Hit Record - The confessions are coming fast and furious all of a sudden! About editing published items (see "The Record II" below), Patrick Nielsen Hayden e-mails

Not only is that true of both NHs, sometimes it's a collaborative process. Viz., this morning, when in the interest of getting to work on time, Teresa ran the hair dryer while conducting, at a shout, a colloquy with me in various ways to edit and revise her just-posted Iraqi Museum post.

The true extent to which PNH material is written by TNH, and vice versa, with be revealed in Heaven.

Aaron Haspel writes

I do exactly the same thing. I give myself at least a half hour window to remove gross solecisms after posting, and indefinite time to correct spelling errors.

It is interesting, though, that email lasts forever while old versions of a web page disappear down the memory hole, unless Google is lucky enough to cache a copy.

Incidentally, you misspelled WYSIWYG. See what I mean?

Meanwhile, Stephen Dunn has more advice for Andrew Sullivan. And Thomas Nephew recollects a first, fragmentary report of US prisoners in Afghanistan.

Dance with the Devil - Jesse of Pandagon discovered an Asia Times report that

United States and Pakistani intelligence officials have met with Taliban leaders in an effort to devise a political solution to prevent the country from being further ripped apart.

Preliminary, brief comments from Tacitus (" I mean it, I'm burning my RNC card if it's true") and Hesiod ("I don't recall the Government or the media reporting that the Taliban had taken any coalition prisoners, let alone U.S. prisoners" - via e-mail).

I'll have more to say on the matter when I know what I think. What a pisser, though. In the meantime, it's worth noting that the item might not be true. Plus there's the whole Charles McCarry thesis that the whole point of having an intelligence agency is to keep a line in to out-groups and adversaries. (See the passages of The Last Supper set in late-1940s Indochina, when OSS/CIA officer Paul Christopher regrets being ordered to break off contact with the Viet Minh.)

Fat City - Preview: Sunday's fitness blog item will contain actual politics, discussing the current notion of fat as a public health issue. Two recent Reason items (by Ronald Bailey and Jacob Sullum) will be on the syllabus.

The Record II - To amplify something I said below, I've made about a half dozen wording changes to "The Record" in the 5 minutes or so since hitting "Save." Why? First drafts suck. I find Movable Type's preview mode uncongenial - the tags I use tend to turn the text into a tombstone of different fonts. The edit window itself I find good for typing but not for copy-editing. Even copying into a text editor doesn't quite work for me - the various html tags, including often voluminous link tags, tend to break up the flow of the text past the point where I'm experiencing it as a piece of writing that I can critique. The first WYSIWYG look at it on the blog is the time that my characteristic writing flaws really jump out at me - repeating favorite words in close proximity, stringing together too many sentences of the same length and structure, and . . . that's it! That's the list!

So I edit for as many as ten minutes after publishing. Which probably violates code. Oh well.

The Record - Since it's becoming Blogger Inside Baseball night . . .

Stephen Dunn of the group blog Begging to Differ has an item criticizing Andrew Sullivan for the way he handled a correction on his site. It's an interesting take. Stephen is right that the accepted method of correcting a weblog item is to leave the original text verbatim and append an update explaining the error. Am I as down on Sullivan as he is, though? No, not really. This doesn't seem to be a case of Sullivan trying to deceive his readers about what he said by wiping out the evidence. Were that his aim, he wouldn't need the voluminous apology - just delete the item and be done.

I think the standard etiquette is a good guideline. For my part I don't follow it exclusively. I'll correct typos after an item is posted. I'll even change wording in the immediate aftermath of publishing an item if I think of something punchier or decide I left something important out. These larger changes I'll only make during the session in which I post the item. If I wake up the next morning thinking of a different way to say something or something I should have added, that becomes an update or a new post. Basically, I'll monkey with it before I think most people have had a chance to read it, and won't monkey with it afterward. And I won't edit an item someone has linked to without a clear update explaining the edit.

But what if you published something and found yourself deeply ashamed of it, which I suspect is what happened to Sullivan? Might you think that your mea culpa is not worth leaving the original out there to mislead and possibly inflame? I'm not sure that call is entirely obvious. In this case, I think Sullivan got it wrong. But not heinously wrong.

The worst item I ever wrote, I've kept:

Wilderness of Mirrors - Indispensible Off-the-Rez blogger Andy Kashdan of A Libertarian Reads the Newspaper links to the wackiest conspiracy theory yet.

UPDATE: Andy Kashdan now debunks this rumor. Net moves fast, thankfully.

And what was that "rumor?" Nothing less than the infamous "It wasn't a plane that destroyed the Pentagon" hoax. I could offer all kinds of excuses - the original item doesn't endorse the theory; I was bored out of my skull in a New Brunswick hotel room . . . and, actually that's all I've got. But it was absurd to offer the claim anything but immediate, reasoned scorn. For the time it took from originally blogging about it to the correction, I was a fool. (The shame fairly pours off the update, doesn't it?)

I had then a fraction of my current readership and nobody ever seemed to notice that item one way or another. Andy Kashdan's weblog is, alas, long defunct, so the links are dead. Stumbling on it in an archive search you'd be hard-pressed to even guess at the subject matter. But I know it's there, and I actually think about it now and then. It's my own memento mori tucked in the server's memory and my own, the comments section I otherwise don't have, reliably whispering You're not as smart as you think you are.

Lies, Damn Lies and Fellow Bloggers - Andrew Olmsted has updated his item on the question of possible lies about Iraqi WMDs with a response to my item of this morning. In ordinary circumstances, I'd take exception to some of his accusations, but the actual circumstance is that my tone this morning was insulting to Andrew and I have no standing to complain - I'd be ticked too in his position.

I think he has an arguably strong point when he says that everyone has to decide what's "reasonable," and that everyone has that right. Also, I complained that his version of the "Bush lied" thesis was constructed as a straw man. He says that he has seen precisely that version of the argument made by war and Bush opponents that were not me. I think he would have aided understanding with a link. For my part, I've seen people say "Bush lied." In most cases, context has convinced me they meant "Bush's Administration lied," but some of them surely meant Bush himself. However, I don't know anyone who argued that Saddam "never had WMDs." That more than anything led me to lump Andrew's post in with the straw man arguments - frex, the one that amuses hawks that "Saddam Hussein must never have existed since we can't find him." However, if I can grant that doves will say a sensible thing ("The Bush Administration lied about the evidence") loosely ("Bush lied about WMDs") then I should as readily grant that hawks may say a sensible thing ("destroyed well before the war") loosely too ("never existed").

I agree with Andrew that we can not, right now prove that President Bush knowingly lied about Iraq's unconventional weapons. I feel strongly, for reasons I've discussed many times, that the most reasonable conclusion to draw is that some of the Bush Administration lied about the evidence to Congress and the public, and others of the Administration lied about the evidence to themselves. The strongest alternative to Dishonesty Theory is a stunning indifference to the Administration's national security responsibilities - the war plan made no sense if you assumed that substantial stocks of Iraqi chemical and biological weapons existed.

Andrew actually outclasses most of his fellow hawks and I've added him to the New Crew section of the blogroll effective immediately. He'll help balance out all the liberals that have snuck in lately.

By the Way - I'm on record as being against war with Iran or egging on the sorts of paramilitary resistance to the Iranian government that could lead to war. (Both the Mujahadeen-e-Khalq and the ethnic-Azeri nationalist movement seem to be candidates.) But I hope the protesters win. I think that's most likely if we keep our official support on the rhetorical level only. I'm also all in favor of direct "civil society-to-civil society" support such as the AFL-CIO provided to Poland's Solidarity in the 1980s. But the bulk of the work has to be of Iranians, by Iranians and for Iranians. That's the kind of reform that sticks, and the kind that doesn't require decades of "peacekeeping" to prop up.

This is especially true, I think, because the closer analogue to Iran is not Poland but the Soviet Union itself. Iran's government is not propped up by foreigners the way Poland's junta was. The Bush I treatment (let it ripen and rot) more than the Bush II treatment (we're going to fix it for them) will best serve us and the Iranians both.

UPDATE: See Andrew's item for a response to the above, and see my follow-up here.

Why Can't I Stop Thinking About the Doublemint Twins All of a Sudden? - Wrigley patents anti-impotence gum.

One More Time - A useful reminder by Gene Healy at, of all places, FoxNews.com, that " with or without chemical and biological weapons, Iraq was never a national security threat to the United States."

My only cavil is that Gene (like Matthew Barganier) argues that, even from a dovish perspective, it doesn't matter if they don't exist, because they made an invalid case for war in the first place. Gene is right that, in theory, "Iraq is a big country, and the weapons may yet turn up," just like the Administration claims. However, that possibility gets smaller and smaller all the time. And if the Administration knew or should have known that they were basing their central case for war on faulty claims, that truth matters very much. After all, it's not as if Iraq was the last war a US administration will ever try to drag the country into - not even the last war this Administration will try to drag the country into.

So the question of the Administration's honesty is crucial, crucial enough that Andrew Olmsted spends an entire item, touching in its way, explaining that the Administration couldn't possibly have, you know, lied. After a faulty restatement of the issue, Andrew offers a couple of bad reasons to support his argument.

First, the faulty restatement: " there never were any WMDs, and the President knowingly lied about their existence to fuel support for the war." The accurate version of the claim is that "Iraq's WMD were destroyed by the late 1990s and the Administration knowingly lied about the evidence of their existence to fuel the war."

Bad reason number one: "f it was already common knowledge that Iraq had no WMDs, why didn't anyone say so before the war? The French did almost everything in their power to prevent the war, yet they never suggested that Iraq didn't have any WMDs. The debate prior to the war focused on the question of what should be done about the WMDs, not whether or not they existed."

The irony here is palpable: more people didn't say so because we foolishly accepted that the Administration's case must have some validity if they were so vocal about it, or were embedded in institutions substantially beholden to US power, e.g. the UN, NATO etc. and so felt compelled to give the US credence on some level, because the Administration suppressed a lot of contradictory evidence (e.g. the statements by Hussein Kamel that Iraq had discontinued its entire program) and because the dovish case didn't depend on the existence or lack of the weapons.

Andrew's bad reason number one is a version of "How could the Administration be lying if everyone believed it?"

Bad reason number two: "There were numerous reasons to support a war, (most of which were cited by the White House at some point), from the humanitarian issues to Iraq's support of terrorism. Were WMDs so crucial to the argument that the President couldn't win support without them? Hardly."

This falls foul of the basic reality test: in fact, the Administration did center its case around Iraq's weapons stockpiles. I always assume politicians know their politics. So if the Administration stressed WMDs, it's because, politically, they felt they had to: those "numerous reasons" may have seemed compelling to hawkish bloggers, but that's different from seeming compelling to Congress or the public at large.

Bad reason number three: "And if the President did believe that he had to lie about WMDs, why wouldn't he arrange some evidence to prove his case? If he was willing to lie about their existence in the first place, planting evidence seems a small next step."

The problem here is assuming that the Administration would fear being caught out in its dishonesty. (There's also the problem of "the President" standing in for all the constituent parts of his Administration.) Given the long list of Administrations who lied the United States into war and got away with it, why, really, should the Administration have worried? I said above that the truth matters. That was Hope talking, not reason.

That said, I agree with not a little of what Andrew has to say in his two concluding paragraphs. (They suffer from the familiar hawkish concern with first deciding what kind of criticisms to allow as "reasonable.")

Notes on the General Decline - Now the New Criterion has a weblog. That's like John Henry buying a Dremel tool. Like Matthew Arnold writing a screenplay. It's just - it's just - wrong!

But at least we know blogging really is over now. I thank you, my retro friends, for sticking around.

Don't Forget - Whatever else David Brinkley was, he was the author of a damned good book, Washington Goes to War, about the Capital City during WWII. The passage recounting V-E Day is stunning prose, and it's quite a good pocket history of an episode in the growth of government too. (He charts the origin of the federal income tax withholding.) I've read claims that his historian son Alan did much of the actual writing, which would have been something of a trial given their very different politics. Anyway, a good book by David Brinkley or someone with that name.

Much Better, Thank You - As an official Friend of Fantagraphics, I thought I should mention that the annoying but valuable^TM comics publisher says they are out of the financial woods. Maybe they got enough to reprint JOURNEY while they were at it. (Link via just about everybody.)

JOURNEY, strangely enough, has no fan page, which means I have a mission in life. It was the creation of cartoonist William Messner-Loebs, published during the 1980s by Fantagraphics. The protagonist, Wolverine McAllister, was a kind of - I'd call him a mountain man, but he lived in the Northwest Territories during the era of the War of 1812 and mountains are pretty scarce through Illinois and Michigan. The JOURNEY stories were wonderful, full of history, philosophy, religion and whatever else Loebs felt like sneaking in. (One story arc was an homage to the American hardboiled novelist Ross MacDonald.) Tekamthi, Johnny Appleseed (as "Jemmy Acorn"), you name it, they appeared in JOURNEY or made their presence felt. He even got in a dig at his own publisher's New Criterion approach to the comics medium in one sequence. You can just imagine the dizzying heights of popularity a black-and-white comic about an introverted fur trapper with a habit of falling in among Swedenborgians attained.

Like Fantagraphics, Loebs and his wife have also suffered financial reverses, at least as of last summer. I'm not sure if their problems have since been eased or if it would still be a good idea to become a Friend of Bill Loebs.

A Fanboy's Notes - Franklin Harris clobbers apparently-admired Marvel comics writer Chuck Austen in his latest Pulp Culture column. He ignores Austen's writing of Captain America, but wouldn't improve his opinion if he took it into account.

The late-winter "torture brouhaha" impelled me to seek out Captain America comics for the first time in many years. What I found was that the series, with Austen writing, sucks - not, as professional scold Michael Medved would have it, because Marvel has turned the series "unpatriotic." Just becaus Austen can't really write. Everything is overblown, adolescent bombast with a patina of "mature themes." (Yes, this certainly describes Steve Englehart's "Secret Empire" saga of the 1970s, but that was of its time and frank in its method and purposes.) The art of Jae Lee doesn't help either. Lee is apparently also admired, but he's a terrible storyteller - it's hard to follow the action through his drawings and he seems to have skipped the facial expression classes at the Joe Kubert School.

It's a shame that a flagship character like Cap has been so fitfully well-served by his corporate custodians. Maybe there's something to neilalien's complaints about "archetypal heroes." NA never mentions it but Marvel has at least three of these - Cap, Iron Man and the Hulk, all of whom have had sales troubles at some point over their history. Come to think of it, neilalien's beloved Dr. Strange probably qualifies as an archetypal hero himself, and it's been years since anyone tried to sell his book.

I can't help think that better creators could solve most of Captain America's problems, though. For comparison, check out the quasi-throwback Captain America: What Price Glory, miniseries, sure to be reprinted as a collection any day now, with consciously Kirbyesque art by Steve Rude and a Bruce Jones script strangely bifurcated between Silver Age and whatever-age-we're-in-now sensibilities. I assume Marvel would really like to interest movie producers in a Captain America blockbuster, so they'll probably keep throwing material out there until it sticks. I imagine there's still a fair amount of shame attaching to the straight-to-video embarrassment of 1992 that they'd like to expunge.

UPDATE: Dirk Deppey suggests, via e-mail, that while Marvel may be eager to sell a film deal for Captain America, producers may be shy of current lawsuits:

The biggest problem with convincing someone to make a Captain America movie is that the character is under dispute -- one of the character's co-creators, Joe Simon, has taken Marvel to court in an attempt to regain the copyright, and Marvel's sued him right back in response. Ampersand blogged the relevant appeals court decision back in November of last year.

On the Other Hand - Max Sawicky has an interesting reconsideration of the question of the Vush Administration and Imperialism. Worth reading just to read Max Sawicky say " It follows that in the dispute between Bush and true Wilsonians over governance in Iraq, Bush is the lesser of two evils."

Nut graph:

Bush, Rummy, and Cheney, in this hypothesis, are not neo-cons. They employ neo-cons to radiate a Wilsonian gospel, but the Bushists' real business is to economize on the use of force.

Maybe, I say. The problem is that, true or not, Bush et al have shouldered open a Wilsonian door their successors can barge right through, whether in Iraq or elsewhere. Just as the Bushies reused the Clinton Administration's "humanitarian" rhetoric during the War for the KLA to "justify" the war and ex-war in Iraq, so the stated claims about wanting to reconstruct Iraq will find be available to some future set of actual neo-Wilsonians, neo-hegemonists etc.

Now Pull the Other One - Sometimes, Mencken said, a belly laugh is worth a thousand syllogisms. The Hudson Institute has a new broadside claiming to demonstrate "that Saddam Hussein is legally and morally responsible for the September 11 attacks" that is worth a couple of belly laughs. That's two thousand syllogisms right there!

Notes from an Ex-War - Sabotage in Basra bedevils efforts to get Iraq's southern oil industry back on line.

Some Fugitives Are More Equal Than Others - Is Abu Musab al-Zarqawi the official Snowball of our interventionist Animal Farm? The obliging Washington Times reports that Colin Powell's official link between Iraq and al Qaeda is now being "sheltered" in - Iran. One of these days Zarqawi is actually going to be somewhere but none of the villagers will come running when the boy calls. Heck, maybe that's now.

Gas Guzzlers - Reader D. Kratsas found a picture of a US Army mobile hydrogen generator. We're better than the Iraqis, as ours fits in the bed of a cut-down Humvee. I searched the net - half-heartedly - for pictures of British systems but found nothing.

Horror Story - We're from the government, and we're here to ruin your lives with our clueless, militant "compassion."

Link via Brickbats via the Agitator.

Justice Will Take Us Millions of Intricate Moves as William Stafford wrote, in what I'd call the single best line of his oeuvre. A few of them are detailed in this Cairo Times article about a noiseless, patient human rights lawyer in Egypt, sneakily building a body of genuine human rights case law. (Link via Hesiod.)

FWIW II - From the NYT . . .

Two of the highest-ranking leaders of Al Qaeda in American custody have told the C.I.A. in separate interrogations that the terrorist organization did not work jointly with the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein, according to several intelligence officials.

Abu Zubaydah, a Qaeda planner and recruiter until his capture in March 2002, told his questioners last year that the idea of working with Mr. Hussein's government had been discussed among Qaeda leaders, but that Osama bin Laden had rejected such proposals, according to an official who has read the Central Intelligence Agency's classified report on the interrogation.

In his debriefing, Mr. Zubaydah said Mr. bin Laden had vetoed the idea because he did not want to be beholden to Mr. Hussein, the official said.

Separately, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Qaeda chief of operations until his capture on March 1 in Pakistan, has also told interrogators that the group did not work with Mr. Hussein, officials said.

(Link via Tacitus.) The Times quotes a senior intelligence official "explaining that everything al Qaeda detainees say must be regarded with great skepticism." Which is surely true, but we keep talking to them. And I wonder how much skepticism we'd be told to bring to the conversation if either of them said Osama and Saddam chatted all the time via IM.

NB: the senior intelligence official has a point. Note also that the leaks from Anglosphere intelligence officials are coming fast and furious these days, in Britain and here. It's dangerous business for politicians to try to set up intelligence agencies as fall guys. Intelligence agencies know things. And they care more about their own political health than yours. Didn't Watergate start to go sour on Nixon when the White House tried to scapegoat the CIA?

Anyway, I still think that this two-front war - White House vs. CIA/DIA and Downing Street vs. MI6/GCHQ - has been going on for much longer than the end of the war. I suggested back in February that the "dodgy dossier" Colin Powell waved before the UN may have been a time bomb designed to explode in Tony Blair's face - plagiarized from easily-discoverable open-source documents masquerading as high-grade intelligence, much of it simply a backgrounder on the structure of the Iraqi security services rather than an account of weapon programs.

In the latest countersalvo, Scotland on Sunday offers a very Blair-friendly account of a previous Iraq dossier, not heretofore reported, I believe, that " purported to contain 55 pages of high-grade intelligence on the threat posed by Saddam, but was in fact largely based on unclassified CIA documents, Pentagon press releases and the published reports of American think-tanks." How much of this was British Intelligence trying to hoodwink Blair into supporting war, how much of it was British Intelligence telling its audience what it wanted to hear and how much was British Intelligence not wanting to admit that they just don't have the money to do more than surf the net and photocopy promotional copies of AEI monographs? Dunno. Bloggers don't do real reporting.

Surely We Could at Least MENTION It - More "Bad Republican" frankness from Tacitus, who forthrightly allows that our current military - the human beings component thereof - is too small to sustain all of our overseas commitments. He offers a handful of possibilities:

There's a few choices here, none of them good: We can undercommit to our commitments; we can continue to abuse the Guard and Reserve system until it falls apart; or we can resume a draft. Any bets as to which we'll do?

While we're tossing unlikely options out there, how about: Forthrightly scale back our "commitments." I mean, humor me here! (I take formally reducing commitments to be different than "undercommiting" to same.)

Don't miss the picture embedded in his item.

FWIW - There's a new Baghdad Blogger, "G." of G. in Baghdad. Since he's number two, he'll probably miss out on the whole questioning his authenticity, accusing him of being a Ba'athist apparatchik thing. There's something poignant about that. (Link via Where Is Raed.)

Notes in the Margin - Here's the latest on the low-grade counterinsurgency campaign US troops continue to fight in Mesopotamia. I had to check the date on top of this one, because it ends with yet another item about Iraqi police being arrested for trying to start secret pro-Ba'athist cells. But the article cleared up my own confusion:

Last Saturday U.S. forces arrested 15 Iraqi officers at the police college in Baghdad for holding secret meetings in support of the now-dissolved Baath party.

Okay, I'm caught up now.

Asinine anti-gun maundering of the week is from Marc Fisher in the Washington Post, about a Catholic diocese where some members have gone over their priest's head to try to prevent him from accepting donations from a charity skeet shoot. (Animal rights supporters may wish to know that clay pigeons do not have a face.)

And so now, in Hyattsville, because some people cannot get beyond their fascination with guns and some people actually believe the words of their faith's commandments, Sunday is a day for staring across a deep divide.

For fun, imagine Fisher using these words about some Catholics who "actually believe the words of their faith's commandments" about abortion. Or homosexuality. And no, I wouldn't like him any better in those cases. But his bad faith is palpable. Not to mention he's on the wrong side of the argument.

Your Talking Dog is back!

And so is liberal interventionism. Gary Farber demands that everyone "Stop it. Call for stopping it. Spend time calling for stopping it. Do it now. Stop blogging and reading and act" to intervene in the latest civil war in the Congo. He has a lot of faith in the power of international intervention to do good, which is surprising given that the Congo has seen quite a lot of it over the years, going clear back to the civil war of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Blue-helmeted peacekeepers, international development assistance, the whole business. Repeated interventions since then. I suspect two not-necessarily incompatible things: 1) This can't work; 2) It may actually make things worse.

Mobile Homeys - The Brits are getting into the Iraqi trailer analyzing business, according to the Guardian:

The intelligence agency MI6, British defence officers and technical experts from the Porton Down microbiological research establishment have been ordered to conduct an urgent review of the mobile facilities, following US analysis which casts serious doubt on whether they really are germ labs.

Herewith a quickie response to British demurrals quoted:

Questions over the claimed purpose of trailer for making biological weapons include:

· The lack of any trace of pathogens found in the fermentation tanks. According to experts, when weapons inspectors checked tanks in the mid-Nineties that had been scoured to disguise their real use, traces of pathogens were still detectable.

This seems germane. We've been told that the trailer showed evidence of disinfecting, but now how effective disinfecting should be.

· The use of canvas sides on vehicles where technicians would be working with dangerous germ cultures.

They quote a Royal Society biowarfare expert who finds both this and the lack of trace pathogens very significant. I'll defer to Professor Harry Smith here.

· A shortage of pumps required to create vacuum conditions required for working with germ cultures and other processes usually associated with making biological weapons.

Eh. Maybe these could have been looted? Not as bowled over by this objection.

· The lack of an autoclave for steam sterilisation, normally a prerequisite for any kind of biological production. Its lack of availability between production runs would threaten to let in germ contaminants, resulting in failed weapons.

The CIA white paper argues that the steam could have come from another trailer, so I don't think this cuts particularly one way or the other.

· The lack of any easy way for technicians to remove germ fluids from the processing tank.

Again, fits with the article I discussed yesterday. When it's easier to get gas out the top than liquid out the bottom, and one side tells you the trailers were for making gas while the other side says it makes germ soup, the default tilt is to the side of gas. (Hydrogen, in this case, for artillery balloons.

The drain problem and the trace pathogen comparison to 1998 - new information as of this article - strike me as telling. The canvas sides bit nearly as much. The other two, by themselves, not so crucial, but they exist in the context of the other problems. Finally, this intriguing possibility:

Artillery balloons are essentially balloons that are sent up into the atmosphere and relay information on wind direction and speed allowing more accurate artillery fire. Crucially, these systems need to be mobile.

The Observer has discovered that not only did the Iraq military have such a system at one time, but that it was actually sold to them by the British. In 1987 Marconi, now known as AMS, sold the Iraqi army an Artillery Meteorological System or Amets for short.

There's Good and Bad in Everyone Dept. - Hesiod says the Bush Administration has a plan to break the power of public sector unions.

Okay, so the Bushies are not a total loss . . .

Dept. of Touche - Commenting on my statement last week that the NYT has less a "liberal" or "conservative" bias than a statist one, Calpundit writes

Of course it does, Jim. I've come to realize that the Times isn't really a newspaper at all, it's the perfect political Rorschach test: just ask someone to read a copy, note down what they mumble irritably about, and then take the mirror image. That's their political leaning.

Heh, to coin a phrase.

Weekly Fitness Blog Item - 172 pounds, waist: something between 34" and 34.5". Waist sizes are fuzzier than weight is. Speaking of weight, that 172 is soft. I was only able to make the scale hit that amount once in my shifting and swaying around. Except in that somewhat off-balance position, I couldn't get the scale above 171 no matter what. This has a lot more to do with the vagaries of our old scale than any precipitous weight drop (from last week's 174), in my estimation.

Not that we lack for humbling reminders! This morning, Offering Boy and I hiked up to the grocery store and back - a round trip of about three miles through leafy Sligo Creek Park - and stopping at the parcourse I discovered that I'm still unable to do a chinup! No more skipping bicep curls during weight weeks!

I suppose it makes sense, really, that if your bicep curl is 50 pounds and you weigh 172 (or whatever) that chinups are still beyond you. Well, like I said, getting fit is like cleaning a messy house: each improvement reveals something else that needs doing.

Reader Mail Dept. Dave Lull questions my certainty that extra muscle mass provides much metabolic advantage:

I used to think that that was significantly so, too. But lately I've been reading reviews of a new book by Gina Kolata, called Ultimate Fitness, and interviews of her, in which she says this is sort of a myth.

Dave refers me to an online chat Kolata recently had on WebMD:

The too-good-to-be-true myth is one that I had believed. I had thought, and so did many people, that if you build muscle that muscle will burn more calories and fat and therefore throughout the day, even if you do nothing, even if you just sit still, you will automatically be burning more calories, your metabolism will be higher. Unfortunately, that’s not true. I asked an exercise physiologist to do a calculation for me. If a man goes to a gym and lifts weights seriously for four months he might build about four pounds of muscle, which is a lot; a woman would build much less. That four pounds of muscle would burn an extra 24 calories a day. That’s like a bite of a cookie.

That's a far cry from Adam Zickerman's claim that three extra pounds is worth a hundred calories a day - by a factor of 4. I read several parts of Kolata's book last night in Borders' cafe, and she names the physiologist and his institution.

Now I can't swear that Kolata is right and Zickerman wrong. Kolata's claim is better sourced in her text than Zickerman's, but that just means the claim is only as good as her expert. I'm inclined to suspect Kolata's figure is more right than Zickerman's now. If any reader can point me to good data showing otherwise I'd be glad to see it.

Note that Kolata does not therefore dismiss weight training, and nor do I. For one thing, muscle is very practical. You can do things with it. Mrs. Offering and I put up a shed two weeks ago, and it was a lot easier than it would have been if I had not gotten stronger. (I mean, not chinup strong, but stronger . . . ) Everything from yard work to moving furniture to carrying groceries gets easier with muscular strength. Old people who undertake strength training reduce their risk of falling, and falls precipitate an awful lot of geriatric deaths. You can paddle kayaks, carry kids and any number of other things with muscles. It's a better life.

Strength training during weight loss probably keeps you from losing muscle tissue along with fat, which is good. And in combination with fat loss, muscle definition will improve your subjective body shape, changing your ratio of shoulders-to-hips, stomach-to-height etc.

But the big thing that comes out of Kolata's book is how little real science there is in any of this, and how much less of the little that exists is likely to come to your attention. Frex, we know that The Offering Plan

1. Start a fitfully-popular weblog.
2. Start posting your weight weekly as a goad to yourself.
3. Do the Atkins Plan for awhile before switching to portion-control combined with empty-carb avoidance.
4. Cycle through several exercise approaches, settling, for now, on alternating weeks of slow-cadence weight training and Heavyhands panaerobics.
5. Do all ab training with weights.
6. Take various vitamins, and a fiber supplement (more on this in a future item), but no fancy "fat-burning" or "growth" powders.

has enabled me to lose more than 40 pounds over six months and improve my cholesterol while getting stronger and more durable. We know that it has not so far enabled me to control my blood pressure without medication or to reduce my LDL cholesterol down to a healthy level. We don't know

1. that you would get the same results. You might do better or worse.
2. that I might not get better results on any combination of fitness factors with a different approach.

There's probably other stuff we don't know that I can't think of.

News from the League of Extraordinary Fitness Blogs: Avram Grumer is still steadily losing weight with his different approach to combining Heavyhands with traditional weight training. He also found this page that supposedly lets you calculate your basal metabolism. He's at least provisionally skeptical of it, though. (It claims my basal rate is 2900 calories per day. That does seem high. But then, I do keep losing, so who knows?) He also found this interesting essay by Glenn McDonald. I agree with most of it, though not this part:

Let your clothes balloon. It may be very tempting to try to buy new, smaller clothes as soon as you possibly can, as another tangible measure of your progress. Don't. Buying new clothes you're only going to shrink out of again is a waste of money, and a bad encouragement to quit before you're done, but more importantly, you will get better physical reinforcement from feeling your existing clothes getting baggier than you would from continually buying incrementally smaller clothes which then feel exactly the same.

Reason I don't quite agree: I've found it personally useful to go down a size because the slight discomfort reminds me that I'm not done yet. Again, who knows what will work for you?

Finally, Jeremy Scharlack is down to 179 pounds. WTG Jeremy, and I'd better keep at it before the bastard passes me. Note that Jeremy is just now starting to explore weight training. Apparently he's been using all those aerobics machines I hate.