Clues Found in Iraq - From the New York Times . . .

In a significant retreat in American efforts to seize weapons held by Iraqi citizens, American and British officials said today that Iraqis would be allowed to keep AK-47 assault rifles in their homes and businesses.

While American officials gave no public explanation for amending what had been a much tougher plan to rid postwar Iraq of heavy weapons, military officials have said they recognize the difficulties in disarming citizens at a time when Iraqis feel their security is still at risk.

The article also has an interesting subplot on Ba'athist cells in the postwar Iraqi police force.

Mnemonic

30 days has September
Also June and November
All the rest have 31
Except for February, which is just weird
And April, which has lasted 61 freaking days so far!

2003: God Apologizes to the Water Table.

But even dangerous truths are still true - Fabulous Natalie Solent meditation about stickers on a professor's office door. No, really. Go read.

UPDATE: Usual Blogspot crap means the link is bad. Go to the main page and scroll down to "Selective political myopia." The item is much better than it sounds.

Mailbag - Obviously new reader Amit Singh writes

Yes, it's all true what you said. The people in Iraq will despise American troops and turn on them with a vengeance. It happened in Afghanistan. Oh wait, no it didn't. Well, it happened when we occupied Japan after WW2. Oh wait, it didn't. Germany. Nah, that didn't happen either.

What's wrong with you liberals? You folks said the war would last for months. It took 21 dsys to take over Baghdad. It took 84 days for Allied bombing t o stop Serbia. It took the British 2 and 1/2 months to recapture the Falkland Islands. Heck, it took Janet Reno 45 days to torch those kids at Waco.

The occupation of Japan and Germany lasted years. It's been two months and it's Vietnam all over again? God damn it, that as 40 years ago.

Wrong about Cold War. Wrong about 9/11. Wrong about Afghanistan. Wrong about Iraq. Will you liberals ever admit that you're wrong?

I'm told that H.L. Mencken kept a standard response card that he enclosed in all replies to reader complaints. It read You may be right.

John Emerson writes

Thanks for the heroin piece. I used to have a friend who was a medical student / alternative musician. He did research and found out that there is only one physical problem associated with careful use of heroin. After decades of regular use, a lung disease develops, though as I remember it was non-fatal and not very debilitating. (Keith Richard figured out the heroin rules right at the beginning and has never had a problem to my knowledge.)

The whole drug war is an attempt at an ideological purge or witchhunt. Since the American tradition and legal system do not allow the burning of heretics, certain physical objects associated with an attitude or way of life have to be made illegal. (In order to avoid the chemical-legal difficulties involved in specifying every single illegal drug all the way down to Hawaiian woodrose, about 1970 a legislator in the always-reliable state of Kansas introduced a bill making illegal the ingestion of any substance with the intention of getting high. But of course, that ruined the whole effect; we can only suppress intentions by outlawing substances).

I recall Keith Richards telling an interviewer once that he always cleaned up before entering the recording studio, and only did drugs to cope with the crushing boredom of touring. (I think this was in the classic collection of interviews with songwriters, Written in my Soul, by Bill Flanagan.)

Now, confession: I plan to read Sullum's book. I thought his last one, For Your Own Good, was quite fine. But with a seven-year-old who is also an advanced reader, I intend to be careful about leaving it around the house. Some people will cry Hypocrisy! But it's not hypocritical to believe that choices you don't want loved ones to make should nevertheless be legal for people to make. I figure I have a couple of years to figure out how to explain this distinction in child-friendly language. It will be neither the hardest nor the easiest balance I manage as a parent.

Cowboy Kahlil wrote several bloggers asking

First, I'm trying to determine if email is a viable method of organizing left leaning folks.

Gee, I hope not. That's the last thing we need, organized lefties - I like them much better in ones and twos.

Nick Sweeney was glad to read kind words for Richard Thompson.

I took my dad -- a friend of Sandy Denny in the late 60s -- to see him in Newcastle a couple of months ago, and it was great. (Better, of course, had we seen him solo, but you take what you're given.)

I actually prefer Thompson live with a band. I've seen him once solo and twice the other way. The last time was the Mock Tudor tour with his son, Teddy and others (see a show from that tour here), plus one from the Gregson and Collister era.

Finally, Nell Lancaster writes about Ariel Sharon and the "O"-word:

I'm afraid that Sharon's new frankness about occupation (and purported willingness to end it) is not really very good news. Apparently he wants to continue settlements and let The Wall handle the "occupying" job. Ampersand (Alas, A Blog) has a clarifying map, and a link to the Gush Shalom site with more information. I'm assuming part of our $3-$12 billion helps fund this...

I don't doubt that Sharon will still try to hold onto everything he can, and that we're far from out of the woods. (Ivan Eland says the US, Europe and Russia should just butt out until the Israelis and Palestinians are truly sick of war, which he doesn't think has happened yet. He argues that a premature, forced "peace" deal that, say, immires US troops in the Levant would be far worse for America than the appalling status quo.) But I come back to Eve Tushnet's principle of the salience of the rhetorical climate: it does, in fact, matter that Ariel Sharon formally, with whatever degree of sincerity, acknowledges the Occupation for what it is. That can lead in directions and distances he himself does not intend. (cf Gorbachev, Mikhail.)

"Iraq, man, there's nothing here" - Reader Melinda Haire tipped me to this SFGate.com story on A. Crassicauda, Baghdad's sole death metal group. Their big ambition: get the hell out of Iraq.

All their songs are in English. Heavy metal should be either in English or German, says rhythm guitarist Faisal Talal. "Arabic doesn't fit."

I'm pretty sure A. Crassicauda is old news to a lot of people, but I thought the new article had some interesting details.

I Say, I Say, That's a Joke, Son! - Ribble Fizz writes "the more I read the post the more certain I am that you were being facetious . . . " Two other e-mailers, presumably standing in for 100 other readers, seemed convinced I must sincerely believe "dog allies" exist and had been questioned by Iraqi weapons. (See "Mr. Language Person Attacks," below.)

There's something strangely humbling about that. Any ally of dogs is a friend of mine, though.

"One Dead Soldier a Day" - Some backup:

Already this week, ambushes carried out in Hadithah, Baghdad and Fallouja have left four U.S. soldiers dead and 15 others wounded.

Tyler Marshall, LA Times.

Conspiracy Theory - I put on my shiny tinfoil hat and interpret this story:

BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops raided the Palestinian Authority's mission in Baghdad and arrested 11 people after ransacking the building, a Palestinian official said Thursday. A top U.S. general said eight people were arrested.

The US story is that the PA mission had "unauthorized weapons." The PA spokesman says that all the embassies have weapons on hand to defend against looters, that the Americans shot out the locks on doors that were already unlocked and took food, water and documents.

Why? At a guess, Rumsfeld and the senior staff of the Defense Department would really like to stop this annoying "Road Map" business the State Department and White House are pushing, and even, if possible, derail Dubya's planned meeting with Palestinian Authority PM Abu Mazen next week.

It's my Life and It's my Wife? - I couldn't skip work today to take in Jacob Sullum's appearance at CATO to discuss his new book, Saying Yes: in Defense of Drug Use. But this excerpt on the real addictiveness of heroin is fascinating.

Mr. Language Person Attacks! - This headline is just wrong:

Iraq weapons questions dog allies

Come on, people! Subject-verb agreement, please:

Iraq weapons question dog allies. The verb "question" does not take an s with the plural subject, "Iraq weapons."

You'll have to read the article to find out whether the dog allies answered any of the questions from the Iraq weapons or not.

Quick, Change the Mood! - Well! Clearly, Mrs. Potatohead packed my angry eyes, just in case. Let's post some nice things, now, shall we?

I like to think of this as the ultimate Advantage: Unqualified Offerings! story.

Annoying but valuable indie comics publisher Fantagraphics is facing bankruptcy. If you buy enough from them they might not have to file. Eve Tushnet and I recommend Love and Rockets. (Via neilalien.)

I shouldn't include this story in a mood-changing post, but it fits with the darker suspicions I chased away at the time.

For something completely different, you can read the FAQ for the new Marvel Universe Roleplaying Game, which our gaming group had fun messing with last night.

It Was Fun While It Lasted - The victory, I mean:

“THE WAR has not ended,” the commander, Army Lt. Gen. David McKiernan, said after a U.S. soldier was killed by a rocket-propelled grenade while traveling in supply convoy north of Baghdad — the ninth U.S. service member killed in Iraq this week.

McKiernan, briefing reporters in the Iraqi capital, described the sporadic attacks as a new phase of the military conflict.

That's from MSNBC.com. And this Post story, "Female attacker inspires angry Iraqis," is about trends in early "martyrdom operations" against US troops. Soon enough women like the late Eman Mutlag Salih will figure out that throwing grenades is a sucker's game and they'll start wiring themselves up and detonating themselves right next to our troops, and the lethality will rise higher than its present, quiet rate of about one dead American soldier a day.

And what can we know about those soldiers now and deduce about the future? MSNBC again:

McKiernan said the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division, which had been planning to return to the United States in June, would remain in Iraq until commanders decided it was no longer needed.

With recent attacks against U.S. soldiers, he said, there were no immediate plans to return the unit to its headquarters at Fort Stewart, Ga.

3ID has been at it nonstop since mid-March, and of course, they've been in theater longer than that. Their vehicles are short on parts and "senior leaders and logistics experts in the 3rd Infantry said most of the division was not ready for combat."

The 3rd Infantry’s supply line was a constant problem during initial fighting for control of Iraq. After the fall of Baghdad, senior officers determined that the division would be leaving within weeks and that its vehicles would be taken out of service, so they never filled orders for parts.

We can be sure of the following: the men and women of 3ID, like the rest of us, were lied to on the way to war. They expected a quick victory, a hero's welcome in Iraq and a quick rotation home. They sort of got one out of three.

Imagine how it must feel to be them now. You're nowhere you would choose to be, you're not going home after all, for the foreseeable future, your equipment needs time in the shop, the locals you thought you were helping are getting surly on you - more and more often, lethally surly. There are more and more stories of troops dying at the hands of seemingly innocuous people. You increasingly can't trust anyone you meet. Prudence dictates that you stay hard and ready and keep the locals at the other end of your gun. Less and less do you feel like helping anybody except your own. This is the thanks you get? Nerves fray, trigger fingers itch. Each new "incident" breeds the next demonstration, the next riot, the next "incident." All of this does nothing for the Iraqis' mood either. And it just gets worse. And it will.

God damn the men who put our troops in this situation. God damn the men who brought our country to this pass. God damn Cheney and Rumsfeld and their cadre of little geniuses. God damn the media poodles who obligingly spun the way they were spun. God damn Colin Powell for the narcissistic lie he told himself about how he was needed "inside the system" when he had the chance to blow it all open by publically resigning. God damn George W. Bush for accepting the advice of knaves and dreamers. God damn Tony Blair and the Third Way messianism that sees war as the engine of human progress, damn the cowardly Democrats in Congress for confusing their short-term political viability with the welfare of the country and damn the freelance cheerleaders, with blogs or syndicated columns, who imagined that their September 11-induced post-traumatic stress disorder was clarity and toughness rather than hysteria. Damn every Annie Hall with a keyboard demanding that Woody Allen come over and kill the spider now, and not just the one in her apartment but every spider on earth, dammit, because someday, someday, one of them just might bite her. God damn every fool who decided to support the war just because the protesters were icky.

Most of all, god damn you if you promise that if we just knock over Iran now, or Syria, or whoever, that all the old lies will come true. God damn your smug, cowardly little souls to hell.

Back! - Like much of the blogosphere, I have my site on a Hosting Matters server, so like much of the blogosphere this site was down all day because of a fire at the collocation site. Sorry to everyone, especially everyone coming in from Matthew Yglesias and Radley Balko to find out which presidents I want to impeach.

More tomorrow.

Music Notes - An interview with the great Richard Thompson and three live songs (solo acoustic) on VH1's website. Meanwhile, on Thompson's own site, a live streaming concert (audio only) and various other free download and streaming goodies.

Some Tyrants Are More Equal Than Others - Hesiod and Jeanne d'Arc have lots of info on a Middle Eastern despot who tortures, murders, fosters a cult of personality and, oh by the way, hosts major US troop deployments in his country. His depredations include boiling political opponents alive. If we do decide to put Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan on the regime change list, though, we might want to cut off the tens of millions a year in military and intelligence aid first, just to make it easier for us.

Crossing the Rubicon - Roman Days, a living history event, June 7-8 at Marietta Mansion in Glenn Dale, MD. Looks like fun. Expected attendance, somewhat light. As my friend Dave, with whom we'll be attending, puts it:

For bigger turn outs [in the midatlantic] perhaps they need to emphasize that Romans too had civil wars.

Holy Shit - Who said this?

“We don’t like the word, but this is occupation . . . To keep 3.5 million Palestinians under occupation is bad for Israel and the Palestinians.”

Ariel Sharon! I confess I am stunned. If this is one more "Likud strings the US along until it loses interest" maneuver, Arik's really going for the Oscar this time. But even it were, and I have no reason to believe it is, these things tend to take on a momentum of their own.

The dangers now are three: that Sharon's party heaves him over (see the quotes from angry Likudniks later in the MSNBC article), that some ultra shoots him or that the Palestinian Authority, with its matchless capacity to shit in its own nest, overreaches.

Maybe I was just a couple years pessimistic. As I've mentioned before, when Sharon won in 2000 I breezily assured Mrs. Offering that it was nothing so dire - it was going to take a Sharon to give back the West Bank and Gaza as it took a Begin to relinquish Sinai and - warning! political cliche coming! - a Nixon to, um, go to, well, I'm sorry! China. Then came all the trouble and I put that prediction in the Wrong Call column. I'd like to be able to haul it back out soon.

Many a slip, etc. but when it comes to the Mideast you take your good news where you find it.

Meanwhile, Richard M. Ebeling of the Future of Freedom Foundation has an essay sounding a theme previously touched on at this site: "Property Rights and the 'Right of Return' ." He stresses, correctly I think, that the injustice involved is one of property rights. The displaced owned personal and real property for which they were never compensated. Where I think he goes wrong is his purist prescription for "resolving" the problem:

If a settlement is reached between the Israelis and the Palestinians, justice would suggest that all legitimate property should be returned to its rightful owners and that residence by those owners on their property should be once again permitted. Indeed, one of the points made over the last 10 years concerning the wars in the former Yugoslavia has been that “ethnic cleansing” has driven people from their land and homes and that they should be allowed to return — even if the conquering group has now redistributed the property to members of their own national or ethnic group. Why? Because it is stolen property and the new occupants are in possession of ill-gotten gains.

If the present occupants of Palestinian properties wish to privately offer some monetary settlement to the rightful Palestinian owners, so that they may retain the land and related assets seized and redistributed to Israelis more than half a century ago, they should certainly be free to do so. And, indeed, many of the descendants of the originally uprooted Palestinian property owners might very well prefer a cash settlement to returning to a piece of land they have never seen. But if the original owners or their descendants did, in fact, wish to reclaim that which is rightfully theirs, justice and the principle of private property suggests that they must be allowed to do so.

I understand his theoretical case, particularly if you grant his hostility to "attempts to maintain ethnically or religiously based societies . . . " But I disagree with him on the praxis:

What would be illegitimate and inconsistent with the fundamental principles of liberty would be for the Israelis to expect U.S. taxpayers to foot the bill to cover compensation or resettlement costs of the displaced Palestinian families and their descendants as part of any “road map” for a Middle East peace agreement. Those who support or feel any personal ties to the maintenance of Israel as a Jewish state should be free to contribute money to buy the property titles from their original Palestinian owners.

A central concern for libertarians is, or needs to be, How do we get to a libertarian society? In the foreign policy sphere, how do we disentangle ourselves from our overbroad foreign commitments? One obvious, even promising answer, is to buy our way out. The US pays continuing monetary and political costs to maintain the current Israeli-Palestinian status quo. An investment that settled the "right of return" problem once and for all, and allowed the US to disengage from the region on the security front, would be among the soundest foreign investments the country could make.

Don't Tease the Squares - Endlessly fascinated by the ins and outs of the Jessica Lynch rescue, the extent to which it was and was not stage-managed for propaganda purposes and what the press did and did not report when and correct when? Me neither. BUT, your one-stop shop for sage Lynch commentary last week was Bruce Rolston of Flit, who brought vital perspective to some hyperextended BBC-bashing by the expected hawkish bloggers, including erstwhile UO foil Bill Herbert of Cointelpro Tool. Start at Bruce's last item and scroll down.

The Good News Front - After the spokesman for CATIC (the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center) suggested that "You can almost argue that a protest against [a war fought in the name of antiterrorism] is a terrorist act," some good news: California's attorney general, Bill Lockyer, who has oversight responsibility for CATIC, explicitly disavowed the spokesman's argument, according to the Sacramento Bee. (Thanks to Hesiod for the link.)

Lockyer also promises that "California won't track peace protesters, even those who engage in minor acts of civil disobedience, as it tries to head off terrorist threats." If Lockyer means it and makes it stick that will be welcome news.

Who Gets to Stay - The other day, Tagore Smith wondered, in e-mail, "out of the post WWII presidents, how many do you think shouldn't have been impeached?" (We had been talking about Bill Clinton and George W. Bush lying the United States into war.) Since then, I've been wondering. Keep in mind the question is not, Which Presidents do I think handled the job well. It's which Presidents I think didn't conduct themselves feloniously in office.

Counting forward from Truman . . .

I don't see much basis for impeaching Truman or Eisenhower.

JFK now, let's see: consorted with gangsters, plotted to assassinate foreign leaders, lied about the missile gap, but that was on the way in, not something that happened while he was there. What did he know about his father's electoral shenanigans in West Virginia and Illinois and when did he know it? You can make a decent case that he engaged in criminal conspiracy with known organized crime figures (Operation MOngoose). Recklessness is not itself a high crime or misdemeanor, so sharing a mistress with a mafia don gets a pass. Overall judgment: Iffy.

LBJ: Lied us into war (Gulf of Tonkin). God knows what else. A grifter clear back to his Texas legislature days. Overall judgment: probable impeachment candidate.

Nixon. Ask me a hard one. Overall judgment: slam dunk.

Ford. I know the pardon rankles some people, but it wasn't criminal. Neither is making Chevy Chase a bigger celebrity than he needed to be. Overall judgment: pass.

Carter. Simultaneously set in motion the destruction of the Soviet Union and the rise of al Qaeda. The ultimate mixed bag, but where's the crime in that? And he started the deregulation ball rolling too. Can't think of anything felonious about his actions. Overall judgment: pass.

Reagan. There was a moment during Poindexter's testimony before the Iran-Contra committee, something Poindexter said he did or didn't tell the President, that only made sense if Reagan knew about the diversion of funds from Michael Ledeen's First Bright Idea to the contra funding "Enterprise." Damned if I remember what it was, almost two decades later. Overall judgment: Sorry, Ronny, you gotta go.

Bush. While I wanted to believe the "October Surprise" theory of the 1980 election for awhile, I ended up reluctantly concluding that it didn't hold up. That brings us to the "lied us into war" issue. Did he know that the testimony of "Fatima" about Iraqi soldiers tossing babies out of Kuwaiti incubators was a fabrication of Hill & Knowlton and the Kuwaiti Embassy? Hard to say. Did he knowingly lie to the King of Saudi Arabia and the American people about satellite photographs supposedly showing Iraqi troops massed on the Saudi border ready to attack? Hard to say he didn't. Overall judgment: likely.

Clinton. Another easy one. Perjured himself when someone had the gall to apply a law that he himself signed (making the sexual histories of those accused of sexual harrassment fair game) to, um, him. Lied us into war in Kosovo. Started said war without congressional approval. Overall judgment: Outtahere!

George W. Bush. Is it likely that Dubya had to know how much of the "evidence" for war was distorted, misstated or just plain untrue? I'd say so. As I've argued before, we clearly fought the war in a manner that indicated scant concern that Iraq might actually have sizable stores of biological, chemical or nuclear weapons. Since Bush had to approve the war plans, he either got assurances that there was no need to worry about securing suspect sites because there was nothing to find there, or he recklessly approved plans without such assurances. Then there's his Injustice Gang at the DOJ. Overall judgment: can still fall back on the incompetence defense, but it doesn't look good.

So there you have it. Far from my reputation as reflexively anti-government, I'm firmly on the side of letting four of the last eleven Presidents finish out their terms. I hope this doesn't convince Leonard to de-link me.

Memorial Day - To all those who gave their lives in service to the country, thanks. Additionally, to those whose lives were wasted on the bad decisions and vainglory of some of our rulers, apologies.

Weekly Fitness Blog Item - 175 pounds, 34.5" waist. It looks like a precipitous drop from last week's 178, but I had been as low as 176 that week; the 178 was one of those daily fluctuations. Human weight is fuzzy.

Anyway, that's 41 pounds in the six months (exactly) since Thanksgiving. Probably 6 inches off my waist, though it's hard to tell since I was fooling myself about my pant size for so long. 10 pounds and two inches to go. It's actually time for before&after pictures, but I don't have an after photo yet. Check back next week if you care.

Diet stuff in the news: Slate did some taste tests of low-carb baked goods, candy and beer. They describe some of the breads as horrifying to the taste, but give passing marks to a couple of the candy bars. I try to stay away from that stuff, though I've had a couple of Atkins or Carb Solutions candy bars this year, and a few Atkins and Myoplex shakes. (Awful stuff.) The article doesn't review ice cream, but the Edy's Grand No Sugar Added line is actually quite good. Three grams of sugar in a serving - less than a teaspoon - and six grams of sugar alcohol. Very creamy and chocolatey. You can eat it with genuine pleasure.

Of course, the danger with all these substitute products is that you'll gorge on them, undoing the good you'd otherwise do. This is how Snackwells et al killed "low fat" dieting - by churning out lots of high-calorie, high-sugar "low fat" junk.

There were also newspaper reports of two new studies comparing low-fat and low-carb diets, touted in the newspapers as offering qualified validation to Atkins-style low-carb principles.

One has to be wary of newspaper reports of scientific studies. (The real papers are in the New England Journal of Medicine, but I haven't had a chance to read them yet: VA study abstract and Penn Med School abstract.)

In both studies, the Atkins dieters generally had better levels of "good" cholesterol and triglycerides, or fats in the blood. There was no difference in "bad" cholesterol or blood pressure.

The University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine study found that the average dieter in their low-carb group lost 15.4 pounds in 6 months compared to 7 for the group on a low-fat diet. However, both groups gaine about a third of their weight loss back by the end of the year, leaving the Atkins group down a net of 9.7 pounds and the low-carb group down 5.5.

The year-end difference was not big enough to tell whether it was caused by the diets, Foster said.

Yeah, but who cares? Because the depressing thing is, the subjects in the Penn study "weighed an average of 217 pounds at the start." And in six months, they lost all of 15 pounds if they were on the low-carb diet. And at the end of a year, they had only lost 10 pounds - five if they were on the low-fat regimen. And 40 percent dropped out of both groups.

The VA study only has six-month figures: 12.4 for "Atkins" (scare-quote explanation forthcoming) and 4.2 for the low-fat group. Assume the same regain in the next six months as the Penn study had and they'd net out at 8 and 3 pounds respectively. The VA study abstract pegs the average body mass index of their subjects at 43.

Sheesh. Why bother?

Why the heck did both groups do so poorly compared to, well, me? (I reject the notion that it's because of my shining virtue.) Motivation may play a part, but one word that comes up in neither abstracts nor news reports is "exercise."

This is one reason for the scare quotes around "Atkins." Atkins insisted that regular exercise was part of his program and that, "If you're not exercising you're not doing Atkins." Most of the low-fat diets I've seen at least pay lip service to the need for exercise. You can criticise everyone from Robert Atkins to Susan Powter for setting their standards for what counts as exercise too low, or for misunderstanding the principles of it, but not for ignoring the concept altogether.

Generally, serious diet promoters stress the importance of exercise and serious exercise theorists insist on the importance of diet. The only exercise advocate I know who pooh-poohs the importance of diet is Leonard "Heavyhands" Schwartz, who may not have appreciated the uniqueness of his own metabolism. (And who may have changed his mind since the 1980s.)

The other reason for the scare-quotes around "Atkins" was a statement in one of the reports on the studies that it restricted the low-carb group to 35 grams of carbs per day or less. But you can be on Atkins and consume substantially more carbs per day than that, depending on your metabolism. I take so many free days now that I can hardly be said to be on Atkins at all, but I was up over 50 grams a day even when I was still pretty hardcore.

The next-to-bottom line on both studies comes from the Washington Post:

"It's another mixed nutrition message," said Robert H. Eckel, professor of medicine at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver.

That said, carb control advocates will take considerable satisfaction from serious studies saying that low-carb diets are no worse than low-fat diets. That in itself represents a serious about-face. And the better triglyceride levels for the low-carb subjects are worth noting too.

The bottom bottom line, I think, is that the Diana Moon Principle holds: the best diet is the one you can stick with.

Last diet news: Tim Rankin of Total Results in Sterling VA, the licensed SuperSlow facility that trains my mother and sister, e-mailed links to two new articles by SuperSlow founder Ken Hutchins on diet. (Again: exercise guys say diet is important. Of course, this can look like the software people telling you its a hardware problem and the hardware people telling you it's a software problem.) "So, Your Ambition Is to Become a Circus Fat Lady?!" flips the problem around, imagining that a "renowned movie producer contacted you and offered you one million tax-free dollars to star in his film about a circus fat lady. You accepted the role with one requirement in addition to your acting talent: You must weigh 300 pounds. The problem is that you presently weigh only 150 and your part is to commence filming in 6 months." There follows an amusing plan for gaining weight, which involves frequent fasting!

Part 2 of the series insists on the importance of counting calories. He compares not counting calories to not keeping a careful register in your check book. Pure personal experience response: I don't count calories. Truth is, I've stopped counting carbs. I just stay away from bad carbs and practice portion control. (Counting carbs let me get to successful portion control.)

Portion control is a wonderful thing once you can do it. For instance, that four dollar jar of shelled pistachios doesn't seem like such an extravagance when you know you'll get the nine snacks out of it that the Serving Size information insists are in the jar. Ditto the six dollar jar of mac nuts.

Department of exercise: Avram Grumer of Pigs&Fishes e-mails to endorse the Powerblock selectorized dumbbells discussed in last week's item:

Hey, Jim. I've been using a set of PowerBlocks -- the SportsBlock set, which goes from 3 lbs to 21 lbs in 3-lb increments. They're great, and I'd buy a heavier set if I could afford it right now.

Avram's also fitness-blogging (on his LiveJournal) and has taken up Heavyhands. He encloses this link to a starting routine. It's a good starting routine. I still encourage people interested in Heavyhands to hunt up Dr. Schwartz's books, though, as there is a lot more you can do than the four moves on the LeanLifestyle page. Just for starters, you can increase the range of motion on the pumps, you can change your stride (duckwalking is great for your quads), you can dance, shadowbox, ski-pole and more.

I ended up doing a third week of Heavyhands in a row, which means tomorrow will be my first weightlifting in a month. I'm curious to find out whether I'll equal, exceed or fail to match my last totals. I even doubled up HH sessions yesterday, in hopes of burning off some of Offering Boy's birthday celebration. (It seems to have worked.)

Salam Pax Item III - Notes from the Briarpatch. Despite everything, Salam writes

Not too hot about any of [the candidates for an interim Iraqi government] anyway and this way we get to blame the Americans for the screwing up of our future. They have been involved in creating the mess we are in now, they should take responsibility in helping us clear it up. Ummm, let’s put it this way so no one gets pissed off: Pretty please with sugar on top, don’t leave now and let the loony mullahs stick me on a pole and leave me in the sun to think about my “Sins”.

You break it, you bought it. Which is why we've increased troop levels in Iraq since winning the official war and will probably have to increase them further.

Better boo the Dixie Chicks a little louder. It won't do to think about the rest.

Salam Pax Item II - Regular readers know of my conflicted view of the paleolibertarians at LewRockwell.com. But here's Rockwell from a column from earlier in the month:

Second, none of these central plans can ultimately work because all of them partake of a problem that afflicts all central planning, namely that society and economic life are too complex to be run from the top down. A management blueprint for a whole country consisting of actual people is a ridiculous notion.

And here's Salam from this weekend:

The type of “humanitarian aid” reaching the southern governorates turns the situation into a sick comedy. Nasiriayh Hospital got 20 boxes; six of them had only shampoo in them.

Need a blood transfusion? Have shampoo, it smells nice.

Another four or five were full of past-use-date stitching thread. In Basra the trucks of “humanitarian aid” coming from Saudi Arabia have crates of Pepsi in them. The Pediatric ward there is running out of medicine to suppress a fever, but they do have Pepsi. If this was in a movie it would be hilarious.

Actually, it was pretty funny in M*A*S*H. Which was the ultimate chronicle and indictment of just the sort of bureaucratic cluelessness that is now Iraq's best hope.

Salam Pax Day Item I - Another meaty several-day item by Salam with all sorts of news, rumors and observations, worth several items for a less strategically-located blogger like me. So let's do several items. First up, de-Baathification may turn out to be a lot like de-Nazification after all, despite what we skeptics think. Consider:

One tiny bit of interesting news before I end this post.

The CIA is contacting Mukhabarat agents for possible cooperation. I swear I am not making this up. Officially there is something called a black list and gray list and pick-ur-color list, but what is happening behind the scenes is that they want to get three different groups.

The agents who were involved in work concerning the USA, they get shaken down for whatever they know and probably will be put on trial for various crimes.

The people who were involved in work concerning Russia, they are being called to interviews selectively.

And the people whose specialty was Iran, they are welcomed, asked if they would be kind enough to contact their colleagues and would they be interested in coming aboard the groovy train?

Sorry this is just wrong, Mukhabarat? You wouldn’t get your Mukhabarat ID if they didn’t know you were a sick fuck who would slit his mother’s throat to get up the party ladder. Or does Bremer’s “de-baathification plan” not include the secret service types?

I'm sure Salam doesn't have time to read Unqualified Offerings like he did before the war, but I have to tell him that this decision fits a pattern:

Major General Reinhard Gehlen headed the Foreign Armies East section of the Abwehr, directed towards the Soviet Union. Gehlen had begun planning his surrender to the United States at least as early as the fall of 1944. In early March 1945 a group of Gehlen's senior officers microfilmed their holdings on the USSR. They packed the film in steel drums and buried it throughout the Austrian Alps. On 22 May 1945 Gehlen and his top aides surrendered to an American Counter-intelligence Corps [CIC] team.

After the War, the United States recognized that it did not have an intelligence capability directed against the Soviet Union, a wartime ally. Gehlen negotiated an agreement with the United States which allowed his operation to continue in existence despite post-war de-nazification programs. The group, including his immediate staff of about 350 agents, was known as the Gehlen Organization. Reconstituted as a functioning espionage network under U.S. control, it became CIA's eyes and ears in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union.

Hundreds of German army and SS officers were released from internment camps to join Gehlen's headquarters in the Spessart Mountains in central Germany.

How did it go, in purely practical terms?

But by the mid-1950s it became increasingly apparent that many of the assets of the Gehlen Organization were in fact controlled by Soviet intelligence. Dozens of operations, hundreds of agents, thousands of innocent civilians had been betrayed, many at the cost of their life.

Has Iran managed to penetrate the Mukhbarat, or will they manage to penetrate the post-Mukhbarat Mukbarat? They'll certainly be highly motivated to do so.

More on American employment of former Nazis in the early cold war can be found in this Boston Globe series, plus any number of Cold War histories.