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.