Fishing But Not Gone Exactly - Greetings, Loyal Readers, from high atop the Alleghenies! La Familia Offering, including even Unqualified Dog, have installed ourselves in a vacation house on the shores of Deep Creek Lake in Garrett County, MD, with my sisters family, their two dogs, and the Matron of All Offerings. Nice enough place, though Deep Creek Lake sucks on the weekends - too much pleasure boat traffic, even after dark. The house has a net connection, but it's - gasp! - dialup, so blogging may be light. (Also, the keyboard is not ergonomic, and thus hard to get used to.)

FWIW - According to the SelectSmart questionnaire, my top 5 2004 candidates are

1. Libertarian Candidate   (100%)  Click here for info
2. Bush, George W. - US President   (69%)  Click here for info
3. Buchanan, Patrick J. – Reform/Republican   (67%)  Click here for info
4. Green Party Candidate   (62%)  Click here for info
5. Dean, Gov. Howard, VT - Democrat   (61%)  Click here for info

No, I don't know how Dubya got that high on the list unless SelectSmart mistakes his rhetorical flourishes for actual policies. I didn't vote for the man, but I had hopes for awhile. Alas, he's no Bob Ehrlich.

(Link via Eve Tushnet.)

Happy Birthday to You - Last year I averred that "it strikes Unqualified Offerings that blog entries are an apt way to honor the holiday." That remains true, but I'm not sure I have much to add to what I said then. So I'll just link to some old items:

We Hold These Truths - Excerpt: "The fourth tendency holds that the Declaration is not just a founding document of the Unitied States, but the founding document - that the Constitution, indeed the nation itself, has purpose and legitimacy only insofar as it faciltates and furthers realizing the principles inherent in the Declaration. This is the view that Unqualified Offerings holds, in company with Madison and Lincoln. (About this vexing figure for libertarians, more later.) It is dangerous for people to hold this view, both for the country and for themselves. (I would argue that each approach the Declaration listed above has its moral hazards.) To hold it is as much as to say "My loyalty is not a given, and could be withdrawn." The risks to the State here are obvious. The risks to the individual are almost as obvious . . . "

South Nashville Blues - written during the height of the pseudocontroversy over Steve Earle's then unreleased song, "John Walker's Blues." Because today is Independence Day.

Shanksville and Shanksville - Prose and verse responses, respectively, to the crash of UAL93. Tributes to the unorganized militia.

Independence - a poem about fireworks and such.

Lit'ry Corner - Aaron Haspel has a hugely entertaining and insightful meditation on "cult critics," marred only slightly by the end, where he insists on drinking the Yvor Winters Kool Ade right in front of us.

My own thought: I wonder if Winters and Leavis are a fair test of true critical cultism. Oh, they certainly are in the sense in which Aaron uses the term, don't get me wrong. But the true test of a classic, stereotypical cult - the People's Temple, the Communist Party of the USA - is whether the members loyally follow wild gyrations in doctrine. A cult leader worthy of the name, like Jim Jones or Stalin (what, you were thinking some American led the CPUSA?), proves his cult leader status by tacking wildly or even reversing course, and having his followers swallow the new line because the leader said it. War against Germany would play into the hands of the capitalists! [Germany invades Soviet Union.] War against Germany is the progressive duty of all mankind! That kind of thing.

Now, leaving aside the question of whether "cults" as such even exist, and I'm not sure they do, I'm not sure Yvor Winters and F.R. Leavis provide an ideal test. Winters certainly and Leavis apparently remained remarkably consistent in their theories and doctrines over their lifetimes. Winters never announced that the Romantics didn't suck after all; Leavis never turned savagely against the novels of D.H. Lawrence etc. Oh for T.S. Eliot to have announced late in life that poetry was actually the embrace of personality! What would Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren have done then? Alas that thought experiments must remain thought experiments! (I wonder if the art critic, Clement Greenberg, might count here, though it's been years since I gave the matter any thought and remember little beyond "ineluctable flatness.")

But that's me taking Aaron's idea for a spin and returning it with a few nicks, not any trip he set out to make. His item stands on its own and is well worth the time of anyone with even a faint interest in critiicism.

We've Been Waiting for You - Michael Kinsley catches up with the latest libertarian thinking as of - I don't know, twenty years ago? Thirty? Can any historians of libertarianism help me out here?

Anyway, I agree with him. Of course.

404 - This is cute. (Link via Arthur Silber.)

Easy for You to Say - The WSJ flub quoted below was funny but inadvertant. President Bush doesn't have that excuse:

"There are some who feel like that conditions are such that they can attack us there," Bush told reporters at the White House. "My answer is: Bring them on. We have the force necessary to deal with the situation."

Bring them on. I'm sure the grunts stuck in Baghdad appreciate the behind-the-lines bravado.

Unfortunate Choice of Words - Why does the Wall Street Journal hate America? or, Adventures in Vague Pronoun Reference:

This is the reason GIs continue to die, and it means the U.S. will have to make a much more forceful, systematic effort to kill and punish them if stability is going to be restored.

As if our troops didn't have enough trouble! And yes, given the full paragraph, you can figure out what the Journal writers were trying to say, but where's the fun in that?

Casualties of War - War skeptics have made much of the "one dead soldier a day" phenomenon when discussing the ex-war. For a time, it dropped back to one dead soldier every other day before, it appears, rising again. But the deaths don't begin to tell the whole story. For every death there are several injuries. For every injury there are several attacks that miss their targets. It's hard to kill people, even in war. Apparently one of the ways historians and human rights investigators determine whether a contested incident was a massacre or a true battle is to calculate the ratio of dead to wounded - the bigger that ratio gets, the more likely you have a massacre rather than combat.

So, nobody killed today, but six US soldiers wounded in Baghdad and an Iraqi interpreter dead in the attacks. Beyond the pain of the soldiers themselves - "wounded" can mean "maimed" - and the loss for the interpreter and any family he may have had, the effect of all this on all our other troops in Iraq. The deaths plus the woundings plus the misses all add to the sense of danger for the grunt in the street. Add in the psychological effect of the deaths and injuries of interpreters and minor officials on the Iraqis, and mutual distrust ramifies. That distrust, rather than the death and injury of the enemy itself, is the first aim of any guerrilla campaign. (Even if officials won't call it that.)

French Domination over American conservative mindshare must cease! Write your French representative today and demand that they stop forcing our right wing politicians and pundits to obsess over them. Look what they've done to John Cole, for instance! It's summer. He should be able to think about other things. But non! Those frog bastards with their evil rays have made him their ressentiment beyotch! Glenn Reynolds has actually fled the United States in hopes of clearing his mind of Francomania. Mon dieu, man - we have to stop them now. What if the Democrats take advantage of conservative distraction to, oh, increase federal spending or something? Huh? Oh.

Could it Be - Remember the incident with the smuggler's convoy that didn't contain any Husseins last week? Jeff Taylor in Reason Express has some speculation:

Continued weapons sweeps in central Iraq have already taken on a parallel to Vietnam's perpetual search-and-destroy missions, although on a much smaller scale. The unknown at this point is whether there are a finite number of weapons to be found, or -- in what would be another ominous parallel -- whether weapons are being sent into the country.

The possibility that arms are being shipped in could help explain why the U.S. was so fired up to chase down a convoy heading into Syria. The idea that U.S. commanders had information that they had Saddam in their sights is a bit of stretch, whereas strict orders to seal the Syrian border without admitting that such orders exist makes a lot of sense.

Makes a lot of sense, presumably, as an explanation of what was going on, if not as an excuse for it. Again, it's speculation, though intriguing speculation. As for how it might change one's moral calculus if it turned out to be true that smugglers are bringing weapons across the Syrian border, that remains an academic exercise so long as the Pentagon continues its preemptive war on an informed citizenry.

Thanks to Avram Grumer and Jean Lansford for quick responses to my LiveJournal query. Jean notes that Unqualified Offerings has not one but two LiveJournal feeds - here and here. For whatever reason, the latter is one entry more current than the former.

Jean also informs me that "there's a searchable database of feeds announced in the syndication promotion journal."

Baghdad Blogging continues to grow. Via Salam Pax, the first known Iraqi woman blogger, Zainab. And G. in Baghdad has started a photoblog.

Proposition: we'll really be getting somewhere when we start seeing Iraqi bloggers who don't live in Baghdad.

In the Immortal Words of the Joker in the first Tim Burton Batman movie, "I'm glad you're dead! Hee hee hee hee! I'm glad he's dead!" Jesse Walker's Hit&Run item about the general lack of notice to the death last week of former Georgia governor Lester Maddox brought this quotation fit on.

I actually remember Lester Maddox appearing on the TV news once when I was a kid. It was actually a broadcast of one of his campaign commercials, in which he pronounced that "The only reason the [bad word] want civil rights is because the [bad word] want our white women!" This was in the early seventies, and I remember wondering, in my naive youth, well, what the hell anyone was doing saying something like that in the seventies. Nobody would like talk like that. Eventually I got out more. But I think Maddox had already hit his high water mark regardless.

As a right winger I have something of a high threshold when it comes to other people's prejudice. I figure most everybody in the world, of whatever hue and creed, has their tics. But decent people keep it to themselves - not everybody makes a hobby of their bigotries, let alone, like Lester Maddox, a career. If it turns out Lester Maddox renounced the vicious programmatic racism of his youth, and middle age, and early dotage when I wasn't looking, I'll take the Joker's words back, otherwise, hee hee hee, I'm glad he's dead.

Technical Query - I'm pretty sure, based on reading the entrails of my referrer logs, that someone has syndicated this site to LiveJournal. By coincidence, I got a query from a reader asking permission to do this very thing. I figure if it's been done I can save her the trouble, right? Or do I just no - hang on. I was about to ask if I just don't understand LiveJournal, which is a question I already know the answer to - no I don't. So, please tell me if my pal can make use of a preexisting syndication "feed" or whatever you LJ people call it. If you have yourself syndicated UO that would be even better.

Weekly Fitness Blog Item - If I lean way back on the scale, I can get it all the way up to 169 pounds before I fall off. Meanwhile, Mrs. Offering has officially defined my waist as a circumference passing through my belly button. That metric comes in at 33.5". The weight in particular looks like a big drop from last week's 173, but the 173 was part of an uptick anyhow, and I'd been down around 171 in various unofficial measurements within the last month. (I don't do the Hacker's Diet weighted average thing, but I take unofficial scale readings throughout the week as a sanity check against the official Sunday measurements. For the waist we have no true comparison since the measurement standard is new.

Anyway, I'll confess to being pretty darn pleased. In 1987 I weighed 170 pounds, according to my doctor's records. This is the first time since then. I played with the Halls BMI Calculator and determined that I'm kind of average weight for twenty-year-olds as tall as I am. I'm also greedy. I still have not a "six-pack" but more of a two-pack. I can easily identify another five pounds of flab that needs to go. And if the pattern holds, I'll plateau here in the 170-pound range for a few weeks.

But enough about me. Let's talk about you, or anyway, your letters. Jean Lansford writes:

BTW, I'm one of those people who lost a lot of weight on the old WW plan and then gained it back. Not by going off the plan, but by switching to the new Points plan when they introduced it. When my pre-paid weeks ran out, I decided I didn't need to pay them to help me gain weight. *rolls eyes*

I thought it was Jean, but apparently not, who wrote that she found it almost impossible to get enough protien on Weight Watchers without going over her point allotment. Mrs. Offering has started WW, and begins her exercise regimen tonight, so the protien situation will bear watching. Mrs. O will try Bill Phillips' "Body-for-Life" weight and aerobic plans, but finds his list of permitted foods unappealing. (Phillips is also all about pushing his EAS Myoplex products, but remember, you are a customer, and that means deciding what not to buy into and to buy.)

This week's topic: How to go off Atkins. First, why you might want to: because you just can't stand the food any more; because your LDL cholesterol isn't improving enough; because your maintenence-level carb intake is too close to induction-level. I'm convinced that Atkins got a lot right, and I wouldn't have lost fifty pounds if his program hadn't gotten me started. He's right about the metabolic evils of processed sugars and starches; the centrality of exercise; the goodness of fiber and the merits of vitamins. That said, he was militantly agnostic about fat type, and I've come to accept the "good fats/bad fats" distinction. (Your low-fat gurus got this completely wrong too, from the other end. You could argue that they got the fat-v.-carbs question more wrong than Atkins did.) Some people's metabolism is such that, even on Atkins maintenance, they need to keep their "net carbs" under 30 a day or so to avoid weight gain. That really may be too low. And maybe you just want a freakin' fajita now and then. (I scarfed down about a half can of Pringles at gaming Wednesday night. That's not the same as scarfing down a half can every day.)

Regardless of the various reasons why, evidence suggests that people do feel compelled to go off Atkins, for whatever reason. So how to avoid the upswing on the diet yo-yo?

Fellow Atkins veteran Patrick Nielsen Hayden's experience tracks mine:

It's been some weeks since I was on the Atkins diet in any meaningful sense. And yet, in that time, my weight appears to have been stable -- and down 35 pounds from when I started Atkins many months ago.

Probably because, in fact, although I'm no longer doing Atkins, I've continued to avoid massive single-meal carb loads, and I've cut sweetened soft drinks out of my diet entirely. And although the weather hasn't been great for it, I do try to commute to work on my bike--five miles, door to door--whenever I can. (My answer to the question "Do you have an exercise machine?" is "Actually, I have two. One runs from Boerum Avenue to Park Row, and the other connects Flatbush Avenue to Canal Street...")

I probably need to take up some new regimens of both diet and exercise, but I agree with you that the "you'll just gain it all back" canard mostly serves to discourage people from small-scale effective action. I'm not doing Atkins at this point, but I give it tons of credit for breaking my addiction to huge doses of carbohydrates and getting me back to eating reaonable portion sizes. These days, when I do indulge in pounding down too many carbs, I immediately feel bloated, which is a fine discouragement from doing it again any time soon.

In line with what Patrick said, here's Jim's Plan for a Graceful Post-Atkins Landing:

1. Free days. Take one day a week where you allow yourself to indulge in whatever cravings you have. Free days may even help you lose weight. How? They convince your body it's not really starving, and it doesn't have to go into shutdown mode.

2. Exercise! Apart from any weight loss and body-shaping goals you still have, you need to push your metabolism to the point where you can metabolize upwards of 50g of net carbs a day.

3. Portion Control. Start paying attention to the "Serving Size" line on nutrition labels. You miss that one and none of the rest of the numbers mean anything. For things without labels, assume a "portion" is about the size of your fist or what will fit in your cupped palm. (A cupped palmful of shelled nuts is a good match for the one-ounce serving size on the can.) Once you're off Atkins and eating more fruit and whole grains and occasional bad-carb treats, you can't eat the whole T-bone any more. Chances are that during Atkins you've found yourself eating less at one sitting anyway, but now is the time to be conscious of it. Portion control goes hand in hand with

4. Eat often. I eat five times a day: breakfast, lunch, dinner and a morning and afternoon snack. I'm still trying to lose weight, so my portion allotment runs as follows: 2-1-2-1-3, sometimes 2-1-3-1-3 or 2-1-2-2-3. Every session includes some fat and protien.

5. Fat-shifting. I have no reason to believe you should really restrict your total fat intake to 25-35 grams a day or whatever. But you should try to get more fats from nuts, oils and fish and less from beef. Those one-portion snacks of mine are almost always nuts. And I don't stint the (low-sugar) salad dressing either.

6. Consider Calories. Heresy! Anyway, I'm not talking about counting calories. A portion (as we've defined it) of most anything will probably fall somewhere in the 100-300 calorie range. A pound is 3500 calories. If during weight loss, I'm dropping an average of a pound a week over time, that means I'm running a 3500/7=500 calorie/day deficit. That means that when I want to maintain weight, I can increase my food intake by two or three portions per day. More than that and I'll probably start to gain, depending on the state of my exercise regimen.

7. Keep your good habits. If you're like me, you eat more real vegetables (the kind that don't get renamed "freedom fries" during jingoistic spasms) under Atkins than you ever did before. Keep it up! You went off Atkins most likely to get more variety in your carb intake, I realize, but your base should still be leafy greens and yellow-to-red fibrous veggies. Along with the fruits and - god help you - breads, make sure you get 2-3 servings every day of something your mother and the FDA would count as a vegetable.

That's what I've figured out so far. Picking up some unused weight plates from my sister and brother-in-law so I can try the leg extension attachment to my bench. Fortnightly Fitness Fun once again gets jiggered around - I'm lifting weights two weeks in a row. My back is healing, but I want to give it more recovery time. Next week I'll be on vacation, and I sure can't take my bench and such with me, but a mountain lake will be perfect for lots of Heavyhands work.

On the Move - Walter in Denver has a new URL and a new design - meaning, he's given up one of the two worst Blogger templates for a functional Movable Type template.

Dr. Frank has moved too, to his own domain.

Four-Color Hell is a new group comics blog. There's rather more fretting about whether a given comic or company is politically correct than I find enjoyable, but there's some good stuff, and the question of politics and comics merits some serious consideration. (Politically correct not from a tedious academic-left perspective but from a "lethal center" - neoliberal, neolibertarian, neoconservative - one.)

Vox Pop - "Occupation Forces Halt Elections Throughout Iraq" notes the Washington Post:

"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."