Decent Nazis
We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world--a nation of bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are not just whores for power and oil, but killer whores with hate and fear in our hearts. We are human scum, and that is how history will judge us... No redeeming social value. Just whores. Get out of our way, or we'll kill you.
Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads? Who among us can be happy and proud of having this innocent blood on our hands? Who are these swine? These flag-sucking half-wits who get fleeced and fooled by stupid rich kids like George Bush?
They are the same ones who wanted to have Muhammad Ali locked up for refusing to kill gooks. They speak for all that is cruel and stupid and vicious in the American character. They are the racists and hate mongers among us--they are the Ku Klux Klan. I piss down the throats of these Nazis.
And I am too old to worry about whether they like it or not. Fuck them.
-- Hunter S. Thompson
# Richard Munday at The Telegraph - There's only one way to protect ourselves -- and here's the proof - nice to see this in a mainstream British newspaper. There's a copy, forwarded by Jeff Cooper to his family members, here.
In a material sense, Britain today has much less of a "gun culture" than at any time in its recent history. A century ago, the possession and carrying of firearms was perfectly normal here. Firearms were sold without licence in gunshops and ironmongers in virtually every town in the country, and grand department stores such as Selfridge's even offered customers an in-house range. The market was not just for sporting guns; there was a thriving domestic industry producing pocket pistols and revolvers, and an extensive import trade in the cheap handguns that today would be called "Saturday Night Specials." Conan Doyle's Dr. Watson, dropping a revolver in his pocket before going out about town, illustrates a real commonplace of that time. Beatrix Potters' journal records a discussion at a small country hotel in Yorkshire, where it turned out that only one of the eight or nine guests was not carrying a revolver.
We should not fool ourselves, however, that such things were possible then because society was more peaceful. Those years were ones of much more social and political turbulence than our own: with violent and incendiary suffrage protests, massive industrial strikes where the Army was called in and people were killed, where there was the menace of a revolutionary General Strike, and where the country was riven by the imminent prospect of a civil war in Ireland. It was in such a society that, as late as 1914, the right even of an Irishman to carry a loaded revolver in the streets was upheld in the courts (Rex v. Smith, KB 1914) as a manifestation simply of the guarantees provided by our Bill of Rights.
In such troubled times, why did the commonplace carrying of firearms not result in mayhem? How could it be that in the years before the First World War, armed crime in London amounted to less than 2 percent of what we see today? One answer that might have been taken as self-evident then, but which has become political anathema now, is that the prevalence of firearms had a stabilising influence and a deterrent effect upon crime...
# Jeff Cooper's Commentaries - February 2005: Midwinter - "the situation of American shooters is rather good at this time; Steyr Mannlicher has organized its own import for the U.S.; carbine considered better defense than hand cannon against dangerous animals, unless you're doing something requiring continuous use of both hands; don't ask "What is it FOR?" at the SHOT show; Star Ammunition has .45 caliber, 230 grain JTC bullets available; Jim West(Wild West Guns) now manufacturing the "Co-Pilot" lever gun from the ground up; fifty-year-old MP40 discovered in Belgium still works; Mike Ryan, RIP; SHOT Show report; overuse of "digital"; Broomhandle Mauser commentary; mule kills cougar (I linked to this a while back); Ruger and Winchester jump on the Scout rifle bandwagon, and why it's a good place to be; our oppulent society; muzzle break noise vs. increased recoil; stopping power, shot placement always important; daughter Lindy's forthcoming African hunt; congratulations on the American and Iraqi elections; Mr. Cooper's news from Iraq comes from family members "on duty on the spot".
# Vin Suprynowicz at The Las Vegas Review-Journal - The 'Roots' schoolteacher talks - Joe Silvestri teaches history at the middle school level. When he was in New York state, he always showed Roots to his students, spread out through the year. They loved it. He also showed it in his first position in Vegas. His new school, Becker Middle School, has forbidden him to do so, and changed his curriculum from history to "basically all geography".
# Milton Mayer at thirdreich.net - They Thought They Were Free - an excerpt from Mr. Mayer's book.
How and why "decent men" became Nazis. Written by an American journalist of German/Jewish descent. Mr. Mayer provides a fascinating window into the lives, thoughts and emotions of a people caught up in the rush of the Nazi movement. It is a book that should make people pause and think -- not only about the Germans, but also about themselves.
...
"You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn't see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for the one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even to talk, alone; you don't want to "go out of your way to make trouble." Why not? - Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.
...
"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That's the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and the smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked -- if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in "43" had come immediately after the "German Firm" stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in "33". But of course this isn't the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
# I got the 45 day free trial of Microsoft's Virtual PC 2004 (VPC). I tried my old copy of VMWare first, but it didn't work on my Linux ISOs. VPC worked great, and it's fast. So I downloaded the minimal live CD of Gentoo Linux, and started building it from scratch. Gentoo is designed for easy configuration by intelligent mortals. They have very good documentation about building from scratch (stage 1), using pre-compiled base (stage 2), and using their system compiles (stage 3). I did stage 1 overnight and am currently in the middle of stage 2 using my stage 1 output.
