Your ability to defend your turf is an ongoing endeavor.

Yesterday, for example, I was reading about the military’s ongoing controversy between the M4 and the M16.  For you and me, it comes down to what you’re comfortable handling.

I want you to consider adding an AR-15, to your self-defense arsenal. Think of your self-defense strategy in terms of many different scenarios.

If there’s a bang in the night and I need to move through the house quickly then I’ll go to my 9mm Sig Sauer 226 which is the standard issue Navy SEAL sidearm. And if time and space aren’t an issue, I’ll opt for my Mossberg 590A shotgun.

But I’d also consider my Colt AR-15, especially if I need to defend a position without firing a shot, which I’ll explain in a minute.

The nice thing about my carbine is that it’s light, allowing me to move around with speed. It also has a magazine that holds 30 rounds. And the recoil is nothing.

If you’ve ever shot rounds from a shotgun for five hours straight like I have at Sig Sauer Academy, you know the recoil is painful. I experienced the flinch in anticipation of the next shot—to save my arm/shoulder—wreaking havoc on my accuracy. And reloading with one tired, beaten up arm takes strength and dexterity similar to playing Mozart with one hand while holding the piano up with the other.

My wife Becky can handle the carbine with ease. No flinching. No arm aches. And accurate at close range and at several yards away.

If you ever have to defend your position without firing a shot I’ll put the carbine right up there with the shotgun. Both are intimidating.

We’ve all walked by a police officer with holstered pistol and know that intimidating feeling. But the intimidation of an officer with a carbine slung over his shoulder is much higher. Use that to your advantage.

The psychological game is over before it starts with the carbine.

The M4 and the M16 controversy will continue but don’t let it hinder your ability to defend your turf.

The Libertarian Mind by David Boaz, executive vice president of Cato, is the #1 new release in Amazon’s Political Ideologies & Doctrines. The book is currently sold out at Amazon.com but you can get the Kindle edition or visit these sellers. Here’s what others are saying:

“America is a country full of people who feel personal liberty and individual responsibility in their guts. This book puts those guts into words. America is also a country full of politicians, academics, and self-possessed elites who mistrust liberty and responsibility to the bottom of their souls. This book plants a kick in that fundament.” – P.J. O’Rourke

“David Boaz wrote the book on libertarianism.” – Vernon L. Smith, Nobel laureate in economics

“For anyone who wants to explore the ideas that are energizing the right and exasperating the left, David Boaz’s clear and often passionate book is the place to begin.” – Jonathan Rauch, Brookings Institution

“The Libertarian Mind is so convincing critics will want to condemn it, regulate it, tax it, fleece it, and forbid it. Fortunately, good ideas haven’t been outlawed — yet.” – Peter Thiel, technology entrepreneur and investor, author of Zero to One

“The Libertarian Mind is a brilliantly updated version of Libertarianism: A Primer. Boaz’s message is both timeless and extraordinarily relevant to the challenges that we are facing today. It deserves to be read carefully and thoughtfully by everyone who truly cares about creating a more ethical and prosperous world.” – John P. Mackey, Cofounder and Co-CEO, Whole Foods Market

David Boaz’s The Libertarian Mind unites history, philosophy, economics and law to bring alive a vital tradition of American political thought that deserves to be honored today in deed as well as in word.” – Richard A. Epstein, New York University School of Law

“David Boaz has been my guide to the history, economics, and politics of freedom for years.” – John Stossel.

David Boaz sits down with Nick Gillespie and Reason.tv for a lengthy discussion on his new book and other liberty related topics:

Nina Teicholz, in The Big Fat Surprise, Why Butter, Meat & Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet , wins the food wars. Teicholz was a student of biology at Yale and Stanford Universities and earned a graduate degree from Oxford University. Nina was a nutrition science writer for Gourmet and a reporter for NPR. She was also a contributor to The New Yorker, the Economist, the Washington Post and The New York Times, as well as the associate director for the Center for Globalization and Sustainable Development at Columbia University.

Nathan Myhrvold, formerly chief technology officer at Microsoft, writes about Nina Teicholz’s ground breaking book: “The Big Fat Surprise delivers on it’s title, exposing the shocking news that much of what everybody knows about a healthy diet is in fact all wrong. The book documents how misunderstanding, misconduct, and bad science caused generations to be misled about nutrition. Anyone interested in either food or health will want to read this book.”

Michael R. Eades, MD coauthor of the New York Times bestseller Protein Power, also weighs in on The Big Fat Surprise: “This meticulously researched book thoroughly dismantles the current dietary dogma that fat—particularly saturated fat—is bad for us. …There aren’t enough superlatives to describe this journalistic tour de force. I read it twice: once for the information, again just for the writing.”

When I am using a book as a research source, the first place I turn to is the bibliography then the index. The exhaustive 47-page bibliography in The Big Fat Surprise is impressive. I was pleased to see so much of the source material  that I have used over the decades in my own independent nutritional science research.

In her concluding chapter, Nina Teicholz writes ‘The advice that comes out of this book is that a higher-fat diet is almost assuredly healthier in every way than one low in fat and high in carbohydrates. The most rigorous science now supports this statement…. pretty much the only possible way to consume enough fat for good health is to eat the saturated fats found in animal foods. Practically speaking, this means eating whole fat dairy, eggs, and meat—even fatty meat. In short: all those rich, forbidden foods we’ve denied ourselves for so long, because those foods are necessarily part of a healthy diet.”

Finally, Ms. Teicholz informs readers, “Over the past decade, a stack of top-rate scientific studies attesting to the importance of dietary fat has grown to the point where the accumulated body of evidence is nearly undeniable. A high-fat, low carbohydrate regime has been demonstrated to fight heart disease, obesity, and diabetes; it leads to better health outcomes than does the so-called Mediterranean diet in head-to-head tests; and it performs far better than the standard low-fat approach that has been recommended in Western nations for half a century. That low-fat diet, it turns out, has been terrible for health in every way.”

Mouthwatering beyond imagination! A few years ago Debbie and I went on a once-in-a-lifetime Paris and Switzerland food tour with Paris-based chef and cook book writer extraordinaire David Lebovitz. Today we keep in touch with David and eagerly look forward to his regular postings on all things Paree. His most recent post on Rodel sardines is a great companion post to our favorite David Lebovitz video of his shopping trip to a Paris outdoor market and an ensuing lunch featuring, well… sardines. Bon appétit.

Would it surprise you to learn that the Department of Health and Human Services barely bothered to study electronic health records (EHRs) before nationalizing the program? Physicians are forced to comply with the EHRs by filling out a template for every patient to show the federal government that they are making “meaningful use” of the system.

The rigid system promotes tunnel vision and inhibits doctors’ critical thinking and medical investigation, writes Dr. Jeffry A. Singer, a physician in Phoenix, Arizona, and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. “They (EHRs) force me to physically turn my attention away from patients and toward a computer screen—a shift from individual care to IT compliance. This is more than a mere nuisance: it is an impediment to providing personal medical attention.”

Read more here from Dr. Singer, who suggests that Republicans should focus on ending the mandatory EHRs.

Related video:

Dick and I, for various unexpected reasons, were not able to attend the Cato Institute Benefactor Summit held this year in Naples, Florida. Among the highlights we will miss is keynote speaker Ayann Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born human rights activists, a fellow at Harvard Kennedy School, founder of the AHA Foundation, and author of Infidel.

Ayann Hirsi, a vocal advocate for women’s rights in Islam, has called Islam “the new fascism” and “a destructive, nihilistic cult of death.” Ayann Hirsi had been invited to speak at Brandies University and to receive an honorary degree, but she was disinvited when student groups protested her appearance.

Read here from the WSJ about the “First Annual Disinvitation Dinner” sponsored by the William F. Buckley, Jr. Program at Yale. Ayann Hirsi Ali was welcomed to the Yale campus recently by the organization. Columnist George Will, who was disinvited last year at California’s Scripps College because he questioned the Obama administration’s statistics on campus sexual offenses, will keynote this April’s dinner in Manhattan.

As the WSJ writes, students involved in the WFB Program reject “the close-minded attempt to silence the exchange of ideas on college campuses across the country. Instead, we seek to restore honest debate to the intellectual life of the university.”

Related video:

Countries front and center, with much to lose, include Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Jordan. Each of these countries needs to go all-in to annihilate ISIS.

Here Secretary of State John Kerry identifies neither the real foe, nor those specific countries that need to step forward in response to ISIS aggression.

Rather, Kerry writes, “Put simply, we are building a global partnership against violent extremism.”

Why is America building a global partnership in the first place? Radical Shia and Sunni fanatics continue in a religious war that has raged forever. The outcome is of no national security interest to America, nor has it been since the earliest days of George W. Bush’s misguided shock-and-awe strategy in Iraq.

Exactly what has America gained by the endless wars, so wrongly promoted by the military industrial complex, the political elites in Washington and their neocon cheerleaders in the media? It is clear that a majority of Americans believe the answer to be little or nothing.

In terms of transformation and devotion, Mr. Secretary, what we need to do is immediately end immigration from radical Islamist states and deport all radical elements not willing to fully support the Constitution of the United States.

As for charging forward in the name of “decency, civility and reason,” Secretary Kerry, it would appear that the time for a decidedly more hard-line approach has arrived. Perhaps those countries with so much at risk here can take the lead in wiping out a radical Islamic horde that has not the slightest sense of “decency, civility and reason.”

As the NYT’s Thomas Friedman warned, “I am all for restraint on the issue, and would never hold every Muslim accountable for the acts of a few. But it is not good for us or the Muslim world to pretend that this spreading jihadist violence isn’t coming out of their faith community.”