Better Living Through Libertarianism - Shit! Julian got mugged last night. Bad enough that: a) anyone should get mugged; b) someone I like so much should get mugged; but, a buddy should get mugged like the day after I saw him.

But what's interesting is, believe it or not, what the whole thing says about rational calculation and utility maximizing. At least, that's Julian's story. Your must-read blog post of the weekend.

There and Back Again - Leon Sparx backpacked into and through Baghdad and back to Brooklyn over the summer. His journals and photos are worth a look.

Look Over There! - Dan Scheltema's Dislogue has moved.

Faith, Hope and Above All Charity - The fine Canadian blogger Kevin Michael Grace of the Ambler is in serious financial straits. He has a Paypal button and would be grateful for any help readers choose to provide. Jeremy Lott has more.

Funny Money - Boy, if people read more than the headlines, they'd find considerable amusement value.

Headline: Donors Promise Iraq $33 Billion, Smashing Expectations

Paragraph six:

The highest estimate for pledges from non-U.S. donors came from the Iraqis themselves. Planning Minister Mahdi Hafez told reporters they had matched Washington's promise of $20 billion.

So, in a heartwarming outburst of internationalism, Iraq - donates $20 billion to . . . Iraq.

1) I'm really glad my own CFO isn't in charge of this project, because I'd have a damned hard time convincing him to book Iraq's contribution to . . . Iraq to the Donation account.

2) For some reason I'm flashing back to the one time I helped man the phone bank for the local PBS station pledge drive. During our brief training session, the producers warned us that sometimes we would pick up the phone to find there was no one there. We were supposed to chatter into the dead air as if we had a live caller. These dummy calls were pump primers, made on the theory that real callers would feel more comfortable calling in if they felt others were doing it too.

Strange the things that go through one's mind.

(Link via the Politburo Diktat, who expresses a certain confusion at the fact that one AP headline reports "33 billion" while another AP story reports 13 billion. I respectfully suggest that subtracting 20 from 33 will clear up much mystery.)

Oh by the way, from the first story linked: "EU External Affairs Commissioner Chris Patten cautioned that past experience had shown there was often a huge lag between promises and delivery of aid." But on the bright side:

Pledges piled up from poorer nations too, with Vietnam offering $500,000 worth of rice and Sri Lanka 100 tons of tea.

Will Wonders Never Cease - I actually agree with James Taranto. Mostly:

Well, allow us to explain. Easterbrook's essay was an expression not of anti-Semitism but of a lesser, though still insidious, form of prejudice. Call it liberal condescension. This sentence from his apology reveals all: "How, I wondered, could anyone Jewish--members of a group who suffered the worst act of violence in all history, and who suffer today, in Israel, intolerable violence--seek profit from a movie that glamorizes violence as cool fun?"

"Members of a group": This is the language of liberal identity politics. And note that this is a philo-Semitic prejudice, not an anti-Semitic one. Easterbrook's premise is that the suffering of the Jewish people ennobles Jewish individuals--or should--even if those individuals have not themselves suffered. Thus he presumes to hold Jews to a higher moral standard by virtue of their Jewishness--though in fact all he's doing is asking them to agree with his highly debatable opinion (does it really make any sense to liken stylized Hollywood violence to the Holocaust?).

Ideologically, Easterbrook's earnest criticism of Jewish studio executives is of a piece with Maureen Dowd's racist rant against Clarence Thomas. Because Thomas is black, Dowd, like other liberals, expects him to conform to liberal orthodoxy and thus treats his conservatism as a far greater offense than that of, say, Antonin Scalia.

"Racist rant" is inflammatory, but the Clarence Thomas comparison seems apposite. (I should note that eventheliberal Atrios rebuked Easterbrook for placing group duties on individuals. That means Taranto is too hard on liberals as a class, and that Atrios and Taranto are secret soul mates.)

What the hell was Easterbrook trying to say? In outline: Movie violence causes terrorism. Jews disproportionately suffer from terrorism. Two Jewish executive responsible for a particular violent movie are acting against their (group) self-interest by releasing a violent movie for the sake of profit. I don't want you to think I think they worship money because they are Jews - they are no worse than other Hollywood executives in that regard. BUT THEY SHOULD BE BETTER.

This is a really dumb argument, but it's not written out of loathing for the Jews, and it does not ascribe loathsome qualities to Jews qua Jews. (It's pretty hard on Muslim filmgoers, though.) It's not hate speech, but it's patronizing as hell, and as sloppily written as it has been sloppily read.

Better Experienced Over the Internet - I was vaguely aware that Jewsweek was out there, but it turns out to be quite the lively site. But um, guys, spellcheck is not enough:

The show, which is currently being taped, will air in six half-hour installments early next year. We're waiting with baited breath.

(My emphasis.)

From the same roundup, a possible blogger triumphalism occasion:

The House of Representatives voted to mark the 350th anniversary of the arrival of Jews in North America, establishing a "Jewish History Month" next year to mark Jewish contributions to US cultural, economic and civic life.

No word yet whether Jonathan "HeadHeeb" Edelstein will be invited to the White House for the signing ceremony. BUT HE SHOULD BE.

It Pays to Increase Your Word Power - Enthymeme is the word of the day, courtesy of the permalinkless Zizka, who suggests

Recent claims that Bush never actually said that Iraq had WMD, or that Saddam was allied to al Qaeda, or that the Iraqi threat was imminent, actually make Bush look worse. His careful avoidance of the clincher sentences makes it very likely that he knew that they weren't true. An enormous swarm of administration statements convinced the American public of several untrue propositions, while at the same time carefully avoiding legal liability.

Even the Liberal Matthew Yglesias came to the Blogarama on Kalorama last night, braving a CATO-heavy crowd and really livening up the evening. (Julian has pictures) In addition to the usual suspects, I got to meet Agitator Man Group member Brooke Oberwetter and Brendan Huhn of the newish Human Liberty. Andrew Chamberlain of Ideashop was there, and I wish I had properly recalled that he was the author of an excellent consideration of scalping that I still intend to get around to comparing favorably to a similar article by Paul Krugman.

The atmosphere was convivial, but the attendees did not shy from controversy.

Glen Engel-Cox: Thor, of course. Thor is a god! That's easy.

Eve Tushnet: The Hulk. I hope the Hulk would win. I don't like Thor and I do like the Hulk. I identify with him.

(Let the record show that this was a serial argument. Eve didn't arrive until Glen had left. Which reminds me, Radley Balko and Gene Healy averred that they often skip the comics posts. I'm sure Dirk Deppey often checks in only to see that, Damn, just more bitching about politics again. And poor Sean Collins!)

It got so late, particularly for a middle-aged man with a day job, that I stupidly confused "an individual rights argument" with "an equal protection argument" while Eve and I were having a full and frank exchange of views on - what else? - gay marriage. But it was a ton of fun. I got some leads on paid writing jobs, we all sang a rousing chorus of the Dean Campaign official song (kidding!) and, eventually, most everyone but Matt, Missy, Andrew and a few die-hards left. But we'll be back! Oh yes! We WILL be back!

Stop Me Before I Blitz Again! - Football Outsiders is having a Tuesday Morning Quarterback homage contest. (Link via Instapundit.)

In a Shocking Lapse of Narcissism I forgot to wish myself a Happy Blogiversary last night while writing about other stuff. Unqualified Offerings is now two years old. I am pleased to see that in a mere two years, our leaders have begun pretty much running the world the way I want. (Uh, Jim? You're confusing yourself with Steven Den Beste. Oops! I hate it when that happens!)

Two Years Ago in Unqualified Offerings: Even this war, begun for the least assailable of reasons (the bastards killed thousands of us in our own country), has led to an awful "antiterrorism" bill, a stupid new government agency, budgetary profligacy and at least a temporary increase in the prestige of the very folks who failed to protect 6,000 people from deadly force.

One Year Ago in Unqualified Offerings: There are two arguments against [releasing the Muhammad/Malvo extortion letter]. First, that the information might panic people. Folks, you have no idea what panic is until you convince an entire metropolitan area that you're keeping stuff that might save lives secret from them. Second, that doing so might make the sniper mad, that his demands include keeping his communications confidential.

Well what is he going to do, shoot somebody?

EventualPundit - By the time I get around to writing about the Gregg Easterbrook situation people will have forgotten that it ever happened, but I'm tired now, and I've got gaming prep to do. Will I get to it before Thursday's Blogarama on Kalorama? I don't know. Will I have written responses to Eve's most recent same-sex marriage arguments before I see her at said Blogarama? I sincerely doubt it. Do I think that My Stupid Dog's critiques of SSM opposition that he wrote in series for Marriage Protection Week last week are well worth reading if occasionally a little glib? Yes. Will Hostmatters continue to suffer DOS attacks like it has every day this week, to the point where it hardly matters if I post anything or not? Maybe.

Mail Call: Sympathy for the Devil - Reader Chris Borthwick writes

I know it’s now taken as a given that Stalin paused at the Vistula only to let the Germans wipe out the Polish resistance, but there is a purely military case that could be and has been made for it on the groiunds that his forces were overextended and needed to let supplies catch up – a case that I was more skeptical about before I learned that Eisenhower didn’t want to take Paris, would have let the Nazis burn it down if De Gaulle hadn’t forestalled him by a sudden dash, and felt afterwards that it had delayed the end of the war (and thereby caused the deaths of a large number of people, including Jews and Poles, though I’m not saying Eisenhower himself saw this as primary) by forcing on him the responsibility of supplying a large number of people who weren’t his army with food and fuel.

Interesting.

The Pure Thing - The signal feature of antisemitism as a bigotry is how eerily it mixes admiration with loathing. People who hate blacks or the Irish don't also profess wonderment at Black and Irish achievement. Bostonians wanted to keep dogs and Irish out of their offices and schools, but not because they feared dogs and Irish would "take over." No Klansman ever despised blacks because he thought them too "cunning." The despisers of Hispanics don't imagine that the mestizo constitute a master race. The wrinkle of admiring people you despise, and despising them substantially because of what you take to be their greatness, is known primarily among the haters of Jews (and also anti-Asians).

For this reason, I was actually a little nervous about participating in Jonathan Edelstein's Arrival Day blogburst last month. I was honored to be invited, and figure that, as an American, I have profited from Jewish-American culture in countless ways. But participating meant writing as a Gentile about American Jews as a group. I chose a subject dear to my heart, the comic book industry, and the outsized contribution of American Jews to its flourishing. This was extremely well-trod ground, covered many times by both Jewish and non-Jewish historians. It's a story well worth telling. But in the back of my mind I couldn't help wondering where the line lay between saying "American Jews made an outsized contribution to the comic book industry" and "Comic books were a Jewish plot." Substitute "Hollywood" for comic books in the foregoing if the problem isn't clear.

I decided that it came down to the intent of the speaker. Which brings us to the already famous speech to the Organization of the Islamic Conference by Malaysian Prime Minister Datuk Seri Dr Mahathir Mohamad last week. His defenders, quoted prominently (of course) in the Malaysia Straits-Times, insist that his remarks about how, oh, Jews control the world by proxy, were taken out of context. This seemed unlikely, but since I came within half a blog item of taking Gregg Easterbrook's remarks out of context Sunday night (a matter for another post), I figured I would read the full speech just to be on the safe side.

Eeuww!

The absolute kindest construction you could put on Mahathir's speech is this: whoever leads the OIC is going to be someone who believes Jews control the world by proxy; better an antisemite who insists that terrorism is self-defeating than one who waves the pom-poms for martyrdom. But I don't think that view survives contact with the speech itself.

Mahathir's speech follows this trajectory: First he says that the Muslim peoples and nations are oppressed. Next he explains the internal reasons for the parlous state of the Ummah - essentially, they are bad Muslims. The peoples, sects and leaders squabble among themselves, and since the late Middle Ages reinterpretation of the Quranic injunction to "Read" as meaning to study religious texts to the exclusion of other fields, Muslim science, arts and liberal arts have undergone a long decline. Mahathir makes clear that the biggest problem with the collapse of learning and research is that the nations of the Ummah cannot produce their own weapons. There are also Muslims who counsel that oppression in this world is simply the will of Allah, that the rewards come in the next one.

There is a feeling of hopelessness among the Muslim countries and their people. They feel that they can do nothing right. They believe that things can only get worse. The Muslims will forever be oppressed and dominated by the Europeans and the Jews. They will forever be poor, backward and weak. Some believe, as I have said, this is the Will of Allah, that the proper state of the Muslims is to be poor and oppressed in this world.

So far, "the Jews" are twinned with the equally collective "Europeans" as oppressors of the Ummah, part of an amorphous West that trods on the Muslim face. The Jews may be miserable, but they have company. That changes within a paragraph:

But is it true that we should do and can do nothing for ourselves? Is it true that 1.3 billion people can exert no power to save themselves from the humiliation and oppression inflicted upon them by a much smaller enemy? Can they only lash back blindly in anger? Is there no other way than to ask our young people to blow themselves up and kill people and invite the massacre of more of our own people? It cannot be that there is no other way. 1.3 billion Muslims cannot be defeated by a few million Jews. There must be a way. And we can only find a way if we stop to think, to assess our weaknesses and our strength, to plan, to strategise and then to counter attack.

If you add up all the Europeans, Jews and Americans, you surely don't come up with a "much smaller enemy" than 1.3 billion people. Mahathir's defenders insist that we look at the context of his remarks on the Jews. The context is clear: Mahathir's entire speech is about what "1.3 billion Muslims" need to do to triumph over "a few million Jews."

Okay, which Jews? Almost all of them:

We are actually very strong. 1.3 billion people cannot be simply wiped out. The Europeans killed six million Jews out of 12 million. But today the Jews rule this world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them.

In context, this is no better than out of context. The notion that "the Jews rule the world by proxy" is ridiculous, of course. What's classically antisemitic about Mahathir's speech is that familiar combination of admiration and loathing. In context Mahathir is saying, "We must be clever, like the Jews." Not just so they don't get all the Nobel Prizes and violin chairs in the Israeli Philharmonic, but so we can beat them.

We also know that not all non-Muslims are against us. Some are welldisposed towards us. Some even see our enemies as their enemies. Even among the Jews there are many who do not approve of what the Israelis are doing.

We must not antagonise everyone. We must win their hearts and minds. We must win them to our side not by begging for help from them but by the honourable way that we struggle to help ourselves.

Dude, even among the Israeli Jews there are many who do not approve of what the Israelis are doing. I don't approve of what the Israelis are doing. But if you want to "not antagonize" me, you might try not peddling essentialist paranoid fantasias about cunning Jews bestriding the world like a Colossus.

The enemy will probably welcome these proposals and we will conclude that the promoters are working for the enemy. But think. We are up against a people who think. They survived 2,000 years of pogroms not by hitting back, but by thinking.

They invented and successfully promoted Socialism, Communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong, so they may enjoy equal rights with others. With these they have now gained control of the most powerful countries and they, this tiny community, have become a world power. We cannot fight them through brawn alone. We must use our brains also.

Here's some more context. Israelis weren't around to invent all those dubious things. There's something drolly subjunctive, in a certain frame of mind, about "so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong." (I realize I am dealing with a translated text. I'm going with the Straits-Times version on the theory that it counts as the most authoritative English translation.) Again, more admiration mixed with loathing.

Speaking of context, democracy is not something Mahathir is big on. Earlier in the speech, he identifies it as a source of the Ummah's schisms:

Apart from the new nation-states we also accepted the Western democratic system. This also divided us because of the political parties and groups that we form, some of which claim Islam for themselves, reject the Islam of other parties and refuse to accept the results of the practice of democracy if they fail to gain power for themselves. They resort to violence, thus destabilising and weakening Muslim countries.

So what do we have here? A powerful man, leader of one of the world's richer nations, before an audience of other powerful men - rulers of countries - insisting on the need for "unity," which, oh coincidence! would increase the power of the organization before which he is speaking, in the name of the struggle of "1.3 billion people" against "a few million" other people. A collectivist call to a collectivist struggle against a collectivist enemy. That, loyal readers, is your context. Here is not your context:

o A distinction between the State of Israel and the Jewish people;
o A suggestion that the very obsession of "1.3 billion people" with "a few million" other people is self-defeating and absurd;
o Any awareness that American policy is driven not by powerful Jews but by powerful Christians (as Justin Raimondo and other American critics of Israel have noted time and again);
o Any call to liberalism as such; Mahathir is actually calling for a program of corporatist modernization of the Ummah - that is, his program is fascist in the truest sense;
o code words!

The Islamic world can do a lot better than Mahathir and the self-interested leaders who praised his speech, and I hope it does.

Political Tourists - A couple of weeks back I wrote about my bemusement at being characterized as a "lefty blogger" by William Sjostrom. One of his commenters wrote

My reading elsewhere of Henley and 'Hesiod' (previous posts) is that they are completely untrustworthy. They take a 'soviet' view of the USA and world events.

For my part this is true, in the sense of having a view that the US is becoming ever more 'soviet.' Oh, not in a Stalin way or even a Leninesque one. I expect us rather to skip straight on to the Brezhnev Era, or maybe the glorious days of Gorbyism. Which brings us back to this site's typical preoccupations, or at least it will in a minute.

One of the classic works of conservative thought was Paul Hollander's Political Pilgrims, a history of idiot-left enthusiasm for Communist regimes running from John Reed and Paul Robeson through the Sandalistas of the 1980s. I believe it was in that book (I don't own a copy), in which Hollander noted just how easily satisfied the "pilgrims" were. Western enthusiasts went to Soviet Russia, or Mao's China, or Castro's Cuba, and reported back rapturously of the wonders they had seen: factories! schools! hospitals! What a bold future these progressives were building in their countries!

Gosh, the pilgrim's critics pointed out. Factories. Schools. Hospitals. We have those here. Even during the Depression we had factories, schools and hospitals. Imagine swooning over instances of what are, come down to it, mere base-level "achievements" of all but the most pathetic of countries. And the critics were right. That their heirs on the right now breathlessly report the US-given miracle that under the Iraqi Occupation Authority, Iraqi children are going to school, doctors are making rounds in Iraqi hospitals and Iraqi shopkeepers are transacting business, tells us a great deal about the collapse of American conservatism. Time was they knew better than to consider this kind of thing bragging material. Do they want a cookie?

(Via Gospodin Hesiod, Newsweek notes that the schools and hospitals were open last May. As for the shops, they've been open for five-thousand years now in that area.)

(P.S. Yes, I know that Hollander is alive, supported the Iraq War and considered war skepticism "anti-American." I never said the collapse of contemporary conservatism wasn't total.)

Happy Birthday to Kevin Drum, who shares October 19 with me. The coincidence inspired an amusing aside on astrology by Patrick Nielsen Hayden, which reminded me of my own standard response when people want to know my "sign":

You tell me.

You know, if astrology were real, "What's your sign?" would count as an extremely nosy question to ask a stranger. Since the people who ask it tend to be the ones who think it's real, it's a nosy question anyway.

Four More Years - The head of Third Corps says US troops may stay in Iraq until 2006. The usual multipliers apply.

But That's What I Was Afraid Of Dept. - Oh joy:

In an eight-hour visit, Mr. Bush for the first time drew explicit comparisons between the transition he is seeking in Iraq and the rough road to democracy that the Philippines traveled from the time the United States seized it from Spain in 1898 to the present day.

"Some say the culture of the Middle East will not sustain the institutions of democracy," Mr. Bush said, taking on the critics of his oft-stated goal to use Iraq as a laboratory for spreading democratic institutions in the Middle East. "The same doubts were once expressed about the culture of Asia. Those doubts were proven wrong nearly six decades ago."

While the administration often speaks of the occupations of Japan and Germany after World War II as rough models for the effort to rebuild Iraq, Mr. Bush used the visit here to make a less explicit analogy to the American administration of the Philippines, which also led to the formation of a democracy. But the comparison has less power to reassure, given that the Philippine government did not gain full autonomy for five decades.

And before that there were the concentration camps, the 200,000 civilian dead in the 1899-1902 insurrection - all the stuff Max Boot actually likes.

Curiously, Bush's speech amounts to a claim that the Philippines became a democracy "nearly six decades ago." This is true as far as it goes, which is from the mid-forties through the late 1960s, when the Philippines was merely an ordinarily corrupt client state. Then almost two decades of Ferdinand and Imelda. But we eventually let Marcos fall to the People Power rebellion, which was wise of us, though many hawks at the time considered it feckless and likely to embolden our enemies.

We Get Letters - Steve Cook e-mails

I wouldn't have pegged you for an "Ilsa, She-Wolf of the S.S." fan.

Hey, I'm not! I haven't even seen the movie. I just like Chris Puzak's description. Steve also tips me to a 1999 Paul Krugman article for Slate on ticket scalping that we'll come back to soon.

Loyal Reader Matt reminds me that I should link to a surprisingly conservative (in the true sense of the word) article by Meline Toumani on Alternet, The Truth About Our Good Intentions. This is a top-notch piece of work:

What can we, in America, know of how it feels to be a citizen of any other country in the world?

We do not have brigades of well-meaning volunteers from, say, the Netherlands arriving in our neighborhoods with bold promises of teaching us how to run our schools. We do not have representatives from Singapore engaging in optimistic efforts to reform our legislature, or teams from France trying to develop our media. Scruffy Swedish twenty-somethings, fresh from college, do not take up residence in our midst and teach us about the importance of government-sponsored healthcare.

Though we pride ourselves on traveling the world to help solve its problems – charity or bust – we do not know how it feels to be always on the worse end of the expression, "It is better to give than to receive."

The article includes a side trip into recent Iraqi polling data, but to its larger point, Iraq is simply the latest particular: "the U.S. – and especially our current administration – has a terribly difficult time putting itself in the other man's shoes."

Let's be clear what Toumani is not saying, and what I'm not saying. That "the other man" is better, nobler, wiser, even necessarily correct on the merits in any particular case where he disagrees with us. No, what I'm saying, and what I think Toumani is saying, is simply that the other man exists and is not us. Toumani continues:

. . . we just keep on shaking our heads at the ungrateful beggar who doesn't appreciate all we've done for him, never seeing him as the angry man whose Hobson's choice is between starving and humiliation.

Toumani implicitly places almost all the blame for this on the United States. I think s/he would do well to recognize the double-bind that the "international community" has often placed on us, though. The hawks are not incorrect when they note that the United States gets criticised for not intervening where it doesn't intervene (there are a few such places), and intervening where it does. Pick a crisis point and there is at least one faction clamoring for American assistance and some combination of goodhearted and venal elites back here determined to give it to them.

Jonathan Pearse wrote in about last week's item on orchard-flattening and the partial restoration of the Shatt-al-Arab marshes in southeastern Iraq:

Jim, while you make a fair point about the marshes and efforts to restore them, it seems to me that it is precisely because George Bush snr and his then colleagues encouraged the Shiites to rebel without offering backup, and hence leaving them to twist in the wind, that we owed them and their brethren an obligation to put that aright. It strikes me that Bush snr's abandonment of the Shiites and Kurds was a shocking policy, a shameful one, and that the original coalition powers of Gulf War I had a moral responsibility to try and fix the problem. Whether that problem has been fixed is, of course, another matter. Time no doubt will tell.

And by the way, that has nothing to do with 9/11, pre-emption and the rest. It is, if you like, almost a Nozickian policy of "rectifying an injustice," in this case, to a group of people we (I'll include Britain in that) encouraged to act and then abandoned.

Let's state right out that this is the best of hawkish arguments, and the most compelling. There is no question that, whether they are properly grateful to the US and Britain or not, the Marsh Arabs are better off with Saddam out of power. I think your better class of hawks brought up the marsh arabs not out of opportunism but sincere shame at the events of 1991. Still.

Accept for the sake of argument that there was any humanitarian motive behind the conquest of Iraq, and any desire to do right be people the US had used and abandoned. Accept for the sake of plain truth that Saddam Hussein was a bad actor who richly deserved to lose his loathsome authority. Accept all that, and the actual humanitarian principle the US has established is simply: We decide. We decide whose depredations against "his own people" matter, and when. We decide who gets to engage in collective punishment and who doesn't, who has to contemplate "power sharing" with their rebels, and who gets to bomb their rebels into gravy.

The Bush I regime's policy toward the Marsh Arabs was as feckless as the hawks say it was. If you were going to back off supporting a Shi'ite revolt if the Saudis start worrying about how it will help Iran, then maybe you should have asked the Saudis before encouraging people to rise up and be slaughtered. If you're going to let Saudi Arabia dictate policy for you, don't dilly-dally about it. (Essay topic: The US incitement and abandonment of the Marsh Arabs in 1991 is not morally equivalent to the Soviets pause across the Vistula while Germany liquidated the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising because . . . ? Show your work.) You may think the Clinton Administration's Iraq policy feckless too. I'd call it, with its 14,000 sorties a year over "no fly zones" we pulled out of our fictive ass deeply cynical, but stick with feckless if you prefer.

Do you really think that people you consider "feckless" will not one day be running American policy again, Britain and the US being democracies? Have you noticed all the places (*koffkoff* Khazakhstan *koffkoff*) where current policy toward your non-humanitarian rulers looks pretty feckless too, even though US policy is supposedly being run by the morally-serious, spiny regime of your dreams?

We decide is our real message and the one the world perversely declines to rally 'round.

Weekly Fitness Blog Item - 163 pounds (again); waist 32 and a quarter inches (roughly). Today's measurements double as 43rd Birthday figures. I'll take 'em. Down 53 pounds since Thanksgiving Day last year and probably about 60 pounds since my 42nd birthday, though I was too afraid to weigh myself at that time. My waist is easily 10 inches less than last year.

This was a good week for fitness mail and fitness links. Last week's report on a small, controlled study comparing low-carbohydrate and high-carbohydrate diets sparked considerable interest.

Reader Mike Wells notes

Regarding yesterday's fitness blog topic, I just had to point this out:

"The low-carb meals were 5 percent carbohydrate, 15 percent protein and 65 percent fat."

Did you notice that that adds up to 85%? What do you suppose the rest was?

That puzzled me too. I wondered if the rest was dietary fiber, which doesn't count as a "net carb" in Atkins-like diets. (Fiber is esteemed.) But that would be as much as 300 calories in fiber a day, which would be upwards of 80 grams of the stuff per day. At that rate, your body would actually start pooping out meals you hadn't even eaten yet. Mike's follow-up theory: "I figure they must have been eating the place settings."

One reader wrote that

What convinced me to take my first Atkins plunge was my disastrous experience w/a rice diet.

Why a rice diet? Because it's easy. You measure the rice out in the morning (one cup=784 calories), cook it, and eat that cup of rice throughout the day. No muss no fuss. Maybe I did a heaper, getting me up to 1000 cals p/d, still not a lot.

I did it for a week.

I didn't lose one pound. Not one pound. Zippo.

That sounds a starvation ration, so the body would tend to shut down. What surprises me is that there wasn't even the water-weight loss that accompanies the beginning of many diets. People deprecate that initial flush, but it provides immediate positive feedback from the scale, and in my case at least, I felt less bloated (thinner) right away.

That problem of the body ratcheting the metabolism down if your caloric intake drops too low is key, and related to our first In Other Fitness Blogs Item . . .

Even the liberal Atrios was moved to comment on one of the quotes in the report on what we'll call the "Restaurant Study" (discussed last week). Atrios zeroes in on a curious quote from a skeptical nutritionist:

"It doesn't make sense, does it?" said Barbara Rolls of Pennsylvania State University. "It violates the laws of thermodynamics. No one has ever found any miraculous metabolic effects."

and responds

Look, this doesn't violate any laws of thermodynamics. The issue is not whether a measure of energy, a calorie, is the same regardless of the form it's stored in, the question is whether or not the form it is stored in has any impact on the way your body processes it.

Right. Think about the rice diet example above. On paper, a woman whose weight is stable at 1800 calories per day and eats only 800 calories per day ought to lose two pounds of fat in a week. (1000 calories/day x 7 days / 3500 calories per pound of fat = 2 pounds.) Bodies are not on paper, though. Most of the ones facing such a deficit will find a way to reduce operating expenses, as it were, to keep as much fat as possible. As far as your body is concerned, the crops have failed and you're in danger of starving.

This is a clear instance of the supply of calories changing the use of calories. That's a metabolic effect for sure. Whether you consider it miraculous or not is between you and your pastor. We may not yet have discovered "any miraculous metabolic effects" in the other direction (where the right intake of foods convinces your body to increase operating expenses) but that doesn't mean they don't exist, for some agreed-upon value of miraculous. (They may not exist. But if the results of this study are replicable, it'll definitely be time to start looking for them.)

Alan Sullivan announces a 15-pound weight loss on Fresh Bilge. The blog, I mean. Announces on his blog a 15-pound weight loss. Not, Loses 15 pounds consuming bilge, but only bilge that hasn't sat around for awhile. Via the same item I discover Marn's Big Adventure, whose proprietess describes her weight room interactions thusly:

Fortunately, all the weightlifting guys know me fairly well now and they tend to see me as this looney tunes charmingly eccentric older woman. I am allowed a wide range of social gaffes because of my gender and advanced years. Of course, I would never take advantage of this situation for my own amusement, just to see how far I can go.

No. Not me. Not ever.

A very entertaining item. Marn says she's begun taking Creatine, which freaks her husband out. She also says that, through week one at least, Creatine doesn't seem to have produced any noteworthy difference in results.

Bruce Baugh is down another pound. This is perfectly fine progress still. Some weeks you lose more, some less, even when still very heavy.

Via All the World's a Stage, yet another quickie basal metabolism calculator from Time Magazine: Multiply your weight by 13 (15 if you are active), and if you want to lose weight subtract 250, and that should be your caloric intake. Worth noting: an extra handful of nuts or two extra servings of potato chips a day will use that 250 calories right up.

At Catallarchy.net, Jonathan Wilde designs an experiment to test whether the low-carb diets lead to greater weight loss than high-carb ones. It's a thought-experiment, and Jonathan declares that

My two posts on the Atkins Diet were made not as a search for the efficacy of the Atikins Diet, but rather to bring about discussion on the scientific method itself. I'm not primarily interested in whether or not the Atkins Diet 'works', but rather how one would go about finding out if it works.

It's a useful illumination of the deficiencies of actual diet studies.

Finally, MSNBC reports that, for the first time in years, America stopped getting fatter. The reason? Actually, the article doubts that it knows, but a drop in restaurant meals may be a factor.