Polish Joke - Little to add to this article by Adam Reed about why the Iraqi reconstruction looks like it does and doesn't look like the one the Polish government proposed. Stray thought: the Polish angle shares tantalizing similarities with my April suggestion that Vaclav Havel manage the reconstruction. See the discussion following the original article and on Light of Reason for questions and responses about the facticity of Reed's reportage.
Stop the Presses - US government praises Syria for its contributions to the war effort: Syria allows militants into Iraq, official says.
As all loyal Americans know, allowing militants into Iraq is a central requirement of the government's "flypaper strategy." Bashar Assad's invitation to the Crawford ranch is in the bag.
Comics Blogging - A couple of months ago, Alan David Doane and Big Sunny D were going on about the virtues of Eightball #22, by Dan Clowes. I picked up a copy last week. Listen people: they were neither kidding nor wrong.
This is one hell of a book. Doane says "it belongs in the libraries of every comics reader," but that understates. Even if you don't read comics - even if you skim or skip the comics items on this site - you should buy and read Eightball #22.
What is it? At six bucks and 36 saddle-stapled color pages, it more justly merits the term "graphic novel" than many thicker softcovers. Imagine: a sequence of mostly one and two-page chapters modeled on Sunday comics strips (especially in the sorts of tabloid papers where the typical strip is taller than it is wise), each carrying forward a braided narrative; Borges with an attention span; a David Lynch movie with a soul. All three of those things at once gets you Eightball #22.
Among other things, the book manages to be consciously metafictional without being arid, which is rare enough in prose, let alone comics.
I also bought Finder: King of the Cats. I enjoyed it. It's not the revelation that Sin-Eater, the first Finder story, is. At about one third the length of Sin-Eater, King of the Cats inevitably has less scope. Our hero, Jaeger, has less at stake here; in important ways, the adventure is an elective for him. The story foregrounds the cultural anthropology that Speed McNeil does so well, but it's not enmeshed in the same tangle of love, duty, family and gender as in the earlier story. (Duty, family and gender are there, but at one remove from Jaeger. The feline Nyima are interesting studies, but not as achingly enthralling as Sin-Eater's Grosvenor family.)
But let me be clear: fun story! Substantially a satire of Disneyworld, setting for a sequence of fortunate cultural misunderstandings between Jaeger and his people, the Ascians, on one side and Queen Marrich and the Nyima on the other. Worth reading after Sin-Eater.
Political-economy thought for the day. As Speed McNeil makes clear, Munkytown evinces the worst qualities of the "company town" system. It's tacky as hell, and as sincere as two starlets kissing hello on Oscar night. It's also the first new city built on Jaeger's world in living memory, the art of city-building having been largely lost. Discuss.
Anarchy Park - So how are we doing, spontaneous order-wise in this area? Not too badly. The police are directing traffic at certain "major intersections," with "major" construed rather narrowly. All intersections with dead traffic lights are to be treated as four-way stops. This includes some intersections where six-lane roads cross other six-lane roads.
On my trips today, drivers were remarkably and universally considerate. Things moved pretty well, which is to say, slower than if there were lights, but there were fewer snarls than you'll find downtown every weekday during rush hour. It's especially impressive when you consider that the "four-way intersection system" breaks down if there are always cars approaching all directions at once - everyone is on someone's right.
Everyone is driving slower, of course. And it is the weekend - we haven't had to endure a rush hour with major signal malfunctions yet. Traffic signals exist for a reason. I don't imagine things can last, but so far things are better than one might fear.
An' Dark, and Nowhere Starlights - Ginger Stampley writes
Well, here's a message for all the DC-based bloggers Ginger reads: Screw you, people!All the DC-based bloggers I read seem to think Isabel was a bust.
Unqualified Headquarters can best be described as "dry, but dark." Good if you're a red wine, probably, bad for a house. We've lacked power since Thursday at 6pm, with none promised before the coming Thursday. As to the storm itself, we lost a tree when the ground let go of the roots, but sideways into a neighbor's tree, not into anyone's house. Today the neighbor and I felled the thing, a forty foot larch. It took down his scraggly old pine too. On the bright side, my neighbor has no fireplace. That's right, Loyal Reader - it's all mine!
Minor siding damage too, but that's the extent of our infrastructure losses.
On the other hand, no power. I'm down the road at the internet/PC games place I blogged from when my PC power supply was on the fritz, listening to the flower of Korean-American youth frag each other. (Game is either Counterstrike or Red Spear.) There are neighborhoods around us with power, and many shopping centers too - you can buy almost anything that's not a "C" cell or a bag of ice, so it's not exactly My Side of the Mountain. Just don't cook so much food you have leftovers is all - got to eat it all at once. (We have a gas stove - I would never buy an electric stove for just this reason - and potable water, unlike much of Northern Virginia.)
These kinds of things are valuable reminders of certain core truths, among them:
o Kids hate canned, evaporated milk.
o This is because canned, evaporated milk sucks.
o It gets dark earlier in September.
o Darkness is boring.
o It takes a long time to cut up two trees.
But on the bright side . . .
It's a time of year when you won't really miss air conditioning or heat.
My office was out of power too. Free day!
Weightlifting in a darkening room at dusk has a certain "Twilight of the Gods" grandeur to it.
Well, not grandeur exactly.
More as time permits.
Like a Hurricane - It developed that some of my coworkers had never heard about the hurricane that drove a straw into a telephone pole. I got to thinking, that would be a great super power - the ability to drive a straw into a telephone pole! Then let's say you faced a villain who got his powers by drinking a specially-formulated shake. Fwoosh! goes his straw and now what's he going to do, huh? Stupid villain!
Poor Bush Administration Planning Update - TV news at lunchtime said that President Bush had left Washington a day early for Camp David, in the Catoctin Mountains, because of the approach of Isabel. The forecasts I saw predict more rain for the piedmont regions of Maryland and Virginia (such as Camp David) than the lowland regions (such as the White House).
Back for the Moment - Jeepers, have I not blogged since Monday? Not intentional. And Isabel may not let me stay on very long now. Currently listening to the Fresh Air interview with Salam Pax that Diana Moon tipped me to. Work let out at 1:30. Currently moderate rains and winds, with the big show supposedly coming tonight.
Instant Blogfest Gonna Get You - Mr. Chad Orzel of Uncertain Principles is coming to River City this weekend. (Hm. Maybe calling it River City is tempting fate . . . )
Anyway, I want to get a DC blogfest together in his honor, Saturday night. He'll be attending a conference in Crystal City, so would anyone with an idea for a good blogfest location close to Crystal City please e-mail me? I'll post a venue by tomorrow night.
Quote of the Day comes from Alan David Doane:
UPDATE: Changed parens to brackets to make clear which part of the above was my interpolation.Honestly, doing a weblog is not as hard as the folks at Four Color Hell [which has delayed its ballyhooed relaunch again] apparently want you to think it is.
Comics Blogging - I don't like romance novels. Not my thing. But when non-writers baldly assert that "I could do better than that," or muse that they should knock off a romance or two to make some easy money, I'm always skeptical. Firstly, the sheer endurance required to finish writing even a bad novel is rare and impressive. Anyone who actually gets that 50,000th or 100,000th word down on the page has my respect, even if every one of those words suck. Secondly, I suspect that, almost without exception, to produce a romance that romance fans will like, you have to have a certain affection for the genre yourself - to sustain your interest and theirs.
The application of this principle to superhero comics should be obvious. Now see if you can guess which of this week's purchases occasioned these thoughts:
1602 #2, Neil Gaiman, Andy Kubert and Richard Isanove. We can now definitively say, this book is no good. I like Gaiman's Sandman as much as anyone. I enjoyed American Gods. 1602 offers pretty much none of Gaiman's virtues as a writer. The dialog is clumsy. There are outright howlers. ("Javier" introduces the 17th-century Iceman to Nicholas Fury by saying, "This is Roberto, who knows much about ice.") As for such plot as has been revealed, whatever. The attempt to beat Count Otto Von Doom! to the macguffin lacks urgency. I've figured out, I think, that the Captain America figure is the real Captain America, and will be key to tying the miniseries into the regular continuity (there's supposed to be a tie-in), but I don't care. Visually, everything is rendered and colored with a stained-glass reverence that, it has to be said, at least befits the lifelessness of the story. But that's not a good thing.
Is the problem that Gaiman considers himself above the material? I don't know. But he doesn't seem to have any particular feel for it. Gaiman is brilliant at telling the stories of ordinary people in the grip of the uncanny, and extraordinary characters enmeshed with the mundane. (With extraordinary characters in the grip of the uncanny he can have problems - the final confrontation between the Old and the New at the end of American Gods fizzles, not in a good subverting-the-expectations way, but as simple anticlimax.) 1602 doesn't play to his strengths.
Captain America #17, Dave Gibbons, Lee Weeks and Tom Palmer. It's hard to beat the cover of Issue 16 for sheer fanboy satisfaction: "Ice, Part 5 of 5," it read, promising the merciful death of the unfortunate Chuch Austen/Jae Lee era. The new storyline, Cap Lives, turns as sharply away as possible - going so far as to switch universes. Captain America thaws out in 1964, in a world where the Germans won World War II, New York is now New Berlin and a Famous Nazi Villain runs the Reich. Not a bad idea for a story, really - a better idea than The Marvel Universe starts happening in Elizabethan England anyway. I wish I liked it more. Dave Gibbons writes dialogue like people used to write superhero dialogue, which is to say, not very well. All the Germans talk like, well, like comic book Nazis. Artist Lee Weeks likes to draw people with their mouths hanging open, like some lost Buscema brother. I like his page layouts though. I'll give part two a try.
Supreme Power #2, J. Michael Straczynski, Gary Frank and John Sibal. Since DC does a prestige-format miniseries every quarter recasting the origin of their major characters in some new setting or perspective, you might wonder why Marvel has to. So far the results aren't bad, though. Straczynski offers us a darkly anti-government take on Marvel's Justice League analogues, the Squadron Supreme. There's enough anti-bureaucratic paranoia in the first two issues to give them a head start on my libertarian affections. But it does seem to tie back somehow. The Superman figure, Hyperion, crash-lands as an infant, is found by a childless couple who take him home and - have the baby confiscated by the military that very night. The government tries to set up the safest (and fakest) possible environment for the kid. We can see it all going wrong, and it makes one appreciate the real origin of Superman anew - maybe simple sincere love really is the only thing that keeps kids from turning into monsters. I don't know if Hyperion will go bad, but I'm interested in finding out.
Problems? Yeah, something Johanna Draper Carlson said at SPX: If someone really did have fabulous powers - the ability to fly, to bend bars, outrun gazelles, stuff like that - shouldn't it be fun for them, at least some of the time? So far, we've seen at least cameos by the Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, Flash and Wonder Woman figures (and probably Aquaman too), and only the boy who will grow to be the Whizzer (read, Flash) seems like he ever gets to enjoy himself. Be interesting to see if that changes.
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume Two Issue 6, by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill. The wrapup to the second miniseries. How did they do? Here's the thing: I really enjoyed LOEG Volume One. But I'm damned if I remember precisely how it ends. I don't think I'm going to have that problem with this volume. An impressively delicate leavetaking between Mr. Hyde and Mina Murray, impressively visceral smashing of martian tripods and more. We are all but promised a Volume Three. Prepare to wait dog years for it to start, then finish.
Blogwatch - Foreigners Are Mean! is dedicated to noting every cross word uttered about the United States by foreign leaders or journalists, plus a smattering of other topics.
Return of the Anthraxblog Item - Bruce Rolston of Flit(ting between our two incompatible personae) summarizes a dead-tree Vanity Fair article making the case that Steven J. Hatfill really was the perpetrator of the Fall 2001 anthrax attacks. Some of what he calls new information is actually old information, that goes way back to the Hartford Courant reports of Summer 2002. But there are a couple of bits that are new, at least to me:
Just because you forge your PhD doesn't mean you'll also launch biological war. The information about Hatfill's mentor is intriguing but not dispositive - guilt by association. But the geographical ties to the hoax attacks certainly make one stand up and take notice, assuming the truth of the reports.*Hatfill got his job as one of the U.S.'s top 5 bioweapons experts by forging a Ph.D.
*Hatfill was in Washington the day of a 1997 hoax bioattack on the B'nai Brith offices in that city. He was in London the day a second, hoax anthrax letter was sent to Tom Daschle from London. He was in Louisiana when a later series of hoax anthrax letters were sent from Louisiana.
*Hatfill mentor Bill Patrick's 1999 report "Risk Assessment" is apparently the only document known that identified super-fine anthrax sent through the mail could be a real threat, before it actually happened.
*Patrick was involved in "simulated bioattacks," supposedly using inert bacilli instead of anthrax, in 1950 and 1952, that appear to have accidentally killed Americans.
Against that set the following:
o Hatfill was a virus expert, not a germ expert, per reports.
o If he faked his PhD, doesn't that make him less qualified to have pulled off the anthrax attacks?
o Searches of the area around Hatfill's residence, including draining a couple of ponds, seem not to have turned up any physical evidence against him.
Time, Gentlemen - Hello, Mid-September. Time for the "September Surprise" report of Iraqi chemical and biological weapons. Or, as Josh Marshall notes, maybe not.
Why it matters: the case against the war never depended on Saddam's lack of Weapons of Some Destruction. But the case for war absolutely did depend on Iraq's possession of same, regardless of what the hawks are saying now.
Lord, Give Me Arab Nationalism, But Not Yet - From an AJC article on the attitudes of Iraqi youth:
Dude, you're in a pool hall!"My friends tell me we have development now and they brag about having satellites and cell phones," said Ali Abdel Karim, 18, lounging at a Baghdad pool hall. "This is not the development we need. Those things will just take away our culture and traditions."
(Link via Arthur Silber.)
Sticky Situations - Colin Powell says it's a problem that "[Iraq's] porous borders are attracting saboteurs intent on undermining" progress toward self-rule. But this isn't really a problem at all, according to proponents of the famous "flypaper thesis." It's supposed to be good for you. All the Islamist terrorists in the world flock to Iraq to fight the Great Satan, leaving the American, um, homeland unmolested and, in some versions, Israel too.
There are only about a million problems with what its advocates call the flypaper "strategy." (A "strategy" is apparently an explanation you come up with to explain why what you did turns out to have been a brilliant idea even though it didn't work out like you said it would.) These problems range from the factual to the practical to the moral.
First off, Powell offers "a rough estimate of 100 such infiltrators." Either this number is a woeful underestimate or flypaper simply isn't attracting all the world's Islamist nutcases, Osama Bin LadenAyman al-Zawahiri's injunctions notwithstanding.
Second, just because some number of al Qaeda operatives and sympathizers flock to Iraq to attack US troops and sympathetic Iraqi leaders doesn't mean that's all al Qaeda is doing or can do. Apparently the US government which allegedly conceived this marvelous "flypaper" "strategy" doesn't think so:
The Bloomberg story from which this excerpt comes ran three days ago, and quotes an additional warning: "We also cannot rule out the potential for al-Qaeda to attempt a second catastrophic attack within the United States."The al-Qaeda terrorist network may be planning attacks more devastating than those of Sept. 11, 2001, possibly involving chemical or biological agents, the U.S. government said in a worldwide advisory to its citizens.
``With the second anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks upon us, we are seeing increasing indications that al-Qaeda is preparing to strike U.S. interests abroad,'' the government said in an e-mailed statement released through the U.S. Consulate in Hong Kong. ``The U.S. government remains deeply concerned about the security of U.S. citizens overseas,'' it said.
To see al Qaeda activity in Iraq and chortle, "See! They're tied down there." would be akin to observing the assassination of Ahmad Shah Massoud on September 10, 2001 and chortling, "Silly al Qaeda dolts! All they do is mess around in Afghan politics. What a bunch of losers!"
Never trust a plan that assumes the incurable stupidity of your enemy. "Flypaper" only works if al Qaeda's leadership is so stupid as to forget the central insight that led to the September 11, 2001 massacres in the first place - that anti-US forces should not waste all their time messing around on the periphery of American influence.
Andrew Sullivan among others expresses satisfaction that, "The extra beauty of this strategy is that it creates a target for Islamist terrorists that is not Israel." I can't begin to say how appalling it is that Sullivan thinks it appropriate to make American troops into targets for another country's enemies, given that the other country has its own government and military already charged with safeguarding its citizens and interests, and given that the Administration did not exactly put this motivation out there for acceptance or rejection during the debate on the war. Indeed, if you argued that war proponents like Sullivan conflated Israeli and American interests, said proponents called you a nutcase or a bigot. Glad we cleared that up. But there's also the minor practical problem that it doesn't seem to be working. Iraqis and (some number of infiltrators) can attack Americans in Iraq at the same time as Palestinians attack Israelis in Israel and Palestine.
Also apparently not working: Saddam's checks to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers have presumably stopped. Suicide bombings themselves have not.
Then there's the question of whether violent anti-American extremists are a non-renewable resource. For Flypaper to work, there has to be a fixed quantity of muslims sufficiently motivated to attack the United States, all of whom flock to Iraq to die. We've already dealt with the question of whether they'll all flock to Iraq. That leaves the question of whether there is a fixed quantity of violent anti-American extremists. There's no reason to think this is necessarily so. It's entirely possible that the very fact of the Iraq war will generate terrorist recruits at a higher rate than it dispatches them. We just don't know.
There's an outside chance that Flypaper could be true but backfire - that is, that Islamist terrorists flocking to Iraq actually could drive American troops out of the country, or take credit for an American withdrawal they didn't cause.
Finally, there's a minor matter of morality. Remember all that stuff about how we weren't at war with the Iraqi people but with Saddam Hussein, or the Ba'ath Party apparatus? Flypaper theory exists to posit and justify a messy war between the US military and non-Iraqi enemies of America and Israel - those infiltrators, remember? Let's state it again, clearly: the presence of American troops in Iraq draws anti-American and anti-Israeli terrorists to Iraq, where we wipe them out. That is, Flypaper supposedly represents a decision by the US to turn Iraq, a place full of the Iraqi People With Whom We Have No Quarrel, into a theater of war between non-Iraqi forces. The dead, wounded, frightened and humiliated will not, of course, be restricted to non-Iraqis. The stuff that gets broke will not just be non-Iraqi stuff. And we wonder why some Iraqis are so sullen.
(Note: investigate feasibility of spending the $87 billion on book deals for every Iraqi man, woman and child. Fly them to London for publicity events for duration of war.)
So, Flypaper phooey. It is neither moral, feasible nor even actual.
According to the Latest Studies . . . - Aaron Haspel issues an important health warning firmly grounded in bogus drug research:
There is a still larger lesson for my vast juvenile readership, who are possibly capable of learning something. Kids, this is very important: don't do meth thinking it's Ecstasy.
Sunday Funnies - Begging to Differ has a comic strip page today. I like the one where the two talking animals discuss sex.
And He Came So CLOSE Too! - Gregg Easterbrook is a smart liberal. You can see him coming up against the limits of smart liberalism here:
That's a problem all right. And it's worse even than that - just watch companies currently employing 51 or 52 or 55 people dump workers to get under the limit when the law goes into effect. That such a law gets as far as it does hints at how California got into the political and economic mess it's in. But Easterbrook won't get them out of it:California is on the verge of requiring all employers with more than 50 employees to provide health insurance. But with health policies now priced on average at $4,000 per year, this means the marginal cost for an employer with 50 employees, to bring on worker number 51, will be $200,000.
How about simply decoupling health ensurance from the current employer-based model? It's an artifact of WWII wage and price controls. (Cue standard libertarian lecture about the pernicious economic effects of wars.) It disfavors the self-employed and does nothing for the unemployed. And, like ineffective government measures always do, it inspires calls for further ineffective government measures to patch the initial ones - calls like Easterbrook's.Either government must provide universal health insurance in some way; or enforceably mandate the individual purchase of coverage, the way auto insurance is enforceably mandated but privately obtained; or all employers of all sizes must provide insurance, to avoid penalizing small business for growing.
Even Easterbrook's least awful proposal - mandate individual purchases, which at least theoretically falls on all citizens equally - is pretty bad. Easterbrook compares it to auto insurance, but I actually do have the option not to buy auto insurance, by not driving. Presumably the only way I can get out of buying health insurance is by not living. That's some exit option.
And you still have unavoidable margin problems, just at the individual rather than the employer level. What if I can't afford to buy coverage? Do I have to take the exit option discussed above? I assume not. Since Easterbrook is a liberal, he probably wants to cover me with Medicaid or some other government program. But then there has to be a level of income at which I get tossed off the Medicaid rolls and into the posse of those deputed to buy their own insurance. The cost differential between the insurance dole and the insurance mandate is going to price me out of a range of improvements in my employment situation that ought to betoken measurable improvements in my situation, but which I can't take because the cost of paying insurance rather than getting it for free leaves me worse off than staying where I am.
It also means that, when the individual mandate goes into effect, it exerts downward pressure on the low-wage employed - suddenly a lot of them are a) worse off than they were the day before the law went into effect; and b) better off unemployed than working.
In other words, Easterbrook would have California shift from a policy where certain companies can't afford to hire me to a policy where I can't afford to take their jobs anyway. All because of another New Deal gift that keeps on giving.
Over the Hills and Far Away - A moving set of valedictory items by moja_vera at Turning Tables. He's coming home from duty in Iraq. May a long train follow in his wake. Don't miss his photo blog.
Weekly Fitness Blog Item - Weight 165, Waist 32.75". As always, waist measurements are for entertainment purposes only. Up a pound from last week, down 51 pounds from Thanksgiving Day.
For the second week in a row, I only managed two weight sessions. I also got off my cardio schedule. Blame some combination of weather, schedule and sheer laziness. (It's become easy to hit the snooze button rather than get up and ambulate or lift. That pushes workouts to the evenings and it's easy for things to get away in the evening.) In my defense I got in six miles of walking on my lunch hours and did a double run/walk session today.
In other fitness blogs, Diana Moon turns savagely against SuperSlow, the weight training regimen I followed this spring after learning of it from her. Okay, turns savagely against rather overstates. "After a while I began to find Superslow a bother," is what she actually says. That means that, of the four people I know who have followed that particular program - Diana, my mother, my sister, me - all of us have stopped it for one reason or another. F, as they say, WIW.
Not that SuperSlow is the only program people have trouble following. In addition to my recent BFL slacking, Avram Grumer says he had a period of skipping BFL workouts too. (He's lost everything he gained back.) Unlike SuperSlow, BFL requires action six days out of seven, and the weight workouts are long - 45+ minutes. So it's easy to find some excuse to get derailed.
Heavyhands links for Zack of Procrastination:
Clarence Bass' introduction/review.
A refutation of a Heavyhands myth by Dana W. Carpender. Nevertheless contains a warning I do not endorse against ever exercising with weights above 5-6 pounds.
An introductory program by Marty Gallagher.
A Heavyhands Yahoo group with, um, seven messages since April.
An illustrated beginning routine from Lean Lifestyle.
Used Heavyhands books from Abebooks. I recommend both Heavyhands: The Ultimate Exercise and The Heavyhands Walking Book. All the fun math is in the first book.