Hunter S. Thompson, RIP

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Mon, 21 Feb 2005 13:00:00 GMT
# Troy Hooper and Claire Martin at The Denver Post - Hunter S. Thompson shoots self in head: "Fear and Loathing" author dead at 67 - Bummer, man. More stories at Google News. [smith2004]

# L. Neil Smith at The Libertarian Enterprise - Under False Colors - Neil takes a LiNO to task. [tle]

"... has prevented us," "Mike" exposes himself more, and it isn't pretty, "from having any constructive contribution to the debate over how the war on terrorism is prosecuted domestically. The GOP is only listening to the police chiefs associations while the LP is talking conspiracy theories and the ACLU is conspiring with terrorist prisoners."

Okay, let's dissect this tangled ball of headworms. First, it is not Republicans who determine who gets to debate anything. And what good would debating do, if we were only allowed to say whatever it is Republicans want to hear? Most importantly, there can be no legitimate debate over the War on Terror, aside from stating the fact that it is illegal.

And exactly like their identical evil twins the Democrats, where civil and constitutional rights are concerned, Republicans never listen to anyone but police chiefs, anyway. We weren't going to change that.

"Mike" apparently believes he can defeat his opponents with magic words, like "conspiracy theories". Yet the First Continental Congress was a conspiracy, and an illegal one at that. The Jekyll Island conference that gave us the Federal Reserve, the Income Tax, and ultimately World War I and the Depression was a conspiracy. So was the Manhattan Project. And what was that in Dave Nolan's living room in 1971?

The current conflict started, 9/11 was only an excuse, because George Bush, his friends, and family wanted to drive an oil pipeline across northern Afghanistan for a decade before the airplanes hit the buildings. They also wanted control of the world's second largest supply of oil, tucked neatly under Saddam Hussein's penny loafers. If that doesn't meet the definition of conspiracy, I don't know what does.

"... the ACLU is conspiring with terrorist prisoners ... " "Mike" informs us. I never realized that it was possible to get so many lies, errors, and inanities into a little sentence fragment only seven words long.

In the first place, the ACLU is more like a gigantic law firm than anything else, specializing in civil rights cases. I have a number of arguments with them, serious ones, but I'm glad they're there in times like these. I would point out to "Mike" what he knows perfectly well already, that conferring with a lawyer--especially when you've been kidnapped without due process and are being tortured on a daily basis--can hardly be described as "conspiring". And being described as a "terrorist prisoner" before you've even been charged, let alone tried and convicted, lies at the very heart of what makes these perilous times--and "Mike" something other than the libertarian he claims to be.

# I upgraded my Knoppix CD to version 3.7 yesterday and tried out Ubuntu Linux. Both booted fine from CD on my Dell 600m laptop, but Ubuntu didn't recognize the sound system, and neither distribution handled my Intel ProWireless 2200BG wireless card. I tried Ubuntu because I read that it includes a driver for the card. It DOES include the driver, but I couldn't get it to work. Neither could I get ndiswrapper to work with a Windows driver in either distribution (it froze Knoppix unless I booted with the 2.6 kernel). Ubuntu is very pretty. Based on Morphix, it's Debian with Gnome and a nice collection of modules for a desktop system. You can install lots of other modules over the net. Knoppix I'm used to. KDE and a huge number of modules compressed into one CD.
And then, because I hadn't had enough fun or stayed up late enough yet, I got the newest versions of Damn Small Linux (DSL) and the QEMU emulator, and ran DSL and Ubuntu inside a window in Windoze XP. DSL is actually not bad in this environment (on my 2 GHZ processor), and Ubuntu is usable once you wait for an age for it to boot. Both could see the network from there, since they were using the Windoze network via Qemu. Looking forward to the fast version of QEMU, the QEMU Accellerator Module, though it will be a while before that ships for a Windoze host (the Linux host is available now).

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