March Madness: Elsewhere - Max Sawicky has posted his report to Stand Down. He calls the "the dean of real libertarian bloggers." I think that means I'm older than the rest of them, which is true, I think. (Except maybe for Landrith, but even that's uncertain.)

Oliver Willis says what needs to be said.

Duckboy & Company had an item saying the San Francisco crowd was 80,000, but it's been replaced by a photo from the Mall in Washington.

March Madness: A Quasi-Vanguard of Webloggers - My report on the October 26 March contained a fair amount of political analysis that I won't repeat here - unless, in the way of miscellaneous posts, I end up repeating it after all. This is a true after-action report without much time, so far, for reflection.

First off, what about my conditioning? Answer: much much better than last time. The diet and exercise really paid off, as I didn't have to rest during the march even though the route was considerably longer.

Second, how about the social scene? Answer: Primo. I met Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden on schedule at the Forest Glen Metro and we hopped a train to Union Station. At Union Station we picked up Matt Hogan, Sam Heldrin, the man I will ever after think of as "Man-Mountain Max" Sawicky and Loyal Reader Ronit Dancis. We ended up separated from Matt and Sam, and separating from Matt meant that I missed meeting James Landrith too. I think I'm spelling Sam's name wrong. He had his son with him, who was very cute. We did meet Nell and the honchos of the Lexington, Virginia contingent, but got separated early. (Sorry Nell!)

Teresa, whose superpower is to have whatever you or she needs in her backpack, used a marker to fill the back of one of my signs with her preferred slogan ("Not THIS War"). She happened to do it at a right angle to the slogan on the front ("Patriots for Peace") so that, no matter which way she held it throughout the march, she was able to speak directly to the Sideways-American community.

I made extra signs in a fit of energy and inspiration last night, with an eye toward giving them away to the sorts of people who didn't feel comfortable bearing NO BLOOD FOR OIL signs but nevertheless needed to do something with their hands. Before we even left Union Station a nice lady happily took possession of the BILL OF RIGHTS YES BILL OF GOODS NO sign. Just before the start of the march proper another woman complimented the NO PROPHYLACTIC WAR sign, so I gave it to her. That left me with PEACE NOW! SOCIALISM NEVER! and BILLIONS FOR DEFENSE BUT NOT ONE PENNY FOR EMPIRE. It was generally agreed among our party - by now, Patrick, Teresa, Ronit and I - that these signs led to the funniest incident of the day.

On the bad news/good news front, the bad news was that my drinking game rules (see two items below) proved not to be practical. The good news was that this was because you could only hear about every third word the speakers had to say. That spared us much boiler plate from Jesse Jackson, Cynthia McKinney, some guy with a British accent (not Tony Blair), some guy from Egypt (not Anwar Sadat, who is dead) and various other pinkos. Really we'd have been just as happy if they replaced the entire speaker's roster with the offstage voice of the adults in the Peanuts cartoons. ("Wonh-wonh-wonhwonh wonh.")

Nor were we alone. It would not be accurate to say that nobody gives a shit what the speakers have to say. In truth, a small minority of attendees groove on it - they pack the area in front of the stage, they chant when asked, they applaud and wave their signs and generally act engaged. But most marchers could care less. It seemed to me that the crowd on the mall behind the stage was vastly larger than the crowd in front of it. While the speakers are saying whatever it is they're saying (usually involving racism and babies, or racist babies, I don't know), most people are wandering around taking in the sights, trying to hook up with friends or talking to the friends they've already hooked up with. (We found Leonard of Unruled, who left for lunch with his brother before the march started, and a Libertarian Party contingent.)

Let me be clear here: I am not saying that everyone ignoring the speakers is a moderate, or a libertarian or a Main Street Republican. A good portion of them are leftist activists and most of the rest are liberals. But any effort to understand, condemn or even praise this march on the basis of what the featured speakers have to say or don't say is beside the point. (And Instapundit is your source for links to these people today.)

Now to the march itself. Our party of four ended up ahead of the official front of the march. This is because we were with Teresa Nielsen Hayden, a woman whose immediate reaction to the calamitous news on the morning of September 11, 2001, was to head for the roof of her Manhattan office building. We were thus more loosely packed than the bulk of marchers, with five to ten yards between us and other pairs and groups. That meant reporters taking our pictures along Pennsylvania Avenue SE, as we were easy to frame, and asking our names and brief other questions since they could do so without getting run over. A nice enough young fellow from Pacifica interviewed us briefly about -

At this point I must confess to an act of branding. Having noticed that the ANSWER signs at the last parade had their website address at the bottom, I puckishly added the URL of Unqualified Offerings to the bottom of one sign and the URL of Stand Down to another. That meant the interviewer quickly wanted to talk about weblogs. We let Teresa handle this, since she's smart and thinks about such things. I made sure to remind the fellow to inform his listeners on Pacifica that my sign said PEACE NOW! SOCIALISM NEVER!

At the very beginning of the march, a uniformed DC cop had his camcorder out filming us. As we passed, I asked him if he needed my address too. No answer. For her part, Teresa apologized to the various motorcycle cops for dragging them out on such a cold day.

Finally we came to the counter-protest. There was even less to it this time than last - maybe three-dozen Freeper types lining a half block leading to the Navy Yard entrance. And as we approached, they began chanting:

Your Red roots are showing!
Your Red roots are showing!
Your Red roots are showing!

Me with my PEACE NOW SOCIALISM NEVER sign. Ronit with her NYC WANTS AL QAEDA sign. Teresa with her very specific Not THIS War, and Patrick and Teresa who have been leading us through renditions of "America the Beautiful," "My Country 'Tis of Thee" and even, hard as it is to sing, "The Star-Spangled Banner." Well, about two thirds of this last, since I skipped several lines by accident. My companions had fine singing voices and on those occasions where we were close enough to other marchers, several joined in.

Let us remember the core principle though: the counter-demonstration can afford to be dinky, because the counter-demonstrators are already slated to get what they want.

Other hoot of the day: Some leftie group got professionally-printed signs dealing with middle east policy. They apparently waited until the last minute to pick them up. They read:

JUSTICE FOR THE PLASTINIANS (sic)

I definitely thought the Plastinians had the coolest ships on Classic Star Trek.

So how big was it? It's hard for me to judge, for a couple of reasons: I've only been to one other protest; this one was along a different route; and we were, as noted, a quasi-vanguard of webloggers. I can say that after finishing the march ahead of everyone else, we had a view down M Street SE for about a half mile of seven-lane street and it was filled with people. That may not have been everyone either since the route did a right angle at the back and we couldn't see who might have been around the curve. But someone can run the Fermi Numbers on that description if they're so inclined. (Maybe Chad Orzel?)

Overall impressions: My compadres, who get to more of these things than I do, thought that for diversity and cleverness of signage this was the best peace march they've seen. This is based on pre-march sightseeing on the Mall, since, again, we ran ahead and knocked off early. Teresa took pictures, which she'll hopefully post when she and Patrick get back to New York. During the milling-around stage, I thought ANSWER signs were much less prominent than they were in October: all to the good. Still, the organizers managed to rankle me, particularly before we got so far ahead we couldn't hear the sound truck. How stupidly muddled and counterproductive for a peace march is a chant that goes:

No Justice
No Peace
US out
of the Middle East?

Good thing there's no call and response in that one.

I haven't had a chance to read up on how events went in other cities yet. That's important. You need to get good turnouts in multiple locations on the same day to demonstrate the existence of a broad antiwar movement. Otherwise, you may just be demonstrating your ability to bus the same core from place to place.

Aft Gang Agley aspect? Gene and Julian pooped out on us, and since we got separated from the other libertarians on the scene, I ended up outnumbered by liberals anyway, though if you're going to be stuck with liberals, Patrick and Teresa and Ronit are good ones to get stuck with.

Afterwards, we introduced the out-of-towners to the revelation that is the Rio Grande Cafe steak fajita. Nielsen Hayden friend Jon Singer joined us and led a discussion on the genetic engineering of roses. Ronit's roomate Tracey discussed hockey and stadium subsidies. Patrick and Teresa drove me back to my car at Forest Glen Station, where I realized that:

I had left it unlocked all day; and,
My fishing rods were gone from the back of the car.

Serious drag. Almost as serious as the parking ticket Teresa picked up because of my bad advice in Bethesda. Except when I got home, it turned out Mrs. Offering had taken them out yesterday to make room for actual people. So all's well that ends well.

March Madness: Quotes - Patrick Nielsen Hayden, from his comment section:

Like many other people going to DC on Saturday, I am completely aware of who initially organized this march.

But they don't own the antiwar movement. Their foolishness isn't going to bait us into an outburst of time-wasting sectarianism.

Max Sawicky has "a few innocent questions" on Stand Down, and concludes:

I've said from the beginning that doubts about the presence of so-called WMDs are not a good anti-war argument. The main reason is that they are not a sufficient condition to go to war. Only clear indications of plans to commit aggression against the U.S. is a reason to go to war. Nor should it matter what the UN says.

Music to my ears.

March Madness - It's ten freaking degrees outside. Prediction: The weather and the recent "troubling" discovery of empty artillery shells will suppress Washington DC turnout to the 50,000 range. For those who remain, this plan for staying toasty warm and very drunk.

Equipment:
Thermos of hot toddies, Irish coffee, spiked cocoa etc.
Speakers platform
Friends

Rules
1. Listen to the speeches. (Sorry. Not all the rules are fun.)
2. Score as follows:

Speaker mentions "blood for oil" - drink
Speaker mentions "white male" anything - drink
Speaker mentions capitalism - drink
Speaker mentions "Palestine" - drink
Speaker mentions Mumia - drink twice
Speaker mentions Kyoto - drink twice
You miss a mention - chug

3. Victory conditions: Stay warm, drunk and amused. Remember, there's a march afterward. Try not to flop over the barricades and you should still be on the route. Smile for the cameras.

Happy Anniversaries - The Gulf War started 11 years ago tonight, and has continued, in one form or another, ever since. I suppose the fitting thing to do would be to wish us all eleven more, but according to this David Ignatius profile of Paul Wolfowitz, the official plan is for something like twice that. (Best part? This: "I cannot be sure whether Wolfowitz also embraces what I view as two critical requirements for U.S. success in Iraq." The column is an account of a lunch Ignatius had with the Undersecretary of Defense last week. So, um, David, why the hell didn't you ask him about your "two critical requirements?")

Also, in an irony I didn't appreciate at the time, this is the first anniversary of my "Open Letter to Perry de Havilland" about intervention, limited government and Justin Raimondo's famous jeremiad against "The Warbloggers." It certainly didn't convince Perry, who sounds more interventionist than ever, but some may find it an interesting blog time capsule.

UPDATE: Reader Court Shuett points out that the Gulf War started twelve years ago. That means . . . he has passed the test I so cleverly set for him!

A Fanboy's Notes: Blog Crossover Edition - Due to a scheduling conflict, my upcomng Nobilis campaign has one opening. If you

a) Game or would like to game;
b) Live in the DC Metro area;
c) Can meet Wednesday nights;
d) Think Nobilis sounds kind of cool;

drop me a line. We will have three player-characters and a GM.

I'll Take My Stand with Colby Cosh on this burning issue.

Fight the Power with UO and Stand Down - Here's the Official Plan for Saturday's march:

The Stand Down contingent - me, Max, Julian, Gene if he's not too hung over from St. Patrick's day - and special guests like the Manhattan Nielsen Haydens and Leonard of Unruled and Loyal Readers will meet the Lexington Group (see "Peace in the Valley," again) at

When: 10:45AM
Where: In front of B. Dalton at Union Station
How: I recommend taking the subway in from the edge
What: Bring flags!
Who: Told you that
Why: War is the health of the State

The SOCIALISM NEVER Meme Spreads - A reader e-mails these instructions from march-organizers ANSWER:

There is a designated area for groups to set up tables at the rally, and there will be a small fee. Table space in the designated area is available on a first come,
first serve basis. The fee must be paid at the time you set up your table.

. . .

There will be volunteers on hand to explain the designated tabling area and to collect the fee. Groups setting up tables for free literature distribution will be
charged $25 per table; anyone setting up a table to sell materials will be charged $50 per table. Please bring cash, check or money order (made to "A.N.S.W.E.R.") with you when you set up.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

The Lazy Man's Way to Blog - From MSNBC.com:

Researcher arrested in plague case
Missing vials of bubonic plague accounted for at Texas Tech

Don't post from work and some stories take care of themselves before you even get home.

Dept. of Doh! - Sometimes I get the idea that Communism, founded on the noblest-sounding egalitarian rhetoric, tends not to work out that way somehow.

John Lott Gets a Break - Julian talks to someone who can provide at least partial corroboration of Jhn Lott's most recent claims about his 1997 hard drive crash and survey loss.

Slip Kid - Patrick Nielsen Hayden on the hidden Pete Townshend-Donald Rumsfeld connection.

Fight the Power with Unqualified Offerings - A mostly libertarian cabal of local Stand Down participants (with Max Sawicky as our foil) plan to march together this Saturday in DC. If you'd like to join us, drop me an e-mail. We hope to meet up with Nell Lancaster's Lexington group.

More Guns, Less Mean Time Between Failures - Reader yermama ("That's right, I said yermama!") wrote wondering if John Lott had explored "forensic recovery" of his hard drive in 1997. Never let it be said that bloggers can't learn: I asked John Lott. He replied:

Yes, I sent it off to a company that deals with these things and they told me that the disk was too badly damaged for them to read it.

Department of FWIW - The Tehran Times reports that "U.S. to Retain Baath Party in Post-Saddam Iraq":

The United States has handed over the plan to its allies, including Japan, as the main post-war plan, Kyodo said, adding that the plan is under consideration by Washington because of its serious doubts about the ability of the opposition in managing the post-Saddam Iraq.

In the beginning, the White House had pinned hopes on the Iraqi opposition. The idea of retaining the Baath Party without Saddam came to the fore because of the fear of Iran's influence through a Shiit uprising in the southern Iraq.

The U.S. has come to the conclusion that the preservation of the party could help the democratization process in the post-war Iraq, it said.

Hey, who knows more about democracy than the Baath Party? Certainly their ability to get their supporters to the polls is impressive.

Now you've probably got a number of questions, such as

Q: Does the Baath Party have a website?
A: Yes, but it's in Arabic.

Q: Is there an english-language version of the official Baath Party site?
A: Sure. Go here.

Q: Who should be more peeved at the trick above, me or Salam Pax?
A: Salam Pax. You're a hoax. Maybe a CIA front.

Q: Has the Syrian Baath Party renounced its socialist agenda?
A: Yes.

Q: Potted history of the Iraqi Baath Party please?
A: Here.

Q: Is it interesting?
A: Now I know you're a hoax.

Q: You linked to the english-language version of the Tehran Times article. Is there a plain english version?
A: Here's your plain english version: "The US and Great Britain have decided that they want to keep Iraq's constituent parts together at all costs. That means continued domination by the Sunni minority in the center of the country over the southern Shiites, the Northern Kurds and scattered other minorities. The Baath Party, founded on the principle of pan-national arab unity, has been in practice the instrument of Sunni dominance, especially the dominance of Saddam's clan from Tikrit. That's what the US has decided it wants, only without Saddam. Select Shiite and Kurdish leaders willing to be bought off will be rewarded with largely ceremonial Party posts. Many lower-level State and Defense department employees on the scene, as well as military occupation authorities, will sincerely want to work within the system to guide Iraq toward marginally nicer governance for minorities. Their consolation will be that Iraq is more tacitly liberal about alcohol than most other Arab countries. The US and Britain also want to minimize the political and other costs of occupation. That means contracting out as much of the unpleasant parts as possible. And if there's one thing the Baath Party is good for, it's unpleasant parts.

TardyPundit Item - I haven't written anything about the "ricin arrests" in Britain because, let's face it, we've been burned before on the Breaking Terror News front. But maybe there's something to it.

I haven't written anything about Pete Townshends arrest on charges of possessing child pornography because it's too depressing for words. Either Townshend is a pedophile, which sucks, or he's telling the truth about his motives and it won't matter to the courts (as Jesse Walker points out on Hit and Run), which sucks. I'm only a nominal boomer - my theory is that a cohort of us born between about 1958 and 1967 form a subgeneration I call "cuspers" - but the Who's music was powerfully important to me, late as I came to it compared to true boomers. And Townshend the rhythm guitarist awed me.

Like I said, depressing.

It Takes a Gaming Blog and Bruce Baugh has started one with a group of friends and colleagues. See the Rock Scissors Blog for more. If you care about roleplaying games, you want to know what Bruce has to say.

On other fronts, Bruce says he's deemphasizing his Mark II general weblog in favor of his Livejournal, which gets more readers. (Some people keep both a LiveJournal and a weblog. Do I understand these people? No. Do I understand how LiveJournal differs from Blogger, as those in the know maintain it does? No.)

Go Figure - The more people read me, the worse I do on the Blogosphere Ecosystem.

Pinin' for the Fjords - Reader Arlene Wespestad, responding to the claims that inspired the Revised Pledge of Allegiance, below, speaks up for Norway and Denmark:

My mother lived under the Nazi occupation of Norway (my father was at sea supporting the Allies on gasoline tankers and couldn't get back until the war ended; he was torpedoed twice by the Japanese).

Most Norwegians were not Nazis or collaborators. They were a tiny neutral country when they were invaded by the Germans in 1940. Why do you think they fought the Nazis every way they could, by escaping and joining up with the Brits or by sabotage? And the Danes. They had a very tiny Jewish population (about 6,000). Are you aware that the Danish people cooperated to get just about every one of them to safety in Britain and Sweden? They also kept up their homes and property so when they were able return, they found them just as they had left them.

These peoples have every right to feel proud of their actions during WWII. If you delve into their history, you will find some fascinating stories of bravery in these tiny countries.

Arlene leaves out one important fact: Snow Treasure, by Marie McSwigan, about Norwegian children smuggling the country's gold past German guards on their sleds, is the best boys book ever.

UPDATE: Kathy Kinsley e-mails: "Pretty decent girls book too. You MCP, you!" At least, that's what she says . . .

More Guns, More Blogs - Here are some links to updates on the John Lott situation:

Julian Sanchez reports on his attempts to verify some of the statements in John Lott's e-mail to us with the contacts Dr. Lott provided. He can not report successes so far, but he is continuing. Quickie rating: maybe the most important item on the subject today.

Tim Lambert, one of Lott's critics, has a lengthy roundup and response to material in Lott's e-mail, plus links to all kinds of other commentary. Quickie rating: Excellent one-stop shop for links. Lambert's own analysis is important, if partisan.

Marie Gryphon, new CATO mafiosa blogger, added an update to her original post, which brought the issue to the attention of the libertarian corner of the blogosphere. Quickie rating: Worthy. Her site will probably be a good one for following the story as it develops.

In an item on Reason's Hit and Run, Jesse Walker reports that the magazine has asked John Lott for his side of the story. Quickie rating: Useful.

Professor James Lindgren of Northwestern has updated his report on the issue. Alas, since Lindgren does not run a blog and uses on the most basic web presentation techniques, the revisions don't jump out at one. But the two December e-mails at the bottom, one from Lott and one from David Mustard, look new. Quickie rating: Essential starting point.

Clayton Craymer speaks on behalf of Lott. His very first sentence assumes the truth of what is at issue: whether the 1997 survey took place. He then spends time casting aspersions on the motives of Lott's critics. Turnabout may be fair play, but I wish that Cramer, who took great and unjust abuse during his work on the Bellisiles case, forebore the same sorts of maneuvers. He tries to distinguish the Lott and Bellisiles cases by saying that Lott's 1997 survey claims are just one part of the total mass of evidence in More Guns, Less Crime, but this is the same sort of thing that Bellisiles' apologists said about the probate data in Arming America. Quickie rating: I hope that Lott and his supporters can do better than this.

Ted Barlow has a John Lott light bulb joke, since it's Light Bulb Joke Week at his site. (But, um, Ted? Advantage: Unqualified Offerings!) Quickie rating: He's got funnier ones on other subjects.

Revised Pledge of Allegiance - In addition to taking out "under God," I have made other necessary modifications:

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, not as bad as Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, Denmark, Norway, The Netherlands, Belgium, and Austria during World War II.

Makes the heart sing, don't it?

John Lott Responds to the recent questions floating around the blogosphere about one of the surveys cited in More Guns Less Crime, copying several of us who wrote on the subject. (My piece is below.) The e-mail is lengthy and parts of it are marked Do Not Publish. (These parts pertain to a recent survey attempting to replicate the results of the disputed 1997 survey and are embargoed pre-publication.) Here is an excerpt:

First, I have responded to people. I responded to the e-mail from you that had been forwarded via Clayton Cramer last year (you did not send it directly to me for some reason). I have responded extensively to Polsby when he wrote me after Christmas and I responded again to Lindgren (twice) when he e-mailed me on December 24th. During the last week, I have also corresponded with Dave Kopel. The data on the original survey was lost and I will go into it later. First, here is a similar survey that I did as well as some comments on it. This survey is NOT for public dissemination as it is for a book that I have that will shortly becoming out. My publisher would be very upset if the results of the survey or the survey itself were released.

Doctor Lott includes contact information for people who worked on this more recent survey, with requests that not everyone involved pester them. He prefers that just one or two writers (e.g. Glenn Reynolds and Dan Polsby) take care of verifying that information.

He also writes at length about the dispute over the 1997 survey. He makes several points, which I will paraphrase:

1) Offers the correspondents the names of several people who will say he lost his hard drive in July 1997, plus the name of a colleague with whom he discussed the survey questions contemporaneously.

2) States that he lost a great deal more data in the hard drive crash than just the 1997 survey data, that he has been years replacing the other data and that the 1997 survey was well down his list of data to worry about, since it involved only one sentence of his book.

3) Explains that in the six years since the original survey, he has moved repeatedly and had many student assistants; also that "[A]n ad was taken out in the fall in the University of Chicago Alumni magazine to try to contact the two University of Chicago students who organized some other people from different places to work on it." (Editorial comment: If there were only two Chicago students involved in the survey, then James Lindgren's suggested test (see here) loses viability.)

4) Discusses the sample size and statistical significance of certain apparent discrepancies in results. I'm not sure which discrepancies he means and am far from the best person to evaluate the issue.

5) Addresses the question of his responsiveness. Says he doesn't follow the firearms discussion groups on which the controversy has grown, but has responded to e-mails.

He concludes that he considers "the most important bottom line" to be that the more recent survey "produced very similar results." The new survey will certainly be available for independent verification, which is all to the good. I think the best possible thing for John Lott and the cause of gun rights both would be for an independent party to undertake to replicate Lott's results and succeed.

He also notes:

One difference between newspapers and bloggers is that the newspapers at least contact the person and try to talk to them before they write something and put it out.

This is certainly true. (Though I've contacted people for reactions a couple of times, once successfully and once not.) Bloggers are editorialists more than reporters, and diarists more than editorialists. We also mostly, I think, consider ourselves to be "small time," and have a hard time imagining that anyone would bother responding to us. (Hi. I bitch about politics on the internet. My website is an ugly sherbet green. Can you answer some questions?) I shudder to think what our nation's achievers would do if all 250,000 bloggers (or however many) started trying to reach them. But times are changing and blogs as a medium are less small-time than they used to be, so it behooves us to reconsider the question. At the very least we owe the people whom we write about a public after-the-fact response in our own fora, if they make one.

Administrivia - I've temporarily changed the site tag line in honor of Saturday's marches.

Suddenly, Neolibertarianism Reconsidered Its Iraq Stance - This from Reuters:

Gun culture is deeply ingrained in Iraq, where possession of guns is seen as a mark of honor among the 150 or so Bedouin tribes.

Asked about his sudden change of heart, Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit.com rested his No Blood for Oil sign on the pavement while fellow peace marchers streamed past him, and said:

"All of a sudden I just kind of liked them."

Sometimes You Don't Even Know Where to Start and this Instapundit item is one such case. Is it here?

The wrongfulness in the World War Two internments, after all, wasn't that they happened, but that they were unjustified. Had significant numbers of American citizens of Japanese descent actually been working for the enemy, the internments would have been a regrettable necessity rather than an outrageous injustice.

(No, the wrongfulness in the World War Two internments was that they were based on the principle of collective guilt, and applied to US citizens, and the internees were dispossessed of all their property without compensation. I'm not sure what Glenn thinks would be "significant numbers" but it would still not be okay to rob the innocent Japanese-Americans of the bulk of their belongings, as the Roosevelt Administration allowed to happen as part of the internments.)

Or is it here?

First, there are American Muslims who are quite loyal -- the Lackawanna Six, after all, were turned in by members of the local Yemeni Muslim community. Other American Muslims have begun to question the role of Saudi money in Muslim institutions in the United States, and the drastic drop in giving to foreign charities by American Muslims who wonder where the money goes is also a good sign.

(The wording ["there are American Muslims who are quite loyal"] implies that these wondrous creatures are prodigies, like saying "There are Snowy Owls as far down the Appalachians as Eastern Kentucky." Gosh, but the surefire sign of disloyalty to the United States would seem to be committing terrorist acts against it and a bare handful of American muslims, almost none of them citizens, have tried to do that. As Gene Healy has pointed out, it would be a trivial matter for "significant numbers" of American Muslims to raise all kinds of caine around here. Doesn't seem to be happening.

I'm no fan of CAIR-style victimology, but peevish ethnocentric bitching is neither unique to muslims nor disloyalty to the country - especially coming from ethnic-group leaders, who are always going to paint their pictures in somber hues.)

Or is it this?

But Landrum is certainly right to indicate that the conspicuous shows of patriotism by the Japanese American community in World War II have not been matched by the Arab Muslim community in America. (Though there have been a number of barely-covered pro-war demonstrations by Iraqi-Americans).

(Here patriotism is equated with conspicuous approval of the policy of the White House - if you demonstrate in favor of the war the Bush Administration seems to want, you are a patriot. Never mind that you may be doing so because you think family connections will give you power in post-Saddam Iraq, in which case patriotism seems to have little to do with it. As for these barely-covered Iraqi-American demonstrations, I saw one. It was dinky. A few dozen apparent Iraqis. As many more Young Republicans. Big whoop.)

Or is it this?

Sadly, various taboos mean that this issue isn't getting the examination it deserves from journalists or political leaders.

(Damn shame. Here we have a mere handful of Muslim Americans trying to kill other Americans, and, as Glenn notes, other Muslims turning them in. Meanwhile the rest of America's Muslims are, as the famous Trainspotting formulation had it, "Just getting on with their shite." Except for the ones sticking up for the US with the folks back home, I mean. How better to improve that situation than to have the nation's elite loudly questioning - leading questions at that - the patriotism of Muslim-Americans as a whole?)

Or is it this?

And those who favor extensive profiling should note the photos of Ali -- the hero -- and Jakup -- the alleged terrorist -- and think about which one of the two would be more likely to come in for close attention under most profiling proposals.

(Actually, this part's pretty good.)

Enemies Lists - The Pontificator finds one particular sentence of the Fourth Circuit's enemy combatant decision especially worrisome. I take his point. For my part, I see a significant difference between Yasser Hamdi, captured in a war theater among the country's battlefield enemies, and Jose Padilla, captured in - what was it, Chicago? by himself. The Padilla case bothers me much more.

Million Mom Mail - It's not all mail, actually, but titles must alliterate! Months after I wrote it, my essay called "The Million Mom War" has drawn some criticism. The essay argued that "The expansive version of the War on Terror is driven by the same impulse toward perfect safety that gave us the Million Mom March." It said more, it's a pretty lengthy item for a blog, but I suppose you're used to that by now. Come two e-mails and a blog entry in disagreement, all within the last week or so. Peter Caress writes:

I've always been annoyed by your "Million Mom War" analysis, so I'm writing you this quick note explaining my reasons for annoyance.

(1) Fear amidst the pro-gun crowd.

I'd agree with you that some of the Million Mom marchers are panicky people looking for a quick government fix that will make them unassailably safe. But these people surely have their counterparts in the pro-gun movement, people who are so anxious about crime or terrorists or whatnot that they turn their houses into armories and buy far more firepower than anyone could possibly need to defend himself. People who think we need to legalize machine guns to defend ourselves (as the NRA has advocated) strike me as inordinately fearful.

(2) Nucelar weapon proliferation.

Part of your argument is that nuclear nonproliferation is a lost cause. But is it really? In the third world, the only agency that could possibly build a nuclear weapon is a government, and it takes a third world government years and years to do it. We can't completely stop the spread of scientific and technological knowledge, but we can do something about the governments that are currently trying to build nuclear weapons. The case for nonproliferation being a lost cause is not yet proven.


(3) Secretive use of nuclear weapons.

You wrote, "it's also none of our business what Israel does to Iraq if he [Saddam] uses WSD's on them." Let us imagine a world in which Iraq, Iran, and (why not?) Syria had nuclear weapons or were known to be developing them. One of these governments gives a nuclear bomb to terrorists, hoping that Israel would blame it one of the others. The terrorists promptly destroy Tel Aviv. Israel would simply not know who provided the weapon, so Israel would be left with the unpalatable choices of using nuclear weapons against the nation they merely suspect is responsible, or nuking all three nations.

The odds that this doomsday scenario will come to pass are low, of course, but are they so low that we should blithely ignore the possibility altogether? You may say that in the long run nuclear proliferation in the Middle East is inevitable, but in the long run Israel's enemies will eventually acquire semi-normal governments that can tolerate Israel's existence and would never even consider giving nuclear weapons to terrorists. If we can delay proliferation until that day comes, the world will be much better off.


(4) Tinpot tyrants with nuclear weapons.

This one is fairly minor, yet irritating. You also wrote, "The mightiest nation in the history of the world cringes before not just this year's tinpot tyrant..." But a tyrant with a nuclear weapon is no longer tin-pot; he's a major power. How else do you describe a tyrant that can destroy an entire American city in one shot?

Daryl McCullough and I were exchanging e-mails about the situation in Northeast Asia and the option of arming Japan and South Korea with nukes - that constituting proliferation. I wrote back that I was okay with that, for reasons outlined in MMW and he replied

The problem that I have with that sort of argument is just that, as you ramp up the destructive powers of weapons, the odds of something really, really, bad happening go up and up. A madman with a sharp knife can kill a few people before he is stopped, but if the number of madmen is small, the chance of being killed by one is negligible. A madman with a machine gun can kill dozens of people. A madman with a nuclear bomb can kill millions. Deterrence (if you use your weapons on my friends, I will use my bigger weapons on you) works well enough to limit the aggressive actors to a small number, but I don't see how you can make it always zero, which is what you need in the case of nukes.

And blogger Derek James posted a critique on his site, Thinking as a Hobby.

Derek's argument, in summary, is

1. Deterrence doesn't work any more because even if Saddam and Kim Jong-Il are rational, skilled actors, you can't count on every national leader who might develop nukes being one.

2. Also, non-state actors like Al Qaeda are not deterrable.

3. A nuke could be delivered by covert means (container ship, frex) in a way that would make it impossible to trace back.

4. Nukes deter the US from acting on behalf of allies and satraps threatened by nuclear neighbors, by making the cost of intervention unacceptably high.

Therefore, Derek argues, militant nonproliferation is the only option for the US (and presumably the rest of the nuclear club).

A common theme running through the critiques is that whatever policy we adopt toward nuclear proliferation must be "perfect" because if it is not perfect, a nuke might be used, and used against us or those we love. After all, the result of a nuke use would be horrible devastation. As Derek James puts it in a hypothetical:

We'd have tens of thousands of people dead, tens of thousands more burned and poisoned with radioactivity, and a molten, radioactive slagheap for downtown Boston.

All my critics argue that we can not have perfect certainty that deterrence will work, and they're right. But Derek especially leaps from that fact to a wholly unjustified faith that militant nonproliferation will work with perfect certainty. Again, from his item:

We have to follow a course of nonproliferation, the entire international community in concerted cooperation.

Or guess what? We're fucked.

Well, guess what: we're fucked.

Nonproliferation is slowly failing. North Korea has won already, and other countries will win too. Why? Because the entire international community simply is not going to follow a course of nonproliferation in concerted cooperation. The "international community" is more fictitious than most "communities" that get invoked in domestic politics. Just as the United States is not, pace what you hear when the Democrats hold their conventions, "like a family," the nations of the world are not a meaningful community - or, if that offend thee, say rather that that community only extends so far. It's never going to be in every nation's interest to keep a given country from getting the bomb. The trivial case is the nation considering nukes itself - it is not in Syria's interest that Syria not get the bomb, for instance. But for every nation thinking about going nuclear, there will likely be a third party that either doesn't mind their doing so or even likes the idea.

For instance, we know that Pakistan helped North Korea with its clandestine program. We might suspect that the Russians helped India with theirs. Why? In the first case, one likes to think it was for money, but the chance that the Pakistanis were doing China's work in arming an adversary of the US can't be discounted. Nor can the possibility that militant jihadists in Pakistan's secret service were themselves eager to help a potential enemy of the US get the bomb. In the latter case, Russia knows that Indian nukes are little threat to it, but a big worry to China and Pakistan, not countries that Russia embraces.

Anyone who saw what happened to Slobodan Milosevic and thinks there's even a chance that the US might pull a Kosovo on his regime has a powerful motivation to get the bomb. Anyone who thinks the US might pull a Kosovo on his regime also has a middling motivation to help similar leaders in other parts of the globe.

And though you might think it a foreign concept to this site, the US isn't the only great power given to intervening abroad either. There will be people wanting nukes because they think China might pull a Kosovo, or Russia might, or France (which is in the middle of intervening in the Ivory Coast right now).

Simply put, the class interests of the existing nuclear club and the nuclear have-nots diverge powerfully; nor are the national interests of the existing club members reliably in concord. And sometimes factors are going to combine in favor of the nuclear wannabe, even if we make Michael Ledeen Prince-Regent. North Korea, for instance, has a number of things going for it - it is tucked safely under the armpit of two nations who would really rather we not mess with it - Russia and China - and is butt up against the national, economic and cultural capital of an essential US trading partner. (Quick: name a South Korean city besides Seoul.) And, you may have noticed, we're a little distracted right now.

We seem to have proven that at enormous economic and political, if not yet military cost, we can prevent one particular country, Iraq, from getting the bomb for a couple of decades at least. In those two decades, India and Pakistan both joined the Club and North Korea may well have too. US-Indian relations are pretty good these days, but have been historically cool. US-Pakistani relations have been good in the past but are presently fraught. Somehow we never quite hit it off with the North Koreans . . .

Meantime the combined policy of militant nonproliferation and interventionism increases the incentive for non-nuclear countries to get the bomb or, failing that, germs. If I were Senhor Lula in Brazil, reading what they're saying about me in US conservative magazines, I'd sure want the biggest weapons I could get my hands on. And I'd have an awfully big jungle to stash my program in, too. I've seen what happened in Yugoslavia and what is happening in Iraq, and I start to get the idea that, once they start saying bad things about you in certain American journals, you're well and truly screwed. Unless you are yourself packing unconventional heat. OR, someone somewhere else is such a big problem for the US that they have no time to bother me.

So a program of militant non-proliferation and ready regime change will tend to bring about highly-motivated alliances of convenience in opposition. To the extent that the non-proliferation/regime change program is led by the US, these will be anti-US alliances. And they will be highly-motivated to cooperate clandestinely with those non-deterrable non-state actors.

Militant non-proliferation has, that is, its own significant flaws, and structural reasons why it can't be perfect - and perfection is the standard non-proliferation's partisans apply to its rival, deterrence. The question that interested me when I wrote "The Million Mom War" is why the critics of deterrence didn't see the impossibility of their own program working. The answer seemed to me then and seems to me now what I said in the essay: a demand for perfect safety and the belief that "doing something is better than doing nothing" - deterrence being wrongly equated with doing nothing. That, to put it caustically, is liberal talk, "If even one child is BLANK we must BLANK" stuff. Well no. It may be stupid, even counterproductive, to BLANK.

PAUSE: This is a damned long item already, isn't it? I had better respond to the rest of the criticisms made by my respondents and correspondents in separate items. Thanks for your patience and theirs.

Imitation Diet Blog Post - 200 pounds this morning. That's down from a known 216 on Thanksgiving Day and an unknown max before that when I was afraid to weigh myself. Waist this morning: 39". Waist a month ago: 42". (Another thing I've learned in this whole process: American pants manufacturers lie like hell.)

I also stepped up the exercise program this weekend, picking up Heavyhands again for the first time in years. Heavyhands, an aerobic handweight program developed and promoted by Dr. Leonard Schwartz, was all the rage for awhile in the 1980s, but faded out.

Heavyhands is aerobic strength training. You use very light handweights - starting at one pound, not likely going above ten - but measure repetitions by minutes rather than incidents. There's no "lift twenty times" in Heavyhands. It's "pump for 30 minutes."

This article by Marty Gallagher argues that it faded because people didn't use the weights right:

It was not the fault of the system, it was the fault of the user. Folks simply did not train with enough intensity. We have all seen the typical Heavyhands jogger, running along with his two little dumbbells. But if you carry the weights and refuse to pump the weights, you're not going to get any results! Heavyhands became carryhands . . . and carryhands is a lame and ineffectual exercise system!

The public didn't like pumping the little weights - it was uncomfortable; it was hard; it made you sweat and feel bad. It was a lot easier to run around carrying these little-bitty weights and pretend you were doing the Heavyhands thing. Plus when you didn't pump them you could run along at a respectable pace and for a respectable distance - you start pumping the damned things and you'd be lucky to make it a block - how embarrassing!

After a month or two of carryhands, the Heavyhands dumbbells got tossed into the back of the closet along with the leisure suits, Deep Purple records and bell-bottoms. Carryhands was (deservedly) an unqualified failure as a exercise form. Sadly, Heavyhands, the baby, got tossed with carryhands, the bath water . . .

I'm sure there's something to this. But there's a flip side too, that I experienced. This post by Todd Moody says

I used to be quite a Heavyhands enthusiast. In fact, I still think it is a useful kind of exercise, but with one caveat: It's easy to strain tendons, ligaments, etc. doing Heavyhands.

Although Dr. Schwartz advises lots of variation in the HH movements, the reality is that there are only so many ways to swing those weights around. Related to this is a tendency, for males mostly, I think, to use more weight than you can really handle. Especially for those of us who are used to weight training in the gym, these little 3 or 5 pound handweights feel like nothing, so we are inclined to go to heavier ones. But since the exercises involve hundreds or thousands of reps, the strain on connective tissue is enormous. You have to use weights that are lighter than what you think you could handle, at least until you are sure that your tendons and ligaments can handle the stress.

And that fits with my experience (except for the weight training in the gym part). Especially early in the program, your heart and lungs tend to have more work capacity than your elbows do. And I definitely tended to jump the weights up too soon.

This time, I've been preparing for Heavyhands first. I started exercise walks only in November - I was out of shape enough that simply walking a half hour five days a week represented genuine exercise. (Actually, I had to start at 15 minutes every other day and work my way up, but never mind.) At the same time, I did anaerobic work with my wife's ten-pound dumbbell every two or three days, building up to 3 sets of 12 reps each through various movements. Then, last week, I began pumping my arms without weights for about half my walks. (The half where no one I know could see me!) Then last night I felt ready to finally combine leg and handweight exercise again. I made sure to switch among various long and short-lever arm movements while walking in place. Result: No elbow soreness this morning. Now the trick is not to try to jump right away to the two-pound weights. Also to continue the anaerobic weight work.

The real fun with Heavyhands is dancing and shadowboxing. Those are also the best ways to strain a tendon. So patience remains my watchword. I'm losing weight. I'm feeling better. I can do more stuff. I may not be Oliver Willis, but I'm doing all right.

Imitation Booklog Post - Having finished The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which turns out to deserve every bit of its reputation, I'm now well into Neil Gaiman's American Gods. Interesting that the two books are linked by protagonists who do stage magic.

I also finally wrapped up the ten graphic reprint volumes in the Sandman collection last week. It took me about a year to collect and read them, so I'm looking forward to a compressed reread. My memory of a few of the supporting characters from early in the run who reappear at the end grew hazy in the interim.

Hey, Ask a Hard One, Why Don't You? - On the Easy Questions front, Ginger wants to know

Would someone please explain to me what it is about Tolkien that brings out excessive vapidity in the media?

Easy enough:

1. Tolkien is fantasy.
2. The media have no fucking clue about fantasy.

Ginger's piece discusses not one but two stupid Tolkien articles in mainstream media.

Report from the Real Front - Blogger does reporting: Zack of Procrastination went home to Pakistan for the first time in five years. His on-the-scene report of vox pop attitudes there is not encouraging. The one arguable bright spot is that he finds that there is indeed a Muslim/Pakistani guilty conscience about the massacres of September 11, 2001. A clever US policy could work with that.

Return of the Prodigal Blogger - A rare day off yesterday, as I spent the early part of the day running errands and the latter part watching some of the most frustrating football imaginable. It's always sad for a Washingtonian when the Eagles do well, and worse when it takes a throbbing abcess of a game for it to happen. Meanwhile the Steelers get knocked out in a game with no onside kicks but, by my count, one of just about everything else. If they do like Green Bay did a few years ago and draft nothing but defensive backs this spring, nobody will be able to blame them. (Well, they need at least one or two corners and, judging by the way Tennessee tight ends were getting open and then running after the catch, a safety or two.) A classic third down back, which Chris Fu is not, might be a good addition too. Of course, Kordell is probably going, so they also need a reliable backup QB.

For the good of the country, we must ensure that there is no Eagles-Titans Super Bowl.