End the War on Freedom

"I am very concerned about proliferation of small arms among the people most likely to misuse it: police officers, Treasury, BLM and FDA employees. I'd like MMM to address that pressing problem." -- Oleg Volk

# Accurate Reloading - Welcome to ACCURATE RELOADING'S VIDEO PAGE - check out the 577 T. Rex videos. They show various people suffering the recoil of this large caliber rifle (750 grains at over 2000 fps). Hehe. [highroad]

[the videos have moved to Accurate Reloading's forums. To view them, go to forums.accuratereloading.com, click on the "Click here to enter the Accurate Reloading Forums" link, click "Enter/Join" on the right-hand side at the top of the forum list box, click the "I am not registered on: The Accurate Reloading Forums" radio button, and fill out the form. Then scroll down to the last forum section, "AR VIDEOS", and click on "THE CHAMPIONS". Finally, click on the single message in that section, "The big guns", and you'll be taken to a message with links to the videos, and instructions on how to access them.]

# Ananova - Top doc backs picking your nose and eating it - can't tell if this is tongue-in-cheek or not, but hey, it's nice to get some support for something I've been doing for as long as I can remember. [grabbe]

Picking your nose and eating it is one of the best ways to stay healthy, according to a top Austrian doctor.

Innsbruck-based lung specialist Prof Dr Friedrich Bischinger said people who pick their noses with their fingers were healthy, happier and probably better in tune with their bodies.

He says society should adopt a new approach to nose-picking and encourage children to take it up.

Dr Bischinger said: "With the finger you can get to places you just can't reach with a handkerchief, keeping your nose far cleaner.

"And eating the dry remains of what you pull out is a great way of strengthening the body's immune system.

# Ron Paul's Texas Straight Talk - Iraq One Year Later - over 550 Americans have died in Iraq and 10,000 have been wounded. Was it worth it? No way.

Is America better off as a result of our war in Iraq? The young men and women who were hurt or killed certainly are no better off. Their families are no better off. Taxpayers are no better off. Whether we are safer from terrorism here at home is an open question. We all hope and pray nothing happens. But even our own intelligence forces cautioned that an invasion and occupation of Muslim Iraq could breed resentment among sympathetic Muslims and serve as a recruiting tool for al Qaeda. As commentator Lew Rockwell states, "It is not caving in to the bees to stop poking a stick into their hive."

Are the Iraqis better off? Saddam is gone, along with his murderous cohorts, and that certainly presents a positive opportunity for the Iraqi people. But we cannot be sure that the Hussein regime will be replaced by something better. Iraq is still very unstable and divided between Sunni, Shiite, and Kurd factions. Civil war could ensue upon the departure of American troops.

# Thomas L. Knapp at Rational Review - Speechifyin' in Hot Springs - Mr. Knapp's talk at the Arkansas Libertarian Party Convention last Saturday. [smith2004]

As a grunt -- an infantry NCO -- a lot of your training consists of walking around in the woods, stopping occasionally for a class on one aspect or another of the art and science of killing other grunts. So, one morning, having marched a few miles through the woods, my platoon pulled up some real estate and our company first sergeant gave a class on perimeter security. Half an hour later, having refreshed our knowledge, we stood up to go on ... and I looked down and noticed that my once-green camouflage trousers were black. Other Marines were noticing a similar transformation in their own clothing.

We'd stopped for our class in the biggest deer tick bed on the planet, and they weren't just on our uniforms. They were having us for dinner. I picked more than 200 of them off my legs and, uh, more intimate areas before I stopped counting. A couple of guys ended up in the hospital with allergic reactions to the bites, and somewhere out there I suspect a couple of cases of Lyme Disease turned up.

That's my Arkansas story for today. I've actually told it a few times elsewhere, because for me it illustrates a key characteristic of government.

In the post 9/11 era, we're largely absorbed in "big issues." Foreign policy. Civil liberties and the PATRIOT Act. The things that dominate the daily news.

But I could make the case that it's the little things that kill. The regulations and laws and taxes and beureaucratic edicts that latch onto you and suck your blood whenever you stop moving and try to do something productive. The little pork amendments to every congressional appropriation for a bridge here, a defense contract there, until, as Everett Dirksen said, "a billion dollars here, a billion dollars there, and before you know it, we're talking real money."

Yeah, government's a big ugly beast ... but it's also a million tiny parasites who combine to drain us dry. For every Bill Clinton with big ideas, there's 500 Asa Hutchisons with little ideas that are just as bad and not as noticeable ... until you look down and notice them crawling all over you.

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