From Newsday's Web site:

The United States has 90 guns for every 100 citizens, making it the most heavily armed society in the world, a report released yesterday said.

U.S. citizens own 270 million of the world's 875 million known firearms, according to the Small Arms Survey 2007 by the Geneva-based Graduate Institute of International Studies.

On a per-capita basis, Yemen had the second most heavily armed citizenry, with 61 guns per 100 people, followed by Finland with 56, Switzerland with 46, Iraq with 39 and Serbia with 38.

-- David Eldridge, managing editor, WashingtonTimes.com

The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights isn't usually the stuff of comedy, but Nigel Ashford got plenty of laughs Tuesday as he discussed such provisions of the 1948 U.N. document as these:

Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security ...

Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection. ...

Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.

"Whatever they are, they're bloody well not human rights," Ashford said, speaking at a "Conservatism on Tap" event at the District Chophouse, sponsored by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

Ashford recalled his reaction on first reading, as a schoolboy in his native England, the preamble of the Declaration of Independence, with its assertion of the "self-evident" truth that "all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Ashford said he still gets "goosebumps" when he hears those words.

However, Ashford said, the concept of human rights has been "abused by the left" to advance interests that are not actually rights. Meanwhile, real human rights are sometimes ignored, especially the right to property -- "what I call the forgotten right," Ashford said.

"When was the last time you heard a human rights activist complain about the violation of property rights?" he said.

-- Robert Stacy McCain, assistant national editor, The Washington Times

Megan McArdle, the libertarian blogger known as Jane Galt, has joined the blog lineup at the Atlantic Monthly.

Take a look at the rest of the Atlantic's bloggers, and see if you can't discern a certain pattern in the educational pedigree:

Ross Douthat -- Harvard.

Matthew Yglesias -- Harvard.

Marc Armbinder -- Harvard.

James Fallows -- Harvard, graduate degree from Oxford.

Andrew Sullivan -- Oxford, with master's and Ph.D. from Harvard.

Failure to gain admission to Harvard University, it seems, is tantamount to permanent disqualification from the staff of the Atlantic. It's a club, a clique, an elitist fraternity. Or at least it was, until they invited Miss McArdle to join. Not that she's exactly a peasant with a pitchfork -- she got her bachelor's degree at Penn before getting an MBA from the University of Chicago -- but compared to the other members of the Atlantic's all-Harvard blog crew, Miss McArdle is a provincial plebian.

For some years now, bloggers have been portrayed (and have portrayed themselves) as grass-roots outsiders, rebels storming the privileged bastions of the journalistic elite. I'm not sure that image was ever accurate, and the hierarchy of the blogosphere is probably becoming more elitist every day, as more establishment organizations seek to carve out a place in the medium.

It might be worthwhile, if only as a research project, to catalog the credentials of leading bloggers (e.g., Ana Marie Cox, U Chicago '94/Berkeley grad school) in order to develop a true picture of the socioeconomic context of blogging. I'll bet Jacksonville (Ala.) State University alumni -- like myself and James Joyner of Outside the Beltway -- are few and far between in the blogosphere.

-- Robert Stacy McCain, assistant national editor, The Washington Times

UPDATE:

James Joyner comments:

[I]t stands to reason that the blogosphere would be dominated by academics and lawyers, who tend to have both the intellectual training and the time available to spend large chunks of their day processing information and churning out interesting commentary on it.

-- RSM

Tuesday's Culture Briefs include an excerpt of a column by Johns Hopkins University economics professor Steve H. Hanke:

A true intellectual conveys to the public new ideas on a wide range of subjects, unearthing these notions long before most people do. That is the essence of Nobel laureate Friedrich von Hayek's definition of an intellectual. In his 1949 University of Chicago Law Review essay "The Intellectuals and Socialism," Hayek also underlined that for better or worse, intellectuals are more important than most people think. After all, they shape public opinion.

Austrian economist Hayek was one of Ronald Reagan's favorite thinkers. And Reagan, by Hayek's definition, was an intellectual. Reagan the intellectual? The book "Reagan, In His Own Hand" (2001) answers that question. This volume ... contains 259 essays Reagan wrote in his own hand, mainly scripts for his five-minute, five-day-a-week syndicated radio broadcasts in the late 1970s. They are awe-inspiring in their breadth of subject matter. And they laid out the philosophical framework for his presidency. ...

No wonder Reagan always appeared to be relaxed and in control. He had thought things through.

Mr. Hanke's column in Globe Asia makes an excellent point. Reagan, it should be remembered, was originally a Democrat -- he proudly cast his first vote in 1932 for Franklin Roosevelt -- and a very liberal Democrat, at that. In his memoir "Where's the Rest of Me?" Reagan jokingly described himself as "a near-hopeless hemophiliac liberal," saying "I bled for 'causes.' " In fact, although he later became famous as an anti-communist, Reagan in the 1940s had unwittingly joined two communist "front" groups in Hollywood.

To have shifted not merely from Democrat to Republican, but from fellow-traveler to anti-communist, Reagan had to think very deeply about what he believed and why he believed it. And, as Mr. Hanke points out, Friedrich Hayek had a profound influence on Reagan's understanding of the relationship between the free market and the free society. Anyone familiar with Reagan's philosophy can see certain seeds of it in Hayek's essay "Socialism and the Intellectuals" (online in PDF form, thanks to the Mises Institute):

Socialism has never and nowhere been at first a working-class movement. ... It is a construction of theorists, deriving from certain tendencies of abstract thought with which for a long time only the intellectuals were familiar. ...
In every country that has moved toward socialism, the phase of the development in which socialism becomes a determining influence on politics has been preceded for many years by a period during which socialist ideals governed the thinking of the more active intellectuals. ....

Critics of Reagan have at times suggested that his conservative views were "anti-intellectual." But what Reagan was actual "anti-" was the elitist views of those intellectuals who, as Hayek pointed out, favored abstract theories that had little support among the working class. Hayek's insight was echoed in Reagan's first inaugural address:

From time to time we've been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else? ...

We hear much of special interest groups. Well, our concern must be for a special interest group that has been too long neglected. It knows no sectional boundaries or ethnic and racial divisions, and it crosses political party lines. It is made up of men and women who raise our food, patrol our streets, man our mines and factories, teach our children, keep our homes, and heal us when we're sick -- professionals, industrialists, shopkeepers, clerks, cabbies, and truck drivers. They are, in short, "we the people," this breed called Americans.

Reagan had more faith in ordinary Americans than in those elitist intellectuals whom Hayek derided as "secondhand dealers in ideas." Hayek called on the friends of freedom to "make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage." Reagan answered that call, and inspired others to join the adventure.

-- Robert Stacy McCain, assistant national editor, The Washington Times