Yes There is a God - Unqualified Offerings is your ultimate good news blog, men! (Link via Perverse Access Memory.) And yes, this is a big load. Off. My. Mind. As it were.

You Heard It Here First that Salam Pax was maturing into a serious writer. Hey, that part's done now. For the time being, he's one of the planet's indispensible reporters. Now here's the stupid thing: Where is Raed's readership is way down. I realize that a lot of his March/April traffic was curiousity seekers, and the whole, you know, war thing meant that new material was rare for awhile. And a lot of people will be catching him through his Guardian column. But not everything in the blog appears in the Guardian. Anyone who reads weblogs at all and has any interest in politics at all - needs - to - read - this man. The latest: through the miracle of modern technology, Salam publishes an e-mail from a fellow Iraqi forwarded to him by an American reader. Also, he's translating for Ishtar, a new female blogger from Basra.

What's all the latest add up to? Pick your poison. Baghdad . . .

In Baghdad that gun would be pointing either at the car right behind the military vehicle or at the sidewalk, scanning the buildings. But the British guy wasn't pointing at anything, he was just looking around with the gun turned in, at an angle that would have shot him in the foot if it had gone off by accident. You appreciate this only after you have been driving behind an American Humvee and praying that your car doesn't backfire or make strange noises, because the US soldier has that gun pointing right at you.

The Brits are more laid back in Basra, even after the al-Majar al-Kabir riot. Salam closes the Guardian column with a tongue-in-cheek plea to the British to bargain harder in weregeld negotiations. But the lighter British hand has costs of its own. Ishtar goes shopping:

Because the things I need are so many it got to the point where it started negatively affecting my mood, and that didn't need another thing bothering it, I finally decided to go to the market. Ignoring, although only superficially, the danger and trouble of going out without veil specially to a place like the market. I wore for the first time a very wide and long skirt….really wide. And a shirt which was as wide and loose fitting as the skirt, it also had long, loose sleeves so the effect was like wearing a long jubah. And I had to put a Hijab on my head although it was so hot my head was almost exploding. But that might have been because I was feeling annoyed with myself for giving in to some else's wishes and maybe also because I believe that by doing as they wish I am helping in propagating their wishes. Anyway this is better than getting harassed by someone and as I have been told this harassment might take the form of a small knife or a razor-sharp tongue.

A Fanboy's Happy Notes - Whee! It's Daredevil week at the comic store! Whee!

I just love this book. This month, somewhat unusually, an issue-long fight between Daredevil and Bullseye. But the good news is, nobody shuts up for very long, so it's still an issue full of Brian Michael Bendis dialogue. Here is how good Bendis is: I, a hardcore libertarian, who could at various times quote you chapters worth of federal malfeasance in law enforcement, have fallen completely in love with FBI agent Driver, a recent cast addition. I love the guy! I would happily arrange marriage for him with my three-year old daughter (in 25 years! she has to complete her postdoctoral work first) if he stepped out of the pages and asked.

Yeah, Bendis is still dining out on the whole Kingpin-Bullseye meal that Frank Miller laid out twenty-five years ago and that a generation of Daredevil writers has been living off ever since. Bendis isn't going to create a whole new cast of supervillains. (Probably because work-for-hire gives him no incentive, right Dirk? And I mean that.) Like most superhero writers, he's all about reusing what's in the fridge. It's a heavenly hash, though.

A Non-Fangirl's Notes - Eve Tushnet goes to a comics store. Buys less than she expected. Reacts to what she buys. ("Also, Emma Frost needs to stop dressing like a skank, or at the very least she needs to be drawn as a somewhat more realistic skank.") Recommended.

I promise more comics-related items this week, before all the comics bloggers drop me from their links lists.

UPDATE: Eve, for good dialogue try anything by Brian Michael Bendis. He's not such a strong plotter, but he sure can put words in people's mouths. I recommend the collected Daredevil storylines starting with Underboss (Wake Up is optional), and Powers (where the plots are especially nominal).

Revealed at Last - "Bush = Clinton" observes Franklin Harris. And Bush = Clinton again, observes Gene Healy.

Not quite fair though - I don't think Clinton promulgated any protectionist measures as appalling as the new catfish tariffs. Radley Balko is all over that one. Hey, how about a Washington Catfish Party where we take a bunch of catfish and throw them . . . into the . . . ah hell. They'd like that.

I had catfish for dinner last night. Just mentioning.

Brain Teaser - At work yesterday we somehow got on the topic of what we might call "mystery riddles" of the "A man walking down the sidewalk sees that a restaurant serves albatross. He enters and orders some. After taking a single bite, he exits the restaurant and shoots himself. Why?" variety. We spent hours on that one as a kid, and the one where the guy dead in the middle of the field turns out to have been wearing a parachute that didn't open, and the guy "running home" was in a baseball game, and two or three that involve corpses and melting ice. To think of all the yes-no questions we asked and answered!

Anyway, now and then I've wondered about one riddle in particular:

A man and his son are in a car accident. The man dies instantly; the boy is critically wounded. The ambulance rushes him to the emergency room and the attendants wheel him quickly into the operating theater, on the slim chance he can be saved. The surgeon enters, takes one look at the boy and says, "I can't operate on this child. He's my son.

How can that be?

I figured that between the 1970s, when my cohort first puzzled out this one, and now, society had changed to such an extent that this one wouldn't throw anybody for even a minute. So I was surprised when I tossed it out and a young female colleague, whom we'll call Young Female Colleague, immediately dug herself into insolvability - she paraphrased it for coworkers as, "The doctor says he can't operate on the boy because he's his son."

The automatic identification of "doctor" and "male" was what I thought would not stymie "the youth of today" the way it stymied the youth of thirty years ago. Wow, I wondered. Residual sexism? Something specific to Young Female Coworker's traditionalist religious upbringing?

YFC had her own theory, once I flipped all the cards and gave the answer. (Hey, we had to work.)

"There are nothing but males in the setup," she said, and that gets your mind in a male-assuming groove.

And that seemed plausible yesterday. I wonder, as a test, try the obverse version on someone:

A woman and her daughter are in a car accident. The woman dies instantly; the girl is critically wounded. The ambulance rushes her to the emergency room and the attendants wheel her quickly into the operating theater, on the slim chance she can be saved. The surgeon enters, takes one look at the girl and says, "I can't operate on this child. She's my daughter.

How can that be?

I'm inclined to doubt this would confuse anyone for very long. But it would make an interesting empirical test. Hey, I'm not sure what I think because it's not about the war!

Pick on Max Sawicky Day - Brother Max has an item on the California government's fiscal crisis that contains the following stunner:

The responsibility in making a state budget, of course, is to match up revenues and expenditures over the business cycle. This the state failed to do.

Given its spending ambitions, the main reason is the failure to bank sufficient revenue. For most of the decade, spending was roughly 98 percent of revenues. Too much. In the state government's defense, it was prey to the same giddiness that seized millions of investors in the stock market.

A defense like that is actually a prosecution. Let us roll the words around on our tongues a little:

prey to the same giddiness that seized millions of investors in the stock market

The implicit argument here is that the government was no worse than those excitable ninnies in the private sector. But the justification for the regulatory state is that the government is wiser than the private sector - cooler of head, longer of perspective, able and needed to check private sector folly.

Guess not.

Now, we know that some governments sometimes engage in accounting chicanery just like some corporations do. And we know that some governments sometimes run short of money just like corporations do. The difference between a failing company and a failing government is that the government can solve its money problems by forcing you to give it more money, on pain of imprisonment or death.

Since we're picking on Max, which I'm only doing because he's not physically present, because he's big and could kick my ass, it's worth noting his unsatisfactory item granting the US permission to invade Liberia. There are two big problems with this piece. He tackles the right wing criticism of leftists as preferring to use force only when US national interests are not at stake head on, writing "There is a very good reason to be skeptical of interventions that involve what Krauthammer describes as 'in the national interest' since they typically involve conflicts of interest. The least likely cases for conflict of interest are those where humanitarian goals are the sole object." But surely there can be considerable disagreement about what the "humanitarian" course is in any given instant. I've argued at length that to attempt "help" that you should rationally realize you cannot successfully give is immoral and the opposite of humanitarian. Hence Max's problem number two, his injunction that we should " jump in there and see if you can do some good."

That seems rather cavalier. Anyone who thinks we can't make things worse than they already are is naive - of course we can. Anyone who imagines that the force levels presently contemplated - around a thousand troops - will "stabilize" the situation by cowing the local warring parties into submission has another problem, which starts with "r." (Answer in this early Offering!) You say that and you've essentially said that the leaders and followers of the various warring factions are not fundamentally serious people, that they lack any real commitment to their apparent goals (raw power, in many cases) or any gumption to stick to their guns in when presented with a comparative handful of American faces. Max doesn't argue that a thousand troops are all it will take, so I explicitly declare I'm not calling him racist, but others are asserting that a relative handful of Americans can tidy the place right up, and they do have a problem.

Now, time to give Max his due - a forthright and completely accurate declaration that "HOWARD DEAN IS NOT A PEACE CANDIDATE."

Radio is a Sound Salvation - Also on Hit & Run, Jesse "I Am Mr. Radio" Walker has two pieces on radio spectrum. One is on "software-based radio," which would enable a degree of spectrum-sharing as to obliterate the "scarcity rationale" for the current regulatory regime. The other covers a scientific channel to the "third channel adjacency requirement - -- in essence, a rule demanding enormous buffers between stations to prevent them from interfering with each other." The nonprofit MITRE Corporation, retained by the FCC to study the technical feasibility of urban micro-radio, called the buffers unnecessary.

Me, I figure that if the federal government had not locked in a "scarcity" based on 1920s technology at that time, we'd have had solutions to the problem long since - "squirting" transmissions, variable wavelength transmissions etc. If spectrum "owners" were genuine owners of a property they could subdivide, they'd have had a reason to do so, receiver and transmission technologists would have had an incentive to design commercial narrowcasting equipment and we'd all have more to listen to. (The Nation, of course, would decry the "fragmentation" of the public sphere, but that beats decrying "media consolidation.")

Will anything come of the new developments? As Jesse notes, "The relevant regulators do not have a strong history of adjusting their rules in response to technological change."

Free Minds, Free Markets, Free Muslims? - Via Hit & Run, the Minaret of Freedom Institute, a by god classical liberal muslim think tank. Just really dipping into the site, but here's an interesting condemnation of female genital mutilation from an Islamic perspective, a "We Russians invented baseball" type paper on similarities between medieval Islamic thought and Austrian economics and a game attempt to distinguish halal interest from haram Riba. I'm not qualified to judge the doctrinal soundness of the Institute's arguments, but I sure am glad to see them trying. To the extent there's a "them." Reading between the lines, the Minaret of Freedom Institute looks like the next thing to a one-man operation. But as the poet said, "justice will take us millions of intricate moves."

Liberty, Independence, Sovereignty - Via Tacitus, who makes an interesting brief for Paul Bremer, this Associated Press article on the new Iraqi governing council. It's the sort of thing that, in principle, could work. I'd argue that the way we'll know it's worked for real is when the Iraqi governing council can tell the Americans to go to hell on something and make it stick. Heck, if Paul Bremer is as smart as Tacitus suspects, he ought to subtly arrange for this to happen. Otherwise, the deadly P-word ("puppet") will be on everyone's lips.

That, and the fact the council was selected rather than elected, led to criticism at an Arab League meeting in Cairo, where Secretary-General Amr Moussa showed little eagerness to embrace the new Iraqi political body.

If the new council had been elected, Moussa said in a statement released Sunday night, ``it would have gained much power and credibility.''

That's a bit rich, considering the source.

I should note that Tacitus reads one section of the founding document rather differently than I do. The relevant section:

Policy authorities: The coalition will be required to consult with the Governing Council on all major decisions and questions of policy. The Governing Council shall have the right to set policies and take decisions in cooperation with the coalition in any area of national policy, including financial and economic reform, education, electoral law, health.

Tacitus glosses thusly:

There you have it: an unlimited mandate for the council, plus a formal restriction on coalition power. This is looking less like a mere rubber stamp with each new piece of information.

Whether because Tacitus is a pollyanna, or I'm a gloomy gus, or whatever, it seems to me that he has it backward. The coalition has to "consult with," which is not remotely the same thing as get the approval of. Meanwhile the Council can do tangible stuff "in cooperation with the coalition," and, on my reading, can do squadoosh without coalition approval. That looks like a formal restriction on the Council's power, and a pro forma restriction on the occupation authority. Like I said, one way you'll know there is "a free, democratic and independent Iraq" is when or if that's no longer true.

I should grant that the question of how essential national sovereignty is to personal liberty is a vexed question for libertarians. The latter is what matters; the former is, like anything else government does, only of value to the extent it enables the latter. Clearly it often does not - any given sovereign government may be the enemy of its subjects' liberty rather than its guardian. This is why many who value personal liberty supported the overthrow of Hussein - he certainly wasn't doing much for the liberty of Iraqis. I'm pretty sure these folks made the wrong choice - that national sovereignty is, on balance, necessary but not sufficient for any hope of personal liberty. But the proof of the proposition is too long to fit in the margins of this notebook.

Weekly Fitness Blog Item - Back home and back on the scale. Weight 170, maybe a hair over but my scale doesn't do partial pounds or even precision really. Waist 33" sucked in, 35" let out.

I can't believe I got off so lightly. After 169 two weeks ago, I added a couple pounds back and fought them back down to 170 the day before vacation. On vacation I ate like a pathetic pig, including all manner of junk food. What I learned: if it's available, and my routine is off, I'll eat it, and then eat more of it. I'm going back to a more severe Atkins phase for a couple of weeks to clean out my system. I'm also going to jigger with my exercise program. I've got two months, basically, to get in Halloween costume shape, which is 5-10 pounds from where I am now.

Exercise notes: our part of Deep Creek Lake is full of hills! That provided extra intensity for Mrs. O and I, who worked out together to an extent, which was nice. At home, one of us has to watch the kids while the other hits the paths. Since I pump weights while walking and she doesn't, and since I include intervals of running and she doesn't, and since she therefore walks for twice as long as I do, we were only together part of the time except for Thursday. Thursday I left the weights at home and walked/ran her entire route. It turns out to be much easier to run when you're not swinging five-pound dumbbells at the same time. Who knew? Felt strange, though, like I was wasting half my body.

Was momentarily puzzled about the state of my Heavyhands program. I'm doing the same interval routine with the same five-pound dumbbells, but it hasn't been getting any easier - meaning, it's still all I can do to finish two complete cycles. My arms, especially, are like lead when I'm done. Today it hit me. "Dummy!" it said, "progressive resistance training, remember?" and it was right. I haven't mixed in any intervals with heavier dumbbells, and therefore haven't stimulated significant new muscle growth.

I apologize for the lack of a general interest section this week, which is supposed to be the usual reward for persevering through the mememe stuff. I'm investigating the South Beach Diet as an alternative to Atkins - it seems like a "Mediterranean" Atkins. If it checks out, it will be more sophisticated than previous low-carb or low-fat diets and more in tune with current science. But I don't know enough to offer even my usual half-cocked evaluation yet. I'm also looking into back strengthening options, because I really don't want any more of the muscle pulls I had last month, but here again have nothing to report yet.

Scharlack is halfway to his goal weight. Congrats, man! The heat and life have impeded Avram Grumer's program and he's rethinking his approach.

Tanned, Rested and Ready and I was tanned, rested and ready last night too, but a thunderstorm ate my return post when it was in mostly-composed form. You would've liked it. Damn. Back from vacation. Whee.