Correction - Dan at Rhumb Line says that, contrary to my statement the other day, he is not a pro-war blogger. He asks (rhetorically?), "Is it because I posted an e-mail from someone who is trying to rebuild Iraq?" Answer: not entirely. I was misled, apparently, by his emphasis on his friend's "optimism" in his intro to the excerpts from her letter. My perusal of Rhumb Line also turned up a quick, approving link to a "the shooting of the unarmed insurgent in Fallujah was not a war crime article. The irony here, of course, is that I made the exact same argument and I'm not, and I realize I should have told you all this well before now, a pro-war blogger myself. So! I stand corrected, Dan at Rhumb Line!

Blogging on Steroids - I posted some stuff about the Sports Issue of the Week to the Agitator. I'll mention here that, as a late-blooming athlete of no particular distinction, I feel this issue to a depth I didn't even three years ago. In an abstract way, I understand the temptations, and the muddiness of the borders between superior training and illegitimate enhancement have a salience they didn't before. I take a multivitamin, a fatty acid supplement, a glucosamine/chondroitin/MSM supplement - my orthopedist even recommended this last - and Vitamin C. I ingest supplemental protein. I swill carefully formulated sports drinks on long runs and SlimFasts (4:1 carb:protein ratio!) afterward. I take a chemical that allows me to train harder with less cardiovascular risk than I could otherwise: it's called blood pressure medication. I've idly wondered if a nonprescription iron supplement would improve my red blood cell count to the point of tangibly boosting my aerobic capacity. I don't take testosterone, creatine, THG, HGH, the Clear, the Creme or the Pretty Darn Cloudy Ointment. But risks aside, the line between the things I do and the things that are commonly held to be illegitimate is not at all obvious to me.

Semi-Comics Blogging - Man, am I out of this habit. Here are some stray, comics-related thoughts.

I've continued to enjoy Daredevil more than I expected. Since I wrote my "Collapse of NuMarvel" item awhile back, Daredevil has been one of two books that exceeded my expectations for the future. Substantially, this is because creators Bendis and Maleev have not given up on the threads they've been weaving through the long "Out" storyline. We haven't seen much of Matt Murdock's estranged wife Milla, but the recent Black Widow storyline was driven by Matt's determination to keep faith with her in the face of temptation. The current storyline, featuring an aging, mutant-growth hormone mobster who once killed a masked vigilante and is aiming to notch his second, is, first, an opportunity for the art team to really go to town - different flashback sections have production sheens reminiscent of Golden and Silver Age comics. And as of the most recent issue, it looks like writer Bendis is about to intensify Daredevil's not-quite-secret identity complications rather than quietly pressing the reset button. The narrative jumps are either to your taste or not. (Frex, the latest issue begins with Matt the bound prisoner of mobster Bondt and the supposedly reformed Gladiator. Did we get to see how the two captured him, or even exactly how Bondt suborned Gladiator to his cause? No.) They work for me. Bottom line: I still find Daredevil an unreserved pleasure. Indeed, I think it's on an uptick.

Another way you can tell I'm not a Real Comics Blogger is that I just can't work up the requisite outrage over the just-concluded, controversial storyline in Amazing Spider-Man. In the story, it is "revealed" that Gwen Stacy had a brief fling with Norman "Green Goblin" Osborn just before she died, said fling resulting in a pair of twins Peter Parker knew nothing about. Owing to Osborn's funky genetics, the twins grew up fast (and they grew up mean), led to believe by Osborn that Peter Parker, Spider-Man, was a) their father, and b) the murderer of their mother.

I should stress that I am in the perfect demographic to be outraged by this. I read the origiinal Death of Gwen Stacy storyline when I was twelve, the instant it hit the newsstands, and yeah, I cried. What's more, through the Marvel Tales reprint series, I was familiar enough with the history of Peter and Gwen to understand teh impact. And here I am, one of the aging comics-reading white men damned for keeping the industry afloat at the cost of imposing our peculiar nostalgia template on current production, and they're (Marvel and author J. Michael Straczynski) sullying the memory of Gwen Stacy by making her some kind of a, well, a, um - I think the word people are trying to avoid using is "slut." Because she had one sexual encounter with a dangerously-appealing older man who was not her boyfriend. In the seventies. Imagine.

And I'm sorry, kids, but I'm not offended. Nor do I think the premise especially bad, nor even that the story was poorly done. It's no masterpiece. In passages, the bathos is amped to the point of recalling the very era of comics (bronze age Marvel) it supposedly dishonors. But there are some nice stretches about the impact of the revelations on Peter and Mary Jane. I haven't followed the series obsessively, but Straczynski seems particularly good writing about marriage. (He also, let's not forget, is the man who made Aunt May more than a stale joke.) Mary Jane is the heroine here, and to the story's credit the ending rewards her rather . . . ambiguously. Look, if I say "Spider-Man," you say "superhero soap opera." The unknown kids storyline is about as soap opera as it gets.

You can find the contrary view expressed by Bill Sherman:

Still, I can see where fans are coming from when they react to the news of sexual coupling between the once-pristine Gwen Stacy and the skuzzy maniac in the green goblin suit. Straczynski's "adult" plotline isn't just a violation of character; it's a violation of the storytelling premises and format under which these characters were first crafted. Though she's been memorialized for years in all manner of Spider-Man stories, the fact remains that Gwen Stacy was created and lived her comic book life in a time when Marvel's superhero comics were aimed at a wider aged-ranged readership than the current plotline allows. Reading that these figures from the brightly colored Lee & Ditko/Romita Sr. comics once engaged in a sordid sexual coupling is a bit like learning Santa Claus has a thing for young elves: it might make a rollicking episode of South Park, but would you wanna hear a stanza about it in a public holiday reading of "The Night Before Christmas"?

I like Bill, but I'm damned if I can see the difference between this thesis - by no means Bill's alone - from John Byrne's widely reviled (by comics bloggers!) peroration on "All-Ages Books."

Paul Hornschemeier, probably my favorite young cartoonist, has a new Forlorn Funnies out. The story, "Return of the Elephant," is a "quiet" one, about two pedophiles meeting to exchange material. The two have known each other since childhood, and inherited the - bug? - from their fathers. The visitor has taken over his father's supply business; the host is, like his father, a consumer. The story has a coldness to it that I associate more with Dan Clowes than with Hornschemeier. Even the art recalls Ghost World-era Clowes as much as, say, Hornschemeier's own Mother Come Home. (I think it's the wash shading.) The characters are unassumingly repellent and you get not a moment's relief from them. I'm not sure what to make of the thing. I realize that may itself be Hornschemeier's desire. In moments, I wonder if it might even be intended as a satire of Clowes, a critique of the limits of the eye coldly cast. It's certainly an object lesson in the difficulty of separating the moral and emotional response to a work from the esthetic - or at least, my difficulty.

It's the Most - Wonderful Time - of the YEAR! That's right - New Year's Eve is coming, and that means it's time for the fourth (fourth!) annual Unqualified Successes awards. I am judge, jury and, er, executor of the series. HOWEVER, I am inviting nominations for any and all categories from any and all loyal readers. Truth is, even fickle readers can submit nominations. I mean, I might not even know which you are, right? Each year offers a mix of standard and new categories. To get the flavor see the 2003, 2002 and 2001 announcements.

Quick Linkblogging - First week of the month is always hard on blogging and this month is worse than most. But here's some stray stuff of note:

John Scalzi's Ten Least Successful Holiday Specials of All Time. Includes A Muppet Christmas with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Christmas with the Nuge and Ayn Rand's A Selfish Christmas among others.

A "Good News" letter to a prowar blogger from a friend in the Iraqi reconstruction effort. The mind boggles. It deserves close comment, but I feel guilty at the prospect, since the author of the letter is almost certainly quite young and, while you can find in her letter illustration of much that is wrongheaded about our Iraqi adventure, this young woman herself is not the cause of its absurdity; she's a symptom. She obviously possesses physical courage and a desire to Do Good. But, Oy. Via Yglesias, who gets the Find of the Year award.

Related to the previous link, I first discussed what I call "RSN Syndrome" and Iraq not quite 13 months ago.

Your Agitator guest-blogging link of the day is not a piece by me. It's Drug War Rant's Pete Guither on stupid conservative reactions to the medical marijuana case. Not that they could be much stupider than a couple of the justices.

Eve points readers to EndTortureNow, which "makes it easy for you to email your senators about Gonzales's support for torture."

Deluged by requests from, um, me, Dave Intermittent has added an Atom feed to his fine, occasionally updated blog. His site r0x0rz, and with RSS you don't risk forgetting that it exists during his sometimes substantial pauses in activity.

Return of the M-Word - "Magisterial" of course. Radley Balko's TCS article this weekend leaves a smoking crater where claims of "libertarian unseriousness" on foreign policy have been. I could quote from the thing all day, but it's more efficient if you just go read it right now. A certain amount of ups to TCS for even publishing it, given their predilections.

Yet More Stray Iraqi Thoughts - The anti-Soviet resistance in Afghanistan didn't start gaining military traction until it got its hands on Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, which it could use to shoot down Soviet Hind helicopters. It also eventually got serviceable TOW antitank weapons too, and could directly attack Soviet armor. It got those things, of course, from us.

Happily for us, the Iraqi resistances (foreign, Sunni, Sadrist) so far lack good anti-helicopter and anti-armor weapons. (RPGs don't cut it.) This either means they are NOT getting significant foreign support, or the foreign support figures that provisioning such things would tip its hand in a way it dare not currently do. So long as that situation continues, American casualties will remain manageable and we'll be able to sieze (if not hold) any patch of ground we take a fancy to. If that situation changes, the balance of power changes concomitantly.

(I take it for granted that if Iraqi resistance groups had such weapons they would use them. They've used everything else they can get their hands on.)

Two other things seem likely: 1. The Sunni-region insurgents seem to have had access to substantial Saddam-era weapons stores. That suggests that the terrifying "threat to the whole region" that was Baathist Iraq was itself essentially bereft of working man-portable antitank and anti-aircraft weapons by the time Gulf War Phase III rolled around in March 2003. 2. If anti-American forces in Iraq do suddenly come into possession of man-portable anti-vehicle weapons, it will suggest that Someone outside Iraq has decided it's worth a major effort to take the Americans down or at least bleed the hell out of them. It would be a major risk for any non-nuclear power to take.

More Stray Iraq Thoughts - One of the reasons commonly given for the impossibility of petitioning Iraq along ethnic/sectarian lines is that it would leave the Sunni section a landlocked, oil-free wasteland, a kind of surlier Jordan. I think "Sunnaq" would have a more arable land than Jordan, and there are plenty of theorists who view oil wealth as something of a political curse, but that doesn't mean Sunnaq would want to do without. But if the will were otherwise there, it should be possible to give Kurdaq the oil fields around either Kirkuk or Mosul and Sunnaq the ones around Mosul or Kirkuk. Both cities and regions are contested, so "each gets one" is an imaginable compromise.

That just leaves a few other nagging problems, like Iraq's Sunnis not wanting to give away everything else in partition, the Kurds wanting "the whole schmear" (Mosul AND Kirkuk), the thoroughgoing ethnic intermingling in Baghdad (largest Kurdish population in Iraq, IIRC) and the apparent lack of enthusiasm for partition among the vast majority of Iraqis. Oh well.

Firefox Mania GoesToo Far - EggOn! "Firefox extension for cooking the perfect egg." Via Brett Peters, naturally enough.

Home Away from Home Dept. - Today's Agitator guest worker item wonders about the possibly changing face of paleolibertarianism.

Stray Iraq Thoughts - The latest "liberation strategy appears to be Codename: "Fuck the Sunni." (See Krauthammer and Ignatius. Both are well wired into official views, and reliable transmitters of same, for current values of "official.") You can find more rabid versions of the sentiment if you look, and it's not hard to understand why: the Sunni-specific resistance to the post-invasion occupation of Iraq has caused the lion's share of US casualties and done the most to ruin the victory parades. Plus, Fuck the Sunni offers either the quickest exit strategy or the surest route to a continued presence (enduring bases) in the country. Keep the dominant Shiites sweet and you can get out sooner OR stay longer.

From what I can tell, if the question is "Who cast the first stone, Sunni Iraqi or Shiite Iraqi," the answer is Sunni Iraqi. From that perspective the cynic might say They've got it coming. If you change the question to Sunni Iraqi versus America, the answer becomes decidedly less clear - I can't remember the last time I saw an Iraqi jet over American airspace or had to pass through an Iraqi checkpoint. Sunni attempts to roll back any of our Central American interventions in the 1980s escaped my notice.

From a practical perspective, Fuck the Sunni seems to amount to this: we have a problem with terroristic Sunni-inflected radicalism. A material number of Sunni Arabs (with a smattering of non-Arabs) hates us enough to go out of their way to do us harm, to uproot their lives and dedicate their every waking moment to planning and inflicting mayhem on us. Our medium-term response to this looks like it will be choosing a particular Sunni community with no immediate connection to such mayhem and upending it. This doesn't seem brutal enough to cow Sunni radicalism into compliance. Nor does it seem calculated to take the edge off that hatred. It's as if the good fairy saw Little Bunny Foo Foo picking up the field mice to bop them on the head and decided to deal with it by kicking the shit out of an entirely different rabbit. Not necessarily the nicest rabbit in the forest, but another bunny nevertheless.

UPDATE: Point being, when the good fairy clobbers a non-Foo Foo bunny, it doesn't stop Bunny Foo Foo's depredations among the mice. And chances are it pisses off a bunch of the other rabbits. But it's a bad analogy in some ways. It would be more precise if there were a Bunny Fa Fa who attacked the Good Fairy, and in response the Good Fairy clobbers Bunny Foo Foo instead. You get the idea. But maybe reading mimi smartypants (and I for one can't wait for the post-Thanksgiving entry) is rubbing off on me in strange ways.

Look Over There - I do a bit of sportsblogging on the Agitator. Tonight's topic: those Joe Gibbs "retiring because of his health" rumors: accident? coincidence? conspiracy?

Plus, yet more Hitherby Dragons-related linkblogging.

Time Passages - April, an American serviceman (Wash Post):

"I hope we don't get to the point where we are so jaded we start rolling down the streets in tanks and shooting at everything that moves," said Capt. Chris Chown. "If you start to lose that sense of humanity, you've lost your mission."

November, an American serviceman (Knight-Ridder):

One guy talked about guard duty in Kosovo one day and getting angry about being there, in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of nothing. He saw a mentally ill child who always came to the gate, asking for candy. The soldier told him to come over, and then he punched him as hard as he could, over and over, just to see if the kid would come back the next day. When he did, the soldier beat him again, laughing.

After that story, Laird told the soldier he was a coward and an ass.

More, from the same article:

Spc. James Barney, who drove the Bradley that carried Sims' body, stood by the vehicle outside, talking to himself. "We need to just finish it, level the whole damn city," he said. "I'm tired of this place, I'm tired of this shit."

More:

"Being in our track and smelling him — I'm glad I never saw his face," Ward said of Sims.

On his way out, Laird turned and said he'd been thinking about his son.

"I don't want my boy to know his daddy's a killer," he said. With that, he picked up his gun and walked out the door.

More:

More bullets flew by, and the mortar rounds grew closer. Capt. Kirk Mayfield, of the recon team, yelled, "Everyone behind the truck."

Standing next to his Humvee, Mayfield screamed for U.S. mortar strikes on the five-man team. After the ensuing rumble, a voice called over the radio: "Can I get a battle damage assessment?"

"An assessment?" the reply came. "There is no more building."

More:

"F------ Hajji," he muttered, using grunt slang for Iraqis.

What's the penalty for asking too much of people?

UPDATE: From a reader letter to Flit:

It's seems an odd exchange. Then once inside, Sites tells the lieutenant that these men were the wounded from the day before. The officer goes outside to radio in a report and the now-famous event then unfolds... but even though significant time unfolds in Sites' narrative after the firing of that additional shot, the lieutenant doesn't reappear -- despite presumably being close enough to have heard the shot and be able to tell it was from inside the mosque.

Best Weblog Period Goes to Dogs - It's true. I will be guestblogging at the Agitator for a bit along with some other sharp folks - once I get a password. Blogging will not cease here, nor will I cross-post. I will post notices here when there's new content there and vice verse. My plan is to do very little warblogging there - it'll be the softer side of moi, mostly. Particularly I hope to keep up Radley's tradition of sportsblogging and keeping up with the War on Pleasure. Expect roughly a post or more a day here and a post or so a day there (exclusive of pointers) through the holidays.

Dept. of Modest Proposals - Glen Whitman has one to combat overzealous, revenue-driven property evaluations by state assessors:

So here’s my proposal: Any property owner whose property is subject to a tax based on a government-assessed valuation should have the option to force the government to purchase the property at, say, 97% of the assessed value. This would give the state a strong incentive not to overvalue property, since whenever it did so, it could be faced with the losing proposition of buying at above-market value and then selling at actual-market value.

Why 97%? Read the original to find out why Glen Whitman merits the designation "smart ass."

Would Knight-Ridder Please Buy a Paper in Washington? Because their reporting still beats the pants off everyone else covering Iraq. Read this heartbreakingly good embed journal by reporter Tom Lasseter from the Fallujah battle.

(Hat tip: Gary Farber.)