Just watching a montage on an O'Reilly repeat -- of Chris Dodd, Madeleine Albright, Howard Dean -- all preaching the incredible powers of "diplomacy."

Diplomacy is a powerful tool. But it has one key weakness.

The word "No."

As in--

"Stop making nuclear weapons." -- "No."

"Stop firing long-range missiles." -- "No."

"Stop funding terrorists." -- "No."

"Stop killing and kidnapping Israelis." -- "No."

It is baffling to me that Democrats are unaware that, for all the incredible power of diplomacy, all diplomatic efforts can be entirely rebuffed with a single syllable word.

When Democrats are asked what to do about countries which keep saying "No" in response to our diplomacy, they invariably offer one strategy: More diplomacy!

Unaware, I guess, that every country, no matter how poor, has an endless supply of the natural resource known as the word "No."

Apparently they think if we just keep coming after the terrorists and Iranian Mullahs and Norks with more and more precision-guided diplomacy, we will eventually exhaust, attrit, or destroy their stockpiles of the word "No."

I hate to tell them this, but-- "No."

Posted by: Ace at 04:03 PM | Comments (144)
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In much the same way, Brett says, that Cindy Sheehan abstains from solid food.

Ice cream doesn't count; a lesbian sex-tape with a "model" doesn't count, either.

Paris Hilton is giving up sex for a year. The hotel heiress has imposed the ban on herself because she is convinced abstaining from all carnal activity will help her "rediscover" herself.

Tht makes sense, although I would imagine rediscovering the complexities and depths of Paris Hilton's soul would take no more than three or four minutes.

She said, "I'm doing it just because I want to. I feel I'm becoming stronger as a person. Every time I have a boyfriend, I'm just so romantic, and I'll put all my energy into the guy, and I don't really pay attention to myself."

I see. Paris Hilton needs to pay more attention to herself, and care less about the needs of other people.

This makes sense to me.

Then again, I'm a moron.

...

She said, "One-night stands are not for me. I think it's gross when you just give it up. Guys want you more if you don't just hand it to them on a platter. If they want you, then they will wait. You have to make them work for it. I think that's the only way you know if they really want you or just want to be able to brag that they've been with you."

Um. Yeah. Paris Hilton has "rediscovered" a key insight that's suprising only to a twelve-year-old.

Anyone want to ballpark the IQ on Paris Hilton? Does anyone think it tops 85?

And don't give me that "she knows how to manipulate the media" silliness. I don't think it takes much brainpower to know that if your a billionaire-ess you will get a lot of attention if you "accidentally" let a couple of sex-tapes get out into the public.

Posted by: Ace at 03:07 PM | Comments (59)
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It's about time, really. There is a whole crop of second-tier stars who are more interesting than those on the A-list. Johnny Depp, Vince Vaughan, Luke Wilson, Owen Wilson, etc. (PS: How funny is it that tabloids now routinely call Owen Wilson "The Butterscotch Stallion"? And how funny is it that he showed up on Jon Stewart baked off his Butterscotch Stallion ass?)

Why pay Tom Cruise $30 million when you can pay, say, Clive Owen $7 million? Why pay Harrison "Block of Inanimate Rock" Ford $20 million when you can pay Kurt Russel $8 million?

What I think is odd is that these a lot of these high-cost genre pictures started starring A-list stars with their requisite A-list celebrities. When I was a kid, big, dumb movies like War of the Worlds never starred someone like Tom Cruise. They always had an "all-star cast," which usually meant a list of old-Hollywood faded stars and cheap younger talent like (at that time) Gene Hackman, plus O.J. Simspon, for some reason. O.J. Simpson was in every genre picture made in the 1970's.

If you're making a Juraissic Park, it's smart to put Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum in as its stars. They're not really stars with drawing power, but they're good actors, and no one's going to see Juraissic Park to see big-name celebrities anyhow, for crying out loud.

It's also annoying that the top Hollywood earners are also kinda lame actors, isn't it? With a few of exceptions, like Sean Connery and Denzel Washington and a few others, movies would be better if all the A-listers were summarily fired and replaced en masse with their B-list betters. The only guys really earning their big paychecks are the comedy guys like Jim Carey and Adam Sandler (and yeah, even Eddie Murphy), because in comedy, the star is prety much the whole movie.

Celebrity "Journalism" And Stars On The Cheap: I wonder if the huge celebrity "journalism" industry is making it easier for Hollywood to mint new stars. They are voracious in their need to print scoops about anyone who's ever been on tv or in a movie, and maybe they're doing Hollywood a service by keeping more lower-tier "stars" in the public eye, thus reducing the "celebrity premium" on someone like, say, Tom Cruise.

Posted by: Ace at 02:20 PM | Comments (24)
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A reader wrote this:

Ace,



Why is it that every time I send Jeff Goldstein some $$$, he sends me a "Thanks"-e-mail, but whenever I send you some monetary lovin you don't? Seriously, you'd be able to pay off the Val-U-Rite tab a lot easier if you just sent out a lame-o "Thanks" after someone coughed up a few sheckels.



You're like an awesome-but-bitchy bartender... The drink is good, the service is excellent, but you won't say "thanks" for the tip. WTF? I'll stay for the service, but will be less inclined to hit the tip-jar if it dosen't mean anything to you.



Your choice.



Regards,



[name deleted]

Okay. This stung, and I deserved it. Here's what I wrote back, with a little additional stuff.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 01:17 PM | Comments (60)
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...which is of course every day in the Caliphate. (With picture of the cute little ragamuffin terrorists-in-training.)

It goes without saying (though TigerHawk says it anyway) that if the children hanging out with the Hamas soldiers were killed by Israeli counterfire, Israel would be blamed.

But not the terrorist bringng their tykes to a firing position, of course.

Thanks to Larwyn.

Posted by: Ace at 12:17 PM | Comments (11)
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Correction: Dave tells me I really lowballed the Exocet's price tag. $2000 does seem pretty damn low. But his guess of $300,000 seems to high. Our Javelin missiles -- super-advanced -- cost like $1 mil a piece, so I don't know that middle-weight French missile cost that much in 1982. Maybe in today's dollars. In any event, I've deleted my lowball guesstimate.

I've also added an update at the end, a link to the old article "Why Arabs Lose Wars," sent to me by steven_in_hb.

...

Although Israel is popularly imagined to be an ass-kicking state that is hellacompetent at fighting wars, I think this is now an overhyped idea. I think those who think that Israel merely needs to unleash its formiddable warmachine on its enemies are vastly overstating Israel's power.

For one thing, there's the fact that it's a tiny state. It has a strong economy, but economies tend to be badly disrupted when rockets are hitting important cities and a large fraction of its economically-productive citizenry is moved into the economically-useless (but militarily critical) army.

Israel's previous wars have been mercifully short. Can Israel actually fight a long war?

Israel has better technology than its enemies, but not that much better. The fact that a multimullion dollar British warship could be destroyed (or crippled, at least) by a relatively cheap French Exocet missile during the Falklands war demonstrated a technological shift that favored smaller, weaker armies. An Israeli ship has been crippled by an Iranian missile; I imagine that much of Israel's assumed advantage is in fact no longer much of advantage at all due to the proliferation of Chinese advanced missiles.

The US responded to this sea-change, as it were, by creating a massive missile-screen around its carrier groups with Aegis cruisers and the like; Israel doesn't have anything like that capability.

Patriot missiles have been deployed to the north, but, if they've successfully shot down a Hezbollah rocket, I have yet to hear of it.

There is an idea that Israel can fly into Iran and hit a bunch of critical targets. I doubt it. For one thing, the Israel airforce is not vast -- 500 warplanes or so -- and its doubtful that such a small airforce could do much to punish or cripple Iran's warmaking, or dissuade it from making further war. We're used to seeing the US completely own the skies in a country we attack -- but that's because we destroy almost all of their radar and anti-aircraft missile batteries early, with cruise missiles and precision guided bombs from Stealth fighters. (For shits and giggles, we also usually take out all of the enemies aircraft pretty early, too.) Israel doesn't have anything like that -- which means that a hypoethetical squadron flying into Iran will face a daunting guantlet of fairly-advanced anti-aircraft missiles, as well as Iran's not-insignificant and not-primative fighters.

And even if half the squadron survives, what then? What level of punishment can twenty or thirty F-16's inflict with relatively small bombs? It's always fun to talk about a "decapitating strike," but the US has trouble managing such a thing, and we've got the best planes and bombs and real-time tactical info in the world. The odds of hitting, say, the location that Ahmadinejad is at at any particular moment are low, and even if the location is hit, there's no guarantee that smallish bombs will kill him.

Syria might be an easier state to attack. But even a good kill, like hitting Bashar Assad, doesn't accomplish much. Assad is an Idiot Prince who pretty much does what the old guard of the Syrian military tells him to do. To effect a true decapitating strike, Israel would have to kill not only Assad but the bulk of the old guard who more or less rules the country.

I don't write this with the intent of suggesting "All is doomed." I'm just trying to provide, to the extent I know anything (and I don't know much-- this is basic impressions gleaned from the same news you read), some context for the crisis.

Israel may be focusing on southern Lebanon because they figure that's pretty much the limit of the realistic military capabilities. Or they may worry that more ambitious attacks would result in unnacceptable losses to their air force, resulting in Israel itself being much more open to direct attack from enemy air forces.

Iran has a lot of money right now. Their economy is not a basket-case. They underperform, of course, as almost all Muslim nations do; but they're in economically good shape, especially with the price of oil so high (partly so high due to their constantly threatening war and thus making everyone fear a disruption in supplies).

I really wish people would stop buying SUVs. I'm sure they're good vehicles, and there are practical reasons for driving them. But they consume a lot of gas, increasing demand and putting more money in Iran's (and Saudi Arabia's, and Venezuela's, and Russia's) pockets.

Are they worth it?

I'm not sure what Israel can do that it's not doing now. Perhaps if they sent in commando squads to abduct or assassinate Lebanese Hezbollah politicians. They are fair targets -- they are the political representatives of an army with which Israel is at war. Leadership is always a legitimate target.

This wouldn't send a message to Hezbollah. There's hardly any point to sending Muslims "messages;" they alway ignore them. Give them their due -- they are implacable.

But suddenly purging the Lebanese government of its Hezbollah representatives might free up that government to take action against Hezbollah, or at least make it more difficult for it to operate.

Update: A very old article, "Why Arabs Lose Wars," that I remember reading just after 9/11.

A good one in case you've never read it, and a bit uplifting.

Then again, I think Arabs and Muslims have realized they can't win actual "wars" and so have resorted to terrorism, which, gee willickers, it turns out they're quite good at.

The Moral Hazard of Sophistic Progressivism: Those who tout Israel's well-nigh-invincibility in regional wars should remember, too, that the Israel of 1967 or 1973 is not the Israel of today.

I can't prove it, but something tells me that Israel wasn't so filled with pussies back then as to have protestors demanding a surrender to terrorists.

A Semi-Correction: Melkor writes that I'm wrong to expect Patriots to shoot down Katyushka rockets, as those are just too small for the Patriots to target and hit. He says the Patriots need a bigger target, like SCUDs, which he calls "big trash in the sky."

Makes sense. But then Israel can't expect much reprieve from the hundreds of rockets being lobbed at it.

Posted by: Ace at 10:52 AM | Comments (83)
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Religion of Peace (TM) launches more Love-Rockets into Haifa, killing eight.

Lebanese guerillas fired a relentless barrage of rockets into the northern Israeli city of Haifa on Sunday, killing eight people at a train station and wounding seven others in a dramatic escalation of a five-day-old conflict that has shattered Mideast peace.

Soon afterward, Israeli warplanes hit the south Beirut stronghold of Hezbollah with at least six airstrikes, shaking the Lebanese capital and sending up a cloud of thick smoke. Hezbollah's firing of at least 20 rockets at Haifa came after Israel unleashed its fiercest bombardment yet of Beirut, reducing apartment buildings to rubble and knocking out electricity in many areas of the city.

...

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said there would be "far-reaching consequences" for the Haifa attack.

Those rocket were, shockingly enough, Syrian-made:

Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Dan Halutz said on Sunday afternoon that the more advanced Fajar missiles that were fired with a barrage of other rockets at Haifa on Sunday morning, killing eight people, were made in Syria.

Iran behind attack on Israeli warship:

Israeli officials charged that elite Iranian troops operating in Lebanon were involved in the Hezbollah offensive, and were responsible for firing an Iranian-made, radar-guided C802 missile - not the unmanned bomb-laden drone originally reported - that struck the warship on Friday, killing four sailors.

"There are Iranian officers belonging to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard among Hezbollah and they operated the missile," said Israeli Vice Prime Minister and elder statesman Shimon Peres.

Iran and Hezbollah both denied cooperation but Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad condemned Israel's military offensive in Lebanon, saying "the Zionist regime behaves like Hitler," Iranian state television reported.

The Truth Laid Bear continues aggregating war-news and blogging, as does Pajamas Media.

You also might want to check out the J Blogosphere, an aggregator of blogs by "those people."

Sorry to write so little yesterday. I just can't keep up with it, and it's all a little dispiriting. Also, there just doesn't seem to be much new. Muslims murder people, non-Muslims bomb empty buildings, killing no one at all.

Olmert keeps threatening serious consequences, but thusfar he seems to be very restrained and cautious. Perhaps wise, given the fact that Israel, despite its overhyped warmaking capability, is really a very small country that cannot survive very long were it forced into total war, at least not without huge and controversial subsidies and armaments provided by the US government. But I don't see much changing here. The Islamists have escalated into a higher gear, and will probably remain at that higher gear, now that the French and Russians and Italians and Germans and Chinese have given them their blessing to kill Jews.

Whoa, Germans on that list? What a surprise.

Posted by: Ace at 10:08 AM | Comments (9)
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Larry Johnson again claims Israel's PM Olmert has "no military experience," this time on Stetaphanopolous.

Aparently the media's favorite intelligence experts have difficulty utilizing such tools of spycraft such as Wikipedia:

Olmert served with the Israel Defense Forces in the Golani combat brigade. While in service he was injured and temporarily released. He underwent many treatments.

Posted by: Ace at 09:52 AM | Comments (7)
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The New York Times: The Switzerland of Herald Square. (Link to LGF, not the NYT.)

Although this is certainly fuel for the fire, I'm not sure what it is an unarmed photographer could have done in the presence of heavily armed terrorists. It is curious how the photographer gained the terrorists' trust.

I'm pretty sure he's the sort they know won't go telling the US military anything that could keep our soldiers safe.

Posted by: Ace at 10:42 PM | Comments (43)
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Funniest episode ever last night. The "mystery" was lame even by Monk's Encyclopedia Brown standards, but Good Lord A-mighty, it was funny.

They didn't even slow down the show, as they so frequently do, with one of those unwatchable two-minute "comedy bits" of Monk rearranging crap. Those weren't really funny the first dozen times, and now they just grate. We get it-- he's obsessive. Move on, guys.

But man... last night had me laughing out loud.

If you don't watch the show, look for a repeat on USA. Just as a teaser: Monk, obsessively neat and with a huge pile of phobias about garbage and germs, is going a little crazy due to a garbage strike. He becomes pretty unhinged, and ultimately "solves" the mystery of a union boss' death by postulating that a random celebrity is responsible. The celebrity shows up in a cameo to illustrate Monk's absurd theory.

May not sound funny, but if I say more I'll spoil it.

Posted by: Ace at 10:11 AM | Comments (38)
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