Yes, I, the amateur who knows less about guns than some of these guys do while they’re snoring heavily, am being allowed to host the Carnival of Cordite this week. Maybe I’ll start off by taking a picture of my *vast* firearms collection, mwahahaha.

In case you’re not familiar with it, the Carnival of Cordite is a weekly carnival devoted to guns, shooting, and the Second Amendment (and the issues that come with it, from women’s self-defense through specific-bill-politics). It’s generally non-partisan, PG-13 (at worst), family-friendly, and very, very patient with beginners’ questions.

In short, if you have a post or comments on the subject you’d like to share with us this week (Milbloggers and messages-from-theatre welcome! — anonymity preserved upon request), please either email me your submission at c a r n i v a l o f c o r d i t e a t h o t m a i l d o t c o m, or else use Ferdy the Conservative Cat’s handy dandy “Carnival Submission Form, ” located here. If you like, you can also simply pop on by and drop your urls in the comments box below the post.

The deadline is Friday, at 2 a.m. EST. Hope to see you there.

So, I’m sitting around wondering “where on earth is my hovercar?”

And (the oh-so not-safe-for-work) Satire sends me his latest missive about a cool new nicotine-enhanced beer that smokers can use to quit the habit… I have obviously sensed a theme.

Welcome, to the Carnival of the Optimists.

This week’s carnival is fairly small, following upon Satire’s footsteps.

Plain Good News.
Over at Technogypsy, Son #1 is at the Boy Scouts Jamboree, and is doing fine outside of a light heat injury. (Contains some politics, but how can you argue with “be prepared” and “can do?”)

Bootstraps.
Harvey over at Bad Example, has a serious suggestion. If you have a list of items to be achieved that’s as long as the alphabet, and you finish even more frazzled than you started… why would you call that vacation?

This week is going to be a touch heavy on Progress.

First, a double-whammy from Wired, simply too good to ignore.
#1: What happens when nanotech won’t do the job, and your own field is failing to figure it out, too? You go interdisciplinary, that’s what you do. And in the process, create yet another means of snuffing out cancer not only within our lifetime, but theoretically within the decade.

#2: Living animals have regained locomotion as their spinal cords were mended in the lab with stem cells — theoretically highly-adaptible to humans. Unfortunately, this particular case is embryonic stem cells, which carries truly significant ethical issues when taken to humans… but as a precedent, this is clearly a step in the right direction.

The Third entry is a political entry by Tony Blankley, appearing on RealClearPolitics. Now, I know what you’re thinking. Half of you are thinking “finally, he’s breaking down and coming out with the politics,” and the other is dreading the emergence of the Almighty Political Snarkitude. Well, “I heart the snarkitude.” But not in this particular Carnival. This is Blankley pointing out that the debate over abortion, one of the most horrifically, viciously divisive battles in American politics, may go the way of the dodo not because one side or the other triumphed… but because the stellar advance of embryonic viability technology made it a near non-issue. If you’ve ever known a woman who desperately wanted children in spite of the looming threat of miscarriage… read this link.

And that’s it for today, folks. Keep ‘em coming, and we’ll see you next week.

May wind up committing us to World War Five, but at least they get it.
Universal democracy, anyone?

It looks like I’ll be able to use Wayback to rescue my old blog posts… (insert happy sounds here).
Now if I can only figure out how to configure my template to allow both a left and a right sidebar, I’ll be a happy man (I’d like to break up the blog roll and the link archive from each other, in order to do a better job with both).