Crime Waves and Crime Particles - A final query about the police numbers in the British Crime Survey. (Link is a pdf. See page 57.) The BCS is surely right that the recording change of 1998 explains the discontinuity between the 1997 figures and the 1998 ones, and Lambert is surely right that the discontinuity problematizes Malcolm's comparison of 2002 to 1997. But the police trend after 1997 is not flat. Over the three years after 1998, reported crime rises by about a third. How reasonable is it to attribute the post-change rise to the recording change, as the BCS authors do. The discontinuity, sure. But if what we're dealing with is a discrete change in recording practice beginning in mid-1998, wouldn't we expect to see a graph with a flattish line on the left, a sudden, discontinuous jump and a higher flattish line on the right? Do the BCS authors (and Tim Lambert) maintain that it has taken years for some precincts to catch on to the new system, so that a rolling compliance wave means a new set of precincts every year finally implements the new standards?

If so, the argument has a surface plausibility, but doesn't seem obviously true. The 1998 discontinuity itself argues for immediate compliance in a large set of precincts. (Almost all?) If this is the argument, when would Lambert and the BCS authors expect the "rolling compliance effect" to level off? (I should mention that this is a sincere question, not a rhetorical one.)

Now, I propose a test for someone qualified to run it:

The discontinuity implies that many precincts complied immediately with the new policy.

1. Isolate those precincts.
2. Trend crime reported by those precincts for the years after 1998.
3. Compare that trend to the national trend on page 57 of the BCS.

If the "early adopter" line is substantially flatter than the national line, you'd have a pretty good argument for the rolling compliance effect. If it substantially resembled the national line, I think you'd have to doubt the BCS/Lambert argument.

Go Figure - Tim Lambert is pretty good about linking to everything Lott&Lambert that pops up on the web. But if you go by what he writes about my interminable item of last night on guns, statistics and crime, you'd think my minor aside about his faith in the methodology behind the British Crime Survey was my sole point. It wasn't. But now that he mentions it . . .

[Henley] is concerned that I am too trusting of the British Crime Survey. As far as I can tell they have used standard practices for victimization surveys and since many people are involved I don't see how the data could be cooked without someone finding out. I would also expect victim surveys to be more accurate than police reports because the police are directly responsible for controlling crime, while the statisticians and surveyors who run the BCS do not.

There are several oddities here. I'm pretty sure many people put Enron's books together, and they weren't caught for years. The way "data could be cooked without someone finding out" is if no one bothers to look. Had Clayton Cramer and James Lindgren not actually investigated the accounting of Michael Bellisiles, and had Lambert, Lindgren and Gryphon not poked into the methodology and data of John Lott, no one would have "found out" about their issues either.

Next oddity: Lambert notes that "police are directly responsible for controlling crime." But that can cut a number of ways. One possibility is that the police want to look good, so they suppress crime statistics. But it's the police statistics that show an increase in crime. Mind you, another option is that the police feel they benefit from higher crime rates as it leads to the budget increases and social controls that cops hold dear. Which is to say that the police are certainly interested parties, but that we can't really say what their interest means for their reporting.

Come once again to the BCS. Lambert writes that "the statisticians and surveyors who run the BCS" are not "directly responsible for controlling crime." True enough. But their bosses are permanent civil servants and ministerial appointees who have a keen political interest in crime and the public's perception of it. I doubt that those people have no managerial role in the publication of the BCS. And it's worth recalling another recent British government report in this context.

Let me be clear: I am not accusing the BCS of cooking their books. I'm saying that the BCS is composed by men and women embedded in institutions, and that there is always the question of interest and the possibility of bias and chicanery in that context. Lambert's seems not to consider this. (In his letter to Reason, he says he found the BCS on the web and went straight to the chapter on violent crime, presumably skipping any paraphernalia on methodology etc. It's entirely possible his letter to Reason simply left those steps out, of course.) That, in my book, is a limitation.

Note that I do not claim this as a basis for invalidating every argument Lambert has made about John Lott, Joyce Lee Malcolm, guns, crime and X2: X-Men United. My item of yesterday broadly assumes the integrity of his work as he broadly assumes the integrity of the BCS. In principle, though, I coud be wrong about Lambert and Lambert could be wrong about the British Crime Survey.

Dept. of OTOH - Jack Shafer of Slate writes

If Hersh's interpretive/predictive streak holds, we should expect to find proof of WMD and a direct link between Iraq and al-Qaida within the next two weeks.

Of course, Shafer's piece ran on May 6. Clock is ticking!

Faith-Based Intelligence: the Sequel - Remember the Office of Special Plans, the Pentagon intelligence shop that Seymour Hersh wrote about in the New Yorker earlier this month? They were the outfit set up to assume Saddam had an active WSD program and ties to al Qaeda and collate evidence that fit those theories. According to the Forward, they've got a new assignment:

At a lower level, two sources said, Iran expert Michael Rubin is now working for the Pentagon's "special plans" office, a small unit set up to gather intelligence on Iraq, but apparently also working on Iran. Previously a researcher at the Washington Institute for Near East policy, Rubin has vocally advocated regime change in Tehran. He did respond to e-mails seeking comment.

Republic of Tar - From today's New York Times: "In Reversal, Plan for Iraq Self-Rule Has Been Put Off":

One Iraqi who attended the meeting said Iraqi opposition leaders expressed strong disappointment over the reversal.

I daresay. Cockeyed optimists may prefer the conspiracy-theory view of the announcement: The administration doesn't mean it. This is a chance for their preferred clients (the exiles of the INC) to gain local cred by visibly opposing the administration. The exiles noisily demand independence. The US gives it to them. The exiles are heroes in Iraq and the administration is happy. How do I know the conspiracy theory is wrong? Because it requires that the administration at least appear to lose a contest, and I don't think they can stomach that.

The Matrix Refigured - Justin Slotman is right on:

The Philip K. Dick influence is all in the "question reality" themes and nowhere else. If Dick was writing the Matrix, Neo would've still gotten out and possibly saved the world, but been unhappily married and in love/lust with a coworker. And his wife--someone who lived their life in the Matrix and wasn't ever thinking about getting out--would've had a much larger role. Dick did some weird stuff, but it all happened to real people.

Yeah. If Dick had written it, Neo would be a shoe salesman. (No, I haven't seen the movie yet.)

More Guns, One More Time - Composing the previous post brought to mind the work of Joyce Lee Malcolm on the history of gun control and crime rates in Great Britain. She's written a book, Guns and Violence: The English Experience, which I have not read, and an article for Reason, Gun Control's Twisted Outcome, which I have. Malcolm's thesis is that 80 years of increased legal restrictions on firearms ownership in Britain have correlated with rises in violent crime over that time, and that the former are substantially responsible for the latter.

A bit of Googling determined that Malcolm's Reason article was challenged by Tim Lambert, well-known critic of John Lott and others. In an October item on his site and a letter to Reason, he argues that Malcolm errs by using police data rather than the government's British Crime Survey, which measures crime victimization. He agrees with the authors of the BCS that a recording category change in 1997 drives the large jump in the police statistics. The BCS shows several categories of violent crime falling between 1997 and 2002, the period in which the police rates more than double.

Malcolm replies to the Reason letter (see link to letter and scroll down) and to this companion item of Lambert's. In general, Lambert comes off better, on my reading, on the grounds of clarity of argument, ability to stick to the point and other, subject-independent means of judging the credibility of disputants. (For instance, Lambert asks Malcolm about the 2002 BCS survey and she replies with a critique of the 2000 survey.)

Lambert has biases of his own, mind you. He has fiercely probed every aspect of the data and methodology of John Lott's surveys, and more power to him - that's how science advances. But he seems to accept the bona fides of the BCS survey readily - I may have missed mention of it, but he doesn't seem to inspect how the BCS conducted their survey, weighted their sample, settled on categories etc. But the BCS is conducted by the British Home Office (analog to the US Justice Department), which has an institutional stake in demonstrating progress against crime. This doesn't mean they did cut corners or engage in outright chicanery. But there is no reason to regard them as disinterested, as Lambert seems to.

In other ways, though, Lambert is very careful about his claims. ("Malcolm also misses my point about whether the decline in violent crime was caused by the handgun ban. Handguns were already tightly regulated, so the ban did not represent that much of a change on previous policy and consequently it is not reasonable to attribute large changes in crime rates to the ban.")

Which gets to my larger point: for all Lambert's largely justified debunking of Lott's work, and this aspect of Malcolm's, the most you can say for the counterfactuals he presents (chiefly, other surveys) is that gun control doesn't seem to have much effect on crime one way or the other. This is certainly a challenge to the shibboleths of libertarians and (some) conservatives. But it's as big a challenge to the enthusiasts of gun control - bigger, I'd argue.

Take the long term trends in the English murder rate that Lambert includes here. As Lambert himself glosses the data:

The homicide rate in England declined after gun control was introduced in 1920, though this could have been the continuation of a long term trend. The rate increased again after 1970 and is now almost as high as is was in the 1880s.

Here's the data as Lambert presents it. My clean, readably-narrow columns will probably chop it up, but follow the preceding link to see it on one line. I will not fiercely probe his figures as I find him an honorable fellow. Please drop me a line if he's putting one over on us.

1860 means decade starting 1860 i.e. 1860-1869
1860 1870 1880 1890 1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990
 1.7  1.6  1.5  1.1  0.9  0.8  0.7  0.8  0.8  0.7  0.7  1.0  1.2  1.4

The big gun control initiatives were in the 1920s, 1950s and 1990s. I'm damned if they seem to have had any noticeable effect. Lambert notes that the 1920s murder rate was slightly lower than the pre-control rate for the teens, but scrupulously acknowledges that this looks like the continuation of a preexisting trend. You could plausibly argue that the loss of so many young men in the wars of the teens and forties left a smaller pool of potential criminals in the 1920s and 1950s, and that as the pool of young men refilled after each war, homicide rates rose concomitantly. You could plausibly argue all sorts of things. But at least when it comes to murder rates, gun control seems beside the point.

The reason this is a bigger problem for gun controllers than for gun rights advocates is that the whole justification for gun control is that it will reduce crime. The British data, and American surveys debunking Lott show, by Lambert's reckoning, no such effect.

Which brings us all back to individual cases and the principle of the thing. My principles are these:

Self-defense is the most basic right.
If the net societal harm of a practice is unclear, err on the side of permission, not prohibition.
Gun control is inherently infantilizing. (I/we don't trust myself/my neighbors/ourselves to handle deadly force responsibly.)
Gun control reflects paternalism on the part of a nation's rulers.
Paternalism on the part of a nation's rulers is bad.

Malcolm makes most of these political arguments and I find them stronger than her statistics. (Lambert does not attempt to show that British police don't exhibit an infuriating paternalism and insouciance about the crime victims they can't get to in time. As always, unless I missed it.) Mark Kleiman sounds a similar note when he writes

[Editorial note: That leaves me favoring shall-issue, especially as part of a package including a crackdown on sales to ineligibles; if giving a bunch of people something they intensely desire does no demonstrable (net) harm, then why not?]

All of the above leaves aside the dubious "data" that antigun groups have retailed for many years. Still, one must police one's own ranks. Gun rights supporters have been guilty of laziness. We thought we had the ultimate labor-saving device in Lott's original concealed-carry data and we fell in love with it. Nothing wows Americans like a slam-dunk practical argument. You can ignore all that messy business of political philosophy and ethics and the nature of the good. But the device doesn't work as advertised.

Back to work.

The News from 1984 - Via Avedon Carol, this handy, eloquent jeremiad against Tony Blair's New Labour and what they've made - and unmade - of Britain. Author Philip Bowring writes, among other things:

People who once ran important civil society organizations supporting civil liberties and the welfare of immigrants are now ministers backing draconian infringements on liberties and harsh policies toward asylum seekers.

This is not just a reflection on individuals. It raises the question of whether such organizations are being run by people dedicated to principles or by opportunists using them as stepladders to political office.

which is a criticism that goes way beyond Tony Blair, and way beyond Britain. I have to wonder if Avedon realizes just how far it goes. It's an indictment of the class that forms the backbone of both the Labour Party and America's Democrats - not the voters, but the cadres and candidates.

These X2 Tie-Ins Are Going Too Far - MSN link text for ESPN story:

Mystique couldn't save the Lakers

The Lazy Blogger's Guide to Success III - Let other bloggers do the work. I was going to write a fair amount about the inaccuracies and agendas of the semi-famous David Warren article slamming Salam Pax. I don't have to do near as much now, though, because Eve Tushnet, Jesse Walker and some others have done it for me. Quotable Eve:

But in particular cases, hello, sometimes people are just weird. Sometimes people are conflicted, risk-averse in geopolitics but risk-taking in their personal lives, irrational, intermittently insightful and wilfully blind, and a bit random. Welcome to the world of the unreliable narrator.

If nothing else, you'd think you could learn that from blogs.

Quotable Jesse Walker:

They offer a number of reasons for this thesis [that Salam's purpose is spreading Ba'athist disinformation], but their case boils down to this: Salam Pax's posts do not reflect our worldview. To reassess our worldview would be a terrible hardship. Therefore, his posts are lies.

Needlenose troubles to point out just a couple of examples where Warren's claims about what Salam has written are demonstrably at variance with actual text on Salam's weblog. I could come up with more without too much trouble. The funniest of Warren's malfeasances, for me, has to be this one:

He drops many hints that he is a homosexual, suggesting reckless candour. (I'm inclined to doubt these.)

Hints that he is a homosexual! Mr. Warren, one does not "hint" with a megaphone. Salam doesn't just come right out and say he's gay, his tone and text are, in Jerry's classic words from Edward Albee's play, The Zoo Story, "Queer, queer, queer, with bells ringing and banners snapping in the wind."

So what the article really tells us is that Warren's Gaydar needs servicing. Also that the psychological phenomenon of projection lives. Warren insists not just that Salam's writing reflects his class, but that Salam's purpose is to advance his class interests. But the clearest thing about Warren's article is that his entire purpose is to advance the class interests of, first, his fellow neocons, and second, their favorite Iraqi exile personalities and groups. Warren's piece is a lightning ball of free-floating resentment against anyone and everyone who dares to bring news undermining the prewar rosy scenerios of himself and his fellow world-beaters. That is: what Jesse said.

My own biases are that I don't like Warren's crowd and I do like Salam. (Even though I spent much of this week convinced, for the first time, that he really was a Western fake. Then I reminded myself that I was absolutely sure who wrote Primary Colors, and it wasn't Joe Klein.) Keep that in mind. But there's no way Warren's checkable claims about Salam survive contact with a fair reading of Salam's oeuvre.

The Lazy Blogger's Guide to Success II - Don't pick up stories in the first place. Saves you from having to run the retraction later.

Oddly enough, I suppose it didn't work in this case, but the principle is sound!

The Lazy Blogger's Guide to Success I - Have your readers do all the work for you. Robert Theron Brockman III sends the following AP article and comment:

US military tells Iraqis to turn in all guns or face arrest

Baghdad, Iraq-AP -- The US military is now telling Iraqis they cannot own or sell guns. Any Iraqi who does faces arrest, according to a new radio spot running in the country.

Lieutenant General David McKiernan, who is commanding US forces on the ground, says a new set of laws in Iraq are aimed at rebuilding law and order.

Ok, so now they’re going to try and disarm the population, making them totally vulnerable to looters and armed gangs. As usual, only the law (such as it is) abiding will cooperate, and then only if they lack any intelligence whatsoever. This will also put the USG at odds with whatever ad-hoc citizen police forces (vigilantes) have been attempting to restore order.

Swell.

There's nothing more to say!

UPDATE: Well, maybe I do after all. Putting on my warblogger hat for a minute, I must assume that the Bush Administration is playing a deep, brilliant game, right? Okay, it's a eugenics program designed to raise the average IQ of the Iraqi population over the next generation. The stupid people give up their weapons, the stupid people get killed, the rest pass on their genes. Ruthless but with a certain logic to it.

Looks Like I Picked the Wrong Week to Stop Sniffing Glue - Sometimes the pleasure of these Advantage: Unqualified Offerings! items is at best rueful. Two headlines:

Rumsfeld: No Idea Where Bin Laden Is (from leftist agitprop vehicle foxnews.com)

'Terrorist cell 'was led by Tora Bora caves fighter (from the London Telegraph, hotbed of anti-americanism)

As I wrote last November

We fought the Afghan War against Al Qaeda in such a way that we couldn't even know whether we won or not, if winning is defined as the certain destruction of Al Qaeda's leadership and ability to wage terror against us. We did it for some serious reasons - fear of US military casualties, fear of Afghan civilian casualties, fear of public opinion in South Asia, the Middle East and the US, fear of (oh yes!) quagmire.

But when all is said and done, we did it in a manner that meant, in important ways, we couldn't win. At least not decisively.

We may have repeated one of the two possible errors to this approach in Iraq (the other possible error is fighting the war at all if the available means don't allow you to achieve the victory you need), where Saddam Hussein may be not only alive, as almost everyone concedes, but directing the nascent guerilla resistance to the occupation.

The problem may be getting worse. Just yesterday Secretary Rumsfeld announced the exciting news that "U.S. forces in Iraq used, for the first time, a new, small missile capable of striking enemy forces hidden in bunkers and other hardened complexes," which takes us further yet from Heinlein's "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."

Lastly, a lot of hawkish pundits spent more than a year assuring us, not without a certain smugness, that Osama Bin Laden was dead, dead, dead. Would those people please affect at least a mild humility for awhile?

Geography-Challenged - On the evidence, "al Qaeda" is a loose-knit network of the like-minded, some of whom are stupider than others:

A key suspect in last year's Bali bombings said Wednesday the intended targets of the attack were "the enemies of Islam," especially Americans, and that he regretted the high Australian death toll.

I guess figuring out that comparatively few Americans, as opposed to Australians, vacation in Bali would have taken more time than this murderous dipshit had. And you thought American schools didn't teach students anything about the world.

Ignorant bastard.

Past the Legal Limit - I shouldn't duck saying what I think about shooting looters (see next item), whether that's our plan or not. First, I completely take Alan's point on the distinction between shooting looters and an atrocity like My Lai. At least theoretically, we shoot looters right here in our own country during riots and national disasters, so it's not picking on the Iraqis per se.

It's not justice, though, since you're making one (young, tired, jumpy, far from home) individual "judge, jury and executioner." And by loosening the restrictions on violence, it probably marginally increases the risk of genuine atrocities. It may be less bad than allowing looting to continue, though.

Basically, my instinct recoils, but I have no alternative that does not involve time machines and second thoughts.

They Call It Instant Justice - With impeccable timing, Alan "Seablogger" Sullivan e-mailed yesterday:

Say, I was just reading UO, and I see much grumbling about disorder in Baghdad. There’s a simple, brutal answer. In such situations, during the chaotic aftermath of war, occupying troops have traditionally shot people for looting. The effect is quite bracing. Civil order returns promptly.

If we’re too squeamish to run a successful occupation, we shouldn’t be there in the first place. (I know…you said that.) But the problem is not lack of troops. The problem is lack of guts. In an age of embedded reporters and live television, it may not be politically possible for any administration to achieve what Truman’s did after WW II.

Please don’t regard these comments as an endorsement of atrocities. There’s a difference between shooting looters in Baghdad and slaughtering villagers at Mi Lai.

And just an hour or so after I got that e-mail, new Iraq proconsul L. Paul Bremer announced that the US would start shooting looters. Clearly Alan needs to e-mail me about what the US needs to do to find Saddam's Hidden Arsenal and establish a stable, united federal Iraq. Then we can all take the weekend off.

Alan later e-mails that

it will be more difficult to restore order now than it would have been, if post-victory procedures had been properly planned before the campaign. This is a fruitful topic for criticism of adminstration policy, but most warbloggers are still too busy kissing Dublya’s…ring.

I actually saw either a hawkish blogger or a pro-war commentator on a hawkish blog say that he now believed the administration had mishandled the postwar situation.

But the Knight-Ridder report on Bremer's first press conference says

The former ambassador to the Netherlands denied reports that he had floated the idea of shooting looters to send a new tough-on-crime message.

Based on earlier reports that have held up, I can state categorically that US troops occupied Baghdad in April, sweeping aside light resistance. More recent events will surely come clear with time.

Out of the Mouths of . . . Talking Dogs, this e-mail answering my question of a few days ago, how Baghdad lost its power:

It seems obvious what has happened in Baghdad, and other cities in Iraq. The reports of Saddam burning up his stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons were quite true. Unfortunately, it looks like he was burning them to run his electric generating stations, and he seems to have used up his stockpiles at an incredibly inopportune time.

Now, we look doubly bad-- first, we can't find the bloody weapons that were our supposed casus belli (in fact, Saddam's power generation using bio and chem agents was SO efficient, it didn't leave any trace of the fuel). And second, we look like absolute asses in not even being able to get the lights on, foolishly assuming that Iraqi generating stations ran on petroleum, when in fact, we forgot that Saddam had more chemical and biological weapons than he did petroleum (President Bush even let the UN in on this.)

If only we could get those damned sanctions lifted (don't get me started on the French and the Russians and the Roqueforts) we could IMPORT some more chem and bio agents from Syria and Iran, and get the Iraqi power back on.

So there you go!

Poetry Corner - Newish blogger Tagore Smith covers the poetry beat with items on W.H. Auden and Sylvia Plath. He joins Aaron Haspel, Ikram Saeed and me as punditspaces poetry correspondents. With any luck, he'll change his tiny text font soon.

Credit Where Credit Is Due II - Matthew Yglesias gets it right in this item on blog cheers for the Bushies:

I think this is completely accurate and, in a way, sums up everything that's bad about the Bush administration. A "dream Sunday" consists not in making substantive progress on issues that would improve the lives of Americans -- employment, homeland security, nation-building in Iraq, North Korea, health care, etc. -- rather it consists in the revelation of embarrassing information about its enemies.

He's surely working from different definitions of "substantive progress" than I am, but his point holds regardless.

The Salesman Turned Around Said Boy You Break That Thing You Bought It - From today's Washington Post (subhed, Iraqis, U.S. Officials Want More Troops):

Baghdad residents and U.S. officials said today that U.S. occupation forces are insufficient to maintain order in the Iraqi capital and called for reinforcements to calm a wave of violence that has unfurled over the city, undermining relief and reconstruction efforts and inspiring anxiety about the future.

My emphasis, but then again, it was my emphasis back in October too.

You know how the slug who runs the DEA keeps saying the "War on Drugs" and the "War on Terror" are the same war? There do appear to be some similarities, according to the Post article:

Reports of carjackings, assaults and forced evictions grew today, adding to an impression that recent improvements in security were evaporating. Fires burned anew in several Iraqi government buildings and looting resumed at one of former president Saddam Hussein's palaces. The sound of gunfire rattled during the night; many residents said they were keeping their children home from school during the day.

Surely when people decided to back a war to make Baghdad more like Washington DC they were thinking Federal Triangle, not Anacostia at the height of the crack wars.

"Imagine spreading 150,000 soldiers in the state of California and then ask yourself could you secure all of California all the time with 150,000 soldiers," McKiernan told reporters last week. "The answer is no."

Right. So when did the geniuses running the Pentagon first "[i]magine spreading 150,000 soldiers in the state of California?" Last week? The week before?

The hell of it is, this is not necessarily bad news to the geniuses. They want a big mideast footprint and chaos in postwar Iraq is an excuse to have one.

"I don't see it getting better. We can't be everywhere, can we?" said Pfc. Jacob Weber, 21. "I feel like a cop, but I'm not a cop."

Finally someone to apologize to, as so many hawks have demanded: Sorry, son. Not for opposing the war. For not opposing it well enough. If I could have kept you out of that job, I would have.

Credit Where Credit Is Due - My favorite Green, Josh Buermann (okay, he's the only Green I like), finds something nice to say about - the Republican Party:

On CSPAN today Foley and Gingrich discussed third parties briefly, in which Gingrich said that Republicans made it an overt strategy to co-opt libertarian voters in '94. That's important, when the Republicans saw a lost election because of a third party they did something about it beyond petty whining.

Josh's point is that the Dems might try this kind of thing instead of blaming Green Party voters and candidates for choosing not to vote Democratic. But Josh should keep in mind that after the Repubs co-opted libertarian voters in 1994 we got - bupkus. Okay, they killed the 55-mph speed limit. Last I checked, the Commerce Department and National Endowment for the Arts were still there, the tax code was a mess, Creeping ClintonCare advanced via baby steps and corporate welfare dwarfed real welfare for public expense and economic impact.

Franklin Harris notes today that "Republicans are useless at best and evil at worst" from a libertarian perspective.

The funny thing is, this 1998 academic article he links to argues that

If the Republican sweep in 1994 can be seen as a referendum on big government, then this election can be seen as a referendum on "lifestyle liberalism," and lifestyle liberalism won big. Over the past 30 years it is possible to observe the following paradox in American political beliefs: America has increasingly embraced political conservatism and rejected political liberalism. Yet at the same time Americans have become more conservative politically, they have become more liberal socially and culturally.

What has been called "lifestyle liberalism" has advanced in tandem with political conservatism.

Hm. I know what to call that combination. The authors, who don't like "lifestyle liberalism" one bit, complain that "Republicans have made no serious public argument about lifestyle liberalism," but with those poll results it may be just as well. The authors go on to allow that "They made no serious argument in this election about big government, either, though government has continued to grow larger even though President Clinton has declared "the era of big government is over." In other words, Republicans didn’t make much of an argument about anything at all."

Their conclusion, " Republicans lack civic courage, and this constitutes the chief ground of doubt that they will ever be a serious governing party," seems true enough, but what of the Democrats, who lacked the stones to oppose a war they believed to be disastrously misconceived and dishonestly promoted, and which their own base disliked intensely? I'm not convinced we have a "serious governing party" on offer in this country. The elections will all continue to have winners though.

Cue Mencken: Democracy is the theory that the people deserve to get what they want and get it good and hard.

Does This Mean Moussouai is Innocent? - When the Saudis announced that they were seeking 19 terrorists in connection with the since-realized plans to kill westerners in Riyadh, I had a hm moment. "19 there, 19 killers on September 11. What gives?" It passed. John Cole found a sura from the Koran in which there are 19 angels doing, um, something or other that confounds unbelievers.

John says that's all he's found, which seems to leave nineteen well shy of the ubiquity of the number 40 in the Bible. I strongly suspect that what we have here is a big fat coincidence or something less. For starters, it depends on what your definition of "nineteen" is. Do the creeps who funded the September 11 massacres count? The ones who helped plan it, provided logistical support, were supposed to come but couldn't get visas? What about possible other terrorists meant to strike that day who got grounded instead? Did nineteen-man teams bomb Khobar Towers, the African embassies or the Cole?

Were the Riyadh bombings even carried out by nineteen men? Near as I can tell, our assurance on that comes from the Saudi government, about whose statements regarding al Qaeda I believe precisely nothing. And here's what I mean by "less than a coincidence" - the Saudis could have chosen "nineteen suspects" as the current announced number because there were nineteen murderers in the WTC/Pentagon attacks.

Note: John Cole didn't sound overly-impressed either. It's worth noting that he found the sura in the book, The Age of Sacred Terror. What this suggests to me is that its authors may have been straining after numerological phantoms themselves.

UPDATE: RGB Mike Jacobs solves the riddle:

[19] is the amount a cribbage hand cannot score. (well and those above what the highest possible score is). when playing and you get a hand with total crap, one says 'nineteen!'

It's a clue!

Scattergories - Matt Yglesias gets it wrong when he writes

Needless to say, that's exactly what makes [Tacitus] the best conservative blogger in the eyes of non-conservatives like Henley and myself — he's not a very good conservative.

Actually, he gets two things wrong. He should use "me" in place of "myself," and Tacitus isn't a bad conservative. He's a bad Republican. One must not take the one for the other.

Now Tacitus is by no means perfect. He's soft on empire, for all that he seems to rue it. Even here he has an excuse though. Conservatism, as has been much noted, is more a temperament than a philosophy, all about keeping what has been. American empire has a century-long pedigree now (as does opposition to it) so it's not surprising that some contemporary conservatives might feel attached.

I've never seen him misuse "myself" though.

Who Turned Off the Lights? - I'm asking because I don't know. Early in the war, broadcast reassurers showed us pictures of the illuminated Baghdad skyline at night to illustrate how precise the bombing was and how we were leaving Iraq's infrastructure untouched "this time" because we were going to have to fix anything we broke. (Note: the point was not to get people wondering how badly we damaged Iraq's infrastructure last time, or what purpose strategic bombing really served in a six-week limited war.)

Postwar stories, like this one in the Washington Post, note that

In Baghdad, many neighborhoods still lack electricity and running water . . .

But when and why did that happen? I don't recall any news stories that the US had started bombing infrastructure. (Mind you, I didn't follow all the war news obsessively.) Did I miss the memo? Or did something else take out Baghdad's utilities?

That Was Then, This is Now - From the London Times, February 12, 2003:

AMERICAN war planners believe that they have little more than 48 hours from the start of a ground war to kill President Saddam Hussein if they are to avoid a protracted conflict and a complicated peace.

From the London Telegraph, today:

"These attacks show that Saddam, his family and senior members of his regime are still in Iraq and still pose a threat," a spokesman for the interim government said.

"We have received reports that Saddam is hiding in the area between north Baghdad and Tikrit and is attempting to direct guerrilla attacks against Coalition forces and to disrupt attempts to set up a new government in Iraq."

And add to your list of "things we're not bothering to look for/at in Iraq":

Although Washington claims to have samples of Saddam's DNA, no officials from the Coalition forces in Iraq have visited either of the two ["decapitation strike"] bomb sites in Baghdad to collect samples.

In my most cynical moments I've wondered if the "decapitation strikes" weren't pure entertainment from the start - mummery and flimflam to wow the domestic audience (and secondarily to awe the Iraqi one). There was certainly a lot of excitement around my office the day after the first one. "My neighbor works at the Pentagon and they think they really got him" stuff. I still rate this as unlikely, but only because those tinfoil hats are scratchy.

In for a Penny - If Tacitus were President, we'd have been told this ahead of time: "we're going to need more troops for the occupation than we did for the war." But in that case, we might not have had the war at all. In any case, it's why Tacitus could never be President.

Red Meat Antiwar Stuff - Those readers who prefer their war skeptics diffident if not downright apologetic might prefer to skip down to this week's fitness blog entry. For the rest of us, a couple of fun items. From the New York Press, Matt Tabibi, whose thesis is that

It has become fashionable on the left and in Western Europe to compare the Bush administration to the Nazis. The comparison is not without some superficial merit. In both cases the government is run by a small gang of snickering, stupid thugs whose vision of paradise is full of explosions and beautifully designed prisons. Toss in the desert fatigues motif and the "self-defense" invasion tactic, and there does seem to be a good case.

But it’s way off. It’s wishful thinking. The Reich only lasted 12 years. The Soviets reigned for 75. They were better at it than the Nazis, and we’re better at it than the Russians. Ask anyone who’s lived in a communist country, and he’ll tell you: Modern America is deja vu all over again. And if ever there was a Soviet spectacle, it was Bush’s speech last week.

Tabibi appears to be your third-generation gonzo school columnist. ("Jennifer Lopez and Tom Clancy would have been perfect fits in the Soviet Union; they would have worn medals in public and ridden the trains for free.") But the excerpt of an Ari Fleischer press conference in David Corn's latest Capital Games column provides the supporting paragraphs to Tabibi's column-worth of thesis statements. It's unrelieved cant, pure party line, language strangled in the crib of meaning and then paraded before the national family in a bizarre Santorumesque healing ritual. It's also too long and painful to excerpt, so follow the link.

Corn has been hitting the question, not so much "Where are Iraq's WMDs" as "Why doesn't the administration act all that concerned about Iraq's WMDs" for a couple of columns now. And why not? Can there be a bigger issue? The Bush Administration either knew they were making the whole thing up, or they were criminally negligent in putting together the war plan. As I've said before, I hope they knew they were making the whole thing up, because if they really cared more about demonstrating how small a US force could conquer a foreign country than about how big a force would be required to secure dozens to hundreds of real WSD sites then we're in big trouble, not least because the same clowns have at least two more years left to run the country. Corn has more:

On May 4, Barton Gellman in The Washington Post reported that a specially-trained Defense Department team was not dispatched to the Baghdad Nuclear Research facility until May 3, after a month of "official indecision." The unit found the site--which was the home to the remains of the nuclear reactor bombed by Israel in 1981 and which stored radioactive waste that would be quite attractive to a dirty-bombmaker--ransacked. The survey conducted by the team, Gellman reported, "appeared to offer fresh evidence that the war has dispersed the country's most dangerous technologies beyond anyone's knowledge or control." Sometime in mid-April, US Central Command had sent a detachment to guard the gate to the facility. But for two weeks--until the special team arrived--this security detail allowed Iraqis who claimed to be employees of the research center to come and go. The detachment had no Arabic speaker and could not question those entering and leaving. Nor was it able to handle the looters, who some days numbered in the hundreds. A mile away, the Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center, where UN inspectors in years past had found partially-enriched uranium, was also looted.

Idiosyncratic conservative Steve Chapman of the Chicago Tribune was on the case as early as April 20:

An even greater fear was that in the chaos of the war, Iraqi officers would sell their nastiest weapons to terrorists. In that, I confess, I may have been too willing to believe the administration's claims that Iraq had vast stores of chemical and biological agents. But if those weapons exist and some of them find their way into the black market, it could be a while before we find out.

Chapman lists other reasons why he won't "beg forgiveness" for opposing the war, all of which will do for me too.

Weekly Fitness Blog Item - No measurements this week. 1) I was away from the scale and tape this morning. 2) It's a damn good thing.

It will take days to undo this weekend's buffets, if not longer. Those 34" slacks feel tighter than they did when I bought them Monday.

So let's change the subject! Here's an MSN article by Pete Sisco about ab training. He hammers a familiar point:

There is nothing unique about abdominal muscles as far as their training and response to training is concerned. The principles that apply to biceps and triceps apply equally to abs.

He goes on to suggest ways to get the requisite

1. High-intensity of muscular overload
2. Progressive intensity from workout to workout
3. Proper spacing of workouts to avoid overtraining or undertraining

He does not note that all the ab exercises in the world will not give you a visible six-pack unless you shed the last fat hiding it. (My own sixpack remains discreet, demure, covert.)

Other Business: the fitness item series threatens to become a garden series too. Kevin Carson of The Mutualist e-mails a tip that ties in several UO themes:

I used to work with a guy who did the square foot thing--he filled 8x8 raised beds with dirt scavenged from under rotten logs in the woods, and worked in gallons and gallons of guts from his bass fishing expeditions. He gave me five gallons of frozen guts once, and I mixed them in a garbage can full of grass clippings and let the mixture ferment for a couple of weeks. I turned it in and then planted turnips there, and got turnips the size of my head that were soft and not the least bit pithy or woody.

This scares me, because it suggests that Kevin's fishing friend eats bass. Of course, I'm just as frightened by the idea of eating turnips. (Actually, smallmouth bass are supposed to be pretty good if you take them from clean, gravel-bottomed water.) But the idea has a certain pedigree and undoubtedly works.

Back from the West (of my state, anyway). Indeed there was not much fishing, though largely because of the weather, not the family presence. A band of thunderstorms from Friday night through early Saturday afternoon. I caught a little ten-inch rainbow trout off the Rocky Gap Resort dock Friday night and watched a couple of other fellows pull in two rainbows and a smallmouth Saturday afternoon while I got skunked. (They were wormfishing, multiple-poleusing people.) Great joy this morning, though. I fished from a kayak for the first time, which was a lot of fun - now I want one for my own. (This one I rented from the lodge.) And I caught the biggest bluegill of my life by far - eleven inches long with a deep lake body. (River and creek bluegills tend not to be as "tall" - from belly to back.) Nonfisherman may wonder what the big deal is about an 11-inch fish. That's only an inch longer than Friday's "little" trout. The typical bluegill is between 5 and 7 inches long, so this was a prodigy. They fight hard for their size too.

I also hit the driving range and putting green, discovering there that all my fitness improvements have done nothing whatsoever for my golf game. I will not play again unless I take lessons.

Rocky Gap Resort itself was quite nice. The staff was very helpful; the view from the lakeside rooms was just gorgeous. Lake Habeeb is one of the prettiest bodies of water I've seen. I like my lakes with mountains to shield them from the wind and reflect off the surface, plenty of coves, stone riprap at one end and a surface untroubled by wakes. (Lake Habeeb forbids power boats.)

The resort itself is expensive, the kind of place a middling family like ours might splurge on for a long weekend but not an entire week. The food was uneven for the price, but I went with the buffets and you take your chances with those. Unlimited spiced shrimp covers a lot of sins. By "sins" I mean the overcooked crab legs in Friday's seafood buffet. Breakfasts are expensive.

The resort is much more oriented toward golf than fishing. (It's Maryland's only course designed by Jack Nicklaus.) They don't rent boats by the day, only the hour, and during May only between 10 and 6, officially. (Erin of Guest Services got me a kayak this morning at 8am.) If fishing's your thing and you have your own boat, you can camp at the state park and fish when it suits you. Fishing pressure is light, even though you can see the lake from I-68.

Our best meal came from nearby Cumberland, at Uncle Tucker's Woodfired Pizza Cellar and Brewhaus. We'd been passing this place for years. The restaurant is in a colonial-era tavern building. The pizza was superb. Mrs. Offering had the premise-brewed Pale Ale and pronounced it not just good but "distinctive." I indulged in their microbrew root beer - delicious. Worth a trip of some distance, and I've definitely found no better place to eat along I-68 if you're traveling.

All the rivers were under a flash flood watch. I drove to Barnum, West Virginia (motto: The Pit Viper State!) to look at the North Branch below Jennings Randolph. You know the stretch of Niagara below the Falls where it passes through the gorge? The North Branch was a little more turbulent than that. The drive along WV46 was interesting. While West Virginia may historically belong to the Democratic Party, one hallmark of the Nanny State is conspicuous by its absence - guardrails. There were several curves where, with enough momentum, I could easily have gotten back to Maryland, albeit somewhat smeared.