I won’t be posting as usual tonight, because I’ll be at the Viking table for the Festival of Nations at the River Centre in St. Paul today, Saturday and Sunday. Stop by if you’re in the neighborhood. I’ll be back Monday.

In another milestone in the United Nations’ march toward a finer, freer world, the world body has “elected” Iran to a seat on its Commission on the Status of Women. Here’s the story from FOX News.

NEW YORK — Without fanfare, the United Nations this week elected Iran to its Commission on the Status of Women, handing a four-year seat on the influential human rights body to a theocratic state in which stoning is enshrined in law and lashings are required for women judged “immodest.”

Let’s pause for a moment to savor the bittersweet irony of this.

It’s a classic U.N. Compromise – “We have something for everyone! For liberals, we have enthusiastic support for abortion on demand. For conservatives, we have the stoning of women. Everybody should be happy!”

It’s hard to make anything like meaningful statements about “world opinion” and “international sentiment” (which is one of the basic problems at the core of the whole U.N. enterprise), but it seems to me a lot of the world (especially Europe) is counting on perpetual Islamic hatred for the United States to keep them out of the terrorists’ sights.

But this won’t last forever. Eventually, either because America has stood firm and scared the jihadists off, or because it has succumbed to dhimmitude, Islam will turn its eyes on the rest of the non-Muslim world (or, as it’s called in the Koran, “The House of War”).

And then, “the world community” will either have to man up and defend what they think of as their values, or say goodbye to their sexual experimentation, “gay” rights, feminism, and secularism.

It occurs to me that I probably ought not to worry as much as I do about the advances of social liberalism in America. They will almost certainly be stopped in time, either by a resurgence of Christianity in this country, or by the substitution of Shariah.

Tip: Townhall.com blog.

Disney to buy Greece for $120 billion – Alice Schroeder writes a column she anticipates being published in eight months:

Morgan Stanley topped 2010 global debt-and-equity league tables and broke banking records by representing Walt Disney Co. in its $120 billion acquisition of Greece.

… Already under construction are Space Mountain Olympus, the Pirates of the Aegean water theme park covering hundreds of nautical miles, the Little Mermaid Harpoon thrill ride, and “Trojan,” a multimedia adventure that the company reassured shareholders yesterday will not be adult-themed. . . . The market was filled yesterday with speculation about similar deals, including reports that Diageo Plc is in discussions with Ireland, Spain and Portugal, three countries known for their alcohol production and consumption.