CHARLES JOHNSON has a report on anti-Israeli shenanigans at the Eurovision song contest, and an explanation.

CHECK OUT THE TERMS OF USE on this Muslim fundie-wacko site. They’re a lot stricter than mine!

Oh, and look to the left — there’s a poll!

Speaking of polls, here’s another one from Taliban Online! (No, really).

CLAY WATERS has taken up his pen against anti-Semitic graffiti in New York.

SUICIDE BOMBER IN PERTH, AUSTRALIA! James Morrow has the scoop on a guy who seems to be imitating Palestinians, though with a different agenda.

PORN IS BIG, AND IT MAKES A LOT OF MONEY. But, says Emmanuelle Richard, not as much money as people think. It’s primarily a story about the gullibility of journalists (no!) and about the tendency of people in industries they cover to lie (no!) to said journalists.

THE WEB IS DEAD TODAY, but Meryl Yourish’s page is very much alive. She’s uncovered some crocodile tears in the Arab News about Chandra Levy and the conviction of the 1963 Birmingham church bomber.

Hey, shouldn’t they be siding with the bomber?

HERE’S A RUSSIAN BLOG, mostly in Russian, by Yaroslav Grekov. The title is all too true.

PUNDITWATCH IS UP! And Tony Adragna wants to protect the children.

HERE’S A SWEDISH BLOG in the “news digest” style, covering the war. (Via LakeFX, whose return is welcome, but kind of hard to get used to after such a long absence).

WOOHOO! Joining the news watchblogs aimed at the Boston Globe, New York Times, Washington Post, L.A. Times and Harper’s is a new one aimed at watching my very own hometown paper, the Knoxville News-Sentinel. We have arrived!

I think this trend will spread, and I think it should.

NASA SAYS IT HAS FOUND huge amounts of water ice on Mars. This obviously makes the terraforming discussion in my TechCentral Station column a bit more relevant. Meanwhile, other reports say that NASA is planning a manned mission to Mars as a result. I’m sure that some people at NASA are working on plans, anyway. NASA has been refining the Mars Direct plan originally developed by Bob Zubrin and estimates that a manned mission to Mars could be done for about $40-50 billion in 1998 dollars — less than a tenth of what NASA had estimated in the early 1990s using a far more cumbersome approach.

Whether anything will come of this, I don’t know — but it’s certainly moved the issue off the back burner, where it’s been for quite a while.

UPDATE: Andrew Stuttaford has comments on this over at The Corner, and Rand Simberg has comments on his page, too.

ROCK AND ROLL: Libertarian, not libertine, or so a new series at DodgeBlog is arguing. BTW, the above post-link isn’t working for me at the moment due to the dreaded Blogger Archive Bug. I’ve emailed ‘em, but if you go here it’s currently near the top.

JOYCE MALCOLM offers a cautionary history on English gun controls and the resulting explosion of crime. And it’s in the Boston Globe of all places.

DAVID BLANKENHORN has a pro-marriage website and blog. The tone is more civil and intellectual than some recent sites I’ve visited.

GLOBALIZATION AND FREE TRADE: While Western anti-globo crypto-Marxists bitch, the question from Africans is please, can we have some more?

My prediction: within a few decades, an explosion of African entrepreneurialism will cause Europe to worry about trade competition from Africa. You think I’m kidding? Hey — Uganda’s top band (and it’s not easy to sell half a million in Uganda) has a song about the beauty of privatization. That ain’t happening in France. But then, Africans have been all the way to the bottom with socialism and kleptocracy.

STRATEGYPAGE says that a Pakistani-Indian nuclear war will be hard to avoid.

Here’s a thought — I don’t know if it’s right or not. But it occurs to me that while the United States is busy doing its (probably inadequate) best to prevent a nuclear war there, it’s much of the rest of the world that has the most to lose.

The United States’ nuclear power is a huge military ace that it can’t really play, mostly for diplomatic reasons. But if there’s a nuclear war between two more-or-less Third World countries (Pakistan more, India less) will that lower the threshhold? If I were, say, an Iraqi, or a Saudi, or for that matter a French diplomat, this would worry me.

If I were Israel, on the other hand, I might see some value in the loosening of nuclear restraints. I wonder if anyone’s thinking about this sort of diplomatic repercussion?

STILL MORE TEEN SEX: I would let this drop, but I’ve decided it’s going to be the topic of my FoxNews column for next week, so I have every incentive to keep the idea-stream flowing. Reader Francis W. Porretto sends these observations:

With regard to the teen sex debate, I find myself substantially in agreement with your position — and I’m an observant Catholic. Even so, I think it wise to attach a couple of observations to the subject that have largely been overlooked.

In earlier societies in which teenage sex was less exposed to condemnation, because the typical newlywed couple was two teenagers, there were stronger protections for the young woman involved, in the form of social constraints.

Often those constraints, though entirely private, rose to the level of coercion, usually applied to the young man to “do the right thing” by a girl whose virginity he had taken. (Cf. “shotgun weddings.”) [True, though those constraints typically only applied within, and not across, class lines].

The Western world, and particularly the United States, is a far different legal, social, and economic environment from those earlier societies. I’m sure I needn’t tell you about the many legal changes! My point here is that the incentives and disincentives to irresponsible sex, and the penalties for unwise decisions, are quite different from those times of yore, so we must be careful about invoking them for comparative purposes.

Porretto also sends a link to this thoughtful earlier post of his on the topic, and Orchid weighs in with the voice of teen sex experience, and Jody says teens aren’t as dumb as we make them.

THERE’S A NEW Smarter Harper’s Index up.

OUR ENEMIES THE SAUDIS: Michael Barone pulls no punches in his description of Saudi perfidy, duplicity, and outright enmity. He’s dead right. We should be planning for a successor regime in the Saudi-controlled parts of Arabia. It’s going to collapse anyway sooner or later; we should make it sooner so that people in the region learn that there’s a price to this sort of behavior.

The Saudis stymied the FBI investigation of the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing. The Saudis refused a U.S. request in 1996 that they take custody of bin Laden; he went to Afghanistan instead. They refused in 1995 to hand over Imad Mughniyah, believed responsible for the bombing of a Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983. Far from aiding our efforts against terrorism, the Saudis have worked against them–to protect the terrorists in their own ranks. . . .

It may not be prudent yet to speak the truth out loud, that the Saudis are our enemies. But they should know that it is increasingly apparent to the American people that they are effectively waging war against us. And they should know that we have the capacity to destroy their military, presumably in a matter of hours. The Saudis’ eastern provinces, with their oil, could be given to their Shiite Muslim majority, now oppressed by the Sunni Muslim Saudi rulers. The holy cities of Mecca and Medina could be returned to the custody of the Hashemites (Jordan’s King Abdullah’s family), who unlike the Saudis are direct descendants of the prophet Mohammed. Let the Saudis have the sands of central Arabia and their bank accounts in Switzerland, hotel suites in London, and villas on the Riviera.

He’s right. The Saudis have had opportunity after opportunity to show that they’re worth saving, and they’ve missed those opportunities because, well, they’re not worth saving. And notice how the Hashemite Restoration idea just keeps gathering steam. Now where did I hear that first?

FIRST MAUREEN DOWD. Now Ann Coulter. Er, except that the Coulter column is a parody. The similar Dowd column was merely self-parody.

NICK DENTON weighs in on the enviro-wacky idea of designating the Moon a wilderness preserve:

I just don’t get this, or the people who are worried that we’re going to contaminate Mars. The moon is an airless, lifeless, pockmarked ball of rock. I would far rather industrial development took place off-planet, or in Antarctica, for that matter. English meadows, or California redwood forests, are far more valuable to me than a wasteland that most human beings will never visit. And, if anyone is worried that development will spoil the view of the full moon, we can always put the industrial zone on the far side.

Amen.

JOSH CHAFETZ has been blogging today! Of course, it’s not a holiday weekend over there anyway.

MARTIN DEVON commits aggravated Fisking. Also, scroll down for a take on the RIAA and payola.

UPDATE: Andrew Long says Devon has gone overboard.

AD HOMINEM ALERT: Ben Domenech says that my post on teen sex means I can’t be a father. In the comments section on his page he responds to those who correct him by saying that “I’m aware the man has children in the paternal/biological sense. It’s his Fatherhood that I’m disputing.” There is, however, no actual response to the substance of any of my comments. (Compare this thoughtful post from Mark Byron).

This is more or less the same as those Sharpton types saying that Clarence Thomas’s views mean that he’s not really black, rather than responding to his views. Domenech should be embarrassed by this statement.

UPDATE: Now Richard Bennett seems to be saying that I’m only for teen sex because I’m sleeping with teenagers. Uh, no. And surely that’s not what he means, though I’m not the only one to read it that way. (See the comments on Ben’s page). I’ve gotten a variety of hate mail on this too from a number of people along these lines.

I’ve managed to talk about this without accusing any of those who disagree with me of being sexually repressed, neurotic, or priest-ridden, and without making any teen-sex-priest comments. I must say that I would have appreciated the same courtesy.

Sadly, it’s this kind of discussion that serves to remind me why it is that — despite my position on the war, say — I’m just not a conservative. At least, not the kind of conservative that likes to tell other people how to live their lives, and that enjoys the role of moral censor. That sort of thing is just another species of PC bossiness, sharing far more ground with the intrusive left than it wants to admit.

UPDATE: I notice that Bennett (also in Ben’s comment section) has rather profanely clarified that he didn’t mean to charge me with infidelity or — what’s the word? –ephebophilia. He doesn’t actually use that word, but I wanted to — it was a new one to me as of a few weeks ago, and I like new words. Strangely, it didn’t appear among the exotic terms I studied when preparing for the spelling bee in my youth.

Here are some wise comments on the subject by Gena Lewis.

UPDATE: And N.Z. Bear has some comments on fatherhood.

HERE’S A TRANSLATION GUIDE that will help you decode speeches by people like Saddam Hussein and Yasser Arafat.

BRENDAN O’NEILL has looked at the various anti-Israel petitions and has some interesting insight into what’s driving the anti-Israel movement today:

In the past, people tended to define themselves as anti-Israel as part of a broader anti-imperialism – in opposition to US and Western intervention abroad, whatever form intervention happened to take.

What could Western academics, anti-capitalists and Islamicists possibly have in common, to make them all so vocal about Israel? Could it possibly be a loathing – or a self-loathing on the part of some academics – for Western values? Could it be, not so much an anti-imperialist stance against foreign intervention, but a reaction against aggression that is just too unapologetic and unabashed in an era where intervention abroad has to be dressed in the language of humanitarianism and human rights?

Whatever it is, there is something about today’s ‘anti-Israel’ stance that makes even me – who always sympathised with the Palestinian cause in the past – feel distinctly uncomfortable.

Yes, and I think that this is what makes so many of us (particularly Americans)who aren’t Jewish or evangelical Christians feel more than “uncomfortable.” This is really a movement inspired by rejection of the Enlightenment, of reason, and of modernity. Which is why I view it with such deep contempt.

UPDATE: David Carr refers to it as the “great convergence of the world’s idiots,” and has some firsthand observations.

TEEN SEX UPDATE! TAPPED has ridden to my defense on the teen-sex debate: “Reynolds has it just right when he writes, ‘you won’t teach teens to wait until they’re ready by launching unaimed broadsides against the assumed evil of teen sex, and by acting as if teen sex is unnatural or aberrant. It’s not.’”

UPDATE: Orchid has more. So does Eugene Volokh, who may or may not help his credibility by also observing that his opinion of male sexual ethics causes him to look with favor on the idea of having a lesbian daughter.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Brian Sinclair has the whole debate summarized (with links) on his Daily Babble site. The real question is, have we inadvertently google-bombed the term “teen sex?”

STILL ANOTHER UPDATE: Nope, not even close on the Google thing. Surprisingly, however, some actual non-porn sites do show up on the first page.

HEY, CHARLES OLIVER is posting today, too, with comments on Southern Hemisphere Christianity, Japanese fecundity, and midwestern teachers’ ethics.

WOBBLY WATCH UPDATE: Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan say Bush has gone wobbly.

Me, I still lean toward “rope-a-dope,” but reasonable minds may disagree. Either way, it wouldn’t hurt Bush, and a lot of other folks in the Administration, to read this regularly. Or perhaps they should just go here now and then.

UPDATE: Oliver Willis says the Administration isn’t serious, either. Hmm. We’re hearing a lot on this from a lot of different quarters this week: Steyn, Kristol, Willis, Sullivan, et al.

“THAT’S A BLOODY SHOCK!” Tim Blair reports on a bizarre twist to last week’s big euthanasia story.

ERIC RAYMOND INFORMS ME that he’s posting today, and on one of my favorite subjects. Hmm. He didn’t link to a specific post or say what he was referring to, so you’ll just have to read today’s items and try to figure out which he meant. I’m still not sure, but that’s okay. I’m a man of varied interests.

A HACKER broke into California state computers and stole data on 200,000 employees, UPI reports. Craig Schamp observes that this makes a National ID database, and Larry Ellison’s promises that it will be safe, even less credible than before.

I’M POSTING LESS, but as far as I can tell, most people aren’t posting at all today. Though Andrew Stuttaford has some keen observations on Generic Marmite, cufflinks, and random gunfire over at The Corner. Start here and scroll up.

And Adriana Cronin has a long post on public/private law enforcement that also features her looking quite fetching astride her old (now stolen) motorcycle, and a non-astride photo of her new motorcycle, a Ducati Monster Dark 900. She likes the old one better, but I think the Ducati’s got the edge in the name department. I mean who wouldn’t want a Monster Dark 900? Even if that were the name of, say, a spatula? “Honey, I’m flipping the pancakes now [dropping voice into manly tones] with my new Monster Dark 900 — the teflon coated one!”

I’m hoping that Dale Amon, who’s attending the International Space Development Conference in Denver, will find time to post a report on the wacky enviro-types who are going to be there agitating to keep the Moon “pristine.”

MORE AMERICANS are answering questions about their race or ethnicity by simply saying “American,” according to this report from the Washington Post. (Via Joanne Jacobs).

HERE’S ANOTHER anti-Israel petition, this one from Canada. The signatures here aren’t as amusing as the ones on the Aussie petition.

AN ANTI-ISRAEL HARVARD PROFESSOR is unmasked by Jeff Goldstein. I’ll never listen to that album the same way. . . .

UNILATERALISM, INTERNATIONAL LAW, AND TERRORISM: Some lessons from the French, courtesy of Banana Counting Monkey.

SOME SEX ADVICE from Eve Kayden can be found here.

I WILL BE POSTING, but at a reduced rate, over the Memorial Day Weekend. In the meantime, you may want to check out this page by Andrew Olmsted and this page by David Merchant, a University of Tennessee alumnus. (Olmstead site via Lawrence Haws.

THE UNITED STATES is warning citizens against travel to India and Pakistan, and is suggesting that citizens who are there get out.

In more cheerful news, I’m uploading very cool songs from Michele Newton. When they’re available for listening, I’ll link to them.

TEEN SEX UPDATE: Rishawn Biddle weighs in.

TEEN SEX UPDATE UPDATE! Robert George, over at The Corner, observes:

“Teen” sex is a relatively recent phenomenon because the “teenager” is a recent phenomenon. For all intents and purposes, teenagers are a 20th century creation, maybe even second half of the 20th century at that. Consider Teddy Roosevelt and George H.W. Bush were men doing manly things (like going off to war and such) well before their 20th birthdays. “Teendom” is a conceit of the post-war suburban leisure class. Furthermore, there is an interesting tension in society’s where we insist that teenagers be treated as children when it comes to sex, but as adults when it comes to murder.

Yes, I had meant to point out that contradiction myself.

JUSTIN WEITZ reports that Norwegian grocery stores are labelling Israeli products so that pro-Palestinian shoppers can avoid them. Weitz responds with some labelling suggestions of his own.

JOSH CHAFETZ doesn’t like my title of “free speech on the left” below, referring to the student protest threats that led to the cancellation of an appearance by Chief Justice William Rehnquist. He says it’s rudeness, but not censorship.

Well, he’s sort of right. But while the First Amendment, which protects free speech, bars government censorship but not rudeness, that does not mean that things that don’t involve the First Amendment don’t involve free speech. And you can bet that the rude students were high-fiving at their success in getting the appearance cancelled via a mere threat.

Shorewood High alumnus Ann Haker says that Shorewood is in fact a haven of censorship, too, which puts a somewhat different complexion on things:

Shorewood High is my alma mater too (class of ’85). I’m embarrassed by the Rehnquist disinvite. Thought you might like this link:

SHS has a speech code banning specific words, and any others that a teacher deems “disruptive”, and the penalty can be getting arrested by the police.

Nice liberal place, isn’t it?

Hmm. I wonder if that speech code would have been used had students threatened to disrupt a speech by Janet Reno, or Michael Moore?

By claiming the authority to censor student speech, and then not exercising it in instances where they may agree, the authorities — in my opinion — become complicit in the behavior, which turns rudeness into censorship.

UPDATE: This post by Justin Adams says it better than I did.

THE CALIFORNIA APARTMENT EXPLOSION looks to have been caused by a gas leak, according to this report.

PEJMAN YOUSEFZADEH has a nice piece on the Second Amendment over at FoxNews.

ALL THIS ON TEEN SEX, and I get not one word of support from TAPPED. I mean, if the Democrats aren’t good for defending teen sex, what are they good for?

WOBBLY WATCH: Steven Den Beste has some thoughts.

READER TRENT TELENKO sends this somewhat more comforting take on Indian / Pakistani nuclear war from StrategyPage.Com. However, while I’m a big StrategyPage fan, this piece is rather sketchy. It says that most deaths would come from economic disruption rather than weapon effects, which is almost certainly true. It also says that economic collapse would bring an Indian/Pakistani war to a rapid halt, but doesn’t make clear just how that is to be. (Didn’t people say that before World War I, too?) Here’s the most interesting part, though:

So it is likely that the United States will put great pressure on India not to attack Pakistan until we’ve conquered Iraq. India is not dependent on the US for anything so our major influence comes from incentives, not punitive disincentives. There is one coin which can truly buy India’s short-term inaction – promised American support for India’s later conquest of Pakistan. Such conquest would permanently protect India from Pakistan’s growing nuclear arsenal, and from Pakistani state-supported terrorism.

I wonder what promises are being made.

STANLEY FISH DOESN’T LIKE REPORTERS: Apparently some come with an agenda, some are grad-school washouts who are just jealous, and all are idiots. So why has he spent so much time talking with them anyway? Because, he says, he wants to be “understood and admired and celebrated.”

A THREE-STORY APARTMENT BUILDING in Los Angeles has been leveled by an unexplained explosion. Probably nothing, but still. . . .

UPDATE: This FoxNews story has a picture. My take: If this is terrorist-related (a big if) this explosion was likely an accident in an apartment used for bomb-making rather than a planned one.

MORE WORRIES: Here’s a study on the death toll from a “limited” India / Pakistan nuclear war. “Only” three million casualties expected. (Via Joe Katzman). Meanwhile Lileks is buying iodine just in case, and Brits are pulling nonessentials out.

Worst of all, Chris Patten is trying his hand at shuttle diplomacy.

BUSH’S APPROVAL RATING is steady at 76, and his disapprovals have actually dropped by 2 percent, going from 19 to 17. Apparently the “Bush Knew” campaign isn’t doing very well. (Edward Boyd has a nice tabular display of the relevant figures).

On the other hand, Rod Dreher reports that he’s getting lots of angry emails from conservatives about Bush’s inaction. It better be rope-a-dope, with those stories about the Iraq invasion being off just disinformation. What worries me is that somebody at the White House is looking at these poll numbers and trying to avoid rocking the boat.

FREE SPEECH ON THE LEFT: A speech by Chief Justice William Rehnquist at his high school alma mater was cancelled because of student protest threats. (Link via Howard Bashman).

MORE HOT TEEN SEX! And at The National Review (Online), too. Does WFB know about this?

Jonah Goldberg has not just one, but two responses to the Charles Oliver posts that I mentioned earlier. But I think people are talking past each other, at least in part.

At the core of Jonah’s response to Charles seems to be the importance of marriage — or at least the importance of acknowledging the importance of marriage. Well, that’s fine, I guess. But if teen sex is particularly bad, it must be bad for one of two reasons: because it is inherently bad, or because it’s bad in its consequences.

If teen sex is inherently bad, then it’s hard to see how marriage makes it better. (One might object to it as premarital sex, but he explicitly disclaims that he’s getting on a soapbox about that). If it’s bad only in its consequences then things that ameliorate those consequences, like contraception, safe sex, etc. also ameliorate its badness.

And consequences have to be measured both ways: good and bad. Teens do all sorts of things that are dangerous to their bodies or emotions, like play sports (one girl in my neighborhood blew out a knee ligament, which will have lifelong painful consequences, playing soccer at the age of 15) and we weigh those risks against the pleasure the sports bring and the life lessons that they teach. Is it so absurd to argue that the same reasoning might apply? If it doesn’t, it must be because there’s something about sex, beyond the consequences, that makes us think about it differently.

I don’t regret any of the sex that I had as a teenager, though none of it happened when I was, say, 13. (Being around a campus during the early 1970s, I had some opportunities with older women at that age, but as exciting as that sounds in the abstract it struck me as a bit too creepy at the time, and I don’t regret not having sex then, either.)

So maybe it’s important to wait until you’re ready. But you won’t teach teens to wait until they’re ready by launching unaimed broadsides against the assumed evil of teen sex, and by acting as if teen sex is unnatural or aberrant. It’s not. Teenagers have been having sex since the beginning of time. Their bodies are ready for it, and it’s absurd to tell them to “just say no.” Instead they need to be taught the judgment and sense of self-worth that will enable them to do what is right for them.

I notice that Jonah didn’t respond to the Shakespeare point, though.

FAR OUT? When I wrote this column for TechCentralStation I was worried that the topic — colonization and terraforming of Mars, etc. — was too far out. But now comes this story, originally from the Wall Street Journal, on environmental activists who are organizing to fight lunar development plans.

As I said in the TCS column, this mostly reveals what the enviros’ priorities are.

And remember when I said a couple of weeks ago that the International Space Development Conference in Denver this weekend would be worth attending? The whole dispute is going to come to a head there. Too bad Kaus wouldn’t let me borrow the Boeing.

CHARLES OLIVER is all over the whole teen sex debate and he’s giving Jonah Goldberg what-for. Just start at that link and keep scrolling up, all the way to the point where he says Jonah has his Shakespeare completely wrong.

THE EUROPEAN UNION has some surprising supporters, according to H.D. Miller.

Well, I wasn’t all that surprised.

PAT TILLMAN IS LEAVING THE NFL to join the Army.

CATS AND DOGS LIVING TOGETHER, CONT’D: Now TAPPED is cheering on a lawsuit by Judicial Watch.

TED BARLOW has a post on defeatist terror warnings that made me say “I wish I’d written that.” And I wish that Bush, Mueller, Ridge, etc. would read it.

MEGAN MCARDLE has an article on proposed litigation against purveyors of “junk food” and “fast food” in Salon. It’s good, naturally.

KATIE ALLISON GRANJU, a certified parenting expert (she has a book with Simon & Schuster), joins in the teen sex debate.

KEVIN MCGEEHEE says that Jonah Goldberg’s column on blogging (below) actually argues for the success of blogs. McGeehee may be right, but my favorite part is the use of the term “legacy media” to refer to networks, print newspapers, etc.

CULTURE CHANGE ALERT: I’ve said before that guns are being de-demonized. Here’s an article from my local alt-weekly, which has the political and cultural stance of most alt-weeklies, taking a rather sympathetic look at guns, and people licensed to carry them. That there are lots of Knoxvillians who like guns, and carry them, is nothing new. That the local alt-weekly would look at them this sympathetically is.

NOT CONTENT WITH ASSAULTING ME, Jonah Goldberg is dissing the entire Blogosphere! Actually not. It’s a perfectly fine column, and may well turn out to be right.

Though I think Jonah expects revolutions to be noisy, loud and destructive. The Blogosphere Revolution, if there is one, will be far more subtle and will take things over so insidiously people won’t know the difference at first. Gradually establishment journalists like Eric Alterman or Chris Matthews will start blogging, staid publications like the National Review will get blogs, publications and big-media websites like Fox or Slate will start to incorporate bloggers into their regular content, well-known journalists will tout their latest columns to bloggers and respond angrily to attacks from the blogosphere. . . .

Nah, couldn’t happen.

UPDATE: Proving my point! Rand Simberg notes that Goldberg’s column contains an admission that The Corner is a blog! And ABC News’s Marc Ambinder emails to complain that I didn’t mention ABC’s blog “The Note.”

FRED BARNES says Bush has given up on Europe. That’s better than Mark Steyn’s suggestion, below, that he’s just given up, period.

JIHAD AT HARVARD: Yglesias has more, with links.

WOBBLY WATCH UPDATE: Mark Steyn says that we’re not acting serious about the war, and Bush will be a one-termer if things don’t change very soon.

STEVE CHAPMAN has a column about the Michigan Law School diversity case. Here’s an interesting passage:

If you take a look at the University of Michigan’s Web site, you can find all sorts of information, including some that would come as news to its administrators. A “Nondiscrimination Policy Notice” says the university “is committed to a policy of nondiscrimination and equal opportunity for all persons regardless of race.” But the school has been fighting a court battle for years for one simple reason: It discriminates on the basis of race and wants to keep doing so.

I wonder why people who give schools and other organizations money in reliance on these policies (the Association of American Law Schools tells applicants for law-teaching jobs who use its process the same thing, and then sets up the process to facilitate such discrimination, which it encourages, among its member schools) don’t just sue for fraud. No fancy-pants constitutional claims just: you took my money under false pretenses, and I was harmed thereby. It certainly looks to be as strong a case as a lot of class actions that get filed.

JONAH GOLDBERG is beating up on me over at The Corner about the teen sex post below. I kinda thought that might happen. But I don’t really disagree with this part:

Glenn, if it makes you feel better, think of “Teen” as a catchall phrase for poorly-educated people with bad or no jobs, little life experience and few life skills, raging hormones who mostly live with their parents. People — of any age – who fit this description shouldn’t be having too [much] sex, if you ask me.

Jonah’s basically describing the guests on Jerry Springer, for whom sex looks like a less desirable option (from society’s standpoint, not just their, ugh, potential partners’) with every passing year. And as someone in the comments section on the post below notes, sometimes the idea of a Norplant dart gun sounds appealing. I’m all for responsibility, but I think that the term “teen sex” is one of those media creations that lets them scare parents about 13-year-olds while showing provocative photos of 18-year-olds to boost circulation. There are a lot of reasons why policy entrepreneurs then jump on the bandwagon, but that doesn’t make it sounder.

As a noted Europhile, let me note that European countries somehow seem to have similar levels of teen sexual activity with much, much lower levels of pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease. Whether that’s replicable in the U.S., or whether we’d even want to replicate their approach in the U.S., is a separate question, but it indicates that the connection between teen sex and undesirable consequences isn’t set in stone.

MATTHEW HOY SAYS that this time Paul Krugman is half right in his criticism of the Bush Administration. Hey, that’s more credit than Krugman usually gets from the Blogosphere!

MERYL YOURISH says that the boycott of the New York Times over its slanted Israel coverage is working.

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ says that Barbie is just a toy. I disagree: I think she’s a fearsome weapon against Islamofascist oppression.

STILL MORE NORTH KOREAN DEFECTORS trying to get into China. Keep an eye on this; I think North Korea’s days under the current regime are numbered. Interesting angle from the story on some of recent history’s biggest losers: Korean expatriates in Japan who moved to North Korea in the 1960s in light of promises that it was “paradise on Earth.” Oops.

Of course, that’s a sign of how badly Koreans, even nth-generation Koreans, in Japan were (and to a significant degree still are) treated.

PEOPLE ARE EMAILING ME to say that the operators of the Australian anti-Israel petition are pulling a CAIR, but they’re not. You have to click on “view petition signatures” and then on one of the number ranges. They’ve got nearly 1000 so far, but they’re mostly from the likes of Adolf Hitler, Elmer Fudd, etc.

Here’s a link to the main signature page; just click on one of the numbers. I have a suspicion, though, that somebody will be taking this stuff down soon.

THE SEARCH FUNCTION now works properly — taking you to a user-friendly (and bandwidth-conserving) single-entry page instead of just to the week’s archive page. Comments are working on the auxiliary pages too now, and there’s a “Printer Friendly” format link on the left.

Stacy Tabb’s really good.

ERIC OLSEN’S LATEST “TOUR O’ THE BLOGS” is about Virginia Postrel.

Virginia, by the way, has just noticed InstaPundit’s “Terms of Use.” They were on the old site, too, but I’ve only gotten a handful of emails about them — mostly from bloggers wondering if they could add them to their own sites.

WHAT’S WRONG WITH TEEN SEX? The U.S. News cover story is about a perennial bogeyman, teen sex. This reminds me of something.

In his African history classes, my brother asks the students: “What do you think they call ‘deadly African killer bees’ in Africa?”

The answer, of course, is simply “bees.”

In the same way, what we now call “teen sex” and treat as somehow aberrant or frightening was known for nearly all of human history simply as “sex.” Most people were married — and more were having sex — in their teens, and often their early teens. And they managed to deal with it, and with the other aspects of adulthood, pretty well. A Roman youth was old enough to serve in the Legions at 14, and to marry, sign contracts, etc. The Bar Mitzvah preserves a similar tradition from that era. And much closer to our own times, George Washington was bossing a survey team in the wilderness at 16, British midshipmen were commanding sailors in battle at even younger ages, and even in the 20th century lots of soldiers were teens.

It is not teen sex that is the aberration, but our increasingly absurd modern effort to treat teenagers as babies. I say increasingly absurd because teenagers are actually sexually mature at an earlier age than they were in those older days.

This doesn’t mean that teen sex is necessarily a good thing — as with adult sex, that depends on the circumstances, and the individuals, and also on what part of the teens we’re talking about. But treating it as something scary, aberrant, or unnatural is part of an overall pathology about sex that is both unfounded and — when, as it now usually does, it comes from baby boomers who felt quite differently about the subject thirty years ago — pretty hypocritical.

THE NINTH CIRCUIT has ruled in the prisoner-fedexing-of-sperm case. Howard Bashman has the link.

MY GOODNESSS. Just look who’s signing this anti-Israel petition.

GRAY DAVIS SCANDAL-O-RAMA UPDATE: Here’s a column from the Sacramento Bee by Daniel Weintraub. Here’s the lead — or lede as Real Journalists like to say: “Gov. Gray Davis has been forced to admit that his administration is either corrupt or incompetent.”

I’m not a bigshot political consultant, but this sounds bad to me.

HERE’S A LAURA INGRAHAM COLUMN responding to Mary McGrory’s assault on Ashcroft. Here’s the key passage:

McGrory’s column is important because it demonstrates how desperate the Left has become about guns. Gun control fanatics simply cannot comprehend why most Americans aren’t buying the view that guns cause crime, and so they’ll do and say just about anything to scare them into enlightenment. One highly-acclaimed antigun scholar, Michael Bellesiles, has already seen his book Arming America (Random House) debunked as fraudulent. When other scholars questioned his data on gun ownership in early America, he claimed his supporting documentation was lost in a flood.

Indeed. And the flood claim is looking iffy these days, too.

HERE’S ANOTHER LOCAL-MEDIA WATCHBLOG, this one in Boston. This is an idea that seems to be spreading. And should be.

TIM WILSON says I’m worrying too much about counters and numbers. He’s right. It’s just that every damned reporter who calls or emails wants to know this stuff, and I feel stupid not answering. Then there was a John Scalzi piece where he implied that bloggers were inflating their number claims. Hence the public counter.

But hell, I should just give up and install one of these (click on it; it’s amusing):

Life’s too short. I mean, it’s not like somebody’s paying me based on this traffic. In fact, it’s not like somebody’s paying me, period, except via the occasional donation. And I like it that way.

THE AMERICAN PROSPECT‘s Natasha Hunter writes about “an industrial chemical that’s everywhere — and that you’ve probably never heard of.”

But, despite what I thought when I saw the subtitle, and read the first few sentences, she wasn’t referring to this one.

DAVE TROWBRIDGE has some thoughts on the inevitability of cloning.

I’VE NEVER CARED MUCH ABOUT THE CONDIT-LEVY THING. In fact, back before 9/11 this site bore the slogan “100% C*ndit Free!” (Without the asterisk, you see, the slogan would have been self-falsifying).

But although Best of the Web and Andrew Sullivan are already declaring Condit vindicated, it seems a bit soon to me to declare the case solved and pin the murder on a “drifter” (isn’t that who they always try to pin it on in those murder mysteries where a Congressman or a Governor or a Cabinet official or somebody is the real killer?) More importantly, it seems a bit too soon to Mickey Kaus, who unlike me has actually thought about the issue, consulted maps, and so on.

IT’S AN ISO-CERTIFIED PISSING MATCH between Eric Alterman and Andrew Sullivan. Charges of narcissism fill the air, like — nope. I’m stopping this simile right here.

It should be a traffic-builder for both of them, of course. Say, you don’t think. . . .

RISHAWN BIDDLE REPORTS nasty insider action at Kinko’s.

“Nasty insider action at Kinko’s.” Boy, what search-engine action I’m going to get with those words all in a string.

THERE’S A NEW POST over at PsyWar Update. I think it’s time to bring that feature back.

DAN HANSON just got raped by Sony as the result of a CD price increase, and imagines the marketing meeting at which piracy due to high prices was dealt with by raising prices. To $26.99 in the case of his Warren Zevon CD.

I got the new Moby CD the other day for $13.99 It’s good. And that’s about what a CD should cost. Well, really $9.99 is what a CD should cost.

SAUDI PR CAMPAIGN A FAILURE, POLLS SHOW. See, Americans aren’t as dumb as some people seem to think.

“UNIQUE” HITS: Reader Steve Furlong says my counter is understating the traffic:

The “unique visitors” counter is only an approximation of the actual unique visitors you get. It almost certainly counts distinct IP addresses. This doesn’t quite map to distinct end-user computers because of IP masking, Network Address Translation (NAT) and a couple of other things. Stripping the jargon, AOL and other large ISPs and most largish companies are assigned blocks of IP addresses. Smaller sites might have just a single address but support multiple users with internal routers.

A user visiting you from one of those sites will seem to you to have one of the IP addresses in that block; if he visits again he might have the same or a different apparent address. And someone else visiting your page from one of those systems might be assigned the same address.

Two concrete examples, showing each of these distorting factors:

- My web server’s log sometimes shows someone visiting some of my pages. It’s clearly the same person visiting successive pages, but he might show six different IP addresses for ten hits in five minutes. (My site normally gets a few hundred hits per *week*, discounting the robots, so I can examine the logs in detail if I wish.)

- My small home network connects to the internet with a DSL line with a static address. I have a router to support up to four simultaneous connections, but they all appear to be the same address so far as the world is concerned.

You might well know all this, but I find it’s better not to assume that people in other fields know the stuff in my field of work, and to “waste” the time explaining.

Yes, I’m familiar with this stuff, though many readers may not be. And my counter’s worse yet, because it only counts visitors to the main page — links to individual posts go elsewhere and don’t get counted. But nonetheless it’s shown more unique visitors than I expected, so it’s taught me something. And by making it available, I want to undermine those people who have occasionally implied that bloggers lie about their traffic. I’d like to see some “mainstream” sites provide similar information in a similar fashion, but I doubt that will happen.

Comments are enabled on this one. What do you think?

WELL, YOU KNEW THIS WAS COMING:

Ralph Hughes of Sony Music testified in the Senate today urging lawmakers to enact legislation which would ban felt tip markers. “These innocuous looking writing instruments are the scourge of our society,” he said holding up a Sharpie. “Not only can this black stick of death be used to violate the DMCA, but it could also be used to write the instructions to incubate the anthrax virus.”

I’m pretty sure this is satire, but these days it’s harder and harder to tell.

GRADES ARE DONE, though I didn’t follow this advice from reader Doug Hutson:

Since Hahvahd (Harvard) is considered by many to be the epitome of educational institutions, and since any law professor worth his or her salt would strive to be a professor at said Hahvahd, doesn’t it make sense that you would give grades like they do at Hahvahd? Give them all A’s, which will prove you are truly worthy. Also solves your current problem of having to grade papers!

Sadly, I give real exams, and actually count off when students get things wrong. The grades in my paper-writing seminar were pretty good, but that’s because — with multiple drafts that I comment on — it’s hard not to write a good paper (or at least one that I’ll think is good) by the end of the semester. The Constitutional Law exams, however, were a more mixed bag and required some curving to bring them into line (since it’s a required course, we don’t like too much variation among sections).

As one of my colleagues says, the rest of the job we do for free — but it takes our whole salaries to pay us to do the damn grading.

JOE KATZMAN posted a response to some of my nuclear questions last night. Or this morning. Get some sleep, Joe.

MUELLER UPDATE: Okay, what if they have pretty good knowledge that something big is going to happen, and figure that they can’t stop it — say a smuggled nuke in an American or European city, but they don’t know which? Would it make sense for Mueller to be lowering expectations then?

YESTERDAY I posted on a U.S. / Mexico border clash. Today The Corner has more. Go here and scroll up.

PATRICK RUFFINI explodes some Chandra Levy conspiracy theories. He’s also got a post blaming Bob Shrum for Casey’s defeat in Pennsylvania.

BILL QUICK says that there’s a sea change going on in the academic world, partly as a result of 9/11. Josh Chafetz wrote something similar a while back.

I think they’re both right. The interesting thing is that the true PC loonies — often perceived to be running campuses — are a minority almost everywhere. But they’re loud, and they know how to pressure the Administration, and they stick together, and they’re not afraid to call anyone who disagrees with them names. Oh, and most of them aren’t much as scholars, so they have plenty of time to serve on the committees that do a lot of the behind-the-scenes direction setting in academia.

But they’re still a minority. And even before 9/11 people were waking up to that, not least because they were managing to marginalize themselves through absurd behavior. (You can call people who disagree with you racists, but after you’ve called enough people racist, the term loses its sting, and you lose your credibility). I believe that 9/11 triggered a cascade of people realizing just how out of touch the campus left had become, and how morally and intellectually bankrupt it was.