FN P90
"What's the difference between a boyfriend and a husband? About 30 pounds." -- Cindy Gardner
# Kim du Toit - Gratuitous Gun Pic: FN P90 (5.7x28mm) - a review of a futuristic-looking Belgian sub-machine gun from FN Herstal. NATO has chosen this as its next small arm. [kimdutoit]
# Fred Reed at LewRockwell.com - I Love the Media - why the major print media is having a progressively harder time selling its stuff. [lew]
Every year a conclave of editors and publishers laments the decline in circulation and blames illiteracy or television or the alignment of the planets. It's someone else's fault. Recently I saw a story, perhaps on Wired.com, saying that the media are finally realizing that bloggers and small web-only sites are undercutting them. How very alert of them. This too is someone else's fault. One reporter thought it was because people want bias.
Permit me to offer another explanation: People weary of the usual media because they aren't very good. How's that for a shattering insight? (This column is big on shattering insights.)
...
Third, the media are controlled, controlled, controlled. It is easy not to notice just how controlled. For example, people are interested in crime and the police. Ever see a television station put a cop on camera and let him talk for half an hour about what it's really like out there? Never happen. An honest cop couldn't manage three sentences without saying something perfectly true but forbidden.
...
Now, compare this with the world of bloggery. If it is your blog (or website), you are the editor. You aren't afraid of advertisers because you don't have any. No one sits at the next desk. If you want to, you can write under an assumed name. Them as wants to read it, will; them as don't, won't. The choice is entirely between you and the reader.
The net is...gasp...a truly free press.
# Jerome Tuccille at LewRockwell.com - Gearing Up For the Next Military Draft - could start as early as June, 2005. And your choices should you not want to go will be reduced to violence or prison. My son will turn 18 in 2010. If they try to draft him, I'll volunteer to assist him with the former. Who's my real enemy here, an Iraqi patriot half a world away or the draft board employee threatening to arrest my kid if he doesn't go there to die? [lew]
If Bush is reelected in November and succeeds in his quest for a new military draft, it will surely be even more odious in its implementation than the one that existed before 1970. For one thing, the loopholes that allowed Bush to escape service in Vietnam during his own youth will be tightened nearly to extinction. Canada will no longer be a safe haven for Americans seeking refuge from this latest incarnation of American slavery as it was in the late 1960s, thanks to the "Smart Border Declaration," the Orwellian name given to a treaty signed by Canada's Minister of Foreign Affairs John Manley, and U.S. Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge. This insidious document calls for a "pre-clearance agreement" of people entering and departing each country and, in an effort to make the draft more "equitable" along gender and class lines, also eliminates higher education as a shelter. It's as though Bush examined the escape hatches that were available when he was threatened with enforced military duty and is determined to make sure they are no longer an option for the latest generation of draft-age Americans.
