Random Acts of Blogging

1. Haifa Wehbe's bringing sexy back. Bahrain doesn't know how to act. But there is good news.

Ms Wehbe's reputation for revealing clothes and sexy performances have not endeared her to Bahrain's Islamist-dominated parliament.

But she did well in a list of the most desirable women compiled by the website, AskMen.com, and she has featured in People Magazine's most beautiful list.

2. Thank you, Phil Klein, for drawing my attention to the prose stylings of Indiana Congressional candidate Tony Zirkle, who vows:

Let's save our Jewish brothers and sisters from this tyrant king porn dragon before we get to another world-wide pogrom after a war with Iran or some other conflict and after the Jews get blamed again.

The best that will ever come of this is a new name for the band that reassembles in twenty years from ex-members of Monster Magnet.

3. Georgian-Russian relations continue their slide from bad to worse. "We won't let you join the WTO." "We won't let you exercise sovereignty over your internationally recognized territory." It's possible that all this can be blamed on Kosovo, but, more likely, it can be blamed on Russia, which has all the initiative here. From what I understand if Russia wanted to conquer Georgia on Saturday it could do so tomorrow. The real question is what anyone would do about it. Not that Russia would ever make so boneheaded a move, but it helps in the audacity department to know what one could get away with in a pinch. Whereas Georgia still has some hard thinking to do about the best way to secure itself a long and prosperous future. The answer is the EU, not NATO. This should make America happy, but for a variety of passable-to-terrible reasons, it won't.

4. The awesome George Washington University National Security Archive keeps turning out more gems -- like the Air Force's comfort level with the, uh, "dropping of the deadlier ordnance," as Ike put it.

The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Air Force Gen. Duke Nukem Nathan F. Twining, had explained at a Cabinet meeting that U.S. planes would drop 10-to-15 kiloton nuclear bombs in the vicinity of Amoy, a coastal city on the Taiwan strait now called Xiamen.

The idea was that the Chinese would have to lift their blockade. Otherwise the United States would proceed to attack Chinese airfields.

But Eisenhower ruled out the initial use of nuclear weapons, concluding the fallout would cause civilian casualties in China and on Taiwan, risking nuclear escalation.

The Pacific Air Force commander, Gen. Lawrence S. Kuter, whose operations plan had assumed the United States would carry out nuclear strikes as necessary to defeat attacking Chinese communists, characterized the idea of a "limited response" as disastrous.

The bomb did its awful work in Japan because Japan is small, but nothing could be more Maoist than considering 200 million an acceptable cushion of incinerated lives. So it's still nice to see that Eisenhower  still prevailed. A feather in Ross's cap, then.

5. RIP Charles Tilly. My connection to Prof. Tilly is nil, and my reading of his work isn't (yet) what it should be, so allow me to refer you to Profs. Dan Nexon and Mary Dudziak (two of my best professors).