THE MANOLO IS PROFILED over at the Pajamas Media site.

There are lots of other profiles, too, including Pamela of Atlas Shrugged and Jeff Goldstein of Protein Wisdom. Just go here and keep scrolling!

SO MY FORTHCOMING BOOK IS ALREADY UP ON AMAZON, but did I find this out from the publisher? Nope. I found it out first from reading a blog.

Which is just more evidence in support of my thesis!

And so is the fact that the Indian Institute of Planning and Management, thanks to its efforts to suppress blog-criticism, remains at the top of the Technorati listings day after day . . . . Background here.

UPDATE: Reader Bob Schneider emails: “I think you’re being unfair to your publisher. Amazon posts new books in advance of their publication. It’s difficult for a publisher to keep track of just when a book will be posted.”

I wasn’t picking on the publisher — this is just a case of one computer talking to another, actually. I just thought it was funny that I got this from a blog first. I suspect that they were waiting to tell me about it until the cover graphic went up.

UPDATE: Up to #905 #814 on Amazon at the moment. Not bad for a book that doesn’t have cover art yet!

WALID PHARES has thoughts on the Iraqi vote.

LAWBLOGARAMA: This week’s Blawg Review, the law blog carnival, is up. And check out BlackProf.com, a black lawprofs blog.

JOHN SCALZI HAS A NEW BOOK OUT: It’s called The Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies.

RAY KURZWEIL AND BILL JOY AGREE that publishing the 1918 Spanish Flu genome was a very bad idea:

To shed light on how the virus evolved, the United States Department of Health and Human Services published the full genome of the 1918 influenza virus on the Internet in the GenBank database.

This is extremely foolish. The genome is essentially the design of a weapon of mass destruction. No responsible scientist would advocate publishing precise designs for an atomic bomb, and in two ways revealing the sequence for the flu virus is even more dangerous.

On the upside, those who complain that this Administration is too concerned with secrecy in the name of Homeland Security are proven wrong! Here’s their big point, though, with which I am in complete agreement:

We also need a new Manhattan Project to develop specific defenses against new biological viral threats, natural or human made. There are promising new technologies, like RNA interference, that could be harnessed. We need to put more stones on the defensive side of the scale.

We realize that calling for this genome to be “un-published” is a bit like trying to gather the horses back into the barn. Perhaps we will be lucky this time, and we will indeed succeed in developing defenses for these killer flu viruses before they are needed. We should, however, treat the genetic sequences of pathological biological viruses with no less care than designs for nuclear weapons.

This is one of those areas where you only have to screw up once to have terrible consequences.

MORE CRITICISM OF THE MIERS NOMINATION, from John Fund:

There are philosophical reasons for Republican senators to oppose Ms. Miers. In 1987, the liberal onslaught on Robert Bork dramatically changed the confirmation process. The verb to bork, meaning to savage a nominee and distort his record, entered the vocabulary, and many liberals now acknowledge that the anti-Bork campaign had bad consequences. It led to more stealth nominees, with presidents hoping their scant paper trail would shield them from attack.

President Bush has now gone further in internalizing the lessons of the Bork debacle. Harriet Miers is a “superstealth” nominee–a close friend of the president with no available paper trail who keeps her cards so close to her chest they might as well be plastered on it. If Ms. Miers is confirmed, it will reinforce the popular belief that the Supreme Court is more about political outcomes than the rule of law.

Read the whole thing. Also, Ramesh Ponnuru looks at the fault lines that the nomination has exposed.