Author: VD

Abortion is not only widely deployed against children with Down Syndrome. It is expected, and praised. Jocelyn Elders, just prior to being named Bill Clinton’s surgeon general, famously proclaimed that abortion “has had an important and positive public-health effect” because it reduced “the number of children afflicted with severe defects.” She pointed out that “the number of Down Syndrome infants in Washington state in 1976 was 64 percent lower than it would have been without legal abortion.”

Dave Shiflett may not have a clue about the political spectrum – no one on the political right supports eugenics – but he can see the winds of so-called progress blowing towards increased state-sanctioned murder in this country too. Do you? Perhaps we should just kill the lame and the crippled people too, not to mention the fat and ugly – they’re such a blight on society.

Reader SJ writes: I have seen you use the “Nazi Party /Communism liked that policy so it must be bad.” argument before more than once. It is faulty logic. It does not follow from “a political movement is evil” that “every single idea recommended from that party is evil” There is no idea so flawless that some wrong minded organization hasn’t used it, to restate Cicero.

I agree with the broader point, but take total exception to the conclusion. It is of course absurd to argue that since Hitler loved dogs, everyone who loves dogs is a crypto-Nazi. But we’re not talking about minor idiosyncracies of correlation here, we’re talking about direct ideological kinship wherein both political strains hail from the same intellectual seed – Platonic elitism – and have many, many policies and goals in common. My question to those of SJ’s mindset is: “what percentage of policies and positions must be in perfect accordance before you will admit the ideological kinship between X and Y? Thirty percent? Fifty percent? Eighty percent? If you eliminate those policies which are no longer applicable due to the 70 years that have passed – is there a single political party anywhere in the world that has a position on the particulars of the treaty of Versailles? – the concordance between the current Democratic party and the historical Nazi party is so high that it should be extremely worrisome to any thinking, historically cognizant individual.

Would SJ or anyone else agree with the statement that: a political movement is evil, so any political movement which shares a large percentage of policies and goals in common with that evil movement is also evil? Because that’s what I’m saying. It’s not just a random notion cherry-picked here and there, it is the majority of specific ideas as well as the overall attitude towards society that are identical.

Take public education, just to cite one supposedly innocuous correlation. The Nazis viewed it as an integral tool in preparing future generations for a new world order. Is there any serious doubt that this is precisely what the public school system in America is being used for now? If you don’t believe so, I recommend reading the latest educrat literature from the NEA, which will soon set you straight on the purpose of the modern educational system.

The Sports Guy says that every year, two teams come out of nowhere and look like potential champions at the midseason point. One of them is the real deal, and one of them is a pretender who’s had the benefit of an easy schedule, some lucky breaks, or sometimes, an unusual coaching scheme that the other coordinators haven’t figured out yet. The team that is the real deal often ends up making it to the Super Bowl – even winning it, like the 1999 Ravens and the 2000 Rams – the other fades to 8-8 or thereabouts and is forgotten.

There were three surprise contenders as of last week. The 6-2 Carolina Panthers, the 6-2 Dallas Cowboys and the 6-2 Minnesota Vikings. And, as much as it pains me to say it, the Vikings are looking like the pretenders. Real playoff teams don’t get hammered by a lousy Chargers team, even if the permanently-underrated Doug Flutie is behind center, and the Falcons have made what looked like a suspect loss to the Giants even worse.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Carolina made it to the Super Bowl. Tough defense, a power running game and a workaday quarterback who keeps it simple and doesn’t make mistakes. Sounds a lot like the Trent Dilfer Ravens, doesn’t it? Or like a Bill Parcell’s Giants team. Speaking of the Big Tuna, he doesn’t have enough talent in Dallas to make it far in the playoffs, but he has clearly nailed down his place as an all-time great football coach with the Cowboys’ overperformance this year. Their 10-6 victory over the Bills was the most fascinating one-touchdown game I’ve seen in years.

In summary:

Carolina Panthers = the real deal

Minnesota Vikings = pretenders

Dallas Cowboys = anomaly with great coach

Some readers are wondering about my continual hammering on the kinship between the historical National Socialists and their modern descendants – in America, the current Democratic party, in Europe, the European Union. The truth is that Democrats and Eurocrats, while in general ideological agreement with the Nazis, are actually almost identical to the Italian Fascist party, which was the original Third Way.

It’s interesting to see that those who are obsessed with the non-existent threat posed by a few whacked-out losers waving swastikas should be so blind to the development of the EU’s Fourth Reich, which represents the most recent attempt to reunite the Frankish empire of Charlegmagne. Or, if you prefer, Karl der Grosse, which is how his German-speaking heirs refer to him. Lest anyone take seriously the eurofascists’ attitude towards democracy, note that the political whores who are attempting to usher in the New European Order are doing their best to ensure that the people of France and Britain will not be permitted to protest their subjugation to their new masters.

“France narrowly won the referendum on the Maastricht Treaty and there are suggestions that it could lose a plebiscite on the European constitution. Ministers are also concerned that pressure for a referendum in Britain would escalate sharply if such a close neighbour as France opted for one.”

What good is a constitution, after all, if the people are allowed a voice? And why should they be permitted to be heard anyhow, since as the world has been repeatedly assured for years, the EU isn’t a political entity, it’s just an organization to facilitate trade and economic development – oh, wait, they lied about that too, didn’t they.

All right! I finally got Fedora accessing the Internet properly through my wireless card, and it did so without using the RPM packages that were required for Redhat 8 and Redhat 9. It’s got all of the necessary drivers built in, and it turned out that it was detecting the card all along. That’s the good news. The bad news is that I’m not entirely sure what I did, other than to avoid going through a firewall on the installation. The thing is, I wasn’t using it before and I still get a message during the boot process that orinco.cs device is not present – that’s the wireless card, even though it clearly is there since everything is working fine. That is troublesome.

I’m good to go, for the most part, but I’m still not sure I want to upgrade my work machine since my grokking is incomplete. I suppose I’ll probably back up all my important files and have a go at it sometime next week. I can always drop back to RH9 if it doesn’t work out since I understand how that setup works. Well, actually, I don’t understand it, but I can make it perform dependably. That’s the difference between the Power User and the Hacker. The former can make things work, they just don’t know why. Or, as the above example shows, sometimes how.

I like what I’ve seen of Fedora. It’s a little snappier, and it seems as if the programs run a bit more quickly than RH8. In particular, Evolution doesn’t spin its wheels while shutting down. I also just DL’d the latest version of WINE and was able to run my Windows Palm Reader, which was pretty cool. If I can do the same with the hotsync software – not an option on that machine thanks to its broken USB – I’ll be very psyched.

I touched on this in my column for next week. But the raw breakdown is even more astounding than the overall numbers. You’d think that only 62 years after the Final Solution was put into action, Germans and Austrians might be a little more circumspect about their judenhassen.

A European Union poll of 7500 found that 59 percent deemed Israel “a threat to peace in the world” with figures rising to 60 percent in Britain, 65 in Germany, 69 in Austria and 74 in Holland.

I’m telling you, this War on Terror is no such thing. It is rather the beginning of World War III, which is in the process of spreading to Europe – most likely in France or Holland – long before it comes to an end in the Middle East. The sooner that our opinion elites begin to understand this, the sooner the West can go about winning it. This is a continuation of the long Western struggle against the Saracen, and its difficulty is compounded by the fact that Europe no longer consists of fractious states with the common bond of Christian culture, but is divided into three. The West now has the huge benefit of America, but America is divided into three as well. At this point, only Christian America can be counted on to support the war once its true nature becomes apparent to everyone, while Neutral and Godless America will likely still hope to avoid taking sides.

Of course, they can’t. If the jihadis are willing to kill Saudi Muslims they consider insufficiently enthusiastic about the cause, why would anyone think that an atheist American isn’t fair game for them, no matter how keen he is on understanding why they hate him?

I was wondering how on Earth Walmart could be offering Linux computers for $200. Then I saw the retail prices on what passes for standard software these days and it began to make sense. Not that you’re going to pay full retail for a new computer bundle, but still… I’m not even sure I like MS Word better than OpenOffice Writer. While the one feature that I miss since my migration is the ability to do a Word Count on a selected portion of text, I quite like the ability to save directly as a PDF.

Microsoft Windows XP Professional 2002 – retail: $270.99

Microsoft Office XP Professional 2002 – retail: $579.99

Norton Antivirus Corporate Edition 2003 – retail: $69.99

OpenOffice 1.1.0 – download time for ~ 200 megs

So maybe the MS solution makes sense if you’re still on a 28.8 modem or something, paying by the minute for your download time.

Well, the upgrade from Redhat 9 killed my Internet access. From doing some searching on the Internet, it looks like I’m not alone in this. While I’m sure there’s a workaround, this does prove that Linux remains firmly in power user territory. In the meantime, since it’s only a test machine, I’m doing a full install that will wipe out everything and let me put the Internet access together from scratch. This may not work, since the key RPM is for an older kernel – I think – but we’ll have a whack at it and see what happens. There’s certainly some research to do before I’ll dare to put it on my current work machine, which is staying with Redhat for now.

Disappointing, to say the least, but not entirely unexpected.

Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) said of Gibson, “I think he’s infected — seriously infected — with some very, very serious anti-Semitic views.”

Mr. Foxman is a stunningly myopic man. Since he can’t seem to get it through his thick skull, let me point out that the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ IS NOT ABOUT JEWS! Except in that Jesus, a Jew, died for Jews just like he did for everyone else. It is inexcusable and incredibly short-sighted to attempt to accuse a good man of anti-Semitism who is guilty of doing nothing more than articulating the Gospels in a visual medium. Forget the very valid argument about artistic freedom – where is Mr. Foxman when Christians are defamed in what passes for art these days – if believing in the truth of the New Testament makes me an anti-Semite, well, then I’m an irredeemable anti-Semite, all my defenses of Jews and Israel notwithstanding. Do the Jews have so many friends in the world today that it makes sense to alienate their only consistent defenders? Without evangelical American Christians, who do they expect to come to their defense, French existentialists? Lesbian neo-pagan Wiccans from San Francisco?

Guess what, Mr. Foxman. Only Christian fundamentalists who take the Bible literally give a damn about Israel. Because if you don’t believe that there is a God who made a binding promise to Abraham, a God whose only son died to save the souls of men, a God who gave John a prophecy in which the Jews’ return to Israel is an integral part, then Israel is nothing but another “s—– little country”. European guilt over the Holocaust is dying with the WWII generation and in another fifty years, a Muslim-dominated Old World will be about as friendly to Israel as Syria is now. Atheist America doesn’t care about Jews anymore than it cares about Rwandans, Tibetans or Sudanese – and why should it?

Furthermore, if it is acceptable to blame Christians today for the actions of Christians 500 years ago, guess what? It’s perfectly reasonable to blame Jews for the actions of Jews 2000 years ago. Michael Medved, who is himself Jewish, understands this. “My concern is that the campaign against The Passion is provoking far more anti-Semitism than the movie itself ever could.”

Holy cats! 43 MORE minutes in the extended play version of The Two Towers. Definitely going on the Christmas list.