph Schuster was a member of the Central Committee of Czechoslovakia's Communist Party for 20 years. He attended his last Communist Party meeting in 2000, boasting to the delegates, "I am proud of what I did under the former regime."

The struggle to end communism in Poland pitted Lech Walesa, hero of the Solidarity labor movement, against Aleksander Kwasniewski and Leszek Miller. Kwasniewski was a career propagandist for the Communist regime. Miller was a member of the Communist Party's Central Committee. Today, Walesa is out, and Kwasniewski and Miller are back in . . .

Hungary's prime minister is Socialist Peter Medgyessy, who spied for the Soviet-era secret police under the code name D-209.

Mitchell notes that surveys of actual public opinion in "New Europe" resemble nothing so much as public opinion in - Old Europe. Per Mitchell, 45% of Romanians favor war - the highest level of support in the countries in question - while opposition to the war goes as high as 84% in Bosnia. Bosnia, having had firsthand experience of being liberated, seems a bit short on gratitude and enthusiasm. (Romania had the bloodiest and dirtiest transition to "post-communism.")

"But," Mitchell notes, "since when did public opinion matter in Eastern Europe?"

"They're all a bunch of Commie hacks who are used to giving into to whomever is the biggest bastard on the block," Laughland said.

UPDATE: Fixed link to Americans Against Bombing.

News of the Weird - A reader sent me the premium subscription version of Stratfor's daily Iraq briefing. The public version teases

Following a fast visit by former Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein is said to have agreed to cooperate fully with U.N. weapons inspectors. Sources also say that U.S. energy companies could be invited back to Iraq after a 30-year hiatus -- but Washington's reaction to the proposal, to be delivered by Russian diplomat Vladimir Voloshin -- is anything but clear.

Details missing from the teaser:

o Primakov and Saddam are said to be old friends. (Ick.)
o Saddam told Primakov he would "scrap [Iraq's] al Samoud 2 missile program by March 1."
o Saddam will invite UN peacekeepers in to assist the inspectors - essentially volunteering for the currently stillborn "inspections plus" program.
o Here's a pisser: Per Stratfor, Saddam has asked Primakov to convey an invitation to US and British oil companies to return to Iraq for the first time in thirty years.
o Overall goal:

The ultimate goal of [envoy Vladimir Voloshin's follow-up] visit [to the White House] is to persuade the Bush administration that Iraq will be disarmed to such a point that it not only will be unable to threaten U.S. and Israeli forces for years to come, but would be unable to resist a U.S. invasion if Washington deems it necessary to attack Iraq in the future.

The first thing to wonder, as always with Stratfor, is "How reliable is the report." Can't say. The second thing to wonder is, "Will it work?" That is to say, will it stave off war, as the Russians and Iraqis hope? Stratfor is skeptical, which makes sense to me. Stratfor notes, "The proposal would not achieve Washington's two main goals in Iraq: regime change and a new base for U.S. forces in the Middle East." Now we already have bases in the Middle East (Oman and Qatar come to mind), but not bases from which one can launch land invasions of Iran and Syria, so keep this "new base" goal in mind when evaluating Kenneth Pollack-style arguments that Iraq is uniquely worse than other rogue states. (Lynxx Pherret, as so often, does the best job of stating that case.) This war is not designed to end in Iraq. Stratfor's formulation also implies that "regime change" has become an end in itself, not a means to greater US security.

Stratfor (and I) also think that the domestic political situation still tilts in favor of a decision to invade. While the public remains split, there's an activist Republican Party constituency, centered in the think tanks and magazines, insistent on taking Saddam down. All the scribblers have to do is to turn the head of a potential primary-challenge glory hound, and Bush's reelection chances almost disappear. Contrariwise, if Bush decides to invade, he can hope that the "cakewalk scenario" comes to pass, or that all the bad stuff is out of the way by summer 2004. Then the soft opposition in the public at large goes away, the base is happy and he cruises to reelection.

Also, the oil company thing is so transparently cynical on Saddam's part it could backfire on him politically.

But watch this space.

Note from Home - Tired and a touch under the weather. Over the next few days, reader mail, Kenneth Pollack and whatever comes to me while I'm sitting at the computer. Now, decongestant and a pillow.

War of the Kurdish Suppression Update - Per the pro-war Telegraph:

Kurdish leaders in Iraq gave warning yesterday that American-sanctioned deployment of Turkish troops in northern Iraq would lead to fighting.

What kind of fighting?

But [Nasreen Mustafa Sidiq, the minister of reconstruction and development in Irbil] too gave a warning about unforeseen consequences if the Turks entered the area. "If Turkish soldiers come here, to Irbil, I will hate the Turks. We will use what we have, even our lives, if we have to."

"Even our lives?" Is that an oblique reference to . . . suicide bombing?

Okay, but why do the Turks want to do this in the first place?

The Turks say they want to prevent a repeat of the mass exodus to their territory after the failed Kurdish uprising of 1991, and to protect the Turkoman minority in Kurdistan.

But Mam Qassem, a Turkoman money changer whose family has lived in Irbil for generations said this was a pretext and that his people enjoy equal rights under Kurdish rule.

"The Turks are only coming for oil," he said, "those Turkomen who ask the Turks to come here; we don't like them, they are like spies for the Turkish government."

Mr. Qassem apparently hasn't heard that it's not about oil, dammit.

Anyway, developing . . .

Daredevil - I feel like a bit like a Star Trek fan - I realize I'm forgiving a lot for the sake of my enjoyment. (Note to self: stop making fun of those people.) But there's a lot I liked. One thing: in most superhero stories, endless contrivances prevent anyone from unmasking the hero. Here everybody takes Daredevil's mask off at some point. Elektra does it, the Kingpin does it, Matt Murdock's priest does it. I liked Matt's "solution" to the Kingpin discovering his identity. It makes a nice change from the default. (Contrive to have the villain die through no fault of the hero's.) It felt right that the one person in on Daredevil's secret identity from the beginning is his priest. The fight with Bullseye atop the pipe organ was pretty fine. The courtship/fight with Elektra: primo. Foggy Nelson: perfect.

What's not to like? The costume. The somewhat jerky pacing. The editing of some of the fight scenes. I wasn't wild about the CGI rendering of Daredevil's radar sense. The only partially-successful response to the problem of Batman Envy.

Batman Envy was even a problem during Frank Miller's legendary first run as series writer, and Miller's work on Daredevil changed the way superhero comics were written. (Miller was the first "good" writer to script comics, where "good" means not confusing overwriting with merit.) Miller did the logical thing and went off to write Batman instead (The Dark Knight Returns). On his return to Daredevil, he actually freed the character from "avenger of the night"-hood. A lot less of the cowardly, superstitious lot calling him " 'Devil!" and quaking at his shadow. The reprint of those issues, Daredevil: Born Again, is well worth your time. I spent an enjoyable hour with it last night in Barnes & Noble after the movie. Miller and "Born Again" artist Dave Mazzuchelli then made "Batman: Year One." I would argue that to read Dark Knight, Born Again and Year One together is to see that by that point the two heroes are utterly distinct in Miller's mind. He's identified a core sweetness in Matt Murdock and his world that just doesn't exist for Bruce Wayne. (He identifies the sweetness with Christianity.)

You could make the case that the movie is about Matt Murdock making the same discovery in himself Frank Miller made for him - the movie Murdock decides his core value is not vengeance but mercy. The decision makes him happier and gives him strength. (It'll make confession easier too.) One problem is that, despite what I wrote about the evolution of Frank Miller's approach to the character, the evolution from avenger to defender is not Daredevil's story - not the character's ur-text from the beginning of the series. Miller never confused Murdock with Bruce Wayne, exactly. He employed Darknight Detective tropes in the reaction of characters to Murdock's costumed identity. A Comics Code baby, Daredevil never had a "killer phase" to grow out of.

The other problem is that it means most of the movie becomes "The Dark Knight Walks with a Cane." At the end, Daredevil decides not to be Batman, but to be Chandler's "man who is not himself mean." But that means we still don't have a Daredevil movie, because it's only at the end of the movie that Matt Murdock becomes Daredevil.

Better Gaming, Better Living - Bruce Baugh's RPG designer's manifesto is worth a general audience. Excerpt:

Yes, I craft entertainment. But entertainment is important. The demands of living a decent and humane existence are tough: it takes work to be a good child and parent, spouse and friend, employer and employee, neighbor and citizen. Life is seldom altogether delightful. Our entertainment time is our chance to renew our sense of enjoyment, and in gaming to do so with friends in a really pretty unique kind of way. Having as much fun as possible in gaming is, or can be, part of living life responsibly, recharging energy and enthusiasm ground down by duty and happenstance. Gaming seldom gives anyone new ideas, and indeed anyone who gets their ideas about life from gaming has some other problems. But good gaming can build us up in a bunch of ways, including the sense of rising to a challenge: "I wanted to do this, and I prepared for it, and I made it work. We did something cool together, and it happened because I made it." Those of us who create games are the collaborators-at-a-distance with all the folks reading and playing the games in their various and sundry ways. If I fail to pursue options for adventure, intrigue, drama, tragedy, and mystery just because they weren't done right or at all 20-odd years ago, I'm being an irresponsible steward of the money and time I'm asking you to invest in my products.

Weekly Fitness Blog Post - Those not into the weight loss thing may enjoy A heavy girl's guide to success, by Kerry Daniels.

This week's title change simply acknowledges what everyone else undoubtedly decided weeks ago - there's nothing "imitation" about this regular feature any more. Of course, I just checked and there's nothing weekly either - despite clear memories of writing a fitness item last Sunday morning, no such post exists in the database. Suddenly Eric Mauro's recent e-mail - "PS no diet posts lately?" seems less cryptic.

So last week we were at 194 pounds, 37 3/4" waist, same as the previous week. This week, 190 pounds, same pants size. From a plateau to a big drop, both of which are expected features of any diet. That drops the BMI to 26.5, still officially (and genuinely) overweight, but making me now slightly thinner than my age-gender cohort (49th percentile). But as I've said before, the heck with those slackers - I'm after better.

(Define better? Okay, two goals - one sensible, one absurd. A few years ago, at a poetry conference, one of the grad students working the conference allowed that he was forty years old. I was stunned. I want to be that guy. Not in a making my hair less gray sense - I don't care about that. In a how can he be in such good shape at that age sense. Second, if I make my weight and am plausibly athletic by this fall, I get to wear a superhero costume at any Halloween parties. I haven't decided which one yet.)

New statistics: Yesterday I used the blood pressure chair by the supermarket prescription counter. These things are nowhere close to definitive and it was my first use. Still, I got 123/76, with a 72/minute heartbeat. Those are the best readings I've had in years. I have to see the doctor this week about something else, so we'll see if these numbers hold up.

Now for the exercise portion of the item. I would say that I continued to pursue a weightlifting-only strategy this week, but I'm not sure that's strictly true - after all, I spent a couple of hours shoveling snow. Snow shoveling is such high-demand activity - which is why people die doing it - that Leonard "Heavyhands" Schwartz actually recommended "practice shoveling" as an exercise in his first book. It was the only exercise that did not involve small dumbbells. Instead, he suggested holding an actual snow shovel and engaging in rhythmic shoveling movements at your target heart rate for several minutes during your workout. Two hours of shoveling can easily burn 800 calories. (For perspective, though, that's only about a quarter pound of fat.)

What I can say is that the snow provided a useful fitness test. I did three sessions over three days. Arms, legs, abs and heart held up fine. That's quite a change from the early winter snows, where my heart rate shot right up and I had to take frequent rests and walked like a zombie for days afterward. I suffered some mild soreness in the back muscles, but thanks to those stiff-legged deadlifts, even that wasn't as bad is it's been after previous snows. (Another thing Schwartz and the slow-cadence weightlifting gurus would agree on: the solution to America's back problems is not to avoid using our backs. The solution is to train our backs.)

Hey. not having a heart attack while shoveling snow is a major fitness goal for men my age.

Am I convinced yet that slow-cadence weight training really is all the exercise one needs? No, not yet. I've felt subjectively less conditioned in the chest area toward the end of the week - two weeks since my last heavyhands session. That could be a cold I've picked up, though. And I posted those good blood pressure and heartbeat numbers regardless. I plan to give the weight's-only program another month.

The part of this post that isn't obsessively about me. I do, I should mention, get fitness-blog e-mail. Eric Mauro writes:

I tried out your plan, don't know if I'm any stronger, but it does leave more time for the fam. I'm counting on you to clear my conscience. Certainly there must be a better way to do this than chipping off those calories on the stairmaster. I'm only 33 and already my joints are going. Oy my sciatica...

The numbers one more time. Running a mile uses up a hundred calories. A pound of fat is 3500 calories. Run a mile, in place or on the go. Eat 3 oreos. You've lost ground. Plus, the stairmaster does nothing for the upper body. (At least elliptical trainers provide for arm work, though it looks like the range of motion is nothing spectacular. But I've never used one.) Eric: I clear your conscience. Build muscle. Weights do that.

Now, what the weight training enthusiasts may not appreciate is that there is an aerobic way to burn a lot more than a hundred calories at a time and build muscle too. You all know what it is by now. Schwartz's tables in the first Heavyhands book suggest that a 170# man can burn 1.5 calories per minute per MET. (1 MET is the work the body does at rest.) A trained heavyhander can sustain workloads of 10-15 METs over a half hour. That's 15-22 calories per minute. Four half-hour sessions of that a week could burn a half to three-quarters of a pound of fat and would also, if you keep working in some aerobic intervals with heavier dumbbells, build muscle mass over your entire body. That means that, unlike the stairmaster, it will keep working between sessions.

I saw a jogger along Sligo Creek Parkway yesterday, her little arms up in front of her like a squirrel's, and I just wanted to stop the car and shout "Stop that!" (Fred Hahn claims that studies have found that runners have as much of the brain protien S-100B in their system as boxers, suggesting that they're bouncing their brains around while exercising.)

I'm sure now that slow-cadence weight training builds muscle, and at a faster rate than Heavyhands alone. I can feel it. Like I said, ask me in a month weather my breathing and heart rate are where I feel they should be. The problem is that, if slow-cadence weight training turns out not to be all one needs or wants from an exercise program, it's hard to combine it with anything else. All the slow-cadence gurus stress the importance of recovery time. That's when the body actually builds muscle. So far, my legs are taking most of a week to recover between sessions. (I plan to try out a new squat this week that might alleviate the leg problem.)

I'm automatically suspicious of the fitness advisors who say "You need to do all the exercise types" - it sounds political. But if they're right, slow-cadence weight training makes it hard to fit those other exercises in - you don't want to ruin recovery time. The slow-cadence gurus I've seen all say, "You don't need to do aerobics, but if you really want to, wait four or five days after your weight workout."

Here's a possible alternative. Call it "Fortnightly Fitness Fun": Do a slow-cadence weight session Sunday. Rest all week. Next week, do three four intense sessions of Heavyhands. Then start the cycle over. The week of Heavyhands should at the very least prevent muscle atrophy, allowing one to continue to make strength gains after the weight sessions.

But that's for later.

Dave Lull writes

PS: I've been THINKING about Super Slow for a while, but have never done it. I think a lot about things before I try them. I haven't done an exercise program since I got out of boot camp at the age of 22. I've been thinking about exercise, in various forms, since then, i.e., for about 32 years now. Someday I may actually do some. Well, actually, I did do some exercises a while ago to help alleviate some pain I was suffering. Of course, when the pain subsided, so did my bout with exercise. But the success I had with these exercises made me interested in the ideas behind them. So now I'm THINKING about them.

Dave's suggested reading is this article from trainer Pete Egoscue. Egoscue theorizes about pro athletes that injure themselves:

Despite all the hours of practice and weight training, high school and college ball and endless drills, these athletes are still products of their own culture, and that means they've been running a motion deficit since infancy. The great thieves of bodily function are cars, desks and television sets. Technology is robbing us of a precious legacy. We are losing our life-support system.

The Synopsis of the Egoscue Method contains this spectacularly bad sentence:

That decrease in performance could be expressed in the way you deliver a curve ball to a person having difficulty rising from a chair.

That's just cruel.