It Never Hurts to Ask - I'd like to join a group RPG-oriented blog, one with an emphasis on theory. (Not computer RPGs but the tabletop kind.) Alas, the only one I know of has a membership of high-powered professionals and is dormant. If you run one I can join, please let me know.

Also, if you'd like to bankroll the nationwide chain of comic-book retailers that Marvel editor-in-chief Joe Quesada says the industry needs, drop me a line. I've got years of retail management behind me, additional background in accounting analysis and a vision that I'm convinced can make money.

For the Troops - Via Gjovaag and others: Operation Comix Relief aims to donate comics to wounded and ill US soldiers in Iraq. No fair dumping all your copies of 1602 and Batman: Hush on our fighting men and women, though - they've got enough problems.

I can not personally vouch for this particular charity, so donate at your own risk. I like the idea though.

Actually, if Diamond Distributors and the various comics publishers had any brains at all, they'd figure out a way to ship some of their overstock directly to the forces in theater. These folks will get home eventually - most of them anyway - and if some of them came home with a taste for comics, that would be a boon to the industry. (All I Need to Know I Learned from my Crack Dealer.)

Speaking of charities, don't forget blogger Chief Wiggles' program to distribute toys to Iraqi kids.

Some News Just Makes Your Day - Via Laura "Tegan" Gjovaag, this report that cartoonist Lynn Johnston "plans on ending her strip 'For Better Or For Worse' in a few years." Better would be a report that Lynn Johnston will use arcane rituals to blot the memory of For Better or for Worse from the minds of man," but sometimes you take what you can get.

Straight Eye on the Queer Tie II - Eve wonders what a hardcore libertarian like me is doing arguing the details of same-sex marriage rather than simply insisting that marriage be treated as just another contract, outside the purview of the state entirely. It's a fair question. I do think of marriage as, among other things, a contract, and as something that implicates all sorts of other contractual arrangements. Pretty much all of my section two treats the prohibition on SSM as a right-of-contract problem - in present circumstances, the state refuses to enforce various types of contracts that a gay couple in love may wish to enter into - contracts that it will enforce for straight people.

Second, apart from the question of whether the state should be in the business of endorsing and forbidding types of marriage is the social question of gay marriage as a phenomenon. The social question is itself interesting, and doesn't disappear with the state's role in my utopia. Gay marriage, legal or not, is still a good or bad idea that takes one or more forms and has whatever impacts.

Third is the familiar libertarian necessity of arguing in terms chosen by others. The United States is not a libertarian society and won't be in my lifetime. But it may, in some ways, become a freer society. Sometimes pushing it in that direction means meeting people on their field rather than mine.

Moira Breen pipes up to agree with Eve that, childless couples or no, marriage is about rearing children and that trumps "fairness" concerns. (She also says that same-sex marriage opponents have not yet demonstrated that legalized SSM will "work against the interests of children.")

I clearly need to address the issue of gay marriage and child-rearing in more detail as I take in more of the opponents' arguments purporting to show the harm. Right now they are hazy in my mind and, I think, in much of the writing of gay marriage opponents. My major concern in yesterday's item was to deal with the separate "harm to straight marriage" argument.

But I would note for the time being that gay couples are raising children already. Well okay, rearing children. Sorry, Mrs. Conrad from Third Grade. The link is strictly from Lazy Google, for which I apologize, but while the census numbers may be inflated somewhat, I'd be surprised if anyone argued that the phenomenon wasn't real.

Absent a draconian program of keeping kids out of the homes of gays, the question is not whether it's better for for gay people or straight people to raise kids, it's whether it's better for gay people to raise kids inside marriage or outside marriage. I strongly suspect the answer is: inside marriage.

I'd also argue that the very phenomenon of the "gay-by boom" is more evidence that, as the queer activists fear, the real influence trend is gays emulating straight behavior rather than straights emulating gay behavior.

I've probably got more to say about gender roles later, but a brief thought for now: From what I can tell, gays love their kids too. So if it becomes widely accepted that straight children of gay parents have special gender-model needs, particularly straight children opposite in gender to their parents, I would expect actual gay parents will invest a fair amount of thought and ingenuity in finding ways to meet those needs. Magazine articles, advice books, Yahoo groups, pediatrician's office classes, the playgrounds of parks in gay neighborhoods, coffee klatches - all the places that parents try to figure out what the hell they're doing before they ruin their children. I promise to blather about all the healthy and unhealthy places gender models come from later; for now my argument is simply that gay parents will be motivated to find solutions to the problem, to the extent that it is a problem.

There will be a minority of politically-stubborn gay couples who reject any developing consensus, just as some deaf couples regret having borne children who can hear. Some gay parents will screw up their children for political reasons. You don't have to be gay to do that, though. Hell, David Horowitz never did recover. Most gay parents will just be schmucks like us, getting on with their schmuck-y lives and doing the best they can. Heather may have two mommies, in other words, but neither of Heather's mommies will have two heads.

All Tinfoil Hats Look the Same in the Dark - Dr. Manhattan tips me to Gregg Easterbrook's series of imprecations against DC/Maryland utility PepCo for the quality of their post-Isabel power-restoration efforts. His thesis is that PepCo has deliberately dragged their feet because a long outage suits them: they want a sustained blackout fresh in the minds of the utility commission when they press for rate increases later this year. To that end, argues Easterbrook, they've actually gotten around to restoring power in the area's wealthiest areas last, so elite opinion will be especially receptive.

It could be. One thing that Easterbrook is certainly right about is the changed relationship between the Washington Post and those elites - these days the Post is all for 'em. It lives to get its publishers and executives invited to the best parties and break bread with said elite at the best restaurants. (This had everything to do with the editorial page's favorable Winter and Spring attitude toward the war that the Post, the poobahs and Easterbrook all favored.)

He may, despite this item's cutesy title, be right about the rest too. (Easterbrook describes PepCo as existing in a partially deregulated and partially regulated environment, which is to say a regulated environment. That is, they are rent-seekers.)

See Easterbrook's items from Day 6, Day 7.

Hunh - So Edward Said is dead. I never liked him. In my neoliberal days I actively disliked him. (It got me a discount on my New Republic subscription.) Even after going completely off the reservation on foreign policy issues, I still didn't like Said because he blathered. He was an unusually bad writer even for a contemporary academic.

For all that, and notwithstanding his long history of apologetics for terrorism, I wonder these days, with Jesse Walker, whether Said may have been right about one thing: that the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis is not viable, and a unitary democratic state really is the only arrangement that can work. My immediate reaction is, the Israelis would be nuts to try it under present conditions. My next reaction is, all the hopeful paths forward in the middle east are nuts. And back and forth like that.

But then Diana Moon dropped another possibility on me:

Three-state solution. Palestine for the Arab nationalists, Israel for the Jewish nationalists, and the Free State of Haifa, for secular non-nationalists. No taxes, and no vote, either. A revolving citizens council. No army, naturally. You'd have to sign an affidavit saying you are a functional atheist.

Only the last sentence is a joke. I'm dead serious on the rest of it.

And hey, why the hell not? (I'd keep an army: in that neighborhood you need one.) I could imagine the Free State becoming the Singapore of the Med, but funkier.

Oh by the way, yes I am long familiar with the argument that Palestinians who call for a "unitary, democratic state" only want that long enough to vote the Jews into oblivion. I don't dismiss the possibility, and it factors into my reluctance to embrace the one-state idea. (That and the fact that it's only my business insofar as my country is the chief underwriter of Israeli policy.)

The Rats of NIMD - Noah Shachtman reports that the "BRIDE OF 'TIA' LIVES."

"Pursued with a minimal public profile and lacking a polarizing figure like Adm. Poindexter to galvanize opposition, NIMD has proceeded quietly even as TIA imploded," Aftergood writes.

Excuse me a second while I am not surprised.

Comics Blogwatch - Lean Left, of all sites, picks up and runs with my item about comics stores.

Speaking of that item, Sean Collins amplifies the basic retail principle of putting your staples where people who know you have them will have to pass other things. There are some exceptions to the principle that are worth noting even though I don't think they apply. If you're in a competitive industry, you'll stick the "hot" items and categories toward the front hoping to trigger the impulse to buy it now, from you rather than your competition. When I was running bookstores, my mall-based chain made sure to stick the bestseller sections and anticipated bestseller sections out front. After all, chances were you had a competitor in the same mall - you had to grab the walker's eye right this instant and get her across your lease line rather than down the hall where the other store had the same book. And since hundreds of new titles come out every week, not dozens, and casual readers don't memorize shipping schedules, not even necessarily for their favorite authors, you need to stick hot new releases in the public face, so the public face knows the book even exists.

This has approximately nothing to do with the situation of the typical comics shop.

Speaking of Sean Collins, he praises the new issue of Captain America, which reminds me that last week he went into an odd rant about my equivocal reaction to the prior issue. "Jim Henley . . . gets the most recent issue of Captain America completely wrong," he wrote. This despite the fact that I said that the previous stories in the run - the ones Sean didn't like - were bad, and that the premise of the current story - which Sean calls the right way to do Captain America - was a good one. My complaints pertained strictly to the execution of said premise. I can't help but think that Sean assumed, based on my prominent membership in the anti-American conspiracy, that I meant something completely other than what I said.

Eve Tushnet has a whole bunch of new comics reviews. I squinted during the reviews of the Finder books I haven't gotten to yet.

Before lending me his copy of Sandman: Endless Nights, Nate Bruinooge posted a substantial review to Polytropos. I squinted through it too, but you don't have to.

Alan David Doane is giving up his Comic Book Galaxy site, which is a drag. Worse, he implies that he's giving up the attached ADD weblog too. Dammit Alan, if you haven't heard, running a weblog isn't all that hard. In the immortal words of maniacal artificial intelligences and bizarre alien lifeforms everywhere, "Don't! . . . Leave! . . . Me! Don't! . . . Leave! . . . Me!"

Straight Eye on the Queer Tie - I haven't been persuaded by any of the arguments against gay marriage I've seen. I prefer to deal with Eve Tushnet's, because one knows that her arguments aren't animated by anti-gay animus.

But that doesn't make the arguments persuasive. Let's break the case against down into a couple of elements, taking Eve's report of an AFF debate and her Jewish World Review article as our texts. (And this one and this one too.) And, oh yes! there will be numbered subsections!

1) Eve: "Opponents of SSM need to work much harder on explaining what "the children!" are doing in our argument. There needs to be much more careful attention to the role of ideals and models in people's lives. Instead, we're getting bogged down in questions about infertile couples, etc., which I think are just plain irrelevant."

The discussion also "bogs down" in discussion of couples who are childless by choice. There are a lot of them and, if one is male and one is female, they are legally permitted to marry in the United States. Clearly, while marriage is a sound structure for the rearing of children - I know no better - marriage is not just that.

It ain't bogging down to note relevant facts. Legally and practically, marriage is not only about rearing children.

2) Eve is concerned about what it is not: "Advocates of SSM really need to stop talking about me and my best friend when they think they're talking about marriage." I see this as connecting to an earlier statement: "Like most of these discussions, it was framed in terms of heteros vs. homos. I think that's unnecessary and misleading; I've said before that I think this is an issue about men and women, not gays 'n' straights."

Here's my problem. I do think this is an issue about men and women. One of the ways it's about men and women has to do with sanctity of contract. Some men and some women cannot, as I can, be sure that their wish that certain important medical decisions will be made by the person they love and trust most in all the world will be honored, in the event of their incapacitation. Some men and some women cannot bequeath their estates to their beloved without a much greater risk of having their wills torn up under challenge from the aggrieved, the greedy or the simply bigoted than I face. Some men and some women can be compelled to testify in court against their life partner in a way I can not. Some men and some women can not extend certain coverages and indemnities (insurance etc.) over their life partners as the woman and man at Unqualified Headquarters can. They would not face these difficulties if they were married. But they're not allowed to get married, even though they want to.

These are not nebulous, abstract harms. These are tangible nuggets of differential hardship. Leaving aside all that emotion stuff about being forbidden to formalize your union before your fellows in the way society has established - and I take that emotion stuff very seriously in itself - the legal and financial impact on gay men and women surely qualifies as a "heavy burden" when resolving the question of whether equal protection-type arguments should apply here.

Eve says, "marriage is not friendship" and "marriage is about sex," but this is only relevant if she is also saying, sotto voce, gay people who say they want to marry someone they love and sleep with are really just friends with that person. I personally have no reason to be sure that gay people who want to marry are that confused.

3) This gets to the issue of the extent to which "gay marriage" will or won't be like "straight marriage." Same-sex marriage advocates note that vocal queer theorists abhor the idea of gay men taming themselves into monogamous married relations. Where's the transgression in that? In response, gay advocates of gay marriage such as Andrew Sullivan have denied that that is their intent - essentially, professing that, married or not, boys will still be boys, wink wink, nudge nudge.

Same-sex marriage opponents foresee this as the causal mechanism by which legalizing gay marriage weakens the institution for heterosexuals: gays get married. Gays flout the concept of marital fidelity. Straights, especially straight men, see this going on and decide, "I want some of that concept flouting too!" And now marriage is ruined for everyone.

Let's break this down.

The first thing to note is the differential sexual behaviors of mature gay men and lesbians. Promiscuity is a gay male value, or stereotype. Since SSM opponents reject the applicability of equal-protection arguments regarding marriage rights, why don't they adopt a "Yes to gay female, no to gay male marriage" position?

I accept, by the way, the belief that men and women have different sexual priorities and that heterosexual marriage is a way to tame male sexual behavior. I'm convinced that gay men have been as promiscuous as they are because they can be - they don't have to get permission to have sex from women the way straight men do!

The next problem may strike some as minor: the causation argument depends on straight men (in marriages) observing the behavior of gay men (in marriages) and wanting to emulate gay men. That is, the theory assumes that in this matter straight men will adopt a completely different stance toward gay men than they do in almost every other aspect of life: "don't be so gay."

But here's my big demurral: the "institution-weakening" argument may be entirely wrong about the direction of influence. It takes the prospective professions of activists today for the actual behavior of rank and file gays tomorrow - Sullivan said it, I believe it and that's that. It assumes that straights will observe gays and be swayed.

But why mightn't the influence go in opposite direction? Why shouldn't we believe that the queer theorists are right, and the gay "moderates" shining them up about all that we'll still be party animals stuff? The queer theorist fear, after all, is that, gay marriage will tame gay sexuality - that the institution will be stronger than the impulses, that the drive for gay marriage represents a desire to be more like those straights with their mortgages and monogamy.

When you come down to it, the queer theorists may have more faith in the power of marriage than their strange bedfellows in the conservative opposition. And they may be right. At the very least, it's an open question. I can identify as well-defined a causal mechanism my way: gays actually start marrying. Some of them do try the catting around anyway thing. But in more and more couples, one of them puts his foot down. It occurs to him that in all those sessions laughing over the bridal magazines with his fruit fly girlfriends, that it really was "the whole package" that he wanted. (At the AFF debate, says Eve, the participants were asked to define marriage: '[The great Jonathan] Rauch, in a clipped and passionate tone, simply said, "To have and to hold, to love and to cherish, for richer and for poorer, for better and for worse, in sickness and in health, 'til death do you part." ') Perhaps the quiet revolution in gay marriage will be led by the, ahem, less butch. (Perhaps not.) Marriage will turn out to be even better at taming male sexuality than we thought.

Like I said, it's at least an open question: which way is the influence more likely to run - a (let's face it) small population of gays pulling a large population of straights over to the dark side, or a large population of straights bewitching a small population of gays? I'd say the early returns actually favor my argument. Because what is the gay drive for marriage rights but a movement to be more like straight people - indeed, a demand to be allowed to be more like straight people? I used to believe merely that there was nothing gay people could do to straight marriage, that straight people would or wouldn't do it themselves. Now I suspect that there's quite a lot that straight marriage can do to - and for - gay people.

4) A brief coda on gender roles and Eve's question of what effect gay couples might have on the gender roles available to their children. Here we already have some history, and not just with gay couples. (See this amusing plaint by Jeanne d'Arc.) Because conservatives are largely right that gender roles are not just social construction, gender roles are surprisingly durable. In my own family (by marriage) I have lesbian relatives rearing a son - he strikes me as not any more screwed up about sex and gender than any other teenager. (Nor more nor less sullen.)

Eureka! - Jesse Walker sent around a link to a Corner inanity this morning so I read through a half day's entries, and I think I get it now. A lot of magazines have group weblogs. National Review publishes its Instant Messenger logs instead.

Comics Blogwatch - Two new draftees join Team Comics and Team Semi-Comics:

Grotesque Anatomy by John Jakala has started very strongly.

Worlds within Worlds by Sean Fumo is even newer - like, two days old. But the author has a substantial track record of comments and e-mails to existing comics blogs, so there's no reason to think he'll give it up after a couple of days. He's particularly strong on Things Manga.

Not by any means a new blogger, but Dirk Deppey has a substantial article about the death spiral of the direct market. He makes a good case that the market is terminal. Sometimes I feel an evidentiary disconnect between some of his criticisms of comics shops and my actual experiences. For instance, of the half dozen shops I've spent the most time in since returning to regular comics readership, all of them have substantial manga sections, prominently displayed, four of them have impressive displays of non-superhero books in both "floppy" and book form and, um, two of them are even tidy and well-merchandised. Three of the four with strong independent sections display them toward the storefront. These virtues hold true for Jim Hanley's Universe in Manhattan, too.

And yet. I "fired" the most convenient shop to my office (Alliance Comics in Bowie) because their selection of Independents was so poor, and avoid their shop closest to my house because it's generally drab. There's a shop in Rockville I ignore because it is dark, has a slim selection of most everything and - on Free Comic Book Day yet - a staff best described as "inert." Most horrifying of all is Comic Classics in Frostburg, MD (a small college town in the western end of the state). This gloomy storefront had hardly any books from the last two years when I visited it this summer. No graphic novels. Almost no manga. On the bright side, they had a 2000 DC reprint of Showcase #4 on the display wall that I picked up. It was kind of like that song:

And all the time she laughs at those who shout
her name and steal her clothes

There's a semi-famous comics/used bookstore in Wheaton where you literally can't walk to a given set of shelves on any particular day and where the owner and staff have always struck me as forbidding, and one of those appalling "comics and card" stores in Plaza del Mercado.

So, of ten or so stores with which I can claim some familiarity I would class one as superb (Big Planet Comics in Bethesda), three as excellent (Beyond Comics in Lake Forest Mall, Phoenix Comics in Herndon and Jim Hanley's), one as very good, two mediocre and three frightening.

Big Planet is the class of the lot - best fulfilling Dirk's sensible criteria for smart retailing. The window displays make some attempt to reach the culture at large. (Recently it focused on - duh! - American Splendor.) The manga is is in the front corner. The cash wrap area is tidy, boasting a big selection of kids comics. Before you get to the monthly superhero comics racks, you pass the faceout display of Tintins at the far end of the register area. A big selection of magazines and books about comics toward the back. The new books wall is in the back, and on the other side of that, a separate area for erotic comics. Independents are displayed closer to the front than the superhero backstock.

And opposite the cashwrap, running half the length of the store from just inside the front door, a better, more complete selection of trade paperbacks than you will find at the Bethesda Barnes & Noble. Everything - DC, Marvel, Fantagraphics, Top Shelf, Lightspeed Press. It's there and you can find it. The section is consciously organized to beat Barnes & Noble at the trade paperback game.

Toys and collectibles exist, and are even prominently displayed, but they don't overwhelm the space and they don't feel cluttered. The staff is knowledgeable and genial but not overbearing. There's no anti-superhero book snobbery to the display logic either - just a matter of knowing that if you're a fanboy (like me) you're going to make the walk to the back of the store, so put material that might inspire the curiousity seeker where it can catch the eye.

Some stores really know what they're doing. The question is whether they'll lift the industry up, or if the industry will disappear beneath them, so that they sink too.

Music Notes - From Deutsche Grammaphon:

"Deutsche Grammaphon presents....GET MOPEY!!! The new, not-so-fun album from Elvis Costello!

"The noted performer, praised for his chameleon-like musical abilities, releases this material after an unfortunately well-publicized controversial incident. Costello is alleged to have drunkenly said aloud to performers John Mayer and Suzanne Vega in a bar that legendary singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen was "a derelict, horny, morose Canuck". A angry scuffle nearly broke out, but everybody instead remained where they were and quietly rocked back and forth, sniffling.

"Once word of this major bum out reached the music press, Costello hastily assembled an awkward press conference to put his actions in context. 'I love depressing music,' he stammered. 'I mean, to a certain extent. Sure. But would any of you here honestly want to spent five minutes with Morrissey? He's like Bob's Big Boy constantly at a funeral. Robert Smith looks like my aunt. And Michael Stipe calls me to talk about how sad the squirrels make him. Swear to God, that's what he said. Well, that's what I could make out between the sobs. Maybe I should sing about sad squirrels. Is that what you people want from me?'

"Deutsche Grammaphon believes GET MOPEY!!! will nevertheless will prove Costello's respect for the melancholy masters. Get your copy and a box of tissues today!"

Article text by Mike Carter. (That part's for real.)

Hold That Thought - I see that Atrios is sure that, as a "good libertarian," I'll be against the new proposal for "privatizing" most Iraqi state enterprises because property rights are not possible "[i]n a country without a real system of government, a constitution, a set of laws, institutions, a court system, etc."

First off, I don't know what I think about the new proposal because (confession!) I haven't yet read much about it. It's true that, over the last decade or two, libertarians have come to recognize that many "privatization" and "deregulation" proposals don't really merit the names - they simply shift the locus of state control and at best create a favored class of politically-connected rent-seekers. At worst they are a hash of perverse incentives and conflicting impulses, such as California's bizarre scheme for energy "deregulation."

At best, though, deregulation changes whole industries for the better, as with the Carter Administration's revolutions in the trucking and airline industries. And some method of privatizing strongly socialistic political economies is vital.

I would disagree with Atrios a priori as follows. Property rights are not likely secure in "a country without a real system of government, a constitution, a set of laws, institutions, a court system, etc." They are also not necessarily secure in a country with those things. The question is which system of government, constitution, laws etc. As a historical matter, Atrios probably has the evolution backward in many cases - assertions of property rights, and informal recognition of same, often precede their formal incorporation into the legal regimen. Given a community of lobstermen, for example, you probably see first, the assertion that "Don't lay your pots where my pots are" followed by "I won't do that if you won't lay your pots next to my pots" and then "We don't lay our pots next to other people's pots" with no reference whatsoever to system of government, constitution, laws etc. Disputes will occur, which the group will initially attempt to solve by consensus, often breeding new informal procedures. ("You can't lay more pots than you can check in a week." "You can't lay pots in Spring where someone else laid pots last fall until a week has gone by.") Hard cases eventually flare into violence or court cases, but the early court cases will seek primarily to have the informal customs ratified and enforced as common law.

Consider a way that Atrios is obviously wrong in Iraq specifically. There was individual ownership in Iraq of houses, shops and firms (even if merely small ones). The system of government, constitution, laws etc. was not ideal for securing those. It was a quasi-socialist dictatorship. A Hussein could and would muscle in on your action if he wished. However, contingency aside, people clearly had houses, shops and firms that they thought of as "mine."

That government, laws, court system etc. is gone. Clearly, given what we know of Iraqi crime levels in the postwar period, the occupation regime is not doing everything it could to secure those people's rights to their property. But would we say that, the old regime having vanished, the old property rights have vanished as well - that if you owned a house, a shop or a firm in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, you now have no more right to it than anyone else? I think most Iraqis would rebel against this notion. I rebel against this notion.

Consider the reported episodes of "ethnic cleansing" in the Kurdish areas - Kurds evicting Arabs from houses in the Mosul area and putting Kurds in them. Their argument is not "We're Kurds, we won, it's ours now," but rather "These houses belonged to Kurds before Saddam's government dispossessed them and settled Arabs in their place." In other words, the argument, if not necessarily the practice, grounds itself in a sense of property rights that transcends the actual legal regime in force at the time of the original dispossession.

Property rights are actually just one more human right, like speech rights, assembly rights or worship rights. To the American way of thinking, rights precede any particular legal regime or system of government - government exists to secure reexisting rights, not to establish them in the first place.

Which is not to say that the specific proposal for privatizing Iraqi state enterprises is any good. But it's not necessarily bad either.

Lookee! - Basic lesson in free market economics from, of all people, conservative bete noire Paul Krugman, disposing of William Greider's new book. See also Daniel Drezner's related item on income inequality and whether and how it does and doesn't matter. Me, I could care less about income inequality as such, because income inequality simply measures relative position on the wealth scale. Imagine a country where half the people make $10,000/year, half the people make $20,000/year and an absolute measure of "poverty level" comes in at $13,000 - that is, below $13,000 a family can't feed, clothe and house itself. Now imagine another country where the poverty level is $13,000, half the people make $20,000 and the other half make $60,000. Income inequality is greater in the second country, but everybody is better off.

So I wouldn't get worked up about income inequality as such, but only by data showing increased absolute, rather than relative, privation. The long term economic trends in the US are contra privation. This is true almost anywhere outside the socialist and kleptocratic worlds.

I suspect that relative income inequality is necessary - that "a perfect world, where everyone was equal" is too analogous to the heat death of the universe: maximum entropy, no useful energy. Someone's got to have capital to spare to fund anything new and promising, which perforce means someone's got to have more money than they need, which means more money than someone else.

Return to the Wilderness of Mirrors - Newsweek's excerpt of Marianne Pearl's new memoir of her kidnapped and murdered husband contains the text of three e-mails from the kidnappers. Each e-mail comes across, in the account, as authentic. Each also reads like it was written by a different person. We go from this kind of sentence structure

Unfortunately, he is at present being kept in very inhuman circumstances quite similar in fact to the way that Pakistanis and nationals of other sovereign countries are being kept in Cuba by the American Army.

to this

We have interrogated mr.D.Parl and we have come to the conclusion that contrary to what we thought earlier he is not working for the cia. in fact he is working for Mossaad. Therefore we will execute him within 24 hours unless Amreeka flfils our demands.

to this

AMRIKANS WILL GET THE TASTE OF DATH AND DESTRUCTIONS WHAT WE HAD GOT IN AFG AND PAK.

In addition to the decreasing grasp on the structure of English grammar, the initial letter writer never contracts or misspells "Americans." He also doesn't do all caps. He's your unctious, sarcastic bastard, succeeded, by turns, by a raving paranoid bastard and a slavering, apocalyptic one.

Is there a clue here to the internal politics of the conspiracy that culminated in Pearl's murder? And what about these demands from the first e-mail?

The Pakistani prisoners in Cuba must be returned to Pakistan and they will be tried in a Pakistani court. After all Pakistan was a full member of the international coalition against terror and it deserves the right to try its own citizens. And Send Afghanistan’s Embassador Mulla Zaeef back to Pakistan and if there is any accusition Pakistani Government should handle it.

What a weird argument for an al-Qaeda-connected kidnapper to make, huh? "Pakistan was a full member of the international coalition against terror - "? And Mrs. Pearl has more:

Another message is attached. It is in Urdu, and it is much the same as the English version, except for one additional demand: the release of a shipment of F-16 fighter jets that Pakistan bought from the United States in the 1980s, which was stopped after Congress cut off military sales to Pakistan in 1990. “These planes should be provided to Pakistan or money should be refunded with a 15% interest rate.”

?!?!?! That's an even stranger demand from the representative of a bad-tempered NGO. So, what was going on here? Possibilities:

o The kidnappers were actually representatives of Pakistani intelligence rather than al Qaeda (to the extent there's a difference)
o The kidnappers were making outrageous demands for the sheer sport
o The kidnappers aren't presently the Pakistani government but expect to be
o The kidnappers were trying to make it look like they had connections with the Pakistani government, to strain its ties with the US.
o The kidnappers' true target market was the average Pakistani - the "ransom note" was just an opportunity to remind same of various reasons to resent the United States.

The problem with the first explanation is that it would be a really stupid plan (not that government agencies don't come up with those). The second is the one that, according to Marianne Pearl, the investigators accepted at the time. I don't like it because it simply waves away what it should be explaining. The third and fourth fit so well with my longstanding "It's always been about Pakistan" theory that they must be resisted. The last one I think I like best, because it strikes me as the closest fit between desire and attainability (from the perspective of the kidnapping murderers).

But it doesn't do to be too sure about these things. Cf. Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, who says there was no link between the Saudi government and the September 2001 massacre plot, and Abu Zubaydah, who says there was.

Back - Power returned last night at 8:30, cable internet and TV this morning. Still got a lot of wood to split, and one downed branch to cut up. Look on the bright side dept: our refrigerator, refrigerator-freezer and standup freezer are sparkling clean inside!