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.