Does it have a plan, per se? Or is it just making it up as it goes along?

I don't mean that as an insult. Unlike some people, like St. Andi of the Beagles, I think war is mostly making stuff along as you go. As they say, a plan never survives first contact with the enemy.

At any rate, Allah sums up the two possible plans:

Two interesting strategic analyses making the blog rounds this morning. One, from the Washington Times, alleges a four-stage Israeli attack plan; the blockade is part of stage one and is intended principally to coerce the Lebanese government into sending its army south to confront Hezbollah. The other strategy comes from John at OpFor, who says the blockade is actually designed to trap Hezbollah inside the country so that when the inevitable ground invasion begins, they have nowhere to run.

Both plans, he says, rely upon the Lebanese government helping trap Hezbollah and taking action against them. Which, he notes, is not particularly likely.

As Benecio Del Toro said in The Way of the Gun, "A plan is just a list of things that ain't gonna happen."

Posted by: Ace at 03:16 PM | Comments (42)
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No, not Muslims. Of course they have the right to fly. Canada has actually decided that known members of terrorist organizations cannot be barred from air travel unless it is proven they pose a threat to aviation.

Isn't the membership in a terrorist organization ipso facto proof of a threat to aviation?

Did they miss that whole people-jumping-out-of-buildings and towers-falling-to-the-ground kerfuffle a few years back?

I guess so. There must have been an Anne Murray retrospective on that past four years.

Not to bluster, but honestly, doesn't this mean we're compelled to bar all Canadian flights from entering US airspace?

Posted by: Ace at 03:02 PM | Comments (14)
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No details of his death have been provided yet. One hopes it involved a dame and .45. He'd've wanted it that way.

Mickey Spillaine of course wrote the blood-and-guts Mike Hammer series, which liberal book critics called "fascistic" in its crude, naive belief that sometimes evil just needed some killin'. He's one of the few writers who every got the chance to play his most famous creation in a movie. He also got to play himself, basically, in a Columbo episode.

Ayn Rand was a big fan of his very masculine, "objectivist" sort of writing. Or at least she took it that way. I remember an essay of hers quoting this passage from Spillaine's One Lonely Night as the sort of direct, Roarkian writing she approved of:

NOBODY ever walked across the bridge, not on a night like this. The rain was misty enough to be almost fog-like, a cold gray curtain that separated me from the pale ovals of white that were faces locked behind the steamed-up windows of the cars that hissed by. Even the brilliance that was Manhatten by night was reduced to a few sleepy, yellow lights off in the distance.

Some place over there I had left my car and started walking, burying my head in the collar of my raincoat, with the night pulled in around me like a blanket. I walked and I smoked and I flipped the spent butts ahead of me and watched them arch to the pavement and fizzle out with one last wink. If there was life behind the windows of the buildings on either side of me, I didn't notice it. The street was mine, all mine. They gave it to me gladly and wondered why I wanted it so nice and all alone.

There were others like me, sharing the dark and the solitude, but they were huddled in the recessions of the doorways not wanting to share the wet and the cold. I could feel their eyes follow me briefly before they turned inward to their thoughts again.

So I followed the hard concrete footpaths of the city through the towering canyons of the buildings and never noticed when the sheer cliffs of brick and masonry diminished and disappeared altogether, and the footpath led into a ramp then on to the spidery steel skeleton that was the bridge linking two states.

I climbed to the hump in the middle and stood there leaning on the handrail with a butt in my fingers, watching the red and green lights of the boats in the river below. They winked at me and called in low, throaty notes before disappearing into the night.

Like eyes and faces. And voices.

I buried my face in my hands until everything straightened itself out again, wondering what the judge would say if he could see me now. Maybe he'd laugh because I was supposed to be so damn tough, and here I was with hands that wouldn't stand still and an empty feeling inside my chest.

Quoted from a pretty cool Mike Hammer site, if you're curious to read more about the tough-guy detective who just never got the props that Spade and Marlowe did.

Thanks to Kent for the tip.

More.... CNN has a good obit.

They call this "boilerplate," though. I think it's rather innovative in its brutality.

As a stylist Spillane was no innovator; the prose was hard-boiled boilerplate. In a typical scene, from "The Big Kill," Hammer slugs out a little punk with "pig eyes."

"I snapped the side of the rod across his jaw and laid the flesh open to the bone," Spillane wrote. "I pounded his teeth back into his mouth with the end of the barrel ... and I took my own damn time about kicking him in the face. He smashed into the door and lay there bubbling. So I kicked him again and he stopped bubbling."

He had no pretensions, though:

Spillane, a bearish man who wrote on an old manual Smith Corona, always claimed he didn't care about reviews. He considered himself a "writer" as opposed to an "author," defining a writer as someone whose books sell.

"This is an income-generating job," he told The Associated Press during a 2001 interview. "Fame was never anything to me unless it afforded me a good livelihood."

Mystery writer Lawrence Block recalled one time Spillaine was on a roundtable chat with other writers, and they were asked what spurs them to write. The others gave the typical answers, like "when I get inspired by an idea" or "when there's just something inside of me that needs to get out." After a few minutes of this Spillaine said (paraphrased), "When are we going to talk about money? Because I'll tell you, I start getting the urge to write another book when my bank account gets down to zero."

At which point, Spillaine having broached the crude issue, the other writers piped up to say they, too, tended to get the "most inspired" when a big mortgage payment was on its way.

And Still More... Cool background:

Mickey Spillane was born in Brooklyn, New York, as the son of a bartender. In his youth he read such writers as Alexandre Dumas and Anthony Hope, and was also fascinated by comic books. He attended briefly Fort Hays State College in Kansas, but dropped out, moved back to New York, and began his writing career in the mid-1930s. Spillane's first stories were published mostly in comic books and pulp magazines. He developed Mike Danger, a private detective, and wrote among others for Captain America, Captain Marvel, and The Human Torch. During WW II Spillane worked as a flying instructor for the U.S. Army Air Force.

If anyone doesn't like some of the word-choice in the One Lonely Night passage above, bear in mind: Spillaine wrote his first book, I, the Jury (what a title) in nine days.

Compare that to Chandler's taking two or three years on a book. Sure, Chandler's a better writer. But there's no doubting Spillaine was a lot more efficient.

His most famous lines were from the end of that first book. After he shoots the dangerous dame who's been his lover, but is now revealed as a murderer:

"How c-could you?" she gasped.

I only had a moment before talking to a corpse, but I got it in.

"It was easy," I said.

Ohhh, snap, as all the kids say.

He Had The Right Enemies Update: He was attacked by Dr. Frederic Wertham, who, as all true geeks know, almost killed the comic book industry by claiming comic books promoted hooliganism and homosexuality.

"Why should one of the most popular authors of the twentieth century need defending? Easy, as Mike Hammer might say: his subject matter and his approach were so hard-hitting, so individual, that Spillane repelled the more proper and staid among the Literary Establishment (and the Establishment in general, including Dr. Frederic Wertham and Parents Magazine and other unpointed arbiters of public morality.). ... ( 'Mecca Spillane' by Max Allan Collins, in The Big Book of Noir, 199

Spillane has told that he finishes his text in two weeks and do not revise anything he has written. Although critics have tried to belittle the author's achievements, Spillane has had such defenders as Ayn Rand, who has said, that "Spillane gives me the feeling of hearing a military band in a public park." To his critics Spillane has answered, "but it's good garbage." On a list complied in 1967 of all the best-selling books published in America between 1895 and 1965, seven of the top twenty-nine were written by Spillane. Especially during the height of anti-Communist paranoia, Hammer's unyielding, patriotic character comforted many American readers.

And he wrote for Batman, too.

Some more of Spillane's unnuanced politics. Or rather, mostly his wife's. He doesn't like talking about them. But you get a feel for the general contours.

We weren't far along the road when he showed me a card: a permit to carry a concealed weapon. "What do you need to carry a concealed weapon for?" I ask. "In case I need to shoot someone... Aye, that's a joke."

...

"[My wife's] an intellectual," he told me in the car disgruntled. "She loves politics. I married her on Hallowe'en. Still don't know if it was a trick or treat."

...

Mickey hates politics; he'd rather talk about fishing. Jane and I began talking politics. "I hate the Clintons," she said. "I am part of the rightwing international conspiracy".

...

While we talked he sat there whistling. "People ask me how I like being married to a male chauvinist pig," Jane told me. "And I say: 'I love every minute of it'."

...

He told me he hates the French because they hate Americans, and he does not like to travel anyway. He does not feel indebted to the French for giving him honorary intellectual status.

Now, Hammett and Chandler were better writers, but... Hammett was a Commie symp -- errr, socialist utopian -- and Chandler was a stumbling wreck of a man, an alcoholic who did not handle his affliction particularly well, a bit of a persnicketty Anglophile, and had a very loving, though strangely dependent, relationship with his much-older wife.

On the other hand, Mickey Spillaine knocked out mutlimillion-selling books in two weeks, refused to revise a word of his cranked-out books, wrote blood-soaked tales of Commie-hunting, punk-bludgeoning, and dame-slapping, wrote for Captain America and Batman as a young writer, and proudly admits he did all for the damn money.

I think I know which of the three I'd want to have a drink with.

Posted by: Ace at 01:46 PM | Comments (74)
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Nails the celebrity disaster-tourists who went to New Orleans for photo-ops but didn't contribute a check or a hammer-arm.

Also says he's "qualified to beat people up," but also "pretty intelligent."

In related news, the trailer for Rocky VI is out. Grendel wants to know my take on it, and I thought of writing one, but then I realized -- not even I care what I think about Rocky IV. But let me say briefly:

It looks okay. It's kind of ridiculous that Rocky can still fight for the heavyweight title at age, what is he now, 92?, but then, George Forman did okay at age fifty.

With the exception of Rocky IV, they've all been pretty good, or at least okay. I objected to that one because it was too crude in its manipulation, and also posited Rocky essentially bringing down the Soviet Union. Same problem I had with Rambo, when he went to save the POWs. Real problems (assume arguendo that there are POWs still held in Vietnam) have to be taken seriously. I don't like movies that posit fantasy solutions for real, serious problems.

I'm also not sure how Rocky, suffering brain damage, and having been basically a finesse-free fighter throughout his life with almost no skills, just punching power and the ability to absorb massive amount of damage, suddenly knew all sorts of Brazillian jui-jitsu street-fighting moves at the end of Rocky V.

I thought brain damage slowed you down and made you more clumsy. I didn't know it bestowed Spiderman-level agility and reflex speed and an intuitive comprehension of mixed martial arts.

Oh-- and Rocky III is the key to a good Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon question. Kermit the Frog? Kermit was in Rocky III with Sylvester Stallone who was in The Specialist with Sharon Stone who was in He Said, She Said... with Kevin Bacon.

So that's my opinion on Rocky VI.

Posted by: Ace at 01:11 PM | Comments (26)
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Reality sets in. I've long, and too frequently, commented on the Sunnis' bizarrely counterproductive war on America. Just what did these idiots imagine would happen if we left?

Maybe the Shiites, who outnumber them, and now out-gun them, and who have been massacred and oppressed by the Sunnis for fifty years or more, would, I don't know, decide it was time for a little ethnic-cleansing payback?

It was and is a strange situation. The group we're protecting the most is the group that's murdering us the most. One thing that appealed to me about the Demcrats' bug-out plan -- ooops, I mean "strategic over-the-horizon strong, tough redeployment to Okinawa" -- was that the Sunnis would, tragically but justifiably, get to enjoy reaping the whirlwind they created.

As sectarian violence soars, many Sunni Arab political and religious leaders once staunchly opposed to the American presence here are now saying they need American troops to protect them from the rampages of Shiite militias and Shiite-run government forces.

I feel like there should be a Rocky Horror style shoutback here, like "What did you think would eventually happen, assholes?"

The pleas from the Sunni Arab leaders have been growing in intensity since an eruption of sectarian bloodletting in February, but they have reached a new pitch in recent days as Shiite militiamen have brazenly shot dead groups of Sunni civilians in broad daylight in Baghdad and other mixed areas of central Iraq.

"Castles don't have phones, assholes. And oh, by the way, if you keep butchering people, they might start to butcher you back. Just FYI."

...

The Sunni Arab leaders say they have no newfound love for the Americans. Many say they still sympathize with the insurgency and despise the Bush administration...

"An outnumbered, outgunned despised formerly-tyrannical minority shouldn't keep blowing people up, assholes!"

But the Sunni leaders have dropped demands for a quick withdrawal of American troops. Many now ask for little more than a timetable. A few Sunni leaders even say they want more American soldiers on the ground to help contain the widening chaos.

Oh, Lordy. They want more Americans to protect them from the violence they created. More American boys in harm's way, trading American combat deaths for Sunni lives.

Yeah. We'll get right on that, Chief.

Posted by: Ace at 12:59 PM | Comments (18)
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Instapundit links this book. And he interviews the author in his latest podcast.

The book postulates that calcium is the key to weight loss, and that eating (low-fat) cheese and ice cream will make you slim, healthy, and fabulous.

The book says it has "science" to back this up. Okay, but... why is that American kids, who drink milk throughout their childhood, tend to be fat, and Asian kids, who don't drink milk past infancy, tend to be thin, and know kung-fu?

In response to a question about why women periodically made abstinence pledges, I responded:

You want to know why?

Witchcraft.

Stay with me. I was in a vitamin store and I realized how much witchcraft is still with us. People really think that magical potions will improve their lives.

Apart from basic vitamins, which are useful of course, there are all these pretty minor nutrients and all these non-nutrients (St. John's Wort, crap like that) that people are still buying and eating every day in the belief that they have some restorative or potency-increasing effect.

I'm a skeptic, and anti-bullshit and all that, and yet I found myself credulously wondering if I needed some more Essence of Spearmint in my life until I realized what a moron I was for even contemplating such a thing.

Women are especially succeptible to magical thinking (sorry to be sexist, but men are not the biggest consumers of horoscopes).

And abstinence pledges and all these health fads and heath scares are all rooted in the witchcraft-based belief, which we all have to some degree, that there is some secret mix of things we can put in or take out of our bodies that will give us health, love, vigor, power, youth, and happiness.

Hot yoga, aromatherapy, megadoses of specific (or all vitamins), St. John's Wort... all potions. All witchcraft.

I don't know the science of calcium, but every three weeks a new vitamin or mineral is touted as the key to health and joy. Vitamin C was the first miracle vitamin, and then B, and then A, and recently D, and now it's calcium.

We need all these, of course. But is any one of them really the super-elixir to eternal hotitude?

I follow some diet witchcraft myself, of course. Atkins, as many of you know. But the science behind it made amazing sense, you can test that science out as you diet (you can determine how much stored fat you're burning by, well, peeing on an indicator strip that shows if you're producing the byproducts of stored fat metabolisis), and, well, I lost seventy pounds in four months and I haven't really added any of it back. Oh, sure, I add back five pounds once in a while, but then I take that off again.

I don't know. I'd like to believe a Friendly's Fribble is the key to health, but I need more convincing.

Note: I meant to write "stored fat metabolism," but instead wrote "stored fat metabolisis," which probably isn't a real word, but I kind of like my error, so I'm keeping it.

Oh, And Men Perhaps Spend More On Certain Potions Than Women: There's a whole industry -- a big one -- providing those "muscle-building" powders.

To some extent, I guess, well, they work. If you intend to work out hard and gain weight, you need to take in a lot of extra calories and protein, and those shakes do provide them.

But... the "potion" part comes in suggesting that there are some special ingredients in the power that make them more effective as muscle-building fuel than, say, a big steak with a big side of pasta.

Related: I can't hear this (I'm so tired of writing that), but, from context, it appears that here Sam Neill combats vegitarianism-witchcraft by declaring, "Red meat-- we were intended to eat it!" Maybe it's a commercial for the Australian beef industry or something?

Anyway, red meat, Sam Neill, something for the guys, something for the chicks. And a double-helping of awesome-sauce for the Republican homos.

Posted by: Ace at 12:17 PM | Comments (43)
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Cool beans. The new SkyGuard system may be deployed in northern Israel... eventually, and if Nothrop can manage an export licence.

was, perhaps, the most successful laser gun in the history of energy weapons. Now, it could just prove to be the key to Israel's defense. Maybe.

In the early part of this decade, the Israeli and American militaries worked with Northrop Grumman to build the Tactical High Energy Laser, or THEL. During tests at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, the chemical-powered energy weapon blasted out of the sky 28 Katyusha rockets -- just like the ones now assaulting Israel. Another 18 artillery shells and mortars were successfully zapped, as well. No other laser has ever come close to building up that kind of track record.

Downside: $200 million estimated cost for system (probably twice that), plus $1000 per single shot, plus lots of ferociously toxic chemicals created by the reactions needed to fuel the laserblasts.

Upside: It's all so f'n' awesome it couldn't be more awesomer if it had awesome sauce pouring out of its awesomehole. (Thanks to JK for that, though I suspect he's getting it from Jack Black.)

Video of Katyushka shoot-downs at link.

Improving The SkyGuard: Most lasers are invisible, which is just freakin' gay. I want to see them.

So I propose (at no cost; this idea is freely provided) mounting a gun that fires brilliant neon-red tracer rounds along the path of the laser, with a massive soundsystem that plays the laser-bolt sound effect from Star Wars (choookh! chooookh!) whenever the laser is fired.

I just think that when you have a totally awesome laser defense system, it should look and sound totally awesome, too. Not some invisible, silent pussy-crap.

Posted by: Ace at 11:39 AM | Comments (22)
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Naomi Campell trashes boyfriend's yacht over beef with Italian chef.

"I saaaiiid... we got a motherfuckin' aging supermodel (?) on this motherfuckin' yacht...!"

Campbell, known for her outbursts, flew into a violent rage after an argument with the unidentified chef over antipasti on a menu and his choice of wine.

She is said to have smashed up furniture and fittings on the £1.5 million yacht, Nasma, belonging to her new boyfriend, Dubai-born Prince Badr Jafar.

...

News reports estimated the damage to be more than £30,0000.

Staff on the yacht dived for cover as Campbell lashed out at furniture, including priceless antiques, light fittings and cushions, as well as smashing china plates and crystal glasses.

No offense, Naomi, but you're not hot enough to get away with this crap anymore. I don't know you ever really were. Your spastic temper is writing checks your ass can't cover.

Posted by: Ace at 11:05 AM | Comments (19)
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Terrific. The city was a mess for ten years as they built them, now they're shut down for "months" as they repair them.

I confess that I was a lukewarm supporter of the Big Dig. I had problems with the plan, of course. I was annoyed at the huge amounts of money spent on the project. And the unhinged liberalism that decreed that, despite the fact that demolishing the huge ugly overpasses would free up acres and acres of prime real estate for development, this land would simply be made into parks, instead of being sold off for huge money to defray the Big Dig's costs.

But I supported it, because one of the few things I think the government should be doing is building and improving roads and bridges and the like. Few bridges are built in America anymore. In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century bridges and other big civil engineering projects were going up like crazy. Now-- not so much. Perhaps it's that we don't need further big infrastructure projects, or perhaps... America just doesn't do big things anymore.

It was the last part that made me support the Big Dig. The idea that we just didn't do big things anymore. Well, the Big Dig was big. So we could do this sort of thing, if we wanted. And I just loved the idea of construction on such a grand scale, overcoming so many difficult engineering problems. I've watched the documentaries about this on the Discovery and History Channels so much I can pretty much quote them. I feel at this point I could pretty much direct the construction of a refrigeration-hardened slurry wall, if it was required of me.

But now, it seems, we can't do these big projects anymore. Our idiotic and corrupt bureaucracy will just piss money away on shoddy workmanship.

So the Big Dig was a test for American government. An important test. A test American government failed.

So now we know.

Liberalism supports massive public works projects like this. You would think, then, that liberals would be determined and laser-focused on bringing these things off without massively overspending and, dare to dream, without massive systemic flaws.

Not so much, it turns out. They want lots of money for urban improvements, but don't give a rat's ass how it's spent or even if it actually improves anything.

You guys had a big chance here to prove that a big chunk of liberalism could work. You blew it.

Posted by: Ace at 10:45 AM | Comments (24)
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Hezbollah must disarm.

There. Everyone said it. Ergo, it must happen.

Diplomacy-- Catch the fever!

Posted by: Ace at 10:37 AM | Comments (15)
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