Imitation Tech Blog Item - The new Mozilla mail program in development, Thunderbird, that I mentioned a few days ago, is now available in a - whoo hoo! version 0.1 release! I downloaded it to check out. It seems nice enough, I suppose. Some oddities will surely be dealt with in future versions - frex, you can add a "Next" message button to your toolbar, but not a "Previous" message button. How weird is that? Weird but, presumably, temporary. I keep getting a "The RETR command did not succeed" message when downloading mail, even though it does successfully download mail. I'll take that one to the Help Forum.

But, when you come down to it, it's basically another freeware mail client. I don't know if I'll switch or not, even after more development.

Light Blogging - No, I don't know what's gotten into me. But yeah, I suck this week. Sorry.

Has the Fat Lady Sung? - My affair with Opera may be coming to an end. I'm trying out the public beta of Mozilla Firebird, which aims to be fast, light and extensible. It does feel subjectively faster. It runs Shockwave games, which I never could get Opera to do. No adware. The tabbed browsing works at least as well as Opera's. It comes set to suppress popups by default, which you need a third-party add-on to do in Internet Explorer. I never liked Netscape or Mozilla much, but I'm liking this.

What it doesn't have: mail and news. If you went for Opera's M2 mail client, you won't want to switch. (The Firebird people are working on Project Thunderbird, a redesign of Mozilla's mail client. It's not as far along as Firebird.) I never switched to M2 for various reasons - it struck me as worth seriously considering in future versions, but there haven't been any. (Opera client development has slowed way down, too.)

On the extensible front, two words: Google Toolbar! Plus BlogThis and more. (Things They Left Out looks like a good extension for those who want to get into serious customization or have important security concerns.)

If you're a Windows user, I recommend downloading the version with the unofficial installer module. It auto-configures many plug-ins and MIME types, and avoids an unfortunate Flash bug that can crop up with manual installs.

This is not a definitive endorsement, more "if nothing awful happens, I'm sticking with it." I'm trying it as my default browser until such time as I reject it utterly.

The Callous Policy of an Evil Government Cont. - From a Washington Post article on changing US counter-insurgency tactics:

Col. David Hogg, commander of the 2nd Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division, said tougher methods are being used to gather the intelligence. On Wednesday night, he said, his troops picked up the wife and daughter of an Iraqi lieutenant general. They left a note: "If you want your family released, turn yourself in." Such tactics are justified, he said, because, "It's an intelligence operation with detainees, and these people have info." They would have been released in due course, he added later.

The tactic worked. On Friday, Hogg said, the lieutenant general appeared at the front gate of the U.S. base and surrendered.

If you can read that and not flinch, you've emigrated.

Folks, anti-interventionists have argued that among the problems with "preemptive" "defense" and "benevolent hegemony" is that you can only successfully pursue these policies by immoral means. Past a certain point, apologists can shout "Moral equivalence!" all they want - moral equivalence becomes simple fact. US troops

picked up the wife and daughter of an Iraqi lieutenant general. They left a note: "If you want your family released, turn yourself in."

Collective responsibility is the notion in play here.

picked up the wife and daughter

War annhilates the concepts of individual rights and responsibilities. The question changes from "What did you do, or not do?" to What use can we make of you?

If you want your family released, turn yourself in.

Stamp it on our coins. Include it in the prayers that open Congress. Add it to the instruction block of all triplicate government forms. Use it as the description line for your warblog.

. . . and to the Republic for which it stands, One Nation, Under God, Indivisible. If you want your family released, turn yourself in.

Atrios has the relevant quote from the Geneva Conventions, Protocol I. It turns out that the taking of hostages is not only an abomination, it's against the laws of war. Who knew?

By the way. I never want to hear another word about the alleged iniquities of Justin Raimondo, ANSWER, Robert Fisk, Patrick Buchanan, Lew Rockwell or even, god help us, the French. Not one more fucking word.

Standing Athwart Adventurism Yelling Stop - Stephen Chapman of the Chicago Sun on Liberian folly:

But as we've learned in Iraq, the best-laid plans often go astray. How, then, can we be so confident that getting out of Liberia, a place we know much less about, will be as easy as getting in? The assumption is that because of our historic ties to the country, founded in the 19th century as a refuge for freed American slaves, we'd be greeted as liberators, and that we could impose peace because everyone is tired of fighting.

But intervening on that assumption doesn't require a mere leap of faith. It's more like a pole vault.

Chapman notes that certain quarters denounce any reluctance to commit troops to Liberia as stemming from racism. I've said it before and I'll say it again: the enthusiasm for this type of adventure is often driven by racism - by a blithe conviction that these swarthy little foreigners with their tribes and factions and weapons cannot possibly be serious about their own goals, and that it will be a simple matter for the Great White Fathers and Mothers to put them in Time Out and then get them to behave. Don't go there.

Swing Low - The Matron of All Offerings went into the hospital this weekend for some tests. Nothing too scary, thanks, but her hospital roommate is dying - some kind of heart condition. She looks like an old woman about to die, like a leaf bag that's lost half its leaves. I haven't seen her move in two visits. This afternoon, I listened across the curtain: first, her grown granddaughter reading to her from the Bible in Pilipino and English, voice breaking as she made her way through the Lord's Prayer, then the granddaughter and, near as I can tell, two daughters began to sing to her. Spirituals of a kind, though contemporary sounding. They had a book they referred to, the granddaughter's soft, clear soprano was joined hesitantly by the daughters' soft clear sopranos in a ragged but deeply felt alternation of solo and chorus. They managed to get some laughs out of their occasional false starts or wrong notes, laughs for which they must have been grateful. I wondered, not for the first time, what it feels like to invoke Heaven and mean it, to speak of God and be sure you're referring to more than an overlapping set of ideas. But mostly I thought that, when it comes my time to lie in such a bed, if three such voices should willingly gather to sing me through the ordeal, that will surely have been a good life, and those singers will surely have singers of their own one day, stored up in heaven or karma.

Weekly Fitness Blog Item - Figures unchanged from last week. Well, you're supposed to ease off those last few pounds, right? Like the old Lunar Landing BASIC game!

They Say you should change up your workout regimen every 4-8 weeks. Keeps you interested, keeps you from developing lazy habits, works your muscles in different ways or works different muscles. At bottom, you're still lifting weights and doing cardio workouts, but do them differently. That's why I switched weight-training protocols to the Body-for-Life program a couple weeks ago. I only did one session before it was aerobic week again, but I'm back to weights this week. It takes a lot longer to complete a session than SuperSlow takes, but it lets me avoid buying more dumbbells for awhile. It's six sets per exercise versus one, and faster reps (though still not fast).

On the cardio front, I "ran" again today. "Running" is alternating intervals of running and walking, over a 3.2 mile course (through the park to Kemp Mill Shopping Center and back). On the way out, I walked one minute and rested one, then repeated. On the way back I ran only a third as much as I walked. Completed the circuit in 37 minutes.

I also did more walking without weights this week, about 6 miles, as "off day" activity, and just three sessions of Heavyhands.

I'm trying to ramp up the intensity of my workouts because Halloween is only three months away, dammit, and if I'm going to carry off the Spiderman costume (or whatever), merely decent shape won't cut it. I have my dreams, ridiculous though they may be.

Recovery Tip of the Week: I asked my orthopedist why my quads hurt so badly after weight workouts, and so much worse and longer than the rest of me. His answer: Hello! They're the biggest muscles in your body! He said 20 minutes of ice right after the session will do wonders, so I'm going to try that.

Heavyhands Tip of the Week: Interval cycles. This is for indoor, in-place workouts. You alternate brief cycles of work and rest, e.g. 6 seconds on, six seconds off; 10 seconds on, 5 seconds off; whatever enables you to handle the workload you're after. The few seconds allow more recovery than you might think, which lets you work for longer at high workloads. It's perfect for TV time - I did a half hour the other night at a 20/10 second pace with 8-pound weights for 20 minutes, then 2-pounders for a much faster-paced ten minutes. I couldn't walk five minutes throwing 8-pounders around, but with the interval cycles, I managed to work them for 2/3 x 20 = 13 minutes. With the two-pounders, I did lots of shadow-boxing, jumps and double ski-poling.

Double ski-poling is a back-oriented move, but it also works your legs and buttockals (glutamates). The in-place version works like this:

1. Start with your arms outstretched over your head. Use lighter weights than you usually do Heavyhands with.
2. Sweep the weights down in an arc while squatting and bending forward on the count of 1.
3. Sweep the weights past your knees and up behind you on the count of two, finishing with your trunk horizontal leaning forward and your arms horizontal behind you.
4. Sweep the weights back past your knees on count three while beginning to straighten.
5. Finish on count four with your body upright, knees straight and arms stretched over your head again, just like you started.

It doesn't take much of this to get you breathing pretty hard.

For on-the-move DSP, substitute steps for counts. One entire circuit is four steps. Only do about a minute of these at a time at first. You may even want to do them without weights in the beginning.

Diet fun: Lycos has an article on "dangerous diets." The intro focuses mainly on diets with low calcium intake from food. (Atkins, Sugar Busters, Body for Life and Suzanne Sommers' diet make the list.) Fair enough. It's important for women to know they need to either take a calcium supplement or switch diets. Then come " five signs of a dangerous diet," including

Lists "good" and "bad" foods

Okay, no one should tell you that sugar is "bad" or fiber is "good." 'Kay. Then, whiplash:

A recent study from the Nutrition Institute at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville that was published in the Journal of Nutrition concluded that low-fat dairy products may help control body fat. Lead researcher Michael Zemel says that a diet rich in low-fat dairy foods will change the way the body's fat cells do their job. "A diet high in low-fat dairy causes fat cells to make less fat and turns on the machinery to break down fat, which translates into a significantly lower risk of obesity," he explained in a news release announcing the study results. In other words, dairy foods burn fat.

So low-fat dairy products are a . . . good . . . food. Man, my neck hurts.

In other fitness blog news:

Jessica Grieves advocates food journals. She makes a strong case that some people may really need them. I may yet need one.

Missy likes the fitness items. That's another one!

Avram Grumer in the land of the weight machines.

Finally, Ellen Goodman simpers about corporations and America's waistline. Companies giving you more for your money gets recast as conspiring to increase portion sizes. People from poor countries eating more when they get to a rich one is recast as people from thin cultures who move here get fatter.

Ellen, it's real simple. America does not want to be all that thin all that much. If it did, it would become so. America likes to eat. When that changes, America can get doggy bags and tote half of those large portions home. Or just buy less. (You can still get a regular hamburger, small fries and a small coke at McDonalds. Just try it. The small fries come in a bag no bigger than the ones they had when you were a kid. Better yet, you can get a hamburger, small fries and a cup of ice water. Mrs. Offering speaks highly of the premium salads too.)

I do, by the way, think it's reasonable for schools to remove junk food vending machines from their grounds if they choose.

The Whole Hideous Inverted Childhood - Derek Lowe offers an appropriately inconclusive meditation on what Ritalin might have done for the aging Philip Larkin. One thing that struck me about Larkin's letters and, despite author Andrew Motion's best efforts to obscure the pattern, his biography: Legendarily Morose Larkin arose only after Larkin's body began breaking down in the early 1970s - the health problems came first and the melancholia second. (The other factor was the death of his mother.) Before the illnesses set in, he had what we can only call a decent time juggling his two girlfriends, working his jobs, writing poems, living the life of the mind with his buddies (Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest chiefly) and caring for his collection of spanking magazines. Early Larkin is acerbic, sure, and cynical, but a different order of curmudgeon from late Larkin. Chronic physical pain seems to have had a lot to do with that. (Link via Instapundit.)