A lot of debate has been going on about Afghanistan. With the Taliban digging in, the Pakistanis pushing hard and new questions about troop increases, everyone’s wondering what to do with the war we swept under the carpet.

My advice is what it always has been: Learn from the greatest - Alexander the Great.

Alexander would bastardize a modern saying, “Go big or go home.” The way to win in Afghanistan, following in his bloody sandal prints, is to Go Big, Then Go Home.

Afghanistan will never embrace “enlightenment” by Western values. They will embrace our cash. But touch their burkhas, child prostitutes and opium without properly buying them all off, and look out. The best we can hope for is getting a pack of honor-killing, clannish mercenaries on our side.

That has not changed since Alexander’s time. Neither has the threat Afghanistan poses. Turn your back on those bandits at your peril.

So the thing to do now, is to link hands with Pakistan in hitting them as hard as you can. Don’t cut corners - take a page from the famed “Surge” and give the combat commanders at least somewhere near the amount of shooters they want. Then give the Talibs, foreign fighters and local gunslingers a chance to cut terms.

It’s the only way to safe face and keep the coin flowing. Anything less, and you risk Kabul becoming gory sequel to Saigon. But for the sake of American fighting power and Afghani civilians everywhere, make sure you plan on going home after you go big.

I conducted an interview with Jocelin Donahue, an Imperialist-era history scholar who just happens to be an Indy film star, lately lighting up the brooding frames of Ti West’s The House of the Devil.

Check it out here at the one, only, absolutely awesome Pretty-Scary, site of women in horror, by women in horror.

Jocelin Donahue is a thoughtful actress. Thoughtful films would be her genre: The former NYU Sociology-History undergrad has starred in period pieces like The Burrowers, a horror-western that was as much about settling the wilderness of the West as about what beasts lurk beneath that harsh terrain. She has been in abstracted short films like The Masquerade and Express 831. Sitting with me in a room at the Four Seasons, draped in the catalog-sharp attire that befits her past career as a model, Jocelin tells me she is drawn to acting because she is fascinated by the formation of identity.

Stem cell research finally pays off big:

Scientists have developed breast implants grown from the client directly. The key is stem cell research, which serves to make the implants stable.

Successful trials have already been carried out in Japan producing breasts that look and feel smoother than those from conventional cosmetic surgery using implants. Apparently using stem cell technology means that the fat grows its own blood supply and becomes part of the breast.

Why am I entirely unsurprised that the Japanese developed this first?

Can’t wait to see what the folks who brought you used-school-girl-panties vending machines will do with stem cells next.

Holy O.M.G., Batman!

It looks like teens were sending naughty pix and messages to each other!  This kind of aggression against the near-certainty that they’d reach the Age of Majority absolutely innocent of carnal knowledge cannot stand.

Fortunately, cops were quick to act, and will likely bring child porn charges against the offending teens.

Ruining their lives with a jail sentence and lifelong sex offender tag - now that’ll teach those teens to do adult stuff!

I am back in the online word circuit. This blog will be used as billboard for what I’m up to. Political opinions may still soil the screen. If so, my apologies in advance. I will not be kind. The time for kindness ended when the greatest economic crisis of our age was answered by a pissing contest from all directions.

So what am I do? I take a page from our “Elected Representatives” and I, who cannot do, criticize.

I wrote this recent review of Jennifer’s Body, for my friend Heidi Martinuzzi’s take-no-prisoners, women-in-horror site, the incomparable “Pretty-Scary”:

I also reviewed the straight-to-video Infestation, one of the better survival horror comedies I’ve seen in awhile. Check it out on Pretty-Scary.

As for other projects … I’m certain to go back to politics eventually. For now, my analysis can be summed up neatly.

My future is less about macro-level misery: Watch this space for serial murder.