The 139th Carnival of the Vanities has now been posted by John Behan at the Commonwealth Conservative, and I'm honored that my post on Kofi Annan at Penn was placed in John's "Cream of the Crop" category.

Because that post was also linked in today's Blog Cabin column at the Philadelphia Inquirer, I want to take this opportunity not only to welcome Inquirer readers to Classical Values, but to direct their attention to the Carnival.

This especially applies to new blog readers from the Inquirer who want to learn more about the blogosphere. Whether you like my blog or not, today's Carnival of the Vanities is a wonderful opportunity to familiarize yourself with the blogosphere, because it's a collection of reviews -- what I'd call a "BEST OF THE BLOGOSPHERE."

Many excellent blog posts submitted by a wide range of bloggers.

A particularly good example of what's there is this ferociously eloquent post (obviously written from the heart) in which Bad Example's Harvey discusses the personalized hard work which is the nature of blogging -- but which Harvey maintains is not the nature of newest kid on the blogosphere, the big media's Arianna Huffington:

She looks at the blogosphere as a single entity with enormous power, and she lusts after it with deepest envy. She has fantasies of stepping in with a cabal of sycophants and grabbing this power for herself so that she can control "the public's imagination". She's under the delusion that all the scandals exposed by the blogosphere in the last year or so are directed from a single point of control, as though there were a handle that could be pulled to steer all the blogs in a single direction.

What she wants is to grab that handle.

To mangle a line from the Matrix, "there is no handle".

Arianna, darling, the blogosphere isn't a machine to be controlled from a single point, it's a herd of cats, and it'll go where it sees fit in ways that can be neither controlled nor predicted. It's not an actually entity, but rather the sum total of the individual human lives behind every blog. If you persist in your insane beliefs to the contrary, your project will disintegrate before your eyes, leaving you alone, ignored, and wondering what went wrong.

Whether you agree with Harvey or not (or with me or not) isn't the point. Each blog resembles a life form -- living organism endowed by its creator with its creator's unique attributes. Taken together, these life forms have spawned another, much larger life form called the blogosphere.

But that's just this blogger's view. There are millions more.

UPDATE: In his comment to an earlier post, Harvey reminded me that he cited the interview used for the basis of his opinion (i.e., his criticism of Ms. Huffington is no spontaneous rant).

MORE: In addition to Eugene Volokh, the Huffington Post features Roger L. Simon with a post about Newsweek and editing. In response to one of his surprised blog readers, Roger replied:

As for going over to the dark side, lindenen, I'm an optimist. You know, one of those people who's crazy enough to think he can change people's heads. I'll go where the heads are.