Bye and Bye - Tell me again how if we just vote the evil Republican Bushies out of office our liberties will be safe. This just in:

Retail employees who sell violent video games to minors would face a $500 fine under a bill passed by the Washington state Senate.

The measure, approved 47-7, targets games that depict violence against women and the killing of police officers. It was passed by the state House last month and is expected to be signed into law by Gov. Gary Locke.

Governor Locke is a Democrat. State House bill sponsor Mary Lou Dickerson is a Democrat. The House passed the bill 81-16 and the Senate, 42-7. The roll call offers a heartening picture of Republicans and Democrats, men and women, joining hands across the aisle to threaten poorly paid store clerks with the majesty of the law if they should flout the legislators' superstitions and mania for control. That fine is equal to two to three weeks' take-home pay for a cashier, though Washington State legislators and the people who want favors from them can no doubt easily drop that much on lunch.

The title of this item is a translation of the Washington state motto, "Al-Ki," a Chinook phrase also translated as "Hope for the Future." As if.

Blogwatch Auxiliary - Some things out there:

Perverse Access Memory. I can't read this site from home because of some stupid, still unfixed routing problem on the part of my ISP. But when I was reading it from another machine today there were several good things.

Leonard of Unruled does requests! I asked him if he would write something about the current chaos in Iraq from an anarcho-capitalist perspective. "Mere Anarchy" is the result.

Jesse Walker has a really good item on Passover, a "radio fable" and the last word in political taxonomy.

Making Light. Teresa Nielsen Hayden, "almost certainly a man," notes that "I’m getting linked to by various blogs that are full of spluttering indignation about how I obviously value a museum full of trinkets over the lives and liberty of the poor oppressed Iraqi people" and goes on to explain how full of shit these critics are. Actually, there's just a bunch of good stuff on Making Light right now. Read it all.

Body and Soul comments on a stunning bit of moral opacity from CNN, "Sally Field imperialism," she calls it.

. . . not only do we bomb you, take over your country and exploit your resources, but when we do, you must like us, really, really like us.

Also a good set of links to Iraqi Museum looting developments.

The Agitator has more on "your Weekly Standard/National Review guide to appropriate Catholicism." Plus, fan mail. And it's his birthday tomorrow, so put some good wishes in his comments box.

Electrolite has, well, fuck-all. All week now.

Tacitus, apparently felled by a Movable Type upgrade gone bad, has the same.

Flit has a manful "Where I Went Wrong" post about flaws in his contemporaneous analysis of the war. Not that he did badly in the first place.

God of the Machine has a long, informative review of the latest novel by Richard "Clockers" Price and the only good-natured retrospective on Gulf War Phase II that I've seen. (I do these blog watches to help you find the sort of things you ain't going to find here.)

Redwood Dragon seems to have redesigned. Proprietor Dave Trowbridge has a table of political contribution figures by companies that have gotten Iraqi reconstruction contracts and some postwar optimism, if "we're going to be on [the occupation job] for a good long while" counts as optimism. Dave explains why he thinks it does.

Best Libertarian in a Libertarian Role - Have I mentioned lately that Julian Sanchez still kicks ass and his blog is a must-read? Just start at the top and read everything you haven't read yet.

Note: Some people may wonder how I can say Julian is our "best liberartian blogger" while also saying that his fellow CATO mafioso Radley Balko has the best weblog period. Am I saying that Radley's somehow Not Really Libertarian? No. I think of Radley's Agitator site as a general interest blog, with a sizable portion of politics, run by a libertarian. Julian's site more purely devotes itself to politics and political philosophy. Notes from the Lounge: libertarian blog. The Agitator: blog by a libertarian.

I'm glad we cleared that up.

More Catholic than the Pope - Radley Balko has good sport with the "Catholicism stops at the water's edge" crowd at the Weekly Standard and National Review.

The Wrong Man for the Job - Good Instapundit demolition of John Ashcroft, somehow the attorney general of the United States.

Which brings up a question: how did he get that job?

And Deepen on Palmyra's Street - So what's up with Syria and chemical weapons? According to the Federation of American Scientists Syria report:

"Syria has a mature chemical weapons program, begun in the 1970s, incorporating nerve agents, such as sarin, which have completed the weaponization cycle. . . "

"Syria has been producing chemical warfare agents and munitions since the mid-1980's. . . "

"In addition to mustard gas, Syria is known to be manufacturing nerve gas agents, and can pack CW agents into a wide variety of munitions, including ballistic missiles. . . "

"Syria first acquired CW artillery shells as a "gift" from Egypt just prior to the 1973 war. . . "

"Israeli Chief of Staff Ehud Baraq told an audience of leading industrialists in Tel Aviv on December 6, 1991 that Syria's chemical weapons capability was 'larger than Iraq's' . . . "

So there you have it. Independent observers have long been convinced of Syria's chemical warfare capability. (Internal evidence suggests that the first version of the FAS article dates from late 1991 or early 1992.

Now here's the thing: the strongest argument the Iraq hawks had was that Saddam Hussein had repeatedly used poison gas against his enemies. We skeptics were forced to argue that he had never used them against an opponent capable of effective and personal retaliation and had never, despite a history of supporting anti-Israeli terror groups, shared out the chemical weapons he was known to have or the biological weapons he was suspected to have. He had specifically declined to use chemical weapons against an opponent capable of retaliating not just in kind but in more than kind. (That would be us, in 1990-91.) I considered and still consider the skeptics' arguments decisive, but they didn't carry the day. One can understand that, since the hawks could point to Iraq's actual use of what it had.

With Syria, the picture is much more clearcut. On the evidence, the country has had deliverable chemical weapons for almost 30 years. During that time it fought at least two wars directly with Israel (1973 in the Golan and 1982 in Lebanon), a proxy war with the US in Lebanon in the early 1980s and a proxy war with Israel (via Hezbollah) for the next eighteen years. Plus the wars against Lebanon's Maronite Christian Phalange that gave Syria supremacy in that country.

And in all that time, it never used the chemical weapons it had available.Throughout, it has supported various Palestinian resistance groups, pretty much all of whom include terrorism among their options. In all that time it never passed chemical weapons to terrorists for attacks on Israel.

It's not hard to see why. Israel would have pretty quickly hit back with poison gas and probably nuclear weapons if Syria tried it. (It's also possible that even a loathsome figure like the late Hafez al-Assad found actually using chemical weapons too . . . nasty.)

So there's a deterrability case regarding Syria too. It's much easier to make than the one for Iraq. Those who would argue otherwise face a heavy burden.

The Case Against - The Luxury of Conceit argues that "As long as Jordan has any influence, official or otherwise, on a franchise's personnel decisions, that franchise will never succeed." He has his reasons. I like to think he's mistaken, but my record on the issue is not good.

Repeating Rifles and handguns, and what-have-you. Eve Tushnet address the Iraqi gun question in her latest Jewish World Review column. To my mind, the beginning of the article leans too heavily on a weak Jane Galt counter to the famous New York Times article, but Eve closes strongly:

Simply because one right, in isolation, is not enough to bring down a modern totalitarian state, that in no way implies that the right is useless in warding off tyranny; useless for other purposes; not really a right at all; or a right we can sharply curtail or do away with entirely.

This echoes a piece of reader mail I got from a someone who's practice is to explicitly tell me those occasions when I'm free to use his name and who didn't tell me this time:

I also do buy the canary in coal mine but better analogy is that gun rights are like a receipt -- you can lose your receipt and still enforce your rights, but it's harder; you can keep your receipt and still lose your rights, but it's better to keep it as a policy.

A government that says, if you dont trust us, here's your guarantee (receipt): you can keep your guns and organize with them. That's a governement in good faith.

This seems to be a logical problem for some gun phobes - they argue, implicitly or explicitly, that if gun rights aren't a perfect guarantee of liberty or personal safety, then they are worthless and can be dispensed with. We have an example on Counterspin this very morning. This is akin to arguing that habeas corpus hasn't helped Mike Hawash, so we might as well dump it.

Is Our Bloggers Learning? - Yes, I believe they might be. Near as I can tell without really, you know, looking, relatively few hawkish bloggers boomed the "buried mobile labs" story. Which was smart, since

The 11 cargo containers were filled with new laboratory equipment apparently intended to make conventional weapons, said team leader Chief Warrant Officer 2 Monte Gonzalez.

That per CNN a few hours ago. Sites I searched: Popdex, Instapundit, On the Third Hand and AndrewSullivan.com. Near as I can tell, even Best [Neocon-Approved Items] of the Web didn't pick it up.

It goes without saying that Iraq may yet turn out to have Weapons of Some Destruction. It may be encouraging that our hawkish friends (and adversaries) have gotten burned enough by the topic to approach initial reports cautiously. Of course, it may be that they just want to change the subject, since WSDs have not been a good one for them so far.

End of the Road? - Add to the list of things that may be true the assassination of Nizar al-Khazraji, who was, according to Al Bawaba, on his way to the US-sponsored opposition-group meeting in Nassiriyah. (Or Ur, depending on the precision of Iraqi geography.) I found nothing about this on the sites of CNN, MSNBC, the Post or BBC. It may not be true. It may be. (People may mount "20'x20' containers" on semi trailers and rail cars too, even though standard semi trailers and rail cars are half that wide and half again as long or more.)

For what it's worth, the BBC was referring to Khazraji in the present tense as recently as "7 hours ago," according to Google News. Khazraji was in Denmark recently, under house arrest, but disappeared, as noted by Michael Young in Slate. For the record, al-Khazraji was under house arrest in Denmark on suspicion of helping to direct the famous gassing of Halabja. Khazraji maintained that was just his enemies making stuff up. The top theory for how Khazraji got out of Denmark involves the CIA, said to favor him for the role of post-Saddam Saddam. If he's dead, there will be a lot of plausible suspects. Khazraji's was not a life lived with an eye toward minimizing the number of people who would like to kill him.

Help! I'm Bored with the Fate of the World! - Lots going on. The US is trying to provoke Syria while also letting it be known that war is not on the table. For now. If you can believe what you read. (Here's a tip: you can't.) In an example of the genius of our two-party system, where Democrats try to sound more hawkish than Republicans on international issues while Republicans try to sound more compassionate than Democrats on domestic issues, Senator Bob Graham declared Saturday that the US "ought to consider launching cruise missiles or another form of warfare on terrorist camps in Syria after giving Syria time to dismantle the camps" according to Newsmax according to the Miami Herald.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi occupation already begins to resemble the nightmare scenario doves warned against, with demonstrations in Nasiriyah, protesters in Mosul shot dead during an encounter with US troops, the least influential and most influential actors in postwar Iraq spurning the US-sponsored loya jirga (or whatever), plus ethnic cleansing in Kurdistan. (A mistake! say some Kurds quoted in the article. Not, say some others.)

And I just can't get arsed, he said Britishly, to say much about it all right now. Didn't we just do this? If history is going to repeat as farce, shouldn't it be funny?

I realize this ennui is a personal failing, but after all this is a personal website.

On the bright side, US troops caught Abu Abbas, mastermind of the Achille Lauro hijacking and murderer of harmless American tourist Leon Klinghoffer, singled out for death on account of being Jewish. The chance to lock Abbas up and throw away the key is small but meaningful consolation.

Tinfoil Hats and Others - Amusing article about, yes, Iraqwar.ru in The Progressive Review. I doubt its central speculation - that the Russian GRU was using the site to try to pass helpful information to the Iraqi government, but the fallback speculation seems possible:

It's quite a notion: Russian spooks blogging concrete advice to Iraq. It's a notion that Strafor's Matthew Baker termed "nonsense." He said, "A website is not the way to get information to the Iraqis; a phone or radio is better."

Baker sees it, rather, as an expression of an internecine struggle among various Russian military and espionage interests wrestling over whether to align more closely with the U.S. or seek a counterweight axis with Germany and France. He said, "They're not putting it up for amusement or profit, but for reasons to do with Russian politics." He ad! ded, "It's an agit-prop campaign by those who argue that sticking close to the U.S. is wrong."

This seems entirely possible. It was the same for all the players in the war period - you couldn't believe what they told you, but you could learn something from what they wanted you to believe.

(Thanks to Hesiod for e-mailing me the article.)

A Pack of Iraqis, Not a Herd - From a Saturday Red Cross report:

Alwiya Children's Hospital: This 125-bed hospital, the main pediatric medical facility in Baghdad, had been protected from looting by the presence of armed medical staff living in the hospital. The wards were closed, but some 100 consultations per day were being performed for out-patients. The staff were defending the hospital with courage and conviction. They definitely need protection and additional personnel. Some paediatric drugs were lacking.

My emphasis. Thanks to reader Tom Scudder for the link.

Every Dog Has His Say - Your Talking Dog e-mails about regime change collectible card games:

Honestly, Jim-- the cards are really perfect. Can you think of a more apt metaphor for our riverboat gambler in chief than a deck of playing cards? I can't. 55 no less. (That would be three jokers; in 3-D, Dubya, Dick and Don, perhaps? Or is it Beshar Assad, Kim Jong Il and Ayatollah Khamani. Ah, what a wonderful game!) There's nothing more charming than a riverboat gambler who thinks he's on a winning streak.

Well, we're at Day 25, and no WSDs, no WMDs, no anthrax, no mustard gas, no RBS-- just some freaking pesticide... Assuming that this really was ever about the bad stuff, this sure would be awfully embarassing. Fortunately, we both know that Saddam hid all of them in Syria, so that will solve that mystery. Colin Powell sounded awfully sure we would find the bad stuff. Of course, he sounded awfully sure we'd get 9 UNSC votes too, as I recall.

Or did Saddam hide it all in Iran? I keep forgetting. No matter.

Well, the bright side is that this might be really good for Amram Mitzna. If we go ahead and remove all of Israel's existential threats, Arafat will have to clean up his act instantaneously. At that point, the Israeli electorate might feel safe enough to dump Likud once and for all, clearly an angle the neo-con hawks failed to consider.

Its a good thing the Tigris-Euphrates has supported civilization for 8,000 years. Cause methinks we're gonna be there for a while.

Me, I have various thoughts about the WSDs that didn't bark (so far), but that's for another time.

When Doves Cry - Well, not cry exactly. Jesse Walker has a fabulous consideration of the aftermath of war from the standpoint of an opponent. Writing like this is why I've been a Jesse Walker fan for years.

Weekly Fitness Blog Item - 180#, 36.5" waist. That's "still" on the waist, but a two pound improvement over last week. One more pound and my body mass index will hit 25 and I'll officially no longer be overweight. At that point I'll write a bestselling book, From Fat to Flabby in Just Five Months. Who wouldn't buy that?

Getting in shape is a lot like cleaning your house after you've let it go for awhile. Every step you take to tidy up reveals some new level of mess that, while you didn't notice it before, seems to jump right out at you now. 36 pounds lighter than my Thanksgiving weight, I find myself looking askance at my posture - I'm working on carrying myself straighter - and thinking that my stomach muscles are still distended from all those years of overeating and under-exercising, and realizing that I'm now at a weight and fitness level that began to bother me in my mid-thirties. So, miles to go before I veg out.

The other thing this demonstrates is how loose the BMI standards are. I will not feel slim at 179 pounds. Of course, after tonight's anniversary dinner, I might be some time getting back to this morning's weight of 180! Strip steak, my first serious french fry consumption in months, and the cheescake I promised myself 10 pounds ago. (Mrs. Offering at less but had silly girl drinks like - no lie - a chocolate martini and coffee with booze in it.)

Now for the reader mail section - in some ways the most important part of these updates since it proves that not everybody skips the fitness items. So there.

Adrian Turtle suggests a culprit in the Case of the Cereal Headaches:

I noticed you mentioning getting headaches on the days you ate a high-fiber cereal sweetened with Splenda. Splenda is a migraine trigger for me, and might be causing problems for you as well. (Nutrasweet is a very, very strong migraine trigger for me, and is known to cause headaches for lots of people...the sucralose effect is a bit subtler and less well-known.) You might want to try eating cereal without the Splenda. I like it with some frozen blueberries.

This could be. I haven't consumed much Splenda on my diet, content to let my sweet tooth atrophy. But if it is true, that will be too bad, since Splenda is really really good. It's the only artificial sweetener I can stand, and I find it nearly indistinguishable from sugar.

Meanwhile, Kevin Marks had a suggestion for my cholesterol problem:

I was told to do this too, and tried the '8-week cholesterol cure' diet, including Niacin and Phytosterols (which block LDL absorption from food), and oatmeal for breakfast. My HDl went up, my LDL didnt' budge.

Then, I started taking soluble fibre (metamucil) 3 times a day. Within 3 weeks my total cholesterol dropped 70 points. The fibre absorbs the cholesterol and you crap it out.

Thanks to Kevin for nudging me about fiber. I was taking fiber earlier in my diet, but gave it up as I increased my carbohydrate intake. Since Kevin's e-mail, I've worked it back in (also Niacin). We'll see how it works. I'm eating less red meat too, when it's not my anniversary, and I've given up breakfast eggs.

On the exercise front, my mother is taking a hiatus from her Super Slow weight training (see most previous fitness blog items). She needs to get a shoulder fixed and the doctor wants her to hold off weight training until after the procedure and physical therapy afterwards. She was pretty clearly looking for an excuse to give it up anyway. She says the leg press hurts her feet (which suffer from neuropathy) and the pain around her artificial knees has not improved. I consider this a shame because, starting from just about zero, she's made definite functional gains in just a couple of months. She manages steps better and more easily gets in and out of chairs. It's hard training though. I'm close to a wreck for two days after my own workouts. We'll see what happens.

Frabjous Day - True, I had to work all day at my consulting gig with my old company, but it was sunny and pleasant, we got all our prisoners back alive, which would be the high point of any normal day, but beyond that, it was twelve years ago today that Mrs. Offering and I officially commenced our Unqualified Enterprise, so we added a lovely dinner and dessert to the day's other good news.

I have just two words for you, Loyal Reader: Huh. Zah!