Britain has a massive problem with burglary, a problem compounded by the indifference of the police and the frequently hostile attitude taken by the authorities to the householder who tries to defend himself. There’s a good editorial on this topic in the latest London Spectator, but no mention, alas, of something that might help sort out this problem.

A law giving Britons rights roughly equivalent to the Second Amendment

What's wrong with the EU 'consitution'? Noel Malcolm explains. In addition to the familiar – and valid – objections, there’s this:

"But if this draft European Constitution is in some ways a typical federal constitution, in other ways it is one of the most disturbingly untypical constitutions ever written. The purpose of any constitution is to set out the fundamental structure of authority of the state - the powers of the parliament, government and judiciary, the basic rules for elections and citizenship, and so on. A constitution is about legality and political authority. It is not about the particular policies which a government, once it was legally elected, might or might not wish to pursue.

This constitution, on the other hand, is stuffed full of policy statements. The third of its four main sections is actually entitled "The Policies and Functioning of the Union". These policies are mostly defined in terms of "objectives", which range from the sublime ("peace" and "social justice") to the ridiculous ("protecting the physical and moral integrity of sportsmen and sportswomen").

They include full employment; "high levels" of health protection and consumer protection; "dialogue between management and labour"; reducing disparities between the regions; raising the incomes of farmers; and, by the by, eradicating poverty in the developing world. In addition, there is a lengthy "Charter of Fundamental Rights", which contains a further wish-list of policies (workers' consultation, the universal right to strike, and so on).

Most of these matters are the sort of thing which, in any democratic state, are left to the politicians to deal with. Some are necessarily contentious (imagine the howls of protest if Mrs Thatcher had tried to impose a British constitution which said that governments must not make full employment their priority). Others, even if universally approved, must still be subject to political decisions, because resources will always be finite. Yet in the new Europe, these policy "objectives" will be constitutional imperatives; the European Parliament will be able to "request" that they be implemented; and, most crucially of all, "the Union shall provide itself with the means necessary to attain its objectives". "

Democracy? Not if Brussels gets its way.

The nuns, presented as consistently evil, money-grubbing, merciless hags, have no emotional depth. They are as exaggerated in their sadism as Ingrid Bergman is in celestial benevolence in "The Bells of St. Mary's" -- the film Sister Bridget sheds a crocodile tear over at a Christmas screening. Not one ounce of human kindness -- not to mention Christian compassion -- can be found under any wimple or collar.

This painting with broad brush strokes is better suited for the propagandist than the dramatist. Regrettably, drama is jettisoned along with objectivity since this kind of stacking the deck drains the narrative of any inner tension. The result is a cavalcade of cartoonish vignettes which present to viewers about as nuanced a picture of Irish nuns as 1915's "The Birth of a Nation" did of African-Americans.

According to one who attended, Shriver, a veteran journalist for NBC News, sat at one end of the table, the action star at the other. "She ran the meeting," this agent said of the grilling, which continued even after Schwarzenegger left the room.

The message: To win Arnold, you had to win over Maria.

Shriver's strong hand in Schwarzenegger's professional choices suddenly looms as a factor in California's political future. As Schwarzenegger deliberates a run for governor on the Oct. 7 recall ballot, nearly a dozen business intimates say the decision will be heavily influenced by a wife who has often functioned as a de facto personal manager.

FMCSA finds no inconsistency in its authorization to States to offer CDL tests in languages other than English, while at the same time requiring motor carrier employers to ensure a level of English proficiency for drivers on our public highways. The tests, training and study manuals associated with obtaining a CDL are complex. Therefore, the administration of the CDL test in languages other than English is justified.

So the question for the Americans is not whether you want to send 2,000 boys in to get picked off for a few months, until whichever warlord is willing to be bought can be installed as head of a provisional government after a token ‘election’ for the benefit of the international community (Taylor held his in 1997). The question is whether you want to commit yourself to fixing West Africa.

I know how most Americans would answer that. But the Bush administration thinks more about the Dark Continent than its predecessor did. Disease in Africa, for example, has been identified as a potential national security threat. An American diplomat recently described to me the war on terror as a Saudi civil war that the Saudis had successfully exported to the rest of the world. What would it take to export West Africa’s troubles to the world? For some no-account nickel’n’dime operator, Charles Taylor has done a grand job of destabilising a region. Where’s next? Benin? Togo? If you don’t think West Africa can be contained, it’ll have to be cured, and that’s a 30-year project. Otherwise, George F. Kennan’s argument against intervention in Somalia holds for the west of the continent, too: ‘This dreadful situation cannot possibly be put to rights other than by the establishment of a governing power for the entire territory, and a very ruthless, determined one at that. It would not be a democratic one, because the very prerequisites for a democratic political system do not exist among the people in question.’

On the other hand, if anyone in the Bush administration were to start talking about Liberia in those terms, you can pretty much guarantee that Howard Dean, Bishop Griswold and all the other enthusiastic interventionists would be marching up and down chanting, ‘It’s all about diamonds!’

The Rolling Stones (sorry, David) have been performing in Prague. Amongst the highlights, an appearance by Vaclav Havel. He appeared on stage and presented a T-shirt to Keith Richards. The T-Shirt's slogan?

"F--k the Communists."

Press reports note that the T-shirt drew "laughs and applause" from the audience.

Czech communists are, reportedly, offended by this gesture. Well, Havel is right, f--k 'em. Their party was responsible for the murder, jailing or exile of tens of thousands of people - and that's really something to be 'offended' by.

Stan - I agree that Canada's policies on gay marriage are significant, but they do not constitute an irresistable undertow for the United States of America. We are different countries. If Canada were our future we would be holding bake sales for the Pentagon budget and the Post Office would be running health care. Americans and Canadians have many things in common but they also have a great many things not in common. Arguing that Canada is leading the way for the US must be demonstrated. And the historical record on major issues like health care, foreign policy, the United Nations, taxes, etc etc suggests that such a demonstration would be at least difficult.

As for the American Law Institute, I don't know enough, but I don't see why we have to let the American Law Institute settle these questions for us. You assert that the Law Commission of Canada and the ALI are "rough equivalents" in your Standard piece. I take you at your word, but I do know a little about the Canadian Law Commission's power and influence -- as well as Canada's general acceptance of rule by the courts -- and I must say I'm a little skeptical that the ALI has the same authority here.

And as for slippery slopes, I have a long record as a skeptic of such arguments, but all I'll add is that I agree with Noah Millman. If you are going to use them at all, you need to demonstrate very carefully that A must force B into existence and that B requires C and so on. You cannot simply say that B is more likely once A happens, or that it would be intellectually consistent if supporters of A also campaigned for B. People aren't consistent and they don't follow through on their convictions simply because a straight-line prediction of their rhetoric suggests they should.

Andrew floats a compromise: a constitutional amendment guaranteeing that states wouldn't have to recognize one another's same-sex marriages. (He says he doesn't support it but offers it as a suggestion. I'm not sure on what grounds he does not support it wholeheartedly, given the federalist case he makes for it.) I might support his modified marriage amendment if it were modified again, to reach down to bar state judiciaries from imposing same-sex marriage. Andrew doesn't seem to object to such judicial activism.

He writes, "Much bigger majorities opposed inter-racial marriage in 1967, when it was finally protected, than now oppose same-sex marriage. But then those evil judicial activists imposed equal marriage rights on an unwilling populace." Does anyone have any numbers on this? Had no states democratically lifted their prohibitions on interracial marriage in 1967? Did sizable majorities think that interracial marriage was not only something to be avoided, but something to ban?

I am a business lobbyist (and lifelong NR reader) and I will be speaking before a group of college-age students from Arab nations.

I've read so many NRO column... that I can't remember the most salient one on the development of the Arab world, esp. the need for mitigating civic institutions (independent judiciary, mosque/state separation, secure property rights, and so on).

Could you please recommend the best items from the NRO archive so I can use them as handouts for my students? I just learned a few minutes ago that I'm up against the state political director of AFL-CIO, who has truly far-left views on government intervention in the economy.

Nicholas Antongiavanni of the Claremont Institute is miffed that various respondents to his post about John have failed to understand its nuances. It is the constant lament of a writer. In this case, the headline over Antongiavanni's post contributed to the confusion (if it is a confusion). My own disagreements with Antongiavanni--always leaving open the possibility that I too am insufficiently attuned to his deeper meanings--are several. (I will leave aside his assumption that he knows the ins and outs of personnel decisions at National Review.)

First, he conflates paleoconservatism with foreign-policy realism. The paleos may like realism better than neoconservatism, and some of them may even think of themselves as realists, but there really is no reason to treat a realist turn as a paleo turn. Calling the paleos isolationists isn't exactly right either, but it's closer to the truth than calling them realists--and surely nobody needs instruction on the difference between realism and isolationism?

Second: Having characterized the National Interest's philosophy on the basis of three articles contained in one issue of it, Antongiavanni goes on to complain that his views are being attributed to Claremont as an institution. I think it much fairer to say that the journal has been open to various views, with a strong tilt toward a non-paleoconservative realism. John is friendly with various paleos, and I do not doubt that a few of them will be published in the National Interest. But I wouldn't go further than that.

Finally, I don't believe it is true that O'Sullivan has a "paleo-realist background," unless opposition to continuous mass immigration is all it takes to be a paleo (in which case I'm one too). Certainly National Review under John's editorship was not a paleo mag.

“I have degrees in electrical, mechanical and metallurgical engineering and a certification in nuclear engineering and I can find no flaws in the technology. They are going on-line at a Con-Agra plant in Missouri this week, making turkey offal into #2 diesel and water…. When I first read about it, I thought it have the sociological impact of manned flight... I still think so.”

Nice profile of Mickey Kaus. Personally, I want to read one about Derb.

Sugar, if you think that's porn browsing you've got to change the filters on your browser. But if you must know a "friend" sent it to me.

Andrew, I'm with you. As I mentioned Monday, I think it will be very interesting to see how people respond to JOS's stewardship of The National Interest. For years, people have called the National Interest "neocon" solely, it seems, because Irving Kristol founded it and it is the sister publication of the Public Interest. But this has always been a superficial and lazy categorization. I mean, just look at the name. It's the National Interest. If it were the "neocon" publication the ignorant claim it is, you'd think it would have some other title like maybe "The Human Interest." The magazine has always been realist with a tolerance for certain neoconservative arguments when they dovetail with America's national interests. Also, many observers have long misunderstood Irving Kristol's foreign policy which has always been less "neo" than, say, Bill Kristol's. Irving was for US withdrawal from NATO when such suggestions elicited cries of "isolationism" from Norman Podhoretz and the Commentary crowd when offered by others. In fact, it would make a great article to see how much Irving and Bill Kristol disagree over foreign policy. My guess is they disagree a lot.

As for John O'Sullivan, I may disagree with him on some issues, but the idea that he's a "Paleocon" of the Buchanan variety is also a distortion and I'm surprised anyone at Claremont would say such a thing. As a close observer of the NI (Full disclosure: I dated three female editorial staffers there (at different times), and the best man at my wedding is a former Managing Editor), I think JOS is both an exciting and logical choice for the job.

Too many people talk about "neos" and "paleos" like they're names on baseball cards -- identifiable by a team name and a uniform and little else. But don't get me started on that.

Technological savvy could turn 600 million tons of turkey guts and other waste into 4 billion barrels of light Texas crude each year.

I don't want to get too deep back into the gay marriage stuff. But I thought it might be helpful to point out something: just because queer radicals -- or whatever they're called -- want to open the floodgates to let the entire Star Wars cantina into the institution of marriage does not mean they will be successful (and again, I'm not in favor of same-sex marriages, but I do favor some compromise on unions).

First of all, the radicals are right that marriage -- same sex or hetero -- is an inherently conservative institution. The slippery slopists too often take for granted that pro-marriage homosexuals will be enemies in the fight against polyamory, incestuous marriage and the like. But it's just as likely that many of these folks would be allies in such a fight -- as the radicals fear. It is human nature to protect what you have. And I suspect that many same-sex couples would suddenly become quite "conservative" on some of these other assaults.

Second, anti-marriage radicals have not won their arguments on purely heterosexual terms either. For example, when I was the producer of the PBS series "Think Tank," we did a show on whether divorce is too easy. One of our guests was Ellen Willis, a radical feminist, left-libertarian. I don't have the transcript, but she made one incredibly memorable comment which has always stuck with me. The gist of it was that when she was younger she'd hoped to have children one day in a communal arrangement where her neighbors and friends saw no distinctions between her children and their own. My child is your child and vice versa. She was dismayed that when she finally did have children no such communities existed. Of course, this runs entirely counter to human nature and is baldly absurd. I remember thinking at the time that this was how certain breeds of penguin raise their offspring. If a mommy penguin takes five babies penguins into the water, she must come out with five baby penguins. But they don't have to be the same ones she went in with.

Now, I may be butchering my understanding of the chick-rearing behaviors of penguins (I'd learned all that on a nature show, I think). But I'm fairly certain I've got the spirit of Willis' remarks right. My point is that radicals believe in all sorts of crazy guano, not just crazy stuff about gays. And, they are rarely fully successful and even more rarely completely satisfied. The assumption I think many of the opponents of gay marriage are making is that if the radicals are successful on A, they will also be successful on B, C, D, E, and all the way through Z. But each success breeds a response and changes the dynamics of the debate. We saw this with feminism and loads of other isms. The radical feminists wanted the moon and their opponents believed if the feminists succeeded at any stage of their campaign they would succeed at all of them. But the reality was that after their first major successes -- voting, for example -- the appeal of their movement and their arguments withered because the context changed and the radicals lost popular support. Static analysis doesn't work in economics and it doesn't work in culture either.

Bishop Fred Caldwell said he will pay $5 per hour for Sunday services and $10 an hour for the Thursday service. The idea came to him during his sermon Sunday. “Our churches are too segregated, and the Lord never intended for that to happen. It's time for something radical."

"I just want the kingdom of God to look like it's supposed to," he said. "There ain't going to be ghettoes in heaven."

Porn star action figures. Obviously, this link isn't for everyone.

Al Hunt offers a nice round-up of the conventional wisdom in his WSJ column. The only thing that bugs me is that he starts from the premise that because partisan Republicans and partisan Democrats are deeply split -- pro vs. con, obviously -- on George W. Bush that therefore Bush must be a deeply polarizing figure. There are a whole bundle of assumptions behind this very common thinking. First, it assumes that the country would be better off if the President always split the difference between black and white. Second, it assumes that this is somehow surprising or unnatural in a country evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. There is this bizarre notion that saw full flower during the McCain boomlet that "indepedent" thinking -- i.e. a little conservative, a little liberal, some Democrat, some Republican -- is somehow more intellectually honest than being all on one side of the issue or the other. Of course, some issues are more complicated than the party lines sometimes suggest, but there's no reason to believe that simply shmushing (not a word, but you get me) together the two "extreme" positions is any less simple-minded.

The economy grew by a better than expected 2.4% in the last quarter.

UPDATE: Woops. I should have said the economy grew at an annualized rate of 2.4%. The economy isn't growing at 10% -- yet.

“ A 24-year-old man was sentenced to death in Bangladesh for throwing acid on his nine-year-old bride, disfiguring and blinding her for life, prosecution lawyers said on Tuesday….

The Acid Survivors Foundation, a charity working for the acid victims, said the use of acid in domestic violence is on the rise in Bangladesh. The victims of acid attacks are usually women and girls…

Child marriages are banned in Bangladesh under the law, but the practice is nevertheless prevalent mostly in rural villages.”

I've never met Mr. Pryor, but his political life is a matter of public record. He has served the State of Alabama with distinction, enforcing its laws and court decisions fairly and consistently. This is why President Bush nominated him to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and why the Senate Judiciary Committee approved him last Wednesday for consideration by the full Senate.

But the committee debate on Pryor was ugly, and the vote to advance his nomination split exactly along party lines. Why? Because Mr. Pryor believes that Catholic teaching about the sanctity of life is true; that the 1973 Supreme Court Roe v. Wade decision was a poorly reasoned mistake; and that abortion is wrong in all cases, even rape and incest. As a result, Americans were treated to the bizarre spectacle of non-Catholic Senators Orrin Hatch and Jeff Sessions defending Mr. Pryor's constitutionally protected religious rights to Mr. Pryor's critics, including Senator Richard Durbin, an "abortion-rights" Catholic.

According to Senator Durbin (as reported by EWTN), "Many Catholics who oppose abortion personally do not believe the laws of the land should prohibit abortion for all others in extreme cases involving rape, incest and the life and the health of the mother." This kind of propaganda makes the abortion lobby proud, but it should humiliate any serious Catholic. At a minimum, Catholic members of Congress like Senator Durbin should actually read and pray over the "Catechism of the Catholic Church" and the encyclical "Evangelium Vitae" before they explain the Catholic faith to anyone.

You would think that if any member of the Senate Armed Services Committee understood a thing or two about futures markets, it would be the Cattle Queen of Arkansas, Hillary Rodham Clinton. Not only did Clinton display Soros-esque market timing during her days as a futures speculator, but she's a native of Chicago, home of the Chicago Board of Trade and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. (It was the Merc where she famously turned $10,000 into $100,000 on cattle futures.) But the junior senator from New York was derisively dramatic when she described the Pentagon's proposed futures market for predicting terrorist strikes as a "futures market in death" as if it were a financial version of the death match in Stephen King's Running Man.