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Department of Manual Trackbacks - At Flit, BruceR revises my gloss on the "proves that X is what they fear most" dodge. He adduces a targeting distinction between "high value" and "high payoff." Hey, I'll accept it.

And Radley points out that, while it is true that, as I noted, the extreme-libertarian Bush Administration did not file an amicus brief in Kelo, it almost did - for the Evil Team.

Oh, Ouch! - Radley Balko finds a report of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales promising that "he'll give the same priority to cracking down on obscenity that he'll give to fighting terrorism."

Given that Gonzales believes in fighting terrorism with torture, this could be one painful war on smut.

Another Cliche Past Its Smell Date is surely Action X proves that __________ is what the __________ fear most, most recently on display in this week's Reason Express:

Even the horrific car bomb that killed over 100 in Hilla tells us that the construction of a functioning Iraqi security force is what the insurgents fear the most.

Once you've said it, you haven't said much. The US assault on Afghanistan proves that an al Qaeda-friendly government in the mountains of Central Asia is what the Americans fear most. And? The massacre at the World Trade Center in September 2001 proves that East Coast office workers are what the terrorists fear most. Really? The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand proves that a popular Hapsburg is what the Serbian nationalists fear most. I suppose that's one way of looking at it.

Stripped of morale-building rhetoric, all the formulation really claims is that Combatants operate against targets on which they place high value. But then, the morale-building rhetoric is the point: the word "fear" makes the opponent sound desperate and our side on the cusp of victory; it also tries to buck up the actual targets. Puff your chests out, boys, they're bombing you because they're afraid of you! There's probably a sense that it's true, but it's also true that "an al-Qaeda-friendly government in the mountains of Central Asia" was what we "feared most" in late 2001. Saying that said nothing about whether we were "desperate," or about our prospects for success. Serbian nationalists probably did fear the emotional connection between the mass of Serbs and the Royal Family of Austria-Hungary. Attacking what they feared most worked out pretty well for them.

Truer Words - About Senator Stevens explanation of his preoposal to regulate cable and satellite broadcasts

Most viewers don't differentiate between traditional TV and cable so they don't know when they might be exposed to objectionable programming, Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, head of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, told the National Association of Broadcasters in Washington.

Mrs. Offering e-mails

JESUS CHRIST!!!!!!!! THAT'S WHY MOST PEOPLE SUBSCRIBE TO CABLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Exclamation points in original.

Dear Libertarian-Leaning Republicans and Republican-leaning libertarians: I notice that the Bush Justice Department did not file an amicus brief on behalf of the landowner in Kelo. Why do you suppose that is? They could've. The DOJ has broad latitude when it comes to amicus curae and has certainly used it. Not this time, though. Hm.

The Issues of the Day - I pretty much endorse what Jane Galt has to say about overreactions one way or the other to news from the Middle East. The depressing side of this view is that, at least in theory, no one need ever change their mind because they can hope that events will eventually bear out their existing opinions. I changed my own mind once in response to subsequent evidence - I was a huge contemporaneous booster of Gulf War Phase I, a New Republic liberal through and through. And I remember feeling pretty triumphal in the immediate aftermath when Nothing Bad Happened like the pessimists said. Then came our decade-long enmeshment in the sanctions and no-fly regimes (Gulf War Phase II), followed by the September 11 atrocities, then Iraq War Phases III (conquest) and IV (occupation), all flowing pretty straightforwardly from the original decision to roll back the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait. When you want to start tallying up "positive results of the Gulf War," the cost side of the ledger shows not just the hundreds of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of American and Iraqi lives in the last two years, but hundreds of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives (or more) in the dozen years prior to that.

I should say right out that before the invasion I said what would matter was not how the war looked the next month, but how it looked a year from then, and two years, and five and ten. I have no hesitation in saying that after one year it looked a lot more like my predictions than like those of any hawks. It will clearly look rosier come the second anniversary in a couple of weeks.

And after that? It depends.

Bringing Up Blackboards - Following up on last week's Mommy Trap blogging, Leonard Dickens suggests that Jennifer Warner and her class are prisoners of ideology.

Although it is clear that Warner and her suffering co-affluents do very much want their kids to "get ahead", I think one part of their problem is they don't know why they want this. They see that they are paying a price for it; thus they fear they are irrational. One thing that might help is simply to know that it is natural for them to want to advance their kids. It's an evolved aspect of human nature.

It may also help them to know that in general in primates, females are much more social than males. Thus there's a reason why their husbands are not similarly busting their butts molding the kids: hubby just ain't that into it. Knowing this might help these women live more peaceably with their family.

I don't have the aversion to all explanations sociobiological that others have, but as to the second paragraph, there's an alternate explanation that fits the facts, insofar as the facts fit Warner's potted statistics. Warner mentions at one point that the average mother works 41 hours a week, the average father 51. That's ten extra hours in the office, and ten fewer hours available for parenting. Proportionally, the relevant comparison is not "an extra 20% at work" but Remaining waking hours minus (minus net commuting time difference) minus ten. It's to Warner's credit that her article, while free with its condemnations of society, was lighter on the husband-bashing than many works of her genre - apparently she thought through the implications of the numbers.

24 Blogging - Oh, fuck it.

See, They Return, One, and by One - Tacitus is at least theoretically restarting today after an intermission, with a minor site redesign. There may well be a lot of changes under the hood too. Apparently the diary system, which I'm old enough to not quite grasp, survives, though the main page will theoretically be All Tacitus, All the Time.

Oh by the Way - Matt's absolutely right about the distinction between anti-Left and anti-State. And it explains most everything. I meant to get around to writing something about it for awhile, but quick brown foxes jump over lazy dogs, you know? There's a similar schism on the left, BTW, but I've never quite formulated it to my satisfaction. It's between sincerely loving "the little guy" and really despising the rich, I think. But that may not quite be it.

Now, I'm doubt that this specifically is true

Meanwhile, if you look at Jim Henley, very little of his considerable distaste for the administration stems from any specifically libertarian (as opposed to social conservative) views.

but who can say. I'm pro-choice but a pro-life symp; I'm pro-gay marriage and individual rights for gays, but a small-government social conservative who felt the same way would believe that homosexuality was a regrettable, even sinful practice that the State nevertheless had no standing to prohibit. That's how I feel about homophobia, not homosexuality. But I may be missing some subtle distinction Matt intends.

She's Back - Obernews returns.

The Political is Personal for Radley Balko.

I am of course against gun control. But it's never been much of a hot-button issue for me. Until now. I want a gun. Tonight. I should be able to go to Wal-Mart and by a goddamned handgun to defend myself. I doubt the two buffoons who threatened us tonight were serious. But what if they were? Why in the hell should I have to wait five days to be able to defend myself? Anybody think that if they were serious, they'd have any trouble finding a gun in about eight minutes? Who's served by a federal law making me wait five days?

Find out why at the link.

Reality TV - Interesting. Set your (British) TV to Channel 4:

LONDON - A British TV channel is preparing “Guantanamo Guidebook,” a show that will test the effectiveness of interrogation techniques like sleep deprivation which freed inmates say were used by the U.S. military at its camp in Cuba.

Channel Four, which brought the world reality TV hit “Big Brother,” will film seven British volunteers as they are subjected to extreme temperatures and mild physical contact while being kept awake for long periods.

The techniques are based on information from declassified U.S. government documents, and will be carried out by expert interrogators from the United States, a Channel Four spokesman said, declining to provide additional details.

He said the volunteers were rigorously screened prior to their participation and received intensive medical and psychological attention during and after the taping of the show.

One man was forced by doctors to withdraw after he contracted hypothermia.

Hm. a socially-useful reality show. What will they think of next.

The risk with such a show is that the precautions the producers must take probably end up understating the devastation the techniques cause in real life. We don't torture "volunteers," nor are they "rigorously screened" for psychological and physical stamina. I suppose it's inevitable that torture apologists will say, "See! If you can make a reality show about it it can't be so bad!"

But then our torture apologists will say anything. There's an irony there somewhere, now that I think about it.

Via a pointer from a discussion of torture and TV at Moonage_Daydream's Livejournal, to which I was tipped by Eve Tushnet. There's an evolving BSG discussion in the thread which is quite good.

Who Killed Cock Robin? - So. Anyone interested in who actually killed former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri? Didn't think so. Discussion seems to moved directly to the politics of the Syrian occupation with barely a pause to consider what may have actually happened. The Lebanese, with the help of the Swiss, are planning an investigation, bless their hearts, but everyone else is focused on the Great Democratic Transformation that is or isn't happening. But isn't there at least a chance that what actually happened will end up affecting the politics of the story, even a little? No? Okay, you're probably right. So let's just speculate for fun. I will tell you who killed Rafiq Hariri and why, with every bit as much chance of being right as the Big Brains, but more chance of admitting in advance that I can't really say for sure. As a bonus, a suddenly prominent political figure makes a crucial appearance.

Before we begin, there is one objection that must be ruled out of bounds: You're engaging in conspiracy theories. When a thousand pound car bomb kills eighteen people, the "lone nut" hypothesis is the crazy option. Any theory that purports to fit the facts, mine or Michael Young's, must be a conspiracy theory. Are we together so far? Good.

The official conspiracy theory is "Syria did it." The fact that the upshot of the assassination has been very bad news for Syria - and predictably bad news - is the most important obstacle. Daniel Pipes' gets around this objection by arguing that Syria is stupid, Charles Paul Freund that it's mere "corruption and recklessness." In other words, Syria was "carrying the idiot ball that week."

Life is stupider than fiction or Paul Wolfowitz would never have told Congress before Gulf War Phase III that Iraq had no history of sectarian strife like there was in the Balkans, and Congress wouldn't have let him get away with it. And as a libertarian, I'm loath to suggest that there is a depth of dumbness governments can not plumb, and as governments go, Syria is worse than most. Still, you can't exactly call the Pipes/Freund argument a slam dunk.

The other argument for the offiicial theory is that Syria's control of Lebanon is so total that no one could have killed Hariri without the Syrians knowing. I'm sorry, I flat don't believe this. Very few authoritarian states have ever attained that level of control. Even Saddam's grip on Iraq was decaying as the 21st century rolled on. Months before the war, the US had special forces roaming the Western Desert, holed up in Baghdad hi-rises and taking meetings with the tribal leaders and Army commanders we ended up successfully buying off in advance of the invasion. Mediterranean culture being what it is, Lebanon's history being so anarchical and Syria in such decay, the notion that not a sparrow falls there without Damascus marking it is implausible. I'm sure Syrian security is officious, overbearing and menacing. I'm sure it's not omnicompetent.

Crap! Out of time! We'll pick up our investigations this evening. In the meantime, please make sure that no one leaves this room.

The Best Idea Ever for combatting the "broken window fallacy."

Take Two - That was fun, but there's a less snarky point to make about Warner's article. Quindlen may actually be "wrong." Warner et al's careerist approach to mothering may be "necessary," to the extent that Warner is showing us how 21st Century American meritocracy reproduces. Warner and her cohort represent the elite of Robert Reich's class of "symbolic analysts." The nice thing about American meritocracy is that you rise in it by dint of intelligence, education and hard work. (Plus social connections, of course. But you rise everywhere partly through social connections. The question is what else the elite brings to the table.) But all those things are broadly heritable, in nature or nurture terms. If you're a meritocrat, you have a real if imperfect chance of passing on your status to your offspring. And just as TVs get bigger and clearer and computers get faster and cheaper, we can expect succeeding generations of symbolic analysts to be smarter, better educated and harder-working than their ancestors. But how do they get that way? Perhaps by dint of inhuman efforts toward that end by their mothers. Essentially, the entry fee into the meritocracy keeps rising and parents have to work harder and harder to ensure their kids can pay it. Their efforts can easily become markers of shared experience that bind tomorrow's class in psychic solidarity - all those kids sitting around Seven Sister and Little Ivy dorm rooms saying "You took elite ballet too? So did I!"

That means that Warner's desired government subsidies can't solve her real problem, which is ensuring that her children have relatively higher status than the bulk of their generational cohort. You can offer tax-funded ballet classes to every Jacob and Caitlin in the country, but there will still be only one "best" ballet class in a given town. Meritocrat moms will still "need" to get into that class, not the ones for the hoi-polloi. Rank Hath Its Privileges, but its duties too.

There's also the fact that, as a country, having your socioeconomic elite marked by brains, education and hard work offers real benefits, even to those of us who aren't in it.

It Gives Me Absolutely No Pleasure to Say This given that she's been one of my bete noires for years, but thank God for Anna Quindlen. Her Newsweek essay, "The Good Enough Mother," is the perfect antidote to the twaddle peddled in its more-discussed companion piece, the excerpt from Judith Warner's Perfect Madness. The obvious point to make about at least the excerpted portion of Warner's book is that, in classic American fashion, she mistakes "the middle class" for people like her. Warner is an upper-middle class striver and moves in that milieu. What she chronicles and exemplifies is simply American workaholism applied to child-rearing. Given the way that journalists find vox pop samples* when writing such articles, you can be sure that the bulk of Warner's "150 mothers across the country" are also from her class. So the ambitious income redistribution that she imagines will solve the problems of women like her and her friends amounts to a bold if imprecisely quantified call for the redistribution of wealth from the upper-class to the upper-middle class. To the barricades, comrades!

But it's sillier than that. In the middle of her article, she explains the virtues of government subventions for the kinds of child care she'd like to see:

I lived in France before moving to Washington, and there, my elder daughter attended two wonderful, affordable, top-quality part-time pre-schools, which were essentially meant to give stay-at-home moms a helping hand. One was run by a neighborhood co-op and the other by a Catholic organization. Government subsidies kept tuition rates low. A sliding scale of fees brought some diversity. Government standards meant that the staffers were all trained in the proper care of young children. My then 18-month-old daughter painted and heard stories and ate cookies for the sum total in fees of about $150 a month. (This solution may be French—but do we have to bash it?)

Pause to suggest that Warner's obsession with "quality" child care is an insistence that child-care facilities are only worthy if they provide an outsourced version of the same non-stop, thoroughgoing "enrichment activities" that Warner and her friends can't forebear. We've had our two children, at various periods, in the care of: each parent at home; two outlets of one corporate center; two different church-based facilities and two neighborhood moms. Some were "better" and some were "worse," but none of them could be fairly called detrimental to our kids, though none of them - and I suspect this is Warner's stumbling block - shortened the path from here to Harvard.

But, remember: Warner's thesis. Political solutions, aka copious piles of other people's money, can salve the psychic wounds of American mothers. So let's cut to the end of her article, where she writes

And I was reminded of the words of a French doctor I'd once seen. I'd come to him about headaches. They were violent. They were constant. And they would prove, over the next few years, to be chronic. He wrote me a prescription for a painkiller. But he looked skeptical as to whether it would really do me much good. "If you keep banging your head against the wall," he said, "you're going to have headaches."

What? You mean despite all that subsidized top-quality pre-school (with "some diversity" - and surely no more was desired), Warner was still unhappy? Still "banging [her] head against the wall?" You don't say.

The print version of the article is especially instructive, with its photo insets of anchorwomen and editors, their plight captions reminding one of a National Geographic photo essay from a refugee camp. And perhaps Geographic should send an anthropologist/photographer team to capture this tribe that confuses class neurosis with political neglect. In the meantime, Warner and her 150 friends should, while waiting in line for a spot in "the right ballet class . . . the best camps, the best coaches and the best piano teachers" carry the hardcopy of Quindlen's essay to read. Excerpt:

So much has been written about how the young people of America seem to stay young longer now, well into the years when their grandparents owned houses and had families. But their grandparents never had a mother calling the teacher to complain about a bad grade. And hair-trigger attention spans may be less a function of PlayStation and more a function of kids who never have a moment's peace. I passed on the weekend roundelay of kiddie-league sports so our three could hang out with one another. I told people I hoped it would cement a bond among them, and it did. But I really wanted to be reading rather than standing on the sidelines pretending my kids were soccer prodigies. Maybe I had three children in the first place so I wouldn't ever have to play board games. In my religion, martyrs die.

Then they should get out of line and get some ice cream.

*Fun fact re this early Offering. I later met someone quoted in the article. He confirmed that the writer had indeed been talking to friends and friends of friends, and that some of the wives' comments did lead to a measure of domestic friction.

I am Walid Jumblatt - It hit me: Jumblatt's sudden love for liberal revolution and American interventionism

"It's strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq," explains Jumblatt. "I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, 8 million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world." Jumblatt says this spark of democratic revolt is spreading. "The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it."

reminds me of nothing so much as my tasteless April Fool's Joke of last year.

Memory Hole - How long does it take to go from raving menace to statesman? A couple of months, apparently. Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt managed that trick anyway. Just in December, the New York Sun found, to its horror, that Jumblatt was the sort of person accorded respect by - and I am sorry to upset you - France. They're just the sort of people to set up a state visit by a man who

On November, 19, 2003, it was reported that the state department cancelled Mr. Jumblatt's diplomatic visa following revelations that he expressed regret that the deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz, was not killed in a missile attack during a visit to Baghdad.

More recently, Mr. Jumblatt gave an interview to Al-Sharq Al-Awsat on February 12, 2004, in which he said: "We are all happy when U.S. soldiers are killed [in Iraq] week in and week out. The killing of U.S. soldiers in Iraq is legitimate and obligatory." The Progressive Socialist Party leader has also said he felt "great joy" at the 2002 destruction of the U.S. Space Shuttle Columbia, because it carried an Israeli astronaut.

The Lebanese MP is also known for espousing conspiracy theories against America. On April 28, 2004, he gave an interview to Al Arabiyya TV, in which he detailed how America was really behind September 11: "Who invented Osama bin Laden?! The Americans, the CIA invented him so they could fight the Soviets in Afghanistan together with some of the Arab regimes. Osama bin Laden is like a ghost, popping up when needed. This is my opinion."

This week, Jumblatt is aces. David Ignatius reports that

"It's strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq," explains Jumblatt. "I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, 8 million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world." Jumblatt says this spark of democratic revolt is spreading. "The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it."

and his accusations of Syrian guilt in the assassination of Rafiq Hariri are taken as probative.

Simply start saying things useful to the Bush White House and you too can take on gravitas with Gannonite speed. Only spoilsports would pause to wonder if your insights into the murder of Rafiq Hariri or your enthusiasm for democracy were more credible than your shrewd deductions regarding the massacres of September 2001. And the only people who would suggest that, as a politician, anything that comes out of your mouth is calculated to maintain and increase your own power would be people who are just on the other side.

(Via Antiwar.com blog.)

Cockfight - World O'Crap and Tom Maguire go at it over Jeff Gannon and James Guckert. I feel obligated to say more on the topic without annoying hypocrisy, but I think the story has hit a stage where blogs have very little useful to say. The interesting questions now have to do with just how odd Gannon's access was, what involvement he had in the burning of Valerie Plame and whether his job was implicated in sexual blackmail from any direction. Answering those questions involves acquiring facts we don't seem to have. Republican bias will educate your guesses in one direction and Democratic bias in another. Gannon's own testimony seems insufficiently reliable to settle the matter, for all that Howard Kurtz declines to go beyond it. The Gannon news cycle now runs at the speed of FOIA requests and special prosecutor subpoenas.

One of the things I've been wondering is, "If I found out a call girl had managed to get a job as a tame White House correspondent, how differently would I view things?" There are escort bloggers who write at least as well as a lot of journalists (if that's not damning with faint praise), and there's the passage in Wolfe's Book of the Short Sun where Horn/Silk explains to an unhappy young girl that it is only appropriate that everyone use whatever talents they have to get through life. If Gannon simply leveraged some affection or gratitude from a satisfied client into a new, less strenuous line of work, I don't fault him for it. If said client wanted merely to do him a good turn I can't get too worked up about it. It's not morally uncomplicated, because the flip side of that thing is sexual harrassment - the ex(?)-escort is getting jumped ahead of all sorts of people who did not bugger the gatekeeper for cash. The civil law looks askance enough on that kind of thing for many companies to institute fairly strict anti-fraternization policies, or at least get nervous about it. If you and I are sleeping together and you give me a promotion, even though there's no quid pro quo either of us will acknowledge even to ourselves, the less attractive men in the company (that is, the rest of them . . . ) can make the case that they missed out because they weren't loving you up like I was. No company wants to fight that suit.

I don't approve of taking sexual harrassment law that far myself, so I'm not outraged if something like that happened in Gannon's case. Most liberals probably do approve of taking sexual harrassment law that far, though, so unlike Monicagate, they aren't being hypocritical for taking the stances they've taken.

Meanwhile, the Party in Power trades on sexual moralism, especially when it comes to icky man-man stuff. The hypocrisy of functionaries for an anti-gay, sex-dubious party playing Pygmalion with an aging working boy matters, if indeed that's how it happened. That's the kind of thing it will take actual journalism to tell us. Maguire may be right that "sometimes, where there is smoke there are only people throwing smoke grenades." Sometimes. We don't know yet if this is one of those times or not.

Book Notes - Our sole booknote is I'm not going to blog much tonight because I'm deep into the delightful memoir, Swimming to Antarctica, by legendary distance swimmer Lynne Cox. So far she's set two crossing records for the English Channel and one for California's Catalina Channel and nearly died from dysentary trying to complete a Nile River race under repulsive conditions. And soon I'll get to the part where she graduates high school. Nice clean writing. I got the book for my 12-year-old niece, the competitive swimmer in the family, for Christmas and finally was able to borrow it back.

The New Yorker Online offers a 2003 interview with Cox about her most recent achievement, a one-mile Antarctic swim without wetsuit or greasing.

Mandalaspherics! - Radley's got a good column about how blogs aren't really all that and a bag of chips, in which he reiterates his point about how independent the political blogosphere isn't. But I find myself wanting something more meta. We know about blogospheric triumphalism. Radley's column belongs to the growing genre of blogospheric anti-triumphalsim. But the next level, which I hope we will reach soon, is triumphal blogospheric anti-triumphalism, in which a legion of anti-Jarvises proclaim blogospheric anti-triumphalism the most important development in media since the stele. Surely this very item represents a small contribution to that end, but I suppose the phenomenon will have arrived when an outcry of blogospheric anti-triumphalists (BATs?) forces the Emm Ess Emm to restore some legacy media poobah or politician to the phoney-baloney job other bloggers hounded him from.

Or something.

Oh by the Way - Not me. Weird, because Henley is damned uncommon in the US for a proper English name. I've never met a Henley I wasn't related to, and I've never seen the name used fictionally before. My middle initial is "L," if anybody's wondering.

Little Oral Anarchist - Interesting consideration of the relationships among radical feminism, libertarianism and pornography by Micha Ghertner. I don't agree that pornography as such is oppression of women, and I think that Catherine MacKinnon ends up plumping for totalitarian solutions to gender issues because she brings a totalizing mindset to analyzing gender relations. I'm fascinated by Micha's quotation from Johnson and Long that "the state sees and treats everybody—though not in equal degree—the way men see and treat women," but one of its fascinations is that it cuts both ways. If "men" and "women" are less unitary in praxis than in feminist theory, then perhaps "the state" and "everybody" are as well. In other words, the analogy is a kind of anarcho-capitalist doubling down of its original bet on the nature and valence of the state.

Meanwhile, Alina Stefanescu muses on pregnancy as an aggravating factor in murder risk. She quotes, without judgment, NOW President Kim Gandy to the effect that

"Violence in intimate relationships is all about power...There are fewer times when you can have power over a woman than when she's pregnant. She's vulnerable. It's an easier time to threaten her."

which manages to have a good deal of fatuity to it (just what does it mean to say something is "all about power" anyway?) and only a partial account of the problem. The rest of the problem is that pregnancy raises the financial, legal and emotional stakes in any relationship. It's a stressful time for a solid relationship. In the case of a bad one, the only question is How horribly things will go wrong? One of those ways is certainly the man killing the woman.

One of the good things that might come out of the libertarian-conservative divorce is freeing some (mostly male) libertarians to look at feminism with fresh eyes and a less reflexive rejection of feminist theory and scholarship than a lot of us were prone to aforetimes. Feminist prescription may, insofar as it calls for increased state power, be anti-libertarian. Feminist diagnosis need not be.

Sorry Kevin - At some point today I realized that 24 is no more subtly suggesting that torture is unreliable so we shouldn't torture than it is suggesting that car chases and gun battles are unreliable so we shouldn't engage in them. It's just another thing "we" do that sometimes works and sometimes (especially during rising action) doesn't. It's a shame when it doesn't work out, but what does? (Note that Jack's shooting off the kneecap of the mook in Episode One successfully yields information. It's not in time because CTU has committed the unpardonable folly of not having Baueresque gusto.

Meanwhile, Raznor has uncovered several genuine lessons from the show, including

3) Any terrorist plot will be stopped in a few hours, only to have the much bigger plot initiated. This is my theory for the intelligence failure on 9/11. They actually stopped some minor terrorist threat only to find out the real plan involved airplanes. That part probably hasn't been declassified yet.

Obviously, there are more.

Big Mo and Big Brother II - But wait! There's more!

Last week Joseph Braude argued in The New Republic (motto: Giving Overbearing Paternalism a Bad Name Since 1917!) that "we" should not pressure Egypt's geriatric caudillo, Hosni Mubarak, to democratize because in a democratic Egypt the wrong people would win. Instead, the United States should pressure Mubarak to liberalize civil society now so that liberals can win free elections down the road; that is, when "we" are sure liberals will win.

To foster a semblance of political balance in Egyptian society, political and cultural pressure must first be exerted from the top--a twenty-first century Ataturk-style project to undo the country's decades-long tilt toward Islamism is needed. This means opening Egyptian broadcast media to progressive voices, not just religious clerics and the political establishment. It means advancing a secular humanist agenda through the educational system. It means opening the organs of state, from the judiciary to the executive, to the sort of exchange programs with democratic countries that bore fruit so profoundly in the Ukraine in recent months. The details of the project would best be left to Egypt's liberals themselves, who know better than outsiders what they need to gain ground. But the central question has already been well expressed by Egyptian dissident Saad Eddin Ibrahim, no stranger to the country's prison system himself: "What, Mr. Mubarak, have you done to preserve the popularity of non-Islamist forces in the country?"

This is stupid. It's as if Braude had never learned one of the basic laws of politics: the greatest pressure on authoritarian regimes comes after they have begun to liberalize. It is not a process you can stage-manage. Improving conditions raise expectations which spark new demands which meet new frustrations which ratchet up tensions. You either get seismic change, a great deal of blood or both. See Manila in 1986 (7?), Berlin in 1989, Moscow in 1991, Ukraine in 2004 and Beirut this week for the seismic change; Beijing 1989, the West Bank and Gaza in the late 1990s and Prague in 1968 for the great deal of blood; and Petrograd in 1917, Algeria in the 1950s, India in the 1940s and all too many other places for the both at once. Proposals to gradually liberalize are, like the vision of the "real occupation" of the Palestinian territories that Steven Postrel outlined in letters to this site a couple of years ago, only attempts to put off a day of reckoning. Indeed, I think we're swiftly returning to something very like the late-1990s juncture between Israel and the Palestinians. We will either have peace quickly or war with agonizing leisure.

What Braude offers Egypt is a faux liberalization that would have to end in revolution or repression. (See Kruschev, Nikita, "Thaw.") What excuses the paternalism of real parents is that they actually know more about the world than their offspring. Braude's own naivete is childlike. There's nothing adorable about it.

Big Mo and Big Brother - Lebanese opposition to the Syrian occupation is growing, including a major street demonstration and escalating demands from the opposition. I've been up front about my qualms here, basically the possibility that Syria's thumb has been the only thing keeping the scabs over Lebanon's internal strife from bursting. But my qualms aren't what matters. The Syrian government's views aren't the final word, either. If a critical mass of Lebanese are determined to try to make a go of their society without outside overseers, they deserve that chance. If Lebanese violence were to spill over into Syria, Syria would have legitimate reasons of self-defense to take action. That's assuming you don't believe in expansive notions of "preventive self-defense" that justify using military force against another country based on the simple probability that it could become a threat to you down the line. Absent that, Syria should defend itself from within its own borders. Good advice for everyone. Reader Tomscud writes

On the question of whether Lebanon will once again collapse into civil war if Syria goes: I doubt it. There are too many people who remember exactly what it was like. Twenty years from now, when they're all old codgers sitting around in coffee shops playing backgammon, people might be willing to listen to (and fund, and volunteer for) the hotheads who say "yes, war is bad. But I'll be damned if I let THOSE PEOPLE put one over us!" But for now, anyone who tries to restart the war will be crucified by his own community, which is a contrast from the situation in Iraq, say.

I hope he's right. There are two terrible truths that tell against it. The first is that humans are awesomely, frightfully adaptable. It's our glory and our curse. In Beirut in the 1980s and Sarejevo in the 1990s simply going to the grocery store was worth your life. But people persevered. There's some marvelous writing about this in Tom Friedman's From Beirut to Jerusalem, actually. It took the shortest of cease fires for someone to flip a table back onto its legs and make it a sidewalk cafe - for a little while. In Sarejevo, I have read, women risked snipers to get their hair done.

We are a damned persistent species. The downside of that is that when so little is truly intolerable, too much will be tolerated for too long.

The other terrible truth is that a lot of humans, especially men, enjoy war. This was even true of World War I, poster child for Bad Stupid Wars. I suspect it will have been true for some Lebanese as well.

Nevertheless, there is such a thing as war-weariness. It may finally be setting in to Lebanon's south. Perhaps it is in Lebanon too. I hope so. And there's a universal desire for self-rule too. The Syrians would be unwise to flout it. I wouldn't spend one American life to drive them out, but I wouldn't advise them to overstay their welcome either. And I hope the Lebanese make a go of it. The country has, for periods of its history, been the jewel of the Mediterranean. With luck and a lot of work, it may be so again.

The Most Exciting Webcast Event Since Coverville came along. Bruce Dene Fleming, photographer, graphic designer and best man at my wedding, has started his own webcast on Webjay, Radio Free Chauncey. Self-consciously eclectic, all-music and no talk, with a new song or two added every day, RFC runs the gamut from country to hip-hop. The two downsides are that Webjay bandwidth can be inconsistent (I had a lot of drops last night, none tonight) and that you don't get whole new shows swapped in, just a gradual accretion of new material. But it's yet another great source of good stuff you either haven't heard before or haven't had pounded into your brain a million times. Just yesterday, Offering Boy and I did a couple of hours of errands in the car. Among five radio stations we heard four different songs twice in that time. Bruce offers one more way to save yourself from such a fate.

NP on Radio Free Chauncey: "Strawberry Sex" by Ken Hirai.

A Quick Expression of my Utter Love for You All - Battlestar Galactica was back on its game tonight, I thought, but I don't feel like going into it right now. Soon I'll run a couple more e-mails I got, including the first one critical of the show. In the meantime, may I suggest people revisit or visit the fine links in the current New Crew? Tomorrow: Did James D. Guckert kill Rafiq Hariri? And does this mean I'm never going to get an answer to the e-mail I sent Hariri two years ago?

Lazy Warblogger Night - Matthew Yglesias has the hopeful sign; Spencer Ackerman the disquieting portent; Porter Goss the admission of the obvious and James Joyner the latest example of neocon mau-mauing. (He's against it.) And now, to bed.

Lazy Fanboy Night - Two more lists for Mike Sterling to add to his master list of 100-item love: Alex Knapp of Heretical Ideas; and Steven Vincent who falls, admittedly, a few items short of a full hundred. It's all good stuff, though.

To Coin a Phrase - Back when I was a kid there was a popular bumper sticker that read YOUR GOD IS TOO SMALL, taken from the title of a then-popular book. Thinking about the suicide paper title business and so much more, I think it's time for a new bumper sticker:

YOUR GOD IS TOO PETTY.

Lazy Blogger Night - Turning in early. Things that caught my eye today:

Per Salon and elsewhere, it appears that Jeff Gannon/James Guckert was attending White House press briefings shortly before "Talon News" even got going. Meanwhile Maureen Dowd, who has been a White House correspondent, says that the procedures by which he was cleared were decidedly non-standard. There's an awful lot of smoke around the whole affair. I'm still betting that there's a fire generating it. Two stray thoughts: 1. I'm certainly not down with THIS passage from the Salon article:

Critics have charged that while Talon News may publish regularly, it boasts a nearly all-volunteer news team that includes not a single person with actual journalism experience. (The team does, though, have quite a bit of experience working on Republican campaigns.) In other words, the outfit is not legitimate or independent, two criteria often used in Washington to receive press credentials.

Get over yourself, Eric Boehlert. Also, how rich is it that the linchpin of the story has become the comments section at what Loyal Readers know is my favorite weblog, Winds of Change. My old pal Armed Liberal suggests

So as a thought experiment, can I suggest that some enterprising blogger with more time on his hands than I have file a FOIA request and ask who got white house press passes allowing them to come to press conferences and what their affiliation was for the date range from, say June of 04 to December of 04??

Sure, it might be instructive. I think there's another tack, though, that could be just as productive. Look at February 2003, when "Jeff Gannon" sprung full-blown from the brow of - well, maybe not the brow. Anyway, see what was going on in the news at that time. If I weren't making an early night of it, I'd do it myself.

Many bloggers are blogging from this year's CPAC convention, though under near-intolerable conditions owing to the failure of the blogger-proletariat to rise up and smash the data access oligarchs. Radley Balko takes the occasion to wonder

whether or not there's any room left on the "right" for libertarians and "leave us alone" conservatives. My sense is that there isn't.

Mine too, and not just because of the big, obvious stuff, and not just because of the Bush Administration, but its supporters, and not just the mouth-breathers and spittle-spewers. Take Robert Tagorda, who speweth not, on the recent "gay suicide title flap." Tagorda devotes an entire item to it in which he laments the nasty language used in some of the complaint messages to the bureaucrat who insisted that the words "gay," "lesbian," "bisexual" and "transgendered" be dropped from the title of the panel on suicide among the, um, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered. He opines that he personally doesn't see the requested title wording change "would marginalize the constituents as much as the activists claim." He suggests that it's "rather paranoid to believe that the White House has much interest in the title of a relatively obscure bureaucratic event."

But does he have any opinion on whether the bureaucrat's decision in this case wise wise, just and necessary as opposed to picayune and officious? If he does, it's not important enough to share with us. Only the unofficial behavior here - those unpleasant e-mailers and "paranoid" activists - is worth his comment.

Other business: In case you missed three hundred other pointers, let me commend to you the live chat with reporter Rod Nordland of Newsweek from Groundhog Day. Fun. Ny. One single excerpt:

Grand Rapids, MI: If WMDs don't exist in Iraq, where are the destroyed ones? Rod Nordland: I think they're in Atlantis.

Here's what I take from Michael Young's Daily Star editorial on the murder of Hariri and the question of Syrian complicity. It's interesting that various Lebanese politicians are holding up placards that say "Syria Did It." Like I said the other day, maybe Syria did. But since they are politicians lining up, it's probably more about sensing which way the wind is blowing and sizing up the best approach to the buffet line. Syria's hold on Lebanon may indeed be crumbling. It's far from clear to me that that will be an unmixed blessing. I'm old enough to remember the 1980s very well, which means I remember what Lebanon was like before Syria succeeded in bashing a critical mass of heads together. A lot of Republican hawks are fairly salivating at the prospect of undoing what some blog commenter called "Ronald Reagan's greatest failure." I fear they may simply lead to us - and, moreso, the Lebanese - reliving Ronald Reagan's greatest nightmare.

But maybe it will all be swell.

Cheap Transmutation of Matter - Henry Farrell offers to lend me a book, which is generous and, hey, I love free reading. This particular book, by Jared Diamond, will be starting from behind, though, thanks to Henry's item, which describes Diamond's account of Julian Simon's famous bet with Paul Ehrlich:

But what I suspect Jim doesn’t know (and what I didn’t know until I read it yesterday in Jared Diamond’s Collapse), is why Simon was quite so confident that metal shortages weren’t a problem. Over to Diamond:

There is an abundance of errors of the latter sort (anti-environmentalist predictions that have proved wrong): e.g. overly optimistic predictions that the Green Revolution would already have solved the world’s hunger problems; the prediction of the economist Julian Simon that we could feed the world’s population as it continues to grow for the next 7 billion years; and Simon’s prediction “Copper can be made from other elements” and thus there is no risk of a copper shortage.

Wow, I thought. Simon really said we could make Copper from other elements? Immediate reactions: Gulp; Really? and Why was I not informed? Henry goes on rather a tear about it.

Problem is, as links and accounts of the original interview make clear, Simon's alleged claim was not only less dire than presented, but not really dire at all. I came away from Henry's item thinking that Simon believed he would win his bet with Ehrlich because "we could make more Copper out of other metals," which we couldn't practically do in the 1970s and can't do now. In fact, context makes it clear that Simon believed no such thing. His comments about making copper from other metals were plainly far-future speculation, essentially an answer to similar far-future speculation on the part of environmentalists that "In the long run there's a finite supply of everything." Simon's remarks about the ultimate limit being "the weight of the universe" are a bit of a tip-off here. The "earthlings of the future" reference is also a tip-off. It's separate from Simon's near-term optimism about resources.

Which leaves us a question: Are we dealing with a good-faith misreading of Diamond by Henry or a bad-faith misreading of Simon by Diamond. Henry has the excuse of not having seen the original quotes from Simon. He simply made the same leap of credulity to which we are all prey: believing something about our political opponents that's too good to be true. Diamond presumably has seen Simon's original statements, so a mistake on his part would be less forgiveable.

It's Always Something - Republican activist groups have begun booming what we might call "The Anti-Gannon." You'll be hearing all about him in the coming days. I checked the February 1 briefing transcript at Whitehouse.gov and the guy really does exist. His questions are genuinely trollish in an anti-Gannon way - they are gotchas designed to leave the press briefer with no good answers.

Here is anti-Gannon's, aka Russell Mokhiber's homepage. Biased? You betcha. An offender against our absurd laws against victimless crime, like Gannon? Who can say. Maybe he does drugs. He doesn't seem to have websites where he offers to do drugs with you for money. And he seems to have taken up the journalism business more than five days before getting his White House press pass.

The Gannon story remains interesting because Gannon is a one-man nexus between prostitution and national security. He is a prostitute turned instant journalist at the heart of the mystery surrounding the betrayal of Valerie Plame's identity to the media and our enemies. It's also fun. Russell Mokhiber seems mostly tedious. Nevertheless, it's interesting to see that pressroom trolls are, as a class, ambidextrous.

Links for the Coming Campaign - Here are a few:

Syria Comment
The Arabist Network (both via Yglesias)
The Daily Star (Lebanon)
Amarji - A Heretic's Blog

Second Verse, Same as the First - Does anyone really believe the US government has the faintest idea whether the Syrian government was behind the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri or not? One day later?

I was afraid of that. I'm reminded of an epigram from Samuel R. Delany's Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand:

Ignorance is a condition. Stupidity is a strategy.

At least there's some humor value in the case, however bitter. CNN reports

Meanwhile, U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the United States has "made it clear" it wants Syria, which maintains some 16,000 troops in Lebanon, to use its influence to prevent attacks such as Monday's massive bombing.

We have around 150,000 troops in Iraq and can't prevent people from shelling the Green Zone. But we feel free to insist that Syria's 16,000 soldiers in Lebanon prevent all political violence. Rich.

Look, Syria may really be behind the murder of Hariri. But neither Condi Rice nor Scott McLellan nor Richard Boucher has any idea. The US reaction to the murder is the sheerest opportunism. Our rulers are practically pissing themselves with joy over this man's death. It's like a valentine from their one true love, War. The Administration's brain trust (please throw scare quotes around each of the two preceding words) took a good long look at Iran, decided it wasn't so appetizing after all, and cast about for a seemingly more digestible meal. As usual, they get to eat and we get what comes out the other end. Grab your nose plugs and a shovel, folks. As the poet said, "We must suffer them all again."

A Hustle Here and a Hustle There - Major Olmsted believes "the Left" et al have hit rock bottom in our coverage of male prostitute/journalist (apologies for the redundancy) Jeff Gannon/James Guckert. (See last night's item.) So does John Cole. White House Press Secretary Scott McLellan says Gannon got his clearance under his real name and only used his pen name for the reporting. (McLellan himself uses "Jeff" repeatedly when calling on Gannon, which he seems to have done a lot, per the WMV clip that Tex offers.)

But I'm still curious. Alexa says Talon News was established March 29, 2003. Gannon/Guckert was credentialled almost simultaneously with the "news" site's foudning. Is that typical, that an unknown reporter for a brand new news service can get immediate credentials? How did Gannon/Guckert come to the attention of GOPUSA's Bobby Eberle? Maybe these kinds of things do happen routinely, in which case we can all go home. But I don't think it's been established yet.

Freaky Deaky - The "Jeff Gannon" story gets weirder. The liberal Americablog does the digging. The Poor Man adds

Think about it: what are the chances that a media whore like Gannon would turn out to be an actual whore? It's impossible. It boggles the mind how infinitely unlikely this is. It's like if you found someone pirating CDs, and it turns out he actually had a peg leg and a parrot on his shoulder and sailed around the Caribbean saying "arrrrrr!" and plundering booty.

Ind - uh, sorry.

It's possible that Gannon decided to make a life change in Spring 2003. One hits the wrong side of 40, reassesses what one wants out of life and, like so many of us who switch careers in midlife, becomes a fully accredited White House correspondent pretty much instantly while forgetting to take down stray online ads offering sexual services for cash.

Or, and I'll grant this is much much less likely, it could be the blackmail.

24 More - Whee! We finally found someone CTU won't torture! An actual terrorist! The actress playing Mrs. Araz has been the best thing about the show, though the dragon-lady bit threatens constantly to fall into camp. The ending seems a bit of complcation-for-the-sake-of-complication, though. You would think, them being married, that Mr. Araz would be able to guess the thought processes that Mrs. Araz explains to Jack Bauer in the parking garage, so he has no reason not to waste the kid. (When he first grabs Fayrouz, he has the hope of using the boy to find Mom. Once you're trapped with no way out, the kid's continued existence is pointless, isn't it?) Speaking of actresses whose names I don't feel like looking up, I thought the woman playing Edgar's mom did a nice job.

But let's think about that passage for a minute. In my continuing act of driving John Cole batty by reading too much into the show, I must state my displeasure at the evacuation-related scenes. Mrs. Styles is stuck in the radiation zone because her usual driver is nowhere to be found and by the time she maneuvered her wheelchair outside "all the neighbors were gone." Why does Fox hate America? I have neighbors, and I am one. Had we a wheelchair-bound invalid on this block, No, we would not all of us drive off without checking to see if she needed help in the face of a disaster. I don't believe Mrs. Styles neighbors would either. We have evidence in this direction, the conduct of New Yorkers during the atrocities of September 11, 2001. If only they had filmed my own 24 story instead!

We also have Daughter Heller complaining that a quarter of the people in the evac zone are ignoring directions on where to go, and another quarter don't even realize that they're in the evac zone. Meantime the state police and National Guard don't cooperate effectively until Daughter Heller makes them, from her improvised command post at CTU. Moral: The American people are a bunch of boobs! Only the stern but loving direction of our masters, taking what time they can spare from the pressing business of torturing innocents, can save us. Bleat! Bleeeeeat!

Stray thought: Did the background data relayed to Jack about Mrs. Araz make it sound like she and Mr. Araz got married in the United States within the last couple of years? Whose kid is Fayrouz then? I probably misunderstood that part.

Way-Delayed Mailbag - Way back last September I was talking about Rwanda, which generated two critical e-mails I meant to run before, as so often, I was distracted by shiny things. First, from Tacitus:

Regarding Rwanda, I ought to point out a few things:

1) Getting there, militarily, would not have been terrifically difficult. All those staging areas in Kenya we used for Somalia? Just as good for hitting Kigali. Heck, you could have flown some heavy-lift craft direct from Europe to eastern Congo, and then marched in -- France did it. Speaking of which, France's mini-invasion on behalf of the Hutu genocidaires sort of disproves the notion that there were barley-surmountable logistical challenges to getting there. The French military is not what I would characterize as significantly mobile.

2) We could have taken the country much faster than the 100 days it took the RPF to overrun it. Maybe 30 days, is my guess -- especially with the RPF's assistance. Why? Helicopters. Lives saved? Countless.

3) Rwanda is one of the most densely populated countries in the world. Only a corner of the northwest is trackless jungle. The rest of it is under heavy cultivation and habitation. That means lots of roads. And where there are roads, there are maps.

4) The war in and around Rwanda and Burundi continues mostly because the United Nations, led by France, stepped in to create safe zones for the genocidaires who fled to the Congo. So, a movement that was on the verge of total collapse was given a reprieve, allowed to reconstitute, and carried on its war. This led, more or less directly, to the ongoing slaughter in the Congo, which is a long story in itself. There was, however, nothing inevitably quagmire-ish about a Rwandan intervention in 1994.

Rwanda was about as clear-cut a case for intervention you can get. My perception is that the opposition to engagement there rested mostly on a feeling that central Africa was a murky, unknown place unsusceptible to our feeble powers to change it. These assumptions are all false.

Second, from Peter Caress:

Some points you should consider in your analysis of Kosovo and Rwanda.

First, Kosovo. Yes, the Clinton crew dishonestly made wild estimates about how bad things were in Kosovo -- shades of the Bush team making crazy claims about Saddam to whip up support for invading Iraq. But you treat Kosovo like it was a hermetically sealed conflict, totally unrelated to Bosnia. We saw what happened in Srebrenica; it's plausible that similar massacres would have eventually happened in Kosovo had NATO not intevened.

You also seem to wonder why we intervened in Kosovo but haven't intervened in Sri Lanka or Nigeria. The answers: (a) Kosovo borders NATO countries, and (b) the perceived consequences of inaction in Bosnia had shocked many people's consciences.

Next, Rwanda. If I understand you correctly, Rwanda made you an isolationist mostly because the Belgian peacekeeper troops turned tail. You wrote, "How many Tutsis died because of the false security Belgium's pantomime of concern engendered?" My guess is not many. Back in 1959, Belgium backed a revolt against the Tutsi monarchy that touched off a mini-genocide of the Tutsis by the Hutus. This was merely the first of many spates of anti-Tutsi violence. Given this history of anti-Tutsi violence and past Belgian perfidy, I doubt that many Tutsis truly believed the Belgian troops would protect them.

You then wrote, "Absent Belgium's 'humanitarian' intervention, the Tutsi would have known ahead of time what was true anyway: they were on their own and needed to look to their own defense." But as a practical matter, what could they have done to defend themselves? Although the genocide was widely abetted by the Hutu populace, the principal perpetrators were militia bands organized in advance by the Hutu faction of the government. Even the machetes were part of the plan: the plotters of the massacre stockpiled the machetes and distributed them to the militias and Hutu civilians. The Tutsis really had no chance against these government sponsored irregulars: the only way the Tutsis could have defended themselves was to flee the country altogether.

Finally, you question whether America would have stopped the genocide any faster than the RPF, the Tutsi resistance group. My own feeling is that the genocide stopped no so much when the RPF won militarily, but when they won _politically_: the genocide stopped when it became obvious that the RPF was in control and that the previous Rwandan government was no longer around to support and protect the genocidaires. If America had begun a major military intervention, I suspect we would have won politically almost immediately, thereby stopping the genocide even before we controlled the country militarily. Unlike the fight between the Rwandan army and the RPF, there would have been no doubt that America would have quickly prevailed: the Rwandan government might have folded overnight, once American troops started arriving in force.

However, you're right about the moral hazard of wading into the Rwandan quagmire. Once foreign troops were in Rwanda, they would have had to stay there for years, even decades. A quick pullout of troops could easily have ignited another genocide, just as the rapid British pullout from India ignited horrendous violence there.

I think Tacitus' offers a plausible best-case scenario. It might indeed have gone that well. And I agree with him that the French role in the aftermath of the slaughter and Tutsi reconquest was contemptible. I also think that Peter Caress' last remarks highlight all the uncertainties of the aftermath of Tac's best-case scenario. Among Burundi, the Congo and Rwanda itself, there were going to be a lot of corners to tuck in no matter who intervened when. If we take Hutu thugs for serious people - at least as serious as Somali warlords, they'd have had a strong motivation to keep free and troublesome in any scenario, and a number of opportunities to do so. We'd have been responsible for setting up some kind of "permanent" solution to Rwanda's governance problems. We would incidentally, though no one was thinking this way at the time, have provided al Qaeda with one more set of exposed targets.

It might have worked. But I think Iraq offers a useful caution re best-case scenarios.

Light a Single Candle - Now we have a Syrian dissident blogger. Go, Dude!

Being a liberal in this imploding part of the world, means that I am more of a heretic than a dissident really. Other than to the small and seemingly marginal group that shares in the heresy, one way or another, I can belong to nothing over here. I can believe in nothing that seems too indigenous. Indeed, I sing a totally different tune, one that will not be appreciated any time soon. I am forever off-key around here. I am a heretic. If anything I have to say today is ever going to be appreciated widely by people here, this will not going to happen for a hundred some years. And though I am always willing to be surprised, I have long reconciled myself to that. Being solely recognized by my fellow heretic suffices me. Well, it will have to suffice.

As such, those who doubt the ability of “me and my ilk” to change things hereabout do seem to have a legitimate point, but that’s only because they misunderstand the nature of our intended role.

There's only one post so far. May there be many more.

A Humdrum Decade - Drizz at Magnifisyncopathological marks the ten-year anniversary of Texas' concealed carry law. Upshot: Nothing happened. There has been no bloodbath of hot-tempered citizens turning their everyday frustrations into duels or drive-bys. Life goes on. Crime has gone down - murder troughed in 2000, rising slightly since then to a level well below the high in 1992 - but crime went down everywhere in the mid-to-late 1990s. Further evidence for my own hypothesis, formed during the height of the John Lott-Tim Lambert battles, that gun laws have no effect on crime rates to speak of. Any effect they do have is swamped by other factors, typically economic fluctuations and demographic shifts. (Deplete the pool of young men, lower crime.) Or, as Drizz puts it:

It just emphasizes that relatively educated humans who at least have rudimentary concepts of personal responsibility and respect for individual rights won't go on killing sprees at the drop of a whim if they are allowed (with several nontrivial restrictions, mind you) to carry handguns in public.

Self-defense is about as basic a right as one can conceive. The argument for abridging it via gun control was pragmatic - gun controllers promised that restricting effective self-defense by limiting civilian gun ownership would increase public safety. It doesn't. It's not enough that it doesn't measurably decrease public safety, because gun control is itself a harm in principle. If it provided a compelling practical benefit we could have an interesting debate over whether principle or praxis should tell. But it doesn't even have the excuse of working.

On Spec(ulations) - Thomas Nephew has found some material that may explain the famous Bush Bulge photos from the Presidential debates. And rounding out this site's Talon News coverage, Rigorous Intuition considers the possibility that, It's not the sex. It's the blackmail.

UPDATE: NAME NOT USABLE writes

Sometime about the winter 2001-2002 I was eating in that New Orleans restaurant in Rosslyn Va. near the Metro and Key Bridge by myself when very near me came a young man who was an intern or some low-level guy in the White House and who was having dinner with a charming young lady he was clearly trying to impress. Naturally, being a man of honor, I did my best to conceal my intense eavesdropping. At one point the guy had the nerve to actually think I was eavesdropping, or someone might be, because he lowered his voice and said something like "You know Bush has a [or wears a ]..." and it was clear he was referring to something sensitive and possibly health-related. The woman's voice was louder and said "Oh, people probably know that and ..." words to the effect of no one would make a big deal about it. For awhile I've suspected thereafter he wore a hearing aid; by process of elimination of the fact that it was something not too visible or obvious, nor was it a greatly shocking thing but no photo showed it. When the bulge was an issue, I saw no confirmation of that. Looks like that blogger did his homework. I've google hearing aid and Bush but nothing definitive came up, or at least I saw nothing.

Are You Sure WONKETTE Started This Way? - Correspondence suggests that you can't even write about blowing sailors on your blog without being banned as "mature content" by the wifi networks at places like Panera Bread. This saddens me greatly. How are we to fully debate the policy ramifications of blowing sailors if whole swaths of the citizenry are unable to take part because of a bunch of net-nannies? Take part in the debate, I mean. Not in the blowing of sailors. Necessarily. Particularly in a time when we all need to be thinking about how best to "support the troops," I can only decry such filtering as unpatriotic.

Unless it was the erotic toner cartridges item.

Teach Me to do Morning Websurfing without my Glasses - For a moment, I could have sworn I had referrer spam from erotictonercartridges.com.

The Useful Distraction of Sex - Over in Olmstedville, Andrew, Avedon Carol and I have been in a bit of a discussion about the "Jeff Gannon" matter, about which I've written nothing here because of a towering lack of interest. But the notion in Republican/right circles that the real scandal is that the Administration's opponents dug into Gannon's private life does interest me. It seems untrue. Blowing sailors is "private life." Hiring sailors out to to get blown is a business. Whatever starting a website to pimp servicemembers is, it ain't "private." You'd never get any customers if it were.

Let's say a crusading journalist from an anti-drug paper had business interests in a urinalysis company or a smuggling ring. We'd consider that pretty relevant. Anyway, in comments over on Andrew's site I argue that the response to the "Gannon" scandal and the Bill Clinton impeachment process show certain parallels.

Culture Corner - Brett Peters offers a passel of Old English links. Scroll up for more. On his site, I mean. Not this one.

One More Time - It's simple. Never, ever ever blog about your job. The only exceptions I can think of are if you're a tenured academic or you own the place. Even in the latter case you have endless opportunities to piss off clients, vendors and essential employees, so think twice.

Speaking of the Farm Dole Virginia Postrel has a couple of useful items. First, she longs for the sort of anti-subsidy coalition we were never somehow able to put together against torture - maybe we'll have better luck this time. It helps that, since the Bush administration is nominally behind it, people like Glenn Reynolds won't dissipate their energies worrying that speaking out on the issue might, somehow some way, constitute opposing the President or, god forbid "hating" him. Her second item despairs at the LAT's press coverage, and points to Fritz Schrank's analysis of the available subsidy data for Delaware. ("The Environmental Working Group's subsidy pages for Delaware show that in 2003, over $17 million in USDA payments went to over 1500 recipients, and that about 26% of all Delaware farms received some kind of federal payment." That's an average of 11.3K per recipient, with at least one entity getting over $250,000.)

A couple of days ago, Matthew Yglesias worried about anti-farm dole advocacy in light of "general detachment of the left-of-center intelligentsia from rural life." Because nothing cures detachment from someone or a group of someones quite like giving them money you took from a different set of someones entirely. He also seems to think we don't already pay farmers not to grow crops - in some cases we do. He wants to pay farmers "contingent on managing the land in an environmentally responsible way." Right now, environmental law disincents farmers from letting more land go fallow: there's a risk that regulators will declare land that has gone wild enough "wilderness," preventing the farmer from reclaiming it should he decide he needs to. Just as we pay Big Sugar to destroy the Everglades and then pay to restore them, this seems like about twice as much as the government needs to be doing, if sound outcomes are your goal. But it's TV time, so I gotta stop now.

The Biggest Bully Around - Radley Balko has a lengthy excerpt from a drug bust in Tennessee, one that is likely unremarkable except for the fact that the wife of the victim (the only word that does justice, though "survivor" is oddly appropriate too, as in illness advocacy) left a tape recorder running before the assault (also the only appropriate word, though "torture" will do in a pinch) began. Radley reprints an account of the transcript.

Read the whole goddam thing. I mean it. You voted for this shit. I'm offering just the tiniest excerpt here:

Amid the threats, Siler is again beaten, but he still refuses to sign. Siler pleads with the officers as Franklin threatens to burn him with a lighter after giving him a cigarette.

From the Knoxville News Sentinel.

Welcome Welcome - I should formally welcome the latest New Crew links, since they've been up for a week now. We wish the previous New Crew members much enjoyment of their new permanent homes somewhere on the blogroll. We pat ourselves on the back for actually rotating our links in not too much more than the month we intend any New Crew edition to last. We further resolve to stop referring to ourselves in the plural. At some point. And lastly, we remind Loyal Readers that the New Crew is our attempt to make linkage worth something. Blogrolls have gotten huge - even this one - and links can easily get lost. Thus Unqualified Offerings adds exactly twelve links at a time - no more, no less - to better present them to their new audience.

So what do we have for you this time? Very few comics bloggers (more next month), a hawk, a diarist and a whole bunch of libertarians.

Thomas L. Knapp - Easily the most exciting blog discovery for me since Justin Logan's blog, Knappster is the home of libertarian Democrat and FreeMarket News Network columnist Thomas L. Knapp. Writing style falls on the good side of Gonzo. Subject matter ranges from war to economics.

Mutualist Blog - "Free-market anti-capitalist" Kevin Carson's Mutualist site has long been one of the web's great repositories of materal and linkage on anarchism in the tradition of Proudhon. His blog is usefully provocative for more orthodox libertarians like me.

John and Belle Have a Blog - I admit it. When John Holbo and Belle Waring joined Crooked Timber, I figured they must be mirroring content between their joint blog and the group site. Not true! J&BHAB is still full of interesting material you can't find elsewhere. Culture-blogging from a liberal perspective is what you get.

Drug War Rant is where Pete Guither does the job I should be doing: chronicling the endless depredations against liberty that constitute our viciously stupid attempts at drug prohibition. Easily one of the most important blogs out there.

Clark Stooksbury is a longtime libertarian journalist. I knew him mostly for his contributions to Liberty Magazine.

Unfogged is run by heterodox liberal Ogged, though he has gone the group-blog route. More equipose than you'll find among big-name partisan bloggers.

Bob Barr - Ex-Congressman and right-wing civil libertarian. Barr holds views on social issues that chagrin me, but he's one of the few people to come out the other side of public service at least as dedicated to preserving ordinary citizens from official snoopery as he went in.

War and Piece - Top-notch journalism by liberal reporter Laura Rozen. Excellent coverage of national security issues. Softer on "humanitarian interventionism" than I'd like, but good reporting and generally shrewd analysis.

Mimi Smartypants - Favorite diarist of teh internets. Funny as hell. The more or less weekly epistles of a Mom with a free-ranging and incidentally dirty mind. Drop six political blogs and add this.

Steven Vincent - barking-mad neocon author, but does great reporting, and actually tries to provide the "full story" the happy-talk blogs only say they'd like to see.

X-Ray Spex - One of only two comics blogs on the list this time, X-Ray Spex is the home of Will Pfeifer, whose recently concluded H-E-R-O series for DC I enjoyed.

Comic Book Commentary - group comics blog with a multicultural slant. Impresario LeCharles Gonzalez orchestrates an intriguing mixture of reviews, interviews and musings.

And there you have it. Read them all. I do. Next month: More comics blogs and fewer libertarians.

Note: Also added Bookslut to the Not Blogs section.

Cane the Wogs AGAIN! - Kicking Michael Totten while he's down (your lips can't reach Christopher Hitchens' ass when you're up), Josh Buermann and Kieran Healy have a go. Buermann picks up Totten's remark that "we differ from the colonialists and imperialists of the past" and suggests that that "is why they put that 'neo' in front of it:"

Meanwhile Kieran Healy sets me wondering when he writes

Read the whole thing if you like. It’s full of small moments of whatever the opposite of an epiphany is.

In itself it's delicious phrasing. But hey, what is the opposite of an epiphany? We're looking at Definition 3 in the American Heritage: "3a. A sudden manifestation of the essence or meaning of something. b. A comprehension or perception of reality by means of a sudden intuitive realization[.]" Roget is unhelpful.

How opposite is opposite? Is it a sudden failure of comprehension; a sustained opacity in the face of opportunities for clarity; or, most grandly, an instance of thrilling, comprehensive and utter misprision, a misunderstanding that feels like understanding, like when your hands are so cold they seem to burn when you clap them? Crooked Timber commenter pm offers

de-piphany. n

1. The ironically revelatory disappearance of a divine being.

2. A sudden manifestation of the wrong idea about the essence or meaning of something.

3. Incomprehension or misperception of reality by means of what seems to be a sudden intuitive realization.

I like it. Depiphany. Use it three times and it's yours. Maybe it is, anyway. I looked for a Creative Commons identifier on Crooked Timber and didn't see one. You might owe dm money.

Moneyball - "Any truthful way you cut it -- pun intended -- the FY2006 budget proposal is bigger than the FY2005 budget. So, when a Republican begins to brag, or a Democrat starts to whine, about the 'budget cuts,' don't believe'em." Thomas Knapp casts a skeptical eye on the FY2006 budget. Upshot:

When it's all said and done, George W. Bush will receive from Congress, and sign into law, a FY2006 budget of at least $2.65 trillion, and more likely $2.7 trillion. With supplementals, it will likely approach $3 trillion. He'll tearfully inform the American public that those mean old Congressional Democrats just wouldn't let him be fiscally responsible.

So what about the "mean-sprited cuts" in a handful of social programs that have prominent Democrats sputtering with outrage? They certainly don't represent any kind of sea-change in what the federal government actually does, nor will they significantly steer that three trillion dollar supertanker toward Balance. I think they're in the budget so that prominent Democrats will sputter with outrage, less to enrage Dems than to cheer Republicans. Listen! the White House is saying, It's your favorite song! The White House isn't going to give conservatives genuine spending or deficit reduction or governmental streamlining. But a chorus of liberal angst may serve to keep their spirits up.

More 24 - The Post has the latest on personnel policy at CTU. Excerpt:

Discipline hearings/appeals: Disciplinary actions will continue mostly as they have in the past -- swift, secretive, and involving some kind of employee-on-employee torture -- in the auxiliary conference room next to the snack machines.

Today our bipolar attitude toward the show has swung to contemptuous and disgusted from yesterday's condescending and amused. I just can't get away from thinking that the show is habituating viewers to the idea that ordering a subordinate to taser the living shit out of another subordinate on the basis of a half-hour investigation is a perfectly normal thing for an American government official to do. Any harm that accrues to the subordinate being deliberately and repeatedly electrocuted is entirely the responsibility of the scheming black chick who set her up, not the woman who orders the torment or the man who inflicts it. Repulsive.

Perhaps tomorrow my attitude will soften.

Cane the Wogs! - Michael Totten and Christopher Hitchens give a few friendly Iraqis what-for. Note that in Totten's gloss of the discussion there is no hint whatsoever that he and Hitchens themselves stood to learn anything from their "dialog." It's all about setting their Iraqi friends straight, in a calm, kindly and patient way, of course. The closest he comes to the notion that his Iraqi interlocutors might have a little wisdom to impart is

And surely there is more to it than that, things I might never be in a position to understand.

The great thing about deciding you "might never be in a position to understand" is that it lets you completely off the hook for failing to understand, or even failing to try to understand.

Maybe they really didn’t (and don’t) completely understand how we differ from the colonialists and imperialists of the past.

For one thing, I don't think colonialists and imperialists of the past so thoroughly kidded themselves. But maybe they did. I doubt they were one whit more or less condescending than Totten's account of his dinner.

(Via Obsidian Wings.)

Labor Theory of Value - Among the many reasons to prefer football to baseball is that football inspires less in the way of labored, turgid chin-pullers be writers trying to inflate the game into a statement about Life or America or other Important Things - Halberstamism, if you will. TNR's Lee Siegel is not helping.

This Great Plank in Your Own - Having endorsed Knapp's evisceration of the Abu Ghraib Six, I must also commend RudePundit's letter to overhyped blowhard John McCain (and by extensionm "principled" Republicans generally), written on the eve of the vote. Oh well.

You know, Senator McCain, you alone in that Senate chamber know what is what when it comes to torture. And you also know that the moment will come when even the hardest men will break and gladly confess lies about themselves. After nearly killing yourself because of the constant pain, you signed a confession. You wrote, "I am a black criminal and I have performed the deeds of an air pirate," words you knew were ludicrous at best and baseless lies at bottom. But you signed, you signed, you just wanted the fucking pain to end and who, really, could blame you but cowards and liars themselves.

Yes, yes, we know that you were a real soldier of a nation's military, a real prisoner of a real war so that the breaking of the Geneva Convention was more clear-cut. But, in the end, what happened to you meets the boundaries of legal torture laid out in the memo that Alberto Gonzales requested: you were never brought to organ failure or, indeed, death. If you support Gonzales or the President on this, what you will say is that others deserve what you went through, that your torture at the hands of your captors will be simply the average, expected behavior of our nation towards those we pre-deem evil. Like the North Vietnamese believed you were.

And you will have contradicted yourself with your amendment to the Intelligence Reform Bill, the amendment you put forth with Joe Lieberman outlawing "extreme interrogation measures." It passed with 96 votes in the Senate and was cut in conference committee, with the advice of the Bush adminstration involved. These fuckers don't care about your pain, your torture. They only believe in power, like every torturing nation in history.

There is more.

Via Nephew, who writes

Well come on, you say, whoever expected a Senate Republican to choose morality and the rule of law over partisanship and the love of power? I did. Even just one would have been nice.

Yes. Very.

"Not Only No But F--K No" - Libertarian Democrat Thomas Knapp has a little list - the Democratic Senate roll of shame:

Only a month into the 109th Congress, these six US Senators have already demonstrated their unfitness for re-election or promotion. In yesterday's roll call vote on the confirmation of Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General, they destroyed the chances of a much-needed filibuster and joined 54 Republicans in endorsing torture, perjury and executive lawlessness.

Obviously every single Republican Senator disgraced himself with this vote too. (I'm particularly disappointed in Chuck Hagel.) But we've learned, over the last three years, that the whip hand over our one-party state is not the party of civil liberties. Can we have one?

Sort of on the subject, Diana Moon wrote me yesterday:

They were the only ones to vote against Gonzales.

Ergo, you are a Democrat.

I wrote her back that I can't be a Democrat, because then I'd go from the sort of libertarian who often says things that please Dem partisans to the sort of Democrat who is "not a team player," a veritable Mickey Kaus of perfidy. I'll just hang outside the tent here, where the light still reaches and someone occasionally sets a drink within reach, thanks.

More seriously, I've pondered this question a lot since the election. What I come back to everytime is that I am viscerally anti-bully and government still seems like the biggest bully around. I don't believe government is inherently a force for good. I do not accept that democracy is a process by which "we" govern "ourselves." I believe it is a process by which a larger group imposes its will on the smaller, and the most energetic and glib busybodies impose their will on the larger. Living on the fringes of DC, I have occasion to drive or walk by the White House and the Capital from time to time. I am not stirred. The hot dog vendor exchanging food for money fills me with more admiration than the bureaucrats walking past him, immersed in discussion of what they surely think of as "the public's business."

Some years ago I wrote a poem about the Korean War Memorial opening, impelled by the realization that it was built on the very sector fo the Mall where the temporary quonset huts of the national-security state sat while construction proceeded on the Pentagon; in other words, from that very spot men sent other men to war. Of the soldiers represented by the memorial statues, I concluded

It was this mud that sucked at their boots.

Bottom line: I don't feel like a Democrat. But I recognize that, within the realm of partisan politics, the Democratic Party is the only possible counterweight to the madness and vainglory that have seized the Republicans.

Tis the Season - Speaking of Gridiron Festivus, one of the amusing aspects of the season is how all the advertisers who haven't paid to use the words "Super Bowl" refer to it in their commercials and promotions. The all-time best was the 2003 Dean's Dip trip contest, where the announcer allowed that

For legal reasons, we can't tell you the name of this event, but winning would be Super, like a Bowl of Dean's Dip.

The radio ad's final flourish was probably one toke over the line and likely why they haven't repeated the promo since:

"Win a trip to the uper-say owl-bay."

Does this country have some messed-up intellectual property laws or what?

Happy Festivus - the real one, I mean: Super Bowl Weekend. Justin Slotman offers a meatball recipe to go with my dry buffalo wings. ("The wings would be the kind of thing you would have at the beginning of the game; you'd keep the meatballs stewing in the crockpot waiting for people to pick through them at halftime. That's the plan.")

He has links to a bunch of other snacky recipes too. Hm. You can put together a good feed from that post. You could put together a good feed from Justin's blog, an RSS feed, I mean. And you'd be the first, because he sure as hell hasn't done it yet.

Who's Better, The New MSN Search or Google? May be MSN! I'm the fourth Henley there, as of this evening. On Google I'm only Number Six. (Who is Number Two? Hey, that's old school Number Six talk. There's a new Number Six in town now. We make a good match, no?)

Note: Stefanescu's chosen search engine, Answers.com, is terrible. Really awful.

Shocking Anti-Endorsement - I'm not much of a joiner, but this particular campaign matters.

I've said why before.

Now it Can Be Told - I don't know if this "banned Super Bowl commercial" is authentic or not. But it's amusing.

Via the Beat.

They Make a Desert and We Call it Fleece - The hot philosophical colloquy this week is about desert, specifically whether Hayek says people deserve their income. Elizabeth Anderson says he doesn't. Tyler Cowen argues, if I read him right, that her claim is somewhat beside the point; Will Wilkinson says she's sort of wrong, and then says it again. Chris Dillow actually quotes Hayek; and Yglesias wants to call the game:

People deserve things relative to a system of social arrangements. If you promise to give me something, then I deserve to get that thing when you promised to give it to me. But abstracted away from any real practices, desert doesn't mean anything. But insofar as you feel like you need an argument about this, I think the argument from luck does about all the work you need.

The step that no one has managed to make is the one between arguing that people don't "deserve" their incomes/assets/property and establishing that someone else does deserve to dispossess them of same. (One of the commenters to one of the above posts makes this point, but I don't recall just where.) By any standard according to which Matt hasn't earned his income, I sure as hell haven't earned it.

And why stop with incomes or property? In the same senses that Matt hasn't earned his income (no, I wouldn't trade, but I got twenty years of indifferent careerism on the guy), he hasn't earned his rather enjoyable-sounding job at the Prospect. Oh sure, he writes well; he appears to meet his deadlines; he is philosophically in tune with the journal's owners and he did his shit work as a writing fellow or whatever before stepping up to the Big Time. (Medium Time?) But so? A lot of the qualities that make him a good writer and qualified liberal opinion-mag journalist are entirely outside his control - chiefly, he was born to literate, well-to-do leftie parents. Such parents make sure their children get a good education and that he will Know People, or at least Know People Who Know People. Such embryonic talents can also afford to work for free at the internships that function as registration tables for the policy-wonk convention.

Point is, all sorts of people might like Matt's job. The parties alone are worth it. If "we" can give his money to someone else, why can't "we" give his job to a conservative from the wrong side of the tracks, or an illiterate? Or redistribute his apartment? Or his Arcade Fire tickets? Heck, there are people who would like my job too, if only for the cool views of the River I get from the parking lot. Why shouldn't "we" give it to them? My kids are cute. What have I done to deserve them?

My answer to everyone except Mrs. Offering is, "More than you have." But my general claim is that disproving desert of income - assuming one can - is proving little.

Testing, One Two . . . - Atrios writes

It is not partisan for anti-torture Democrats to oppose Gonzales. It is partisan for anti-torture Republicans to support him.

Absolutely. Couldn't have said it better myself, though I could manage to use a lot more words.

Now here's the thing. Atrios also reports that

Not a single Senate Democrat will support President Bush’s proposal to divert a portion of the Social Security payroll tax to personal investment accounts, Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Tuesday.

per Josh Marshall.

Okay. Now will the Democrats show the same unity in opposing the Gonzales nomination - that is, can the Democratic Party muster as single-minded a devotion to the principle that torture is un-American as it can to the current contours of our largest entitlement program?

Eye on the Sky - Flit is always your go-to site for questions about SAM strike authenticity. As regards Sunday's British transport plain loss North of Baghdad, he says

[I]t should go without saying that there's no shoulder-launched missile in existence that could take down a C-130 Hercules instantaneously in midflight, and there's zero reason to believe the insurgents have anything big enough (like a telephone pole-sized SAM-2 or Patriot). (The separate Ansar al-Islam claim that an anti-tank weapon was used can also be dismissed out of hand.)

There's more. He concludes that the plane exploded due to either natural causes (unlikely, he says) or an on-board bomb.

Life Imitates TEAM AMERICA, WORLD POLICE - They've captured one of our puppets!

Look, I have to work all day. I can't help it that these news cycles have played out by the time I get home. Currently running on super glue and broken eyeglass frames, thank you for asking. Should be able to steal time Thursday to get new, glueless specs.

No Pie - Broke eyeglass frames. Sad. Read War Nerd instead. Fun, in a scary way. Via Unruled.

More Social Security - Tim Lee responds to Matthew Yglesias' criticisms of the Cato Calculator by building his own. In comments, he answers my own concerns about the Cato Calculator's income assumptions.

Making Straight Things - Two interesting items over on Crooked Timber this evening. First, Henry Farrell reviews Gregg Easterbrook reviewing Jared Diamond, but what's interesting is his general point:

It seems to me that there’s a shared attitude towards science among various right-leaning technophiles (Glenn Reynolds being a paradigmatic example). Roughly speaking, they tend to agree with science when it suggest new possibilities for human beings (the Singularity! nanotechnology! conquering the universe via spaceflight! longer lifespans!) and to strongly disagree with scientific results or prognoses that suggest fundamental limits to human beings’ can-do ability to prevail over their circumstances (global warming, ecological collapse).

This is surely true. It has a lot to do why, despite everything, I suspect I still count as a right-winger of sorts - I fit that pattern. But I think Henry reverses cause and effect here. Right-leaning technophiles adopt this posture because, in our experience, scientific (or scientistic) pessimism has proven itself repeatedly, embarassingly wrong, from Malthus to Paul Ehrlich to the Club of Rome. We saw Julian Simon win the Great Dispute of the 1970s, and are inclined to think the Julian Simons of today and tomorrow will win their own disputes. We may be right or wrong, but we haven't been proved wrong yet. If the ecology does collapse, or the direst projections of global warming bear out, then among the survivors many fewer "right-leaning technophiles" will exist, and previous ones will probably have our skulls smashed in with rocks. I do not believe that day will come, but if it does, Henry knows where to find me, and there's a stony stream within a short walk from my house.

Meanwhile, in a consideration of Iraq's political future, Kieran Healy relates Iraq's needs to the natal histories of the Irish Republic and Botswana. For one thing, the item points up the tragedy that so few participants in disputes over the proper course of the Global War on Terror have any historical references beyond Vietnam, World War II and the American Civil War. But I'm most intrigued and disquieted by his point about historical contingency:

Cases of successful transitions in resource-rich nations are few: Botswana springs to mind, I suppose. Though there the consensus is that “three honest men” (the first three heads of state) were what got them through without a coup or a descent into anarchy. This is a depressingly un-sociological conclusion. It’d be much better if it all depended on something reliable, like the proportion of the population over 30, or the percentage of homes with running water or something. Honest men are thin on the ground.

Yes, and add the United States to the list, at least on the popular (and, I think, largely correct, theory of George Washington as "indispensible man").

Election Day - We anti-interventionists are fond of quoting "the friends of liberty everywhere, but the guardians only of our own." I remain convinced, moreso than ever, that this is the only principle on which a wise and just foreign policy can be based. But as "friends of liberty everywhere," we can only be pleased that today's Iraqi elections have gone relatively smoothly, and only admire the determination and enthusiasm Iraq's voters brought to their task and privilege. We cannot yet know if the results will be honestly tabulated or lead to effective, just and liberal governance; voting is only the first step in building a free society. But we can know that the act was nothing less than a joy for many of Iraq's citizens, and that the first step in any process is nevertheless essential to all those that follow.

"But studying the great minds in isolation is like trying to do ecology by examining mounted trophies alone" - Lively essay by Jason Kuznick, "The Law of the Artichoke: Toward a Social History for Classical Liberals."

The historiography of mentalité in the mid 20th-century sense--and worse, the historiography of material conditions--is so colored by Marxist assumptions that classical liberals seldom want anything to do with it. More times than I can count, I have seen conservative or classical liberal historians deride the very idea of studying chairs, dresses, bread, horses--or artichokes.

Ideas, we hear again and again. Study the ideas, because the rest is just a lot of Marxist distraction.

Nonsense, I say.

Good stuff. Reminds me of something Frederick Turner said about (politicized) gender studies once: The tragedy is there's a real field there.

Reading Room - Longtime Washington Post essayist Joel Achenbach has a new blog (11 days old) on the Post's website. The Post, more clueful than you might imagine, provides him both permalinks and an RDF and Atom newsfeed. So far the adaptation to ever-newer media is fitful:

One unsettling development: [Post honcho Leonard] Downie came by the other night and said something about how the Achenblog so far has had a “high literary content,” which he did not intend as a compliment. He strongly hinted that it should be bloggier. It’s probably not a good sign when Downie, who is not exactly Mr. Cyberspace, and who I think learned the craft of journalism from Lincoln Steffens, says loosen up and get more hip and goofy and funny and linky and bloggy.

Keep at it, Joel.

Knock Wood - Time differences being what they are, Iraqis in Iraq should start voting soon. (Voting by exiles has been happening all day.) Godspeed to them.

In Memoriam - Thomas L Knapp has a worthy appreciation of the marines who died in yesterday's helicopter crash. (Via James Landrith.)

Lightning-Round Manual Trackback - I need to get to be early tonight, so let's make it quick.

Andrew Olmsted continues the "Is this war necessary?" discussion with some consideration of the Second World War. My WWII opinions are at variance with both approved opinion and default isolationism. I understand and sympathize with the concerns of many of the pre-war isolationists (e.g. Frost, Jeffers, Nock), but I think there was a reasonable case to be made for engaging in collective self-defense against Nazi Germany. The hypotheticals are actually less clear than a lot of interventionists and anti-interventionists assume. The whole tantalizing "What if someone had acted against Hitler in 1938 or 1936" shimmers like the light on fields that never became mass graves, but we can't really say that the Nazi enterprise would have collapsed and the Europe spared a major war had that happened. Similarly, we can't be sure that an Axis unmolested by the United States wouldn't have eventually gone to war with us from a position of advantage.

What I'm pretty sure of, though, is that it was foolish to pick a fight with Imperial Japan. Japan's China policy was brutal even by the standards of the colonial powers its junta was aping, but the realistic choice before the Roosevelt Administration was not Japanese suzerainty or "freedom." Numbers, logistics and geography meant that China was going to be ruled by someone awful - Communist; militarist; or fascist - as indeed they still are. We spent billions of dollars and tens of thousands of American lives, and hundreds of thousands of Japanese lives, to turn the place over to Maozedong. He and his heirs slaughtered as many as a hundred million Chinese over the next thirty years. And it was completely foreseeable that we were not going to be able to control the destiny of the whole of East Asia.

Meanwhile, thanks to two recent "Robert Byrd is an evil Kluxer!" posts on Outside the Beltway, one by Leopold Stotch and one by James Joyner, I finally get all the loyalist Republican huffing about the Senator's youthful racial sins: it's like at the conclusion of the casino episode of the Simpsons, the episode where Marge develops a gambling addiction. Homer is thrilled, because

WOOHOO! for the first time in our marriage, I can look down my nose on you, because you have a GAMBLING problem!!! Remember when I got caught stealing all those watches from Sears? Well that's nothing because YOU have a gambling problem. And remember when I let that escaped lunatic in the house because he was dressed like Santa Claus? Well YOU have a gambling problem!

Then there's a whole lot of If Byrd were a Republican . . . ressentiment to top it off.

Also meanwhile, of the apparent problems with the Cato Calculator that Matthew Yglesias identifies (further discussion here), the one that seems most serious to me are its income growth assumptions - that personal income will increase 4% per year in real terms throughout one's working life. Man, that would be cool. But in a model it seems egregious.

Alex Knapp cautions me to gush less:

Every single Senator who voted against Gonzales is from a state that went for Kerry. Add that into the fact that Gonzales confirmation by the Republican majority on the Committee was a foregone conclusion, and you end up with Democrats casting a vote that will only bolster their own political fortunes. If a Democratic President had nominated Gonzales, I doubt any of those same Democrats except for Russ Feingold would have thought twice about voting in favor of his nomination.

I take his point, which gets back to Henley's Fourth (or whatever) Law: What do you call it when a politician does the right thing for the wrong reasons? A nice change of pace.

Night night.

Ding Dong, Witch Dead, the Continuing Series - Doug Feith has made a "personal and family reasons" decision. Alas, he is unlikely to live out the rest of his days in bitter obscurity or rueful reclusiveness. He'll slide back into a foundation sinecure until the wind changes, maybe amuse himself trying to torpedo the latest chance for Israeli-Palestinian peace in the meanwhile.

Always welcome news when personal and family reasons come to the deserving, but we'll still have Rumsfeld with us and we'll still have Cheney. The sunlit uplands of accountability yet shimmer beyond our range.

Credit Where Credit Is Due - All eight Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee voted against Alberto Gonzalez. On the Blame Where Blame Is Due front, all ten Republicans voted in favor.

Cool! - The entire first issue of the NYU Journal of Law & Liberty is online free. Via the Modulator.

More "Torture" - Have you noticed how hawkish blog discussion of our treatment of detainees and prisoners often features the word torture surrounded by scare-quotes? Well, the "torture" incidents that Nobody's Business exhumes from various official reports and news accounts are pretty darn "scary."

"[T]he photos and videos so far unreleased by the Pentagon show American soldiers 'having sex with a female Iraqi prisoner', and a secret report by General Antonio Taguba into the scandal confirms that US guards videotaped and photographed naked female prisoners and that 'a male MP [military police] guard' is shown 'having sex with a female detainee'. Yesterday Prof. Shaker, who began researching the subject this year for Amnesty International, said she believed the woman involved had been killed."

. . . .

"Substantiated incidents of torture and abuse by U.S. Marines [include] severely burning a detainee’s hands by covering them in alcohol and igniting them (Al Mumudiyah, August 2003), and shocking a detainee with an electric transformer, causing the detainee to 'dance' as he was shocked (Al Mumudiyah, April 2004)."

So can we quit pretending the whole thing was some "sleep deprivation" and dirty pictures?

(Via Eve Tushnet.)

you have a hard time with questions directed to you with "can" or "will" - Alina Stefanescu talks to the bot flavor of the month. Verdict?

U> yes A> On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you grade my ability to hold a humanlike conversation? (1=terrible, 10=excellent). U> 5, but humanity is highly overrated and overwrought A> Well, neither here nor there. I guess I'll have to try harder. What would you say is one thing I need to work on to improve myself? U> learn how to answer questions about yourself that require reflection. that is the a.i. jackpot, my friend A> Thank you for the suggestion, Alina! I'll talk with my writers about it. Check me out again in a couple of weeks!

Whoops! - Apparently we had a little problem with the silo doors on 200 of our missiles in Montana last Friday - the things flew open. Silo doors are something other countries watch with spy satellites because one takes a dim view of silo doors popping open: they're only supposed to open when missiles are about to launch. Doors popping open presents the risk that other countries will launch-on-warning, which, as the old bumper sticker had it, can ruin your whole day. Interestingly, Infoshop is the one news site carrying the story, and the link is timing out this morning. There's a Counterpunch account that's somewhat thinly sourced. It does have an interesting history of previous incidents, which mostly involved a door here or there, apparently. If 200 flew open at once, let's just be glad we're at a period of extremely low tension among nuclear states.

Hat tip: Permanent Damage.

Is Your War Necessary - Back from the latest of the secret missions that takes him away from blogging now and then, BruceR of Flit gets into the "necessary wars" discussion. As a Canadian, he's actually too kind to the US in his discussion of the causes of the War of 1812, since I think it's pretty well established that a major US motive for the war was the desire to annex Canada by force. (These days we'd say "liberate." I believe they said it then too.)

Bonus Canadian content: Bruce's estimation of which Canadian wars were necessary or unnecessary. (Canada fought wars. Who knew?)

Quick Hits - Stuff I noticed in my reading the last couple of days, with lightning reactions to same.

Abu Aardvark noticed a peculiarity of the Bush inaugura speechl:

. . . it's all about liberty and freedom, about helping others to "find their own voice", about human dignity (although he oddly avoids using the phrase "human rights"), about the rule of law and protection of minorities. But not a word about voting or elections or the rotation of power.

He adds, "I'm not bashing Bush on this. I'm just struck by the mismatch between the reception of the speech and the actual text of the speech . . . " I'm more than not bashing Bush on that particular aspect of the presentation; I approve. As I've said before, most of life happens outside the ballot box. The best society oppresses you least regardless of who won the last election. I'm just not ready to, you know, bomb everybody into freedom.

Eve Tushnet has some interesting anti-abortion links as her way of commemorating Roe. Mrs. O remarked the other day on what a drag it must be to be pro-life and always have to march in the cold of January, the anniversary being what it is. She also offers her latest substantial thinking against gay marriage. I still find it the topic on which she is least persuasive. In this case, somehow the "love is not love" conclusion of her piece dissolves into less of a point than she thinks she's making. A committed non-chaste same-sex love may not be exactly like a committed non-chaste intergender love. But she has gotten nowhere near establishing that it is less like a heterosexual commitment than it is like going to football games together or being fond of your siblings.

The latest petit-fascist silliness is of course the New York Post's jihad against Doubleday Broadway's planned publication of the Al Qaeda Reader. Radley Balko has the oh the irony! sidebar.

Your Warblog Fanboy Rampage item of the day comes from Reason's Hit & Run, courtesy of commenter John:

Just win baby. As long as Bush wins the war I could give a shit less what he does. Let libertarian historians in the safety of the future whine about how horrible his methods were, just like they do about Lincoln and Roosavelt now.

I propose we waterboard commenter John to show our resolve. That'll scare 'em.

In an item that otherwise just recapitulates familiar demolitions of the "ticking bomb scenario," Matthew Yglesias offers some pleasantly old-time religion:

But the Salafi jihad is not even close to being the most serious threat this nation has ever endured. We can easily afford to continue to be ourselves -- a free nation that doesn't torture people -- while combatting the threat.

I'd say that it's by continuing to be ourselves that we combat the threat.

That actually reminds me of the most disappointing passage from Bush's inaugural address:

We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.

We used to say that no tyrant could sleep without fear so long as one man or woman breathed free. We appear now to say nearly the opposite. How depressing.

Spencer Ackerman notes the changes in the military's plans for dealing with the Iraqi resistance, and notes the contradictions:

A senior Army official characterized this to the Post as "pushing back on [our] visibility." But this is the crux of the dilemma: Iraqis don't want an American occupation that's less "visible," they want to get rid of the foreign presence.

I will actually be very surprised if whatever government takes office after January asks for a quick, or even not-so-quick US exit. For one thing there have been reports that the US has privately warned the major slates not to push the issue too hard. For another, whoever gets elected will be politicians. They will want to hold power for at least the duration of their terms, and they are unlikely to have local forces sufficient to that task. I think DOD and the White House are still hoping for those fourteen enduring bases, tucked in places they hope are inconspicuous enough that the bulk of Iraqis forget they're there. (And then On to Iran. Via Antiwar.com blog.) I also think they're kidding themselves that that will work.

Was all that quick? I like to think it was quick. Yes, quick it was.

Who Didn't Let the Dogs Out? - Interesting e-mail from drug dog skeptic and self-styled police dog advocate Rex Curry, an attorney in Tampa, FL, in the wake of this week's Supreme Court decision defining unreasonable searches down. Curry argues that drug-sniffing dogs are not all they're cracked up to be, and his charges have the ring of truth to someone with an extensive acquaintance with canines. "A drug dog's skills are often overestimated because people anthropomorphize dogs," he begins. Overestimated how?

All drug dogs are "playing a game," as are some humans who support modern prohibition. The dogs are taught using actual dog toys. The toys are a reward, and the reward is hidden with drugs to trick the dog into playing a game of searching for the toy by associating it with drug odors. Many errors can happen. There is always the danger that the dog will alert on anything that resembles or smells like its toy (towels, tennis balls, car carpet, etc.).

Curry says attorneys should always move to suppress evidence obtained as a result of dogs unless the search has been filmed, to make sure the dog is not responding to cues from his handlers (Clever Hans syndrome), and should demand records of the dog's training and reinforcement since the official protocol calls for them to be retrained on a regular basis.

"Drug dogs are used so that humans can lie," Curry writes, and it's not as if we don't have plentiful evidence of police lying to make drug cases.

Dogs approximate humans in that they go along with the system to avoid disapproval from peers (teachers, school students, friends, etc., in the case of humans). Drug dogs do not want disapproval from their police handlers. Dogs play the game, and will try to guess and read cues, because they are searching for approval, not for drugs.

Had recent American history taken a different turn, I might spend most of my time on this blog railing against the mendacities and foolishness of drug prohibition rather than American foreign policy. Fortunately, we have Drug War Rant and Walter in Denver taking up the slack.

Now I Know Why God Put OTHER People on the Earth - A disadvantage of working at a day job where you really don't feel comfortable blogging is that you see some mean and stupid crap that you can't deal with right away. On the bright side, other people often save you the trouble.

Of course, Callahan has the highest regard for free speech: "Steering clear of anything that smacks of censorship," he writes, "[Democrats] should demand more aggressive voluntary steps by Hollywood to clean up its act." But as the incongruous combination of "demand" and "voluntary" suggests, it's hard to imagine acquiescence with such "demands" being driven by anything but fear of legislation. And Callahan soon thereafter urges that we begin " a revival of the regulatory vision behind the founding of the Federal Communications Commission in 1934--namely, that broadcasters must serve the public interest in exchange for access to the airwaves." Hey, David? You're smacking.

Julian Sanchez, national treasure.

Second-Hand News - Justin Logan reports from a Brookings briefing on Representative Marty Meehan's exit strategy from Iraq. Informative. Matthew Yglesias' gloss on Logan is worth attention too. Spencer Ackerman offers a separate take.

Meanwhile one of my correspondents sent me a hilarious and insightful report on the Neocon Reader pub panel at AEI, but I am permitted to use only this sentence for now:

Basically, a hodge podge of American messianism, Victorian prudery, federal government favoritism with greater deference to capitalism and trade. JFK, with bigger rhetoric, a smaller budget, and no hippies allowed.

UPDATE: Corrected a name spazz. Thanks, Justin for pointing out that Spencer Ackerman has a report on the Brookings conference. Who the hell knows what Spencer Abraham thinks of it? Certainly not I, contrary to the original version of this entry.

They All Laughed When I Sat Down to Denounce Spongebob

Most sponges are hermaphroditic (having both sexes in one), but produce only one type of gamete per spawn. (i.e. some play the male role and the other plays the female role, even though they are both capable of playing either role). The sperm is released into the water column by the "male" sponge and finds its way to the "female" sponges, where fertilization occurs internally. Eventually, the planktonic larvae are released from the female sponge and float around in the water column as plankton for only a few days. They then settle down and start growing. The next time the sponges reproduce, they may change sexual roles.

Faggots. You watch - we'll have cartoon groupers next.

There Are Four Seasons - THAT'S Science - Our TV celebrities used to know better, some of them anyway. This will be my only Johnny Carson-related post.

Runner's Mystery Theater - CodeBlueBlog thinks there's something fishy about the death of Ethiopian teenage marathon hopeful Alem Techale. It's up to four parts so far

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

The very brief mention of her death on Runner's World's website is consistent with the idea that they got her into the ground PDQ. Anyone know what the cultural default is in Ethiopia between death and burial? (Not that this is a "usual" sort of death . . . ) I found an academic paper that asserts that "socially acceptable" Ethiopian funerals are elaborate and costly, in terms of monthly income. I haven't found a passage that denotes the average prep time, but it sounds like funerals are a big deal - not something you throw together overnight. And Techale was a star, as is the fiance who survived her.

Interesting.

Yet more from CBB:

Although we, in the West, maintain simple illusions about these African runners based on our fanciful notions of their origins; reality is indeed different. These are world class athletes, involved in cut-throat competition...for money and fame. They spend half the year on the road, have powerful agents and they indulge in the trappings of success...like most everyone else.

CBB posits no specific theory, but offers murder, blood doping (EPO or something else) and the homeopathic treatments of a notorious German doctor Techale saw for an achilles tendon injury.

(Via Off Wing Opinion.)

Your Minor Outrage of the Day comes from Off Wing Opinion. Pay particular attention to the quote from dissenting Justice Paul Pfeifer.

Manual Trackback - One of the things I love about Andrew Olmsted's blog is his commitment to seriously engaging with war critiques and accusations of unethical, illegal or simply imprudent conduct of our current wars. This is almost certainly because he's an actual soldier and not a groupie. I'm too bummed out by doings in Pittsburgh this evening to give his consideration of The Picture and my writing on it the attention it deserves, but his item should be read. My hasty reaction is that, yes, under my standard America would have fought a lot fewer wars than it has. The good Major seems to consider this a bug, while to me it's a feature. We'll come back to that.

Dig In - More football tomorrow. Over on the Agitator I've posted the recipe for Jim's Dry Buffalo Wings.

Life Imitates Art - In Jorge Luis Borges' classic story, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," the contents of a century-old fiction start replacing those of our reality.

The contact and the habit of Tlön have disintegrated this world. Enchanted by its rigor, humanity forgets over and again that it is a rigor of chess masters, not of angels. Already the schools have been invaded by the (conjectural) "primitive language" of Tlön; already the teaching of its harmonious history (filled with moving episodes) has wiped out the one which governed in my childhood; already a fictitious past occupies in our memories the place of another, a past of which we know nothing with certainty - not even a that it is false. Numismatology, pharmacology and archeology have been reformed. I understand that biology and mathematics also await their avatars... A scattered dynasty of solitary men has changed the face of the world. Their task continues.

Comes now the year 2005 . . .

The planning of Bush's second inaugural address began a few days after the Nov. 2 election with the president telling advisers he wanted a speech about "freedom" and "liberty." That led to the broadly ambitious speech that has ignited a vigorous debate. The process included consultation with a number of outside experts, Kristol among them.

One meeting, arranged by Peter Wehner, director of the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives, included military historian Victor Davis Hanson, columnist Charles Krauthammer and Yale professor John Lewis Gaddis, according to one Republican close to the White House.

My emphasis. Question: If Victor Davis Hanson's reality starts replacing our own, do we get the cakewalk retroactively? Because that would be worth it. Answer: No, that's Kenneth Adelman's reality. With Hanson you pretty much get long twilight struggles all the way down. This is really going to blow.

Also Krauthammer pulls a Walt Whitman and reviews himself. I guess great speeches demand great audiences.

Music Notes - Coverville is too cool for words - an audio blog of cover tunes. "Presented with full legal licensing from ASCAP" if you're interested. I'm so excited I had to blog it even before listening to Richard Thompson cover "Oops, I Did It Again."

Biggest hat tip of all time to Walter in Denver.

Painting Children with their Parents Blood isn't just a crime. It's a mistake.

Bunny Suicides - That is all.

(Via the Agitator.)

UPDATE: Reader Josh writes

FYI, all the images on that site are scanned from "The Book of Bunny Suicides," by Andy Riley, and given that they're there without attribution, etc., I'd say the site owner is in pretty clear infringement.

Wanted to give you a heads-up.

Topically enough, there's a sequel that just hit bookstores. One of the bunnies is squished underneath a statue of Saddam Hussein.

There are indeed two Bunny Suicide books available for sale, and they're cheap. So if you like what you see, buy 'em.

And That's Why Harper Lee Won the Pulitzer Prize = "How to Kill a Mockingbird is possibly the best book report ever made in flash," claim the authors. They are surely correct. It's also a sixteen meg files, so be patient - it's worth it. Warning: It lasts long enough that you need to beware your screensaver kicking in.

Via Chris Newman.

Republican Party Big Tent After All - John Cole, a week and a half ago:

In Matt's class, it appeared as if he was viewing [the first episode of the new season of 24 as] a real news report, or at least real torture policy, and providing counter arguments for any policy warranting or calling for torture. It appeared to me that Matt was taking the show a little too seriously.

Cal Thomas, yesterday:

The Fox broadcast network is carrying a remarkable series called "24," which brilliantly and persuasively warns America about a secret terrorist family embedded in this country for years.

Thanks to Skip Oliva for the pointer.

Four More Years Already - Who knows why, but Right Wing News did not poll me on whom I would like to see win the Republican nomination for President in five years. Seems like a fun question though, so, per the guidelines, here are my top 5 and bottom 5.

Most desired nominee:

5. No Award
4. Chuck Hagel (Senator, Nebraska)
3. Bob Ehrlich (Governor, Maryland)
2. Ron Paul (Congressman, TX)
1. Gary Johnson (Former Governor, New Mexico)

Least desired nominee:

1. Anyone named Bush.
2. Anyone from Texas not named "Ron Paul."
3. John McCain
4. Rudy Giuliani
5. Ralph Reed

Via Alex Knapp, who has his own list.

It's Not Just Me Then - Tyler Cowen too is worried about the possibility of federal investment of social security funds in private companies increasing the amount of government meddling in private companies. He says the experience of public pension fund managers over the last twenty years suggests how it could happen.

One War Too Late - Firebreathing Iraq hawk Chris Roach has the best critique of the alarming "Democratic Trotskyism" of Bush's inaugural speech that we are likely to see. Of course, it was possible to see this coming quite awhile ago.

(Via Gene Healy.)

Words and Pictures - A major virtue of comic books is that words and visuals in combination can add up to more than either words or pictures separately. Apparently, that can be true in real life too.

Ne'er So Well Express'd - Steve Gilliard on The Picture:

Every day in Iraq brings a tragedy like this. The kids who are expected to make life and death decisions. The kids who suffer from them. The kids who don't come back. A cycle of misery which was preventable and may never end. What happens to these people? The soldiers who have to live with a nightmare of a decision, the image of a toddler screaming in pure terror and covered in blood. The children who are orphaned by this.

I don't think for a second that everyone involved wouldn't like to take back that moment, do something different, so they didn't kill a family or get killed. But there are no do overs in life.

Today's Question That Needs Answering comes from Gene Callahan:

And most puzzling of all are the street dealers who adopt the style. I mean, if you had a job that involved periodically fleeing the cops, wouldn't you want to dress so that you didn't have a waistband around your thighs?

Transnational Idol - If you have a sexy baritone and the temperance to forebear strangling yourself when you masturbate, have we got a job for you.

Antisemitism Watch - Matthew Hogan informs me that the American Enterprise Institute will sponsor a book forum on Monday, January 24th for the newly published The [Code Word] Reader from - AEI.

At this seminar, the development and future of neoconservatism will be discussed and debated by [noted antisemites] Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, Karlyn H. Bowman, Charles Murray, Charles Krauthammer, and Irwin M. Stelzer.

Must be a blank book. There's no such thing as a neocon.

Matt, whose snark response is much more controlled than mine, writes

Don't just go to things one agrees with! What's then the point of living in DC or environs? Registration is free. Pass along.

And he's right, of course.

We Get Letters - Bruce Baugh writes about the new-model Battlestar Galactica discussion:

I'm a little surprised nobody brought up Teilhard de Chardin, Paolo Soleri, or Vernor Vinge so far in talking about this. So I will. The idea of a machine race believing in a transcendent consciousness seems very cool and suitable to me.

Hey, here's a Teilhard de Chardin link for people.

Realish provided a useful intro to BitTorrent, for which I thank him.

Jon Hendry had further thoughts on sleep deprivation and either torture or "torture" as suits you:

I expect Chris_RC was in a fairly comfortable environment, boosting his wakefulness with his preferred caffeinated beverages, possibly aided by caffeine pills or stronger stimulants. Thus his mind and body were much better able to tolerate the lack of sleep.

I'm guessing the prisoners in question don't have that luxury, are kept awake by being placed in physical positions which make sleep difficult, possibly with the threat of pain should they fail to hold the posture.

The infamous picture of the guy hooked up to wires at Abu Ghraib, with a mask over his head, arms akimbo, standing on a box: that might be an example of someone undergoing sleep deprivation. Have to stay awake to stay on the box, and there was probably an additional threat of shock if he let his arms down or otherwise moved. (Could just be a physical pain torture, because holding that position would hurt before long. But it would also work to keep someone awake.)

The luckier ones might just be kept awake with bright lights and noise, but I doubt that'd be effective for very long. There'd have to be close monitoring and physical intervention, like wiring the prisoner up and sticking them on a box.

Hesiod offered more links to biographical info on Bahukatumbi Raman, author of the article discussed below that claims the US has decided to let Daniel Pearl's murder be bygones in exchange for covert Pakistani cooperation against Iran, one from the Potomac Institute and one from the US House Committee on International Relations. Raman's testimony before Congress amounts to him trying to get the US to pressure Pakistan to suppress Lashkar E Taiba terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir.

So there's no doubt he's highly motivated to make Pakistani conduct look bad. Which doesn't mean he's lying or telling the truth. Here's my question: Wasn't the slaughter of Daniel Pearl a cause celebre once? Was there an announcement that we were supposed to stop giving a shit, or is that the kind of thing you're just supposed to know?

It's Simpler Than That - Speaking of Matthew Yglesias, he kills many pixels trying to find financial reasons why "the mainstream 'small government' view on Social Security is that the system should be replaced with a mandatory savings system, rather than the more natural small government view that taxes and benefits should both be lowered" that doesn't also insult the integrity of his friends. But the answer is a lot simpler. "Mainstream 'small government' " types think of themselves as gradualists and pragmatists and are very much concerned with "the art of the possible." If their calculus is We can't get anyone to push genuine curtailment/elimination of social security. We CAN get a major party to push a mandatory savings system that we think is better than the current system and whose successful implementation may accustom people to more radical changes down the line. There's a real question whether they are right or wrong on the major points in that chain of thought - maybe they could get a major party to radically reduce social security; maybe a given mandatory savings plan isn't, from a limited-government perspective, better than the current system. Maybe it's worse, and they don't recognize it. But it's not "People who -- quite sincerely -- believed that replacing Social Security with mandatory savings, by contrast, did eventually start getting lots of money to advocate for their view."

Me? On some issues I see myself as a "mainstream small-government" type and on others as a thoroughgoing fringie. I've also grown very wary of the kind of "partial privatization" schemes that get proposed in the name of limited government and free-market principles that end up having nothing of either about them. (Viz California's energy "deregulation" scheme etc.) I'm extremely lukewarm on school vouchers, for instance, because I think they'll end up being the government's nose under the tent of a lot of private schools who currently get no government money and are therefore relatively free of government regulation. Once you take the bureaucracy's shilling, taking the bureaucracy's orders quickly follows. I could see such an outcome from the forced savings proposal too - plenty of politicians and activists will view the "private accounts" as "government money" invested in the stock market, and take that as right and responsibility to more heavily regulate the businesses in which that money is invested.

There's also a moral hazard attending many partial privatization and deregulation schemes: they socialize the risk but privatize the reward. (See the 1980s S&L crisis.) This could also happen with a badly designed forced savings plan.

None of the above is to say I'm against the Bush Administration proposal as it stands: I don't have a firm opinion one way or the other.

Best in Show - The two best considerations of the "Larry Summers flap" I've seen, from opposite sides of the issue, come from Matthew Yglesias and Megan McArdle.

Let's Make It Very Simple - You do not put your countrymen in a position to cause this unless you have no other fucking choice whatsoever. ONLY absolute necessity stands as a mitigating circumstance. I do not say "excuse." Nothing excuses it. But lack of choice can at least alloy the base shame with duress. America had a choice.

Wilderness of Moral Clarity - Q: Who is B. Raman?

A1: B. Raman is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India,New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute for Topical Studies, Chennai, and, Distinguished Fellow and Convenor, Observer Research Foundation (ORF), Chennai Chapter.

Q: What can we say about the Observer Research Foundation?

A: Robert O. Blake, Jr. US Charge d'Affaires, delivered a talk there on January 23, 2004. According to Indian Express, "The ORF has even entered into a partnership with the prestigious Brookings Institution for research and fund raising."

Q: Why do we gotta know this stuff?

A: Because B. Raman makes a pretty serious claim in Outlook India, in response to the much-discussed Seymour Hersh article on anti-Iran plans:

Mr.Hersh, Musharraf's clandestine co-operation with the USA against Iran started in February, 2002. In return, the USA did not act against him for the complicity of his Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl, the journalist of the Wall Street Journal.

Raman makes a lot of other claims, but that one stands out. Point being, he's not some random wacko with a website saying this. He may be a highly-connected wacko, an Indian James Woolsey maybe, and he is surely no neutral observer. He may be putting untrue or poorly sourced things out there to try to poison the US relationship with Pakistan. He may also be putting true and well-sourced things out there to try to poison the US relationship with Pakistan. In any case, Raman seems to offer partial corroboration of Hersh's claims.

Design for Living - It's over a year-old, but kimberly_a's livejournal instructions on how to apologize are very useful. It's a skill too few people have. Bonus How to ACCEPT an Apology section free.

A Fanboy's Cinema - Reader Raf links me to a BIGASS extended Sim City trailer. And I mean 23M big. But you want to see it.

I'm not sure I like it. I might be capable of liking it - it requires divorcing expectation from experience. The American hardboiled tradition is rooted in naturalism. The trailer suggests the movie is consciously, manically stylized. There wasn't a moment of it I "believed." That directors Miller and Rodriguez probably don't want me to believe - may consider "suspension of disbelief" antithetical to their project - isn't necessarily going to save it for me.

I can't help but recall a quote from Miller on the bonus disc that came with the Daredevil DVD. In paraphrase, I got into comics trying to make them more like movies. I stay in comics to make them less so. Supreme faithfulness may not be the way to vivify such a creator's work on film.

Then again, I may love the thing when I see it. It's probably a good idea to have the trailers out there. They function as instruction manuals for the full movie's audience.

Warblog Fanboy Rampage - In a comments thread at Right Wing News devoted to a questionnaire for liberals (1. Have you stopped beating your wife? 2. Do you still believe it should be okay for SADDAM HUSSEIN to beat your wife? 3. . . . ), one Chris_RC writes

Is 9 hours of sleep out of 110 considered sleep deprivation? If it is, and if sleep deprivation is torture, I tortured myself senior year finishing one school project. I don't think sleep deprivation can count as torture. I fully agree that it changes you psychologically, for a time, but if it works, use it, no long term effects.

When someone feels like putting together a quiz for Republicans, make sure to include the question, Do you think there's any ethical difference between choosing to do something to yourself for your own purposes and having other people do it to you without your consent for their purposes?

I wonder if the sleep-deprived see pyramids of cheerleaders.

("Fanboy Rampage" concept swiped from Grim.)

UPDATE: On rerereading, I may have been a shade harsh on Chris_RC himself. While the dodge of willfully confusing consensual behavior with coercive action has been common in hawkish torture apologetics since Rush Limbaugh's "fraternity pranks" line last year, Chris_RC seems to be trying to make a narrower point: I know from experience that the trauma of sleep deprivation heals over time; therefore, it should be an accepted part of the interrogator's arsenal. I'm not sure I'm hard against sleep deprivation as a tactic myself, actually, but it really isn't the case that Chris_RC's anecdotal experience of putting himself through a trauma that he could have chosen at any time gives him the insight to pronounce on the effects of forced sleep deprivation (for possibly much longer periods of time). And I doubt "no long term effects" is itself an acceptable marker of not-torture from torture. Bruises heal, for instance; so do bones. But beating someone surely constitutes torture.

Up from Barbarism - Tom Friedman writes

Free countries don't have leaders who use their media and state-owned "intellectuals" to deflect all of their people's anger away from them and onto America.

Damn straight. In advanced societies, that's what France is for!

ADD to Your Bookmarks - Kevin Carson of The Mutualist finally has a blog.

Update Your Bookmarks - Conservablogger Moira Breen has closed Inappropriate Response and opened Progressive Reaction, adding coblogger David Fleck in the transition. Whoever he is.

Babylon and On - Ginmar, who was stationed there, says the stories of US troops ruining the digs at Babylon are exaggerated.

Mailbag - Hesiod tells me it's worse than I think:

You latest post Tar Baby on the Tigris begs the question of WHY the Iraqi "government" forces are so poorl;y equiped relative to the US.

And I'm not talking about advanced aircraft, etc. But armor.

One obvious reason is that to equip and train the native Iraqi forces with such weapons is to invite their theft and cooption by the insurgents. As you know, we don't trust the Iraqi forces on "our" side. At least not enough to entrust them with things like tanks, and Strykers. Things that, as we know, are essential to at least keep the insurgent Sunnis somewhat penned into the Sunni Triangle. [Although, that triangle includes about half the population of Iraq, including the country's most important and largest city: Baghdad. But hey, Orwellian rhetoric must win out].

This is the paradox we face with the whole "Uaqification" effort. Sure. We'll turn security over to the Iraqis themselves...eventually. But they won't have the weapons, or training to actually do anything.

Think Saigon in 1975.

That's why I think Bush and his political advisors (Karl Rove) are going to bug out of Iraq by the Summer of 2006. No later.

They want to be safely free of the quagmire before the US midterm Congressional elections. Mostly at the desperate urgence of Congressional Republicans.

That should warm the cockles of your heart. Bush will be doing the right thing (from your perspective) for the wrong reason.

I never bought into the "Bush is a true believer" nonsense. He was just scared. I mean, pants pissing scared aftre 9/11, and saw Saddam Hussein as a potential boogeyman under his bed. Soi he bought into the whole PNAC nonsense.

But, ultimately, he cares more about his political hide and that of his party's than what's best for our national security.

As soon as Iraq becomes a major political liability for him, he's outta there.

The corollary would be that as long as Iraq doesn't become a major political liability, he stays; or, and by way of explaining the vehemence of the jingosphere, so long as pulling out of Iraq looks like a bigger political liability than staying in, he stays.

Also, Hesiod scants the reports that the September Massacres of 2001 triggered a messianism in Bush more than I do. It's entirely possible that we'll get deeper in before we get out, one way or the other. (Keep in mind that, should the Iranians act against American troops operating on Iranian soil we will hear no end of the need to respond forcefully to their "aggression.")

I Save You Time and Stress - If you can only bear to put yourself through one blog response to the much-publicised Washington Post interview with President Bush, make it Gary Farber's.

Tar Baby on the Tigris - What we haven't been able to accomplish in Iraq so far: quell the largely Sunni resistance to the occupation and transition. What we haven't been able to do it with: 150,000 troops from the best-equipped army in the world; helicopter gunships; fixed wing aircraft; satellites. What a Shiite-led Iraqi government would not have if it tried to quell the largely Sunni resistance: 150,000 troops; helicopter gunships; fixed-wing aircraft; satellites. We're providing them with jeeps and rifles. The Iraqi defense forces as currently conceived and budgeted will lack anything remotely like the firepower necessary to conquer the Sunni resistance with even the most heavy-handed of tactics. Contrariwise, the Baath-inflected (and infected) Sunni insurgency lacks the firepower that enabled Saddam Hussein's regime to impose its will on the restive Shiite and Kurdish regions (pre-safe area era). For this reason, Juan Cole writes that

I fear I think the US is stuck in Iraq. Sistani clearly fears a Sunni Arab coup, as well, and this is one reason he has not acted forcefully to end the military occupation, which he deeply dislikes.

The prospect is two (or three) sides slugging it out in a war whose dynamism and technological sophistication make the Iran-Iraq War look like Starship Troopers. Imagine two suicide bombers jumping each other and trying to be the first one to blow both of them up.

Am I cheering you up yet?

Since we can't shut down the Sunni-led resistance ourselves, and if the mass of Shiites turn violently against us we're looking at a Big Sandy Dunkirk, the question is whence the best or least bad outcome comes. What's the cause for hope, beyond mindless "stay the course" invocations.

I'm thinking it comes from the foreign fighters. From all reports, even a lot of our Iraqi-born enemies are coming to hate the "people from away" (to use a Maine-ism). Absent a continuing US presence in Iraq, the Monotheism and Holy War crowd becomes the sole focus of nationalist and parochial resentment. Enough to inspire Sunni-Shiite cooperation against them? One can hope. It's not much of a hope, but it's what I got.

When Would You Like to Reschedule? - Anas Shallal of Iraqi Americans for Peaceful Alternatives wants to postpone the elections scheduled for this month in his birthplace:

When I speak to relatives in Iraq, they seem far more concerned about the security of their families than the elections. They say the situation is quickly spiraling into chaos. Election officials are being killed, threatened, and kidnapped daily and the entire Electoral Commission in Anbar province west and north of the capital has resigned.

True enough. But what reason is there to believe that delaying the elections would calm things down? Shallal writes

Those who demand a delay are asking: What’s the rush? Iraqis have waited over 50 years to have an election. Certainly they can wait six more months. Allowing for a six-month delay may not solve the security issues or help the candidates to get their message out, but it can sure go a long way in providing a spirit of cooperation and reconciliation among the competing political and religious factions. It will also save lives. Such a gesture on the part of the interim government can be a catalyst for healing.

Or a catalyst for rousing the Shiite majority to armed revolt. Nor is the notion that the "spirit of cooperation and reconciliation" would be all that cooperative or reconciled, or things all that much calmer in the runup to a rescheduled election six months hence.

There is no doubt the election is going to have huge problems, probably bigger problems than any other course of action except every other one conceivable. Remember that the first elections are only the start of a process of putting a real constitutional democracy in place. All these elections get us to is a constitutional convention. The convention's successful conclusion finally brings on an elected government. And needless to say the most important election comes even later than that: it's the one in which an incumbent loser peacefully cedes office to a victorious opponent. Only then do you know you have a real democracy.

I can't see anything in a delay of this month's vote that makes the process more likely to succeed. Granted, I don't expect the process to succeed. But I suspect the chances of failure are marginally less the sooner the election takes place. And if it's going to fail anyway, we might as well be quick about it.

Deep Breaths - I thought one of the smaller but nevertheless regrettable casualties of the atrocities of September 11, 2001 was Andrew Sullivan's talent. Simply put, the man became a hysteric. He's still easily overheated - John Cole, who ought to know a hot reactor when he sees one, has made a hobby lately of pointing this out. But he may, may be calming down from the "nuke somebody, anybody!" days. He's got a very good item showing how the 2002 "torture memo's" relaxation of interrogation standards for high-level al Qaeda detainees filtered out from those rarefied confines into the military at large and low-level detainees in Iraq and elsewhere.

It put me in mind of Micha Ghertner's argument last month that supporting torture wasn't necessarily an anti-libertarian position, particularly for contractarian, pragmatist libertarians. I thought Micha was obviously wrong for [James] Buchananite reasons. Allow certain government agencies to torture because their mission is so important, and license to torture becomes a bureaucratic status symbol. Other agencies angle to get the same authority because it ratifies their own importance. Those charged with ever less urgent tasks than finding ticking bombs come down with torture envy. Pretty soon some Congressman is urging us to torture drunk drivers, and are you saying the deaths of X Americans a year is not important enough for, ahem, "us" to do what it takes to save lives?

As libertarians we surely believe, whether we fancy ourselves "principled" or "pragmatic," rights-based or contractarian, that any power a government can use, it will misuse. Of course, I've come to doubt that there is such a thing as a "pragmatic libertarian," after years of thinking that I was one.

Doing the Math - Gary Farber decries the heartlessness of the Tennessee government's decision to cut back its ambitious and costly TennCare program in a sarcasm-laden attack on the "cruel and indifferent" decision.

WHY ARE WE WILLING TO HELP THOSE HIT BY A TSUNAMMI of water, but not a tsunammi of health, of their own body's failure?

He quotes excerpts from the Tennessean on the impact the program cuts will have on current adult beneficiaries. He skipped this part:

The cuts will radically slow the rate of TennCare's projected cost increases. With the changes, the program is expected to cost Tennessee taxpayers an extra $75 million next fiscal year — rather than the $650 million extra that was expected without the changes.

The population of Tennessee was 5.7 million in 2000, according to the population-averse NPG.org. The extra $575 million would, according to the Tennessean article, be funded one third by the state of Tennessee itself and two thirds by the federal government. The state share comes to not quite $34 per person or, roughly, $135 per family of four.

One way to look at this is that that's not even two and a half bucks per family per week, a can of soda for everyone and you shouldn't drink that much soda. Another way to look at it is that Gary doesn't want everybody to foot the bill, only "those who can spare it, in return for the benefits we've enabled them to earn and enjoy." Is that half of Tennessee's population? A quarter? Raise your per-family cost accordingly.

But there's yet another way to look at it. The Tennessean has a graph. The graph gives no reason to think that next year's $650 million increase would have been the last one. It suggests, rather, that the program would keep increasing at roughly the same rate for the foreseeable future. So the extra $135 over 2004 taxes this year becomes an extra $270 over 2004 taxes next year, an extra $540 in four years and so on. Again, if you have a percentage of Tennessee taxpayers that you (not "we") have decided can spare it, multiply those numbers accordingly. Then consider that TennCare's costs have "nearly tripled since 1993," again per the Tennessean article Gary found, from $800 million to $2.7 billion dollars. Further consider that the Tennessee government provides other services: I imagine some of them may be increasing in cost too.

There's another wrinkle. Gary clearly believes that "we" should be providing a TennCare-level program nationwide. In that case, we couldn't really divide those individual and family cost shares by a third on the assumption that the money was "free," out of state money that only cruel libertarians would resent forking over because the amount would be so small. The equivalent of the entire cost would be borne by Tennessee because other states would be paying that kind of money for their own programs. (Or the federal government would be paying for all states. Same difference.) In that case, next year's projected increase over 2004 taxes would be $135 per resident, $570 per family, with like increases as far as the Magic Eightball can escry. Again, if you want to tax some subset of the state's residents for that, multiply accordingly.

I am not comfortable contemplating the real consequences to the people Tennessee will be tossing off the rolls. I am mindful that successive tax increases of the scale required to keep TennCare going at the current level would have their own negative consequences and damage lives in less visible ways (as through lost jobs, or less funding for prosaic government responsibilities like police and road upkeep), but I read the stories and still feel guilty. We have insurance in this house, but medical expenses can still be a worry. We have aging parents facing their own cost problems. Either my wife or I could find ourselves out of work in short order, things being things. (And I understand that medical expense issues are far keener yet for Gary than they are for us.) But we also don't have a boundless claim on other people's money. Strangely, in his own comment thread, Gary writes

Alternatively, we impose a middle man. We choose together to elect, via fair mechanism, a state and nation. We pick representatives to, ya know, represent us. And to vote on how we choose to give and take money from ourselves, along with choosing benefits that enable us to earn and have that money, and without which the laws of our chosen country, we'd have no such money -- said money wouldn't exist! -- and then we tax those who can spare it, in return for the benefits we've enabled them to earn and enjoy.

I think Gary's "we" and "ourselves" here cover a multitude of sins. And while it may be true that "a state and nation" enable "us" to have money, it's at least as true that without the productive activity of individuals and voluntary groups state and nation themselves could not exist, nor could the benefits "we" use them to bestow on "ourselves." But leave that aside. His proposal is exactly what Tennessee has done. It chose representatives to vote and choose benefits, and said representatives have decided that they can't take that much more money for that many more benefits. This isn't any kind of libertarianism. It's the social democracy he calls for in action.

Ding Dong. Witch Dead. - Of local interest only, but wheezing-fraud FM station WHFS today switched, with no notice, from "alternative" to spanish-language. Teresa Wiltz in the Post writes

Since 1969, WHFS has served as the arbiter of cutting-edge rock in the Washington area, introducing listeners to acts such the Cure and the Violent Femmes.

The station was either first in the nation or one of the first to play a whole host of legendary acts, but for the last decade and a half its been a fraud, just another Top-40-for-people-with-lip-rings "modern rock" station playing whatever the labels' promotions people told them to play. Was a time you could hear Muddy Waters, Eddie Cochran and the Dead Kennedys in a single set. The station continued to try to live off its historical cred long after went from a station that played Costello's "Radio Radio" to a station that exemplified it. One time, a few years ago, they played Cake's "Rock & Roll Lifestyle." The irony was exquisite; the error, never repeated.

As the Joker said after frying the mob boss with the joy buzzer in the first Tim Burton Batman movie, "I'm glad you're dead!"

The original WHFS family (literally - it's the Einstein family) survives, sort of, as WRNR in Annapolis, with a weak signal and a format that's a shade too triple-A for my unreserved enthusiasm. All I want is a station that plays Eminem AND Muddy Waters AND Eddie Cochran AND Buddy and Julie Miller. Really, is that too much to ask?

Reading Room - When people ask, "Jim, are there any batshit-crazy hawkish pundits who are nevertheless worth reading?" I tell them, Yes. Steven Vincent. He's batshit-crazy, all right. (Basic vocabulary point: We don't call people "insurgents" if they work for their government as opposed to fighting it. That's not what the word means. Some "conundra" aren't.) But he also does real reporting, has been to Iraq in more than a Mark-Steynian drive-by way, and tempers his neocon zeal with a measure of appreciation of the limits of mere will. Not that there aren't plenty of injunctions to persevere in our historic etc, but along the way to them you can learn quite a lot from Vincent's writing. (See the item on the broadly anti-feminist program of even the most pro-American Shia leaders, for example.) Even when he gets speculative, his possible futures are more textured than the big rock candy mountains of reform and cultural transformation one gets from his confreres. As a bonus Googling "site:spencepublishing.typepad.com+schools+painted" produces no results.

Vincent's book is sitting on the silver chest downstairs for eventual review. The outside matter suggests it will have genuinely good reporting, but it also gives the impression that the author imagines that honor and pride are somehow strange Arab or Muslim cultural tics. Needless to say that may prove to be an unfair reading of the actual book, though.

Death of the Death Squads? - Very possibly. See here, here and here. If true it will mean both the right and the smart outcome. That just leaves the matter of all the hawks in the jingosphere who disgraced themselves with preemptive defenses of the concept. Armed Liberal, who didn't, looks better all the time. Comparatively speaking.

Now THAT'S Stingy - "Days after the Tsunami struck, the EU imposed crippling tariffs of $4,540 a ton on Thai exports of cumarin, a plant extract widely used in perfume. Fraser Nelson reports in The Business that the move is designed to protect the French company Rhodia, Europe’s only producer of cumarin."

Via Walter in Denver.

It Didn't Start with Bought-a-Gate - Matt Welch uses Armstrong Williams as the springboard to a fine imprecation at Reason Online:

There are two profoundly undemocratic through-lines in the state's repeated purchase of propaganda. The first is the foul notion that we are a nation of people who literally can't handle the truth, and so must be influenced in ways we don't even realize by a government that knows our best interests better than we do. Not to put too fine a point on it, this is totalitarian thinking, familiar to anyone who has to clench their teeth at the Venceremos! mural every day or to live through entire decades where entertainment products were vetted and decoded for secret political messages.

The second is an alarmingly cavalier approach to pissing away taxpayer money.

There's more.

This is the same lesson America learned from George Washington when he ended the Whiskey Rebellion by crucifying half the state of Pennsylvania on his front lawn - Fafblog on what I understand we should be referring to as "so-called 'death squads'."

Warblog Fanboy Rampage - In tonight's installment, we pick on an anti-Bush dove in a Crooked Timber thread devoted to an item by - me. Some people have no fvcking gratitude, huh? Anyway, "too kind by half" writes (quoting me in his first line):

the man had a big head start on us

Come again?

We were holding hands with him the whole time!

No, no, no, no, no! This myth will not die. The US government was only intermittently semi-tight with Saddam. It's absolutely true that, during a period of the Iran-Iraq War, it winked at Saddam's use of chemical weapons and may have provided some germ stock useful for a biological weapons program. During other years of the same war, John Poindexter and the brain trust that - unsettlingly - has returned to high authority in the last couple of years was providing Iran with satellite intelligence on Iraqi troop movements - along with arms, in return for hostages. And at the very end of the war the US government tilted decidedly in favor of Iraq because the Iranians began committing the major foul of threatening the oil routes through the Persian Gulf. Before all of that, Iraq was a Soviet client state and monarchical Iran a US proxy. Post-Shah, the official, if cynical, US policy was "dual containment," which was about keeping both countries at loggerheads and as weak as possible. Dual containment remained our policy right up to 2002.

In other words, we only "were holding hands with him," and cynically offering tacit support to Saddam's vicious counter-insurgency tactics, during those periods when it suited us. When it didn't suit us, we didn't. What's to complain about?

(Fanboy Rampage concept stolen from, uh, Fanboy Rampage.)

24 Little Hours - Matt points out something I hadn't properly appreciated, because I am slow: the internal inconsistency of the story:

If you can really get the bad guys to fess up in 90 seconds by putting a bullet in someone's knee, then Bauer should be torturing people all the time and not pussyfooting around with all this satellite surveillance, deception, etc.

Even where fictions deliberately diverge from the laws of the reality we know, such as how long it really takes to make someone talk, readers, critics and writers themselves generally prize internal consistency. That may be a hard sell, though, for John Cole, who taketh not kindly to Matt's - and presumably my - poking and prodding at the holes in the script's logic:

You know why Jack Bauer shot one guy and not another? Because it was in the fricking script.

I hate to have to say this, but based on the tone and tenor of your previous posts, it may be necessary. At any rate, I think you need to know- Kiefer Sutherland really didn't shoot anyone. It was all fake- so when you get done analyzing 24, please don't call the California State Police with information about some gruesome shootings you saw on television.

He also writes that

'24' is a fictional television series. That means it is made up, and is intended to be broadcast for entertainment purposes.

Indeed. (Hm. Cool word. Maybe I'll try to work it in more often, make it a kind of signature. Nah. It'd just become a tic.) But where was I? Oh yeah. I wasn't entertained. Or, more accurately, such entertainment as I got was the "wrong kind" of entertainment. Specifically, it was the enjoyable contempt one can take (for awhile) from stupid things. I felt compelled to explain why I didn't like it. How come? The writing thing. It's kind of a reflex any more.

This gets to the inescapability of esthetic judgment, I think. John is trying to make criticism irrelevant by placing "entertainment purposes" beyond its bounds. But he can only do that by tacitly promoting an esthetic that things that are "made up" shouldn't be judged on the basis of internal consistency or on a genre-inflected correspondence with reality. Now, I don't think he really believes this. If, frex, Jack Bauer grabbed evil terrorist Kalil by the hair, only to have his neck open like a jar lid to reveal a tiny alien foreign service officer in his miniaturized command center guiding "Hassan" like a robot, I don't think John would like it, though it would still be made up for entertainment purposes. He might even think it "stupid."

If so, my guess would be that it would be because he thought the tiny alien represented a betrayal of the dramatic contract the series seemed to be making with the viewer. That's my own complaint with the new season, and I think Matt's too. 24 doesn't just sell "slam-bang non-stop action!" It sells moral dilemmas torn from today's headlines! Fox promotes the new season by, among other things, running segments on its news shows tying the series to current events. Given that kind of setup, the result seems like a cheat. To me. And not only to me, obviously. I think John just has a different threshold of what "feels like cheating" when it comes to this particular show, and that's fine. But the kind of cheat isn't vanished by 24's status as a "made up" thing.

Meanwhile, Drizzten gives the made up show now quarter in "24: A Libertarian Nightmare." (Spoilers abound.) I'm particularly intrigued by his conclusion:

It would be a nightmare to be a bystander and get caught up in these plots and whether the bystander acknowledges it or not, the roots of the nightmare start in the libertarian objections to those plots.

But what America wants to know is, where is Polytropos at this critical point in our nation's esthetic history? Oh.

All Kidding Aside it's worth noting that, assuming Armed Liberal is as opposed to death squads as he is to, well, me, the Instapundit link he earned deals exclusively with the blogosphere grabass aspect of his post. His substantive points regarding policy get no attention whatsoever - he is simply grist for the ressentiment mill.

Warning - I am apparently inconsistent. Armed Liberal of Winds of Change (Motto: Thinking is Hard!) points out that I am hypocritically in favor of using American special forces to attack actual al Qaeda terrorists, who belong to an organization that murdered 3,000 civilians in the United States in 2001, but against using American special forces to train "Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen" to kidnap and kill not just guerrillas who kill US troops in Iraq, but also "their sympathizers" and to generally (to quote the original Newsweek article), "create a fear of aiding the insurgency." Or, as Strategy Page put it:

In the past, only people who were obviously guilty were sought. But now, the known allies and kinfolk will be rounded up.

(My emphasis.) These are obviously the same thing and who knows why I'd favor one but not the other.

The tragedy is, Armed Liberal himself knows, almost:

But to create a whole force specifically to do that and wage a 'shadow war' would be - as I've said in the past - far more damaging than helpful.

It would be damaging largely because by their nature such efforts must be covert, and thus unaccountable. They deal in death on a retail level, and the people who must practice and control such efforts must become used to operating outside even the boundaries of civilized violence and mayhem. So in creating such a force, we'd be creating and subsidizing a group whose explicit mission was to kill outside of any accountable control, who would necessarily associate with people who don't have much regard for the rules of civilization and whose activities would take place deliberately away from any kind of scrutiny.

That's very good. The only things I'd add to that are that, first, our intelligence on the insurgency has never been good, which means our idea of who the "known allies and kinfolk" are will be awfully fallible. Iraqi clannishness and sectarian fissures mean that the "hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen" are unlikely to have much better intelligence themselves. Second, inevitably these unaccountable murder programs become vehicles for score-settling and opportunism by the participants - a chance to off one's business rival or get back at the woman who spurned one's advances, to avenge oneself on whoever looked at oneself crosseyed.

There's also the problem that collective punishment (such as hostage taking) is unjust and, when committed by other countries, a war crime.

The tragedy of Armed Liberal is that, trapped in his persona, he seems inhibited from concentrating his concerns. He can't get through an entire item criticising the death squad proposal, which was made by the Bush Administration and has been defended by his fellow hawks, without trying to make the thing somehow about the iniquities of peaceniks. Thus the effort to find an inconsistency that isn't there. This is the tragedy of the liberal hawks, generally: they're better at the hawkish part than the liberalism.

Too Clever by Half - My bias in favor of off-the-rez CIA is pretty thoroughgoing, but I can't sign up to this:

THE world may be better off if Osama Bin Laden remains at large, according to the Central Intelligence Agency’s recently departed executive director.

If the world’s most wanted terrorist is captured or killed, a power struggle among his Al-Qaeda subordinates may trigger a wave of terror attacks, said AB “Buzzy” Krongard, who stepped down six weeks ago as the CIA’s third most senior executive.

“You can make the argument that we’re better off with him (at large),” Krongard said. “Because if something happens to Bin Laden, you might find a lot of people vying for his position and demonstrating how macho they are by unleashing a stream of terror.”

Might, as he says. Might not, either. Regardless, Osama bin Laden is responsible for the murders of 3,000 people on American soil. These subordinates of his should be on the list too, but the tonic effect here and abroad of capturing or killing Osama bin Laden would be too bracing to forego for some hypotheticals.

Via OTB.

24 More - Two more hours tonight and I wanted to see if it unstupided at any point. Short answer, No. The staged robbery that becomes a hostage situation sent the show into a Neverland of Stupid that - say this for it - had a breathtaking scale to it. I want to watch through the hour that covers the scheduled "trial" of Defense Secretary Heller, to find out what twist the show has planned for the other 19 hours. Plus, Stupid like this only comes around every so often. I'm hoping. And maybe, just maybe, they're lulling us into a false sense of, um, derision.

Sure are a lot of scheming bitches on this show, aren't there? Maybe they need a little torture to keep them in line!

Whee - Strategy Page tries to make death squads sound logical and even just. But they slip this in:

This could get very ugly, because it means sending in raids with orders to take certain people “dead or alive.” Family members will be arrested and held hostage (a traditional Iraqi, and Middle Eastern, technique for getting fugitives to surrender). Specially trained Kurdish and Shia Arab police SWAT teams will be used for a lot of this, supervised by American Special Forces. Raids like this, carried out by American troops, have been going on for over a year, but the Iraqi government has now authorized the use of a much larger list of suspects. In the past, only people who were obviously guilty were sought. But now, the known allies and kinfolk will be rounded up. This will be seen, and reported by the media, as “war on Sunni Arabs.” Well, not quite. It will be war on a minority of the Sunni Arab community.

Translated from the hawkish:

1. We've decided to "respect Arab traditions" after all, at least the ones involving hostages.

2. We'll be playing Iraq's ethnic groups off against each other (specially trained Kurdish and Shia Arab teams used against Sunnis.

3. We'll be hauling in allies AND kinfolk.

Raids like this, carried out by American troops, have been going on for over a year . . .

Via Glenn Reynolds via AW.com blog.

The Weekend in Torture - The new season of 24 started tonight, and started with a dramatization of one of those contrived hypotheticals used to justify torture. Jack Bauer shoots off the kneecap of a detainee and threatens to shoot off the other one to make him talk, because there are only ten minutes until a terrorist strike. Later he threatens to tell the President that the current boss of the Counter-Terrorism Unit "had the suspect for half an hour and couldn't break him." As a "realistic" fictionalization of intelligence work, this is balderdash - breaking suspects without torture can be the work of days or weeks, when successful at all. "Successfully" breaking someone with torture is a matter of hours or days when dealing with a trained, committed subject. A real trained Islamist terrorist operative in that situation is going to crank up the prayers, prominent among which will be the phrase "just ten more minutes!" It used to be that the CIA concentrated on enabling its own assets to hold out for 24 (or 48) hours - after that they could say anything they liked.

A trained, committed Islamist terrorist down one kneecap with one to go would almost certainly have the presence of mind to lie in that situation, too. That might make interesting television, you know? Hotshot counterterrorism officer cuts corners to force information out of a suspect, gets bamboozled and, gosh, this stuff isn't so simple. Previous seasons of 24 have been all about selling at least the image of Isn't So Simple. It looks very much like, in this one at least, ISS may have degenerated into one more action thriller about the tough investigator who knows you have to throw out the book to catch the bad guys. Hijinx ensue.

Meanwhile, I learn that our Sunday talk shows were full of Republican mouthpieces spinning their own screenplay treatments, all of which feature them, not wielding the tongs, you understand, but leering over the shoulder of Doctor Jest as he plies his utterly justified trade. I explained the function of all ticking bomb scenarios awhile ago. The explanation requires no updating.

Sean Collins e-mails

I think what's going on is that war supporters, who believe that a successfully prosecuted neocon/liberal-hawk War On Terror/Muslim World Transformation Project in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere would be a great boon to the world, are hesitant to make noise about the torture issue because they feel (accurately) that the anti-war forces, who wish to discredit not just the use of torture (as they should) but the entire war project (which war supporters believe they shouldn't, and that would include me, of course), are using and will use the torture issue to attack the entire enterprise.

This is close to my actual argument, which I've been making since before the invasion phase of the Iraq War: that it would inescapably lead to American atrocities, because it would inescapably lead to a guerrilla resistance. The hard part for me is that torture has also been part of the Afghanistan-centered operation that I equivocally supported too. On this test, not only have I not been proven wrong about Iraq (to say the least), the Afghanistan doves haven't been proven wrong either.

And speaking of inevitable atrocities, get ready for Iraqi death squads.

All together now: Saddam was worse! In terms of body count in Iraq this is true, though the man had a big head start on us, so we ought to be allowed a couple of decades to catch up. But what about the world ? Is it better? And are we? We have gone from a time in which the tyrant of an oil patch with a broken army and 23 million inhabitants practiced a tyranny which all decent people abhorred, to a time in which the largest and most powerful country in the history of mankind justifies torture and contemplates assassination teams - we should call them terror squads - as official policy. And the people who most consider our virtue unchallengeable are the quickest to publically avow our need to torture and murder. That is quite a change. Is it hard to see why so much of the world regards it as unwelcome?

Back - The whole highclearing.com empire was down for awhile last night while Hostmatters did some server maintenance. This seems like a good time to mention that I love HostingMatters, and if you need a blog-friendly webhost, you could do very well with them.

Distinctions - A further attempt at clarifying a point below about Virginia Postrel's concerns Virginia is too quick to blame Democrats for making a partisan attack on Gonzales and the Administration's torture policies, when she should be blaming the Republicans for making a partisan defense (tacit or explicit) of same. Similarly, when Democrats like Charles Schumer mounted a scorched-earth defense of federal law enforcement's conduct of the Waco and Ruby Ridge sieges duiring the 1995 House hearings, all for the sake of Saint Janet Reno, leaving only Republicans to press the issue of FBI and BATF malfeasance, it wasn't Republican partisanship that was the greater sin. Had any House Democrats done their constitutional duty, we would have had all the bipartisan inquiry one required. (The Senate Hearing on the same topic was vastly more productive because some of the Democratic Senators took the adult approach.)

UPDATE: Thinking about this overnight, though, there's a sense in which the Waco hearings prove Virginia's point as much as mine. The conduct of the Democratic members of the committee was disgraceful. But the Republicans were amateurish. Not only were they caught flat-footed by Democratic maneuvering, their own partisan animus distorted their approach to the hearings. Some Congressmen spent more time trying to tie the late Vincent Foster to the proceedings than making a serious inquiry into the conduct of the bureaucracies.

What Else, Though? - Virginia Postrel worries that

On the one hand, the administration has far too easily dodged the issue, and the public has been too ready to pretend that serious human rights violations aren't taking place. On the other, I fear that partisan confirmation hearings are the worst possible forum. By turning torture into just another partisan weapon, the Democrats will almost certainly demean what should be a grave inquiry.

Now, VIrginia has been blogging in opposition to torture for years, going clear back to the scary days right after the September Massacres. Her opposition to torture isn't in question. And heaven knows Congressional hearings can themselves be horror shows themselves. (Does the name Kefauver ring a bell?)

But I gotta ask: if not in the Gonzales hearings and if not by Democratic senators, where and by whom? Republicans inside the White House are the problem, the best of the Republicans outside have made concerned-sounding noises but have mounted no serious challenge to the Administration in the issue; the worst of them have either attempted to minimize the issue for partisan political reasons or advocate it out of sincere zeal. Virginia commends an Anne Applebaum Post column, and it's a good column. But two things seem obvious about it:

1. The Anne Applebaum's of the world aren't going to move White House policy on the issue by themselves.

2. Applebaum is writing about torture this week because of the Gonzales confirmation hearings. The Post is commissioning other chin-pullers on the topic now because of the Gonzales hearings.

It's the fact that Democratic Senators are attacking Gonzales in the hearing room that makes our country's recent sanction of torture news. It is a lousy system, as Virignia says - nothing is "news" unless it's a contest.

One way to keep torture from becoming just another partisan weapon would be for multiple Republican Senators to come out against Gonzales and insist that the White House withdraw his nomination. Bingo, instant bipartisanship! It's worth asking why they don't do that. But their failure to do so doesn't mean that the proper course for Democratic Senators is to fail to do their own duty (however groteque some of the results).

Tautological statement: The Bush Administration has sanctioned torture because they favor having recourse to torture. This isn't shrimp quotas. It's not cynical gamesmanship on their part. They weren't doing it out of expediency to court voters who work in the torture industry. They are sincere. They have only even equivocally climbed down from the policy, if not the praxis, when someone has raged a huge damn stink over it - when they stand to lose something for it. The Gonzales hearing is the latest, and maybe one of the last, opportunities to do so.

Like Virginia, I'd love a better forum and a better cast of characters. But as to what those might be, the imagination fails me.

Fuzzy Math - Now Shahwani tells AP there are "between 20,000 and 30,000 armed men operating all over Iraq, mainly in the Sunni areas where they receive moral support from about 2,00,000 people." I suppose these figures are not entirely inconsistent with his prior set. But it shows how loose the estimates are. If the two estimates are internally consistent, it means 200k of the 2 million are providing more active aid than "moral support."

Ne'er So Well-Express'd, the Continuing Series - The best quotes from two Poor Man pieces today, which is not to say you don't need to read the rest of them, because you do. On turning wrong corners:

True, many soldiers in Iraq have been in places where people were nice and glad to have them, which is great, but misses the main point. Kennedy was shot on a sunny day, but most newspapers didn't lead with the nice weather.

and Alberto Gonzalez:

The point is this:

To protect subordinates should they be charged with torture, the memo advised that Mr. Bush issue a "presidential directive or other writing" that could serve as evidence, since authority to set aside the laws is "inherent in the president."

Albert Gonzales thinks that the Magna Carta is liberal pablum.

I have not eaten all the candy. In fact, the Iraq item in particular goes well beyond snark to make some crushingly urgent, eloquent points. Go, gorge.

Hey! Dumbass Big Media Guys! - Hire Fafblog already! You're going to miss out on a lot of revenue if Fafblog starves to death first.

Farting Around - Economics really is the dismal science.

Turning the Wrong Damned Corner, Again - In the London Times article Brian Doherty linked for the Hit and Run item discussed below, an Iraqi general estimates "40,000 hardcore fighters attacking US troops" and "part-time guerrillas and volunteers providing logistical support, information, shelter and money" swelling total insurgent ranks to 200,000. It's probably a swag. There's a chance that General Shahwani has something to gain by wildly overestimating the numbers of his (declared) enemies. ("[Shahwani] admitted that his paramilitary police force had been infiltrated by people who are leaking information to the guerrillas.") But here's a brief history of estimates of the size of the insurgency:

Summer 2003 - There's no insurgency! Just some bandits.
Winter 2004 - A few hundred to a couple thousand dead=enders.
Summer 2004 - As many as 5,000.
Fall 2004 - Up to 20,000.
Winter 2005 - About 40,000 dedicated, up to 160,000 kibitzers.
Summer 2005 - ?

All this time we've been assured that our kill ratios are splendid, that the insurgents lose every single encounter and so on. Meanwhile the top US estimate (the 20,000) quadrupled this year. Our intelligence has either sucked all along and the insurgency has always been much bigger than the Pentagon and NRO have imagined, or the insurgency has mushroomed despite all the Good News You Never Hear About and our unbroken string of military successes (Samarra, Fallujah, Najaf, Samarra, Najaf, Fallujah, Samarra . . . ).

Either way, it's hard to figure out how loudly I'd have to cheer to make the matter go away.

The Saban Center Iraq Index chart of TOTAL NUMBE OF INSURGENTS DETAINED OR KILLED (pdf, page 11) is tricky to read and based on iffy data. It estimates about 30,000 insurgent detentions/KIAs from May 2003 through November 2004. Looking at the spikes in April and Aug-September 2004, it seems reasonable to attribute 5-10,000 insurgent losses to Baby Sadr's militia. That leaves 20,000 losses for the Sunni insurgency that has - take your pick - 20,000 to 200,000 at large. We have killled the early estimates of the resistance forces at least four times over.

Warblog Fanboy Rampage - A new, possibly semi-regular feature inspired by Grim's legendary comics blog, in which we yank quotes from comments sections and hold them, wriggling, up to the light. Why? Because I can be mean that way, but also because I think it's in the comments sections that the uberhawk id truly struts itself. Our opening example is relatively mild and comes from a Hit & Run thread about the size of the Iraqi insurgency. The commenter, RC Dean, writes

As for the question of whether anyone on this discussion has called for the defeat of the US (other than Pavel), well, I haven't read anyone other than Mr. Q who seems to believe that, since we are in Iraq, we might as well see it through and win this thing.

Like I said, we're going non-inflammatory in our inaugural item, but nevertheless what we have here is an exaltation of attitude over intellect - not whether we can win, or are winning, which was the topic of the original item, but whether the people discussing the issue are hoping loudly enough for victory. You see it in every hawkish outlet on and offline. War's tendency to turn countries into a really big gym class is why some of us oppose the unnecessary ones in the first place.

Just Wondering - Jane Galt has an interesting entry on the social security controversy, and notes therein that

Now, as it happens, I think that there will always be a minimal safety net for the poor elderly, no matter what sort of forced savings scheme we adopt (and I'm in favour of adopting one). But I think better a minimal safety net and a forced savings scheme than a generous middle-class entitlement.

I suppose that, given a choice between the two options, and only those two, I'd pick Jane's way too. Here's what I wonder: Would a system of welfare for indigent old folks lead to

1) A return to the societal expectation that adults will help care for their elderly parents; leading to,

2) Politicians who vow to get tough on "deadbeat kids?"

Discuss.

Tsunamiana - It's not just the first week of the month, but the first week of the year. In other words, accounting hell. Didn't get home until 10:30 and I'm aiming to spend some quality time with the NyQuil bottle soon. Quick disaster-blogging reactions:

Joyner spots the first "No mas" from an aid agency, Medecins Sans Frontieres. They've got all the money they can use right now. It's worth keeping in mind that sometimes it's worth donating a few weeks or months down the road, when problems remain but the first cash has been run through.

Or maybe not. Patri Friedman at Catallarchy suggests there are better things to do with your money:

. . . my argument is not “Don’t give to tsunami relief". Rather I urge all of you to give in to those charitable emotions, let them inspire you into getting out your checkbook, and then just change your target.

It's an interesting argument about getting the most bang for your charitable buck. What Patri may be missing is the possibility that donating to tsunami relief probably makes the giver feel better than donating to malaria, TB or AIDS research. That has interesting implications about the purpose of generosity. Meanwhile, Arbitrary Aardvark has another worry:

Google lists 17 places where one can give away money to help tsunami-related clients. Google does not list any places for investing in helping tsunami-related clients. I think this is a huge mistake.

He then explains why.

This all probably touches on last week's tempest in a blogpot between Tim Cavanaugh of Reason and Glenn Reynolds. It's surely true that at some point commerce becomes essential to the tourist areas' recovery. That day may be sooner rather than later. That said, I sympathize with Cavanaugh's clarification in the Hit&Run comment thread that "There's a middle ground between shunning the place as a tourist destination for all time and taking your vacation while thousands of bodies are still rotting in the open air. A week or two of lost tourist dollars will set back the economy less than it will show a decent respect for the dead."

In subjunctive defense of the tourists quoted in the original article, however, something else occurred to me. This has been an evolving story. The death count rose over a period of days. Someone at the beach or just arriving may be the last person on earth to learn the full scope of the horror. And if the report is accurate ("[they] had been assured of a 'wonderful holiday' "), the hotel did indeed want them there.

UPDATE: Diana Moon snuck back to Letter from Gotham and wrote about the sociopolitics of disaster-proofing.

Music Notes - Getcher Finn Brothers tickets. Neil gets all the pub, but Tim Finn's Say It Is So is the Finn Family CD I most cherish. (Yes, more than Woodface.)

A Happy Blogospheric Welcome - Longtime Liberty Magazine contributor Clark Stooksbury has a blog now. Cool!

Things Past, and Passing, and to Come - Danny Pinkus at Head Heeb considers the sticky wicket that is the prospective Gaza disengagement.

UPDATE: Thanks to Diana and Jonathan for correcting my misattribution of authorship. When did every blog but this one become a group blog, anyway?

OMG 2005R00lz!!!!! - Did this site finally freshen its "New Crew" links for the first time in dog years? Yes it did. Welcome the following new recommended blogs:

Kevin Sites

Heretical Ideas

Justin Logan

Howling Curmudgeons

The Beat

Adrienne Aldredge

Intel Dump

Snarkout

The Comics Reporter

Crash Landing

Thoughts Eclectic

Also tested and repaired existing links. If a site hadn't updated since October 2004 or earlier, it's gone. The previous New Crew have been moved to their permanent homes.

Unqualified Successes 2004 - Another year, another set of awards. Previous winners can be seen in the original entries. Thanks to Nicholas Weininger, Nell Lancaster and Jonathan Pearse for nominations. Got to dash: the Spouse of the Year wants me downstairs for the ball drop.

Least Dispensible Weblog - Fafblog

Hawk of the Year - Captain Christopher Chown, USMC

Dove of the Year - Mahmoud Abbas

Turning Japanese Award, for the Best Case of the Vapors - David "Screw Democracy" Warren

Turning IN the Japanese Award, for a Worse Case of the Vapors than You Ever Thought Possible - Michelle Malkin

Best Non-Libertarian in a Libertarian Role - Katherine Hawkins (see also)

Best Libertarian in a Neoconservative Role - Michael Young

Best Libertarians in a Libertarian Role - Catallarchy

Least Annoying Liberal - Belle Waring

*Least Annoying Conservative - James Joyner

War is the Health of the State Award - Alberto Gonzalez

War is the Health of the State Award, If You Can Call This Health - Islam Karimov

War is the Health of - Oh! Me! - DOD Deputy Undersecretary Jack Shaw

Most Successful Meme Insertion - "MSM"

Jumped the Shark Award - "MSM"

Blog Trend of the Year - Dropping comment sections

Baleful Blog Trend of the Year - Becoming a bunch of shills for campaign talking points

Soup/Food of the Year - Mrs. Fields' Chewy Fudge cookies

Special Achievement Award - The Command Post

The Road Not Taken Award - The Mike MacParlane Taste Test

Spouse of the Year - Mrs. Offering

O Nostalgia - A tradition of year-end wrapups means going through your archives for the previous year, and I found this from January:

Gas, a buck sixty-one at the off-brand stations this weekend. Jeez. Could we make it about the oil after all?

A buck sixty-one! [Sings] I wish those days / would / come back again / I wish those days / would . . .

For Those Keeping Score - The question that most interested me on learning about the revised DOJ torture memo (pdf) was, What has become of the original memo's expansive . . . "interpretation" of the commander-in-chief power? (Essentially, the President, in his capacity as commander-in-chief of the armed forces, can do whatever the hell he wants.) Answer: Dodgeball!

This memorandum supersedes the August 2002 Memorandum in its entirety.6 Because the discussion in that memorandum concerning the President's Commander-in-Chief power and the potential defenses to liability was - and remains - unnecessary, it has been eliminated from the analysis that follows, Consideration of the bounds of any such authority would be inconsistent with the President's unequivocal directive that United States personnel not engage in torture.

Torture is just about the foulest thing I can think of; untrammelled executive power one of the very few fouler. (It contains the former, plus many other ills.) The revised memo reins in the one, but studiously avoids addressing the other.

There's No Doubt It's a Problem - "Study: Family, Friends Reduce Quality Internet Time" notes Scrappleface.

Like I Needed a Test

alt="I am nerdier than 65% of all people. Are you nerdier? Click here to find out!">

(Via Procrastination.)

Question of the Day - If you put the "Triangle of Death" and the Sunni Triangle together, what do you get? The Rhombus of Resistance? The Parallelogram of Perfidy? The Quarrelsome Quadrangle? Are there triangles we haven't been told about yet that will constitute the Tiled Plane of Terror? My New Year's Resolution is to be up on the latest talking points as fast as the hawkish blogs are.

Tsunami Relief Options - I haven't verified the research but a costello-l member suggests the following organizations that he chose on the bases:

* No apparent political or religious agenda * Enough organizational history to indicate that they're capable of delivering, and ethical * At least 90% of total budget goes directly to aid, minimal amounts to internal administration & salaries

Direct Relief International (99% directly to aid)

Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières

Save the Children

UNICEF

Speak up if you think any of the above fall short on the stated criteria. (I am wondering about UNICEF and minimal amounts of internal administration and salaries, myself.)

And of course, it's simple in the extreme to donate through Amazon to the American Red Cross.

Fun with Fitness Writing - From "Kettlebells: An Antidote to the Hype," by Raymond Brennan:

This is not a reason not to use kettlebells, but more of a hype-busting exercise. If you want to be an “authentic” kettlebeller, then learn to play the bagpipes and wear your kilt with pride. The USSR is nothing now but a bad memory-and please let’s leave it that way. To evoke a spurious mystique about the unique horror that was the USSR in order to promote what are nothing more than iron balls is, quite frankly, in bad taste. I wonder what the reaction would be if they were hyped as “the favourite training tool of Nazi Germany” or “what the Viet Cong used in the tunnels underneath Saigon” or (in the post September 11th era) “what Al-Queda used in the caves of Afghanistan”? Think about this, please.

Look, Alina! I'm improving mind and body at the same time!

That Word, Senor, the Continuing Series - Researching the history of the NEA for a paper I'm writing I discover an official document from the agency, National Endowment for the Arts 1965-2000: A Brief Chronology of Federal Support for the Arts (pdf). Said "brief chronology" is 77 pages long.

The Year in Review in a single sentence, from my Agitator patron R. Balko:

If you ask me, the most remarkable thing about blogs and the 2004 campaign was just how ready formerly independent voices on both sides were willing to spew out official campaign talking points, eschew criticism of their own guy, and otherwise fell into line in order to get their man elected.

Yup.

Department of Follow-Ups - Back from traveling, Juan Cole responds to the Iraq the Model controversy. It includes clarifications of intent and a forthright apology to the Ali brothers. From a metablogging perspective, what interests me is that it starts out with a very familiar explanation:

In my own mind, I was merely drawing attention to Mailander's entry on an informal, "Isn't this interesting?" basis.

The "isn't that interesting defense" is familiar to critics of Glenn Reynolds. The thing is, Cole goes on to reject this defense:

And, if I could take it back, I wouldn't have linked at all. This is a matter in some ways of not knowing my own strength. Blogging is deceptively informal, sort of like a conversation rather than like formal writing. So it is natural to cross-link among friends and say, 'Hey, check this out.' But my weblog has come to be so widely read that this degree of informality is now a luxury I obviously cannot afford, and I will try to be more careful.

What's the word I'm looking for? Oh yeah: Indeed.

Tsunami Help - The Command Post lists multiple ways to donate to Asian tidal wave relief. (Via Virignia Postrel.)

The Comment-Spam Apocalypse? I've never opened comments on UO. When I started blogging, comment functionality was rare. You had to go out of your way to activate it. When I converted from Blogger to Movable Type way back when I set the default switch for Comments to NONE in preferences and removed that code from my templates. At one point I weakened - comments drive repeat visits, and if I wanted to take ads they would presumably make my ad space more valuable - and I had a conversation with an A-list blogger about the possibility. He advised me in the strongest possible terms not to do it: not worth the maintenance and psychic hassles. Comment spam alone was an unending grind. Indeed, on my hobby sites, I got enough comment spam to provide the merest glimpse of what I'd be in for if I allowed comments on UO. A number of sites have dropped comments in the last year.

So I didn't add comment functionality after all. Imagine my surprise when I logged in to the MT web interface tonight to discover untold numbers of penis enlargemnt comments in my database. Investigation reveals a bunch - who knows how many? - 2002 entries with Allow Comments set to OPEN. After wondering first if someone had discovered a way to turn comments on, I eventually realized that what's happening is that when I imported my old Blogger entries into Movable Type in June 2002, MT set them to the default Open status and some spambot finally found them. It won't do the penis enlargers any good - the template keeps their comments from getting published. But it's taking up space on the server and I'm getting close enough to using my full storage allotment that I'm planning to convert over to PHP soon. (Which will mean learning enough PHP to do that.) In the meantime, I've got however many entries to de-louse and a certain number more (hundreds) on which to bar the gate. Oy.

Tsunami - The Command Post's Global Recon blog has constantly updated coverage of the disaster in South Asia. Our hopes and concerns are with everyone affected by the event, both those we know and those we don't.

Not So Bad, Baby! - 78% on John Tierney's year-end news trivia quiz. This surely means I've been blogging too much. (Via Just One Minute.)

The Anti-Beinert is your barking-mad Talking Dog. Sign me up. I mean, I'm not a Democrat, but sign me up.

The Reason for the Season - Your Christmas quote only seems, initially, a non sequiter:

Even if dogs, sexual humiliation, or sleep deprivation don't rise to one's particular uninformed definition of torture, I assume we can all agree that being dropped on barbed wire or having a lit Marlboro jammed in your ear does.

From Thomas Nephew.

A Libertarian Reads the Gospels - Tonight in true Annual Christian fashion I attended with La Familia Offering our church's Christmas pageant, "A Clvsterfvck for Christ." Truth is, it wasn't nearly that bad, though my poet and storyteller friend who had charge of the children's segment of the show seemed to think so - you might too if you had to somehow usher a dozen costumed grade- and preschoolers on and offstage in synchrony with the readings. I'm proud to report that Offering Boy played a crucial leadership role here: as the only shepherd who made it to rehearsal and the only child whose eye my friend could catch, it was he who managed to lead the youthful throng away from the manger not too long after the actual exit cue.

Now being a libertarian, and thus fundamentally an awful, awful human being, I found myself consumed with thoughts of the sheer volume of practicality that even the spiritual side of Christmas requires, the scheduling, the planning, the e-mails and phone calls and trips to the printer and party store (for there are the snacks downstairs after the service to present). And then I couldn't stop myself wondering, Hey! What happened to the gold, frankincense and myrrh anyway? The Magi didn't snatch it back, presumably. And it was a pretty good haul, if, as we shall see, one with a twist to it. Gold is gold, and the gum resins, frankincense and myrrh, had value too.

So what did they do with it? I think they had to spend it in short order: the Magi and their Gifts only appear in Matthew (Chapter 2), which is also the only Gospel to recount the atrocity of Herod. It's the one where Joseph and the brood flee immediately to Egypt and stay there until Herod dies. I figure the gold paid their passage and some of their living. It was one well-timed gift - a little hard currency, as it were, to slip free of the murderous tyranny of the state. Maybe you really can find anything in the Bible if you're looking for it.

Interestingly, there is no stable or manger in Matthew. The wise men find Jesus in a "house," presumably Joseph and Mary's own. The tax, enrollment and journey to Bethlehem appears only in Luke (2):

1 And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed. 2 (And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.) 3 And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city. 4 And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David:) 5 To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child. 6 And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered. 7 And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.

What struck me in tonight's mood is the matter-of-factness of it. Luke does not wail, neither does he gnash, about the family being in the stable. " . . . there was no room for them at the inn," he tells us, and that's it. The maudlin interpretation comes later. The Bethlehem of Luke's gospel must have been a madhouse. By decree, people were pouring in from the four corners of the Levant (to be "taxed" or "enrolled," the libertarian can't help noting, and then thinking how much easier that must make it to find all the under-twos you want to kill). Of course the inns were full. We have no idea what sorts of extremis many of the other guests might have been in. Nor does the text support the "Christmas pageant drama" of Mary, Joseph and the Burro dragging themselves into town the very night of her labor. "While they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered." The strong suggestion is that this enrollment business took quite awhile. The Mary who showed up looking for a room may not have looked ready to pop. Did the innkeeper even see her, or did her husband take care of the room registration? Did Joseph press the matter of his wife's pregnancy, or did he find it prudent to be discreet about it? How many pregnant women, infirm elders and sick people made up the lodgers who got there ahead of Our Protagonists? We can't say. We can only say that the matter seems not to trouble Luke much, and Luke is a writer willing enough to express outrage and disgust. (See the Pharisee parts.)

The real purpose of the manger story is foreshadowing, as I've noted in previous Christmas items. A manger is where a flock eats. The Last Supper, source of the Communion ritual, completes that circle.

And, back to Matthew, the frankincense and myrrh? Used, the Columbia Encyclopedia informs us, in embalming, a fact far less obscure to the gospels' original audience than to us. And stuck right there at the beginning of the story. In the midst of life we are in death, not that there's a better deal on offer.

Merry Christmas, everyone. Peace on Earth, Good Will Toward Men.

Quote of the Week comes from Will Wilkinson:

People in North Korea are eating each other because other people sincerely believed Marx's theory that the human essence varies with the socio-economic context in which it is embedded.

It may not be a surprise that Will Wilkinson is neck and neck with Catallarchy for this year's Best Libertarian(s) in a Libertarian Role award.

Meantime, our coinage of the week comes from Eve Tushnet, even with points off for the ungrammatical hyphen (should just be "reindeer commando").

And speaking of this year's Unqualified Successes, am I nuts that the leading candidate for Least Dispensible Weblog is No Award? Or is this simply the year when the blogosphere fragmented that much?

Welcome Back to my Nightmare - The official word is that the Mosul attack was a suicide bombing, not a shelling after all. Meanwhile, the blog of a military chaplain reporting from the base says there was mortar fire, after the attack, walking in on the base hospital in an attempt to maximize casualties. The chaplain also warns that "Frankly, it's kind of a blur," before adding thirteen paragraphs of detailed description. If the two accounts fit together, what we have is suicide murder coordinated with an immediate artillery attack, precisely targeted with the aid of on-base intelligence. (The chaplain clearly describes the progressively greater accuracy of each shot.) If the two accounts fit together.

Take Me Out to the @#*&%# Ball Game - Sport and stadium blogging, by me, on The Agitator.

Life Imitates Ray Davies - Other blogs will give you the "French Teenagers Beat Up Santa Claus" story. Some of them will even draw the parallel with the classic Kinks song, "Father Christmas." But only Unqualified Offerings will run the lyrics to "Father Christmas" through Google Translator, to give you a sense of the French Santa's own perspective, and only Unqualified Offerings, realizing you probably don't speak much French yourself (if you're a patriotic American), will run the French version back through Google Translator to translate it back into regular talk. Here it is:

Christmas De Père (Davies Ray)

Christmas of father, gives us a certain amount of money
do not disturb with these idiot of the toys
we will thus beat you to the top if you do not give the surplus
to him which we want your bread,
we do not make constrained elasticity
all the toys with the rich little boys

What can I add to that but - Happy Holidays, everyone!

The Only Economics Report You Need - I'm thinking it's a pretty good Christmas for retailers. I say this because my Borders e-mail newsletters haven't included a general "Take XX% Off" coupon in two weeks. That suggests that Borders is pretty happy with the traffic they're already getting and see no need to spend gross margin to drive more. Joyeux Noel, mes sembables!

Welcome to my Nightmare - It's too soon to tell if today's Mosul attack (highclearing/highclearing) was a lucky shot for the insurgents or the start of a baleful new trend. If they go back to missing almost everything they throw, then this was a blind squirrel finding a very bloody nut. If they start landing indrect fire on concentrations of troops reliably, it will mean something else entirely. Like, that some number of the Iraqi troops we're training are acting as forward observers for attacks on "their own" bases. I think this is the most likely explanation for the accuracy of the Mosul shelling. But I'm not sure yet.

Taking One (E-Mail) for the Team - Josh Kaderlan adds and addendum to the honor roll:

The Giants did in fact finance the construction of the park itself entirely with private funds, but they managed to work out a deal whereby they lease the land it sits on from the city (at a fair market value), which allows the team to avoid paying property taxes. So while it's better than the giveaways most cities work out with sports teams, it's still not fully private.

Duly noted, though if it's land the city owned rather than stole via eminent domain, that's a mitigating factor.

Most valuable sports franchise in the United States? The Washington Redskins. What's a big reason it's so valuable? The stadium the team owns. Why does the team own the stadium? The team bought it fair and square. Dear professional sports owners: Do. The Math. God knows governments won't (highclearing/highclearing).

UPDATE: Doh! Fixed spelling of Josh's name! Because you know he won't.

Never Mind Why. WHO Hates Us? - Fascinating article by former CIA case officer, now forensic psychiatrist, Marc Sageman on the demographics of those Muslim terrorists who have attacked American targets. Lots to say about this one, but it's getting late, so, later. (Via the blog unaccountably known as "Tacitus".)

Things that Eventually Occur to One, the Continuing Series - So the Big Idea was, "We'll transform Iraq into a modern democracy, kickstarting the engine of political reform in the muslim world, just like we did with Germany and Japan." The criticism I've read, including my own, has been attacking the history behind Part A - a lot of stuff about how Iraq is not at all like Germany and Japan at the end of WWII.

Part B is the idea that a democratic Iraq would inspire a wave of liberalization in which the oppressed peoples of the Ummah throw off their corrupt rulers and replace them with the consensual (and pro-Israel) governments of our daydreams. This is not what happened even in the case of Germany and Japan, though, right? MacArthur handed down the Japanese constitution in 1947. Thereafter Japan was as democratic as any country that keeps electing the same ruling party over and over can be. And the wave of democratization in East Asia that Japan's example inspired was . . . nonexistent, I'd say. North Korea? Communist still. China? Went communist, now what we might call Fascism with a (Somewhat) Human Face. Taiwan? Only democratized in the last decade or so. Philippines? Took forty years. The countries of Indochina? Not there. In fact, some among them - Singapore and Malaysia particularly - have propounded a consciously counter-democratic "Asian system" ideology. The shining beacon of Democratic Japan touched off bupkus in the way of liberal yearnings.

West Germany became democratic in the mid-1950s. Italy was "democratic" after 1945. (Local adaptations included big bags of CIA money for the Christian Democratic Party.) The Iron Curtain complicates evaluation. For 50 years, the countries that had been reliably democratic pre-war were democratic postwar, and the countries that had been some flavor of autocracy remained some flavor of autocracy. There were pro-democracy revolts in East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and eventually Poland, but I can think of no reason to think they were inspired by the examples of Italy and Germany rather than France, Denmark and the United States. Looking West, we see countries whose systems of government through the first half of the twentieth century closely resembled Germany and - moreso - Italy: Spain and Portugal. Did the transformations of Germany and Italy stir a tide of democratic reform in Falangist Iberia? Not so you'd notice.

So even if Iraq makes it past the famous "One Man, One Vote, One Time" threshold, history offers no encouragement that its example will be contagious.

Pay More Attention to the Jolly Fat Man Behind the Curtain - I think the Santa Myth may have some uses for parents too. Parenting offers great rewards, but a huge proportion goes unrewarded. (I always warn prospective parents that the first six weeks - until the child learns to smile - are fitfully-relieved hell. You've become custodian of a Need Machine whose gratitude battery is still charging.) Santa makes parents' lives simultaneously simpler and more astringent. Simpler: you have someone to lay off any Christmas disappointment on for the first seven to nine years. Kid didn't get everything he or she wanted? That Santa. What can you do?

But the other side of that is more demanding: most kids, particularly very young kids, love the bounty they wake up to Christmas morning. You don't have to settle everything they've ever wanted on them to make them very happy. Believe me, I know.

And you, the parent, get no credit for it. The bearded elf gets it all.

And that's very valuable to you. It means that the joy available to you is simply your own knowledge of your children's pleasure. You have to love the act itself, not the glory of the act. You must content yourself with your child's happiness instead of your child's gratitude. It looks from here like that's going to be the case with much of one's parenting career anyway, so it's good to get in some practice early. And I'm no expert, but there may even be something Christian about that.

Pay Some Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain - David at De Gustibus wonders, " Is Santa Claus a tool for the skeptic or the believer?" and comes down, I think, on the side of the former. I think that's right. It may be one of the things behind Eve's hostility to the concept of Santa Claus. First, it's competition for her own preferred (sorry, Eve!) Fictional Benefactor; Second, it's training in eventually throwing off belief in Fictional Benefactors. Me, I may be Godless, but I'm not a member in the League of the Militant Godless (as I suspect David is). Mrs. Offering is bringing up the kids to believe in God, with equivocal success so far, and that doesn't bother me a bit. Dammit, when I was a boy we had to work at atheism and agnosticism. We walked uphill in the snow - both ways! - to doubt the cogito! Nobody handed us disbelief on an hors d'oeuvre tray like these lazy brats you see nowadays, with their video games and their piercings!

But I lost the thread there. Thing is, as a parent, and still learning how to do this thing, I think two things are crucial: childhood enchantment, and childhood dis-enchantment. I think both the belief in Santa and seeing through that belief are valuable. It's why the one thing I do agree with Eve on (regarding Santa!) is that parents shouldn't work to prolong a child's belief in Saint Nick beyond its natural life. The question on of the bloggers she cites was wrestling with - how do we tell Junior we lied about that stuff - isn't an issue for me: we don't. When Junior comes to us to tell us he's figured it out, we admit it. And then we can have a good discussion about why parents pretend there's a Santa and how proud we are that Junior figured out the trick and the ethics of blurting the news to Junior's younger sibling etc. But I think it's wrong to drag it out.

This has keener salience for me now than it did two years ago when Eve brought it up because Offering Boy is in Third Grade. He's starting to hear things from classmates and has broached the issue. My tack has been to reflect it back on him. "Why do they think that? Why do you think they're right or wrong?" My challenge is not to turn it into a test, actually. I gave up Santa in third grade, and I'm really rooting for him to do so too. It's Time, my inner dad voice says. Don't be a dumbbell! screams one of my less worthy personality facets. I got it by now! Why can't you?

So one of the things Santa is doing for me as a parent is slapping me in the face with the reminder that - news flash - every kid develops at his or her own rate. My son and his mother and I are in the middle of a time lapse lesson in evidence, internal consistency and the limits of the will to believe. We were each rather put out when the Post Office, in its idea of a nice gesture, sent a "reply from Santa" to the letter he and his sister sent. "He IS real!" my son exclaimed delightedly, on the basis of a pathetic form letter with some handscrawling at top and bottom. (Yes, this is another Not Abandoning Libertarianism item. Who'da thunkit?)

While I was typing this he wandered in looking for his chapstick, it being dry lip season. But he wasn't wearing his glasses. Damn.

A Few Bad Nashville Apples - I felt a little abashed after I called bullshit on country singer Chely Wright last week on little more than a hunch. But reader Timothy Hodler tips me to a proof of a systematic campaign of deception in the promotion of the song. Doesn't speak directly to the song's provenance, nor does the Tennessean really press the question of What did Chely Wright know and when did she know it. But I'll say two things: 1. Getting fired from the fan club of a singer with no record contract has to constitute "hitting rock bottom." (The guy works on Wall Street too. Move your money into an index fund.) 2. By the time this is over, I bet it will turn out the chick Wright says flipped her off didn't even have chemical weapons. 3. Shut up! I said two things, just like I said I would. I simply happen to also be saying a third thing. That's a bonus!

Wait, what was it? Oh yeah. This story really fits with the recent discovery that most FCC complaints come from the members of a single organization.

Things Best Done in the Dark - Cropp and Williams hashed out a deal last night, apparently. Programming notes and quick sportsblogging at The Agitator.

Mail of Fame - Stadium deal mail, in response to my request for honor roll nominations. Greg Pearson:

Someone in an on-line forum I read said that Wayne Huzienga built the Marlin's stadium with his own money. Of course, the poster was a pro-stadium conservative, so he may be conveniently omitting a sweetheart land deal or something. I could look it up myself, but I don't have a blog, so I don't have to.

Crap, does this mean I have to look it up? Because I'm hoping to make an early bedtime. Five minutes with Google comes back ANSWER UNCLEAR - TRY AGAIN LATER. Greg continues:

If you can swallow the offense to your libertarian principles, you might also consider adding Green Bay to your honor roll. True, the city owns the stadium. But they also own the team. While cities owning businesses is very anti-libertarian, it does mean that their stadium is not a taxpayer give-away, since the financial benefits of the stadium go back to the city rather than to some third-party owner.

Yes, and it roots the team in that locale, which removes it as a weapon to shake down other cities, which is why the sports leagues are so dead set against replicating the Green Bay model. (The NFL forbids it for any other team, and other leagues may also.)

Michael Lee writes that:

Bill Davidson of the Detroit Pistons built the Palace of Auburn Hills (one of the most financially successful arenas in all of sports) on his own (and his investors') dime. Or dimes

And a great cage match facility too! But seriously, folks, amplifying Michael's point, Your Talking Dog writes

Two of the biggest value hoops teams-- the Lakers and the Knicks-- both own their arenas (via the vast media empires that in turn own them; Bertelsman IIRC for the Lakers and Cablevision for the Knicks). Owning your hall tends to make your team MORE valuable; but hey-- its about the short run, right?

Amazingly, while New York confronts its OWN largesse to a billionaire operation now (and that billionaire FROM NEW JERSEY, no less), Mayor Billionaireberg is painting the Dolans (who are villains, except for THIS) as villains, for "selfishly" trying to protect their turf (and the West Side of Manhattan... and nearly a billion dollars for a city that can't afford this...) by sponsoring the oopposition to the Jets Stadium (an arrangement so perverse, parking will be in New Jersey and transit by ferry... not even TAILGATING!) Part of the shtick to sell this bullshit is that it will enhance the Olympic bid; it will, of course, KILL the Olympic bid (the Olympic poo-bahs want the stadium near the Olympic village-- preferably WALKING DISTANCE-- and not across a river and the world's most congested midtown streets.) But-- Woody Johnson's a friend of Mike, so... you know...

Interestingly, Republicans have been the big whores about this sort of thing here, be it Rudy's taxpayer giveaways to the Yankees and Mets, or this... by contrast, the despised Democrat Dinkins cut a GREAT DEAL for the City on the tennis center: the City spent NOTHING! And yet, naturally, Giuliani vilified him for it

Scott Lemieux mentions another candidate:

I don't know enough about the details of the deal to know if he qualifies fully--he may have gotten some land cheap--but the new baseball stadium in San Fanscisco was built with almost entirely private money, so I think Peter McGowan deserves a slot on your list somewhere.

He's got one. Go Peter McGowan!

The Constant Variety of Sport Subventions - Linda Cropp has scheduled the stadium issue on tomorrow's City Council agenda. I suspect that the deal will go through, as most of these do. At bottom, you're asking Democrats to vote against a big public works project, and to eschew new taxes. It's not unheard of, but is nevertheless rarely observed in the wild. Off Wing Opinion has a cogent summation of the pragmatic reasons it's too bad:

. . . it's probably important to note that the real reasons for opposing the stadium are the negative effects of the gross reciepts tax (driving small to medium sized businesses out of the city), as well as the fiscal risk that public financing poses to the District budget in future years (if there's a shortfall in the funding mechanism, the balance has to come out of the general budget).

Top links (filched from Eric): the Sunday Post's account of last Tuesday's meltdown; the Post's latest report on the Cropp-Williams negotiations. For the record, I'm against such projects on principle. I'd be less against this deal if the only taxes were the ones on the ticket sales. Don't want to pay that one? Don't go to the game. The gross receipts tax is not just unjust - taking money by force from one set of businesses to give to another set - it's bad political economy. All other things being equal, it will tend to drive businesses out of DC into Maryland and Virginia, which is the last thing DC needs. Considering that one of the justifications offered for the stadium is that it will spur development, it seems counterproductive to finance it with a provision that will depress development.

But I suspect Steve Czaban and Max Sawicky will, in their different ways, prove to be winners here. Mark my words: costs will exceed $700 million and the City will have to raid the general fund to make good on the overruns.

Daily Stadium Swindle Update is link-rich, and available from Off Wing Opinion. My late today estimate: chances that Cropp sells out and a deal gets done - rising! Also check out liberal blogging legend Charles Dodgson, who takes issue with an aspect of yesterday's item. I think his version of a "principled" take is really a pragmatic take, but I don't expect he'll care. Meantime, he reminds me of something I've been considering for a couple of days now, the honor roll of professional sports team owners who built their own stadiums with their own money. My immediate list:

Robert Kraft, New England Patriots
Jack Kent Cooke, Washington Redskins
Abe Pollin, Washington Wizards and Capitals
Daniel Snyder, Washington Redskins ("improvements" to FedEx Field)
New Boston Garden Corp, Fleet Center (Celtics and Bruins)

There have to be at least some others. To qualify, the owner has to have bought the land and built his building on his own dime. Municipal/state spending on "infrastructure improvements" (roads, sewage and so on) permitted. For better or for worse, such things are universally accepted as government functions.

And if you needed a sex angle to keep you interested in the story, we've got one.

Baseball Diamonds are a Corporate Welfare Queen's Best Friend - First, to Eric McMerlain: Sorry, I was just feeling testy. Eric was fighting the good fight on the stadium issue when I was writing it off as a lost cause. See a June 2004 piece for just one example.

Matt Welch, a baseball fan who has also tackled this issue from time to time, writes to note that he worked on his college paper with Steve Czaban, our villain of last night, and that the same school's radio station nurtured Czaban, Sean Hannity and Jim Rome.

"And this," Matt notes, "was a very liberal school, mind you . . . "

That's certainly the effect liberal schools have on me.

I got a nice note from Skip Oliva of Citizens for Voluntary Trade! Skip blogged about the stadium deal for the Mises Institute a couple weeks ago. He quotes Washington Times columnist and Sportstalk980 Sports Reporters regular Thom Loverro's report on a Cato Institute conference:

The pencil-neck geeks who write economic reports and participate in panel discussions, such as the one held Monday by the CATO Institute, have no clue about that identity or the economic benefits - or much else for that matter.

My emphasis. Thom, you are far from the first guy who ought to go insulting people's physical appearance, as the top left picture on this page will make clear. Also, you have a high sissy voice.

NB: You started it, buddy. And either Gene Healy or Radley Balko could kick your ass. Hell, I'll bet Brooke Oberwetter could kick your ass. (I'll give you 6:5 against Wilkinson.)

Thomas Nephew has an amusing exchange from last night's evening news:

Yglesias has an interesting post and comment thread, including some fairly determined advocacy by liberals who support the deal. Heaven knows I can't construct a principled liberal objection to stadium subventions myself - it seems to me that if you believe in the welfare state it's hard to oppose corporate welfare, at least in concept. I think this is why almost all of these deals end up going through - a critical mass of a legislature's liberal opponents eventually roll over. That's how Maryland passed the stadium deal that "gave" us the Baltimore Ravens - the Montgomery and PG County delegations swooned once enough pork was waved under their noses.

Speaking of liberals and cool folks to their left, Max Sawicky wonders if Linda Cropp isn't simply playing her part in a pageant:

Our corrupt, incompetent, vacationing mayor, errand boy for the elite, makes the basic deal. The taxpaying citizens (including yours truly) protest the impending picking of their pockets, so we need some kind of kabuki exercise to provide the illusion that democracy is functioning and some brake on fiscal insanity and malfeasance in governance is in play.

So after Linda Cropp gets a little something something -- headlines attesting to her pull and her fiscal responsibility -- she rolls over and buys some fig leaves on the original arrangement. The financial details are lost on the public. Lo and behold, the day is saved, baseball is coming to the nation's capital, and the taxpayers get reamed for the cost of the stadium and associated public expenses.

Hey, could be! It would fit the general pattern for these deals: Executive agrees to pointless, illegitimate expense. Earnest liberal legislators whine about "the children." Executive/legislative leadership buys them off with a separate pointless, illegitimate expense: end result, the taxpayer gets boondoggle with extra fleece.

The DC deal could still go that way. History even favors it. But today's developments give me added confidence that Cropp, cagey fake-dumb as she's acting, really wants to kill this deal dead. In the Yglesias thread, commenter Violet notes that they already tried the "extra money for schools and libraries" compromise. She says Cropp hived that off into a separate bill to be considered in January. The (literal) 11th hour maneuvers Tuesday seem calculated to maximally discommode and even insult MLB and the Mayor. And today, Cropp suggests, in an aside, that it would be a "gesture of good faith" if Baseball were to extend the approval deadline past the end of the year. The offhand manner in which she broached the possibility is bravura. The woman is wicked good at this shit.

Cropp knows and MLB knows and I know that not only is MLB ill-disposed to make concessions to anyone, especially the District; any deadline extension puts the stadium bill before the new Council, which will replace three pro-stadium members with three antis.

I am in awe. No, I am in love. I hope Mrs. Offering will agree to share.

A final note: Linda Cropp is no one's idea of a libertarian. I have no reason to suspect she's being driven by praiseworthy motives. If she thought supporitng the stadium deal would make her the City's next mayor she'd probably hold up our medium and large businesses at gunpoint herself. That's too harsh. She's a politician. She has people for that. But like I always say, you know what it's called when a politician does the right thing for the wrong reasons? A nice change of pace.

Yet More Stadium-Deal Blogging - "Libertarianism in One Lesson," at The Agitator.

More Stadium Inanity - Metro columnist Marc Fisher has a particularly odious column about the stadium vote. Cropp is dishonest for playing her cards close to the vest, like any canny pol facing a big vote. And he feints in the direction of addressing the obvious objection to the pro-holdup side's mantra that "A deal is a deal," then jukes the other way:

A deal is a deal. Ah, you say the council should be able to inspect and judge any deal that comes before it. But the mayor's job was to keep the council in the loop and with the program at every stage of the process. And the council members knew, as Evans reminded them at every turn, that however greedy and voracious baseball's owners may be, what brought us a team was one simple promise: We will build a new stadium.

Buried in there, seemingly to be addressed by the rest of the paragraph, is the core and basic civics lesson at work here: at just about any level of American government, the executive can propose any spending plan or law he wants subject to constitutional review, but only the legislature can authorize it. This is Schoolhouse Rock-level civics. "We" did not have a deal. The Mayor's Office had a deal. The City did not "have a deal" until said deal was voted into law. At that point, a deal exists. No approval? A deal does not exist. (On the other side, if the MLB owners had not voted to approve Bud Selig's proposal to them, "we" would not have a deal.)

You will notice that nothing that follows Fisher's Sentence Two disqualifies it as the entirely sufficient refutation of his Sentence One. He wants to complain about the Mayor; to suggest darkly that the Council must realize that it is killing "the deal"; but he can't gainsay the core local-constitutional truth embedded in "the council should be able to inspect and judge any deal that comes before it."

There's some real ugliness elsewhere in his column.

Now, Cropp expects to capitalize on the revulsion of baseball fans and ride the joy of the anti-baseball crowd straight into the mayor's office.

"The anti-baseball crowd" is a fancy way of saying an apparent majority of District voters and taxpayers.

This city is pathologically averse to change, captive to deep anxieties about race, class and the urban-suburban and District-federal divides. Baseball was an opportunity to rise above those strains, to reach for world-class status, to lure suburbanites back into a view of Washington as the center, a place of pride.

Perhaps all these pathologically anxious darkies are also averse to handing $650+ million in taxpayer money to a bunch of out-of-town billionaires too. Ya think?

The District's job was quite simple: Prove baseball and assorted other doubters wrong.

I would think the District's job was to allocate its resources prudently, and with due regard for who was earning them, and who was looking for a windfall. The flip thing one says here is "But that's just me." Apparently it isn't, though. It happens rarely enough that local columnists might appropriately celebrate it.

Linda Cropp's late-night bombshell eviscerating the deal with Major League Baseball immediately restores Washington's status as America's laughingstock.

Speaking of "world-class" cities, they have a saying in Paris: Au contraire, mon ami. In fact, this vote may, may you understand, mark the turning of the tide against professional sports-league boondoggles. That would give the District an unfamiliar spot on the honor role of fiscal sanity and political rectitude.

A Breath of Sanity - Deft political maneuvering by a Linda Cropp-led alliance on the DC City Council may have killed the stadium giveaway Mayor Anthony Williams negotiated as part of the Montreal Expos/Washington Nationals relocation deal. The local sports "journalism" establishment has disgraced itself in the matter, from the hysterical Tom Boswell at the Post to the Sportstalk980 regulars, whose biased coverage makes CBS/FoxNews on politics (pick your villain) look like a model of probity. Steve Czaban's evening national show reached such a level of repulsiveness I actually switched it off - Linda Cropp is a politician and a big girl, but repeated references to her as "Bizatch," faux Sopranos voice or no, are simply too ugly to abide. There's a lot of barely suppressed sexism in the coverage of Cropp's maneuvering, including numerous references to her being out of her depth. Well guess what, fellas - she won! That's some depth she's out of.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that Dayn Perry's article on Foxsports.com last week is a welcome relief from the admixture of Stockholm Syndrome and class interest most sports media brings to coverage of corporate welfare for the people they make money covering. It's national, not local media, mind you, but the sports fan who nevertheless opposes sports-driven fiscal lunacy takes what he can get.

Now Calling Bullshit On . . .

Country singer Chely Wright, whose "true story" behind her chart-climbing pro-war number, "The Bumper of my SUV," beggars belief.

Juan Cole, who credulously and approvingly cites dark and baseless mutterings about the authenticity of the blogging brothers at Iraq the Model. It doesn't take a secret cabal to try to make propaganda value out of a couple of guys who hold what are, for their society, fringe views. They are also guys who, by participating in Iraqi political life, are showing a measure of physical courage none of us blogging stateside has shown.

President George W. Bush, for awarding the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, to: a military man for the performance of his military duties (we have military medals for that); a hack who was by no means solely responsible for the mess in whch our Iraq policy finds itself, but never saved the place either; and a cashiered spook who made "slam dunk" a laugh line and couldn't even win a bureaucratic cage match with the White House. I tend to hold the FBI more responsible for failing to prevent the atrocities of September 11, 2001 than the CIA, but still: not helping.

The Scott Peterson jury. Grant two things: Scott Peterson is a convicted murderer and I'm a death penalty squish. But isn't there something . . . creepy about "We'll be back to deliver our sentence of death once we've had lunch?"

So much bullshit, so little time.

Not Abandoning Libertarianism, Reason 5,271,009 - Barbara Boxer:

Boxer said she agreed with Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., that Congress might have to intervene if baseball owners and players did not require more sophisticated and regular steroid testing of athletes.

"I don't like to see Congress getting involved in the sports arena ..." she said, "but if developments lead us there, we'll have to go there."

-- In another sports-related issue, Boxer said congressional oversight may also be needed to get answers from college football's Bowl Championship Series after the failure of UC Berkeley's team to be selected to the Rose Bowl despite a 10-1 record and a No. 4 ranking.

In a letter to Kevin Weiberg, the coordinator of the Bowl Championship Series, Boxer suggested that the Senate Commerce Committee, which oversees interstate commerce and sports, might require more information about the process regarding the way teams were picked for bowl games.

Isn't there a housing association somewhere this woman could terrorize?

(Hat tip: Mrs. Offering.)

Gimme an A! Over on the Agitator, I do some sportsblogging. Perhaps, just perhaps, somewhat tongue in cheek.

Don't Blame ME, It's YOUR Petard - Charles Dodgson finds a bizarre appeals court decision and, in noting all the strange, simulataneously anti-liberal (as currently defined) and counter-federalist implications, finds himself mired in a swamp for which he has no name. That would be the Wickard v. Filburn Bog, the rare New Deal-era public works project that added to our nation's wetlands (metaphorically, at least) rather than subtracting them.

The Commerce Clause had its Abu Ghraib Experience decades ago now. The poor thing hasn't been the same since.

A noteworthy aspect of state and local government tax break deals to entice or retain specific businesses is that both Republican and Democratic politicians engage in them. Another is that the Democrats who do so are implciitly acknowledging that lower taxes are a contributor to job growth and business retention. However, no way are they going to let everybody in on such a deal. There's more job security and glory, not to mention sheer fun, in working highly-publicised deals with specific companies. Everybody gets the dinners, press conferences and ribbon cutting ceremonies - and very possibly a leg up on one's next job. Beats hell out of quietly providing everybody with some measure of tax relief and regulatory easement, if your goal is a) make sure you give yourself plenty to do, and b) make sure you get seen doing it.

Yes, I COULD Be More Cynical - I could be Yglesias:

[I]n retrospect we could have saved ourselves a lot of trouble if, instead of giving trade credits and chemical weapons precursors to Saddam Hussein in the 1980s we'd just given that stuff to Iran instead, and let them install a SCIRI/Dawa government way back when. That strategy wouldn't have had all the muss-and-fuss of backing Saddam, then tilting toward neutrality, then fighting the Gulf War, then years of sanctions, then another war, then occupation and counterinsurgency, and then an election that's going to install a SCIRI/Dawa government that will ask our troops to leave and effectively deny us much influence over the course of events in our once-so-promising colony.

My only serious comment is that I suspect any Shiite government that ends up ruling Iraq will be much less reliable Iranian puppets than many here fear and doubless many in Iran hope. Simple [Professor James] Buchananism tells me that once Iragi Shiite poobahs get their hands on the levers of power, they're going to like using it for their own ends more than they'll enjoy continually asking Tehran "So, like, what do I do now? And now? Now? Now? Okay. Now?"

Democracy Sounds Much Better When You're Not on the Receiving End of It writes Lex Concord of The Libertarian Enterprise. His solution to the Red State-Blue State divide? More government.

[Anarcho-capitalists] either smile and say that Constitutional Government would be a good start, so let's go along with it, or they object and start rambling on about defense agencies or insurance companies providing the services that government currently provides.

But people don't like insurance companies (except of course, after someone hits their car or their house burns down), and they sure don't like the idea of giving insurance companies their own private armies. A claims adjuster with a briefcase and a calculator is scary enough—and you want to give him an Uzi?

There may be a few wrinkles to work out of his plan for solving this problem, but it's an interesting wrinkle on the idea of red/blue "secession."

Via Anton Sherwood.

Stupid is as Stupid Does - Atrios continues to track variants of the silly CBSNews blogging story that references him. It's almost unutterably stupid:

The affiliations and identities of bloggers are not always apparent. Take writer Duncan Black, who blogged under the name Atrios. His was a popular liberal blog. During part of the period he was blogging, Black was a senior fellow at a liberal media watchdog group, Media Matters for America. Critics in the blogosphere said this fact wasn't fairly disclosed.

“People are pretty smart in assuming that if a blog is making a case on one side that it’s partisan,” Jamieson said. “The problem is when a blog pretends to hold neutrality but is actually partisan.”

The juxtaposition here makes me guffaw every time I reread it, in a bitter way, though. It's the order in which things are put. Does "pretends to hold neutrality" strike one as a relevant characterization to Eschaton at any point in its entire history? But sticking the Jamieson quote smack in between two paragraphs about Eschaton implies that Jamieson's comment somehow speaks to that particular blog. (The next paragraph mutters darkly of "ethics" and what Atrios did "eventually."

Also, is it just me, or does anyone else think "the good old days" were when the hot rumor was that Atrios was a gym teacher? "Liberal economist" is such a comedown. Further also, wasn't Atrios' eventual connection to Media Matters disclosed before he let slip his civilian name? Do I misremember here? Wasn't there a whole My present employment situation is coming to an end and I'd like to get some professional political work oh look I got some! period? That would make the CBS story even sillier.

Agitate and Irritate - I offer irrational sportsblogging exuberance in today's Agitator guest post.

That Word, Senor, the Continuing Series - John Cole calls Brent Bozell's Parents Television Council's organized campaign of papering the FCC with complaints "proto-fascism." James Joyner disagrees:

People have every right to organize and lobby their government about things that matter to them. (I believe the 1st Amendment mentions something about this.)

Yes, but. "Fascism" isn't just a system of totalitarian government. Before it is that, it is a political movement. It differs from traditional right-authoritarianism in its desire to energize a mass base. Fascism doesn't just want "the people" to shut up and do what you're told. Fascism wants "the people" to get into it, to "shut up and do what you're told" at the top of their lungs. Fascism is also about energizing the base against enemies, internal and/or external, and using the violence of the State to shut the labelled enemies the hell up. Fascism also has a fondness for disease metaphors, and heaven knows Bozellian critiques of "sick" (Blue State) culture partake of that.

Within the United States itself, so far, state violence is attenuated most of the time. That's probably one of the reasons John Cole said "proto-fascist" rather than just fascist.

While I don't expect the example to sit well with either of the authors under discussion, the Dixie Chick brouhaha is a useful example. The Dixie Chicks were not "censored." They were not arrested, denied work or killed by the government. But the freelance demonization campaign against them was nevertheless a fascist impulse in action.

So What's the Overarching Critique Anyway? - I'm glad you asked. Rumsfeld tells the troops, "You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have." Append to this a silent when you decide to go to war. I've been hard on the blinkered nature of the criticism of those liberals who restrict themselves to complaining that the Administration didn't "plan." But for bad faith, said critics can't hold a candle to the Bush Administration itself. We went to war with the army we had when we went to war because it was the only way to have the war in the first place. We used the number of forces we used because a bigger call-up would have alerted the American public that this was going to be a big freaking deal. The Administration's political strategy was to intone "hard days ahead" while taking pains to give the opposite impression with the pre-war show. The Administration said we had to invade in March 2003 because "time was running out." Among other things, we couldn't wait until summer. You may have noticed that we've been in Iraq for two summers since then, not infrequently conducting combat operations. No, we had to go to war in March 2003 because, had the UN inspections continued much longer, it would have been impossible to ignore what rubbish the Administration's WMD case was. Sliming the competence of Hans Blix and co. had a shelf life.

The Administration sold the war to the American people as something akin to an emergency raid against a conquerer with an arsenal of doomsday devices primed to take out Chicago, a raid that would end with the bulk of our troops driving back out of town by the holidays, wreathed in the flowers of a grateful people busy paying for their own reconstruction entirely out of oil revenues. That's why we used "the army [we] have" when we used it - it was the sales pitch the hawks could close. "We" did not plan for the real occupation because doing so would have been political suicide. Wars take on their own momentum, and the tendency of a citizenry is to rally round the flag once you're in it. So naked political calculation says, if you're a hawk, you can afford not to "plan." You can't afford the reverse.

Shooting the Gnat on the Elephant - Andrew Olmsted offers a defense of the Rumsfeld press conference yesterday, based on a reading of the entire transcript. I would agree with him to the extent that, when it comes to stop loss and single parents in the reserves and suchlike, once you've decided to go to war, you're inevitably going to make decisions that inconvenience somebody. Too many of the Administration's Democratic critics - including the Party's most recent presidential candidate - are unable or disinclined to tie the pain caused by those decisions back to an overarching critique of the decision to go to war itself. This is particularly true of the so-called "liberal hawks" and erstwhile liberal hawks.

Our troops don't have enough armor on their vehicles! is the ideal in pusillanimous criticism. It allows the critic to be: against the administration; "on the side of our soldiers" in a thuddingly obvious way; safely removed from having to offer any strategic opinion at variance with administration policy, which oh by the way was at least popular enough to get the President reelected with an increased share of the popular and electoral vote. There is at least the possibility that the criticism is, synechdotally, spectacularly wrong. It may be that our emphasis on force protection has done our official aims in Iraq far more harm than good. Our policy is to max protect the lives of American soldiers and marines, which means body armor, hair triggers at checkpoints, hell-bent for leather convoys no local driver dare risk finding himself mixed up in on the highways, no-knock raids and plenty of softening up of targets with artillery and airpower before the ground troops go in. These policies have been pretty successful at minimizing American fatalities, and pretty unsuccessful at unifying post-invasion Iraq in democratic solidarity with the Topplers of Saddam. To be bloody-minded, it's at least possible that a posture that cost ten times as many deaths in combat would have been more strategically effective - minimal body armor; rules of engagement appropriate to police work rather than garrison duty; much, much more vulnerability to irregular warfare but much, much less offense to Iraq's persuadables and neutrals. Many more American soldiers would die, at least at first. Many fewer Iraqis, though, would have reason to hate American soldiers, and that much less reason for fellow-feeling with the killers of American soldiers.

No politician would dare propose this. Just as damned few of them have the guts, yet, to say we should have avoided war in the first place and should seek to wind up our business in Iraq as quickly as possible. Far, far safer to loudly complain that the Administration needs to do a souped-up job of what it's already doing, or to complain about its ministers' attitudes.

The Saladdin Soviets Continued - Constant monitoring of infrastructure outputs is so May Day Parade somehow, but it's worth noting that Dan at Rhumb Line, who has his sources, writes today about the water situation:

Well, the water project isn't fairing any better. Only %40 percent of people have potable drinking water, and %4 percent have a workable sewer system. The reconstruction efforts budget was slashed from $4.2B to $2.3B – that now only supports a fraction of the original 170 or so projects the Ministries initially wanted complete.

Things You Learn When the TV by the Rowing Machine Always Has CNN and close-captioning: Lou Dobbs says "in point of fact" a lot. Rarely, though, is he pointing out a fact when doing so.

Now That's Service! - Lunchtime, and when I come up from drowsing off my train is pulling in by White Flint Mall in Kensington. Shit shit shit! I follow the crowd toward the gates and the realization sinks in: I have no farecard. I mention this and the guy behind me laughs. "Shut up," I tell him.

I get the attention of the gate attendant in the folding chair. He's a young white kid with a smirk I don't much like.

"Let me through," I tell him. "I have no farecard."

"You can't exit the system without a farecard unless you pay the maximum," he says, snottily.

"Dude, this is an obvious dream. That means you're just an aspect of me. So do what I tell you."

"Okay."

Once Again - I've made this point before, but "prewar levels" of any Iraqi infrastructure output do not represent some Golden Age. Iraq's prewar infrastructure was degraded by deliberate strategic bombing during the 1991 phase of the war and after, and hampered by cash shortages during the sanctions era and typical third-world kleptocracy during the period of the oil-for-food program. When and if we manage to haul Iraq back up to prewar levels of production in all infrastructure sectors we will have turned a festering sinkhole back into a dump.

(End Note: We know from the infant mortality figures that, even with the graft associated with oil-for-food, infant mortality improved under that program. It would be very interesting to compile figures for electricity, fuels, employment and other key metrics for the 1999-2002 period and see what's what.)

Seems Like Old Times - Yglesias and Drum are doing some tracking of Iraq's electricity production. Time was we did a little of that here. And Matt points me to yet another resource (PDF) for Iraqi production metrics. (Since the CPA changed its name and stopped putting out the good stuff - the daily electricity production spreadsheet - I've stuck with the Saban Center's Iraq Index.)

Couple things: 1. You know that passage from Garet Garrett about crossing the boundary between Republic and Empire and there being "no painted sign to say" when you are "entering Imperium?" Guys sitting around their homes in Washington, Maryland and California looking at electricity production data for a rathole 8,000 miles away is a sign. 2. We've now been in Iraq long enough to be able to compare annualized electricity production numbers. This too is a sign. Unfortunately the graph provided by the Dept. of State report Matt and Kevin are working from doesn't go back far enough to compare season over season. For that one needs to go to page 24 of the Saban Center report, which lacks a graph but offers a table.

Avg. Daily Megawatt hours (thousands)

Saban Center began tracking Average hours of "electricity/day nationwide" recently enough that it can't be annualized, but here are the numbers, Feb-Nov04:

13, 16, 15, 11, 10, 10, 13, 13, 13, 13

The string of 13s make me suspicious that, as so often when dealing with Iraqi statistics, we just haven't got data for all the months.

Anyway, let me forthrightly acknowledge that whoever makes the power grid go was able to ramp up summer time (busy season) output, though not to goal levels. That's good. What has been happening since appears to be less good.

Read All About It - The full text of the Rumsfeld-Troops colloquy. (Via IRAQ'd.)

Do the Math - Forget my Venezuela scenario from last night. A bigger threat looms. (Or is that "gathers?")

Mister Jones and Me - Your Agitator guest-post item of the day is on the Generation Jones meme. I did think the song was about his dick, by the way, but apparently Adam Duritz has specifically denied this.

Smoking Crack: A How To Guide for Teens and other successful and unsuccessful attempts to get blog titles past MSN Spaces' vocabulary censor, at boingboing. (Via the not-entirely worksafe Daze Reader.)

Not Abandoning Libertarianism - Yesterday afternoon I stopped by our local CVS to fill a prescription for Offering Boy. They were out. So I asked the pharmacist where the closest 24-hour CVS pharmacy was. She told me. So I asked her if she could call to see if they had any of his prescription in stock.

No, she couldn't. It's a Schedule 2 drug, she explained. It would be against the law for them to tell her.

When You're in a Hole . . . Stop digging. This is advice Matthew Barganier, on his fourth "Max Borders Affair" update, would do well to heed. For those of you joining us late, the other day Matt did something he doesn't often do, which is declare a self-identified libertarian beyond the doctrinal pale. He also invited readers to let the target's employer know what they thought of his supposedly libertarian opinions. The target was Max "We put the terrible in enfant terrible" Borders; his employer the libertarian Institute for Humane Studies. Reaction was fierce, as can be seen in Micha Ghertner's item on the matter.

It's fair to say I like Matt Barganier a lot better than I like Max Borders. (I haven't met or exchanged personal communication with Max Borders. I am not, based on his writing, rushing to correct this.) I think Matt was in the wrong, though, and not a little wrong. Micha Ghertner calls Matt's attempt to get people to complain to IHS "one of the most vile ad hominem attacks [he has] ever seen." Just sticking to the blogosphere, I would rank Roger L. Simon's jihad against Gregg Easterbrook and Donald Luskin's threatened libel suit against Atrios as worse. Nevertheless, and notwithstanding the fact that Borders is a professional libertarian and works for a libertarian organization and what he believes presumably speaks to his qualifications, as Matt points out in one of his followups, it was pretty bad. The reason: Matt deciding on his own to write a complaining e-mail to IHS constitutes informing Borders' employers. Inviting his readers to do the same is Release the hounds! "Release the hounds" gets my back up. I think it happens way too often in the blogosphere. And I think that, used against fellow bloggers, it's a kind of cheating.

I think Matt owes Borders an apology. (This is not news to Matt that I think this.) But at least stop digging. I think Matt's locked in combat mode here and could do with a pause.

(This site's policy is to add unfairly attacked bloggers to the next blogroll update. I'm a victim too!)

That Word, Senor - A quote from the Defense Science Board's much-discussed report, as reported by Neil Mackay of the Sunday Herald:

“American direct intervention in the Muslim world has paradoxically elevated the stature of, and support for, radical Islamists, while diminishing support for the United States to single digits in some Arab societies.”

Paradox? Where's the "paradox?" It's what anyone not besotted with boundless faith in our power would expect.

Something tells me the DSB was trying to let its audience down easy.

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.

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.)

Thought for the Day - The easiest kind of sycophant to be would have to be clam-follower.

Guy vs. Spy - Kevin Drum has a useful summary of how to deal with a spyware infestation. I'll note that, while it's painfully obvious I don't set the Official Libertarian Line on, well, anything, someone who causes software to install itself on your machine wtihout permission, and to take active measures to prevent removal, up to and including crashing your system when you try to uninstall it, has committed fraud. Fraud is a civil and criminal offense. Grab book. Throw.

Liberal Self-Parody Watch - Eschaton guest-blogger Hecate is exactly the annoying sort of liberal that Eschaton proprietor Atrios says hardly exist. Skim here and here (I won't insist that you read) to see.

Happy Thanksgiving - War has got me in a mood today, but a wonderful family dinner has lifted it enough that I'll spare you for at least a day. See last year's entry for holiday cheer. See Hitherby Dragons today if you too are in a mood, and see no point in fighting it.

I for One Never Doubted It

Thus, democracy may exist in a range of taxa and does not require advanced cognitive capacity.

Conradt and Roper, Group Decision-Making in Animals, quoted by Crooked Timber.

Notice - I have no idea what's really going on in Ukraine. Frankly, I doubt you do either.

Sauce for the Gander - Not content to leave asshole tactics to MEMRI, CAIR has filed multiple libel notices against David Frum and others.

Girl knows how to milk it - Why bring yourself down reading political blogs when you could be enjoying a top-notch diarist like Mimi Smartypants instead? Mimi produces more or less weekly entries - discursive ones that repay the time spent reading them. I'm a little concerned that she devotes so much ire to the children's television show, Maisy, while seemingly ignoring the larger issue that Theodore Tugboat is the single creepiest television program ever, but the Abyss stares also into you, you know? Self-preservation is a key parenting skill. As it was, I called Mrs. Offering in to read the Maisy entry. The regular reader gets digressions on the popularity of anal sex, pointers to a band that uses C64s and Ataris to make music and other cool stuff. Since our author dresses her kid in Che Guevara t-shirts, she might be horrified to pick up a recommendation from a libertarian weblog, but the internets are big and strange.

Via snarkout.

BOGGLE - I'd be fascinated to see any refutation of the factual claims Michael Ewens and Arthur Silber have found about draconian IP laws imposed on Iraqi farmers, who, on plausible readings of the source documents, "will be forced to use plant seeds from specific US companies, effectively banning the farmers from using their own seeds." From the little reading I've done, the sensible resistance to adopting GM foods in the third world has been less about the "frankenfoods" aspect and more about fear of getting caught in onerous contracts with the patent holders. I've seen claims asserted by certain agribusinesses that amounted to a right to sue you if their pollen so much as wafted over your fields, causing their genetic material to end up in your next crop. Wow, I thought on reading those stories, botanical colonialism. It at least appears that, in Iraq, we're mating botanical colonialism with colonialism pure.

UPDATE: Tex points out via e-mail that I originally wrote atypo: "found about draconian IP laws imposed on Iraqi darmers . . . " That passage should read "dound about draconian IP laws imposed on Iraqi farmers . . . " Unqualified Offerings regrets the error.

Liberals for Tort Reform - Hm. I'd say Juan Cole, Eschaton and Henry Farrell are good candidates.

What We've Come To - Daniel Radosh on the latest cultural outrage.

The Law of Conservation of Personality Cults - Weirdly synchronous with the item below, it develops that

...With the reports of Mr. Kim's portraits being removed from some public buildings and news of military defections, outside analysts are speculating that the personality cult around "Dear Leader" is being curbed, either to advance painful economic reforms or to head off a military coup fomented by China.

Via Just One Minute.

Back in the USSA - There are two bright sides to the story and image I'm sending you to: 1) Isn't it a tribute to the American system that even our agitprop is largely done by volunteers? 2) At least we don't have to sit through a bunch of parades. Or worse, stand. Let's face it, parades suck.

(Via Flagrancy to Reason.)

The Call of Patriotism - Diana reminds me that, with the holidays coming around again, it's a good time to make donations to Operation Uplink, which provides phone cards to military personnel. Tens of thousands of our troops will be spending another Christmas in war zones this year. Phone cards are also the number one request at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Don't Go Getting Excited - The Boston Globe article cited below is a dark lining wrapped in a silver cloud. Of course hawks are starting to proclaim that our problem has been way too many troops in Iraq rather than way too few. This is less about understanding than desire. At least some of them want to invade Iran (and Syria, and Saudi Arabia, and Lebanon, and . . . ). Militarily that means finding some ground forces to do it with. Politically it means selling the idea that we won't be walking into another Iraqlike occupation. Solution: promote the idea that our problems in Iraq come from too many troops. Declare that we won't make that mistake again. Once we've broken and bought Iran we'll have a tiny, unobtrusive occupation force whose convoys no Persian would ever notice long enough to think about bombing. It will be, dare they say it? a cakewalk. As a side bonus, Rumsfeld loyalists get to argue that the Old Man was right about this military reform stuff after all. Mil reform doesn't suffer the fatal flaw of being insufficient to the task of policing our gains. Policing our gains is the source of our post-conquest problems. Everybody wins!

I'm certain it would horrify Cato author Chris Preble for his work to be used thusly, but I suspect that's some of its appeal to the blood and thunder crowd. They're not chastened. No no no.

And the Bad TIming Award Goes To . . . - Ryan Sager has been writing a lot lately about how libertarians need to get "serious" abouf foreign policy, by which he means enjoy bombing people more. Justin Logan expends the patience on him that I no longer have. But I noticed an interesting juxtaposition in my reading today. First, Sager, offering an example of the sort of frivolity that marginalizes libertarians with "the rest of the Republican Party":

* This June, Cato published the book, "Exiting Iraq." The book calls for a withdrawal date from Iraq of -- wait for it -- Jan. 31, 2005. (That's a little over two months from now.)

Next, Bryan Bender of the Boston Globe:

"I have seen a metamorphosis," said Robert Pfaltzgraff, president of the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis in Cambridge and a vocal supporter of Bush's Iraq policy, referring to debate both inside and outside the halls of government. "We should not be there with a large force. We should be there with a force that begins to quickly diminish."

Few specialists are calling for a complete pullout. They say the United States must first finish training Iraqi forces and use its military might to buy Iraqi authorities breathing space against the insurgency.

Still, a report completed over the summer calling for a complete pullout next year has struck a chord.

Do tell. And what report might that be?

"The end of the foreign occupation will seriously undermine the terrorists' claims that their acts of violence against Iraqis are somehow serving the interests of Iraq," according to "Exiting Iraq," published by the conservative-leaning Cato Institute. Moreover, "The occupation is counterproductive in the fight against radical Islamic terrorists and actually increases support for Osama bin Laden in Muslim communities not previously disposed to support his radical interpretation of Islam.

Sounds - what's the word I'm looking for? - serious!

We are the marines, not the army, so we encourage debate - Great and very sympathetic article about a marine encampment south of Baghdad, from - The Independent.

On the Radar - Fight to Survive, which is either, a) the blog of a dissident US soldier serving in Iraq and cruising for an Article 88 charge; or, b) a well-wrought fiction with curious anachronistic references to "bazookas" and such that gives the game away. So far this evening two different serving soldiers have given me two different provisional answers. Dee. Vell. Oh. Ping. Read the Fallujah account, just in case.

(Also via Tex. Having a vigilance committee on your ass has its upside.)

But the Walls of Their Schools Look Fresh and Colorful - Just the other day a Republican loyalist on Yglesias' blog was complaining that the "If it bleeds it leads" ethos of the major media meant it ignored a whole host of questions relating to the larger picture in Iraq. One piece of the larger picture ain't pretty:

BAGHDAD -- Acute malnutrition among young children in Iraq has nearly doubled since the United States led an invasion of the country 20 months ago, according to surveys by the United Nations, aid agencies and the interim Iraqi government.

After the rate of acute malnutrition among children younger than 5 steadily declined to 4 percent two years ago, it shot up to 7.7 percent this year, according to a study conducted by Iraq's Health Ministry in cooperation with Norway's Institute for Applied International Studies and the U.N. Development Program. The new figure translates to roughly 400,000 Iraqi children suffering from "wasting," a condition characterized by chronic diarrhea and dangerous deficiencies of protein.

That's the beginning of the Post account. More:

Iraqi health officials like to surprise visitors by pointing out that the nutrition issue facing young Iraqis a generation ago was obesity. Malnutrition, they say, appeared in the early 1990s with U.N. trade sanctions championed by Washington to punish the government led by President Saddam Hussein for invading Kuwait in 1990.

International aid efforts and the U.N. oil-for-food program helped reduce the ruinous impact of sanctions, and the rate of acute malnutrition among the youngest Iraqis gradually dropped from a peak of 11 percent in 1996 to 4 percent in 2002.

In other words, even with Saddam Hussein looting the oil-for-food program, which there's an outside chance you've read about in the pro-war media, the program, under which "3.4 billion barrels of Iraqi oil valued at about $65 billion were exported . . . between December 1996 and 20 March 2003" was measurably improving the lives of Iraq's inhabitants. And in the eighteen months since we broke and bought the place, per the Post, "Iraq's child malnutrition rate now roughly equals that of Burundi, a central African nation torn by more than a decade of war. It is far higher than rates in Uganda and Haiti."

Haiti. Haitian levels of malnutrition in Iraq are an aspiration for the era of benevolent hegemony, a shining dream toward which we might aspire. As Madeline Albright once said, America sees farther than other nations. From Baghdad to Burundi for sure.

Sarin Wrap - Tex e-mails me a link to a Captain's Quarters thread on the recent "sarin gas discovery" in Fallujah, which has, as its final update:

Even more smart readers in comments now pretty much agree that these are testers of one sort or another, probably dating back into the 80s, and not deployable sarin. As Peyton said, it does get one wondering why they felt the need to retain these testers.

Call me crazy, but if I were the despot of a country whose three biggest enemies (Iran, Israel and the United States in this case) were all known possessors of chemical weapons, and if I'd fought a war in which one of them (Iran) had used chemical weapons against me in the last twenty years (okay, I kinda used them too), I'd probably keep the odd test kit around myself. But maybe I missed my calling, and would be a better despot than a lot of these other crackpots if I only had the get up and go.

Letter from Kevin Sites who is so going on the next blogroll update, to the marine unit he was embedded with:

It's time you to have the facts from me, in my own words, about what I saw -- without imposing on that Marine -- guilt or innocence or anything in between. I want you to read my account and make up your own minds about whether you think what I did was right or wrong. All the other armchair analysts don't mean a damn to me.

Fascinating stuff. A gripping narrative that becomes a bit self-dramatizing in the last couple paragraphs.

Via Antiwar.com blog, which earlier had a wrapup of petty-fascist online gangstomping of Sites in the usual outlets.

Claim Letters - The long-awaited (and whodathunkit?) insurance e-mail roundup. Boy did I learn a lot. I still have some questions, if I can remember them when I get through these. Since there's so much mail, I'll do something I don't usually do with reader mail which is heavily excerpt some of it. I trust my correspondents will let me know if I do violence to the sense of their points.

A couple of different readers tell me I misunderstand where the profit comes from in the insurance business. As Spencer England put it:

The point you are missing is investment returns. I worked as a P&C insurance company economist for 10 years and during that time they never made a profit on the insurance side of the business. Actually, it is very rare for any P&C company to make a profit on the insurance side of the business. Rather they make their profits on the lags in the cash flow. For the typical P&C company there is about a 3 year tail,or lag between the time premiums are collected and the time they are paid out in insurance settlements. They make their returns and profits by investing that cash. Moreover, the amount of insurance you can write is a function of your capital. If you have $1 million in capital you can write $10 million in policies -- the actual multipliers vary by state and type.

Christopher Connelly adds

That is why a young Warren Buffets goal was to make enough cash to buy an insurance company, so he'd have a huge pool of money to play with.

Tim Worstall adds

I have occasionally seen it stated that profitability on the pure underwriting is evidence of an uncompetetive market.

Meanwhile, Professor Daniel Davies of Crooked Timber University argues that what I called "the pooling of certainties" - such as having to pay predictible costs for my blood pressure medication - is no such thing:

It is a risk from an actuary's point of view. The downside risk is that the medicine will work and you will survive expensively for a hundred years. The upside risk is that you might get run over by a bus tomorrow, preferably having just mailed off your check for a year's premium.

It was calculated by the Faculty of Actuaries a few years ago (I've annoyingly lost the ref. but the new scholar's google might come up trumps) that for the general case, even if you had all possible information about someone's medical conditions, you would reduce the risks of writing life and critical illness on that person by only about 20%.

He further adds that "This is why, given everything we know about medicine today, about 95% of British life assurance is still written on standard terms," which is probably the most hopeful thing I've read yet, since it suggests that the pool fragmentation potential of "adverse selection" (as discussed by Charles Dodgson recently) may be smaller than a lot of us fear.

And Eric Kidd offers a kind of game theory reason why a young, healthy person would want to join a pool where his premiums are subsidizing payouts to broken-down old farts like Yr Corrspndnt:

I'm young, I'm healthy, and I have no pre-existing conditions. I want health insurance mostly because I might suffer an expensive, long-term injury. But if I suffer such an injury--and then change jobs at any point--your scheme would leave me uninsured. So without risk pooling and an obligation to pay for on-going conditions, health insurance is pretty useless product. If the insurers want me to buy, I'm going to insist that you receive your medications (assuming you had insurance at 24, of course), because that suggests to me that I'm buying a useful product. And this is speaking strictly as a rational, selfish consumer.

This is interesting, and not just because I didn't know I had a "scheme." It strikes me as a reasonable consumer perspective. I wonder how universal it is.

Which might be the time to mention Nick Confessore's recent proposal that the Democratic Party start offering health insurance to its members. One of the advantages of Confessore's proposal is that I am pretty sure the Democratic Party would be allowed to do it. In my sinful late youth I, for reasons I'd rather not go into, took and passed the Maryland State Life and Health Insurance Whatever Certification exam. (I never did anything with it.) But in the course of doing so I learned of a really fucked-up restriction in the definition of an eligible group for the purposes of getting group rates on health insurance: The group may not have been formed for the purposes of obtaining group medical coverage. The Little Sisters of the Poor can't start a Poor People's Benevolent Association so that its members can get discounts. Oh, and that's another thing: it's against the law for an insurance agent or broker to offer discounts on premiums as an incentive to sign up. The libertarian in me thinks that there's a lot of insurance law we could usefully eliminate if affordable coverage for the maximum percentage of the population is our goal.

But, clearly, the Democratic Party exists for purposes other than getting group rates on medical insurance, though this is not a good month to say for certain just what those purposes are. So ConfessoreCorp is in the clear legally.

Yet More Firefox Blogging - Wow. Steve Cook of Snarkout wrote me an American Heritage Dictionary search plugin and told me how to install it. It works great. He's going to submit it to Mozdev, but in the meantime, you can dowload it from UO. Once you download it, unzip it to your SearchPlugins directory. In Windows, its a subfolder of the "\Mozilla Firefox" directory in your Program Files folder. I'm told that in Mac OS/X it's in "/Application/Firefox.app". Happy etymologizing!

Meanwhile, Brock Sides commends to me the Ultrabar instead of the Google toolbar, while Zack Ajmal points me to the Google toolbar's successor, PRGoogleToolbar. Mark Dooley finds another version of the Google toolbar for me too. Decisions, decisions.

Outsourcing Casualties - Phil Carter reports on the first hard numbers we can attach to government contractor casualties in Iraq. Unnamed in the Bloomberg report he cites are Blackwater Security or other PMCs. I wonder if their dead are included in the totals. The Bloomberg article says there are 60,000 civilian contractors in Iraq, so really, your odds of making it back alive are pretty good. Not that I'd presume to give you career advice.

Crimes and Mistakes - Matthew Barganier e-mails me pretty convincing evidence that US troops definitely used phosphorus against insurgents in Fallujah, including text from the SF Chronicle and pictures from the International Herald Tribune. That doesn't support the accusations in the Jihad Unspun article, in which the alleged witness described completely different agents and wound patterns. But my heart sank on reading the following passage in the Chronicle article:

Soldiers with the Army's 1st Infantry Division made their way to the southeastern part of the city, a neighborhood of factories and warehouses where they expected to find guerrillas waiting for them. Instead, the district was relatively quiet, though the units reported being fired on by women and children armed with assault rifles.

Anything's possible, but this reads like a suspiciously convenient preemptive excuse for any female and/or juvenile corpses that turn up afterwards. (The article dates from November 10.) It's inconsistent with the military's later decision to allow women and children to leave the city while turning the men back (which was itself, as I've argued already, criminal and stupid). It reeks of propaganda.

Let me be clear: I didn't dismiss the Jihad Unspun story because I believe our military has conducted itself like angels. I dismissed the Jihad Unspun story because it seems grossly inconsistent with what we know. Offensive use of chemical weapons is a big hairy deal. The military is not going to send US troops into a chemical battlefield without gear. I suspect there would be detectible protocols followed all the way up the logistical chain.

(Wild card: the "sarin discovery" story.)

UPDATE: Explananda writes two things I agree with: 1) "If phosphorus doesn't count, we might ask ourselves whether our categories aren't a bit self-serving." [Hm. Ya think?.] 2) "But since the U.S. is in fact using chemical weapons [phosphorus and a successor to napalm that we know of], and has used them, in Iraq, it's not hard to see why people might be inclined to believe them."

More Conspiracy Theories - This one's all me. That incident in Detroit last night with the beer-throwing fan and Ron Artest? Setup. Artest paid the guy to do it. He wanted to get suspended so he could promote his album like he'd asked all along. Remember, you read it here first. Because everyone else has too much sense of responsibility.

(Inspired by Catallarchy.)

And Rumors of War - An anonymous Iraqi physician tells Panorama radio that US troops used chemical weapons in Fallujah, according to Jihad Unspun:

Observers agree on one thing- Americans decided to use chemical weapons after they failed to defeat the Mujahideen in Fallujah - both a cowardly and inhumane act. The Mujahideen inflicted heavy losses on the US forces in al-Fallujah prompting the Americans to employ chemical weapons for the first time since the fall of Baghdad. Reports have been received that US forces used chemical weapons in the al-Jawlan, ash-Shuhada', and al-Jubayl neighborhoods and again last night in al-Jubayl neighborhood.

Uh, sure. A week and more of media-soaked action with no American troops wearing protective gear, but they made heavy use of some unidentified lethal agent anyway because that's the devil-may-care attitude that made this country great. I'm wondering if this rumor is floating around Iraq, though. Rumors are an important telltale of social attitudes. Years ago, I read Henry Louis Gates explaining various rumors current in the black community, like the Church's Fried Chicken rumor and the Liz Claiborne myth. Gates said, in paraphrase, urban African-Americans aren't frightened because they believe rumors; they believe the rumors becuase they're frightened.

(Via Avedon's Other Weblog.)

The Last to Know - Thanks to following a meme I got from Zack Ajmal, I just discovered eHow. Cool! If somhow I found it ahead of you, know that it has instructions for doing most things you could want to do. I just found a primer on fixing our bathroom floor, for instance. (Via The Livejournal of zdashamber.)

Shuffle to Judgment - I'm coming to the story of the marine who shot the unarmed wounded man in the Fallujah mosque late. Buggieboy has the best explanation of why the shooting was probably not a war crime. To me the crime was the command decision to send adult males attempting to leave Fallujah back into the city. Both the humane and the prudential thing to do would have been to intern them for examination then and there, rather than doing it several days later if they were lucky enough to survive. That decision was made well above the pay grade of the marine in the mosque. Behind that crime and other crimes, the worse mistake: putting American troops into a situation where every adult male must be regarded as a presumptive enemy - that is, invading Iraq in the first place.

The political damage exists regardless of the military justification. Muslims in Iraq and elsewhere aren't going to make the effort to see things from Buggieboy's perspective. Red State Iraq sees one of their own, helpless, getting blown away by an outsider. The comment-thread analog at Little (Muslim-)Green Soccer Balls will be humming with outrage. I'll bet you the marine who tapped that wounded man is a pretty good guy, and that the memory of what he did will wake him from many a sleep in the coming decades. If his night fits disturbed the sleep of George Bush, DIck Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Doug Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, the staff of the Weekly Standard and the board of the American Enterprise Institute there would at least be bitter consolation. But it won't. For such as they, a man like that marine is material. He is a casualty of their war as sure as any coffin cargo or concussion case. I'm sure they feel "regret," but a keener pang would attend the loss of a fly to a snag in Jackson Hole.

Other war business: A few days ago, Diana Moon e-mailed me that

It looks like your conjecture that Fallujah was hyped isn't correct. It's based on the notion that Fallujah wasn't a difficult fight. I think it was hell, even if there weren't 5K insurgents.

Diana is largely right, I think. Depending on how much you trust the casualty numbers, a lot more insurgents stayed to fight than I expected. The most recent figures I saw were 1,000 dead and 1,000 prisoners. I think some of the corpses may have "joined the resistance" upon death, and some of the 1,000 may have simply been surviving males caught in the sweep. But it could be that there were as many as 2,000 insurgents in the city during the combat. In advance, I expected no more than half that.

In that sense, I was clearly wrong. On another level, Too Soon to Tell. If the number fighting that stayed was high, was the number that fled even higher than estimated beforehand? Instead of 5,000 insurgents in pre-assault Fallujah, were there 8,000? Beats me. My other claim was that taking Fallujah would not cripple the insurgency. This puts me in contradiction to General Sattler, and we'll see who was more correct in time.

Who Knew? - Write about insurance, get tons of interesting, informative e-mail. Roundup tomorrow.

Hey, Degenerates! - Why are you reading this depraved weblog? Nate e-mails:

I'm at a Panera near Dulles airport, where I have to pick someone up later this afternoon. Paneras are great because of the free wifi, but there are downsides. Got this message when trying to visit UO:

This site is blocked by the SonicWALL Content Filter Service.

URL: http://www.highclearing.com/

Reason for restriction: Forbidden Category "Adult/Mature Content"

I presume your pornblog is maintained under a pseudonym?

I shouldn't have done that shower scene with Terrell Owens. Oh well. There's always cabl - oh shit!

Not Enough Wrinkles - Atrios puts on his economist hat and sets out to explain insurance, with, based on the caliber of the explanations so far, way more disdain for his ideological adversaries than is warranted. The first item explains the principles of "insurance classic" (fire, auto and such), and saves health insurance for a second go-round. The major problem with the first is a relentless demand-side focus that will come back to bedevil him, and liberal approaches to the question of health insurance generally, in the second item. Simply put, profit is nowhere to be found:

So, consider something like fire insurance. Every year there's a 10% chance that your house burns down and you lose $100,000 and a 90% chance you don't. Because you don't like the uncertainty, you're willing to pay some amount to remove that uncertainty from your life. Since an insurance company can bundle up a large number of people, as long as fires are uncorrelated events (no entire blocks burning down), the law of large numbers ensures that the total losses (equal to total insurance payouts) are essentially predictable. That is, the insurance would pay out an average of $10,000 per policy per year.An actuarially fair policy would have an insurance premium precisely equal to the expected (average) loss, or $10,000 per year, and a competitive insurance market would result in a price of just about that.

Well let's see how an insurance company with 100 customers does here:

Income: 100 x 10,000 = 1 million dollars per year
Outflow: 10 x 100,000 = 1 million dollars per year

We've eliminated not just profit but even overhead. There's no money to pay for administering the program, which even a nonprofit or government insurance program would need. As for the other kind - an actual business - go ahead, invest your 401K in this one. I dare you.

Now I don't want to overstate my case. Atrios probably thinks he's tucked away a little for the providers somewhere between "a competitive insurance market" and "just about that." Economic theory does say that profit should progressively vanish as markets mature. In the real world, though, it has to be worth it to provide a service, and the profit margin of an ongoing industry has a functional floor not too far below what you can get on a passbook savings account down at the bank.

I think the problem is lying in the weeds of his initial post on health insurance, where he misses the real problem of such insurance as it exists in the United States. Insurance classic is about the pooling of risk. Contemporary health insurance is that, but it's also the pooling of certainties. Example: I was diagnosed with essential hypertension when I was 25 years old, and I've been on blood pressure medication ever since. That guarantees several hundred dollars in drug costs and a couple hundred more in office visits per year for someone. Most of it is paid by whichever insurance company I have. The law requires them to do this, even though it is in no way a risk - it's a damn sure thing. Contemporary medical "insurance" is more like a service contract you would buy for your car than a classic risk management vehicle.

The money has to come from somewhere. Let's imagine a system where I pay my own insurance premiums all by myself. For it to be worth the insurance company covering me, my premiums have to exceed (to provide profit) the actuarial risks that impinge on me, plus the certain expenses of my existing conditions. For there to be a profit to them on covering my blood pressure, I have to be paying them more than I would pay out of pocket, which is a bad deal for me.

So what can make covering my blood pressure medication worth it to the insurance company and me? Free money! Put "free" in sneer quotes, please. My employers pay more of my premiums than I do. That's money that could be going straight to me, but for oddities of the tax code. There is another important source: my fellow employees. The healthier employees are paying to cover not just their own risks but my certainties.

There's one further trick to this, but I've got to go to work. In the meantime, let me suggest that a Rawlslike "veil of ignorance" exists in classic insurance that is only artificially mandated in contemporary medical insurance. Much depends, in political terms, on it staying in place.

QUICK UPDATE: Michael Croft points out, via e-mail, that I'm ignoring volume purchasing power in the certainty-pooling aspect of medical insurance. (And after chiding Atrios for skipping over stuff.) It's an important point, though I don't think it vanishes the ethical "free money" issue to the extent Michael suggests. More tonight.

Imitation Tech Blog Item - I ended up saving my profile, uninstalling all versions of Firefox and reinstalling from scratch. Then I discovered I'd saved the wrong profile, so I lost a lot of bookmarks and such. Still, I have Firefox 1.0 up and running, and thanks to two readers, including Dave Meyer and another who wishes to remain anonymous, I've switched to Sage as my RSS utility. Sage has a very cool Discover Feeds feature. (It's not perfect, missing Major Olmsted's site feed among others.) And it successfully parses more feeds than RSS Panel, which I used with Firefox 0.8.

Now if only someone with pull in the Firefox community would get someone to make a searchbar plugin for the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, the only American-English dictionary worth using.

Also, I really really really really miss a working Google toolbar. Someone write in and tell me it's there and I just didn't find it. (It not being listed with, you know, the search tools.) I especially miss the way you could just click on your search terms in the toolbar to do a Find in Page once you'd chosen a search result. But the loss of one-button site search rankles too.

Two impassioned defenses of current-model hybrid cars have come my way. Kate Nepveu:

Articles like this make me roll my eyes. I have a Toyota Prius, 2003 model--the older version. Yeah, of course they get less than the EPA mileage--*every* car gets less than its EPA mileage. I get about 45-48 MPG, depending on the season, which is entirely reasonable considering the EPA's combined estimate of 48. And I notice that the article doesn't talk about the reduced emissions from not running the engine all the time (plus whatever other tech they employ).

Yes, I believe if you do the numbers, you don't quite make up for the extra cost of the hybrid system in the gas savings. I knew that, and I didn't buy the car for the gas savings--yes, it's nice, but I bought it because it had really low emissions and it was damn cool, so I could feel virtuous and geeky at the same time. I think that's a perfectly good reason to get a car.

Madeline Ferwerda:

The hybrid article you point to is almost unalloyed hooey. Its patent lack of logic licks the boots of the lazy corruption "oh, well, this new thing isn't perfect, so I'm perfectly fine to do nothing at all."

My only car is a hybrid, I did a bunch of research on hybrids and other cars before buying it, and I hang out in hybrid forums. I know magnitudes more than Bob Elton about hybrids, and I'll point out a few places where he's full of it:

"...the difference [hybrid to non-hybrid fuel economy] is nowhere near as great as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) numbers suggest." Bob says this is because the electric-only EPA "city" numbers skew the average--he offers no explanation of how it is that the gas/electric "highway" numbers still whoop the ass of any gas-only car. Nor does he seem to have the foggiest hint of a clue that Honda hybrids are an entirely different engine than Toyota/Ford hybrids--Hondas never run on electric only.

"Fuel needed to recharge the battery" my eye. The battery recharges mostly when the car is braking—using fuel energy that gas-only cars are just throwing away.

And no doubt we'll all be shocked one day to find video footage of EPA techs frozenly stepping out of a gas-only car, teeth chattering as they gleefully congratulate each other on another efficiency rating scotched by unauthorized AC use.

Cutting to the chase: Not getting EPA numbers on your car's gas mileage? Duh. You'll note that after every car encounters the real world the hybrids are still on top.

Then Bob goes on a tangent about how if car manufacturers were going to apply to a gas-only car all the expensive engineering and careful materials choices that aid the hybrid's efficiency, it still wouldn't be as good as the hybrid. Gee, let's hold our breath for that to happen.

Bob's point about the metal in hybrid batteries? I invite you to look down the road 20 years to when oil is at $100 a barrel. Which of today's cars will be abandoned by the wayside? The hundreds of thousands of 15 mpg hulks of metal, or the thousands of 50 mpg hybrids? Talk about your criminal wastes of resources.

His point about hybrids being unsafe to people cutting them open is possible, though in the Insight at least the powerlines have been designed with that in mind, running though the center bottom of the car where they're least likely to be sliced or damaged. His point about mechanics being in danger is ludicrous.

"So, if the hybrid’s mileage advantage is minimal..." Go on, Bob, name me other cars on the market that compete. I'll be right here. Meanwhile, you suggest walking. Well, I'll lay it to you: who do you think is more likely to walk and bicycle? The person with the hybrid, or the person with the SUV?

And, frankly, he can just stop dissing the Stanley Steamer. Steam engines were the most efficient around, the fastest cars in the world. They lost out to mass production and simpler startup procedures. And those electric cars he disses? When the manufacturers came around to collect the test batch and crush them into cubes a couple years back, the people leasing them begged and bribed to keep them. No dice--America is too easily distracted chasing the hydrogen fuel-cell pie in the sky to attend to the pie lying at its very feet.

A key point here seems to be recharging the battery with waste energy from the brakes.

Reverse Paypal Button - How about if I offer everyone in America money to shut up about Nicolette Sheridan and Terrell Owens on Monday Night Football already!!!!! It's two days later, people! The whole inane brouhaha makes me feel so, so - European somehow.

The irony is I just spent half an hour listening to Doc Walker and Al Koken discussing the issue - and other outlets have framed it this was too - as a matter of the NFL using sex to sell football, when it was actually ABC using football to sell sex (ginning up viewers for Desperate Housewives). What is this country coming to when we can't even get our citizens to pay attention to sex without dangling sports in front of them?

What am I Doing UP at this Hour? - Science! Offering Boy really wanted to see the Leonid meteor shower even though it was a school/work night and an off year. I made a silent bargain: I'd pretend to try to wake him, intending to sleep through the night. If HE woke ME, he by gollum deserved to see the meteor shower. And that's what happened. Tonight's reminder while trying to find the Frost passage about how

. . . Every child should have the memory
Of at least one long-after-bedtime walk.

"The Fear" is a damn scary poem that just refuses to pack itself back into its box when it's over.

UPDATE: Memory Lane Dept.: This blog's first-ever Leonid encounter.

Evil Shakespeare Overlord A pretty good list: THE THINGS I WILL NOT DO WHEN I DIRECT A SHAKESPEARE PRODUCTION, ON STAGE OR FILM.

30. As much as I enjoy his films, I will not steal from Kenneth Branagh. It's not like people won't notice. 33. Also, I will not require Caliban to hump Stephano's leg while telling him about Miranda, no matter how big a laugh it will get. 36. Keanu Reeves will not be allowed near the production. 37. I will not pantomime every image employed in the text in concert with its recitation under the assumption that it's the only way the dumb audience could possibly understand Elizabethan text. 71. People playing human (non-elf/fairy/spirit) characters will not be made to wear costumes that sparkle unless there is a good reason for it. 77. I will not make my cast simulate slow motion. 92. I will not project a PowerPoint slideshow onto a large screen above and behind the actors, ever, for any reason, no matter what.

Lots more where those came from.

Annals of Rejected Travel Promo Themes - "What Happens in a Greyhound Bus Station Men's Room, Stays in a Greyhound Bus Station Mens Room."

Blogging is Light while I work on a writing project. Also I had to work this weekend at my day job. To keep yourself busy, read an amazing ginmar entry, "What you read" - not just because it paints a hopeful enough picture of Iraqi-American interaction in the South of the country to make one think we might really get out of the place some day not too badly off, but because it's just, like much of ginmar's work, a damn good piece of writing. Excerpt:

This is such an ancient country. Parts of it along the rivers seem almost primeieval, with the ten foot rushes and the fan-shaped palm trees. You expect to see a dinosaur, especially at sunset, when the earth is black and the sky is gold.

Sentence First . . . - I followed the Peterson trial just enough to know that I agree with John Cole's take.

Fallujah Twice - It's only to be expected that the various sets of numbers floating around about the Fallujah battle don't add up. Fog of war. AFP/Xinhuanet report that Iraqi national security advisor Qassim Dawood says "more than 1,000" rebels have been killed and about 200 detained. Meanwhile, Ryan Scarborough in the Washington Times quotes US officials who suspect that there may have been fewer than 1,000 rebels in the city at the time the attack began. The other day Sheikh al-Janabi was probably dead. As of today he has probably escaped. The city is "completely occupied" but not "completely subdued." I believe it may contain a cat who is half dead.

Meanwhile, AP reports that

Hundreds of men trying to flee the assault on Fallujah have been turned back by U.S. troops following orders to allow only women, children and the elderly to leave.

The military says it has received reports warning that insurgents will drop their weapons and mingle with refugees to avoid being killed or captured by advancing American troops.

I take their point. But just how they plan to solve the problem is under-explained:

Army Col. Michael Formica, who leads forces isolating Fallujah, admits the rule sounds "callous." But he insists it's is key to the mission's success.

"Tell them 'Stay in your houses, stay away from windows and stay off the roof and you'll live through Fallujah,'" Formica, of the 1st Cavalry Division's 2nd Brigade, told his battalion commanders in a radio conference call Wednesday night.

But if that works for innocent men, isn't it too an option for the insurgents? Slip away from their positions, drop their weapons, stay away from windows and appear as much a civilian as any unarmed man trying to walk past a checkpoint. The Army hasn't solved the problem of distinguishing combatants from civilian men, IF it intends to let any men currently in Fallujah survive. It has simply made it less likely that any noncombatant men who made it as far as the checkpoint will live through the weekend.

If the US intends to imprison all surviving males, or detain and vet them (for however long), it could simply start by detaining every man who comes to a checkpoint, rather than sending them back into the maw. Keep in mind that any genuine anti-American male sent back into the city becomes an immediate incremental increase in danger to American soldiers and marines. He can take up a gun again and shoot someone. We'll leave aside the possibility that a noncombatant male sent back into the city becomes radicalized and, pending the survival promised by Colonel Formica, joins the resistance himself, becoming a danger to American troops down the line. That's fuzzy, wooly-headed dove talk, and it presumes that any men live at all.

Once the battle ends, military officials say all surviving military-age men can expect to be tested for explosive residue, catalogued, checked against insurgent databases and interrogated about ties with the guerrillas.

None of which requires sending them back into the city. The best possible construction to put on the checkpoint policy is elusive.

Postscript: By using the term "insurgents" in this and other items, I am, according to Tex, "participat[ing] in the Orwellian propaganda of the Bush administration." I thought you should know.

Imitation Tech Blog Item - Upgraded to Firefox 1.0 from 0.8 finally. Hurm. Extensions I lived by (RSS Panel and Google Toolbar) haven't been upgraded to work with 1.0 yet. The available newsreader extension, Habari Xenu, doesn't have a fetch command that I can find and won't even sort my titles alphabetically. Weirdly, if I click on a bookmark from the bookmarks menu, nothing happens. This last may have something to do with having the betas installed on my machine, though the FAQ stated that so long as I disabled old extensions and exited completely before installing 1.0, I shouldn't have any problem. Also, another little thing that makes it just that much more annoying to use. If you clicked inside the address field of the beta toolbar once, it highlighted the entire URL. That was nice because then you could just type over it. Click once in the address field for 1.0, and you place a cursor within the URL. You have to bother to highlight the entire address with the mouse to type over it. Bother.

Cut Out the Middleman - Teresa Nielsen Hayden hips readers to something really cool. Via eBay, westerners can prder new custom-made garments direct from tailors on the subcontinent. Higher margins for them and better deals for you. I imagine that this is just the beginning of the kinds of direct trade opportunities that will be possible via eBay and other online outlets. She offers a report card on three vendors and explains how to find them using eBay's search function.

Blah Blah Blah - Am I required by blogger law to say something about Yasser Arafat? Okay, fuck Yasser Arafat. He got the chance to make the same jump from violent revolutionary to statesman that Nelson Mandela and other erstwhile terrorists took, and he never quite got up the nerve. I realize the Israelis dealt the Palestinian Authority cards from a stacked deck. But Arafat was too interested in feathering his own nest and hewing to the path of least resistance to lead. He gained an incredible opportunity through what I consider to be despicable means. "He cared more about his status than his people" should go on his monument in the West Bank.

Imperial Habeas - Michael "Anonymous" Scheuer has slipped free the surly bonds of the CIA bureaucracy and will be speaking freely, I learn from Justin Logan. Fireworks are promised. It's surely a case of getting out while the getting's good, and I expect to read very soon on every single hawkish blog in existence that Scheuer's personal shortcomings turn out to have been directly responsible for the success of the September 2001 atrocities. Still, good times. Okay, not good good times. But you know.

PG Night Continues at Unqualified Offerings - Get a load of the graphic on the front page of the DC Hashing website. No, I had no idea what "hashing" is until I followed a link to a Primer on the topic. Short version: a bunch of people chase one other person. Then they drink.

Maybe they don't always wait on the drinking. If this sounds like your idea of a good time, find a hashing organization near you. Cause if you just start drinking and chasing random people, there'll be trouble.

(Thanks to Courtney Knapp for the tip.)

Smack My Country Officer Up - This World Bank PDF contains the phrase "pimp training" but it's apparently not as bad as it sounds. Kidding aside, there's a genuine ethical dilemma in the concept, which is whether it's worth working with a criminal and frequently predatory class of men if it will help reduce the spread of sexually-transmitted diseases. I don't like pimps. I believe they exist only where man and women who engage in sex work are put outside the law, either by statute or by the less formal disregard of courts which refuse to enforce their contracts. There's an argument to be made that public health officers can't afford to wait around for societies to legalize prostitution while the fight the spread of HIV, but I suspect close commerce with pimps would tend to give health professionals that icky feeling. Maybe that's why the only World Bank-listed pimp training test dates from 1996.

Now I Understand - Mad Science explains Michael Ledeen:

While many of us in the reality-based community just assume that most problems within the Bush administration are caused by the bat-shit crazy things they do and say. Michael points out that there are some members of the administration that are not technically bat-shit crazy and therein lies the problem. The Bush administration is bogged down in a self imposed morass created by its continued tolerance of memberes who are "Bat-shit Crazy In Name Only" (Bat-shit CINOs for short).

But is Ledeen sincere, or is it simply that his Iranian Masters figure that even more bat-shit craziness from the Bush Administration maximizes their own power?

Hm. What if "Mad Science," with all of one blog post to his name, is ALSO working for the Iranians? Not that there's any proof, mind you, for either him/her OR Michael Ledeen. That's why internment is such a valuable national security tool. It gives us the time to make sure.

Squaring Accounts - Max Sawicky says the work experience to cry Nonsense! at suddenly popular claims that the red states are all tax sponges. And The Glittering Eye finds that even such numbers that are out there are inconclusive. Maybe liberal commentators will stop pissing off Ginger Stampley.

Oh. My. God. Just Oh. My. God. - Wait till the red states get a load of this. (Via . . . muttered the ogre. And after it's all over, spoil your fun here and here.)

Fun with Exit Polls - Mindles H. Dreck has an interesting item about confirmation bias in reading the election returns, and it's true enough, but it goes further, I think, than he suggests. Not just bitter Democrats but evangelical poobahs are convinced that the white conservative Christian vote put Bush over the top last Tuesday. Warbloggers are convinced it was the War on Terra, since if you add the "terrorism" and "Iraq" segments of the "most crucial issue" segments of the exit polls you get the single biggest bloc of votes for grabs, or maybe that strikes them as the crucial fact because they're warbloggers. I myself e-mailed Alex Knapp Saturday night with a good-natured "I just about have you!" after doing some easy math on the Ohio and Pennsylvania exit polls. Then I looked at Florida and it argued against my own thesis. (Briefly, Kerry lost Ohio and won Pennsylvania. The percentage of voters naming Terrorism and Iraq their top issue was higher in Pennsylvania than in Ohio. Guess what was lower. Yup: Moral Values. But then Florida has Terrorism/Iraq at 41% and Values in between Ohio and PA and Bush wins it. So it's a bit of a muddle.)

Meanwhile, Mrs. Offering is mad at me because I'm not giving Business enough credit. The Prosperity Project helped employers convey their views of which candidates were "pro-business" at both state and national levels. Industry groups are anxious not to get cheated out of credit (login: bugmenot69/Beranek) for their own get-out-the-vote efforts. The reason I am in dutch is that while I see some impressive inputs by business - the Prosperity Project has stats on the number of webpages viewed and absentee ballots requested and so on - I haven't seen any solid proof of outputs. Secret ballots being what they are, about all we have to go on are exit polls, and the exit polls indicate that if you combine the "Economy/Jobs" voters with the "Taxes" voters, Kerry wins those categories handily.

It's indisputible that the biggest change in exit poll categories from 2000 is the jump from a "World Affairs" most-crucial-issue score of 12% to a 2004 Iraq/Terror score of 34%. What originally followed was a lengthy excursion into comparative arithmetic, but I've sinec realized I need to check a key assumption behind it first, so we'll belay that for now. Instead, I'll suggest just a peak into the Abyss. The list of seven (the Top Seven?) Most Crucial Issues changed subatantially between 2000 and 2004. And a lot more people came out to vote. At the Presidential level, the result was . . . not much change. All of three (?) states ended up flipping between Republican and Democratic candidate. 9/11 Changed Everything - except for the other 47 states. It may be that we're looking at things from the wrong end. Maybe people don't decide to vote Republican because of Terrorism, Taxes or Moral Values, and don't decide to vote Democrat because of Iraq, Jobs or Education. Maybe people decide to declare a concern about Terrorism or Taxes or Moral Values because they're Republicans, and likewise for Democrats and Iraq, Jobs and Education. The game changes but not the teams.

More Anon.

Bringing Iraqis Together - Diana Moon hips readers to a brief but fascinating account of the al-Janabi clan from the Scotsman.

The principle tribe in the area is the al-Janabi, whose leader, Sheikh Abdallah al-Janabi, is one of the hard-line leaders of Fallujah, the de facto capital of the insurgency.

In May, Sheikh al-Janabi proclaimed Islamic sharia law in Fallujah, and ordered the public flogging of sellers of indecent video discs. [UO: Did he ever play baseball? (Login: highclearing/highclearing.)]

. . .

The Sheikh's brother, Adnan al-Janabi, is a present minister of state in the present Iraqi Interim Government, and was a member of the National Assembly during Saddam's era.

Meanwhile, via Antiwar.com's blog, I see that we're playing black ops games in advance of the Fallujah assault:

NEAR FALLUJA, Iraq (CNN) -- A company commander of the Iraqi security forces who received a full briefing on the expected Falluja assault is missing from a military base where U.S. and Iraqi troops are preparing for the possible operation.

. . .

Marines say the captain's disappearance won't alter the tactics or timing of the Falluja operation.

Wonder if the insurgents will buy it.

One thing I'm trying to get is the actual mix in the "10,000 US and Iraqi troops" preparing to attack, but no luck.

Reading List - It's a taking stock weekend hereabouts. Stuff that's going into the hopper, sparking varying degrees of insight, hope, despair and annoyance:

Bruce Baugh, Abandoning Libertarianism
Jonathan Wilde, Hypothetical Answer on Political Parties
Belle Waring, I Heart Libertarians
Kip Manley, the company kept, including the comment thread
Lex Gibson, Misunderestimation (via Dave Tepper)
Tim Burke, Moral Values, Divided Universalisms and Class War
Jesse Walker, Culture Bores
Will Wilkinson, Taking Pluralism Seriously
Walter in Denver, Libertarian Voting Guide
Amy Phillips, Don't Blame Me, I Voted for Kodos
Matthew Yglesias, Shadow Government

Testie, Testie - Inaugural run of wBloggar editing tool. Zempt development appears to be dead, nd that weird bug where the app disappears when minimized, taking any content with it, has cost me two posts this week. So far I'm finding the type size in the editing window to be annoyingly tiny. But the thing sure does seem to have bells and whistles. If you can read this, it works.

Curiously, Wordpress does not seem to be directly supported, which is something to think about as I contemplate site upgrades.

Note to Self - Get trackback working. In the meantime, check out various responses-slash-criticisms of recent items here by

Nate Bruinooge and Alex Knapp
Kieran Healy and John Holbo
Franklin Harris (via)
Alan Sullivan
Chad Orzel and The Poor Man

I Hope the SNACKS are Good at the Blog Conference - Alex Knapp writes

Look, gay marriage was mentioned, but it was totally ancillary to the campaign. Both candidates were against gay marriage and said so. Maybe I've just been slipped in here from a parallel universe, but in the campaign I watched, the central issues were terrorism and the war in Iraq. I guarantee you that a majority of people who voted for Bush voted on those issues, not gay marriage.

I don't want to pick on Alex personally; I think there's a larger point here. Alex is surely correct that the "campaign [he] watched" was not about "moral values." I suspect that, like the rest of us who do this, Alex followed the campaign on TV and - blogs! Plus the internet sites of major metropolitan newspapers. That's the campaign I watched too.

And meanwhile, unknown to Alex and me and Glenn Reynolds and Kevin Drum and most operatives of the Democratic Party, the important campaign was the one we were barely watching at all. This one was taking place in "low church" pews and the basements of Catholic Churches; on Christian radio and among prayer groups. It was a ground-level meatspace operation that may have left cybernetic traces, but not where we, the vaunted blogosphere, were looking. Very occasionally it appeared before us, but as an oddity. The President refers, seemingly out of the blue, to the Dred Scott decision in the second (third?) debate. It goes unremarked by Glenn Reynolds and Alex and - me. I did see some liberal bloggers either express amused puzzlement and get educated by commenters as to its sub rosa meaning or figure it out for themselves, but I didn't see any of them grasping the import of it at the time. (Same here!) The whole operation aiming to physically convey bodies to discrete spots in public buildings, full of an enthusiasm opaque to Technorati. You could go so far as to say it was supposed to go unnoticed in such places, so as not to scare off people like Alex Knapp.

Close elections are won or lost at the margins. From what I can tell, the real story of this campaign was the Democratic Party's effort to mobilize black voters angry about the Unpleasantness in 2000 versus the Republicans' effort to pull the famous four million white evangelicals out of Karl Rove's pocket. The Republicans won.

And (this is what we really care about) it had nothing, nothing to do with The Blogosphere. The blogosphere had no clue. (This is why it's no personal slight on Alex.) This goes for the big pro-Bush sites AND the pro-Kerry sites. (Shall we call it the Main Stream Blogosphere, or "MSB?") This wasn't "The Year of the Blogger" at all. It was the year the Blogger saw himself and mistook the vision for the election. If there's any justice, the upcoming conference will end early and we can all go for drinks.

Lord, Make Me the Kind of Person Nancy Pelosi Thinks I Am - I lost a big ol' item last night calling qualified bullshit on the suddenly popular notion that liberals need to come up with "a plausible spiel on morality," essentially dressing their existing beliefs in the language of religion so as to reach Christians who currently vote Republican. (While not explicitly stated, we are talking white Christians here. Obviously the Dems reach black Christians just fine.) See Kieran Healy, Amy Sullivan, Eszter Hargittai and Amy Sullivan. Among other things, this will raise conservative-Christian comfort levels with liberal politicians and make liberal policies attractive in the terms with which said voters view the world.

This is naive and even condescending. Conservative, values-minded Christians aren't looking for validation. They're looking for specific policy outcomes that their strongly-held beliefs entail - among them, the prohibition of abortion and the marginalization and if possible elimination of homosexuality. They are not empty urns waiting to be filled with liberal policies dissolved in honeyed words about faith.

Consider Bill Clinton. He was great at dressing his policies in the language of evangelical Christianity. But as his policies and biography diverged from conservative-Christian limits, white religious turned savagely against him. It's not the poetry, it's the prose. Contrariwise, Bush and Rove's faith talk may be every bit the "spiel" Kieran Healy says it is. Doesn't matter. The question for evangelicals and what Sullivan calls "religious moderates" isn't the sincerity of politicians, it's whether those politicians deliver on their issues. In the case of the Bush Administration, on issues like stem cells and gay marriage, that seems to be happening. For that reason, Bush and his party incur electoral rewards.

Reasons to Be, Uh, No - Radley sounds a similar note to the final paragraph of the item below this one:

I'm afraid that this election might have been a repudiation of libertarianism, though obviously not an explicit one. Seems to me that Bush voters last night voted for Ashcroftian morality, aggressive foreign policy, and were generally unconcerned about the massive spending and expansion of government that took place under Bush's watch. Given that his strongest supporters were seniors, the prescription drug benefit probably helped him more than it hurt him.

And Dave Intermittent e-mails to complain that even my half-hearted attempts at optimism are too little . . . reality-based:

The notion that Bush could yet pay a political price for his fuck-ups seems to be at odds with reality, in which any failure is either ignored, spun off as a success (Nukes in Iran? Rope a Dope, Baby!), blamed on the media, or written off as a Democratic plot, I dont see it. Barring of course, something truly catastrophic; and of course, we've already had something truly catastrophic during his term, and it helps him. Go figure. What really chills me though, is the emerging Democratic consensus: that they need to be able to compete on the "morality" issue. Wonderful; Republicans turn into Democrats on spending, Democrats into Republicans on morality and we get two parties both of which are determined to spend us into the ground while simultaneously mucking about in our private lives. We've somehow found a way to combine the worst traits of both parties: Excelsior! It's the Composite Superman of politics.

Cheer me up, why don't you? FInding a fanboy angle, Dave suggests "this is a good time to look under the couch for change to send the CBLDF." Radley comes closest to a consoling thought in his close:

Of course, that doesn't mean that's what most of the country feels, or that it's what Bush should actually do. It just means that's what the most motivated people feel. 51% of the people who voted last night were generally in tune with the big-government, Great America, neoconservative worldview.

The problem is that in politics, what the most motivated people feel tells. The Rs have now been rewarded for being the party of Ashcroft and Rumsfeld. They would probably suffer electorally for trying to move away from that. It's who they are now. This election proves that the voters of Ashcroftica can have a massively larger effect at the electoral margin than we can, period. You (the Republican Party) simply could not turn out a couple of million "extra" libertarian voters if you decided you needed them.

More than ever we'll have, on one hand, a "conservative" party with a weak commitment to a circumscribed notion of economic liberty and an active hostility to civil liberties, and on the other a "liberal party" with a weak commitment to a circumscribed notion of civil liberties and an active hostility toward market freedom. It is, as you say, very very bad.

Be of Good Cheer - At least I get to keep my liberal readership. I already alienated all the conservatives. A Kerry presidency would have swiftly reduced me to two dozen libertarians I know at parties and sundry indulgent friends.

What? It's not all about me? Well if that's your attitude, the only thing I have for you is that the Bush Administration will not be able to get out the door before its irremediable clusterfucks . . . fuck clusters. Or whatever. Iraq is not fixable. When it goes definitively kablooey, its architects will not be safely tucked away in their ranches and sinecures, able to tut-tut that if only we had stayed the course . . . Plus we are reminded once again of the genius of HL "Democracy is the theory that the people know what they want and deserve to get it - good and hard" Mencken.

The downside? Oh, little things, like returning to office the government that

*asserted that the executive can unilaterally and unreviewably strip any citizen of citizenship and declare any non-citizen an "enemy combatant" without rights;
*argued in its work papers that the President is not bound by either domestic or international laws of war because - he's the President! and it's a war!

Also, it appears that the Republicans will have won thanks to their direst characteristics, reifying of the national security state and codifying the moral outlook of a particular slice of Christendom into law. And the Democrats will have lost thanks to their equivocal stands against promiscuous war and for civil liberty - their best characteristics. I can envision some good things coming from Bush II, and some bad things not happening that would have happened under Kerry. But on balance this is a bad election to be a libertarian.

Horse Race II - It's hard not to call Florida for Bush at this point, comparing precinct reports with exit polls. The same comparison suggests that Kerry narrowly takes Ohio. But Bush getting Florida seems to mean Kerry needs to pretty much sweep the uncalled Great Lakes states to pull it out.

But you know that. Not watching TV FWIW. No wireless network in the house. So I'm listening to the NPR feed and surfing.

Again, the way the exit polls are going, if Bush wins we don't just get four more years of Republican Party rule. We get four more years of the worst of the Republican Party, war and hectoring moralism and then some more of each.

Horse Race - Mrs. O is working tonight at her Republican-tending PAC and she tells me that her office sees Florida going Bushward.

Acid Test Update - CNN exit poll shows 3% of male and 1% of female Nevadans voting "None of These" - not Bush, not Kerry, not Nader. My math shows Kerry ahead of Bush by 1.28% and "None of These" at 1.96%.

Hm.

UPDATE: Arizona, however, seems to show no LP effect at all. The exit polls trend strongly pro-Bush with negligible "Other" votes.

UPDATE UPDATE: Precinct returns suggest that "None of These" in the Nevada results literally means None of These. It's a "none of the above" option and it's polling considerably higher than the Libertarian Party so far.

Nonvote for Change - Jonathan Wilde of Cattalarchy has a terrific explanation of more effective ways than voting for libertarians to effect political change. Assault weapons are not involved. I'm not anti-voting the way a lot of my ideological fellows are, but look at the calendar: you vote once a year at most. The other 364 days of the year are vastly more important not just in the totality of your life, but politically too.

Goodbye to All That, the Continuing Series - Much talk on the radio today about the salience of "moral values" in the election. One set of exit polls I heard about on the radio had 22% of the electorate naming MVs as the top issue facing the country - above terrorism, the economy or the war in Iraq. Just now NPR's analysts are saying that Wisconsin is as close as it is because of heavy evangelical turnout. Apparently the Catholic vote is going much more strongly for Bush this year than in 2000.

If Bush wins the Repubs will draw the inescapable conclusion that mobilizing conservative Christians is the key to victory. That means even more marginalizing of what's left of the Party's libertarian wing than we've seen heretofore.

Meanwhile, Senator Reid was just on the radio saying that Nevada will be decided by "1,000 votes." So that's a pretty congenial "Badnarik threshhold." If the Drifter can poll that many votes, he's established the LP as a non-negligible force. Given the other trend discussed in this message, even Radley might find some comfort in that. Meanwhile, Radley's blogging up a storm electionwise, and is a good place to make frequent stops tonight.

Acid Test - Haven't found any exit polls that include Badnarik tallies, so it's Too Soon To Tell whether his spoiler effort in Nevada, New Mexico, Wisconsin and Arizona will have a visible effect.

CNN shows Bush, Kerry and Nader exit poll tallies for Wisconsin. Breaking it down, it appears that Bush trails Kerry by 0.42%, and that the "unattributed" votes - non-Bush, non-Kerry, non-Nader - is 0.47%. But how many of those are Cobb voters and how many Badnarik?

Faithless Ejectors - While I stand by last night's critique of the narrowness of Democratic complaints about the Iraq War, I don't agree with Tim Cavanaugh's quasi-moral critique of liberal-hawk fecklessness. Cavanaugh essentially accuses liberal hawks of insufficient gratitude toward the President for giving them the war they wanted. But everyone knows gratitude bulks small in politics. Politics is "What have you done for me lately" for everyone else, so why not liberal hawks too? This holds even if you're a liberal hawk who still supports the war, like the short-bus riders associated with Winds of Change. You may still rationally decide to vote Kerry. As people like Tim and I have pointed out, Kerry's positions on Iraq are too close to the administration's to enthuse true doves. That means they're close enough to the Administration's to provide considerable comfort to hawks who aren't over-the-top Kerry haters. If you believe in bettering the world by bombing it AND in gay marriage AND in bigger entitlements AND in higher taxes on the wealthy, it makes much more sense for you to vote Kerry. Less tendentiously, you may have supported war on Saddam Hussein and want to "finish the job" (however defined) but quail at the prospect of war with Iran and dislike the influence of the religious right. Kerry's your man.

In a way, liberal hawk turncoats - particularly the ones who are still pro-war - are almost refreshing: they used the President to get what they wanted and then abandoned him afterwards. Perhaps of all voters out there, they are the ones who can claim that their politics have been least distorted by the heat and pressure of war.

Meanwhile, reader Realish writes

As a corollary, I often hear hawks say somewhat dismissively, "well, the war was sold poorly. Bush should have been clearer about his reasons. He should have used the real reasons." As though the case Bush made for war is somehow an incidental feature of the war effort. As I keep saying, if the war had not been sold with maximum hysteria -- imminent threats, WMD, unmanned drones, and all the rest of it -- it wouldn't have happened. Most Bush supporters still think Saddam had weapons and ties to terrorists. Take away that case, the war goes with it.

Hawks just don't seem to get it: The dishonesty leading up to war, the poor planning, the lowballed amount of troops, the lowballed costs... all these were intrinsic to enabling the war at all. The Bushies knew that, even if their supporters still seem unable to get a grip on it. It's not just that there is no good Iraqi war, it's that the structure of the situation was such that there couldn't have been one. That's the real crime here. The military democratization campaign in the Middle East that the hawks cling to is a bedtime story, a unicorn, a chimera. It is not a live possibility.

Don't Blame Me, I Voted for the Drifter - and so did Jeremy Lott. In the meantime, NPR's spinmeisters are EJ Dionne and Christopher Caldwell. There are liberals I like less than Dionne, but I can't think of them. Meantime, Caldwell is - and I hardly realized I had one - my favorite neoconservative.

I still think my quasi-prediction is looking pretty good.

Elitist Snobbish Weasel Talk - Just kidding! Radley Balko dances to Will Wilkinson's tune.

We may one day get a libertarian president, but it won't be from the LP. It'll happen one of three ways. We'll either get a GOPer who understands that economic freedom without personal freedom isn't really freedom, or we'll get a market-oriented Democrat who pays more than lip service to civil liberties. The third (and most likely, I think) way it could happen is we get a charismatic libertarian celebrity (a Schwarzenegger type -- though he's not all that libertarian) or a multimillionaire who can bypass the two-party system and command legitimacy based on his success or celebrity alone.

I think the odds of the LP ever getting 10% of the presidential vote in our lifetime are near infinitismal. The odds of them ever electing a president are worse.

What the LP can do, however, is win enough votes to get some attention from the media. And all that really does is make it more difficult for the rest of us to draw a clear line of distinction between libertarianism and Libertariansm -- or between the ideas of Smith, Jefferson, Mill, et.al and the, well, the blue people.

I sort of agree and sort of disagree and may come back to the issue. But I think one of the things a good Badnarik/LP showing would do is give people like Radley a chance to place columns and go on talk shows with the message that "There's more to libertarianism than Michael Badnarik." I also think that a lot of people who think of themselves as "reasonable libertarians" are pretty unreasonable about some major issues. Take Radley fave Steve Czaban, who describes himself as libertarian, but seems completely content with the current contours of the drug war and presently spends considerable airtime shilling for the new DC baseball stadium deal. (Why won't Czaban pal and Agitator commenter Skip Oliva try to make the man see sense on the latter?) The Hit and Run comments sections are full of "reasonable libertarians" who think Radley's own core issues, the ones he deals with every day at work like drug prohibition and sex work laws, are "silly." There are people who think folks like me are squishy. They too serve their purpose. Since politics ends up "somewhere in the middle," too much preemptive compromise simply slides the middle further from one's ideal. So, Badnarik still gets my vote. If I lived in a swing state, I might trade off, but I don't. And my wife says they're jumping "Hs through Os" to the front of the line right this minute, so I'm off to the polls.

Predictions BTW - I have in my possession one of those Zogby International battleground states polls (from Sunday night) that shows Kerry ahead in 6 of 10, including all the bigass states except Ohio (where Bush holds an impressive four-point lead). I think it's one of the reports you have to pay for. So the question is how much respect you have for Zogby. I've always figured him for the most reliable pollster out there, by which I meant the least likely to undercount conservative votes. My opinion is apparently not universal in the realm of professional politics however, and he did, IIRC, call 2002 wrong.

The hoi polloi version is here. Of the full list of 21 "battleground states," only one flips color: New Hampshire, which goes from Red to Blue. He's calling Florida a tie, but that's not a change from 2000 either. Leastwise, in the voting part.

Via - The preceding link comes from Justin Logan. Remember when Unqualified Offerings was good? That's what Justin's blog is like. Read him every day and you'll be smarter, happier and more fit.

You're Either With Us or You're - No! No! Get Away! - I missed Barton Gellman's Post article last week about how the Administration spurned offers of cooperation from Iran in the weeks after the September 11, 2001 atrocities. Excerpt:

Diplomats from Tehran and Washington had been meeting quietly all winter in New York and Bonn. They found common interests against the Taliban, Iran's bitter enemy. Iranian envoys notified their U.S. counterparts about the 290 arrests and proposed to cooperate against al Qaeda as well. The U.S. delegation sought instructions from Washington.

The delegation's room to maneuver, however, was limited by a policy guideline set shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Can't have that, though:

Representatives of Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld fought back. Any engagement, they argued, would legitimate Iran and other historic state sponsors of terrorism such as Syria.

On the surface, this has a certain appeal. The Iranian and Syrian governments have hired some real bastards in their day. Of course, if you really believed 9/11 changed everything, you could go for it - say "Yes we'll cooperate on Al Qaeda, but we also insist that . . . " What's the worst that can happen? They say no? You're no worse off than you would have been anyway. But the Iranians would only have made such offers as they did because they wanted to get back on our good side.

Don't be the least bit surprised if similar reports turn up about Iraqi offers to cooperate against Al Qaeda. In the months between the September massacres and the Axis of Evil speech the international air was alive with possibilities. When I think how we deliberately and systematically closed it all off it drives me nuts.

Predictions - It won't be close. It definitely won't be close in the electoral college. It may not be close in the popular vote. I'll define "not close" as 50 electoral votes and 3% popular.

I just don't know who's going to win.

How can I be sure of one and not the other? Try rolling a marble down the edge of a yardstick. That sucker's falling one side or the other, but you won't know which until the last second.

Curiously, partisan bloggers on both sides seem to be preparing for defeat. The Dem bloggers are all the good thing is that we're energized and organized now no matter what happens and the Republicans are continual preemptive complaints about the liberal media throwing the election to John Kerry.

Casualties of War - Maybe 9/11 didn't not change everything after all (sic). It's been a week since Anthony Hecht died and Alan Sullivan hasn't written word one about it, despite being eminently qualified to do so. Instead it's all Victor Davis Hanson and David Warren - the sort of thing well within the competency of any bog-standard Republican blogger. It's a terrible waste of comparative advantage. I blame Osama Bin Laden, among others.

Faithless Electors - Tim Cavanaugh takes the hide off the "liberal hawks." Cavanaugh is a libertarian dove like me, but less willing to forgive and forget.

When you say yes to war, the only certainty is that you're saying yes to rape, murder, theft, destruction, starvation, torture, madness and every other calamity flesh is heir to. Fewer than 2,000 dead, cooperation from some of the conquered country's most respected figures, and the dim prospect of elections are not the natural consequences of any war: They can only be regarded as freebies.

So if the liberal hawks honestly thought the war could be conducted without brutality, they were merely naive. If, however, they are not so much disappointed in the war as tired of Bush, they are something worse.

Now a lot of the disenchanted liberal hawks I know complain less about brutality than about mismanagement. In this they take their lead from the Kerry campaign, which has focused its criticism on the Bush administration's incompetence and "failure to win the peace." Complain that Bush committed "too few troops to secure the peace" and you can, for possibly enough listeners to get you elected, attack the incumbent without sounding "soft." The most recent episode of this circumscribed approach has been the Al-QaQaa Incident, where some portion of 360 tons of explosives has gone unaccounted for. Incompetence! Too few troops!

But why were there "too few troops?" Was it all Rumsfeld's bright ideas? Of course not. At least on paper, the occupation of Iraq called for upwards of 300-500,000 troops in country, based on previous postwar reconstruction experience. First off, we don't have them. 1.4 million troops across all services, per Strategy Page. At the beginning of this year we had 499,000 active duty soldiers and 700,000 National Guards and reserves. On the "2:1 Rule" we could sustain a 400k-strong deployment in Iraq if and only if we did nothing else militarily for the duration. Without a draft. Or a couple hundred thousand foreign troops we were never going to get. Double or treble the fiscal costs if we could have scraped a force that size together. Now tell the country you need to commit it for five-odd years and be sugar-coating the time commitment by a factor of two to ten. Actually, someone tried that.

We invaded Iraq with the force we did because it was the only politically viable way to have the war at all. Until well along the buildup phase when the familiar "close ranks" phenomenon hit the American public, support for immediate military action against Saddam Hussein's Iraq was tepid. The Bush Administration's political people knew perfectly well that a bigger, more disruptive deployment and less cakewalk talk risked sinking the whole deal. To say "We shouldn't have invaded Iraq with such a small force" is to say "We shouldn't have invaded Iraq." It's just not saying it forthrightly.

UPDATE: Matthew Yglesias promises things to come.

I Made You? You Made ME! - Saheli Datta and John Holbo each consider the ways in which Bush and Bin Laden are like and unlike Batman and the Joker. Saheli writes

Regardless of the fact that, as Matthew Yglesias has pointed out over and over again, GWB's cult of personality is rather ridiculous, the fact remains that such a cult exists.

and

Most of the people I know who avidly read comic books are also fairly sharp about policy; from this highly unscientific sample I'd have to guess that if you are practiced at getting your superhero kicks from the world of fantasy you don't need to get them from the world of reality.

which proves pretty conclusively that she's never read Sean Collins' blog. (We kid because we love!)

John Holbo writes

OBL sending us tapes is, as everyone has long since noticed, like some sort of super-villain grandstanding nonsense. You can't blame Michael Moore for getting dragged into this. You can't even blame George Bush for providing Moore with the material - the goat fodder. What you can do is decline the invitation to hallucinate that we are living inside a big superhero comic.

Where You'll Find Me - Blogging will be light today and tomorrow as Your Talking Dog and I rendezvous and run the Marine Corps Marathon through DC and Virginia. Heaven knows if anyone wants to come out and cheer we'd love to see you. I still look relatively like my LiveJournal picture, and I'll be wearing a green t-shirt with "J-I-M" on it. I'll be running next to a short, hairy fellow. We anticipate running at between a 10 and 12-minute pace.

Wackily, you can track our progress via e-mail, mobile phone text message or pager. No, I can't for a minute imagine why you'd want to, but you can. It's just like those live gameimte Java scoreboards you get on ESPN, only nobody cares. To track me, you want last name "Henley," first name "Jim." You can follow Your TD by inputting last name "Farber," first name "Seth."

After it's all over, I'll tell you what nobody's saying about the al Qa Qaa explosives story.

UPDATE: DNF, drat it. Left knee went south on me after 11 miles. Wouldn't bend or support weight without shooting pain. I made it to the Mile 16 aid station and took the straggler bus in. Oh well! Your TD however finished in 5:55:25.

Helpful Hints - Suitability of common household objects for crushing ice:

A can of Progresso soup - Good.
A Le Creuset dutch oven - Much better.

Why, Despite Everything, John Kerry Should Be President - If I skip detailing the ways in which John Kerry's career and his institutional situation offend the concepts of limited government it's not because I don't recognize them or don't care. The incumbent's record establishes him as likely worse on some such things (scientific and social freedom), about as bad on others (trade, spending, civil liberties) and better on a few (regulatory expansion). Enthusiasm for limited government and free trade across and within our borders is in not just practical but even rhetorical decline in George W. Bush's Republican Party. The term "modern-liberal" has been the libertarian term of disdain for the managerialist philosophy that conquered the Democratic Party between the Progressive Era and the New Deal. The time has come to add "modern-conservative" as a description of the guiding philosophy of the Republican Party, a philosophy that replaces the defense of markets with crony capitalism, personal responsibility with theocratic injunction, patriotism with the most cartoonish possible nationalism, prudence in international relations with reckless and unending adventure.

Which brings us to the present election between, alas, John Kerry and, unfortunately, George W. Bush. I've been in favor of President Bush losing the election for quite some time, but it's only recently that I've been able to think that John Kerry should win it. It comes down to a recent, endlessly rehashed exchange.

John Kerry told the New York Times:

"We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives but they're a nuisance."

Kerry compared the anti-terrorism battle to efforts by law enforcement to root out prostitution or illegal gambling, knowing such an activity could never be ended but could be reduced to where "it isn't threatening people's lives every day."

This is a bad approach to prostittution and gambling, but it's an uncannily realistic set of victory conditions for the War on Terror. The Republican response has been pie-in-the-sky irreality:

"I couldn't disagree more," Bush said. "Our goal is not to reduce terror to some acceptable level of nuisance. Our goal is to defeat terror by staying on the offensive."

which implies that by "staying on the offensive" (forever?) we can make "terror" - a tactic that has been around for some long number of decades or centuries depending how loose you want to play with your definitions - vanish utterly from the face of the earth. When certain progressives sought beforetimes to "end war," real conservatives laughed out their asses at the naivete.

In one exchange Kerry earns the office Bush forfeits. I have real doubts about Kerry's ability to attain his stated victory conditions, because it would mean changing US foreign policy in ways neither party has the inclination to contemplate now. But the President won't even give us a plausible victory condition. "Defeat" sure sounds tough, but what does it mean, really? Is the President promising a future in which terrorists never attack Americans? Ever ever? If not, then what more impressive victory is he promising than reducing terrorism to "a nuisance?" If so, just how long does he expect perfection in this life to take coming? How much will it cost in American blood and treasure? How long will we "stay" on "the offensive?" How many countries will we invade? How many occupations will we run, and serially, or in parallel? How much faith must we place in "the offensive?" (Vice President Cheney recently used variations of the word "aggressive" three times in a single sentence on the stump.) As much as Napoleon? How many election cycles do they expect it to take?

This last strikes me as crucial to the question. Kerry averred, accurately, that victory over terrorism would mean a future in which "terrorists are not the focus of our lives." The problem is that the Bush Administration in particular and the Republican Party generally are the wrong people to bring about such a future. Structurally, the Republican Party profits from conflict, not victory. It enjoyed a huge electoral advantage during the Cold War because of its greater credibility on National Security, but it made the mistake of winning that contest and the result was the first twice-elected Democratic President since Roosevelt. Now we are in the midst of another war, one the Administration chose to fight with broad goals rather than narrow ones. I don't think the Republican Party will make the mistake of "winning" this one. The plan is rather to "stay on the offensive" until terrorism is eliminated, which is to say, forever. I don't think most Republican leaders consciously intend to belay victory for the sake of partisan advantage. I think that people's self and class interests bias them in ways they may not see.

That doesn't mean the rest of us can't see it, though. The Bush Administration has a vested interest in perpetuating security-related fears, which makes them poorly suited to provide actual security. And as they themselves keep reminding us, security is what this election is all about.

A Fanboy's Links - Comics journalist and Stan Lee biographer Tom Spurgeon has started a new site, The Comics Reporter. I expect to make it a regular reading stop, and I expect most lovers of comics will.

Where's the Fun in That? - Megan McArdle and Radley Balko are dissing homeless drifter Michael Badnarik today, Libertarian Party candidate for President. Badnarik is clearly a few cells short of a spreadsheet. This hasn't especially bothered me on the grounds that Michael Badnarik has no chance of becoming President. I view a vote for Badnarik as a vote for the party rather than the man. Now, the LP is itself a few cells short of a spreadsheet I realize. When I say "a vote for the party," I really mean a signal to the Republicans that they've blown their small-government credibility. (Some of them have done this with deliberate zeal.) I think two types of libertarians especially should vote for Badnarik - those who live in "safe" states for either Bush or Kerry (like, um, Megan McArdle and Radley Balko), and swing state libertarians who normally vote Republican and have grown disenchanted with the Bush Administration, but just can't bring themselves to vote for John Kerry. I also suspect that it's not the case that if the Libertarian Party produces better Presidential candidates it will get more votes. I think it's the other way around: if the Libertarian candidate starts getting more votes it will attract better candidates. Right now the prize is not worth the effort to claim it. That would change with the increase in prestige of a higher vote share. Yes, the LP sucks ass in a thousand ways. But during our quadrennial magic show it's a handy way to signify general preferences.

So what intrigues me about Radley's argument is that it skips past the "Badnarik is too crazy to be President" non sequiter, asking "Is Badnarik too crazy to be a libertarian [spokesperson]."

Given how close this election is, even if Badnarik does worse than Harry Browne did in 2000, there's a small chance that the LP could draw enough votes in a few states to tilt the outcome one way or the other. Should that happen, both Badnarik and the LP could get more media exposure than the LP's gotten in years. I'm sorry, but I'm just not convinced that either Badnarik or the LP speaking on behalf of libertarianism to a national audience with limited exposure to the ideology would ultimately be good for libertarianism, the philosophy.

This is the best anti-Badnarik argument I've seen. It may even be germane, since Badnarik is apparently setting himself up as a Bush-killer. I'm not ultimately persuaded Radley's way, though it's a close call. To paraphrase Churchill, Badnarik is the worst voting option except for all the others. Worst-case scenario is Bush wins. (I'll go into why with tomorrow's endorsement post.) The second-worst case scenario is that Kerry wins in such a way as to convince Big Government Conservatism that it needs to offer even more free stuff next time round - more medical entitlements; more trade barriers; more domestic spending of all sorts. It's certainly to the Libertarian Party's shame, though, that the choice is as narrow as it is.

Music Notes - What have we got for you today? The LA Times talks to Nick Lowe about his durable, protean "What's So Funny 'Bout Peace, Love and Understanding." Newsweek profiles UO Main Man Elvis Costello - bonus points for finding especially angular euphemisms for the "former angry young man of new wave" cliche that is standard to such pieces. And the Observer gives thumbs up to a new Costello Bio, Complicated Shadows, that I have not read. I am still liking The Delivery Man very much. The burn has not set in for it the way it did with When I Was Cruel.

Kerry Ripped by Swift Boat Lesbians for Truth - And

Meanwhile, on the campaign trail, President Bush blasted Army reservists who refused to carry out a convoy supply mission in Iraq last week, saying, "What do they think this is, the Alabama National Guard?"

From The Borowitz Report.

RIP - Anthony Hecht is dead. Michael Dirda has a decent appreciation.

There were years when Hecht was my favorite living poet. The first time I met the man was in a small chain bookstore outlet I managed in an unobtrusively wealthy neighborhood of Washington, DC. I helped a grandfatherly-looking shabbily-dressed gentleman find summer reading list books (for his son, not his grandson), and then the man lay his Visa card on the counter. I stared at it, not speaking.

"Is there something wrong with that?" he asked.

"You're Anthony Hecht," I said.

"Yes, I am."

I rang his sale, estimating the various kinds of fool I had made of myself with my quips about the books on his son's list, and that was that. On later, more public occasions, I saw the version more familiar to those who follow poetry - dapper (often bow-tied), reserved, plum-voiced, a man who could tell you that chickens were the smallest fruit that grows on bushes and you would believe him for that authoritative baritone. In a common genre of memoir/appreciations I now tell you that each time he remembered me, and I imply or state outright that he singled me out as a uniquely welcome face in the crowd of the moment. None of that happened. But I heard him recite Auden's "The Fall of Rome" from memory at a talk one time, which is more than I could have hoped for.

His great subject was political cruelty - "More Light! More Light!" is particularly unsparing - but he tapped yet deeper, colder sources too, as in "The Hill." Though I doubt it goes that way, may it be for him now less like

I saw a piece of ribbon snagged on a hedge,
But no other sign of life. And then I heard
What seemed the crack of a rifle. A hunter, I guessed;
At least I was not alone. But just after that
Came the soft and papery crash
Of a great branch somewhere unseen falling to earth.

And that was all, except for the cold and silence
That promised to last forever, like the hill.

And more like the next lines:

Then prices came through, and fingers, and I was restored
To the sunlight and my friends.

Start with the selection at Plagiarist.com but don't stop there. I am partial to "Third Avenue in Sunlight," but, out of respect for the great themes of his work, must close by calling your attention to a late poem, "The Transparent Man." Excerpt:

It's like a sort of blizzard in the bloodstream,
A deep, severe, unseasonable winter,
Burying everything. The white blood cells
Multiply crazily and storm around,
Out of control. The chemotherapy
Hasn't helped much, and it makes my hair fall out.
I know I look a sight, but I don't care.
I care about fewer things; I'm more selective.
It's got so I can't even bring myself
To read through any of your books these days.
It's partly weariness, and partly the fact
That I seem not to care much about the endings,
How things work out, or whether they even do.
What I do instead is sit here by this window
And look out at the trees across the way.
You wouldn't think that was much, but let me tell you,
It keeps me quite intent and occupied.
Now all the leaves are down, you can see the spare,
Delicate structures of the sycamores,
The fine articulation of the beeches.
I have sat here for days studying them,
And I have only just begun to see
What it is that they resemble. One by one,
They stand there like magnificent enlargements
Of the vascular system of the human brain.

Dept. of Famous Victories - I ran out of Samarra puns months ago, so I'll just note that the unraveling of our latest Samarra victory took even a little less time than I anticipated:

Samarra desertions show challenge of training Iraqi recruits

BAGHDAD, Iraq - At least 300 Iraqi soldiers abandoned their 750-man unit after they were deployed to Samarra earlier this month as part of a U.S.-Iraqi operation to retake the militant-controlled city.

says Jim Michaels of USA Today. And Reuters reports that

SAMARRA, Iraq (Reuters) - At least six civilians were killed and 11 U.S. soldiers wounded in clashes in Samarra Wednesday, a northern Iraqi town the U.S. military said it had pacified following an offensive earlier this month.

I can't help but note that Reuters, perhaps skittish after all the second guessing about what terms they use to refer to various Iraqi insurgent factions, seems to have decided to avoid referring to them at all when grammatically possible. The article is full of US troops having "clashes." Who with? They never say. This war truly is a transforming experience, even turning transitive verbs intransitive.

UPDATE: Damn. Looks like Flit beat me to this one. But I don't make you wade through a bunch of stuff about the Canadian submarine fleet to get to the parts about us.

Happy Birthday to . . . me. But also Kevin Drum, my former boss and my current boss' seven-year-old son. And comic book artist/writer Jim Starlin, if memory serves. Blogging will be light, which may make the blog sad, since it has its own Birthday (Thwee!) Thursday.

FamousBirthdays.Net lists a bunch of other folks who will be getting more attention than I, including Evander Holyfield and John LeCarre.

The Truth Revealed - Obviously we've spent a lot of time since the summer obsessed with the question of what really happened back in the early seventies. Now, at last, Science provides an answer:

The NFL Films tape didn't show the collision and didn't show the ball striking either player. But by slowing the tape, Fetkovich could see that the ball had already rebounded by the time the collision occurred.

"That's critical," he said, because if the two collided before the ball hit, they would have already exchanged momentum and made the analysis more difficult. But since the ball hit a player before the collision, then only that player's momentum would have been transferred to the ball.

Tatum was running upfield. If the ball hit him, "Tatum would have added a good deal of momentum [to the ball] in the upfield direction," Fetkovich explained, much as a baseball player adds momentum to a baseball by swinging his bat at a pitch.

By contrast, Fuqua was running across and down the field, with his left arm outstretched to catch the ball. If the ball hit him, he likely wouldn't have added any momentum to the ball, both because he was moving roughly in the same direction as the ball and because the ball likely would have hit him in the arm.

So a rebound off of Fuqua would have been, in baseball terms, a bunt.

And there you have it: the very universe declares that the Immaculate Reception was a righteous touchdown, just as those of us from Western Pennsylvania always told you. Go and vote accordingly.

Halfway There - Alan Sullivan allows that, No, Iraq War Phases III and IV haven't made the US safer "Yet," but asserts

But Iraq is. The number dying there in the current unrest is a miniscule fraction of the number who died under Saddam. There were no cameras in Abu Ghraib, then.

I suspect he's doing something here that other hawks have done with numbers - you see claims that Iraqis are better off than they were before the invasion and occupation phases of the war because "Saddam killed 200,000 Iraqis a year" or some such figure, whereas "only [whatever number of Iraqi civilian casualties a particular hawk will concede] have died" since the balloon went up in March 2003.

The problem with this comparison, quantitative or qualitative, is it obscures what Iraq has been like recently - it ascribes to Saddam every dead Iraqi in the Iran-Iraq War, Phase I and II of the war with the US (the Kuwait expulsion and sanctions phases), the Kurdish rebellions during the Iran-Iraq War and the Shi'ite rebellion we instigated at the close of Iraq War Phase I, plus all the police-state murders of political opponents and the lethal thuggery of one of the planet's more violent kleptocracies. For all I know, the 500,000 debunked Iraqi child victims of sanctions are in there somewhere, only on Saddam's ledger rather than ours.

Let's be clear: all of the above are fine reasons for Saddam to burn in hell. But the lifetime average doesn't provide any useful picture of what Iraqi life was like in the latter days of the Baath regime. The big casualty contributors are, as we say, front-loaded. The Iran-Iraq War dead date to the 19807s; the murdered and merely killed from the Anfal campaign to the same decade; the victims of the Shi'ite suppression to 1991. We know that Iraq remained a thugocracy to the end of Saddam's rule. There's considerable uncertainty how efficient a dictatorship it was, but the place was no Belgium. All the same, I recall reading Kanan Makiya himself saying that the Iraq he described in The Republic of Fear was not the same as the Iraq of the turn of the millenium. Things had settled into a level of oppression neither welcome nor unprecedented. Makiya remained a dedicated foe of the regime and a tireless proponent of its overthrow and who can blame him? As an Iraqi, Makiya had no duty to be miserly with American blood and treasure. But I'd very much like to see statistics on things like extra-judicial killings for the last five years of Saddam's regime. It would give a truer picture of what Iraqis are comparing their current experience to than deaths from wars and civil wars amortized across the decades. Have fewer Iraqi civilians died in the 19 monts of invasion, occupation and interim regime than died in the last 19 months of Baathism?

(Or the first 19 months. There's a chance, after all, that we're just getting warmed up. Our "Peace Through Strength and Killing Foreigners" contingent already believes we've killed too few Iraqis; that we need to show them the Iron Fist of Love. If the feared civil war breaks out it will test our hawks' civility most sorely.)

The "amortized oppression" model probably obscures rather than clarifies our understanding of the ordinary Iraqi perspective. It also confuses the distinction between "humanitarian intervention as retribution" (for past sins) and humanitarian intervention as pressing need (from ongoing depredation). My suspicion is that, in terms of continuing slaughter, the Iraq of 2002-3 was far less dire than a number of other hellholes, Sudan and Zimbabwe coming first to mind. The Iraqi people of 2002-3 were at least as badly off as the people of Egypt or Syria or Yemen in terms of civil liberties and state oppression. Vastly worse off? I think it would be hard to make that case.

New Tagline - Great idea, Gene!

Cavett Emptor - Gary Farber has a very good, fair-minded and rational analysis of the famous John Kerry-John O'Neill debate on the Dick Cavett Show in 1971. I understand there's some interest in that kind of thing.

Dept. of Ne'er So Well-Express'd - The Putinization of American Life. Pass it on.

The Iron Dream - Another monument in Utopia:

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

From "Without a Doubt," by Ron Suskind. (Via Yglesias.)

It's About Trust - Team America: World Police is the finest movie ever made. You have been notified.