NEWLYWEDS aren’t as young as they used to be.

THE NEW KURZWEIL AI SITE IS UP.

I’M GOING TO TAKE A RISK AND VOTE “NO:” Is Oral Sex About To Become Extinct?

According to a new study done at the University of Kentucky, only 20 percent of teens consider oral sex actual “sex.” Most of the teens surveyed put oral sex in the same category as “deep kissing.” Right, because they are so similar. In a study done in 1991, 40 percent of teens surveyed considered oral sex actual “sex.” You know what that means? Perhaps Bill Clinton’s little rendezvous with Monica Lewinsky confused the hell out of young people.

Possibly.

HEH: “They told me if I voted for John McCain members of the media would be detained just for doing their job. And they were right!”

“UNCONSCIOUS WILL” SWAYS ACTIONS: This kind of thing is often pitched as a reason for regulation, since your free will is portrayed as illusory. But I say it’s another reason not to trust technocracy, since the technocrats will probably be acting less rationally than they pretend, and yet technocracy’s claims of legitimacy are based entirely on technocrats’ superior rational powers . . . .

IF YOU MISSED ITS LAUNCH YESTERDAY, check out Andrew Breitbart’s new site, Big Peace.

IN THE MAIL: From Mercedes Lackey, et al. Much Fall of Blood.

A JULY 5TH INSTA-POLL:

IF YOU MISSED IT OVER THE LONG WEEKEND, I have some hopeful thoughts on activism. So does Ed Morrissey.

AT THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER, praise for Obama.

TRANSPARENCY! COMPETENCE! Congressional Report Claims Administration Misled About Efforts on Oil Spill.

DEBATING IRISH FISCAL AUSTERITY.

Tom Smith writes: “If say three years from now, the Irish economy is humming along, I think it should get a Nobel Prize and everybody should listen to it in fawning adulation.” Not likely. The answer is always bigger government and more spending — except maybe spending on the military. Only the questions change . . . .

UPDATE: Related: Feeling like 1932?

ANOTHER UPDATE: Vox Day, author of The Return Of The Great Depression, emails:

Just to correct Mr. Evans-Pritchard, 2010 corresponds to 1930, not 1932. He doesn’t grasp the significance of the debt issue: “Perhaps naively, I still think central banks have the tools to head off disaster.”

That is naive. The central banks don’t have the tools to head off disaster. They CREATED the disaster. You might be amused by an anecdote. A friend of mine who was until recently the CEO of a very large multinational came back from a meeting in London bitching about what utter fools he’d been forced to suffer. When I asked him with whom he’d been meeting, he told me “the Bank of England”.

Gulp.

LOOKING FOR WAR ON TERROR NEWS? Check out Fred Pruitt’s Rantburg.

POST INDEPENDENCE-DAY THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: From Robert Heinlein:

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as “bad luck.”

I’m just sayin’.

UPDATE: A bunch of readers email: “Unexpectedly!”

SOME MORE INDEPENDENCE DAY MUSIC.

Gatlinburg, Tennessee.

POLITICO: Republicans have lost the will to fight over judges.

IF YOU MISSED IT OVER THE HOLIDAY, my Sunday Washington Examiner column offers some encouraging lessons for the Tea Party movement from the gun-rights battle.

TOP 20 photos from the Gulf the White House doesn’t want you to see.

And Winston Groom’s thoughts are still relevant.

JOSH BLACKMAN: As McDonald goes back to the 7th Circuit, what about Nordyke v. King in the 9th Circuit?

UNCLE SAM BECOMES UNCLE EASY: The more I think about it, the more prophetic this seems. Even down to swapping the red, white and blue for green . . . .

A LOOK AT Russ Feingold’s challenger, who’s neck-and-neck despite not even having cleared the primary yet.

CHANGE: Faced with internal division, liberal website clamps down on Obama criticism. “With a Democrat in the White House whose approval ratings have fallen well below 50 percent, liberal websites are entering some new territory–how to handle users who are reliably liberal but are not fans of President Barack Obama. Case in point is Democratic Underground (aka DU), a liberal discussion forum started in 2001 that, up until recently, was united in its hatred for former president George W. Bush. But now that many Democrats have withdrawn their support of Obama, DU responded last week with regulations on how its users may express opinions about the current occupant of the Oval Office and Democrats generally.”

Well, everything’s much nicer that way: “Whereas before the rules, DU was rife with criticism of how Obama has handled the oil spill, now, such complaints have ceased.”

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: UNIVERSITY CAN’T ACCOUNT FOR MILLIONS IN MISSING EARMARK DOLLARS:

S.C. State University’s board voted unanimously Tuesday to conduct an external audit on the James E. Clyburn University Transportation Center to find out how millions of state and federal dollars have been spent. . . . The audit will be the first comprehensive review of the center, through which more than $50 million has flowed since it was launched in 1998. S.C. State leaders have about half that money on hand for the building’s first phase. But they’ve been unable to explain where the rest of the money went. . . . John Smalls, the university’s senior vice president of finance and facilities, estimated the report would cost about $100,000. He said the university might be able to get approval from the U.S. Department of Transportation to use grant money to pay for the audit.

Good grief.

MORE TALK ABOUT CYBERWAR. The way to raise the cost of government misbehavior, of course, is for large numbers of citizens to agree in advance that an Internet shutdown is cause for immediate alarm, and distrust.