Trailer Parked - There's stuff some other doves link to that I don't, sometimes because it seems more tendentious than grounded in evidence, sometimes because you've heard it all before, and boring you with the same old routine is my job, dammit, not some hack from the Independent, sometimes because the response I would make sounds peevish even to my ears. So I passed on this amusing Michelangelo Signorile piece about "Trailers of Mass Destruction" because it seemed premature and somewhat carping. I also passed on the CIA white paper on the mobile labs because, while the evidence within sounded far from definitive, I didn't have much to say beyond "The evidence seems far from definitive."

Comes now a New York Times report on skepticism about the white paper among senior analysts and I think we can say just a smidge more. (Ironists will note with amusement that Ahmed Chalabi ammanuensis Judith Miller shares a byline. Does the article represent a remorseful change of heart on her part, a Chalabite shot across the Occupation bow, or did Miller contribute only the responses of white paper supporters while coauthor William J. Broad talked to the skeptics? Inquiring minds want to know, and won't find out.)

There's a lot of back-and-forth among skeptics and advocates in the article. Some of the skeptical case sounds stronger than other parts. But here's what I think we can justifiably conclude:

1. Iraqis interviewed claim that the trailer existed to make hydrogen gas for artillery balloons. The CIA white paper provisionally dismisses this explanation on the grounds that, while the trailers could do this, they would be "inefficient" at producing hydrogen gas.

2. Based on the points of agreement between advocates and skeptics, the trailers also sound like an inefficient way to make biological weapons. In brief: hard to sterilize; hard to drain; requiring other specialized trucks or facilities that have not been found in addition to the trucks in question.

Miller and Broad report that white paper skeptics note that the trailer does seem to have a more efficient gas drain than liquid drain. The white paper advocate is forced to argue that you could drain biological material out the bottom if you hooked an air compressor to the top of the tank.

At this point, I'm not putting the latest "mobile labs" to rest, but the case looks far from proven. I'd like two know two more things, though:

First, can we show that the Iraqis had some other, more efficient production facilities for generating hydrogen for artillery balloons? That would tell against the Iraqis if so, and argue for them if not. Second, do any experts argue that this single trailer could not produce hydrogen. If it could, then it would appear to be more efficient as a hydrogen factory than a germ production facility. If it couldn't, then it still seems no worse at the one than the other.

One final note: the very first diagram in the white paper is captioned:

Interior graphic of a probably mobile BW production plant showing components similar to those in the far left trailer in the graphic on the left [from Colin Powell's February UN presentation].

Here's a list of leftmost-trailer components from the Powell diagram, front to back:

Fermentation
Control Panel
Air Compressor

Here are the components of the Mosul trailer, in order from front to back:

Water Chiller
Air Compressor
Control Panel
Water Tank
Fermentor
Off-Gas Collection

You could argue that the common components are in the proper order, just running in opposite directions along the trailer. A more detailed moparison is impossible because of all the unlabelled components in the Powell diagram.

Their Money or Their Vast Carelessness - A big problem with last night's item section about Jonathan Pearse's Samizdata piece is that it implies too firm a distinction between the pragmatic and the moral, and especially, between the impractical and the immoral. I would say it's a basic tenet of libertarianism and even conservatism that it is immoral to attempt political acts which you know or should know are impractical. To attempt what you know to be impractical is callous; to attempt what you should know to be impractical is careless. Carelessness, especially if your station means others will suffer from it more than you do, is a very bad thing, as the book that provides the title of this item makes clear.

The drug war is wrong, immoral, not just because it flouts the core principle of self-ownership - if I want to put this into my body the state should not interfere. It is also immoral because it is impractical - everything from geography to economics demonstrates, a priori, that the effort is doomed to failure. And basic political analysis makes clear that its pursuit will cause great harm. Note that drug dealers are still bad people. Many of them have murdered women and children. They have tortured. Some of them have undoubtedly even filled mass graves. But because we cannot make drugs go away, and because the attempt itself harms and kills innocent people, and because reasonable, observant people should be able to anticipate this or at least recognize the signs early on, the drug war is an immoral act.

F.A. Hayek makes essentially the same argument about political economy: central planning is impractical. The impracticalities of it drive central planners to cause more and more harm as they attempt to correct those impracticalities. And crucially, the impracticality of central planning can be anticipated. If you survey the wreckage of the Soviet system, the Fascist systems, the Maoist system, the ruin of postcolonial Africa, even the long doldrums of post-boom Japan and set out on a central planning project anyway, you are acting immorally.

Now there are two types of libertarians in the world, I have discovered: the kind who believe that Hayek stops at the water's edge, and the kind that don't. I have argued for most of the lifespan of this weblog that "humanitarian intervention," "nation-building" and neo-imperialism (for lack of a better term) amount to central planning in the international sphere. Many others have made the same argument, as James Pinkerton does in this column. Our moral complaint against the Iraq war is our pragmatic complaint against the Iraq war. Say, rather, it is our pragmatic complaint against the Iraq war coupled with our conviction that it's irresponsible not to recognize the impracticality.

The reason why people like Perry de Havilland and I end up shouting at each other, despite agreeing on almost everything there is to agree on, is precisely because of what neither liberals nor conservatives understand about libertarians - we are all moralists at heart. Liberals imagine that all we care about is money and utility, conservatives that our driving concern is satiating our various appetites. But we actually hate evil. We may not define "evil" the way a given liberal or conservative does. And when one libertarian weights a pair of evils differently than another it can get very heated very quickly.

What He Said - Hesiod takes out after flag-burners, hammer and tongs.

Listen. If any of you morons read my blog, STOP DOING DUMB AND OFFENSIVE SHIT LIKE THAT!

Ditto, to coin a phrase.

Blogwatch Auxiliary - Hit&Run, the Reason Magazine weblog, has become even livelier lately now that Julian Sanchez and Matt Welch have joined the crew. Admittedly, the latter addition increases the risk of baseball items somewhat, but it's still a net positive.

Speaking of baseball, as I understand it, the dilemma is this: imperious umps have shrunk the strike zone beyond all reason and this is one of the things contributing to the recent scoring deluge. It also contributes to games taking forever, depressing attendance and viewership. However, since chicks dig the long ball, the league is conflicted about cracking down. Seems to me there's an obvious solution: restore the real strike zone, but let everyone use corked bats. The genuine strike zone gives you more strikeouts, but the corked bats mean that when a batter does connect, it goes farther. Scoring stays up, game durations come down. It's a win-win.

Now here's the thing: there are people who have a very sophisticated understanding of baseball and some shrewd statistical tools at their disposal. If you are one of those people and see a flaw in my logic, please find someone else like you and tell them. I may never mention baseball on this site again.

Eve Tushnet reconsiders X-Men and X2. For me, the first movie benefitted from Low Expectations Syndrome. It was the first good Marvel movie after a string of low-budget embarrassments. (Did anyone ever see the appalling 1990 Captain America movie? Could they explain why on earth you would make the Red Skull Italian? And not put Captain America in costume for the entire climactic sequence?) Eve is also in the midst of a long colloquy on the politics of judicial nomination disputes - it's kind of like Kelly Jane Torrance and The Ambler's colloquy on Evelyn Waugh, only with actual entries.

Neilalien becomes the first dedicated comics blogger to join the UO blogroll. Journalista proprietor Dirk Deppey becomes the second. Other UO linkees provide minor or major comics coverage, but these two sites are pure comics, all the time. As always, I intend to do more comics blogging on this site. Really, dammit.

Jonathan Pearse has an item on Samizdata that touches on what we might call the question of Rogue States' Rights. He problematizes Randian concepts of altruism-vs.-selfishness, which is admittedly not much harder than making a Classic Trek android's head explode. But he goes on to raise an interesting question fellow Samizdatist Perry de Havilland has raised before about why we should consider tyrannical states to have any rights at all. A full response won't fit in the margins of this blog item, but briefly, Absolutely, a tyrant like Saddam Hussein has no rights against Jonathan Pearse whatsoever, nor against Perry, nor me, nor Arthur Silber. That is, Jonathan or Perry or Salam Pax or anyone else would have a perfect right to put a bullet through Saddam's left eye or, preferably, stake him to an ant hill and slather his nuts with Tab. But Perry and Arthur are different kinds of entities than the United States and Britain. I don't put much moral stock in the rights of states, particularly the rights of states against people, but I think there's a strong pragmatic case to be made for the legal fiction that states have rights against each other regardless of their character. All that annoying Treaty of Westphalia stuff. And it is annoying, because one's instinct is that a semi-decent state has not only a right but a duty to knock over the rulership of any indecent state it can. I used to believe this myself. For a whole bunch of mostly pragmatic reasons, I no longer do.

Hesiod suggests the Dixie Chicks "tell the country music industry to go fuck themselves" and release pop albums from now on. I like to think, rather, that the continued sniping by the Nashville-industry establishment will inspire them to shed the vestiges of mainstream country kitsch (which they certainly bear more gracefully than any other radio-country act) and join the Steve Earle-Emmylou Harris-Lucinda Williams-Buddy and Julie Miller Dark Side.

Justin Slotman explains what kind of single-issue voter he is.

Seablogger Alan Sullivan weighs in on my burst of intemperance last week, declaring "Jim proceeds to editorialize, indignation mounting, until he climaxes in an Indymedia tirade." One of the interesting things about his item is that it exemplifies the reliably bifurcated view of media bias. Righties like Alan are convinced that the media is reflexively liberal, lefties like Avedon Carol are as certain it serves its right wing masters. Me, I think the media just sucks, and has a statist, not necessarily liberal, tilt built into its very structure. Media exists to identify Bad Things and ask "Why doesn't the government do something?" Alan leans way too heavily, I think, on waving away news sources based on their bias. Regardless of whether you think the Washington Post secretly hoped the war would go badly or not, the question is in the first instance factual. For instance, CBS's David Hawkins reports, in this video clip, that US troops suffered sixteen attacks yesterday. That's true or not, regardless of whether David Hawkins secretly hates America. Were the Defense Department to deny the facticity of the report, maybe claiming there were eight attacks, or none, that would be one thing. But the attacks neither cease to exist nor become irrelevant just because it's CBS that reports them.

After that comes the analysis. Here opinion enters into it, but informed opinion needs to take into account a lot of history, including a lot of history of guerrilla resistance to Western powers, which was what I was doing before I let loose with the imprecations. A few days before writing that item, I got to see the film version of The Quiet American, and it was much on my mind. Salam Pax's descriptions of "postwar" Baghdad have their similarities to the atmosphere of early 1950s Saigon. Alden Pyle's certitude has its familiarity too. Conservatives don't want to hear "Vietnam syndrome" talk, of course, so we might better allude to The Battle of Algiers instead.

Balloon Juice has a pretty good roundup of the Great Paul Wolfowitz Misquote episode. Let this be a lesson to my fellow doves: faith-based intelligence can bite us in the ass too.

Weather Forbidding - Nell Lancaster writes

(Enjoyed the mnemonic, which has gotten full laughs in the retelling -- to tomato growers, admittedly.)

Meanwhile, Kevin Maroney sends an Advantage: Kevin Maroney! e-mail. Turns out Kevin too has a LiveJournal, and offered his own theory on the "Long April" days before I did.

All I can say is, our May flowers better kick ass.

I Know You Are But What Am I? - Perry de Havilland and Brian Doss of Cattalarchy damn me right back. More to say later. For now, just pretend that I said everything Scott Cattanach says in the comments section to Perry's item. The Modulator takes statistical issue with Perry and Brian and Leonard of Unruled thinks I generated "a lot more heat than seems appropriate this early in the game."

UPDATE: Arthur Silber weighs in.

Fresh Bilge - Get a load of Alan Sullivan's new Seablogger location and design! (Official blog name: "Fresh Bilge.") I long thought that all Sekimori-designed blogs looked basically the same, but this one has a real freshness to it. And Alan remains the best prose stylist among neolibertarian bloggers. Check it out.

Small World - Legendary journalist Peter Maass, back from Iraq, figures out that Salam Pax was his interpreter. An absolute must-read story.

The Road Home Goes Through Baghdad - I received the following e-mail yesterday. The domain part of the address is a local telecom in Georgia, Coastal Communications, which has a military discount "Until our troops return," and an office in Fort Stewart, Georgia, home to the US Army's Third Infantry Division.

I am contacting you as the spouse of a 3rd Infantry Division soldier who is currenly serving in Iraq.

My husband has been gone since September 2002. His unit was on of the first to deply. They lived in tents, but had access to showers, port-a-potties, and freshly made food. They did their own laundry in buckets when the contractors were unable to handle the job. As the entire division moved in, access was limited to showers but sill available.

At the end of February 2003, they moved into the desert. No showers, no bathrooms, no tents. They lived in the desert, in their vehicles and personal tents for three weeks befor ethey were given the order to move into Iraq.

"The road home leads through Baghdad." Thise was their focus. They had a mission, they completed it. With great hardship and loss of 35 sons, haubands, brothers, and fathers. After mid-April, the soldiers were no longer in combat mode, but had changed to peacekeeping mode. Still no running water, no showers, no bathrooms, living out of vehicles and tents or a bombed out building. But morale was high, their focus turned to awaiting their replacements so that they could return to their homes, families, and rest!!!

Their replacements arrived, and responsibility for Baghdad was given over to those replacements.

But their return isn't going to happen now, not anytime soon. The soldiers of the 3rd ID have been given a new mission. They are once again to be in combat mode, being sent to the Fallujah area to take over, because the FRESH replacement untis have lost 9 soldiers in the past week. But our soldiers are far from combat ready. Having redeployment snatched away at the lst moment, morale has plunged! They had endured so much hardship and horrors that most of us will fortunately never experience. Their equipement is not battle ready either. Parts for the repairs of the equipment were ordered but not delivered, or in some cases, never orded at all. They would turn in the equipment to contractors in Kuwait who would do the repairs.

Being sent back into a combat area with low morale and broken or nearly borken equipment puts every soldier's life in JEOPARDY. Whether through possible equipment failure or human error due to fatigue and the inability to focus on the important job at hand, they are in even greater danger than when they fought their way to and through Baghdad. These are brave and strong soldiers, men and women. They have fulfilled their mission and need to be sent home. Fresh soldiers need to take their place, if more soldiers are needed than had ben initially planned.

I pled with you to intervene in whatever capacity that you can, on the behalf of the soldires of the 3rd ID. Help us to get our soldiers back, safe and sound. They have been gone far too long and bore too much of the responsibility for this war! We all need your help in getting the powers that be to see that fresh troops are needed to complete this mission with working equipment, not our battle tired soldiers and their equally tired vehicles.

Please help the soldiers and the families of the 3rd Infantry Division of Ft Stewart, GA.

My correspondent included this Savannah Morning News article, "The Order from Hell," by Noelle Phillips.

In addition to the hardship on the troops, there is real danger here to both the troops, the people of Iraq and our stated reconstruction goals, as I suggested the other day.

Weekly Fitness Blog Item - 174 pounds, 34.5" waist. That's down a pound from last week. No before/"after" pictures yet - I need to find someone with a digital camera.

This week's disgusting health concept comes courtesy of Matthew Hogan, who e-mails about this MedLine article on visceral fat. If you thought skinfold fat was the only thing you had to worry about - and I did - it turns out that you also have to worry about globules of fat forming right in your guts. That's right - balls of fat nestled among your organs. It sounds like you may need to worry more about visceral fat since it a) forms before appreciable skinfold fat accumulation, and b) probably has more to do with bad health outcomes like cancer and heart disease than skinfold fat.

Well, yuck. Frustratingly, the MedLine researchers looked only at aerobics as a possible solution:

"Participants who exercised at a level equivalent to 17 miles (28 km) of jogging each week saw significant declines in visceral fat, subcutaneous abdominal fat and total abdominal fat," Slentz said.

"While this may seem like a lot of exercise, our previously sedentary and overweight subjects were quite capable of doing this amount."

They studied 170 volunteers, putting them into four groups who got no exercise, small amounts of moderate exercise equivalent to walking 11 miles a week, low amounts of vigorous exercise equivalent to jogging 11 miles a week and a lot of vigorous exercise equivalent to jogging 17 miles a week.

The good news is that you don't have to actually jog seventeen miles a week. Exercise "equivalent to" 17 miles a week will do. Good thing: at a generous estimate of 12 minutes per mile jogging, that's three hours, twenty-four minutes a week powdering the balls of your feet and knocking your knees out of alignment. If you can burn 1700 calories (1 mile walking/jogging/running is worth about 100 calories) some other way, by all that's holy, do it. What's missing is, first, whether there's some level between 11 and 17 miles that will do the job, and second, what benefits the extra muscle from what level of strength training would have on - shudder - visceral fat.

Next up: Fortnightly Fitness Fun Revisited. Not fortnightly exactly. Regular readers will recall I did three weeks of Heavyhands in a row before returning to weight workouts. I finally did slow-cadence lifting Monday for the first time in four weeks. So, did Heavyhands allow me to maintain or even progress on strength? Here are the numbers. "Reps" are concentric (up) and eccentric (down) phases of ten seconds each. Weight is total weight used, whether two dumbbells or one. "70 pounds" means two 35-pound dumbbells.

Dumbbell Squats
4/30/03 - 10 reps/60# (this was when I realized I needed heavier dumbbells)
5/26/03 - 7 reps/70# (I'm going to need new dumbbells again pretty soon)

One-Armed Rows (right, then left)
4/30/03 - 6/15#
5/26/03 - 5/20#

Overhead Press
4/30/03 - 5/50#
5/26/03 - 6/50#

Dumbbell Flyes
4/30/03 - 8/40#
5/26/03 - 7/50#

Ab Crunches
4/30/03 - 8/20#
5/26/03 - 7/30#

Two exercises I skipped on April 30 but did last week:

Calf Raises (left, then right)
4/15/03 - 6/30#
5/26/03 - 6/35#

Leg Raises (left, then right)
4/15/03 - 6/15#
5/26/03 - 7/20#

Lastly, I did dumbbell curls on 4/30/03 (5/50#) but skipped them on May 26.

Okay, here are the uncertainties. The official slow-cadence metric is not reps but "Time Under Load" - the total number of minutes and seconds you spend doing your reps. If I rush a bunch of reps, that throws off the validity of the comparison.

That said, it looks fair to say that I maintained or progressed on every exercise, which suggests that Heavyhands either built muscle or at least didn't lose any. And that was with four weeks between weight sessions - the normal FFF schedule calls for only two.

That said, the combination of Heavyhands, fiber and Niacin didn't effect a miraculous change in either my cholesterol or blood pressure numbers. My total cholesterol, HDL and LDL all improved by 10-15% over my March tests, but my LDL was still 133: too high. The May results were about the same as my 2000 figures. So you can say I undid three years of damage in two months, but I've got to knock another ten years off yet. Blood pressure was still 140/100.

So, no slam dunk for Heavyhands either.

Tim of Total Results took gentle exception to my joke last week about diet guys and exercise guys. I wrote

(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.)

Tim writes

The fact is weight loss or gain is simple math and thermodynamics. To lose weight, calories in (eaten) must be less than calories out (expended). Period! Since exercise in and of itself does not burn many calories (you can easily wipe out the caloric benefit to 7 days/ 1 hour/day exercise by having seconds one night at the dinner table), the single best method to achieve the goal is to PTFD (put the fork down). All the diet plans out there, from Atkins, to Sugar Busters, to Jenny Craig, LA weight loss, Weight watchers, etc., contrary to what they may say, are just different methods of Calorie Reduction!

I agree with him on almost every point. I would only speak up, in a qualified way, for calorie-burning exercise. It's true that you can undo its benefits pretty easily - run a mile, then eat three Oreos and you're right back where you started. However, if you were going to eat the Oreos anyway, you're better off running the mile than not. And let's say you have a sedentary lifestyle but your calorie intake roughly balances your calorie outflow. (I think the average person gains about a pound a year from 25-65 or something like that.) If you continue to take in that many calories and commence an exercise program, then whatever calories you burn during a workout and the cooldown should translate into measurable weight loss.

But I wholeheartedly agree with Tim that "the best way exercise can contribute to weight/fat loss is by building lean muscle mass, which increases your calorie burn rate," as I argue in this space pretty much every week. That's why I lift weights and why the only aerobics program I bother with is itself a progressive resistance program.

Muscle: Good!

In other fitness blogs, Jeremy Scharlack has his Week Two weight posted to his site. (His first fitness item is here.) Jeremy avows inspiration from this site's reports. a) That's very kind of him; b) Take that, Jesse Walker! And Avram Grumer continues to post his workout reports and weights regularly.

Finally, Slate looks at the question of why the Camp Gitmo detainees have gained an average of a pound a month since arriving. I'd talk more about this article except that, when you come down to it, I didn't find it that interesting.

Next week: The American Council on Exercise: WTF??