Comics Blogging - Been a long time since I did any reviews. Let's change that, shall we?

First, stuff I got free from Toiler:

JLA/Avengers 1 & 2 - worth what I paid. I should mention that to this day I have fond memories of the first two Marvel/DC crossovers, Superman/Spider-man and Batman/Hulk. The second was a tour de force, actually, as writer and artist Len Wein and Herb Trimpe took a commercially-mandated pairing and made something magical from it. Joker + Shaper of Worlds = Inspired. And the sheer kindness of Bruce Wayne toward Bruce Banner was wonderful.

The conceit of the early crossovers was that the Marvel and DC heroes inhabited the same world but just hadn't happened to run into each other before. In those days, the Marvel heroes all lived in New York City while DC heroes stuck to the classic fictional habitats. In the first crossover, Clark Kent and Lois Lane happen to come to Manhattan for a convention, and who should they run into but Peter Parker. Peter and Lois know and admire each other's work. In the second, Bruce Banner's wanderings take him to Gotham. No multiversal muss, no cosmic fuss. And with relatively few characters involved the creators were free to make, you know, a story.

In the ungainly cast-of-thousands extravaganza that is the current crossover, the best the dedicated fanboy can hope for is that the quips will be fresh and the right people win the fights. (Superman is stronger than Thor. Check.) On the quip front there is only disappointment. The fights? They get these about right. Thank God Busiek and Perez didn't have to work under "everything has to end in a tie for commercial reasons" along with every other mandate and self-imposed limitation they labor under.

Now, say what you will about the series' shallowness and seeming lack of inspiration, one thing it ain't is "decompressed." Stuff happens, and then more stuff happens. It is crammed with action. The decompression backlash has been in full swing among fans and writers, and since the term has often been synonymous with "padded" it's easy to see why. But tell me, fellow fanboys: is this what you want instead?

1602 #4 - I did not feel cheated out of Toiler's money.

Stuff I paid for:

Big Clay Pot by Scott Mills, whose minicomic, Cells, I liked a great deal. Big Clay Pot is about a Korean immigrant girl who comes to Japan around 200 BC and takes up with an elderly Japanese man who has lost his wife. She's a klutz. The story is . . . nice. I plan to reread it to see if I develop a stronger reaction. Sometime.

Captain America 21 - I - gulp - liked it. Which is not to say "loved." Chris Bachalo draws. His style really brought out the feral nature of Wolverine in New X-Men. Here it really brings out the - feral nature of Steve Rogers. Maybe not what was indicated. And this is just the wrong character for the Marvel Knights design treatment - the black page backgrounds and Photoshop-Rembrandt "colors" just don't shout Captain America! somehow. But the story. I kind of liked it. The idea is apparently to plunge right back into contemporary political themes but with, you know, good writing this time. Writer Robert Morales could presumably screw it up in subsequent issues, but I'm going to give him that chance. Also, Cap uses a firearm, maybe for the first time since Steranko days. I'm all for that - he's Captain America, dammit! Guns 'R' Us!

But it's not just that Cap busting caps gives me a libertarian frisson. It is that the gun-hating respecter-of-all-life default superhero ethic sits poorly on the character. He was created to be a super soldier. And the Golden Age character made occasional-to-frequent use of firearms, to the best of my knowledge. It's entirely reasonable that any man comes home from a war wanting to have no more truck with killing, but for much of Captain America's modern history he's been an official government operative. Note: he declines to fire a rifle in this issue. But what he does do usefully complicates his character.

Empire 5 - Speaking of decompression, there's a two-page sequence in this book that shows the technique at its best. Power corrupts, people. Absolute power? Shiiiiit.

Conan 0 - What makes this extended preview issue work is the way writer Busiek plays against the type of the foppish Arabian Prince. Dark Horse and Busiek tell us that the book will stick to the Howard Conan with their own interpolations in continuity replacing the Lin Carter/L. Sprague DeCamp additions, but they already fail the "Ron Edwards Test" of Howard purity. ("Conan wore a shirt.") Worth trying a couple of issues, though.

Ultimates 12 - In the space of a single issue, I can finally really see why Franklin Harris despises this book. Last issue (if you can remember that far), there was grandeur and nobility. This issue is pure meanness. Particularly it features American soldiers doing a pointlessly despicable thing (pushing an American child for no reason). In the political items I've written quite a bit about crummy things American soldiers are doing these days, but those men are under particular kinds of stress not of their making and having entirely human reactions to it. Many other countries' troops would acquit themselves rather less well. In the comic, the circumstances that drive "occupational arrogance" in Iraq don't obtain. With a lighter touch, as in Bendis' Ultimate Six, the ways in which the Ultimates team allows itself to be used by the government can be effectively disquieting. Here it just pisses me off. I was really looking forward to this issue until I actually got it. (See Fanboy Rampage.)

Supreme Power 5 - Hooray for free enterprise! Marketers find the Whizzer/Flash figure, the "Atlanta Blur," while the government is still convinced he's a myth. They sign him up for all sorts of product endorsement deals. You know what would be really cool? If the Blur, Stanley Stewart, got rich on his endorsements, followed through on his desire to be a hero and accomplished a lot of good for people at the same time. Odds of getting such a story from Hollywood liberal J. Michael Straczynski in this determinedly grim book? Is it just me, or is Stanley Stewart's appearance modelled on Kobe Bryant? That's an answer, son, not a question.

Stuff I read for free in Borders:

Incredible Hulk TPBs 2-5 - I'd been avoiding these, but I liked them pretty well when I got around to them. The problem with conspiracy storylines is balancing tease and revelation. X-Files and Twin Peaks failed at that for my taste and I eventually gave both of them up. I think it helps to approach these Hulk stories in big bunches all at once - I'm not at all sure I'd have enjoyed getting this in dribs and drabs over two years. What I like though, is the sheer decency of Bruce Banner, and the strides he's making (is allowed to make) in coping with his curse. I'll enjoy it until it's retconned back to formula.

Things I didn't bother finishing even though I was reading it free at Borders:

Daredevil 54 - Make it stop!

Second thoughts:

Alias 26 - or was it 27. You know, the last issue. So Jessica Jones is pregnant by Luke Cage? They did it once in the first issue. It was even a big deal later that that was the one time they did it. But the first issue's art and captions strongly implied, without coming right out and saying it, that Luke and Jessica were having butt sex. And now she's pregnant? Maybe that's why it took two years for her to conceive - Luke's little soldiers had to swim all the way back around and finish their mission. They can do that? That's what I call Power, Man!

Your Tax Dollars at Work if you happen to be Italian. UNESCO of all organizations

plans to issue a public denunciation of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," dismissed by historians as a forgery to discredit Jews, amid criticism that the book had gone on display in Egypt and that an official there had made anti-Semitic remarks about it, The Associated Press has learned.

according to Ha'aretz. Good for them. If reports are accurate the new Library of Alexandria has included the Protocols in their holy books of Judaism display. The goal of building the new Library was to recall the glory of the one destroyed early in the first millenium under disputed circumstances. According to the Ha'aretz report, the Italian government is the chief financial backer of the new Library, and the Simon Wiesenthal Center has 'called on Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi to condition continued Italian funding of the library on the removal of the "Protocols" from display, removal of the library's director and public condemnation by the library of what it called the "pernicious nature" of the book.'

DIana Moon found a useful short history of the Protocols.

Egypt is the second-largest recipient of American foreign aid after Israel if you don't count Iraq.

Covers Up - Bruce Baugh and Julian Sanchez e-mailed lists of their favorite cover songs. Bruce's list:

KMFDM, "Material Girl". It's on the album Virgin Voices, and it's just ridiculously funny.

The Aquabats, "Love Without Anger". Well, of COURSE Devo should be covered salsa-style. Why didn't I ever think of that?

More seriously, Silverbeam, "Where the Streets Have No Names". An altogether beautiful rendering; makes the tribute album We Will Follow worth getting.

Laether Strip, "The Carnival is Over". The Dead Can Dance original is pretty creepy, but this really pulls out all the stops. Wow.

Ofra Haza, "Open your Love to Me". Makes it sound like Madonna was always meant to be Middle Eastern pop.

Holly Cole, "I Just Saw a Face". I've got little use for the original. Maybe the Beatles should have been torch singers.

Hooters, "Time After Time" and "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds". That rockin' mandolin sound really worked for those songs.

Julian's list:

. . . on the all-time list of rad covers, you have to include The Gourds version of "Gin and Juice" (snoop dog), Shonen Knife's "Top of the World" (The Carpenters) and Built to Spill's take on "White Man in the Hammersmith Palais" (The Clash). The whole "Schoolhouse Rock Rocks" album is pretty damn good as well. And for pure kitch value, of course, the long-reigning champ is William Shatner's "Mr. Tambourine Man"

I think I inexplicably left the Ramone's version of the 60s Spider-man cartoon theme song off my list.

Far be it from me to suggest that you try to hunt some of these up on the internet. Caring media conglomerates, operating in an environment of government-mandated spectrum scarcity, are surely playing these songs on a radio station near you.

Quotation Marks - Gary Farber finds an article in which a US Army Captain informs us that "The only thing they [Arabs] understand is force - force, pride and saving face." How fortunate for us! Apparently, since pride and saving face are so important to the, well, let's just call them wogs, shall we? the key to success in Iraq is to grind down their pride and make saving face impossible by surrounding their towns with razor wire, requiring passes to move around and demolishing the homes of whoever our famously effective intelligence operations tell us is closer to the Iraqi resistance than Kevin Bacon. Hey, that should work! A couple of thoughts:

1) Maybe it's a coincidence, but doesn't it seem like everybody on the planet has enemies who, they tell us, only understand force? Do we all have the same enemy or something? Because if we do, it should be easy to gang up on the bastards.

2) Let's say Captain Brown is right. If the Arabs only understand force, then wasn't the notion that we'd "free" them and help them found a democratic society kind of . . . stupid?

The same article has another great quote:

"With a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them," Colonel Sassaman said.

Fear, violence and money for projects. That cluster of political values has a name. Strangely, though, it's getting applied to those who oppose the occupation. Go figure. But then, as the great contemporary isolationist Bill Kaufmann has written, it's always the people who object to killing foreigners who get called xenophobes. The same principle seems to apply to the word "fascist" now. Oppose "fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects" and you're on your way to the Nuremburg Rally.

Please Sir, Can I Have Samarra? - Batting cleanup at this point:

BruceR of Flit suggests that the wildly-exaggerated initial accounts of what transpired bear strong resemblances to similar problems with field reports of North America's Indian Wars. There is something very disquieting about the comparison.

Andrew Olmsted's summing up post disagrees with mine on some key points. For instance, he still accepts the "large attacking force" version of events while I'm inclined to doubt it. Keep in mind when it comes to this purely military disagreement that he is Major Olmsted and I am Accounting Analyst Henley.

Justin Raimondo devoted his Wednesday column to the Samarra action. Much of it amounts to a pretty good summary of events for those who - who can say why? - missed my analysis of Sunday-Tuesday. But there's an inspired bit of Googling in which Justin tracks the history of Colonel Frederick Rudesheim's statements to the press from April until now.

This is a technique that could be useful for establishing a narrative of the occupation. It's often a few soldiers that reporters return to again and again.

Hesiod found an Independent article (reprinted on khilafah.com) in which David Hackworth vouches for the authenticity of the anonymous solder who filed the first skeptical insider report .

Speaking of Off-Topic Blog Items - Scott at Off-Wing Opinion, a sports blog, writes about bad recent song covers, with some good ones in an appendix. Me, I love covers. And live covers even more. During the heyday of Napster, I made finding covers a specialty. Heck, I made finding covers of "The Weight" a specialty. (I think I found about six.) A handful of the most-treasured:

Elvis Costello - "Hide Your Love Away" (Beatles)
Steve Earle (with Buddy Miller) - "Sweet Virginia" (Rolling Stones)
David Byrne - "Rocking in the Free World" (Neil Young)
Buddy and Julie Miller - "Keep Your Distance" (Richard Thompson)
Joe Jackson - "King of the World" (Steely Dan)
Alejandro Escovedo - "I Wish I Was Your Mother" (Mott the Hoople)
Johnny Cash - "Hurt" (NIN)
Richard & Teddy Thompson - "Persuasion" (Crowded House)
Bruce Springsteen - "Not Fade Away/Gloria" (Buddy Holly/Them)
Flaming Lips - "After the Gold Rush" (Neil Young)
Steve Earle - "Breed" (Nirvana)
Graham Parker - "I Want You Back" (Jackson Five)
Peter Gabriel - "Ain't That Peculiar" (Marvin Gaye)
Alejandro Escovedo - "I Wanna Be Your Dog" (Iggy Pop)

Looking for a Virgin gamer. After my 20' by 20' Room items on getting new people to roleplay, I thought I should put my money where my mouth is and do it. My colleagues and I are looking for one curious newbie in the DC area, Wednesday December 10 for sure, with further sessions possible if you decide you like that sort of thing. The long-term opportunity is a superhero game, so it helps if you are or were at one time a comics reader.

Mr. Bill and I are also looking for one person, virgin or otherwise, to try Ron Edwards' Trollbabe RPG this Wednesday. The game title sounds cheesy but the game is not. Trollbabe is a story-oriented fantasy RPG.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled bitching about politics.

Coming Attractions this weekend on Unqualified Offerings - lots of mailbag items. The inbox is getting out of control again. The next New Crew list for the blogroll. Some comics stuff maybe. Plus whatever I end up blogging about instead.

Peace Movement? - Geneva Accords blogging from Diana Moon and Steven Weiss (with actual reporting). I'm sure Diana is correct that

Khalidi said that the refugees were the issue, and can't be finessed away. I agree, but under protest. Which is to say: I've been insisting all along, before the Oslo Accords, before anything, that the refugee issue is the existential breaking point. It's the torch that could burn the house down.

I don't follow these things nearly as closely as Diana and Steven Weiss do, but I'm pretty sure Diana is right, and I see only one solution to the "right of return" issue, and have for some time. Let's ask the Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts what that solution might be:

Money, the long green,
cash, stash, rhino, jack
or just plain dough.

Chock it up, fork it over,
shell it out.

Buy them off. The actual dispossessed of '48 and '56, or their first-generation survivors. Pay the actual people who lost actual homes and businesses and land. Pay them real money - value plus interest, not the pittance we eventually drizzled onto the residents of Manzanar et al. Pay it - my libertarian brothers will be aghast - out of the United States Treasury. We are already sinking billions annually into the Middle East with no end in sight unless the Israeli-Palestinian issue somehow settles. If buying out the right of return can end our enmeshment, it will be a bargain - a hell of a lot cheaper than invading and reconstructing "six or seven" different countries.

A lot of Palestinian "leaders" will hate the idea, because it's money that goes to people who aren't them and the continuing grievance is their continuing relevance - take it away and they are nothing. A lot of Israeli apologists will hate it too, since it amounts to an admission of original sin in Israel's founding. And there was. But no country was birthed with clean hands. It's not as if the eventual Palestinian state will result from immaculate conception either. As Diana says, "We're sitting on 10,000 destroyed Native American villages and no one wants to knock down buildings over that!" Which is true. It be a fine thing to better that performance, though.

Plus Ca Change? - UO is not your site for keeping track of developments in Franco-American discord, I freely admit. But the trailing edge has an interesting item about tensions over Afghan policy . . .

When You're Right You're Right - When you're right twice, you're Gary Farber.

A Fanboy's Blogwatch - Hey, Rebecca Sean Borgstrom has a blog. The designer of one of my favorite roleplaying games, Nobilis, has been running Hitherby Dragons since September of this year. The vast majority of entries are microfiction that will appeal to the fans of the "florilegia" in the Nobilis rulebook sidebars. See "Thoughts on Lovecraft and Gladiator" for an example.

Page Boys - Couple of e-mails on DC vs. Marvel page counts from people who know what they're talking about. Sean Sheer writes:

having worked in ad sales at a tw-owned cable network... and in publishing for hearst magazines... i would hazard that dc probably has a better ad sales team than marvel... i really don't think it has anything to with their being owend by tw.

ginger writes about package deals... and while they do happen, they really are not that common, and the advertisers that do them usually are the super huge big budget advertisers like auto manufacturers, beauty and fragrance, and packaged goods. the type of advertisers you see in comics are not those big budget advertisers. mostly you see video game manufacturers. this month in a dcu comic you see 16 different ads (not pages; 16 different ads--some of them are double page spreads--of those 16 ads, 14 are video games. (of course you see exceptions... like the campbells soup ad in dc comics this month.... ) the comic book reading demo and the video game demo are almost identical.

also the people you see advertising in comics are DEFINITELY NOT the same people advertising in time warner magazines ... even TV and film properties are not commonly seen in comics. and despite the big marketing budgets you see attached to films, it has been my experience that, generally speaking, the film industry would not be interested in the very small, very defined advertising niche that comics represent. i mean, just glance at this week's entertainment weekly and a dcu comic: they SHARE NO COMMON ADS. not one.

i really truly think it's just because dc has a better sales team.

This is in line with the e-mail from even-more informed Brian Pearce:

From past experience (I worked at DC as an Art Director for over ten years), I can tell you that the reason for DC's success in paid advertising is that they have very, *very* aggressively pursued it. The company has a very strong sales staff out pursuing paid advertising, custom comics (comics produced by DC for outside clients), and product tie-ins (like fast food premiums), and it's considered to be a very important source of revenue.

I think part of DC's success with this is the range of material they publish...compared to Marvel, anyway. Marvel doesn't really have an equivalent to VERTIGO, or the all-ages kids titles, or MAD Magazine (which started to carry paid ads about two years ago) that give DC a wider range of demographics.

Contrary to one of your correspondent's assumptions, as far as I know, ads for DC's books are *not* sold as part of a package deal with any of the Time Inc. magazines. It always surprises people to hear this, but as far as the corporate heirarchy is concerned, DC is just a small division of Warner Brothers, and isn't really even considered to be in the publishing business. There's little or no connection between DC (and MAD Magazine) and the other periodicals published by Time Inc.

Having gotten such a source on the line, I went into interview mode. Results:

To the best of your knowledge are the page rates comparable between the two companies?

I honestly couldn't say. (Though I'd be curious to know, myself.)

Lastly, it's my understanding that ad pages is a prime - if not the prime - measure of success in the glossy periodical world. Is it as appropriate a metric for comics too?

I don't think so. If there were a bigger business in paid advertising among more publishers and a larger audience for comics, it might become a more important measure. Among comics fans, I find many don't seem to have a good grasp of how the business works to begin with, so they don't tend to pay much attention to who buys ad space and why that might be important in the long term.

I don't know about Marvel; but for DC it's another way to supplement the weak revenue that periodical publishing tends to bring in (along with Licensing, Collected Editions, and Retail Products). In at least one case I think it's meant the difference between a book being cancelled or continued; IMPULSE would have ended sooner had it not been for the Nautica deal, and the paid insert.

I think, when all is said and done, DC has the advantage of more attractive demographics, which are often as important or even more important than big numbers.

And there you have it - at least until someone interviews a "spokesman for the resistance."

UPDATE: Reader Mike Sullivan, who wonders why I keep going on about this stuff, points me to Marvel's rate card for ads. It can be hard to read. Mike tried to find a DC card online but couldn't, which only makes sense somehow. Hey, maybe I'll call them Monday.

Why do I keep going on about this? Because the first goal of any insurgency is to drive a wedge between foreigner and indigene. Wait, that's the other thread. Mostly I'm just curious. Mike thinks DC must just charge vastly less than Marvel and there's no reason to explore further. But some of us like to update our blog more than three times a year, so we have a hunger for material.

Samarra and Samarra and Samarra - Scooped by Hesiod on my own story! Oh the ignominy!

Here's the thing, while I was out gaming and having fun and not blogging last night, I kept thinking more and more about the whole robbery angle, and that question about why you wouldn't hit the bank rather than an armored convoy if you've got 60 well-armed fighters you're coordinating. And darnit, for sixty attackers, I like to think that our side could take down a good number of them, if not 54. That is, things were inclining me to doubt not just the total of dead attackers but the total of live ones.

Then Hesiod found a Middle-East Online interview with a purported spokesman for a group claiming credit for the Samarra ambush. And

SAMARRA, Iraq - A man describing himself as a resistance spokesman Tuesday rejected US reports of 54 insurgents killed in intense exchanges with US troops here, saying just two militants had died, both of whom were among eight civilians reported killed.

"We had two killed in the attack," the man told French journalist Pierre Barbancey, correspondent for the French communist party daily L'Humanite.

. . .

In all just 12 people took part in Sunday's ambush in Samarra, not the 64 or more spoken of by the Americans, said the spokesman, who talked to the journalist unarmed in a private home in the city.

"When the convoy entered the town, four groups of three people each took up position to attack it," he said.

The spokesman also denies robbery was a motive for the attack, saying "If we'd wanted to take the money, we could have attacked the bank whenever we wanted to, without the need to take on the Americans."

Here's the infuriating thing: this version of events makes more sense than anything we've heard from our own government on the matter. It explains why there weren't more bodies - because there weren't that many attackers. It explains why most of the recovered dead seemed to be civilians - odds would favor that. It explains why the attack wasn't terribly successful - in tight quarters, from ambush, with decent weapons, five dozen attackers should have been able to do more damage. I'm not ready to endorse it as the definitive version of events, but it seems to make more sense than the other available accounts.

It has its bad news/good news implications, naturally. In this version of events, the bad news is that relatively few guerrillas were able to provoke a massive reaction that has further estranged locals and occupier - the main goal of an early-stage guerrilla resistance, remember. The good news: everything you heard earlier in the week about how the Samarra ambush with its 60-man attack showed the increasing sophistication and capability of the resistance? You can forget that stuff for now.

Hesiod's item culls several other reports.

A Fanboy's Puzzled Notes - Near as I can tell, Marvel has the top-selling monthly comics and higher aggregate sales of monthly comics - at least if you go by the various direct-market sales charts out there. So why is DC kicking Marvel's ass on the page count and ad page fronts? I checked last week's comics - DC: 22 story pages, 16 ad pages; Marvel 20-21 story pages, 10 ad pages. And a higher proportion of the Marvel ads seemed to be house ads or ads for licensed Marvel product. Several DC comics came with a short insert, and the insert included a couple of pages of additional ads.

Are DC's rates that much lower? Do their comics have a sales penetration not reflected in the Diamond numbers? Or is this something new Marvel publisher Dan Buckley might better concentrate on than blue-pencilling fight scenes in The Ultimates?

UPDATE: Ginger Stampley e-mails a plausible theory:

DC is probably benefiting from "synergy" with other Time Warner properties. Package sales of ads to Time Warner magazines that include ads in DC comics would give DC access more and better advertisers, whether or not the sales/demographics of the comics themselves were that attractive. If you were buying ads and you could get a better rate on buying in Entertainment Weekly by having an ad in the comics, wouldn't you?

and adds later that

Michael also pointed out that DC tends to do more derivative comics from TV
and movies, which would bring in better advertising, and that some of the
advertisements you see may be for Time Warner TV shows and movies. TW gets
a sweetheart deal on the ads, and DC gets a better ad bed, making it more
attractive than Marvel as a place to buy ads.

What it boils down to is that DC is simply in a better position to sell ads.

which all makes sense. It shows the magnitude of the commercial advantage that DC ritually squanders.

"Hahahahahaha. How delightfully witty you are, HIGHCLEARING.COM" says Catherine Zeta-Jones. Kind of. Via Crooked Timber.

If Only I Posted Blurbs I'd sure as hell use the praise kindly bestowed by Fantastic Planet

It's sort of beautiful, like the complex intricacies of a multi-faceted diamond club that's bashing your head in.

He's only talking about the early Samarra posts, but the whole point of blurbs is to abuse the intended meaning. (Other favorite alt-universe UO blurb: "Of course Jim Henley was all over this story months ago, and did you listen?" from Patrick Nielsen Hayden.)

Metric System Update - Sadly, No kept after the Iraqi electrical power story and Uggabugga made a graph . SN reminds that "When electricity production equaled (and then exceeded) pre-war levels in October, the Coalition Provisional Authority was quick to trumpet this as proof that, however slowly, things are getting better."

The CPA has its own tables and graphs available for download, and I made my own graphs from their data for comparison.

The data show that we stopped meeting that standard (pre-war levels) after about October 12. From then until today, power output declines to August levels, both in the country as a whole and in Baghdad proper. Now, an exercise for the reader with Excel. Open the CPA's official report for December 2 (daily updates available). Now open the version I've just done with reformatted graphs of the CPA's own data. See both the "Peak Generation" and "Baghdad Power" tabs. Decide which set of graphs tells the truer story.

I made the following changes:

1. Added in data from August 7-October 6 that the CPA dropped.
2. Narrowed the graph widths.

Were I producing a report for an executive summary, I'd consider the CPA's version inadequate. The wide picture and lack of early data obscures the story, which is "Power goes up. Power goes back down." And if I were the executive and noticed that my analysts hadn't updated the graph on their "front page" since Mid-November, I'd wonder if they were hiding something.

UPDATE: Earlier version of this post suggested that Uggabugga had simply copied a CPA graph rather than making his own from CPA data.

SAM I Am - Bruce Rolston is your man for analysis of the recent SAM attack at Baghdad Airport. He's got links, analysis, and analysis. I'd love to see him dig into the Samarra reports too, but I probably confused him with Aaron Allston in e-mail the other day, so why should he do me any favors?

It's Not Low Profile If You Just Weren't Looking - Hesiod writes about exiled Iraqi nuclear scientist Imad Khadduri, who says now and said before the war that Iraq had no current nuclear program and that even its 1980s-era program was a farce. Some critics have apparently "wondered" why Khadduri is only now coming forward. Hesiod points out, with characteristic effervescence:

"Emergence from a low profile," MY ASS!

I was one of a number of people who HIGHLIGHTED Khadduri's claims BEFORE the war started. This was back in JANUARY! And Khadduri, himself, gave interviews to the Toronto Star and the BBC.

Disjointment in Samarra - Really, I'm almost over my obsession with this topic. But there are some interesting angles here, and some tentative conclusions. Of the latter, here's my current theory of What Really Happened:

Our guys got ambushed by a pretty big force.

Our guys fought them off in a running firefight and got the hell out of town, killing somewhere between 2 and two dozen guerrillas, probably closer to the former.

Our guys made liberal use of their ordnance, taking down some civilians in the process, but this was not their aim.

Our guys tossed a bunch of numbers around in true fog-of-war fashion when debriefed that did not receive the appropriate analysis before being publicised.

The brass hyped it for the happy news value.

It is material that the guerrillas did not win. The money is not in their hands. It is material that they were able to mount this operation, Iron Hammer notwithstanding. It is material that the people in Samarra hate our guts.

Now to the angles. A lot of them have to do with the robbery aspect. Here is what I don't get: if your only interest is the money, why not rob the bank? Think of it: 60 guys with guns and explosives against a stationary target that, whatever guards it has, surely has less than the convoy delivering the money. Wouldn't you like your chances of getting in and getting away before the Americans and such Iraqi police as were nearby could get to the scene? So, the possibilities are

1) There's something I'm missing (e.g. "two teams of 30 attackers" is a wild exaggeration - or something else);

2) The guerrillas are fucking morons;

3) The guerrillas are trying things that _seem interesting_ because they have the leisure to do so - that is, they have the time and the personnel to take a flyer on "Let's see if we can take down an armored convoy";

4) The whole thing was a diversionary stunt, and while it was going on, the guerrillas were acquiring needed cash by quite some other method (possibly the same sources who tipped them to the convoy).

3 and 4 are bad for us, 3 worst of all. Come to think of it, if the Americans already figured out that 4 was the case, it would give them an additional reason to hype the battle - "Iraqis Purloin Coalition Cash by Subtle Means" is not a story you want out there.

Now, the Shape of Things to Come: The old Saddam dinars expire on January 15. After that they are not legal tender in New Iraq. But that's a political decision. Hard-currency libertarians hate fiat money - I'm not one - but fiat money is an important social fact. If you can get someone to take pieces of paper with pictures on it in exchange for stuff somebody wants, you have scored a political triumph. We are, after all, changing the dinar for political reasons. It's one more way to say "Saddam is contemptible history."

Here's the thing. We're also setting up a test for ourselves. Because the opposition may try to circulate Saddam dinars after the deadline. If they succeed in getting people to take old bills in the new year, it will be a measure of their success. If they can't, it will be a measure of ours.

Samarra This Stuff - Gary Farber e-mailed that he does recall reports of "uniformed fedayeen." Curiously, the more recent reports seem to drop "uniforms" in favor of dressed like - which mostly seems a matter of white or black scarves across the face.

Andrew Olmsted had a follow-up this morning and will hopefully add more. And speaking of the early reports always being wrong, I erred last night when I referred to him as Captain Olmsted. In a show of good sense, the Army has promoted him since he started blogging. The self-deprecating and good-humored way in which he informed me, though, couldn't help but call to mind a passage early in Ross Thomas' last novel. An old Army acquaintance/rival comes to call on the protagonist, informing him in the process that he's now Colonel Acquaintance/Rival?

"Colonel?" the hero replies. "But the Army would never - but of course it would. Congratulations."

This joke is for entertainment purposes only and to remind you to read Ross Thomas. Particularly all the Democrats who keep coming round - he was the great liberal suspense author. Start with The Fools In Town Are On Our Side, Briarpatch and Chinaman's Chance. After that you can't go wrong with Out on the Rim and The Seersucker Whipsaw. I can just imagine the savage fun the man could have had with contemporary material.

Your Samarra Links for the Day - Juan Cole got a skeptical e-mail from a former Green Beret. Excerpt:

Are we back to kiting body counts? Are we back to "If it's dead and it's gook, it's VC"?

We'll know soon enough. David Hackworth got an e-mail too, purporting to be from a US combat commander in the action. The report is anonymous and could conceivably be a fake. I asked Major Olmsted to give it the sniff test. He replies, "Obviously I can't speak to the accuracy, but the use of jargon seems pretty accurate to me. It sounds as if it was written by a soldier." Taking the report, provisionally, as genuine, it confirms a number of my suspicions and contains an important new fact - or at least it seems important to me:

Samara was not a supply convoy as reported, but was carrying large amounts of new Iraqi currency to stock local Iraqi banks and US greenbacks used to pay for goods and services the US forces need to accomplish their missions in Iraq.

Okay, we knew it was carrying dinars. But I hadn't seen any reports that it was carrying dollars. That would make that particular truck a very, very tempting target. More:

When we received the first incoming rounds, all I could think of was how the hell did the Iraqis (most of these attackers being criminals, not insurgents) find out about this shipment? This was not broadcast on the local news, but Iraqi police knew about it. Bing, Bing Bing, You do the math.

"A Combat Leader" is full of good cheer ("Iraqi Rebel Guerilla Units elements still retain the ability to conduct synchronized operations despite the massive overwhelming firepower "Iron Hammer" offensive this month") and bad news:

Hack, most of the casualties were civilians, not insurgents or criminals as being reported. During the ambushes the tanks, brads and armored HUMVEES hosed down houses, buildings, and cars while using reflexive fire against the attackers. One of the precepts of "Iron Hammer" is to use an Iron Fist when dealing with the insurgents. As the division spokesman is telling the press, we are responding with overwhelming firepower and are taking the fight to the enemy. The response to these well coordinated ambushes was as a one would expect. The convoy continued to move, shooting at ANY target that appeared to be a threat. RPG fire from a house, the tank destroys the house with main gun fire and hoses the area down with 7.62 and 50cal MG fire. Rifle fire from an alley, the brads fire up the alley and fire up the surrounding buildings with 7.62mm and 25mm HE rounds. This was actually a rolling firefight through the entire town.

The ROE under "Iron Fist" is such that the US soldiers are to consider buildings, homes, cars to be hostile if enemy fire is received from them (regardless of who else is inside. It seems too many of us this is more an act of desperation, rather than a well thought out tactic. We really don't know if we kill anyone, because we don't stick around to find out.

ACL thinks that's bad:

This is a great attitude for a combat commander to have when fighting an armored force on force, but Colonel Rudesheim is not trained in Counterinsurgency and my soldiers are taking the heat. We drive around in convoys, blast the hell out of the area, break down doors and search buildings; but the guerillas continue to attacks us. It does not take a George Patton to see we are using the wrong tactics against these people. We cannot realistically expect that Stability and Support Operations will defeat this insurgency.

As one would expect from using our overwhelming firepower, much of Samarra is fairly well shot up. The tanks and brads rolled over parked cars and fired up buildings where we believed the enemy was. This must be expected considering the field of vision is limited in an armored vehicle and while the crews are protected, they also will use recon by fire to suppress the enemy. Not all the people in this town were hostile, but we did see many people firing from rooftops or alleys that looked like average civilians, not the Feddayeen reported in the press. I even saw Iraqi people throwing stones at us, I told my soldiers to hold their fire unless they could identify a real weapon, but I still can't understand why somebody would throw a stone at a tank, in the middle of a firefight.

Hesiod e-mailed a Los Angeles Times article by John Daniszewski containing some of that "lots more reporting" I suggested there was to do yet.

Highlights:

o The battle "unfolded over a four-hour period," not the twenty minutes in the early reports.
o Daniszewski quotes an Abrams commander saying "small children were used as spotters by the insurgents." This is bad news however you interpret it: either the guerrillas have that much sway over Samarra that they can induce/compel that kind of cooperation, or our troops are stressed to the point of seeing things or Daniszewski can't get quotes right. I'm betting against the last one.
o The brass at 1st Armored believe "there's central financial control and central communications" of the efforts.
o The army reports five non-life-threatening injuries to its own folks. Cole's correspondent parses the phrasing to mean some casualties were seriously maimed.
o Samarra is a destination for Shiite pilgrims. I'm not sure what the Sunni/Shiite breakdown of the local population is. A "low-level struggle has been taking place" between pro-Hussein and pro-coalition forces in the city.
o Do We Control Samarra? Update: No. Apparently not.

Until six weeks ago, U.S. forces were headquartered near the city's main entrance. But after daily mortar attacks that killed two GIs, they pulled out to a more secure desert base about three miles away that boasts long, unobstructed views. Day-to-day security in the city has been turned over to the new Iraqi police and a U.S.-created Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, but their grip on Samarra appears tenuous.

o The Iraqi guards at the main entrance to the town wear ski masks so as not to "be recognized by fellow townsmen"
o There have been other attacks on cash convoys. This makes sense, since those old Saddam dinars become illegal tender after January 15. The guerrillas need cash.
o Department of Coalition of the Willing: The guys actually delivering the money were Fijians, mostly former military men. They get high marks from soldiers interviewed for carrying on with their deliveries under fire. Don't scoff. My friends' dads who served in World War II had nothing but admiration for the "Seabees" of the Construction Battalions who built runways and landing zones and earthworks under fire in the Pacific. It takes guts to shoot back at someone rather than running away under fire. It takes balls of steel to run a backhoe when someone's trying to kill you. These Fijians are like that.
o Two sentences that go together so badly they frustrate the hell out of me: "On Monday, the city seemed remarkably unscathed. Many buildings were scarred by bullets and mortar rounds, and about a dozen cars were burned, including one parked in front of the Golden Shrine." Look, John. We're trying to figure out what the hell happened Sunday. If you could be just a little clearer exactly how you mean it that "[m]any buildings were scarred" and that "he city seemed remarkably unscathed" it would be a great help.

Fun with Carnage - Had a wonderfully constructive e-mail colloquy on Samarra today with Andrew Olmsted and Gary Farber, the fruits of which are forthcoming. It reminded me of the good old days of warblogging, before everybody hated each other.

'Twas a Famous Victory - Now Agence-France Presse does the math on Samarra.

The mystery, which borders on solving a mathematics equation, further deepened with Gonsalves' report. According to him, a total of 60 militants, divided into two groups, attacked two convoys escorting new Iraqi currency to banks in the city. Another four assailants in a BMW attacked a separate engineering convoy. If the US troops killed 46 and captured 11 of them, only three of the survivors would have been left to pick up the corpses.

Where have I heard that before? AFP has more reporting from the scene, too:

The only corpses at the city's hospital were those of ordinary civilians, including two elderly Iranian pilgrims and a child.

What about my conclusion that the reporting demonstrates our lack of control in Samarra and probably other places?

Lieutenant Joseph Marcee, who took part in Sunday's combat, said he saw several of the attackers lying dead on the ground. "There was no time to pick up the bodies. We were receiving fire from other locations," he said. Sergeant Nicholas Mullen, who fired rounds from an Abrams tank Sunday, offered yet another explanation for the army's inability to locate the corpses. "We don't stick around," he said.

I'm now pretty comfortable with the following conclusion: the Army brass or their civilian bosses made a political decision to puff the ambush up into something it was not because they wanted a happy headline running at the end of the bloodiest month of the occupation phase of the war. It worked, too.

Can Can? - Perhaps the strangest request for Loyal Reader Help yet. I had an interesting exchange of e-mails with Kevin Maroney about yesterday's item on the war on obesity (aka the fitness blog item). Here's the upshot: I have a clear memory of reading a can of regular soda (Pepsi) last month which listed a "serving size" of 8 ounces and "servings per container: 1.5." Kevin insisted that his cans said "serving size one can" and I checked my boss's soda can Coke) at work today and it said "serving size one can." But I'm sure that last month's can said it contained 1.5 servings, because I was making the point to someone that you had to take that kind of thing into account when reading nutrition labels.

Am I nuts here? Or can someone confirm that soda can labels have undergone a recent change?

It's Not Just You, Kevin - Even the Liberal Calpundit is right. I ran retail stores for 14 years. The day after Thanksgiving was never "the biggest shopping day of the year." The biggest shopping day of the year was always, as Kevin says, the Saturday before Christmas.

Now, here's a UO shopping tip: if you must shop, shop late. Not in the season, late in the day. The stores extend their hours to 11 or midnight. God knows some probably extend them longer. But the crowds really thin down after the 10.

Remember, we are a full service blog here.

But Wait! There's More! - I'm sorry I'm not as quick on the uptake as some other bloggers, Loyal Readers. I was proofing the post below and that Telegraph excerpt smacked me on the back of the head and said "Hey, dumbass!"

The attacks lasted less than 20 minutes, with troops rapidly supported by four Apache attack helicopters. The US military said that two teams of up to 30 fedayeen were involved.

Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, a US military spokesman, said one person was detained.

Asked about the bodies of the 54 militants said to have been killed, he said: "I would suspect that the enemy would have carried them away and brought them back to where their initial base was."

Let's add it up. "Two teams of up to 30 Fedayeen." That's somewhere south of 60 guerrillas.

54 dead militants. That's a kill ratio of 90%. That's absurd for a running firefight in an urban setting, which is what this was. (Again, I'm correctible on this.) I'm pretty sure that an attacking force should generally "break" at the 30% casualty level if not before.

But worst of all: "Up to 60" minus 54 is - six. Tops. Brigadier General Kimmitt is telling us that 6 guys carried off 54 bodies. General Kimmitt is full of shit. Or else the reporting on this is really bad. Or both.

"Crackpot" Mail - Randolph Fritz writes about last night's item:

"Everything dubious turns out to be much worse than initially reported." Chris Hitchens made the same observation in *The Trial of Henry Kissenger*, did you know?

One doesn't have to be a crackpot to know the history of authoritarians in the USA, and to realize that USers have done monstrous things in the past, and are probably still capable of them. (Think of John Ashcroft, who has ridden to national power on the backs of Klansmen and their fellow travellers.) To believe these things are possible before one knows them to be done takes...I'm not quite sure what. I guess one has to reject one's own belief in the moral qualities of politics before one believes. Often people only come to the realization that such things are possible through engagement in tragedy--that was the way it happenned with Orwell & the anti-Stalinists.

There's an important point here: "sober" defenders of the administration (any administration) admonish us not to be "hysterical" because, whatever we're complaining about, it's not as bad as the depradations in actual totalitarian countries. Therefore we must be reasonable. But I figure the object is to not become as bad as actual totalitarian countries. And the time to do that is this side of totalitarianism. Now is precisely the time for hysteria because, should we reach a state when even our critics concede that "Now it really is bad" we'll be past the point of being able to do much about it. Their own hysteria, like Gorky's, will come too late.

One reader wonders whether we should apply "crackpot theory" to yesterday's Samarra battle. Taking note of the "massacre test" - he expresses suspicion about the reported ratio of dead to wounded:

I've now heard reports of troops crushing cars and hospital workers dead. Building explosions from non-aerial attacks typically leave wounded. Sounds to me more like a few sputtering ambushes and some sustained resistance followed by soldiers going apeshit on the town. The same feeling -- these reports do turn out worse so often and those numbers 0 dead one side 50 dead the other in ground ambush; 50 dead 18 wounded -- it's a funny number.

Hope I'm wrong ...

The same reader notes that Matt Hogan's "massacre test" appears to be "validated in a British Medical Journal study by the Red Cross in UK done studying most modern wars. Dead to wounded were in the 1 to 2-3 range." When you start seeing substantially more dead than wounded, you start to suspect you're looking at murder rather than battle. It's not easy to kill people, as this blog noted early in its existence.

There are some odd and noteworthy things about the Samarra action. The US reports that many of the attackers were "wearing uniforms of the pro-Saddam Fedayeen fighters." I can't recall previous reports of guerrilla attacks that specified the guerrillas wore Fedayeen uniforms. That doesn't mean the guerrillas didn't, and I may well have missed the reports. But let's say I didn't miss any reports (please e-mail if I did). In that case, one does wonder why all of a sudden the government hastens to inform us about the uniforms. Especially when during the invasion phase of the war their statements stressed that the Saddam Fedayeen didn't usually wear uniforms. Remember those days? It's a curious reversal of enemy practice and allied emphasis. One that could be explained, it must be stressed, by politics - the Fedayeen may have dressed up for effect, an affect they ruined by getting their sadistic little asses kicked. (Apparently. See below.)

So, "uniformed Fedayeen": odd but not probative.

The US also states that the ambush was an attempted bank heist:

"It was a co-ordinated attack... on a convoy... delivering a significant amount of Iraqi currency," US Colonel Fredrick Rudesheim told reporters.

You don't figure the CPA puts the schedule of their currency deliveries into their daily briefings. You assume that that kind of thing is a secret. So if the attack really was an attempt to steal the currency, that means the guerrillas have some pretty good intelligence on what we're doing. We either haven't purged enough dead-enders or we're making more of them as we go.

Okay, am I saying the Samarra action was a massacre or not? I'm not. I can explain away the KIA/WIA ratio: Here's a thought: If I'm wounded and I can avoid any place the Americans would noitce me - whether I'm an insurgent or a civilian - I'm avoiding that place. I slip back to my cell and get treated clandestinely; I drag myself home and pay a discreet visit to the family doctor. Because if I'm wounded, then I'm presumptively an enemy of the Americans, and that can let me and my relatives in for a whole lot of trouble. And I have the habits of a lifetime's secrecy.

Thus, wounded numbers depressed by wounded behavior. If it turned out those 18 were seriously wounded - no walkers, basically - that would strengthen the case.

But it gets stranger. Here is the report of even the right-wing Telegraph:

It was impossible to reconcile the two versions of the battle. The US military acknowledged that the death toll was estimated - rather than confirmed - on the debriefings of soldiers and no bodies had been collected.

Where the hell do "estimates" of 46, subsequently raised to 54, come from? Answer: out of one's ass. Period. "Somewhere upwards of 40" is an estimate. "Around 4 dozen or so" is an estimate. 46-no-54 is, in the absence of stiffening corpses laid out in front of you, horseshit. I would think. Maybe Captain Olmsted will set me straight on this one. He has the qualifications to do so.

But wait - there's more! Also from the Telegraph:

The attacks lasted less than 20 minutes, with troops rapidly supported by four Apache attack helicopters. The US military said that two teams of up to 30 fedayeen were involved.

Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, a US military spokesman, said one person was detained.

Asked about the bodies of the 54 militants said to have been killed, he said: "I would suspect that the enemy would have carried them away and brought them back to where their initial base was."

They can do that? Seriously, let's take General Kimmitt's statement at face value.Here's what it means:

We don't control Samarra.

If we can't be absolutely god damn sure of how many people were killed, it means we were not able to secure the area after the battle, helicopter gunships with fancy electronic sights or no. We collected no bodies. Likeliest explanation: we couldn't. We delivered the money to the banks and got the hell out of town.

So I think a couple of things. 1) On the evidence so far, the Iraqi story - that the death toll was much lower than the offiical American reports - is more true than the American story. 2) There is a lot of reporting yet to come on this one.

Lastly, the Telegraph article includes a Turning the Corner Watch Update:

Captain Andy Deponai, whose tank was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG), said: "Up to now you've seen a progression. Initially, it was hit and run, single RPG shots on patrols, then they started doing volley fire, multiple RPG ambushes, and now this is the first well co-ordinated one.

"Here it seems they had the training to stand and fight."

Balance the attackers' increasing sophistication against the fact that - so far as we can determine - they failed. Big time. No American deaths. No Iraqi money. But December's just starting.

Please Stay on the Line - Gary Farber e-mails actual facts about the survey call discussed in the first of today's items:

I've done that survey. I don't mean I was called. I mean I was working last year for a pollster doing surveys, mostly political, and we did precisely that one for Comcast. I made that call a couple of hundred times. It was the only non-political job we did (the firm did no selling whatever at any time; it was all polling and surveying).

And I can therefore vouch absolutely that while I understand someone getting the impression it was leading up to being an ad, and that several questions might walk the border, it was not an ad. There was no provision being made for taking orders. There was no sales pitch. It was, in fact, a survey to determine what sorts of service customers might want, what they were willing or unwilling to pay for, and what knowledge they had of services currently available. Nor was any information recorded on who the individual was; it was all statistical. I fully grant that some of that walks the borders of being an ad. Certainly the question "were you aware that you can have such &such service for such a price? Do you feel that is: a) too much; b) too little; c) just about right?" can be argued as being across the line.

But I'm not sure how a better borderline could be devised. Banning all survey dealing with commercial products might possibly do it, and might pass muster. But it would make for a fairly trivial difference. Commercial surveys would shave the phrase of the question a bit more. This wouldn't make a practical difference in being called. Ultimately, if people don't want to be called by strangers, they should use Caller ID and screen calls. Invidual action, rather than government nannyism. Strange argument? As for Poly's closing remarks and fears, he need not; such a call would be flat illegal.

Gary adds "If an ostensible poll turns into a sales pitch, people merely have to complain, and if a tape of such a call can be obtained, the FTC will fine the callers precisely as they would any other violater of the do-not-call act."

Me, I prefer the good old days when they had to pay you.

Gary, by the way, is blogging up a storm lately. Those who stopped checking Amygdala during his last hiatus have a lot of catching up to do. Like that's a chore or something.

Department of Congratulations - Huzzahs go out to two of my favorite bloggers and two of my favorite people - that's not four folks but two folks. Jesse Walker got married last week to the wonderful R. And congratulations-in-progress go to Nate "Polytropos" Bruinooge, who is in the process of becoming a father this very evening. He and Mrs. Polytropos are at the hospital and, well, yes, he is blogging. He somewhat sheepishly reports that "And now she's napping again after getting an epidural, and lo and behold I found a phone jack I could dial in from with the laptop, so now I can post a couple of entries (coming right up)." Keep checking in for further updates.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED UPDATE: Elanora Willow Bruinooge is here.

Law of Unintended Consequences Watch - Polytropos reminds us that the Do Not Call registry has an exception for "surveys," an exception that appears to mean the sales calls we get will be . . . a lot longer than the ones we used to get.

Cue Lee Greenwood - TalkLeft picks up an ABC News report that, well, this:

According to Time, activities leading toward release of the 140 prisoners have accelerated since the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. It said U.S. officials had concluded some detainees were kidnapped for reward money offered for al Qaeda and Taliban fighters.

Whoops! So now what, huh?

Slated for release were "the easiest 20 percent" of detainees, a military official told the magazine. It did not identify its source, who said the military was waiting for "a politically propitious time to release them."

As Talkleft itself notes "It took the U.S. over two years to figure out that up to 20% of these detainees were total innocents? During which time they were kept in cages without access to families or lawyers?"

A strong implication here is that only the Supreme Court's interest has prompted any real movement - the sort of judicial oversight that the Administration has fought and continues to fight.

The pattern is clear: everything dubious turns out to be much worse than initially reported. Oh, and there's always someone telling you it's actually much better. By the time the truth comes out they're busy defending something else. Even Viet Dinh, culpable in drafting much of the PATRIOT Act, has developed qualms. We're told today that some colonel fired a gun in the air near a prisoner to scare him and next month that he had the prisoner beaten and put a bullet into the ground by his head. We learn that arresting relatives of suspects "to pressure them to surrender" is a routine policy in Iraq. We're told one month that most of Iraq is not just quiet but friendly and the next month, in one of those quiet friendly parts, crowds drag American bodies through the street. We're told that there's no guerrilla war, then that there is a guerrilla war but we've turned the corner, then we notice that fatal casualties among our soldiers have grown exponentially for seven months and more (but we're turning the corner again). That power will soon be back to normal in Baghdad, then that power will soon be back to normal in Baghdad and then, that power will soon be back to normal in Baghdad. We're told that Iraq's oil will pay for the reconstruction, then that we must spend billions on Iraq's oil industry itself. We preen about our national virtue, then pause to contemplate "politically propitious times" to release the innocent. We excuse sins in ourselves we punish in others.

Go read the real crackpots. They've been more right than I was.

Weekly Fitness Blog Item - 161 pounds, 32.5" waist. Strangely for a holiday week, that's three pounds below last Sunday, but like I said, the actual number has been bouncing around within a four-pound range. There was a typo in last week's waist figure too - it should have read "32.75," not 34.75.

Goal for the holidays: Stay under 165 pounds through New Year's. I'll need a goal for next year after that. I'm toying with the idea of - gulp - a marathon in the fall.

In the news - Progress on the "Americans Can't Multiply Act of 2004":

The food label on grocery store products needs an overhaul so it will be more useful to consumers struggling to control their weight, several nutrition experts say.

For instance, a 20-ounce bottle of Mountain Dew might have a line on the nutrition facts panel that tells dieters it contains 275 calories. Currently it says 110 calories for an 8-ounce serving.

Because no American should have to multiply by 2.5. (Insert libertarian rant about public schools here.)

More:

''For instance, it works for a 3-ounce or a 5-ounce bag of chips where somebody might eat the whole thing,'' says Michael Jacobson of the Center for 'Science' in the 'Public' 'Interest', a Washington, D.C., consumer group. ''For a jar of peanut butter, it doesn't make sense. There will have to be some judgments on when it will be appropriate.''

And we will make those judgments! We! Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!

Ahem. Scare quotes in the quoted text were mine.

I should state right out that I read the food labels on practically everything - it is a "massive government program" of which I make shameless use. But given that food label regulations have coincided pretty closely with the much-discussed rise in American obesity, the program is a little short of beneficial outcomes.

More:

But not everyone is sure this change would prompt people to eat less. Some research shows that once people choose what food they are going to eat, they pay very little attention to how much they are consuming, says Brian Wansink, a professor of nutritional science and marketing at University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign.

In one study, Wansink found total calories listed on labels did not reduce how much people ate. But people did reduce their intake if the label said they'd have to walk two miles to burn off calories contained in the package or that they'd gain one-sixteenth of a pound if they ate it all.

Interesting. An otherwise quiet fitness week. See you in seven.

NaGNoWriMo Update - Did I finish the graphic novel? Not hardly. Am I done with the graphic novel, as in ready to set it aside? Not remotely. As I suspected, I had to start writing it to figure out what I had. Now I know. I know where it's going and, more or less, how it will get there. Bill intends to have thumbnail sketches of the first chapter this week - cool!

The comics script is a strangely bifurcated medium. You write part of it for the world (the lines of dialogue, any captions and thought balloons) and the rest of it for one guy - the artist. (I have no editor to consider at this stage.) He'll be bringing the thing to visual life, so you need to make sure he knows where you're coming from. Basically, all that "show, don't tell" stuff goes out the window - I have to explain not just what should be happening, but why. That way Bill can showdon'ttell the reader. It's as if you were sending a director your stage play and cover letter, but the cover letter was spliced into the stage play. Interesting and strange.

Note: the script is neither "Marvel style" plot-summary-first nor, quite, "full script," though it's closer to the latter. In true full-script, the writer explains what he wants to see in every panel of every page. My script goes down to the page level but not the panel level. I feel compelled to write "by pages." But I figure Bill, as an artist, is better equipped than I to decide how best to convey the action within a page.

Mark my words: the whole script will be done by New Year's at the latest.

Metrics System Redux - Here's a measurement I missed until now on Chief Wiggles' blog - size of the "green zone."

I was relieved to see the green zone expanded back to its original size as the 14th of July Bridge was closed again, after being opened for only a few weeks. The two bombings of the Rasheed Hotel forced the issue I am sure.

Apparently we are expanding the protective cordon around our HQ, at some cost, I imagine, to Baghdadis ability to get on with their business. A bridge closing in a major city is a serious matter.

Our Man Deeds - Have just discovered the newish Deeds blog by a CPA employee in Iraq. I highly recommend it. I will confess to reading quite a bit of it "against the grain" - I think it needs to be - but it's a useful addition to your "perspectives collection" and it has some hard news tucked in there. For instance, remember the army officer court-martialed for scaring a prisoner by firing his pistol into the air? Turns out there was rather more to it than that:

The prisoner refused to talk. The initial story was that the LTC fired his weapon into the air two times to scare the guy and it worked.

Well, that's not quite what happened. The LTC allowed two of his guys, a private who was the LTC's driver and another guy, to beat the crap out of the prisoner. But the two guys testified they didn't hit the Iraqi as hard as they could have.

Then, the LTC told the Iraqi he was going to kill him, took him outside, put his head in the sand and shot the sand right next to the guy's head. That worked and he talked.

The proprietor has adopted the pseudonym "John Galt." I wonder how it feels to be the sort of person to take that name and find oneself in the middle of this kind of thing:

For example, we need ID cards, like our drivers' licenses, for our 50K+ Facilities Protection Service (FPS) guards, and the 65K+ Iraqi Police. (The list continues but we'll start with these individuals.) We need to buy the machines that are used to make the cards, which requires that we obtain the funds to pay for the machines. Can't use Iraqi money per CPA mandate. So, we have to use CPA money. That will take at least 90 days to process. Okay, working on that.

Now, how many machines do we need? Someone must call the FPS to find out exactly how many guards are located where. FPS doesn't have permanent offices from which a quick report with the information can be generated.

How do we call them? Use cell phones. We just got 100 cell phones and are trying to link up with the appropriate Iraqis to hand them out.

Before handing them out, however, FPS wants us to make sure they have authority to do so, in writing, from their Ministry of Interior (MoI). Okay--but MoI needs a policy decision made by the CPA Senior Advisor to the MoI. All right, another step.

And this step must go through all 25 CPA Senior Advisors for approval and comment. (Okay, I "cheated" and did this before the ID card requirement was an issue.)

Now I have to wait to get it signed. And wait. While we are waiting, the foreign embassies tell us they want their guards to get cards first, and they want special uniforms for them.

The above consumed three long, hard days, interspersed with lunch, supper, sleep, mortars and sleep.

A is A if you can get the forms signed, apparently.

His scathing criticism of the "donkey attack" is pretty funny. And it's hard not to like a guy who can write the entry wondering where Monday went.

I highly recommend all those who consider themselves "libertarian" or inclined that way to zip to the bottom of the page and read the entries from the beginning, the tortuous path by which Galt managed to even get to Baghdad.

Note: "Galt's" wife posts occasional entries too. My interest in them is primarily psychological.