Eugene Volokh is on a sexual blogging spree today, which actually isn’t very sexy at all unless you have a law-talk fetish but it does make for some interesting legal analysis. He begins by writing about an eye-opening story where a 15-year-old girl posted lewd pictures of herself on the Internet and is now being charged by authorities for sexual abuse of children, possession of child pornography and dissemination of child pornography.

Volokh also discusses the legal conundrum of two minors taking sexually explicit photos of each other and whether that constitutes child pornography and/or violates age-of-consent laws.

His most recent post is on the question of what constitutes a lewd photo of a naked child, or just an innocent nude photo, such as a photo of an infant taking a bath (warning, nudity!). He advises people to cut down photos of their kids being naked, if only to avoid ending up in a “dangerous gray area” in front of a judges, juries and prosecutors.

We now return to your regulary scheduled non-sexual blogging on PIRGS and terrible editorial cartoons.

The Lonely Island is a relatively entertaining little comedy website featuring pretty great short flicks like this one. You should go watch that, followed by this. Then you should proceed to laugh until your internal organs fail.

via Hugh Hewitt and Powerline

The caption contest is now open.

Alex Tabarrok makes an interesting analogy with gas pumps over at Marginal Revolution. I’ve been mildy opposed to electronic voting machines, but this has gotten me thinking about the issue again. I think it’s a relatively apt comparison, but at the gas station there typically isn’t a worry of the employees rigging the machinery to charge customers the wrong amount.. Poll-watchers already have a pretty tough time in certain areas making sure that nothing nefarious happens on election day, a less transparent method of voting makes that even more difficult. A lack of record, in this case, is probably a very real concern when a certain amount of election fraud is known to happen. Plus, it’s tough to mail a voting machine to folks at home, and vote-by-mail is one of the few things Oregon does right.

Portland blogger B!x (aka Christopher Frankonis) and his weblog, the Portland Communique, is featured on the front page (Acrobat file) of the Oregonian today.

Check it out.

The Republic of Ireland has become the first country in Europe to institute a blanket ban on smoking in any workplace – or area designated as a workplace. Exceptions are apparently limited to prisons, hotel rooms, and psychiatric wards. My prediction: a sharp increase in the number of crafty publicans attempting to have their bars rezoned as psychiatric wards.

(See also the discussion on the apparently obscure Reason blog.)

Sunday was the 25th anniversary of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant accident. Next month will mark the 18th anniversary of the disaster in Chernobyl.

So I guess it wasn’t surprising that Coast-to-Coast AM host Art Bell mentioned a Web site known as “Riding Through Chernobyl” last night while I was driving to Eugene. The Web site is run by Elena, a young woman who enjoys taking trips through the Chernobyl “dead zone” on her Kawasaki motorcycle. She might be extremely brave or stupid, but she certainly takes some haunting photographs of the desolate area.

We can always debate about the dangers or benefits of nuclear power, but if something happens it’s undeniable that life will get pretty ugly for anyone who resides nearby.

The best editorial cartoons are worth a thousand words,” Hunt said. “The Teapot Dome scandal? Watergate? Reaganomics? These aren’t necessarily visual ideas, but the cartoonists broke the issues down into highly poignant pictorials. The cartoonists of today follow in that tradition. It’s not the cartoonist’s fault if some idiot schoolteacher in Oregon can’t understand what a donkey riding on a tractor labeled ‘527’ means.

Oh, all right. That’s not Chuck Hunt (or Pete Hunt, for that matter), it’s a made-up person in the Onion. But it could have been.

A NY professor catalogs various NYPIRG infractions of decency and honest scientific inquiry. He even outlines the use of doctored numbers. Anybody know what’s going on with OSPIRG?

First of all, congratulations to Dan and Ashley!

Secondly, there is some analysis.

Thirdly, Dan, while you may feel that you need a break from this kind of reasoning, I would prefer that you keep at it until you come up with some kind of application that will get us out of paying for drinks.

Since we seem to be picking on graphic artists a lot this month, here‘s a VC post about some poor bastard at Southern Missouri State who has managed to cause even more trouble than our own contingent.

This little tidbit comes to us via our favorite guy who works here. Junk science has always been a problem, and will remain so as long as the reporting on science remains terrible. Sensational, bogus claims sell better than their less exciting but more true counterparts. I can’t really blame journalists for pandering to their market, but we’ve got to hope that policy makers have a little more sense. Hopefully the CCF and other groups like it will keep the nanny-staters at bay.

And other fun you can have with the all new Random Jonah Goldberg-ism Generator! Via Steve Verdon [DRINK!]

The nosepickers have it.

Minor state shout-out in Reason.

Lane Co. is seriously lagging behind Benton on this one. At this rate, we’re going to lose our reputation for wackiness.