CHARLES JOHNSON has a report on anti-Israeli shenanigans at the Eurovision song contest, and an explanation.

CHECK OUT THE TERMS OF USE on this Muslim fundie-wacko site. They’re a lot stricter than mine!

Oh, and look to the left — there’s a poll!

Speaking of polls, here’s another one from Taliban Online! (No, really).

CLAY WATERS has taken up his pen against anti-Semitic graffiti in New York.

SUICIDE BOMBER IN PERTH, AUSTRALIA! James Morrow has the scoop on a guy who seems to be imitating Palestinians, though with a different agenda.

PORN IS BIG, AND IT MAKES A LOT OF MONEY. But, says Emmanuelle Richard, not as much money as people think. It’s primarily a story about the gullibility of journalists (no!) and about the tendency of people in industries they cover to lie (no!) to said journalists.

THE WEB IS DEAD TODAY, but Meryl Yourish’s page is very much alive. She’s uncovered some crocodile tears in the Arab News about Chandra Levy and the conviction of the 1963 Birmingham church bomber.

Hey, shouldn’t they be siding with the bomber?

HERE’S A RUSSIAN BLOG, mostly in Russian, by Yaroslav Grekov. The title is all too true.

PUNDITWATCH IS UP! And Tony Adragna wants to protect the children.

HERE’S A SWEDISH BLOG in the “news digest” style, covering the war. (Via LakeFX, whose return is welcome, but kind of hard to get used to after such a long absence).

WOOHOO! Joining the news watchblogs aimed at the Boston Globe, New York Times, Washington Post, L.A. Times and Harper’s is a new one aimed at watching my very own hometown paper, the Knoxville News-Sentinel. We have arrived!

I think this trend will spread, and I think it should.

NASA SAYS IT HAS FOUND huge amounts of water ice on Mars. This obviously makes the terraforming discussion in my TechCentral Station column a bit more relevant. Meanwhile, other reports say that NASA is planning a manned mission to Mars as a result. I’m sure that some people at NASA are working on plans, anyway. NASA has been refining the Mars Direct plan originally developed by Bob Zubrin and estimates that a manned mission to Mars could be done for about $40-50 billion in 1998 dollars — less than a tenth of what NASA had estimated in the early 1990s using a far more cumbersome approach.

Whether anything will come of this, I don’t know — but it’s certainly moved the issue off the back burner, where it’s been for quite a while.

UPDATE: Andrew Stuttaford has comments on this over at The Corner, and Rand Simberg has comments on his page, too.

ROCK AND ROLL: Libertarian, not libertine, or so a new series at DodgeBlog is arguing. BTW, the above post-link isn’t working for me at the moment due to the dreaded Blogger Archive Bug. I’ve emailed ’em, but if you go here it’s currently near the top.

JOYCE MALCOLM offers a cautionary history on English gun controls and the resulting explosion of crime. And it’s in the Boston Globe of all places.

DAVID BLANKENHORN has a pro-marriage website and blog. The tone is more civil and intellectual than some recent sites I’ve visited.

GLOBALIZATION AND FREE TRADE: While Western anti-globo crypto-Marxists bitch, the question from Africans is please, can we have some more?

My prediction: within a few decades, an explosion of African entrepreneurialism will cause Europe to worry about trade competition from Africa. You think I’m kidding? Hey — Uganda’s top band (and it’s not easy to sell half a million in Uganda) has a song about the beauty of privatization. That ain’t happening in France. But then, Africans have been all the way to the bottom with socialism and kleptocracy.

STRATEGYPAGE says that a Pakistani-Indian nuclear war will be hard to avoid.

Here’s a thought — I don’t know if it’s right or not. But it occurs to me that while the United States is busy doing its (probably inadequate) best to prevent a nuclear war there, it’s much of the rest of the world that has the most to lose.

The United States’ nuclear power is a huge military ace that it can’t really play, mostly for diplomatic reasons. But if there’s a nuclear war between two more-or-less Third World countries (Pakistan more, India less) will that lower the threshhold? If I were, say, an Iraqi, or a Saudi, or for that matter a French diplomat, this would worry me.

If I were Israel, on the other hand, I might see some value in the loosening of nuclear restraints. I wonder if anyone’s thinking about this sort of diplomatic repercussion?

STILL MORE TEEN SEX: I would let this drop, but I’ve decided it’s going to be the topic of my FoxNews column for next week, so I have every incentive to keep the idea-stream flowing. Reader Francis W. Porretto sends these observations:

With regard to the teen sex debate, I find myself substantially in agreement with your position — and I’m an observant Catholic. Even so, I think it wise to attach a couple of observations to the subject that have largely been overlooked.

In earlier societies in which teenage sex was less exposed to condemnation, because the typical newlywed couple was two teenagers, there were stronger protections for the young woman involved, in the form of social constraints.

Often those constraints, though entirely private, rose to the level of coercion, usually applied to the young man to “do the right thing” by a girl whose virginity he had taken. (Cf. “shotgun weddings.”) [True, though those constraints typically only applied within, and not across, class lines].

The Western world, and particularly the United States, is a far different legal, social, and economic environment from those earlier societies. I’m sure I needn’t tell you about the many legal changes! My point here is that the incentives and disincentives to irresponsible sex, and the penalties for unwise decisions, are quite different from those times of yore, so we must be careful about invoking them for comparative purposes.

Porretto also sends a link to this thoughtful earlier post of his on the topic, and Orchid weighs in with the voice of teen sex experience, and Jody says teens aren’t as dumb as we make them.

THERE’S A NEW Smarter Harper’s Index up.

OUR ENEMIES THE SAUDIS: Michael Barone pulls no punches in his description of Saudi perfidy, duplicity, and outright enmity. He’s dead right. We should be planning for a successor regime in the Saudi-controlled parts of Arabia. It’s going to collapse anyway sooner or later; we should make it sooner so that people in the region learn that there’s a price to this sort of behavior.

The Saudis stymied the FBI investigation of the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing. The Saudis refused a U.S. request in 1996 that they take custody of bin Laden; he went to Afghanistan instead. They refused in 1995 to hand over Imad Mughniyah, believed responsible for the bombing of a Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983. Far from aiding our efforts against terrorism, the Saudis have worked against them–to protect the terrorists in their own ranks. . . .

It may not be prudent yet to speak the truth out loud, that the Saudis are our enemies. But they should know that it is increasingly apparent to the American people that they are effectively waging war against us. And they should know that we have the capacity to destroy their military, presumably in a matter of hours. The Saudis’ eastern provinces, with their oil, could be given to their Shiite Muslim majority, now oppressed by the Sunni Muslim Saudi rulers. The holy cities of Mecca and Medina could be returned to the custody of the Hashemites (Jordan’s King Abdullah’s family), who unlike the Saudis are direct descendants of the prophet Mohammed. Let the Saudis have the sands of central Arabia and their bank accounts in Switzerland, hotel suites in London, and villas on the Riviera.

He’s right. The Saudis have had opportunity after opportunity to show that they’re worth saving, and they’ve missed those opportunities because, well, they’re not worth saving. And notice how the Hashemite Restoration idea just keeps gathering steam. Now where did I hear that first?

FIRST MAUREEN DOWD. Now Ann Coulter. Er, except that the Coulter column is a parody. The similar Dowd column was merely self-parody.

NICK DENTON weighs in on the enviro-wacky idea of designating the Moon a wilderness preserve:

I just don’t get this, or the people who are worried that we’re going to contaminate Mars. The moon is an airless, lifeless, pockmarked ball of rock. I would far rather industrial development took place off-planet, or in Antarctica, for that matter. English meadows, or California redwood forests, are far more valuable to me than a wasteland that most human beings will never visit. And, if anyone is worried that development will spoil the view of the full moon, we can always put the industrial zone on the far side.

Amen.

JOSH CHAFETZ has been blogging today! Of course, it’s not a holiday weekend over there anyway.

MARTIN DEVON commits aggravated Fisking. Also, scroll down for a take on the RIAA and payola.

UPDATE: Andrew Long says Devon has gone overboard.

AD HOMINEM ALERT: Ben Domenech says that my post on teen sex means I can’t be a father. In the comments section on his page he responds to those who correct him by saying that “I’m aware the man has children in the paternal/biological sense. It’s his Fatherhood that I’m disputing.” There is, however, no actual response to the substance of any of my comments. (Compare this thoughtful post from Mark Byron).

This is more or less the same as those Sharpton types saying that Clarence Thomas’s views mean that he’s not really black, rather than responding to his views. Domenech should be embarrassed by this statement.

UPDATE: Now Richard Bennett seems to be saying that I’m only for teen sex because I’m sleeping with teenagers. Uh, no. And surely that’s not what he means, though I’m not the only one to read it that way. (See the comments on Ben’s page). I’ve gotten a variety of hate mail on this too from a number of people along these lines.

I’ve managed to talk about this without accusing any of those who disagree with me of being sexually repressed, neurotic, or priest-ridden, and without making any teen-sex-priest comments. I must say that I would have appreciated the same courtesy.

Sadly, it’s this kind of discussion that serves to remind me why it is that — despite my position on the war, say — I’m just not a conservative. At least, not the kind of conservative that likes to tell other people how to live their lives, and that enjoys the role of moral censor. That sort of thing is just another species of PC bossiness, sharing far more ground with the intrusive left than it wants to admit.

UPDATE: I notice that Bennett (also in Ben’s comment section) has rather profanely clarified that he didn’t mean to charge me with infidelity or — what’s the word? –ephebophilia. He doesn’t actually use that word, but I wanted to — it was a new one to me as of a few weeks ago, and I like new words. Strangely, it didn’t appear among the exotic terms I studied when preparing for the spelling bee in my youth.

Here are some wise comments on the subject by Gena Lewis.

UPDATE: And N.Z. Bear has some comments on fatherhood.

HERE’S A TRANSLATION GUIDE that will help you decode speeches by people like Saddam Hussein and Yasser Arafat.