ONE EMAIL CORRESPONDENT, in light of all the teen sex discussion over the weekend, asked if it were “Blogger Sweeps Week.” Hmm. No. If it were, I’d be linking to this article on the importance of sex by Will Leitch, from The Simon.

TWENTY YEARS AGO, Europeans were savaging Reagan for not being nice enough to the Russians, and for pursuing an arms buildup they were sure would lead to nuclear war. Now, with the Soviet Union gone and Russia joining NATO after a historic nuclear arms-reduction treaty, they’re bowled over by the brilliance of American diplomacy in achieving such a bloodless triumph, and embarrassed that they ever could have doubted us. Uh, aren’t they? Well, no. . . .

ROBERT SCHWARTZ has an item on Michael Moore’s new movie, which is built around a discredited bit of history (no, not Bellesiles’ — another bit of discredited history, namely that the Second Amendment was all about encouraging slavery, which originates with Carl Bogus).

ALEX RUBALCAVA has moved to this new URL. Adjust your bookmarks accordingly, and go there to read the story about all the proposed Internet regulations currently before Congress.

MICKEY KAUS ANALYZES Seymour Hersh’s intelligence-failure 9/11 story from the New Yorker and asks some questions that Hersh doesn’t.

Meanwhile Josh Marshall set out to debunk the hawks’ claims that we should be going to war against Iraq, only to decide that the hawks are right. But Bush fan Andrew Sullivan now says he’s worried that Bush isn’t merciless enough to do the job.

JOHN HILER has written the definitive article on the Blogosphere (again). It’s long, it’s thorough, and it’s thoughtful. I have a few quibbles, but that’s all they are. Bookmark this, and give the link to your journalist friends.

YOU DON’T HEAR MUCH about this sort of military action in Afghanistan. I wonder why? It’s important.

DADDY WARBLOGS celebrates Memorial Day with a righteous Fisking.

ANOTHER REASON TO LOVE AMERICA: Combination tanning salon / sushi bars!

MY POSTS ARE “ENTIRELY SNARKY” says Chatelaine. But my posts aren’t “entirely American.” I mean, Ugandan bands and Parisian rollerskaters? There’s no pleasing some people.

ERIC OLSEN reports on his all-American memorial day.

Memorial Day weekend was no great shakes at the InstaPundit household, but it was pleasant enough considering everything that happened. My daughter got over her stomach bug, and spent last night at my sister’s. This was supposed to allow my wife and me to have a lovely romantic dinner to celebrate her birthday (last week) but she came down with the stomach bug just in time to put paid to those plans. She recovered enough to meet with some guys today from the production company shooting her documentary, but then it was back to bed for her. I picked up my daughter, took her to the mall for a haircut (very cute), a trip to Build-a-Bear (cute, but a bit expensive — they make the money selling you tiny bits of cloth shaped like bear clothes at exorbitant prices, and it’s carefully calibrated to ensure you spend more than you plan to), and a stop by Godiva Chocolate (I buy her a couple of pieces of that stuff when we go to the mall, with the result that regular cheap-o chocolate tastes like crap to her and goes uneaten). Then home where we finished a book (having completed the Narnia series, we’re back on a second run-through of Harry Potter; just finished the first one). Not a bad day at all, considering.

And any day like that is a good day, considering that there are people out there who’d like to see everyone involved go up in a nuclear fireball. To which I say: screw ’em — and remember the guys who are doing their best to accomplish that very goal.

For a different kind of Memorial Day remembrance, go here.

A FEW PEOPLE HAVE EMAILED to wonder why comments aren’t visible on every post. A couple of Macintosh users have even hinted darkly at conspiracies.

I just don’t turn them on unless I think there’s likely to be a good discussion. Under my new (and much more expensive than Blogspot) setup, I’ve got more or less a dedicated server, but the site is still using a lot of bandwidth and I don’t want to add gratuitously to the server load. Also, I don’t think I could keep track of all the commentage if comments were enabled on everything.

ALEX BEAM, REVISITED: According to this report in the New York Times, another mainline news columnist has been taken in by a rather obvious satire.

Now, anyone can be taken in. But read the names involved in this story and see if it shouldn’t have set off some alarm bells somewhere.

Heck, I checked out this story about an outfit seeking adoptive parents for frozen embryos because it sounded like a parody. Apparently, though, it’s true — or at least they didn’t ‘fess up when I phoned ’em, which to me is the difference between parody and, well, fraud. Here’s a link to their website, and here’s the Deroy Murdock column on “microscopic-Americans” that made me wonder.

(Thanks to Arthur’s Computer Adventure, which my daughter is playing on the other computer in my study, blogging resumes earlier than expected).

BLOGGER GODLESS CAPITALIST says Bush is a moron for saying that Europe isn’t anti-American. (He/she is referencing the story involving David Gregory that I link to below).

On the other hand, reader Tony Seward suggests that Bush is right:

Every Friday night in Paris there is a group of rollerbladers that get

together and do a lap through the city along with Police escort. The attendance cycles throught the year depending on holidays and weather, but there are usually several thousand and have been as many as 25,000.

Le Monde said that there were three to four thousand protesters. If there were more skaters last Friday, one might [ask] why David Gregory didn’t ask Bush how he felt about more Parisians being interested in ‘blading rather than protesting.

Unfortunately, the Pari-Roller website doesn’t have statistics past May 10, so I can’t tell how many people were skating Friday. But overall, it looks like there have been more skaters than protesters pretty much every time since the warm weather began. Advantage: Seward.

I’VE BEEN MOSTLY FOLLOWING LILEKS’ ADVICE today. I’m glad he didn’t. Follow the links.

But where’s 101 Park?

BELLESILES UPDATE; What the Newberry Knew and When it Knew it, courtesy of the History News Network. Note the comments at the bottom of the page. (Via Melissa Seckora).

BEN DOMENECH has a thoughtful and polite response on teen sex now.

But Ben, I’m not an ex-hippie. My Dad is an ex-hippie, whose antiwar protests were sympathetically treated by Garry Wills (who hates me) in Esquire back in ’70 or ’71. I was in fourth grade at the time. And my youngest brother is 21, so I’m not as out of touch with the world of teens as you seem to think.

I got a fair amount of mail along the lines of Ben Domenech’s post, saying “listen to what the teens are saying about teen sex, and you’ll understand how bad it is.”

This seems self-contradictory to me. If teenagers think that teen sex is so bad, then how come we have a problem with so many of them, well, thinking it’s so good?

Really, of course, it can be either — as many other emailers wrote, teen sex was (or is) enjoyable for them, and did (or is doing) them no harm. Some said it was the only happy memory they had of their teen years.

My chief point in my initial post was that teen sex isn’t unnatural or aberrational, and that pretending that it’s some bizarre modern phenomenon born of Elvis or Abercrombie and Fitch misses the point. As I said in a later post, there’s a big difference between sex at 17 or 18 and sex at 13. (Newsmagazines tend to talk about 13-year-olds, while showing provocative photos of 18-year-olds, the better to boost newsstand sales). Personally, I think people are probably better off waiting until they’re post-high school for sex — but I know a lot of people who are damned happy they didn’t, and some who are sorry that they did.

Unlike some people, I don’t feel that I know best for everyone in this regard. If teenagers weren’t infantilized in so many other ways, they’d have a better base of judgment and self-respect, and could make better decisions about when they were ready to have sex. Unfortunately, many teenagers have so few outlets for feeling accomplished and respected that having a boyfriend or girlfriend assumes way too much importance in their lives, which probably causes them to start having sex sooner than they really want to.

I think that the extended infantilization of teens — and even twenty-somethings — in our culture is pernicious and breeds irresponsibility, and I think that sensational treatments of teen sex make that problem worse, not better.

Well, dang. I hadn’t planned to post any more until tonight, and now there’s not time to trim the hedges before I go pick up my daughter from my sister’s. Hmm. Well, as they say at Microsoft, “That’s not a bug — it’s a feature!”

UPDATE: Cal Ulmann thinks Ben’s way too worked up.

MEMORIAL DAY READING: If you haven’t already, you should read this piece by Victor Davis Hanson, which reminded me a lot of this book by Jack McCall.

TAPPED is on the warpath about the Minnesota Green Party, which is running a candidate against embattled Democratic Senator Paul Wellstone. Being of Native American extraction myself, I’m particularly offended by the Greens’ comments on Native Americans’ mental abilities.

DANIEL WIENER says that the Drudge story about Administration unhappiness regarding the Clancy Sum of All Fears movie is the real story. The only reason to leak stuff like that, Wiener suggests, is to get the movie more publicity. He draws some interesting conclusions about why that might be the case — and he’s got comments enabled, so you can add your own observations.

MEDIAPUNDIT says he/she predicted that it would turn out Democrats had as much advance warning about bin Laden’s plans as Bush did, back on May 16th. Advantage: Mediapundit!

I JUST RAN ACROSS this interesting interview with Ralph Peters on homeland security. (Via Cockalorum).

WOW. I can’t remember a President delivering a public dressing-down to a reporter like this one delivered to David Gregory of NBC. First Rumsfeld, now Bush: it must seem unfair. The rule is supposed to be that reporters ask dumb and slanted questions, and politicians don’t call them on it.

How are you going to be a media bigfoot if people actually start mocking you when you deserve it? But, you know, the press has been acting like the press in a Saturday Night Live skit for years. They shouldn’t be surprised that Bush is picking up on his role. And this indicates that the White House isn’t scared of the press, because it thinks Americans don’t respect the David Gregorys of the world — which should scare the press most of all

DAVE KOPEL says that “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh has chutzpah.

I KEEP CHECKING OVER AT SAMIZDATA to see if Dale Amon has posted a report from the International Space Development Conference in Denver, where enviro-wackos are supposed to have been pushing for a ban on lunar development. So far, nothing. What, they don’t have internet access in Denver?