TODAY IS THE 100TH ANNIVERSARY of the Tunguska event.

THOUGHTS ON NARCISSISM and demographic decline.

IN THE MAIL: Elvin T. Lim’s The Anti-Intellectual Presidency: The Decline of Presidential Rhetoric from George Washington to George W. Bush. The subtitle may make it sound a bit like a Bush-bashing book, but in fact it’s about a decline that has taken place over decades.

MICHAEL TOTTEN: The Road to Kosovo, Part II. “Albanian pro-Americanism resembles that of both Poland and Iraqi Kurdistan. The unspeakably oppressive communist regime pushed Albanians strongly into the U.S.-led Western camp, and the humanitarian rescue of Albanians in Kosovo from Slobodan Milosevic’s tyrannical despotism bolstered that sentiment even more.” Plus, a local who characterizes the European Union as “a big Yugoslavia.” Uh oh.

CAN A MAN BE RAPED BY A WOMAN? Actually, something very similar happened to a friend of mine in college. He felt he had been raped. In retrospect, I should have been more sympathetic.

UPDATE: Some related thoughts at Chicagoboyz.

I’M WRITING A SHORT PIECE ON HELLER FOR NORTHWESTERN, and something became clear to me as soon as I started writing: What’s most striking about Heller is that absolutely everybody — majority and dissents — says the Second Amendment protects an individual right.

It’s true that the dissenters’ view of that right is somewhere between “minimalist” (to be charitable) and “incoherent” (to be accurate). But nonetheless, all nine Justices specifically said the right is individual, and thus rejected the “collective right” position on the Second Amendment, a position that’s been the mainstay of gun-control groups, newspaper editorialists, and lower federal courts for decades, and one that was presented by those adherents as so obviously correct that those arguing for an individual right were called “frauds” and shills for the NRA.

Yet the collective right theory could not command a single vote on the Court when actually tested. It was, it seems, a paper tiger all along.

MEGAN MCARDLE: Statistics are a feminist issue.

SEBASTIAN MALLABY: Why politicians should leave energy markets alone. “Richard Nixon’s early-1970s price controls were a disaster. Administering the controls on energy alone took an estimated 5 million man-hours per year and punished motorists with gas lines. Repeating this experiment by clamping down on oil trading is like burning your hand on a gas stove and then sitting on a barbecue. . . . Nixon’s heirs forget that the ‘speculators’ they attack are often trying to reduce risk, not embrace it. Pension funds have piled into oil because they are trying to protect themselves from inflation. Small investors who load up on retail oil funds are mostly doing the same. I know my family will consume several thousand dollars’ worth of oil this year, so I logged on to Fidelity’s Web site and locked in my price. Does Congress think I’m irresponsible?” No, they just hope others are gullible.

JEFF JACOBY: “When it comes to gun control, the Democratic Party is a house divided against itself. That helps explain Barack Obama’s dizzyingly inconsistent positions on District of Columbia v. Heller, the landmark Second Amendment case decided by the Supreme Court last week.”

SOME FINAL THOUGHTS ON IRAQ, at retired-milblog 365 And A Wakeup.

OBAMA SUPPORTERS GETTING GOOGLE TO SHUT DOWN ANTI-OBAMA BLOGS?

UPDATE: “Previewing the Fairness Doctrine.”

IN THE WAKE OF DICKIE SCRUGGS AND MILBERG, WEISS, time for Congressional hearings? Good luck with that . . . .

UPDATE: Your legal system at work.

STRATEGYPAGE: “The United States now has thousands of spies inside Iraq. This didn’t happen overnight. . . . The ‘surge offensive’ of last year was largely possible because the informant network had grown to the point where commanders were confident that many Sunni Arab tribes were ready to switch sides.”

TAKE A BITE OUT OF CRIME: Judge Advises Crime Victim To Arm Herself After Attack:

General Sessions Court Judge Bob Moon said Friday that crime in Chattanooga “has become so rampant that it is no longer possible for the police department to protect our citizens.”

He told a woman who had been pulled from her car and beaten in the head that she or her mother needed to “purchase a weapon, obtain a gun permit and learn to protect yourself.” The woman moved back in with her mother after the May 4 incident on E. 17th Street.

Judge Moon said, “The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that all citizens have a right to purchase a weapon to defend themselves, their families and their homes – unless there is some disqualification that prevents them from owning a weapon.”

Read the whole thing.

OBAMA ON PRIZES: Not a flip-flop, but a straddle?

Declaring last week that he wanted to break the country’s oil jam by encouraging “heroic efforts in engineering,” John McCain called for the government to offer a prize — $300 million (a dollar an American) to the inventor of a battery so compact, powerful and inexpensive that it would supplement or even supplant the need for fossil fuels.

Barack Obama quickly derided the proposal — involving a sum equivalent to nearly 200 Nobel Prizes — as a gimmick and a distraction. But prizes are hard to resist. Mr. Obama’s own energy plan, posted on his Web site, suggests awarding them (in addition to tax incentives and government contracts) for ethanol research. But ultimately, he insisted, achieving energy independence will require a Kennedyesque effort like the one that put a man on the moon.

Plus this:

Considering the bureaucratic bog the space program has waded into — the exhilaration of Neil Armstrong’s giant leap for mankind giving way to plumbing problems on the International Space Station — Mr. Obama might not have picked the best example. The latest pictures from Mars are stunning, but the most exciting thing to happen recently in manned space flight came in 2004 when Burt Rutan won the $10 million Ansari X Prize for the first privately backed suborbital excursion.

Winning the contest, which was named for its benefactors, the Ansari family, and administered by the nonprofit X Prize Foundation, cost more than the award was worth. (Mr. Rutan was backed by a Microsoft billionaire, Paul Allen.) But greater spoils may await, with Virgin Galactic licensing the technology for a space tourism industry.

This kind of leveraging is one of the selling points of sweepstakes science.

Yes, it is. And you’d think it’s the kind of new and exciting approach that a candidate of change would embrace, instead of harking back to what John F. Kennedy did about the time Barack Obama was busy being born. Read the whole thing.

Also, MSNBC’s Alan Boyle notes the increasing popularity of prizes in science, etc., among people who aren’t Barack Obama.

UPDATE: Reader Tim Morris writes: “Yes! NASA is just the model for long term energy independence! Just ask anyone at the Lunar Colony in the solar power satellite assembly operation. Oh, wait. . . .”

OUCH: “Jeffery Fagan, professor at Columbia University, and Stephen D. Sugarman, professor at U.C. Berkeley, have a plan on how gun manufacturers can help curb gun-related homicides in the U.S. If their credentials alone don’t make you chuckle at this premise, reading their actual plan might.”

HELLER’S KITCHEN: Dave Kopel looks at the decision’s impact on New York.

WOMEN AND DEMOCRATS: “Why do they hate us?”

They hate you for your freedom.

STRONG EVIDENCE OF GLOBAL WARMING.

Well, better that than global cooling.

ERIC EGLAND VS. Bill Delahunt. I’ve never liked Delahunt since I read about his water-carrying for Kennedy on the Cape Wind matter. That, however, was just ordinary sleaziness, not extraordinary sleaziness.

EXTREME MORTMAN: “Poor Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick. In a year in which Democrats are making news for heading toward a supposed bulldozing of Republicans, the six-term Detroit Congresswoman faces bad news of her own: a tough re-election battle, in the primary. Who’s to blame? Would you believe, her son?”

ROGER SIMON: Some Fact-Checking Questions For The Editors Of The New Yorker.

BUZZ ALDRIN: Beat the Chinese to Mars.

IN HONOR OF GEORGE CARLIN: 7 Words You Can’t Say in Campaign 2008.