Department of Corrections - Officially it's a Jesse Walker correction, but it's a problem with his USA Today op-ed, caught by Steven Postrel, that I should have noted myself when linking the article. Jesse runs Steven Postrel's letter and his response.

A Fanboy's Notes - Tomorrow is Free Comic Book Day, when a dying industry tries to win back a handful of its lost market share in tandem with the release of a major movie. (This year, it's X-Men 2.) The variety of free comics available is astounding, from Donald Duck through X-Men to indie and small press titles, even "Christa's 100% guaranteed how-to manual for getting anyone to read comic books!" - itself a comic.

Go on. What's the worst that can happen? You end up like me since the Spiderman movie came out, buying a half-dozen titles or more a month and dozens of reprint collections in the last year? Your will is stronger than that, surely. Just a taste can't hurt you. All you have to do is plug your zip code into the Store Locator.

(Thanks to reader Bill Dowling for the e-mail reminder and the link to the promotional site.)

Technical Note - I've gotten a couple of inquiries recently, so I should probably announce that yes, I do have an RSS feed, here.

Ask a HARD One Why Don't You - Tacitus has an interesting item on the hard-to-find Iraqi Bad Things, in which he asks

(Kos suggests impeachment if WMD are not found in six months; does that mean Clinton should have suffered an additional impeachment once it was clear that the Serbs weren't perpetrating genocide upon the Kosovars?)

Well of course he should have. I'm glad we cleared that up. Also for starting a war without congressional authorization.

Well! It was nice having a chance to ride my hobby horse. Read the rest of Tacitus' item for his actual points, which are worth your time.

Tracking the Light of Reason - Arthur Silber's weblog seems to have changed addresses. At the new domain, he has the usual cornucopia of quality, including lots and lots of stuff on Senator Rick Santorum (R-Spanish Inquisition).

Reading Around - Some good stuff:

Jesse Walker on Iran, Iraq and nonviolent resistance in the USA Today.

Jonathan "Head Heeb" Edelstein is back on the Israeli politics beat, which means I don't have to get all my Israeli news from the Talking Dog. Jonathan has two good, in-depth items of interest. This one covers the vexed birth of the new Palestinian Authority government. In it, Jonathan offers at least the hope that Ariel Sharon may be willing to work with Abu Mazen, since he doesn't despise Mazen the way he does Yassir Arafat (who is, let's face it, an easy man to despise). And this one covers an issue I came across in a Ran HaCohen column months ago but didn't feel competent to judge, whether Ha'aretz keeps its harsher takes on Israeli news from its english-language readers. Jonathan makes a damned convincing case that it just isn't so.

Ikram "Path of the Paddle" Saeed has a couple of useful Iraq pieces (here and here). Plus, Canadian stuff.

Speaking of Canadian stuff, Colby Cosh asks the musical, Toronto-quarantine-related question, "Funny how Canadians love squishy institutions of global governance until one of them acts the least bit peremptory towards them." Okay, it's not a question.

Balloon Juice proprietor John Cole wonders if " the Chinese secrecy and deception regarding SARS could be the foundation of an internal uprising, particularly when people in China start dying in the numbers that I unfortunately think they will?" I'd say there's an outside chance of this. Sure, the Chicoms slaughtered subjects in the tens of millions earlier in their history and got away with it, but the country is more open now and the elite less confident than the good old Gang of Four. SARS and the bureaucratic bungling of the epidemic might, and I stress the word might, have the same impact on the PRC that Chernobyl had on the Warsaw Pact - the beginning of the end.

Aziz Poonawalla gets nibbled to death by ducks. Aziz is one of the few bloggers I know who actually blogs to learn - most of us who do this already know what we think about most everything we write about. It's why we started our flippin' blogs in the first place. But one of the things that Aziz could stand to learn is that some criticisms aren't worth taking seriously. That said, regarding his item wondering if Israel really needs it's nuclear arsenal, my response is Hell yes they do. Put me in charge of Israel and I wouldn't give it up in a million years. Nonproliferation remains a fantasy and some of Israel's enemies (Iran comes to mind) are beyond the reach of its conventional forces. A secure deterrent is your best friend in a case like that.

Tacitus, dean of conservative bloggers, is back. He also ended up with a huge bandwidth bill from all the publicity his site got early in the war, so he's taking donations.

Franklin Harris Makes His Marvel. Kind of. He also defends Saddam Hussein . . . 's art collection.

The American Way of War - Here's the thing about the Chemical Ali rumors. They may be true or they may not be, but it's one more indication that this grand strategy of hitting the buildings of individual enemies with really big bombs may not be all it's cracked up to be. Bin Laden, Mullah Omar, Saddam Hussein, Ali Hassan al-Majid, Uday, Qusay and Zeppo, if we're going to make war on individuals, as we increasingly seem to do, we ought to consider doing it in such a way that we know whether or not we actually got them. We're still not sure about Bin Laden and Mullah Omar a year and a half later. It sure would be nice to know, rather than relying on wishful thinking or reflex skepticism.

This isn't a "hawk or dove" or "isolationist vs. internationalist" issue, at least not on first contact. It's a matter of matching means to ends. The preferred means would be the ones that let you know whether you got your target or not, which you would think means "boys who go to a particular place, at H-hour, occupy a designated terrain, stand on it, dig the enemy out of their holes, force them then and there to surrender or die." (I read it in a book, and discussed it in connection with Bin Laden's resurfacing late last year.)

Where it becomes a "hawk or dove" or "isolationist vs. internationalist" issue is when you start to suspect, as I do, that we choose the big-bombs-at-a-distance approach over the "dig the enemy out of their holes" approach because the political costs of the latter are too high.

The Origin of Chemical Ali - I wondered about this the other day. Russil Wvong e-mailed me a link to a Human Rights Watch report from this year. Further searching on their site led me to a 1993 report assigning the chief responsibility for the various gassings of the Kurds to Ali Hassan al-Majid. That's two years before the defections of Wafiq as-Samarra'i and Nizar Khazraji. This by no means clears either of those, um, gentlemen of subsidiary responsibility, though it's worth noting that if you search HRW for Khazraji material everything that comes up re chemical weapons is in context of the Danish case, and Samarra'i is hardly mentioned. Regardless, the HRW report establishes al-Majid's own culpability pretty clearly. Which makes it a drag that the latest reports from Iraq suggest that the bastard may not be dead after all.

Welcome to my Nightmare - One of the arguments against conquering Iraq by force presupposed Iraqi possession of chemical and biological arms. Like, for instance:

Those risks are: Nuclear Pakistan falls, or freelancing harabists in its military slip one of its bombs to a group like Al Qaeda; Al Qaeda picks up surplus Soviet nukes; the Chinese decide that the grand encirclement is proceeding too far, so they see to it that Al Qaeda gets the bomb; or, in the immediate postwar chaos of this much-desired conquest of Iraq, diehard elements of Saddam's armed forces slip some bioweapons into hostile hands.

Of these dire possibilities, only the Chinese angle seems less likely than a Saddam Bomb attack now, and all of them get worse in the aftermath of an Iraq conquest.

My emphasis of my original text.

So here is the situation if certain hawks are right to retain their confidence that Saddam had the gas and germs we said he did:

o the stuff is out there, unsecured;
o the Pentagon says it could take a year or more to get to all those sites;

Inescapable conclusion: any stockpiles of WSDs that exist are at high risk of reaching our enemies.

We're told that we have a list of thousands of suspect sites. That it would take so long to visit them all comes down to one obvious problem: force levels. We simply can't get expeditiously to all the sites we need to secure whatever weapons Saddam may have had. That suggests one of two possibilities:

o the "cakewalk plan" was sufficient to topple Hussein but incapable of fulfilling a major goal of the war (secure Hussein's Bad Things)
o the "major goal of the war" wasn't really a major goal of the war at all.

We're back to the old dilemma, incompetence or malfeasance.

Where's Nizar? - Who knows. A week later and there's still no confirmation of the report of the assassination of post-Saddam Saddam candidate Nizar Khazraji. Kendall Harmon sent me the text of a BBC Monitoring Service report in which one of Khazraji's colleagues denies that Khazraji has been killed. From Khazraji himself, nothing. Given that the only assassination report seems to come from a single Arab news service (al Bawaba), I'm skeptical.

Kendall has two items on his own blog. The Khazraji confrere quoted by the BBC claims that the general is in Kurdistan, a place that would seem to have a high torn-limb-from-limb factor, given his history there. While Khazraji denies that he had any role in the gas attack at Halabja or other gassings during the Anfal campaign against the Kurds after the war with Iran, he was still commander of the Northern Front during the whole unpleasant period, and Iraqi depredations went well beyond gas attacks.

But here's something for an enterprising sort to look into: the origin of "Chemical Ali." When I first started thinking about this issue, it seemed like the attachment of blame for the Anfal gassings to Ali Hassan al-Majid might have originated with Khazraji himself. With further research, I found a 1995 article from Middle East Quarterly in which another defecting Sunni general, Wafiq as-Samarra'i, a Sunni Arab from Samarra

refrains from blaming the Iraqi army for these crimes and satisfies himself with strong denunciations of Saddam Husayn and `Ali Hasan al-Majid, Saddam Husayn's paternal cousin and the operation's commander.

Samarra'i, by the by, has been little in the news since the war broke out, only popping up in the occasional uninformative profile.

There are two ways of looking at the matter: 1) Multiple knowledgeable sources confirm Ali Hassan al-Majid's responsibility for the war crimes of the late 1980s and now the bastard's dead. 2) A couple of operators with blood on their hands and an eye on the main chance settle on a patsy and make it stick. Both men have good connections to the US intelligence/military sector. Conveniently, their patsy gets killed by that sector before he can be asked a lot of nosy questions. 3) Why choose? Plenty of blame to go around. But it doesn't have to go around if it can be interred with the man with the flashy name.

Wait for Me! - Don't let me be the last one to quote these bons mots from Jesse Walker:

DISTINCTIONS:
Patriotism: I love my dad.
Nationalism: My dad can beat up your dad.
Imperialism: Here he comes now.

That about says it all.

Yet Utter the Word "Democratic" - Two useful demurrals.

Gene Callahan heightens the contradictions.

Will Wilkinson notes, quotably, that when you say "democracy" you've said very little:

Getting a democracy is rather like getting a mammal for a gift. Kittens are nice. Wolverines will lunch on your eyeballs. You don't drop a wolverine in your friend's lap, and then walk away feeling you've done them a favor, since the best pets are mammals. Democracy names a vast range of possible institutional structures.

There is, of course, more.

It's Worse Than That - I've been thinking of the Josh Marshall quote that Dave Trowbridge cited approvingly last week:

Iraq is a country of some twenty-four million people. It shouldn't surprise us that a few tens of thousands can be mobilized to support the withdrawal of American troops and the creation of an Islamic state.

True enough. Dave Trowbridge glosses Marshall thusly:

No, this is certainly not a reason for the beating of breasts and the uttering of cries of doom.

But you see, it works both ways. By the same standards, it shouldn't surprise us that a few hundreds or thousands can be mobilised to pull down statues on camera or hand out flowers to the troops. Theoretically that means the future is open, the attitudes of Iraqis beyond the current extremes fluid. In practice, you're back to that old Unqualified Offerings watchword, structure. And the structural situation is, we ain't from around there. The essential conservatism of the planet tilts against us still, as it has from the moment this misadventure entered the planning stage.

Full of News - I got the Noli Irritare Leones link below from Eve Tushnet's site, which is suddenly chock full of new stuff after several days' goldbricking.

Meanwhile, Avedon Carol is in newish, possibly temporary blog digs as she recovers from eye surgery. See Avedon's Other Weblog.

Justin Slotman is doing NBA playoff blogging, plus other stuff.

Meanwhile, Jesse Walker's weblog has become frighteningly active. I say frighteningly because, when he bothers to update it, it's so good you probably don't need the rest of us.

By Gun! - I would never have thought there could be a definition of "gun nuts" that I could accept, but Sappho, pacifist proprietor of Noli Irittare Leones, has come up with one:

. . . someone who vigorously defends the Second Amendment and doesn't care a fig about the rest of the Bill of Rights.

She continues:

And, while I don't ever plan, as a pacifist, to be out there organizing for my right to bear arms (it's my right not to bear arms that I want to defend so much as my right not to bear arms), I do recognize when a gun rights activist is my ally on these other Bill of Rights issues.

As my nine-year-old niece is fond of saying, "I have no problem with that." I would only add that it works both ways. That is, as someone fond of the entire Bill of Rights, I recognize that while "gun nuts" (by this definition) aren't my allies on most of the amendments, they are my allies when it comes to the Second.

In other gun news, I've made the links page of the very hardcore Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, and couldn't be happier. And Hesiod took exception to my reading of his earlier item on the subject. I disagree with his contention that "the John Lott controversy has show" much of anything except the reliability of Lott's own scholarship.

He concludes:

Governments are, ultimately, a means to manage and control the use of force to settle disputes.

The one word I disagree with here is the word that changes everything: "ultimately." You could replace it with "among other things" or "when they're working right" or "on some accounts intended to be." But "ultimately" reduces all the many dimensions of the assertion by one sector of society of a monopoly on violence to a very misleading scalar.

Weekly Fitness Blog Post - 179 pounds. I forgot to check my waist this morning. This side of Easter dinner I'll be damned if I'm checking it. But it feels like it's still somewhere between 36 and 37". Unless I've shrunk, I'm officially no longer obese as of this morning. My body mass index is now exactly 25. Still shooting for 165 pounds, which will be a BMI of 23.

Finally started Fortnightly Fitness Fun in earnest today by engaging in my first cardio workout in over two months - a half hour of Heavyhands, mostly in the nearby park, finishing up with bellyaerobics (Heavyhands' ab exercises) on the new workout bench downstairs. Decided to try the three-pound weights, which turned out to be absolutely my limit. I had to keep changing up arm moves to work different muscles.

It was fun. Nice to get out in the morning air with the dog and see other people out and about. Exercise is not supposed to be fun, the Super Slow people keep saying, but I enjoyed it anyway.

Fortnightly Fitness Fun, remember, works as follows:

Day 1: Super Slow weight training.
Day 2-5: Rest.
Day 6: Heavyhands panaerobics.
Day 8: Another Heavyhands session.
Day 10: Another Heavyhands session.
Day 12: Another Heavyhands session.
Day 14: Goto Day 1.

My other big learning experience this week was niacin flushes. I started taking niacin (vitamin B-3) in hopes of improving my cholesterol, after reader Kevin Marks mentioned taking niacin for his own cholesterol. When, one morning a week and a half ago, I started feeling hot and itchy in the car on the way to work, I thought it was because of a new laundry additive Mrs. Offering was trying. It was another week until I made the connection.

The niacin causes these small capilaries to get larger -- so they might be able to carry two or three blood cells at the same time.  This is a tremendous increase in blood flow.

You experience this as a reddening of the skin -- simply because there is more blood close to the surface of the body.  As this blood flows in these areas the cells of the small capilaries will also be getting rid of their waste products, and often they produce "histamine" as part of that process.  That histamine is another natural substance produced by every cell in the body -- when the cell is under attack, or is getting rid of toxins.

So explains Dr. Brooks at the website linked above.

The heck of it is, the niacin flush, unsettling as it is, appears to be good for you. And it's as close as most of us will come to knowing what it's like to turn into the Hulk. You can get "flush-free" niacin, but you can also just take regular niacin on a full stomach only if you want to avoid the flush. Me, I kind of like it now.

Philosophical topic of the week: fitness and narcissism. Curmudgeons claim that focusing overmuch on your body shape and appearance is narcissistic, and therefore bad. I'm willing to accept the first part (the narcissism) but not the second (the badness). Here's the thing: maybe it's just me, but I don't find that I think about my body more than I did before I started the Unqualified Road to Health Program. That's because I thought about my body quite a lot before I started losing weight. "How fat I am!" I thought. "I sure have gotten weak!" I also thought. "My heart sure does beat fast for even minor exertions!" I thought when not thinking the other things. "I look like a cartoon sperm with arms and legs!" was a thought that came up entirely too often.

In other words, I was just as "narcissistic" when I was obese. I was simply a lot more morbid about it.

Finally, I note the passing of Dr. Robert Atkins this week, a casualty of the Winter We Had Winter. (He slipped on the ice in early April and never regained consciousness.) The word "controversial" will probably stick with Atkins' name so long as we have language, but 37 pounds later, I have to count in his favor. I'm not doing a true Atkins diet these days, and haven't for a few weeks now. I've stopped counting carbs, for instance. But I still stay away from sugar and white starch, and take "good carbs" in moderation several times a day. Most of what I eat comes from the walls of the grocery store (the produce, dairy and butcher areas), not the interior. It was Atkins' book that got me started and gave me hope. I can't scorn that.