End the War on Freedom

From kimdutoit:

This is not necessarily true of individual law enforcement officers: my favorite story is of an Alabama cop who, on seeing a dead burglar sprawled in a living room, saw the three shots to the goblin's chest and commented: "Good grouping."

Unfortunately, this excellent attitude is conspicuously absent from most district attorneys and other foul government types, to whom activist citizens are a nightmare, because they can't be controlled.

Kim du Toit

# NBC10.com - Rocket Plane Makes First Private Space Flight - I posted this around noon yesterday, but I'm doing it again for people who only read once a day and might have missed it. Includes the only freely-available videos I've seen so far of the take-off and landing of SpaceShipOne's flight on Monday. The landing video is excellent. No parachute. It stops by the friction of the front strut. Elegant. Videos probably only work on Windoze. [google]

# Bob Wallace at The Libertarian Enterprise - Satan in a Three-Piece Suit - an entertaining anti-politician rant. [tle]

I'm not grateful to any of them for anything, no matter what name they go under or what wonders they claim they've done for me, as if wars and taxes and inflation are wonders in anything outside of an H.P. Lovecraft story. I consider nearly all politicians to be big gasbags of lies walking around with little human heads on top. Whether the little human heads are smiling or not is irrelevant.

Even that gasbag description isn't quite right. Better? "Rodents of Unusually Human Appearance" is more accurate. Best of all? Huge swarms of parasitical bacteria shaped like people.

Almost all of them wouldn't know the truth if it smacked them like a Greyhoud bus. If anyone told them what is was they'd probably lie on their backs like bugs and point and laugh at you. Lying is such a nasty habit that kids used to have their mouths washed out with soap. It makes me wish I had some kind of wizardly powers, so every time a politician told a lie I could point my wand at him and a bar of Palmolive would appear in his mouth. That would be especially good on TV: "And if elected I promise to--urf! urf!"

# Duncan Campbell and Suzanne Goldenberg at Guardian Unlmited - 'They said this is America . . . if a soldier orders you to take off your clothes, you must obey' - You think things were bad at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay? They were worse in Afghanistan. [whatreallyhappened]

In some ways, the abuses in Afghanistan are more troubling than those reported in Iraq," said John Sifton, the Human Rights Watch representative in the area. "While it is true that abuses in Afghanistan often lacked the sexually abusive content of the abuses in Iraq, they were in many ways worse. Detainees were severely beaten, exposed to cold and deprived of sleep and water.

"Moreover, it should be noted that the detention system in Afghanistan, unlike the system in Iraq, is not operated even nominally in compliance with the Geneva conventions. The detainees are never given an opportunity to see any independent tribunal. There is no legal process whatsoever and not even an attempt at one. The entire system operates outside the rule of law. At least in Iraq, the US is trying to run a system that meets Geneva standards. In Afghanistan, they are not."

# Bryan Henderson at Protest Warrior - Operation Tiger Claw - a West Virginia high school student tells his story of fighting for permission to post signs in his school. Examples: "Stop the vicious spread of wealth creation! Vote Green, and let's all be poor and miserable equally." "Except for ending slavery, fascism, nazism, and communism, War has never solved anything." "Liberating Iraqi children from tyranny is costing too much." "End the Arab occupation of Jewish land." "Saddam only killed his own people. It was none of our business." "Communism has only killed 100 million people... [unreadable]." I don't agree with his pro-war anti-Arab stance, but I like his style. [culpepperlog]

# Bob Wallace at The Price of Liberty - The Coming Housing Crash - there's a boom in housing prices, caused by the fed's inflationary increase of the money supply and low interest rates. Such booms are always followed by crashes. If you buy a house before the crash, don't be surprised when it becomes comparitively worthless afterwards. [price]

# Kim du Toit - Truck Guns - or "trunk guns" for those of us who drive sedans instead of pickup trucks. Some characteristics of truck guns and recommendations for country and city dwellers.

Truthfully, I suspect that my carry handgun gun would handle almost every encounter of the goblin / other pest variety that I'd be likely to encounter, and I carry a little .22 Mag snake gun in the toolbox anyway, for the "smaller" emergencies. But I carry the rifle in the truck because of that word "almost"...

Call it extra insurance, or "just because" -- either reason will suffice.

# Bushmaster .308 Rifles all readily accept FN-FAL magazines, which are still pretty cheap, especially compared to M14/M1A mags. Of course they suffer from the M16's "shits where it eats" problem. And at over $1,865 a pop (for the carbines), they ain't cheap. You could buy the Springfield SOCOM 16 and three magazines instead and have, IMHO, a nicer rifle. [survivalarts]

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