Way back in his blogspot days, InstaPundit suggested exploring the "Bugs Bunny option" in fighting terrorists. But if he wanted to do someone some actual, serious harm, What Would Bugs Bunny Do?

Drop an anvil on them, of course.

Isn't that basically what this is?

But now the crews operating over Iraq from the Ali Al Salem airbase in northern Kuwait are about to go to the opposite extreme and use "inert bombs".

These are basically blocks of concrete shaped as bombs and painted blue to identify them as non-explosive if they are discovered still intact after the war...

But they will be laser-guided 1,000lb blocks of concrete, capable of destroying a tank or artillery piece, but without causing a devastating explosion that would put civilians at risk and shatter surrounding buildings.

I wonder if this is a trend, seriously: kinetic-kill weapons used against vehicles. Jerry Pournelle long ago hypothesized a "Thor" weapon, basically a precision-guided iron bar dropped from orbit. The tank-killing "sabot" round fired by the M1A1 tank is basically a titanium javelin thrown at transsonic speed. (Click the link and scroll down for a cool photo of a sabot round in flight.) With enough speed and precision -- such as the Abrams' big gun and fire control system, or precision-guidance electronics and lots of gravity -- what do you need explosives for?

It's three weeks on from the word "go", and our forces own Baghdad.

I'm curious: is anyone still upset that our political and military leaders took as long as they did, planning and preparing, marshalling their forces? Does anyone recall, much less still feel, the frustration experienced when December arrived and we still hadn't attacked, then January, then February, then March? Is anyone still saying "faster, please"?

Yes, the Iraqi regime had a little extra time in which to murder more of its citizens. But rushing the war preparations might have resulted in more deaths still. The timetable followed may very well have been the optimal one, in terms of reducing overall losses.

I'm not holding myself up as an exemplar of patience here; I was as irritated as everyone else that we waited as long as we did at the starting line. But I was wrong. Tommy Franks knew exactly what he was doing, and how to do it best.*

That may very well be our biggest strategic shortcoming as a nation: the impatience of our electorate, and the even greater impatience of our media.

*It should be especially embarrassing to those who were appalled that the invasion started shortly after the full moon. Given the quality of our forces' night-vision gear, our greatest tactical advantage is during the near-complete darkness of the new moon (which occurred most recently on April 1).

But had our forces crossed the starting line at the Iraq-Kuwait border on April 1st (or on the previous new moon), they would have wasted that valuable interval simply finding, reaching, and assessing the enemy. By the time the fight was truly joined, the moonlight would have started to return.

Instead, our military leaders did exactly the right thing: they started the invasion a fortnight before the new moon. They did what was necessary in terms of disaster prevention (securing oil fields, securing port facilities that could be used to create an oil spill); but other than that, they concentrated on moving as far and as fast as possible. This let them spread out our forces (making them less vulnerable to a WMD spoiler attack), and let them find better tactical locations from which to attack. The resistance that our forces encountered (and mostly bypassed) let our troops -- some of whom had never been in battle before -- get acclimated to what they would be facing; and also provided valuable intel on the location, strength, and tactics of the enemy.

Remember the "operational pause" after the big initial push? That gave our troops a chance to rest, recoup, assess, and do preventive maintenance on their weapons and vehicles. So when the fighting resumed, our troops were in tactically advantageous positions; both tempered by the initial fight and recovered from it; and facing an enemy whose measure had been taken, and who had been softened up by both air bombardment and psychops mindgames. And it was surely no coincidence that the operational pause ended just as the last of the moonlight went away.

After that, the Iraqi forces collapsed with stunning swiftness.

Superbly done.

Just go read it.

Today at the Pentagon press briefing, a reporter asked about Humanitarian Crisis, and Rumsfeld described at great length the humanitarian crisis that existed before the Allies got there, and how things were actually improving. It was classic Rummy; he not only refused to accept the premise of the question, he refuted it like a blacksmith working out marital frustrations on a red-hot horseshoe. You can just imagine what some of the reporters say to one another as they leave the briefing:

I say, what’s that in your hands, there? That pink thing?

Oh, this? It’s my ass. Rumsfeld handed it to me. And I see you have a nice clock there - brand new?

No, it’s quite old, but Rumsfeld cleaned it. Free of charge.

...

I’m not stupid enough to think that we’ve just created a nation of 22 million wannabe Americans. But tonight parents can look down at their children in bed and believe they will have better lives. Not just hope for it, but believe it. Some of us call that the American Dream - hold the scare quotes, please - and we pray for the day when it’s no longer an American concept but a universal birthright.

You and me both, James.

At Canada.com, Mark Steyn holds forth, with his usual wit, on the fall of Baghdad and the political stuggle that is sure to follow:

Bookending the liberation of Baghdad are two summits -- Bush and Blair in Belfast on Monday, Chirac and Schroeder and Putin in Moscow on Friday. It's nice to have the choices put so plainly: on the one hand, the Coalition of the Willing; on the other, the Coalition of the Willing To Go On Selling Saddam Nuclear Reactors In Exchange For Oil Concessions For Another Decade Or Three No Matter How Many People He Kills. The French mock the "coalition of the willing" as "les Anglo-Saxons," and if that's the best insult they can come up with I'll take it. Nothing new about this: in Eastern Europe in the Eighties, Thatcher and Reagan were the heroes, not Mitterrand and Schmidt. Liberated peoples are rarely grateful to those who found it more convenient to keep them in prison. "Anglo-Saxon" may be a sneer in France and Belgium, not in Eastern Europe.

Me culpa, guilty as charged.

It would be an overstatement to say that Tivo "changed my life" -- my life didn't revolve around TV before, and still doesn't -- But it has radically changed my viewing habits. I had basically given up on following any series regularly, partly because I resented having my arrange my schedule around the TV, or go to the trouble of programming a conventional VCR (see that "L" word at the top of the page?), and partly because my tolerance for commercials has gotten lower and lower as grown older and more crotchety. With the Tivo, I can tolerate commercial TV again, and have taken to following several series.

I'm not sure yet whether that's a good thing or not. I'd really hate to give up South Park, Futurama, Stargate SG-1, and a handful of others. But the idiot box is still the idiot box, even smartened up by Tivo; it's still a centralized mass medium. As Lileks said of newspapers, it's a lecture rather than a conversation. Even the best of programming doesn't call on your creativity or interpersonal skills.

If I had to choose between giving up Tivo and giving up the web, the Tivo would be gone in a heartbeat. Not even close. The Tivo is entertainment (as Den Beste recently pointed out, even the news is really entertainment); the Web is entertainment, and real news, and a reference library, and a shopping mall, and a soapbox. The web is more versatile, and one can participate rather than just passively consuming.

The web really has changed my life. Tivo just changed my leisure time.

It's time to start casting for Operation Iraqi Freedom: The Movie.

Dustin Hoffman must play Baghdad Bob. Seriously. I mean, with those glasses, he's "Tootsie" with a beret.

Any other suggestions? Send me a photo (attachment or URL) and a casting suggestion, and I'll add it to this post.

A friend sent me this link under the heading "What Natalie Maines Should Have Said". He's an old gaming buddy, and I love him like a brother, but ... well, I just couldn't let this go unchallenged.

But now, thanks to the thousands of angry people who want radio stations to boycott our music because criticizing the President is unpatriotic, I realize it's wrong to have a liberal opinion if you're a country music artist. I guess I should have thought about that before deciding to play music that attracts hypocritical red necks.

I also realize now that I'm supposed to just sing and look cute so our fans won't have anything to upset them while they're cheating on their wives or getting in drunken bar fights or driving around in their pickup trucks shooting highway signs and small animals.

I am so sick of hearing spoiled millionaire celebrities going on and on, at great length and at high volume, from podiums and front pages, concert stages and talk shows, in every medium and every venue that you can think of...

...about how they're being silenced.

We're not talking about the right to speak your mind. They obviously can still say whatever damnfool thing pops into their heads, without let or hindrance. Nor are they being deprived of a forum in which to express themselves; their opinions are still solicited by People magazine, Barbara Walters, and the usual starmaker-machine crowd -- now more than ever.

We're talking about the right to remain popular -- and to continue to make huge amounts of money based on that popularity -- after saying unpopular things. But there is no such right.

So they sell a few millions fewer CDs, and get only half as much air-time. So what? Their fans, or ex-fans, are free to take their business elsewhere, for whatever reason they see fit. Popularity is not constitutionally protected.

So they're being criticized. Again, so what? That's life in the political arena, and if the Chicks have the right to speak their minds, so do their critics. Freedom of speech is for everyone, not just celebrities.

The Dixie Chicks -- poor, downtrodden victims of repression that they are -- are still in the top tenth of a percent of the population by income. Even if their musical careers ended altogether as of now (not likely), they would still be rich beyond the dreams of avarice, able to lead the rest of their lives in astonishing luxury and privilege.

As political repression goes, that doesn't suck.

By comparison, Fidel Castro, just last week, summarily jailed nearly a hundred independent journalists and human rights activists; most were given sentences of twenty years or more.

And the penalty for criticizing a certain other head of state (recently retired) was amputation of the tongue.

And the Chicks seemed to be okay with that. They might feel bad about it, but not bad enough to think anything should be done about it. Mutilation might be sorta icky, but a fifty percent drop in record sales ... well, that's a real atrocity!

Go to hell, Natalie.

Terry Jones has another America-bashing essay in The Observer.

[Terry Jones. Where have I heard that name before?] He was a member of "Monty Python". [Right, right, now I remember. Which one was he?] The one who wasn't funny. [Oh yeah, that one.]

As Laurence Simon says, at least one of my personalities is sane. [Am not.]

Chris Regan of Junkyard Blog writes on some of the revelations coming out of Iraq from captured intelligence data. While not part of that new information, I hadn't heard this one before:

Sadly, after that Cole bombing in 2000, Ambassador Barbara Bodine scuttled the FBI investigation into al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen that was being headed up by The Man Who Knew that al-Qaeda would soon try to finish the job on the Twin Towers. His name was John O'Neill, and he was thrilled about finally having the hot leads he had been waiting for his entire career. It's very likely that, had Bodine not locked him out of Yemen, he could have stopped the second WTC attack. Instead, the brilliant visionary was finally hounded out of the FBI, and no one filled his shoes. Information like terrorists training in flight schools just got filed away. He ironically died Sept 11th, 2001 when the Twin Towers crumbled down on him. It was his first day on the job as WTC Director of Security. A true American hero, single-mindedly dedicated to fighting the bureaucracy and stopping our "second Pearl Harbor."

As Spider Robinson once said: if a burglar is someone guilty of burglary, if a glutton is someone guilty of gluttony ... then God is an iron.

Referral via InstaPundit.

The Weekly Standard unearths a very old New York Times front page. Amazing how little things have changed in that much time. Including the bylines.

My favorite bit: "Clog Dancing Troupe Retracts Disparagement of Washington -- Head Clogger Regrets 'Wood-Toothed, Slave-Owning Stiff' Slur; Group Seeks To Regain Favour By Circulating Engraving Of Selves In Nightclothes"

I love it when people try to outwit the Internet, and find themselves outwitted many times over in return. Especially when it happens to richly deserving targets, like spammers or Big Media companies.

But when Madonna gets outsmarted by the Net -- well, that just seems a little too easy. Like Dogbert said, it's like sand-blasting a soup cracker. Still, the tunes are pretty cool, even if the lyrics are a little repetitive.

Link via blogdex.

Glenn Reynolds, who aside from being a blogger, law professor, and bon vivant, is a part-time music producer, writes about "pitch correction", which "cleans up" off-key notes in vocal performances, and quantization, which does the same with the beat. (He links to a related story about a producer, R.S. Field, who has labeled his latest production as "pitch-shifting free".)

I have nothing to say about the rights or wrongs of electronically scrubbing audio, and of labeling it or not when you do. I'm no musician, and I'm frustratingly ignorant about audio technology.

Yet I have to wonder: has anyone ever tried applying pitch-shifting and quantization really aggressively to natural sounds? For instance, recording a flock of loud, chirpy birds, and then coercing their song into D Minor? Recording rainfall, and forcing the drops into 4/4 time? It might be interesting. It might not. But has anyone ever even tried it?