ANYONE WHO’S EVER worked from home will sympathise with Fat Doctor’s discovery that quarantine is not as much fun as it looks.

APPARENTLY, the guy who shot up the synagogue in Seattle had recently converted to Christianity.

MORE ON HUNGER: Catallarchy’s Matt McIntosh directs me to a post on Cindy Sheehan’s hunger strike:

After all, if Sheehan is on a “hunger strike” there must be a sliding scale of increasing food intake. The first five ranks:

(100) The UN Food Aid Recipient :: You eat nothing, at least nothing resembling food. You may stave off hunger using sand or copious amounts of brackish, untreated water. No one notices you but a few missionaries but, sadly, the Bible proves to not be a source of nutrition. Too bad the rest of this list is probably pushing for policies that place you in unbreakable poverty and protests the removal of regimes that divert your food to their armies and cronies.

(90) The Devil Eats Nada :: You eat nothing, but what a fashionable nothing it is! You’ve got a t-shirt designed by a hot fashion house that declares your allegiance to saving pandas/the rainforest/face/whatever and unlike your deprived brethren awaiting UN food aid, you’ve got a high dollar bottle of purified water at all times. Far from donating the savings from foregone meals, you’ve invested in a high definition plasma display. Unfortunately, you’re going to need every protestor buck and then some to pay back society, you consumer whore.

Which reminded me of the time, way back in March of 2002, I threatened to go on a hunger strike to protest the fact that Jonathan Last hadn’t mentioned me in one of his articles:

Well, I’ll show Last. I’m going on a fast until I’m mentioned in his column. But since it might be a long fast, and I don’t want to contribute to the perpetuation of the White Male Power Structure with my early demise, I’ll still be eating enough calories to maintain life. At a healthy weight, I mean. In fact, some people who haven’t been radically empowered might call it more of a reducing diet. Or just “eating right”. But you can bet your copy of The Feminist’s Guide to Saving the Earth that not one piece of Auntie Em’s Organic Coffee Cake will pass these lips until this weblog appears at the Weekly Standard Online.

Hey! Do you think this means Cindy Sheehan reads my blog?

SOME GOOD NEWS FROM THE MIDDLE EAST Daniel Drezner reports that “despite the turmoil in the Middle East — and the blame that many place on the United States for what’s happening — the Security Council still voted 14-1 to threaten Iran with economic sanctions unless that country suspended its nuclear enrichment and reprocessing activities.”

I’M A HUGE FAN of clean, green nuclear power. And while I understand Senator Harry Reid’s quixotic crusade against Yucca mountain, I haven’t found it very convincing. But as Bruce Webster says, he does rather have a point when he says that we don’t want Yucca mountain to be built by the same folks who brought you the Big Dig.

CASTRO IS STEPPING DOWN TEMPORARILY due to illness, and handing the reins of power over to his brother. From what I know about Castro, I’d guess he must be really damn sick. Not that I wish anyone (even Castro) dead, but it will be interesting to see what follows his demise. I doubt the communist regime will long survive its founder.

PROTEST LITE: 1/3 less hunger in your hunger strikes:

Was a time when fasting at the very least meant eating less. But while our soldiers are sacrificing their lives for freedom, their detractors don’t seem to be to keen on sacrificing anything at all. Thus we have the Cindy Sheehan “hunger strike,” which allows smoothies, coffee with vanilla ice cream, and Jamba Juice. . .

Now the peacenik group CodePink, according to the Washington Post, “has issued a nationwide call for people to go on at least a partial hunger strike, if only for a few hours, to show their opposition to the war in Iraq.” Partial? For a few hours? Does that mean if you were planning on having two Twinkies and a bag of chips between lunch and dinner you should cut out one of the Twinkies? The life of a war protestor is a harsh one indeed!

I have a friend who is both a peacenik, and an observant Jew; she has made fun of me more than once in the past about the wimpy Catholic notion of what a fast entails. But this makes the official RC “one meal and one snack” look positively spartan. I’ll finally be able to hold my head high again . . .

WHATEVER YOUR VIEWS on the relative justness of the Israeli and Palestinian/Arab causes, I think it’s becoming clear that for Israel, the Lebanese campaign has been a disaster.

Hizbullah is now unequivocally calling the shots in Lebanese domestic politics. Nasrallah is king. And after an attack like this, on a place like Qana that has such symbolism to the Lebanese people, it could hardly be otherwise. . . .

The attack has, in effect, blasted away Hizbullah’s domestic political constraints while tightening both the domestic and international ones on Israel. That may not be fair, but these are the conditions Israel has to fight under. It knew those rules going in, and ignored them at its peril.

Though Americans tend to lump them all into “Islamoterrorists”, Hizbullah, Hamas and Al Qaeda are in fact three very different organisations. My perception is that Israel was slowly gaining some traction in Europe (as well as a lot in America), by the perception that it was fighting Islamic terrorists who target civilians.

Unfortunately, in this conflict, Israel responded to a Hizbollah attack on a military target by killing huge numbers of Lebanese civilians. They may be collateral damage, rather than targets, but in the eyes of the world proportionality matters–you don’t nuke a neighbourhood to catch a shoplifter.

The massive response gave Hizbollah, which has restricted its attacks mostly (not entirely) to military targets in recent years, the cover to launch attacks on civilian neighbourhoods as “tit-for-tat”. I am not in any way justifying deliberately targeting civilians, but Israel’s stated aim of using violence to pressure the Lebanese people to reject Hizbollah has eroded the moral edge it normally enjoys over Hamas.

And whether or not Israel has a right to invade Lebanon (a question on which I doubt anyone is open to persuasion), it is hard to imagine a single goal that Israel has achieved by it. Stopping rockets from landing on Haifa? The rockets started after the invasion. Eroding Hizbollah’s power? Open confrontation has made Hizbollah a hero in the Arab world, and driven even Lebanese factions historically opposed to Hizbollah to supporting them. And the tragedy at Qana is being laid, rightly or wrongly, at Israel’s door, making it harder and harder for the US to maintain its support. Diminishing Syrian influence in Lebanon? Syrian power in the area is growing by the day as the fragile Lebanese government struggles to keep order.

This has led many of the journalists I know into elaborate conspiracy theories about what Israel “really” wanted to achieve. This strikes me as a sort of perverse variant of the Elders of Zion wingnuttery, as if the Israelis are so omnipowerful that any apparent difficulties are merely another chess move in their unstoppable plan to dominate the Middle East. Israel is ruled by a government, which is to say, an entity nearly perfectly engineered for generating mistakes. The parsimonious explanation for the quagmire situation in Lebanon is that the Israeli government was expecting very different results from the ones they got.

Update Michael Young thinks Hizbollah has overreached.

ABOUT THE ONLY nice thing that one can say about Mel Gibson right now is that the statement he released hits the nail right on the head:

I acted like a person completely out of control when I was arrested and said things that I do not believe to be true and which are despicable.

At least he didn’t take the usual famous-person tack of pretending he meant to say something entirely different from “I hate Jews”, or that it was all a giant misunderstanding due to his insufficient sensitivity to religious issues. Of course, that’s really very small comfort.

ISLAMIC BLOGGERS Ali Eteraz posts a letter from an American in Ramallah. And Aziz Poonwalla mourns that “Hizbollah has won. Again.”

Update Why would I post a link to that letter from Ramallah? demand correspondants. Well, because the “warbloggers” tend to get a lot more information from people on the ground in Israel than those on the ground in Ramallah or Beirut. One of the unfortunate aspects of the Israel/Palestinian conflict is that the information blogs are best at generating–informal, personal descriptions and analysis of events–are only available from people who are pretty heavily biased on one side or the other of the conflict. Palestinian activists don’t vacation in Haifa, and people with strongly pro-Israel views are rarely found in Ramallah, at least without tanks and air support. Thus, the only way to get eyewitness accounts is to take them from people with a huge axe to grind.

FINALLY, someone is offering a workable, low-cost solution to the problems in the Middle East:

During the several days that it was 112 degrees and I had no AC, all I wanted to do was build an IED and kill the AC guy who kept driving right past my office and helping other people. In fact, I wanted to kill everyone who didn’t agree with me on just about any point whatsoever.

And I realized that the problem with the Middle East is insufficient AC. If you think about it, virtually all of the organized violence in the world is originating from places where they have poor air conditioning. And in the desert, 112 degrees is considered a pleasant day. Imagine how grumpy you would be at 125 degrees. And guess what I never see on TV when they show footage of the Middle East?

Shade.

Every frickin’ person they interview in the Middle East is standing directly in the sun. Some shade would be a good step toward world peace.

PERSONAL NOTES: I’m American, but I tend to drop British spellings all over the place, because I work for a British magazine, and do most of my typing in Limey. I apologize to those who are even now composing sharp notes about the horrors of extra u’s, but I’m afraid I can’t help it. If it is true that women have smaller brains, the chunk that is missing from mine is the bit that would hold an extra set of spellings for daily use. Having painfully converted myself to automatically supply “travelled” and “centre” in the place of the good, old-fashioned American forms, I cannot easily switch back. If it bothers you, try to think of it as taking a little spelling vacation.

Also, if anyone wants to email me, rather than the Instapundit mailbox, you can do so at janegalt -at sign- janegalt.net.

OH HAPPY DAY: Aaron Haspel’s literary blog, God of the Machine, is back, with a snazzy new design. Despite his appalling habit of betting on a weak Texas Hold’em hand just to make everyone else at the table pay to see the flop, he’s well worth reading.

THERE’S GENERAL AGREEMENT among economists (and most economic journalists) that the American labour market isn’t nearly as strong as we would expect it to be at this point in the business cycle. Unemployment figures are, to be sure, quite low, but in part that is because a number of people have dropped out of the labour force; both the labour force participation rate and the employment-to-population ratio are at least a full percentage point below what they were in the late 1990’s. Median wages have stagnated since that time, indicating that labour demand is weaker than you would think if you just looked at the “headline” unemployment figure of 4.6%. One of my colleagues argues that this is because of competition from improving technology and (yes) outsourcing; anyone who has a job that can be routinized is in trouble. This includes a whole lot of white collar workers who used to have relatively secure and lucrative jobs; globalization seems to be making the poor better off at the expense of the middle class. The loss of those jobs isn’t a tragedy for the economy, of course; eventually, they will be replaced by better jobs, just as jobs weaving cotton cloth and braiding buggy whips were. But in the short term, it can be awfully hard on people who thought they had a safe living.

Andrew Samwick talks about one of the reasons that this dislocation is hitting the participation figures so hard: men are living off savings or spouses or going on disability rather than accept lower-paying, lower-status jobs. It seems to me that we used to have a society in which going on disability was more stigmatized than taking a job pumping gas. Has that changed?

For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Megan McArdle, and I’ll be your resident econblogger for the week (as well as a hefty dose of everything else–I’m a dilettante.)

I’m an economics journalist by profession, so as you might imagine, I spend rather a lot of time reading economics blogs. One of the best out there is Econlog, written by Bryan Caplan and Arnold Kling. You never imagined economics could be applied to so many questions, such as: why happiness researchers want you to commit suicide, and an inquiry into why LA has so many liquor stores, when big box retailers are allowed to sell liquor there (unlike Virginia, his current state of residence, and my own beloved New York State).

If I didn’t know anything else about these states, I would predict that California’s grocery stores would dominate the liquor market. Why make a special trip to a seedy liquor store when you can buy tequila at CostCo during your weekly shopping?

But this prediction is way off. The blatant fact is that there are seedy liquor stores on virtually every commercial street corner in Los Angeles. People are free to buy their liquor in regular grocery stores, but for reasons I can’t grasp, grocery stores only seem to have a modest slice of the market.

Another way to think about this Los Angeles Liquor Puzzle: It seems like the Wal-Mart model should be working, but it’s not. The mom-and-pop liquor stores are thriving in the face of big(ger) box competition.

The comments are also fun; in the post on finding yourself that very special mail-order bride to share your life, commenter Kedar weighs in with some . . . er . . . economic analysis:

Arranged marriage lasts longer. Success rate is also higher. It is a good idea to ask relatives find someone you will see only at the wedding. Love starts at the wedding and it takes time to reach the peak of love and also time to fall. So it takes time for the marginal cost to outweigh marginal benefit of marriage.

I’m imagining a proposal along these lines: “Hey, I calculated that it would take 37 years for the marginal cost of living together to exceed the marginal benefit! What do you think?”

But the image isn’t nearly as compelling as picturing the look on my relatives’ faces if I asked them to “find me someone I will see only at the wedding”.

Not to mention the look on my face when I got my first glimpse of what they’d picked out.

I’M OFF to a hot dish of sour cherry pie and a cushy bed. Thanks so much for letting us blog here this week, Glenn, and thanks to my co-bloggers, who made it look easy.

TAX PROTESTING: It’s not just for libertarian nutjobs any more.

Sheehan, who is asking for a second meeting with President Bush, says defiantly: “My son was killed in 2004. I am not paying my taxes for 2004. You killed my son, George Bush, and I don’t owe you a penny…you give my son back and I’ll pay my taxes. Come after me (for back taxes) and we’ll put this war on trial.”

Somehow, I don’t think the loss of this woman’s taxes is going to force the US out of Iraq.

HELPING PREEMIES Very premature babies have a lot of problems, both physical and mental; as many as 41% of very premature babies have learning disabilities. This week’s New York Times magazine profiles a psychologist who thinks that the way Neonatal units are set up could be contributing to that, and who is trying to make them more developmentally friendly environments.

BANKRUPTCY BOONDOGGLE Delta Airlines is setting up the financing it will need to declare bankruptcy.

Industries such as airlines and telecoms with high fixed costs (i.e., it doesn’t cost them very much to carry an extra passenger or data byte; their costs are mostly concentrated in things that cost them money whether they have any customers or not, such as planes or switching equipment) tend to experience serial bankruptcies. The problem is that once one big player has declared bankruptcy, and emerged with its costs lowered, it can charge less than its competitors, who promptly start hemhorraging money until they are forced into bankruptcy. In the case of airlines, the problems are compounded by the legacy of high labour costs, left over from the days when airlines were highly regulated, and as a consequence, highly uncompetitive. They promised benefits and pensions that are not sustainable in a more competitive environment . . . and developed rather poisonous relations with their unions, which (along with cluelessness and greed on the union side) make it hard to profitably restructure unless a bankruptcy judge forces changes down the union’s throat.

Add to that what a general pain in the ass flying has become (security delays are making trains and automobiles highly time-competitive in my neck of the woods), and you can expect to see more companies follow Delta.

SUNNIS ARE BEING PRESSURED TO RATIFY THE CONSTITUTION. So far, they can’t quite admit that it is over: that they will never again enjoy unfettered control of their country.

For peace to come, I suspect that the Sunnis will need a Michael Collins–someone with the guts, and credibility, to tell his people that their dreams of glory are unrealistic, and it’s time to put down the guns and settle for what they can get. The Palestinians never had such a leader, which in my opinion is one of the main reasons they don’t now have a state. I don’t know who such a man would be in the Sunni community, but let’s hope one emerges before it’s too late.

ANOTHER THING TO HATE ABOUT HIGH OIL PRICES Airlines are hiking their fares.

KEVIN DRUM thinks that he can make the NARAL anti-Roberts ad better:

when you cut through the thousands of words of chaff written about it, there appear to be two main complaints. First, that the ad doesn’t make clear that Roberts’ brief was filed seven years before the Birmingham bombing, and second, that it’s outrageous to say that Roberts was “supporting violent fringe groups and a convicted clinic bomber.”

Well, is that outrageous? Sure. Roberts was defending a legal principle, and the beneficiaries of legal principles are frequently pretty odious characters. Defending the principle doesn’t mean you’re defending a particular person or group, a distinction the ACLU makes all the time.

However, on the overall scale of outrageousness, I have to say that this ad ranks pretty low compared to conservative benchmarks like Willie Horton and the Swift Boat lunatics. In fact, here’s what I think is weird: NARAL could have addressed both these complaints and made the ad better in the process.

Take the timeline issue first. Wouldn’t it actually be more effective to put this front and center so that the 1998 bombing appears to be the inevitable result of Roberts’ winning 1991 argument to the Supreme Court? Sure it would.

As for “supporting violent fringe groups,” why say it that way in the first place? Why not take the high road and acknowledge that Roberts was defending an abstract principle, but then condemn the ivory tower ideology that they believe produced such appalling real world results?

But this makes no more sense than the original ad. The 1998 clinic bombing didn’t happen because John Roberts argued against prosecuting Operation Rescue, a group which as far as I know isn’t even rhetorically in favour of clinic bombings, and which definitely didn’t set this particular bomb, under the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act. Clinic bombers are already liable for prosecution under a host of statutes much more fearsome than the KKK Act, notably those against murder. Implying such an implausible causal link is only marginally less mendacious than the original ad.

Similarly, Mark Kleiman’s attempt to excuse NARAL’s ad by calling Operation Rescue a terrorist group is an abuse of the word. Is Operation Rescue attempting to keep women from having abortions by making them feel shame and public humiliation at an extraordinarily vulnerable time? Undoubtedly. Have they attempted to physically block women from entering clinics? Indeed they have. But speaking as one who used to form a human chain in front of clinics to help women through the protesters, I’ve never seen anything from Operation Rescue that even remotely qualifies as terrorism, nor seen anyone physically threaten a woman (shoving a picture of a fetus in her face does not count). There may have been isolated incidents (as, to be honest, there were isolated cases of overzealous young men on our side itching to get busy with the opposition). But instilling fear for a woman’s physical safety–the definition of terrorism–did not seem to me to be one of the organization’s goals, and indeed, at clinics where OR is protesting there are so many police, barricades, and counterprotesters that it would not be a very effective organisation if that were the goal. I disagree with Operation Rescue about nearly everything, but comparing it to the Ku Klux Klan’s campaign of lynching free blacks is grotesque.

Such ads are undoubtedly effective, but each one contributes to a political culture in which scoring one for the team is the only important consideration. Honest pro-choicers who feel that it’s all right because this is important should have a good long think about what kind of country they want to live in.

RECORD INFLATION Steve Verdon points out that current “record” oil prices are only records because inflation has raised prices across the board. In real terms, oil’s record price was reached shortly after Iran took hostages in the US embassy, way back in 1979, when a barrel of oil cost roughly $90 of today’s dollars.

You see these sorts of “records” everywhere. The highest grossing movie of all time in real terms was, I’m told, Gone With the Wind; it’s only the eroding value of our money that lets Hollywood set new records every few years. Something to keep in mind when you read those headlines.

Update Yup, Gone With the Wind.

Quote of the Day comes from James Joyner:

Airborne school is basically a couple hours of training interspersed with two weeks of harassment and then five hours of proving that gravity still operates over eastern Alabama interspersed with forty hours of sitting around in heavy equipment.

TIMOTHY BURKE REPORTS THAT at least one South African politician thinks that South Africa should look to Zimbabwe for lessons on how to give their land reform “oomph”. Oomph is certainly one way of putting it:

The government’s land redistribution policy, which led to the invasion of the country’s white-owned farms in the past few years, has contributed to the economic catastrophe that now grips Zimbabwe. On top of a drought and the devastation of HIV/AIDS, the land grab has made food production plummet. The UN’s World Food Programme reckons that 3m-4m people will need food aid this year. Cooking oil, sugar and Zimbabweans’ staple maize porridge have become very hard to come by in Harare, harder still in the countryside. Unemployment is probably over 70%; inflation, at last count, was 129%. There is not enough foreign exchange to cover basic imports. Long lines of cars wait in front of petrol stations rumoured to be expecting a delivery.

According to Peter Kagwanja, Southern Africa director of the International Crisis Group, which focuses on conflict prevention, pushing people out of the cities has several advantages from the government’s perspective. Reviving agriculture cannot be done without labour, and most of it left the countryside as commercial farming collapsed. So far, only a fraction of occupied land has been put to good use. Without more labour, even subsistence agriculture cannot pick up. The governor of the central bank, Gideon Gono, has suggested that “progressive-minded” white farmers should come back and work in selected sectors, such as horticulture and dairy farming. But as many were driven off their farms in the first place, that offer may have limited allure. The ruling party has recently talked of amending the constitution to end private land ownership altogether.