THE GOOD NEWS FROM AFGHANISTAN. Arthur Chrenkoff presents Part 15 in a series.

HITCHENS ON IRAQ:

How can so many people watch this as if they were spectators, handicapping and rating the successes and failures from some imagined position of neutrality? Do they suppose that a defeat in Iraq would be a defeat only for the Bush administration?

A HAPPY LANDING. The shuttle astronauts have returned safely.

JOHN TIERNEY ON METH: Drug opponents say “drugs destroy one’s moral sense,” but if you really believe in individual moral responsibility, you should let people make their own decisions about drugs.

HI TO DAN SAVAGE, parallel guest-blogger, over there on Andrew Sullivan. He posted up a storm yesterday, putting in quite an effort, even though it’s just the depth of August, the quietest time of the year. (Saying that, however, makes me want to pause and wish the astronauts well. Irish Trojan is simulblogging the landing.) I’ve loved Savage’s advice column for years and even went to a reading he did on one of his book tours. He drew a huge crowd here in Madison, Wisconsin. So, good luck to The Savage Sullivan. Over on my home blog, my commenters are trying to come up with a name for me to use during my Instapundit stint. One writes:

I have a better nickname than AnnPundit or ALTernaPundit (magic though those are).

How about…

Glenn or Glenda?

Sorry, I’m not going to link back to my own blog. It seems gauche. And I don’t want to set these characters off.

GUEST-BLOGGER LINKS GUEST-BLOGGER: Gay sex advice columnist Dan Savage is guest-blogging for Andrew Sullivan this week. He says he’s “the only professional sex advice columnist in the United States, if not the world, to come out in favor of the invasion of Iraq.” That has to be right.

GATEWAY PUNDIT reports more bad news from Beslan, Russia.

“ARLEN SPECTER SOUNDS EXACTLY LIKE CHUCK SCHUMER,” said Chuck Schumer.

SEGREGATION IN LIBERAL DRAG: Johann Hari says British multiculturalism amounts to segregation. The solution, he says, isn’t a return to Britain’s monocultural past. The solution, instead, lies in the glorious mixing of races.

THE MYSTERY OF THE PIANO MAN CONTINUES, perhaps forever.

DON’T YOU LOVE TO HATE PAULIE G on the great HBO comedy “The Comeback”? I do! Here‘s a big article about Lance Barber, the actor whose smirking hostility enrages us into helpless laughter.

“FOR LESS THAN I PAY A BABYSITTER, I could have had someone write my article,” writes lawprof Christine Hurt.

YOU CAN’T TAKE THE SKY FROM ME: Sara T. Hinson sees libertarianism at the heart of Joss Whedon’s fantastic and wrongly cancelled Firefly series. I wrote my own non-political review of Firefly – which will continue on the big screen as Serenity this September – here.

(Hat tip: fellow fan Julian Sanchez at Hit and Run.)

THE WARNING OF A CIVIL WAR: Britain’s MI5 intelligence chiefs are warning Tony Blair that Britain may face an Islamist insurgency – in Britain. Seems a bit overstated to me, but then I’m not an intelligence chief.

A CURIOUS OMISSION: A Lebanese blogger wonders why there is no jihad against China.

IT WAS FIFTEEN YEARS AGO TODAY, Trey Jackson reminds us.

LOTS OF TRIVIA ABOUT POLITICS IN THE MOVIES at Cinemocracy.

RED FASCISTS AND BLACK FASCISTS: Neo-Neocon posted a unique analysis of the perverse symbiotic relationship between certain kinds of far-leftists and certain kinds of far-rightists.

“THE MOST DISHONEST, UNGODLY, UNSPIRITUAL NATION that has ever existed in the history of the planet.” That’s how Dick Gregory described the United States at an event commemorating the 40th anniversary of the signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (a statute passed by said ungodly nation). La Shawn Barber provides the link to the news report and expresses her sadness at the decline of Harry Belafonte.

FELLOW CENTRIST MICHAEL LIND has some advice for the Democratic Party over at TPM Café. He thinks that if they want to be the majority party again they will need to become economically liberal and socially conservative:

Social liberals can be the minority in a majority party. Or social liberals can be the majority in a minority party. But social liberals can’t be the majority in a majority party–not in the United States, not in the foreseeable future. There just aren’t enough social liberals in the American electorate.

His argument is worth reading as an intellectual exercise, but his advice isn’t practical. Social liberals are temperamentally incapable of tactically morphing into social conservatives. As Rick Heller notes over at Centerfield, social liberalism is the core value of the Democratic Party right now.

Social liberals should be temperamentally capable of morphing into defense hawks, however. That’s exactly what they did in the mid-to-late 1990s. Then it was the Democrats, not the Republicans, who agitated for war against Slobo’s regime in Belgrade for the crushing of Bosnia and Kosovo. Trent Lott and Tom DeLay were the ones who sounded like 1960s leftovers. Reflexive anti-war sentiment among Democrats isn’t as deeply ingrained as it appears.

As far as I’m concerned, social liberalism is the best thing the Democratic Party has going for it. They should keep that and drop the pacifism and isolationism instead. They’ll get a lot more votes next time around if they do. Plenty of socially liberal people voted for George W. Bush on national security grounds. Some of us would go home again if we could.

UPDATE: Jesse Walker at Hit and Run responds.

Just last year the warbloggers were warning that Kerry would submit America’s foreign policy to a nefarious “global test.” The man and his party were damned for their excessive faith in the United Nations, multilateralism, and the power of the well-crafted treaty. And now they’re supposed to be isolationists?

Jesse is quite right that Kerry wasn’t an isolationist. Although I should add that Kerry did get an enthusiastic response when he complained that we are closing down firehouses in the United States while opening them up in Baghdad. That sounded to me like something Pat Buchanan would say and something Rush Limbaugh would have said had a Democrat been president. Still, I wasn’t thinking of Kerry when I wrote this, and I should have taken him into account. He did win the Democratic primary, after all.

I wrote “isolationism” instead of “excessive multilateralism” because I’ve been hearing more complaints of that variety lately — especially since the London attacks on 7/7. Bush and Blair are supposedly making the problem of terrorism against Westerners worse because we have boots on the ground in Iraq in the first place, not because the U.N. didn’t come with us. The multilateralist argument seems to have receded into the background.

THE PROBLEM OF HATING SPEECH Kevin Drum sums up the problem of hate speech laws: “I’m not convinced that content-based speech restrictions can be defined in a broad enough way to make them workable but a narrow enough way to keep them from being dangerous.”

In the case of Britain and its terrorism promoters, I’m somewhat ambivalent. I’m certainly against deporting citizens of the US for advocating terrorism (though I have no problem with stripping citizenship from dual-nationality American citizens who have clearly indicated their allegiance to a foriegn power; until the 1960’s, you couldn’t have dual citizenship in America, and I’m not so sure that was a bad thing). But what about immigrants? All but the very hardest-core open borders folks would allow that we, the current citizens of the United States, have a right to some say over who gets to come join us in our reindeer games. And advocating the killing of our civilians would seem to be a slam dunk disqualifier.

As I understand it, a major reason that Britain has heretofore not shipped its firebreathing troublemakers abroad long before is that they are signatories to the EU’s declaration of human rights, which forbids them from deporting anyone to a country where they will be killed or abused. Sidestepping the thorny debate about whether a country should hold itself morally obligated to support refugees because of the bad behaviour of another state (many refugees end up in Europe’s generous welfare systems), it seems hard to argue that you have a moral obligation to worry more about the impending mortality of people who are encouraging terrorist attacks than about the well-being of the citizenry they are attempting to decimate.

I suspect that if terrorist attacks continue, Muslim immigration to Europe and America will be slowed to a trickle, or even reversed in the European states where decades of guest-worker imports have combined with stringent citizenship requirements to produce a hereditary alien class. This may, of course, be what Al Qaeda wants; the fewer Muslims have intercourse with the West, the easier it will be to stir up hatred against us.

Update Eugene Volokh has more. His post points out that the above usage of “immigrants” is incorrect, since what I mean is “non-citizens”. Naturalised citizens should, and do, have the same rights as born-and-bred ones, with a few limited exceptions.

DOES “ASSORTATIVE MATING” CAUSE AUTISM? Simon Baron-Cohen theorizes that the condition may result from the mating of two “Type S”-brained individuals.

THE PERILS OF PERSNICKETY PASSWORDS I just reserved a campsite for Labor Day at Reserve America, which has taken password requirements to new heights: eight characters, instead of the standard six, with a requirement that two of those characters be numbers. This for a website that allows you to reserve campsites in state parks.

Before I was a journalist, I used to design and build networks for financial firms, and I was a conscientious objector in the password arms race. Many companies require long passwords, number/letter combinations, frequent password changes, unique passwords (you can’t ever re-use old passwords), and so forth because these are harder to crack. The problem is, they’re also harder to remember. Users who can’t reemember their passwords have to write them down. It is, to my mind, substantially less safe to have a user’s password written on their computer, or taped in their desk (two favourite tricks I spent a great deal of time discouraging), than to have it be a five-letter word. Good security should worry at least as much about internal users gaining unauthorised access (to view confidential data or cover up illicit activity by confusing the audit trail with another user’s account) as they should be about hackers who, frankly, generally aren’t all that interested in breaking into the assistant payroll clerk’s computer. What they want is administrator access, and if your tech employees can’t be trusted to devise secure passwords without the computer forcing them on everyone else in the company, well, then, you should fire your network staff and hire someone competent.

The technology world is full of these sorts of things: ideas which, in theory, make everything wonderfully secure, but which make things much less secure when implemented with plain old human beings, instead of the flawless automata that so many security theorists seem to imagine. If you’re interested in how to actually make security good, check out Bruce Schneier’s site.

Update A professional takes the opposite view.

CHOCK FULL OF MONEY-GRUBBING GOODNESS The new Carnival of the Capitalists is up.

IF YOU SMOKE AND DIE OF CANCER, every obituary will take advantage of your death as an opportunity to remind the living to quit smoking.