FRENCH LITERATURE ON liberty and the right to arms.

RICHARD MINITER IS IN TURKEY, and reporting on the Turks, Iraq, and the PKK.

MICKEY KAUS ON GERRYMANDER REFORM: “Two-thirds of California “likely voters” support a plan to turn over redistricting to “an independent commission of citizens.” That seems to be slightly higher than previous polls. [Via Bill Bradley’s New West Notes]. We’ll see if Bill Clinton moneybuddy Stephen Bing and Nancy Pelosi can find a way to block reform this time.”

THOUGHTS ON THE SECOND AMENDMENT, from Jonah Goldberg:

Of course, there has always been a minority of liberals who’ve shown a willingness to admit, often reluctantly, that the Constitution can approve of something they disapprove of. Liberal journalist Michael Kinsley famously quoted a colleague as saying, “If liberals interpreted the Second Amendment the way they interpret the rest of the Bill of Rights, there would be law professors arguing that gun ownership is mandatory.” And in 1989, Sanford Levinson penned a Yale Law Review article tellingly titled “The Embarrassing Second Amendment.”

Such honesty has proved contagious. As Brookings Institution scholar Benjamin Wittes chronicles in the current edition of The New Republic, various liberal legal scholars have come to grudgingly accept that the Second Amendment’s meaning and intent include the individual right to own a gun. “(T)he amendment achieves its central purpose by assuring that the federal government may not disarm individual citizens without some unusually strong justification,” writes no less than the dean of liberal legal scholars, Laurence Tribe. Tribe had to update his textbook on the Constitution to account for the growing consensus that — horror! — Americans do have a constitutional right to own a gun. It’s not an absolute right, of course. But no right is.

Read the whole thing. And law professors arguing for mandatory gun ownership? Don’t be ridiculous!

SATURN’S HEXAGON:

The best theory I’ve come up with so far, after brushing up on von Daniken’s “Chariots of the Gods,” is that it’s the Hex Nut of the Giants, affixed to the end of a massive bolt that’s holding the planet together. I haven’t worked out yet how a race of titanic engineers managed to insert the bolt at Saturn’s south pole. Nor have I identified the location of their hardware store, but we need to start looking for it right away, because NASA’s video shows that it’s swirling counterclockwise dangerously near what looks to me like the end of the bolt. If this thing keeps unscrewing . . . .

I think it’s the walls of an alien base.

CHARLIE ROSE ON the science of longevity.

MAKING YOUR HOME RELATIONSHIP-READY: Though the barber chair sounds kind of cool.

HARVESTING ALGAE ENERGY for pond-powered biofuels:

The science is simple: Algae need water, sunlight and carbon dioxide to grow. The oil they produce can then be harvested and converted into biodiesel; the algae’s carbohydrate content can be fermented into ethanol. Both are much cleaner-burning fuels than petroleum-based diesel or gas.

The reality is more complex. Trying to grow concentrations of the finicky organism is a bit like trying to balance the water in a fish tank. It’s also expensive. The water needs to be just the right temperature for algae to proliferate, and even then open ponds can become choked with invasive species. Atmospheric levels of CO2 also aren’t high enough to spur exponential growth.

Solix addresses these problems by containing the algae in closed “photobioreactors”—triangular chambers made from sheets of polyethylene plastic (similar to a painter’s dropcloth)—and bubbling supplemental carbon dioxide through the system. Eventually, the source of the CO2 will be exhaust from power plants and other industrial processes, providing the added benefit of capturing a potent greenhouse gas before it reaches the atmosphere.

Read the whole thing.

OXBLOG: Our conference call with McCain. Who knew that “hot lesbians” would come up?

A MORMON CONSPIRACY SO VAST — revealed!

JOURNALISTS ON THE JOB: “Questionable claim unquestioned.”

“WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED to ‘name, rank, and serial number?'”

“International law” is only a tool to bash the United States and its allies. It’s not meant to actually protect people. Except the enemies of civilization. Just ask the folks in Darfur.

OKAY, I’VE NEVER ACTUALLY SEEN BEDTIME FOR BONZO, but David Boaz says it’s better than advertised: “I wonder how many liberal journalists have ever watched Bedtime for Bonzo. It’s actually quite funny to see Reagan as a young liberal college professor trying to prove the ‘nurture’ side of the nature-vs.-nurture and saying that there are no bad kids, just bad environments.”

Maybe I should order it! (Via Jesse Walker).

A.C. KLEINHEIDER: “I grew up in New Jersey and I will tell you right now, there is nothing, and I mean nothing worse than toll roads. There are reasons that people migrate down South from the Yankee north. I am sure no one has ever moved out the North explicitly because of toll roads but they are a symptom of a greater disease.”

When I lived in Connecticut, an anti-toll group noted that the toll revenue barely sufficed to pay for the toll collections. The response: “It produces jobs!” It’s like Bastiat’s “negative railway” without the humor.

BIPARTISAN RECOGNITION OF D.C. GUN-LAW STUPIDITY: Democrat Taylor Marsh writes; “The incident surrounding Senator James Webb not only became a one-liner in Bush’s stand up last night, but it has been illuminating. The D.C. gun laws, one of which was recently overturned by the Court of Appeals after 30 years on the books, sound like the most ridiculous set of laws ever to be enacted. I mean really, you can bring an unloaded gun into the Capitol but you can’t travel through the D.C. streets with that same gun on the way to the Capitol?”

UPDATE: Guns and Poses.

SMEARS AGAINST IRAQ THE MODEL: And this response.

Is there any enemy of America that the left won’t side with? Or any friend that the left won’t oppose? No.

OVER AT OPINIO JURIS, an interesting online symposium on challenges to public international law.

One challenge, it seems to me, is the prevalence of double standards.

UPDATE: Ouch: “If the standards are not consistent, it is simply not a regime of law, is it? It is a fig leaf for something completely different and, inevitably, something far less benign.”

ANOTHER MODEST STEP FORWARD FOR CIVIL RIGHTS: Texas’ governor Rick Perry has signed the “no retreat” law.

PROTECTING THE READERS FROM FACTS THEY DON’T NEED: At the L.A. Times, where readers can always count on that kind of protection!

AL GORE as Clarence Darrow? It’s not an analogy that I would have thought of.

I DON’T THINK THIS PHENOMENON IS CENTERED IN WASHINGTON, THOUGH: Human evolution is accelerating.

PORK WINS, troops lose.

THE GENEVA CONVENIENCE: Seldom has the double standard been so clearly illustrated.

GOOD: “Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) introduced the District of Columbia Personal Protection Act of 2007, a bill to restore Second Amendment rights in Washington, D.C.”

I wonder if Jim Webb will cosponsor.

DIANNE FEINSTEIN blazes a trail for women.