OLIVER KAMM: “Ever since the parties of the Second International split over the First World War, national security has divided left-wing opinion as no other issue.” (Via Comment is Free).

THE CARNIVAL OF CARS IS UP! Also check out the Carnival of the Vanities, the History Carnival, and the Carnival of the Liberals.

Lots more carnivals over at BlogCarnival.com.

A SEA CHANGE in the blogosphere.

ANDREW KEEN REVIEWS AN ARMY OF DAVIDS in The Weekly Standard.

He seems to think that I’m some sort of hippie. That’s me!

UPDATE: Joel Miller emails:

This is my favorite line:

“Perhaps the future will be like the 1970s, with the self once more supremely ascendant. In this digitalized idyll, wi-fi will replace marijuana and the ashram will be transformed into the always-on Internet café.”

Glenn, you’re like the gooiest guru I know, man. What’s the sound of one modem connecting?

Om modem padme hum.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Robert Racansky emails: “Shouldn’t that be ‘GUIest guru?'” Heh.

Hippie-talk aside, I’m actually a bit bemused by people who see the book as utopian or pollyannaish. After all, I talk about the substantial danger of human extinction within the next thousand years (and argue that Stephen Hawking’s thousand-year horizon is too optimistic). I guess compared to Al Gore or Paul Ehrlich or other dystopian writers, I seem that way, since I’m not shouting that the end is nigh, but still . . . My point, rather, is that the changes I describe are coming whether you like them or not, and that we’d better find a way to help them turn out well.

As for Keen’s complaint that I fail to address the “crucial” question of “whether or not man is inherently good” — well, that question could support a book, or a thousand books, on its own. And has. While I agree that it’s an important (if, perhaps, difficult to resolve) topic, it seemed like something of a digression in the context of my own work. At any rate, Keen just seems to dislike the notion of indivdual empowerment — which he has elsewhere called “Socrates’ nightmare” — and on that point we simply disagree.

MORE: Well, not everyone thinks I’m a utopian: “Reynolds doesn’t hold a utopian view of technology and the market in which the future holds only unbridled health and wealth if we would just embrace it. But neither does he give in to a pessimistic view that foresees a dystopian future full of tyranny and oppression where technological might makes right.”

Of course, given the tone of most futurist writing these days, simply not being dystopian may make me seem pollyannaish by comparison.

STILL MORE: Another review from Jay Manifold. And here’s one from Peter Ingemi.

JAMES KLURFELD says that Iran is looking like Iraq these days. As the reader who sent the link notes, “well, duh.” And we’ve just seen that U.S. and Iraqi forces can work well together in large, helicopter-borne assault operations, too. Hmm.

ANN ALTHOUSE on gay marriage and polygamy.

UPDATE: Eugene Volokh responds: “I generally much like Prof. Althouse’s work, but here I’m unpersuaded.”

A WHILE BACK, I mentioned I was reading Vernor Vinge’s forthcoming novel, Rainbows End. Several readers have emailed demanding a review, so here goes.

I finished it, and it’s very good. It’s absolutely an Army of Davids world in 2025, according to Vinge, and he does an excellent job of painting the up- and down-sides of that.

Beyond that, it’s quite a good novel. I don’t want to give too much away, but it doesn’t have quite the sweep of such earlier Vinge works as A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, and it’s not, as I had initially thought, a sequel to those books. It’s more of a Neal Stephenson or Greg Egan near-future science fiction novel, with a (somewhat) smaller scope and scale. But it’s very good, and every bit as enjoyable as his other work. I highly recommend it: Vinge fans won’t be disappointed, and people who have never read Vinge may find it a bit more accessible than some of his earlier works.

ANOTHER AOD review, this one by Sam Dinkin. He thinks I’m too pessimistic about the future.

UPDATE: Here’s another review from Trudy Schuett.

IN THE MAIL: Ed Feulner and Doug Wilson’s new book, Getting America Right : The True Conservative Values Our Nation Needs Today. Not being a conservative, I don’t buy all of this, but the need for Republicans to revitalize themselves — and, in particular, to get out from under the big-government, pork-barrel spending style they’ve embraced in recent years — is pretty obvious.

CLIFF MAY ON WAR AND STRATEGY:

It is disappointing that the CIA didn’t accurately appraise Saddam’s capabilities. But even Saddam’s generals were shocked to find that no VX nerve gas would be available to them.

We also know that Saddam intended to restock his arsenals. And we know he supported and trained terrorists, at such facilities as Salman Pak — now closed for business thanks to U.S. military forces.

It’s easy to say that if we had left Saddam alone, nothing bad would have happened. But how is that different from what was said for years about Osama bin Laden? We knew his intentions. We didn’t take pre-emptive action. Don’t you wish we had?

If Americans have learned anything, it should be this: When people say they intend to kill you, take them seriously.

Yes, the more damaging critique of Bush is that he hasn’t pressed the war hard enough — against Iran, Syria, and the terrorist supporters in Saudi Arabia — not that he should have done less.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY:

The government is finally getting around to unloading some of Saddam Hussein’s secret documents. A look at just a few pages already leads to some blockbuster revelations.

In the early stages of the war that began three years ago, the U.S. captured thousands of documents from Saddam and his spy agency, the Mukhabarat. It’s been widely thought the documents could shed light on why Saddam behaved as he did and how much of a threat his evil regime represented.

Yet, until this week, the documents lay molding in boxes in a government warehouse. Now the first batch is out, and though few in number, they’re loaded with information.

Among the enduring myths of those who oppose the war is that Saddam, though murderous when it came to his own people, had no weapons of mass destruction and no terrorist designs outside his own country. Both claims now lie in tatters.

It’s funny that these documents are getting so little attention from the press.

BLOGGER INDEPENDENCE: Daniel Glover reports that some Republicans were disappointed when bloggers at an event showed too much independence. They’re not “lapblogs.”

PRAISE FOR THE BBC: Thanks to XM, I’ve been listening to the BBC World Service when I take my daughter to school in the morning. It’s just an impression, but my sense is that the BBC’s anti-Americanism and war-negativism has been considerably muted in recent weeks. I’ve also noticed a greater willingness to listen to alternative voices such as blogs, etc. Perhaps they’re improving.

WELL, MY DAY IS MADE ALREADY:

WHAT LED TO THE DOCUMENT RELEASE? Here’s at least part of the story.

MICHAEL BARONE has thoughts on information warfare.

MARK STEYN tells all:

I’ve been the token conservative on liberal newspapers. I don’t mind an adversarial relationship in terms of your position on the Gulf War, or Afghanistan, or the European Union or whatever. I don’t mind having differences with editors and so forth on that. But when it gets into, when the whole relationship just becomes generally toxic, then I think it’s best to hang out your shingle somewhere else, which I will do in the United Kingdom at some point.

Read the whole thing.

CATHY YOUNG HAS THOUGHTS on men’s reproductive freedom.

MORE ON THE WAL-MART / BLOGGER / PR STORY. (Via Jeff Jarvis).

I’ll just add what Cathy Seipp said after a similar experience: “When journalists go from keeping secrets about sources to expecting sources to keep secrets about them, something in the media has begun to stink with self-importance.” Actually, I think a lot of it has to do with an obvious agenda and poor people skills. These are not assets in journalism, though they’re not unknown there, either.

IMAO OFFERS a baby seal-killing FAQ. It displays the compassion and factual accuracy that has always been the IMAO hallmark.

AN ARMY OF TRANSLATORS is called for!

UPDATE: More here from Rand Simberg, including this:

I don’t understand why the administration hasn’t been working harder to get these documents analyzed and public. Also, this treasure trove just makes the actions of the government in firing Arab language experts for being gay look all the more stupid. We need all the translators that we can get right now.

Indeed.

STOLEN BLOG ALERT: Betsy Newmark emails:

Dear Glenn,

I’m writing you because you seem to have a finger on the pulse of the blogger world and maybe know some way to help me or at least to get the word out so that maybe Blogger will help me.

My blog disappeared from Blogger some time Tuesday. All I ge is a message that my blog wasn’t found on their server. When I go to my Edit page, it doesn’t show Betsy’s Page as one of my blogs anymore. It’s as if my identity was erased.

I just get this very irritating message
“The blog you were looking for was not found.” It doesn’t show up on my dashboard at all.

Now, somebody has started a blog using my address and hijacked it. This is not me, but it is my URL. How despicable is that?

http://betsyspage.blogspot.com/

I have been writing Blogger for the past two days and all I get are the irritating auto-generated messages. What does it take to get a personal contact from those guys?

They put up those deceptive notes on their Status Page saying that they are doing maintenance on the server and now everything is fixed. http://status.blogger.com/

IT IS NOT FIXED. They are either deceived or are deceiving people. Viking Pundit and DJ Drummond of Stolen Thunder and Polipundit have experienced the same thing, though DJ was somehow able to get his back.

It wouldn’t be so bad if an actual human being wrote me and told me what was going on and that they were working on it and when I could expect it to be fixed and what I could do if it is not fixed at that point. But they don’t do that. And so people will get angry and leave Blogger and go to some other format for their blogs. And their customer service will be the reason.

I was wondering if you could put up a post telling people of my story and see if anyone has any recommendations of how to get my blog back. I hope to be back as soon as possible at either my old address or at a new address. But I would like to get to the bottom of this saga of my blog.

Any ideas?

SOME INTERESTING STUFF from Saddam’s archives.

I’VE LEARNED that Cathy Seipp is not someone you want to have making fun of you.

DAVE KOPEL looks at armed resistance to the Holocaust.