That's the Way You Do It - Avedon Carol has a hard-hitting critique of Colin Powell and "the craven loyalties that have exemplified his entire career." My instinct is to say "he's not that bad," but in the last dozen years on what has he been willing to defy his boss besides gays in the military? Powell was willing to resign over that, but not over a reckless and by no means forthright war policy pushed by people who repeatedly humiliated him. What defense can there be?

Unqualified Offerings Gets Results From The Washington Post - As if! But I do commend the Post for providing a link to the SSI's original "Bounding the War on Terrorism" report from the same page as their article on it. After my complaints of last night, that's a refreshing change. Way to go, Post!

Meanwhile, Julian Sanchez has a theory about why major-media news sites are so lame about linking to original sources:

So what gives? I'm guessing that it's an attempt to hold onto (what's left of) the prestige of print. You're not reading one more web piece, dammit (anyone can post those, after all), but a gen-u-ine published article that just happens to be archived online too. It's time to get over it, guys.

Department of Not Resisting Temptation - Jeffrey Record is not one of my pseudonyms. I have not secretly been commissioned to write analyses for the US Army War College.

It just seems that way. (Temptation not resisted? To link this story, of course. You can get the full report in pdf.)

Meanwhile Diana Moon found a fascinating review of Norman Podhoretz' memoir, Absent Friends, by Professor Albert Lindemann. The review dates from 1999, when it was possible - just - to have a rational discussion of neoconservatism and neoconservatives. Maybe the most interesting passage in the review was this "sauce for the gander" passage:

This kind of graphic, hard-hitting language, the use of such concepts of leftist filth, decadence, and depravity, cannot help but set off certain alarms. Antisemites write like that. Historically, extreme right-wingers have seen Jews as particularly dangerous to a Christian moral order and to social peace; Jews were believed to be destructively dissident, unpatriotic, and unusually prone to sympathy for Communism. Jews were also believed to be heavily involved in such morally damaging activities as the liquor trade, pornography, and prostitution.

In other words, if you squinted, a lot of the early writing of neoconservative intellectuals could look like it was employing antisemitic code. And as Lindemann makes clear, first-generation neocons faced accusations by Jewish leftists of being "bad Jews." Earl Shorris' book about the neoconservatives was called Jews Without Mercy. Jewish leftists accused the neocons of betraying Judaism's progressive tradition.

This was every bit as outrageous as certain second-generation neocons and neocon symps imputing antisemitism to all their critics. The first generation neoconservatives came to reject liberalism for serious reasons. They may have been right, or may have been wrong, but accusing them of letting down the side was shifty and wrongheaded.

Me, I was a neocon symp during the Cold War. My regular reading ran to The New Criterion, Commentary and The American Scholar. I still feel that Cold War-era neoconservatism provided a useful critique of the Soviet Union and its apologists, and was right to highlight some of the hypocrisies among apologists for Israel's less savory enemies. As I've said before, "isolationism" was the last libertarian tenet I adopted. Ten years ago, my foreign policy views would have been indistinguishable from Glenn Reynolds - if Glenn Reynolds had had foreign policy views back then.

In Diana's own commentary, she reminds that "the neoconservative phenomenon wasn't solely concerned with foreign policy issues; important though they may be. Domestic issues, such as crime and deregulation, were very important." That seems to be less true for the second-generation neocons clustered around the Weekly Standard and National Review Online. As David Brooks, Fred Barnes and others have made all too clear, neocons no longer believe that the proper business of conservatives is to restrain the power of the federal government - "big government conservatism" is the order of the day. There is near-uniformity among neocons on some hot-button social issues (cloning, gay marriage, the drug war), but it's in domestic affairs that any of the diversity of views Brooks claims exists among neoconservatives will appear. (Brooks now favors some version of gay marriage.) But a neoconservative who opposes the war in Iraq or Likud dominance of Israeli politics, favors rapprochement with China or a larger role for the UN in international affairs, doubts the wisdom or feasibility of exporting American political culture by force of arms? The mind boggles at the thought. No person who held such views, Gentile or Jew or Phlebas the Phoenician, could get anyone in or outside the movement to agree he was a member. The sole litmus test of neoconservatism has become "benevolent hegemony." Opposition to that is the one impermissible deviationism.

Somewhere in the above is buried the answer to why I never thought of Jewish New Yorker and "Reagan Democrat for all those years" Diana Moon as a neoconservative, even in her hawkish-on-Iraq phase. It has something to do with a sense that, even when she favored the war, she wasn't looking for a project. She wasn't playing a game of Jeopardy where the answer is always "war" and it's just a matter of finding a question to go with it.

But Try Telling That to an Angry Mob - Matthew Barganier wants to get David Brooks fired from the New York Times, or, as he puts it, sent back to the minors. I won't myself be writing the Times, but I won't be lifting a finger to stop anyone else, either.

Equal Time - Peter David tries to clear the air after the recent unpleasantness about comics buyers who "wait for the trade" rather than buying the monthly. I think it's worth noting some of the virtues of David and his new Fallen Angel series: It is, in his terms, "unaligned" - not a Batman book, or Spider-man book, or X-book; it's a new, original character, not a revamp or retread; it's a female lead; it's a female lead with very little cheesecake factor - the chick dresses like Little Red Riding Hood. The issues I've read were entertaining, but even if they weren't, the represent an attempt to offer the superhero comics readership something other than what they're already getting. You gotta respect that. I actually recommend that anyone with even the least curiousity give the series a try.

This doesn't change my opinions on the general topic. From my perspective, the more egregious arguments against the people I've called "waiters" were made not by Peter David himself but by non-pros (or, in the case of John Byrne, unprofessional pros), anyway. David's coinage "Trader Vics" was needlessly inflammatory, and not even funny enough to be worth the inflammation, and fellow pro Nat Gertler had the better arguments as far as how the business can adapt to the new environment. But peace on Peter David, who is clearly trying to provide honest goods for his dollar.

Weekly Fitness Blog Item - 162 pounds. Waist has ballooned to 33.5". Resting pulse: 70. The waistline and pulse are clear evidence of decline from early fall fitness levels. I blame winter, which sends one running to comfort foods.

Policy change: beginning with next week's fitness blog item, personal data will conclude the weekly posts rather than introducing them. Fitness issues - including politics and public health - will come first, followed by workout reports.

Much to talk about this week, including a Tech Central Station article by Sandy Szwarc that questions the value of exercise in weight management. Szwarc cites five different studies, including a meta-analysis and intervention studies that put subjects on various aerobic exercise programs. I won't say there's nothing to her conclusions, because I think we are a long way from anything that could justly be called a science of weight management or even a science of nutrition, but in citing interventions in which people who exercised intensely did not lose appreciable weight, she misses an important point: Americans aren't fat. Americans are fat and getting fatter. We tend to gain weight as we age. If we are fit, we tend to become overweight at the rate of a couple of pounds a year. If we are overweight we tend to become more overweight at the rate of a couple of pounds a year. So someone who exercises, makes no effort to control their eating and loses no weight may well be staying thinner than someone who doesn't exercise and makes no effort to control their eating.

And indeed, if you follow the link to the Midwest Exercise Trial, which unlike other studies Szwarc cites used a control group or at least mentions its results prominently, that's what you see. Szwarc writes of the Midwest Exercise Trial that

While men lost about 5 kg and 3.7% body fat, women gained 0.6 kg of body weight while losing a mere 0.2 kg body fat. It makes for some rather interesting math, noted Gaesser. The women each burned about 138,000 total kcal during those 69 weeks, or about 313,636 kcal per pound of fat!

over the sixteen months of the study. But the authors themselves write

Exercise prevented weight gain in women and produced weight loss in men. Men in the exercise group had significant mean ± SD decreases in weight (5.2 ± 4.7 kg), body mass index (calculated as weight in kilograms divided by the square of height in meters) (1.6 ± 1.4), and fat mass (4.9 ± 4.4 kg) compared with controls. Women in the exercise group maintained baseline weight, body mass index, and fat mass, and controls showed significant mean ± SD increases in body mass index (1.1 ± 2.0), weight (2.9 ± 5.5 kg), and fat mass (2.1 ± 4.8 kg) at 16 months. No significant changes occurred in fat-free mass in either men or women; however, both had significantly reduced visceral fat.

We've discussed the special yuckiness of visceral fat before, but the big thing is the comparison between female exercisers and female controls. While results were highly variable, the female controls gained an average of 6.5# over 16 months, about two thirds of it fat. (Szwarc's somewhat whimsical calculation of "313,636 kcal [of exercise] per pound of fat" is specious. Since calorie intake wasn't controlled for either group, we simply can't make a meaningful calculation.)

Now, I'm being hard on Szwarc here. Let me say right out that I believe exercise in the absence of diet is less effective at reducing weight than the popular imagination holds, and that some of the real benefits of exercise have nothing to do with your body size. Weight training advocates especially argue that diet is more important than exercise in determining weight. Szwarc skips right past diet toward talk of "a genetic component for weight," and concludes by linking to a fat acceptance site. She promises a part two with "other myths about exercise and who's really exercising in our country and who's not." So tune in next week, when I'll probably give part one a more thorough reaction than I've managed so far.

Thanks to reader Dave Lull for tipping me to the article. And see Bill Sherman's take.

Marathon Man. Preparations for my declared goal of running a marathon this year for the week:

Walked three miles. (It's a joke, son! But it's three more miles than I managed over the holidays.)

Read this e-mail from reader Dave Weeden:

I admire your courage in thinking about the Marine Corps Marathon, but your ideas about training are, if I may say so, totally nuts.You don't want to start out by walking anywhere for nine hours. You'll probably give yourself blisters that you mean you can't wear shoes for a fortnight.

Buy some decent running shoes, from a running store if there's one anywhere near you, and run a little.

Start modestly, that is, realistically. You probably know what you can do from the training you have been doing. Running a marathon means running a very long way, for a very long time, longer than any training session, so the actual day will hurt. Know this when you start, because knowing this will keep you going when ten minutes is all you can do and you want to force yourself through to twelve or fifteen. Your body adapts to running. In the first few months of proper training, which means doing an amount which tests, but doesn't kill, you, your stamina will shoot up.

For a marathon, try to run whatever you can at least three times a week. Try to enjoy it, and refuse to let it become a chore. Take it as time to think what you will write next, and private, free time away from work and domestic duties.

There are some half-decent books out there, but publishers tend to churn them out, and I've been running too long to have looked at one for years, so I doubt any I know are still in print. Magazines have ideas which you ought to take with a grain of salt, the way you would anything in print. If you buy any, don't take them as gospel -- keep them in the toilet and use them as inspiration.

One final word, because I've yada-ed too much already, don't blog too much about it until you're sure that it's for you. Climbing down looks really stupid, and most people hate running. I'm one of the odd ones, good luck and so forth.

Too late on the last part! Besides, any man who publishes weekly fitness items on his website is way past being able to avoid looking really stupid. And if I end up bailing, that's just more blog fodder. But some very useful stuff in this e-mail, especially the part about the blisters.

More next week.

How Come Major Media Websites STILL Don't Get the Internet? The Washington Times runs a not-terribly-informative story on the 2004 Index of Economic Freedom put out by the Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal. What's missing? Only a link to the actual goddam study, as usual. This always happens - news sites never bother giving you an easy link to the studies they write about. It's past time for major publications to not only include links to the the original documents in their internet articles, but to print the URL in their dead tree editions. Years past time.

A special shame in this case since the little the WashTimes does reproduce from the study - "The administration of George W. Bush has taken a leadership role in [...] free trade" - is pure comedy gold.

More on the study itself after I give it the once-over.

This Just In - Communism still sucks.

I Hate You and I Wish You Were Dead - Ginger Stampley says Mike Koslowski is a "silly idiot" for his criticism of Apple's new digital media products that I cited Friday.

UPDATE: Patrick Nielsen Hayden is more charitable personally but no less critical. And Koslowski responds to his critics. I won't be happy until somebody compares someone to Hitler.

A Fanboy's Further Ado - In correspondence with Sean Collins about the Marvel Age imprint reworkings of classic Lee/Kirby/Ditko material, I was able to articulate a couple of further thoughts I'd been trying to have. (At least, Sean thought I was able, and he encouraged me to put them on the blog.)

Some of the loudest complainers are people who disdain superhero fanboyism, but by their complaints about messing with the purity of the Silver Age Marvels they sound like nothing so much as their nemeses (superhero fanboys) bitching about some flouting of The Way Things Used to Be. Why, they sound oddly like John Byrne Message Board posters.

Me, I figure if Marvel keeps the Masterworks and the Essentials in print, and credits the original creators in the reworkings, they have nothing to apologize for. And I think you can say more than "if the Marvel Age books attract new readers, they might even seek out the originals," as Sean did. If the Marvel Age books attract new readers, Marvel will eventually try to sell them the originals.

The highlights of comics' Silver Age were a magnificent achievement, but let's not forget they were a magnificent achievement in a commercial medium. Ask yourself, if the Julius Schwartz or Stan Lee of old were calling the shots now, and thought their companies stood a chance to make a buck re-doing their older work, would they make that call? In, to coin a phrase, a New York Minute.

Wow - We haven't gotten to see much professional football in the Washington area the last three years, so it's always a treat when the playoffs come around. Two amazing games, and my teams were 2-0 today. The Carolina-St. Louis game surely proves out the TMQ maxim that "Fortune favors the bold." Mike Martz wimps out at the end of regulation and his team ends up paying the price. He's Norv Turner with better talent to work with. Meanwhile, Bill Belichik solved a tricky little clock management problem at the end of the late game. Do not expect much blogging tomorrow either, when the official UO teams will be Indianapolis and Green Bay.

Let Me Rephrase That - Adventures in unfortunate syntactical construction, by renewed Redskins coach Joe Gibbs:

"And my experience is right now, if somebody is under contract and is a good coach, you're going to have a tough time getting him out of there. It's going to take a stick of dynamite, particularly some place where the coach is very solid."

That sounds painful.

Alternate Histories and Alternative Geographies - In general, I don't bother Victor Davis Hansen and he doesn't bother me. It's a live-and-let-live arrangement made all the simpler by his almost certain, utter lack of knowledge of my existence. But I see he currently has a much-linked column in which he writes

Thirty years ago, during the Yom Kippur War of October 1973, most of the Europeans of the NATO alliance refused over-flight rights to the United States. We had only hours in which to aid Israel from a multifaceted surprise attack and were desperately ferrying tons of supplies to save it from literal extinction. In contrast, many of these same allies allowed the Soviet Union - the supposed common enemy from which thousands of Americans were based in Europe to protect Europeans - to fly over NATO airspace to ensure the Syrians sufficient material to launch and sustain their surprise attack on the Golan.

Does this make any sense on its face? I'm not talking about the refusal of overflight rights to the US effort to resupply Israel. That's well established. It's the other part: "many of these same allies" allowing the Soviet Union "to fly over NATO airspace to ensure the Syrians sufficient material to launch and sustain their surprise attack on the Golan."

I see two little problems here. Look at a map of Europe. Recall that the only NATO allies between the Soviet Union and Syria were Turkey and Greece. It's hard to envision how the Soviets would have needed to fly supplies to Syria over Norway, or Belgium, or West Germany or even Italy. Assuming that both Greece and Turkey allowed Soviet overflights in 1973, that's two NATO allies out of, what, fifteen back then? That hardly strikes me as "many."

And there's another thing. The Soviets were doing this to "to fly over NATO airspace to ensure the Syrians sufficient material to launch and sustain their surprise attack on the Golan." And it was a surprise attack. That's a big reason why the early stages of the Yom Kippur War went so well for the Arabs is that they maintained unusually effective operational security. But by Hansen's own account, the claimed overflights had to happen in advance of the surprise attack. That's the only way you can "ensure . . . sufficient" - ahem - materiel to "launch" same. So the attribution of guilty foreknowledge - the "many . . . allies . . . allowed the Soviet Union . . . to ensure the Syrians . . . [could] launch and sustain their surprise attack on the Golan."

It sure looks like a ridiculous claim: a surprise attack so closely held that only Syria, Egypt, the Soviet Union and many NATO allies knew about it in advance. Be clear: Hanson is not just claiming that "many" allies allowed the Soviet Union to fly arms to Syria, but that they did so knowing that Syria was about to invade Israel. It would be interesting to see any historical evidence that actually backs up Hanson's implausible outburst.

Lacking Polish - From Unmistakable Marks:

I've never edited a movie in my life, never mastered a video DVD, and never even considered making a multi-track music recording. Neither have you, if I might be permitted to play the odds here. By aiming its media tools at creators instead of consumers, Apple is either confusing Jobs' Pixar coworkers and celebrity friends for normal people, or deciding that its long-time 5% market-share is too big.

and more on what he takes to be Apple's wrong turn on digital media.

Deadpan Adventures - Who could resist an item that begins

Two books made their first English appearance in 1973: Dungeons and Dragons, by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, and Speech and Phenomenology, by Jacques Derrida. Let's put these a little closer together...

as Bruce Baugh's does. Not me. See if you can spot the corner of his mouth twitching. It's hard!

Question of the Day comes from Rosemary at Dean's World:

Dean says that there was no "real" middle class tax cut. The reason, as Dean sees it, is because of increases in local property taxes, state university tuition, etc. His solution is to get rid of the Bush tax cuts. I'm not seeing the logic.

Does anyone think that getting rid of the tax cut will result in states lowering property taxes and universities lowering tuition?

I Cannot Teach Him. The Boy Has No Patience. - Will some liberal bloggers please try to get through to Hesiod about why his race-baiting attack on Colin Powell - calling him Stepin' Fetchit, among other things - is so wrong? I failed to get through. I've always liked Hesiod, but this is appalling. Maybe he'll take the objections of a true ideological confrere more seriously.

Zilch. Nada. Nothing. The Sequel. - Kenneth Pollack's article, "Spies, Lies, and Weapons: What Went Wrong," in the current Atlantic is a postmortem on Iraqi WMD intel and its uses by a decidedly interested party. More later on the article itself, but the most striking take on the article that I've seen came from Hit and Run commenter Andrew, a hawk:

The assessment given in the Pollack article appears to be so reasonable that I believe it will probably serve as a platform for any further discussion of the issue. I find that I come away from the article only MORE persuaded of conclusions I had already reached-- and I am sure that others, with different conclusions, will have exactly the same response...AND THEY WILL BE RIGHT.

We will all be right for sticking to conclusions we otherwise find reasonable, because what the article really demonstrates is that intellegence doesn't SETTLE any outstanding policy debate...in fact is scarcely even relevant.

If an issue of importance is out there, and a consequential choice needs to be made, a citizen can come to a sensible conclusion based on the sort of information available to any interested newspaper reader, and he will be as likely to choose correctly as any member of the National Security Council (or the equivalent policy-shaping body in another democratic society).

What Pollack's article demonstrates, is that a modern intellegence apparatus (and no one more than the US) can pile up mounds of data...which don't incontestably support any conclusion. You would be nearly as well off without any of it.

There is lots of data about the stock market. But nobody can call the market short-term, and nobody needs to, long-term (it will go up).

In a way this is reassuring. Debate over foreign policy choices (or any other policy choices) in a modern democracy can proceed among citizens, based mostly on information citizens can reasonably be expected to have.

This strikes me as brilliant and absolutely correct. More than once, among workaday acquaintances, I heard people say, "They must really know something important that they're not telling us about Iraq's arsenal to be so insistent about it." The kindest thing one can say is that that turns out not to have been the case. So even if you're not inclined to say "Never again!" to "preemptive" war, say "Never again" to the notion that mere citizens are less qualified than high officials to decide matters of war and peace. Andrew and I would have made different decisions, but the range of our decisions were no wider than the "expert range," and our basis for our decisions no less sound.

A Fanboy's Ditto - I'd been meaning to offer hesitant demurrals to the apparently universal condemnation of the new Marvel Age manga-sized trade line. For my readers who follow the comics posts here, but don't follow the comics field obsessively, the controversy is this: Marvel is starting a new line of all-ages books, and one of the things they're doing is taking early Silver Age stories and reusing the plots with new dialog and art. e.g. take Stan Lee and Steve Ditko's early Spider-man plots, write new scripts based on them, and illustrate said scripts with contemporary art Marvel believes, rightly or wrongly, to be more likely to appeal to the tastes of contemporary kids than Ditko and Kirby, while acknowledging the original creators in the credits of the new books.

This has been widely considered both idiocy and sacrilege, but didn't strike me as obviously either of those things. Sean Collins is either more industrious or braver than I, and puts together what I consider a very effective case in favor.

UPDATE: Put in an actual link to Sean's essay. I had linked the wrong thing before.

Your Latest Gift Culture Opportunity - Diana Moon writes, somewhat bemusedly, that "I have always thought that asking for money for blogging was like asking for money for knitting yourself a sweater." Of course, when you think about it, if someone knits themselves a really nice sweater, and then wears it, you get to look at the thing. You might enjoy that enough to consider it worth paying something toward it.

That makes the parallel with blogging oddly exact. In the case of Diana's blog, I look at the thing several times a day. And - here's the pitch - she's suddenly less employed than she was earlier this week. So if you admire her sweaters, now is a good time to contribute to the knitting.

A Fanboy's Tristesse - It's something close to official now. Comic fandom's "message board culture" resents comic fandom's blog culture. Someone quotes a UO item on trade paperbacks on Comicon, and someone else doesn't just take issue with my argument - why shouldn't they? - but refers disdainfully to "Hanley and the blogosphere" [sic]. I'm not sure what the source of the general objection is - some combination of Who do they think they are? and Why don't they mix it up with the rest of us? maybe. But it might help to think of us in terms of Michael Croft's suggestion that blogging is "the safe-sex equivalent of Usenet." Good fences make good neighbors, most of the time anyway. We don't get into nearly as many vicious squabbles as message board posters do. At the same time, the comics blogosphere clearly depends on the message board sites, to a considerable extent, for material, and sometimes in, well, a less than generous way (yanking stuff off of message boards for its amusement value).

I guess the point is, we're all assholes, but we're assholes in different ways. Or some of us (the bloggers) are assholes at one remove. Or something. If I had a point in the first place.

Temper Temper - Len Pasquarelli is a good reporter. But his crabby column about Joe Gibbs' return to the Redskins is lazy. He hasn't really got an argument, just a sequence of increasingly strained witticisms. (One of the downsides of the Gibbs return has been football writers trying to sound like they know something about NASCAR. I mean, I don't know anything about NASCAR either, but I can tell when someone's bullshitting their way through the subject, and that's what Pasquarelli is doing.)

In an online chat, the Post's Mark Maske theorizes that " It sounds to me like someone who's mad he didn't know the Redskins were going to hire Joe Gibbs."

Hey, Gibbs could fail! But the man has been in continuous competition, at a championship level, in two different sports over a 25-year period. Betting against him strikes me as risky.

One Step Up, Two Steps Back - Atrios has a message one of his readers got that is attributed to David Brooks, sort of apologizing for his neo-PC column the other day. I am not overly impressed. Brooks writes ""So I was careful not to say that Bush or neocon critics are anti-Semitic. I was careful not to say that all conspiracy theorists are anti-Semitic."

This is true as far as it goes. I would simply add "and careful to imply it."

Peeve: Brooks writes "First, I wasn't saying anything about people who criticize neocons' ideas. The column wasn't about that at all. It was about people who imagine there is a shadowy conspiracy behind Bush policy."

I read a lot of criticisms of neoconservative foreign policy. Been reading them for years, actually, long before the Bush Administration existed. Hey, I've written them! While I occasionally see people who use the word "conspiracy" with regard to the neocon influence on Bush Administration policy, I don't recall actual critics referring to said conspiracy, or Tendency or what-have-you as "shadowy." There is clearly nothing shadowy about prominent national security intellectuals, prominently published in many cases, holding down high-level government jobs and not infrequently making statements to the media. "Shadowy" itself is a word generally inserted into the discussion by those who smear neocon critics, the better to stigmatize them. I googled "neocon shadoy conspiracy" this evening, and a scan of relevant hits on the first two pages shows that the word "shadowy" is almost always used by smearer of neocon critics rather than a neocon critic. Then I googled Antiwar.com specifically. Of the four hits, not one used the word "shadowy" in relation to "neocon conspiracy." Then it was off to The American Conservative. No hits at all.

Googling the same site for simply "neocon conspiracy", the only hit is actually a quote by neoconservative columnist Robert Kagan. Searching the same parameters on Antiwar.com produces 10 pages of hits (imagine!), but none of the ones on the first two pages turn out to be about, well, neocon conspiracies. The word conspiracy is never used to characterize the actions of the neoconservatives in or out of government.

This makes sense. Conspiracies are secret things, and if there's one thing the PNAC, the Weekly Standard and AEI are not, it's secret. Even Richard Perle can't shut his mouth for more than five minutes.

All of which is to say, Brooks is still full of shit. And he hasn't, apparently, apologized for trying to claim that the fact that the PNAC "has a staff of five" means it is somehow without influence. (It's actually seven, plus the Project Directors, plus all the people who signed its Statement of Principles, plus all the people who signed its Second Statement on Postwar Iraq, plus all the other prominent Republican activists, wonks and politicians whose names turn up on PNAC documents.

Brooks' apology has all the sincerity and completeness of Pete Rose's, and deserves the same respect.

It's an Honor Just to be Nominated but it would, I confess, please me no end if Loyal Readers voted for this site in the Best Non-Liberal Blog category in the annual Koufax awards. You just click the link and put in the comments that "Henley's my man!" or something like that. My competitors are all whores and grifters who despise all that is good and decent in the world. It's vital that they be stopped.

Poetry Corner - It's only 2004, but Brooke Oberwetter has already produced a candidate for greatest poem of the century, "Ode to Britney." I laughed, I cried, I was moved.

Patience, My Little Ones - I apologize to people I owe e-mail from this week. It was gaming night. We'll have some good reader mail items in the next day or two.

Nothing. Nada. Zip. - "Iraq's Arsenal Was Only on Paper" writes the Post's Barton Gellman in an authoritative report. On the WMD front, the hawks seem now reduced to two claims:

1) Saddam was eeeeeeeeeeviiiillllllll! Stop asking about this stuff!

2) Saddam tried to bluff the world into thinking he had WMD. He succeeded and got wiped out for his troubles. Where's the problem?

The first is actually the stronger argument., but it simply returns us to familiar should the United States expend blood and treasure toppling foreign tyrants? ground. Had the Administration thought that argument a winner they'd never have bothered pushing the WMD line in the first place.

That leaves us with the second. We are faced with an immediate problem. Saddam's "bluff" consisted, in the main, of insisting his country had no WMDs. He furthered this bluff by having his government spokesmen say the same thing. To this, the hawks reply that these denials were pro forma, and the bluff was proven by his pattern of obstruction of the inspectors. Sticking purely to the post-resolution period, from October 2002 to March 2003, our main evidence for Iraq's non-cooperation with the inspection regime is continual, categorical statements by the Bush Administration, and weaker ones from Hans Blix.

The irony of the hawks choosing Hans Blix for an argument from authority is palpable. As for the Administration's statements, I noticed at the time how reflexive they were - no matter what Iraq did or didn't do, what papers it released or sites it opened up, someone in DC instantly declared that "Iraq is still not cooperating enough." We are faced with this problem: the same administration said, out of various mouths that it believed Iraq had "reconstituted nuclear weapons" (just add water!), that it knew of specific sites full of chemical and biological weapons, that Iraq was hording 20,000 liters of this and 30,000 liters of that, that its human sources had confirmed these facilities manufactured such and such.

We know now that none of those statements about WMD were an accurate reflection of reality. We know in retrospect, and this pisses me off no end, that the statements of one of the worst dictatorships in the world on this issue were more nearly the truth than the statements of our own government officials. So those same officials automatic and largely unspecified statements about "obstruction" are suspect.

And what about those dire warnings of Hans Blix about Iraqi non-cooperation? It makes sense to see these as part of Blix's double game - trying the best he could to keep the Americans sweet on one hand ("Look, I am tough!") and to get the most possible out of the Iraqis ("Hey, you don't deal with me, you deal with them.") It is manifestly the case that Blix's team felt the inspections were worth continuing, and clear that the hawks' derision of Blix for "failing to find any WMD" was unjust. There weren't any to find.

The inspections were, from the Administration's perspective, a charade. Blix said "Nice Doggie" while we gathered rocks. That Blix largely meant "Nice Doggie" made the charade that much better.

Which brings us back to argument 1. Saddam really was evil. And we really did get him. The costs of that deed include not just the dead and the maimed on our side, and the dead and the maimed on theirs, and the couple hundred billions of dollars from buildup through reconstruction. The costs include the Administration's decision to motivate the American people by fear, to perpetrate an official farce (inspections) and to be less truthful about factual matters than one of the most tyrannical governments on earth.

Yes, it was too much to pay, and to continue to pay.

News from Gun-Free Britain - Avedon Carol had a laptop stolen from her house, while she was in it. (The house, not the laptop.) What's worse, it wasn't even her laptop. Help a sister out by donating toward its replacement. The story is told here, here and here. The middle item is especially galling, as it has the most detail on what it takes to bother the police aboutreport a crime these days in Britain.

That's also a cost-cutting measure - instead of sending someone out to the scene of the crime, the way they used to do, they make people come to the station.

That's pretty much the end of even the fiction that police have any particular interest in solving crimes, when they can't even be bothered to come to the crime scene. Here all the police are either writing speeding tickets or buying drugs undercover. Not sure what they do in London.

Trade Me - Glen Engel-Cox takes up the baton in the "(some) comics creators versus trade paperback buyers" dispute. In addition to the personal perspective of someone who would be spending no dollars on comics if it weren't for paperbacks, Glen also has a useful consideration of the business perspective:

However, having made a small study of the business, I know the true reason why Byrne and David are concerned about the loss of the monthlies, because it is in the monthlies that so many creators make their actual money (creators of monthlies are paid by the page, while an original trade would likely be paid for the entire book - at a rate much less of the per page rate of the monthly), and they're afraid of that market disappearing. That is a real concern, but it's their concern, not mine or any other consumer. If the monthly market dies, creators will have to fight for additional payment for those original trades - if they decide to create those, and not, instead, do something else.

There does appear to be a page full of unsquarable circles composing the current economic picture. The readership is mostly interested in familiar characters in stories with a certain level of sophistication and craft. The kinds of stories that the adult superhero fan who constitutes what's left of the market enjoys can't be cranked out Bullpen-style by people writing six books a month and drawing three. (Bryan Michael Bendis is the obvious exception.) But for creators to make a living on historically low workloads means historically high piecework rates, particularly in the absence of an ownership share. (By "historically high," I exclude the late-century bubble. I mean compared to the Golden-thru-Bronze Ages.) Then there's the corporate infrastructure the big companies "have to" support. Then there's the decision of those companies to produce for a developing market (returnable books), while still depending on a declining one. Glen is certainly right that

A market is a market. Even if there's no monthlies, if there's a market for trades, someone is going to produce trades (with or without producing monthlies).

But it may be relatively few peopl who produce them, when it comes to licensed, corporate-owned superhero properties. Many artcomics creators are used to the "advance against royalties and keep your day job" model that is the standard for the vast majority of prose authors. But it will be a rude change for people making page rates. And a lot of very talented people may decide there's a better living in television, animation, design, advertising or, god forbid, telecom.

The hell of it is, I don't begrudge today's creators their living. I just don't owe it to them.

Department of Equal Time, Comicsblogging Division - Bill Sherman praises Craig Thompson's Blankets. Mike Kozlowski buries it.

A Fanboy's Mail - Kevin Maroney reminds me that it was he, not Avram Grumer, who predicted last July that Michael Chabon Presents: The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist would face significant delays. Kevin's actual predicted release date, July 23, 2004. If my source's informant was correct, he'll have nailed it almost exactly. However, Newsarama says it just ain't so.

Due to production delays, Dark Horse has confirmed for Newsarama that Michael Chabon Presents...The Amazing Adventures of The Escapist #1, originally due to be in stores on December 17th is now looking at a release date of February 11th.

Newsarama writer Matthew Brady specifically pooh-poohs the story I heard. I hope he's right and my source is wrong! We won't have long to find out, really. This is a book that was originally announced for October, then solicited for December, then delayed until January. Now the publisher says early February. We shall see.

(Newsarama link via Franklin's Findings.)

Meanwhile, Mary Kay Kare quibbles with my meager regard for Viggo Mortensen's portrayal of Aragorn:

I agree with you about Elijah Wood, but not about Mortenson. He looked very much like my idea of Aragorn and his physicality amazed me. He moved and looked like a vigorous warrior, futhermore one who is both intelligent and thoughtful.

Mary Kay has more of the Rings in blog items titled "The Return of the King" and "Yet More ROTK." Plainly Mary Kay has no truck with some bloggers' need to come up with clever titles for posts! (Or "clever" titles, either.)

Department of Ne'er So Well Express'd

TV phony John Edward's syndicated series, Crossing Over with John Edward, has been canceled after three seasons, proving even Americans can take only so much bullshit.

Franklin Harris.

Annals of Neo-PC - This year, my only interest in people who try to claim that critics of neoconservatism are using anti-Jewish code words is to ridicule them. Our first two objects of derision will be David Brooks and Joel Mowbray. What lying weasels! That is all. (But see Calpundit and Ysglesias for more on Brooks, if you're into that sort of thing.)