Chapomatic

It’s been a bit of a difficult week. But I did take some time to look at this Internet thingy a couple of times. On the “series of tubes” I found some of the following:

1. An interview with HuffPo’s Greg Gutfeld, professional bear baiter.
2. Der Spiegel’s op-ed from a former Israeli peace activist, now with a different opinion.
   

   The result is confusion: I go to sleep at night thinking I am a dove and wake up in the morning to find out I am a hawk.

3. Smash gets all activist again, dealing with a disgrace to the uniform.
4. Lexicons abound, and they’re all good. Tim Blair has his, channeling Ambrose Bierce; Victor Hanson has a different one, with a more academic-sounding version of what Mark Steyn did back in the day.
5. I think I got this from BoingBoing: a Russian Livejournal page with a guy’s visit to a Russian submarine base, an underground tunnel complex (balaklavskeye, boomers) converted to museum abandoned and looted. You can load the link into the Fish to get a translation. Here’s one shot of the inside from Russo’s site, proving that it will take a rather large weapon to destroy something in here:

6. Ralph Peters on Israel and Hezbollah. Here, an observation on Hezb:
   

   Now we see Arabs fighting tenaciously and effectively. What happened?

   The answer’s straightforward: Different cultures fight for different things. Arabs might jump up and down, wailing, “We will die for you Saddam!” But, in the clinch, they don’t – they surrender. Conventional Arab armies fight badly because their conscripts and even the officers feel little loyalty to the states they serve – and even less to self-anointed national leaders.

   But Arabs will fight to the bitter end for their religion, their families and the land their clan possesses. In southern Lebanon, Hezbollah exploits all three motivations. The Hezbollah guerrilla waiting to ambush an Israeli patrol believes he’s fighting for his faith, his family and the earth beneath his feet. He’ll kill anyone and give his own life to win.

   We all need to stop making cartoon figures of such enemies. Hezbollah doesn’t have tanks or jets, but it poses the toughest military problem Israel’s ever faced. And Hezbollah may be the new model for Middle Eastern “armies.”

   The IDF’s errors played into Hezbollah’s hands. Initially relying on air power, the IDF ignored the basic military principles of surprise, mass and concentration of effort. Instead of aiming a shocking, concentrated blow at Hezbollah, the IDF dissipated its power by striking targets scattered throughout Lebanon – while failing to strike any of them decisively.

   Even now, in the struggle for a handful of border villages, the IDF continues to commit its forces piecemeal – a lieutenant’s mistake. Adding troops in increments allows the enemy to adjust to the increasing pressure – instead of being crushed by one mighty blow.

7. Says Mr. Hawk to a person who needs a little more grace in her life than she currently has. There are people in this world who are just not nice (h/t Allah):

You do not intimidate me Jill Greenberg. You are IN MY OPINION a morally bankrupt individual who has no problem manipulating children (interesting how your website is called The Manipulator) and trying to intimidate others from expressing their opinion and excersising their constitutional right to free speech.

8. If you’ve been watching any of the several inside baseball games going on in the blogosphere, here’s a grand slam (Patterico and cast of thousands vs. Greenwald) which will make no sense whatsoever unless you’ve been rubbernecking this particular trainwreck for a while. Must have been a fast train that hit, because there are cars everywhere…
9. oh man. Somebody has a Japanese TV blog. Makes me almost want to break out the old Japanarama DVDs. How much more weird could Japanese TV be? None. None more weird.
10. Finally, John of Argghhh! has changed his castle from Argghhh! to FIELD DAY! See what spectacular shenanigans he’s up to, as he takes a grand old lady home in style after her seagoing service with the Mexicans.
    

    I’ll have to tell you about my romantic walk along the beach with a Mexican Admiral…