VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: “So what passes for international Western morality these days? Not much.”

It has never been much more than a cloak for America-bashing.

THE LATEST Blawg Review is up!

PAUL BOUTIN: “A week ago, I went for a spin in the fastest, most fun car I’ve ever ridden in—and that includes the Aston Martin I tried to buy once. I was so excited, in fact, that I decided to take a few days to calm down before writing about it. Well, my waiting period is over, I’m thinking rationally, and I’m still unbelievably stoked about the Tesla.”

A VIDEO CARNIVAL? Reader Daren Heidgerken emails:

You have done a number of digital camera “carnivals”, how about one on video cameras? I have a new baby and would like to get a simple, decent quality one to send movies to the grandparents.

Any thoughts on that? I’m not really up on the latest there, but I don’t have to be, if my readers are! As I noted in this post, James Lileks has, and likes, the new Sony compact HD video camera — and if I were taking baby videos I’d definitely want to do it in HD, since regular video will be looking old and crappy within a couple of years as HD becomes the norm. (I think there’s a somewhat newer model than the one Lileks has, too.)

If you’ve got any advice, put “video carnival” in the subject line.

DON’T COUNT PAPER OUT YET: I’ve written before on the virtues of paper as an information-storage system, but here’s something that sounds really cool:

Files such as text, images, sounds and video clips are encoded in “rainbow format” as coloured circles, triangles, squares and so on, and printed as dense graphics on paper at a density of 2.7GB per square inch. The paper can then be read through a specially developed scanner and the contents decoded into their original digital format and viewed or played. The encoding and decoding processes have not been revealed.

Using this technology an A4 sheet of paper could store 256GB of data. In comparison, a DVD can store 4.7GB of data.

Paper: The information storage technology of the future! Er, as long as all of this doesn’t turn out to be some kind of scam, anyway.

IS THIS A TREND? Another town passes looks at an ordinance calling for all citizens to own guns.

MICHAEL BARONE:

I’ve just finished reading Robert Gates’s memoir, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War. It’s a well-written, thoughtful book, leavened by occasional injections of nerdy humor. Gates was a career CIA employee on the analysis rather than the operations side of the agency, and the only CIA analyst ever to become director of Central Intelligence. He specialized in the Soviet Union, though he never set foot in the U.S.S.R. until May 1989. His rapid ascent was amazing. . . .

The picture I get of Robert Gates from his book is that of a careful analyst, one who sees American foreign policy as generally and rightly characterized by continuity but one who sees the need for bold changes in response to rapid changes in the world–and doesn’t look for answers from the government bureaucracies. He is very much aware that we have dangerous enemies in the world, and he was willing over many years to confront them and try to check their advance.

Follow the link for much more.

UPDATE: Related thoughts from Pejman Yousefzadeh. “Iraq will be the biggest front-page challenge for Robert Gates as he prepares to assume his new responsibilities. But military transformation is a tremendously consequential issue that should receive more attention in light of Secretary-designate Gates’s appointment than it currently does.”

A LOOK AT the politically divided academy.

IT’S OBVIOUSLY UNSUSTAINABLE AS A NATION, AND THE ONLY SOLUTION IS PARTITION: Iraq? No, it’s the U.K.: “A clear majority of people in both England and Scotland are in favour of full independence for Scotland, an ICM opinion poll for The Sunday Telegraph has found. Independence is backed by 52 per cent of Scots while an astonishing 59 per cent of English voters want Scotland to go it alone. There is also further evidence of rising English nationalism with support for the establishment of an English parliament hitting an historic high of 68 per cent amongst English voters. Almost half – 48 per cent – also want complete independence for England, divorcing itself from Wales and Northern Ireland as well.”